B-Movie War (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

The arrow pointed toward the building opposite the apartment. Penny's legs were rooted to the roof. She couldn't move an inch, her body's fatigue working against her. So much doubt attacked her. Then the words materialized on the roof's floor:

MONSTERS KNOW YOU'RE HERE.

THEY'RE COMING.

TAKE THE FLASHLIGHT OUT OF YOUR POCKET.

TIME TO FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE.

YOU CAN'T DIE.

Up in the sky, a commercial airplane was being attacked by giant moths. A swarm of bats were attacking a church farther downtown. Manholes fired up from the streets and amphibious bog creatures were skulking the streets in search of people to kill.

From behind her, a piano started playing on the rooftop. An old woman had turned the page of her sheet music and played without noticing Penny.

“What the hell are you doing?” Penny demanded. The woman didn't heed her. She only played the music, stroking the keys in deep concentration. “Stop playing that music. Listen, lady, I'm serious. Do you realize what's happening here?”

Words on the roof in glowing letters:

TURN ON THE FLASHLIGHT.

THEY'RE COMING SOON.

Soon came now. Bursting from the hinges of the access door to the roof, one-by-one, they came out in smooth, gliding, pirouetting forms. In pink tutus, they moved like graceful swans. They each revved up their chainsaw. A dozen ballerinas were incoming, each chainsaw taking practice swings in the name of Penny's demise.

Digging into her pocket, she removed the flashlight and turned it on. The beam spat blue sparks, like a giant welding tool in action. The nearest ballerina's chainsaw was inches from cutting Penny's face sideways. Another was to her right about to take a wide slash from her midsection. Another was posed behind her to jam the blade through her shoulder blades and out her chest.

Slashing the air, swiping the beam, blood sprayed her body in a jugular bath. Flesh flopping and collapsing, Penny opened her eyes when nothing cut her up. The ballerinas fell side by side, each of their bodies split down the head down to between their legs, their bodies falling in two halves. Their chainsaws kept roaring until they sputtered and went quiet. Scanning the roof, the piano was cut in half as was the old woman who'd been playing it. Then Penny put it together. The flashlight did everything.

She only swung the flashlight a few times. How did she kill them all?

Wait, she thought. The piano being cut, it had done the same to the ballerinas.

But how?

None of this made any sense.

THOOOOOOOOM!

No time to rationalize the events, the police station a mile east was driven into the ground by a giant arm from the sky. Flattened, the building was no more. The arm was punching, swiping it hands, or using its thumb to squash individual people who were running as the devastation increased. Dust obscured the hand's direction of movement, but it seemed to be coming straight for her.

The neon green arrows burned brighter.

Then the words JUMP.

Penny's body did that for her. After a running leap, she dodged the arm from the sky as it pounded the building she was just standing on into the ground.

Landing on the next rooftop, the green glow of words appeared. JUMP.

Scaling between buildings again, she kept running, her arms pumping, her body jerking to life as the arm from the sky was still coming after her.

JUMP.

Landing again on the next roof, though slipping on all fours when she landed, Penny got right back up. Again, the words on the roof: JUMP.

Another building, another leap, but this time Penny turned her ankle. She couldn't run and jump anymore. She turned around to face the arm looming high up in the sky. For the first time, she got a good look at it. Its fingernails were life-like, clogged up with chunks of buildings and road and even a poor old man who clutched onto his walker. Its skin was very life-like and covered in hairs as thick as bridge cables. Its hand could cover an entire baseball stadium. The fingers were as thick as the pillars that held up an oil rig in an ocean. Veins and muscles writhed beneath the flesh as the hand flexed to destroy Penny and the building. She had only seconds to think of how to fight back, or else die where she stood.

Penny did the only thing possible, and that was to swing the flashlight that shed its cutting blue light. The hand from the sky jerked to avoid the beam. She craned her neck to the sky, challenging the enemy. She slashed the sky with the flashlight. Unable to see the arm up close now that it hid back into the clouds, she kept swinging it, praying she scored some damage. The arm was shaped as if to slap her off the rooftop, but the beam sliced the tips of its fingers clean off. Like popped tabs of a shaken up bottle of soda, blood fizzed out the tips, the spurting sounding like high pressure air.

Sssssssssst! Sssssssssst! Sssssssssst!

The hand was pissed as blood rained from its fingers. Thousands of gallons of blood spurted down onto the building. She dodged the pelting red. The arm from the sky balled its hand into a fist, as if to stop the flow of blood. Forming into a hammer, the fist raised up to slam down and flatten Penny. She did the only thing she could do and kept slashing at the air with the blue beam.

Two things happened simultaneously. The blue beam in the flashlight's head burnt out, then the contraption dismantled itself, the weapon coming undone into many pieces. Useless to her, she was unarmed and helpless. Knocked backward, she was flipped not once, but twice. Blinking stars out of her eyes, she stayed on the ground. From the sky, she watched the severed hand fly across the city and bounce into an unseen pocket of rubble. The stump in the sky bled profusely, as if the sky itself were an open wound bleeding onto the city.

The blood pelted the roof, the tide as thick as an ocean's wave. The force threatened to toss her off the side of the building. Before the rush of red waves touched her, the door access to the roof opened. Somebody appeared, but she couldn't quite see them through the crimson raining down. Helped up, they carried Penny to the access door. The door was thrown closed behind her. She was left in the darkness with an unknown savior.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Jules Baxter had no way of referencing how he ended up on the steps of the courthouse. The dolly Mr. Ratchet had strapped him onto was gone. The rope bindings over his body were missing as well. His head was swollen with ache. It emanated as if he'd taken a serious blow to the skull. Dried blood covered him. His memory was slowly coming back to him. The movie fest, his time with Darlene, his wife,
his dead wife
, the film strips steeped in blood, the showing of
The Final Flesh
,
and Mr. Ratchet unveiling the movie as clips of horror movies burst from the screen. The movies were alive. The movies were killing. It was his fault.

Shaking himself awake from deep unconsciousness, he noticed the courthouse steps were independent of the building. Uprooted from their foundations, he was actually in a dog park. Debris from buildings that had been blown to pieces were scattered about everywhere. Horrible to see were the victims who had been disemboweled, disfigured and murdered in brutal fashion. People in the city had faced the horror movies come-to-life and had clearly lost the fight.

Getting up, Jules walked a straight line, keeping his movements quiet and his sights set on everything around him. It wasn't long before up from the lake nearby (what lake, there wasn't a lake here before!) came the crab monsters. They snapped their crab pinchers as they surfaced one at a time. Beady eyes and red bodies marched onward right in Jules's direction.

Jules fell to the ground and played dead. He had seen
Crabs Infest Terror Lake
. These were the human-shaped crab monsters who used their pinchers to pinch off heads. They were deadly, but stupid. Jules waited as the twenty-four crab monsters wandered past him.

Standing alone again among miles and miles of the remnants of carnage, the truth sank in. He had contributed to this horror. The way he followed orders from his “wife” and didn't question anything until it was too late.

The dead played tricks on you. It wasn't your fault.

Everybody's still dead the same.

A corpse that looked like every ounce of blood had been sucked from its neck spoke to him as its flesh boiled and melted until it was no more.
“
…
no time to feel sorry for yourself. You can't bring the dead back to life, but you sure can save those who remains alive
…
”

A blackened crisp husk of a human body raised its arm to point is phalange finger.
“…go to the lake…”

Corpses stirred everywhere, partially buried in rubble, hands pointing, mouths reiterating for him to head to the lake. His faith in reality was gone, but then again, what choice did he have? So much was unknown. Plus the lake's surface glowed a bright white. Angelic, her image reflected on the lake's surface.

Darlene.

His wife was like flesh on the water. Darlene spoke to him as new faces formed on the water's surface. Other people he'd known many years ago from high school, a few friends, and those who'd died recently were also reflected.

“…find Max Alabaster…rescue films…won't be easy…can't run away…death is everywhere…close to winning…every person will perish…up to you to find what we need…follow the arrows…we're here…won't be here forever…hurry, Jules…I love you…the living and the dead are counting on you…”

Then the images of the corpses suddenly changed. In ten second's time, they suffered what a corpse would look like after rotting under a hot sun for months. Those Jules knew and loved were ravaged by rapid decomposition.

Instantly, the lake's water vanished and was replaced with heaps and heaps of maggots and nasty crawlers. Slithering towards him, devouring the scattered human remains on the way to Jules, he dashed from the lake's edge in terror.

From the left, he was flanked by a horde of squirrels and raccoons who were frothing at the mouth with rabies. Where could he run? Nowhere was safe. The van parked on top of the hill beckoned his attention. The sliding door opened. Living corpses were inside, armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles and shotguns. Before the vehicle reached him, a fog surrounded Jules. A man appeared out of the fog, stepping through the white wall to greet Jules. He wore a gray suit and big red bow toe. It was the same man who had pushed him in that dolly into the theatre where
The Final Flesh
played. The smile on the man's maniacal face didn't wane during his speech.

“You're wasting your time, Mr. Baxter,” Mr. Ratchet warned. “The dead are stronger than the living. The dead who wish to help the living are weak, while those who've suffered eternal damnation cling onto their motivations. We'll all be dead very soon. Everyone will finally be equal. Nothing you can do will stop it. Know this when the time comes for you to die. Eternity is waiting. It'll only be punishment for those like you who help the living. Take care to remember that.”

The man in the suit stepped back into the fog and vanished. Seconds later, the van pulled up to him. Jules recognized one of the corpses, the one who waved him inside the van. It was his uncle. The man was recently dead. He fired a shot from a double barreled shotgun, blowing a line of squirrels off of their feet and into pieces.

“Get in, Jules. You've got somewhere to be. Fuck that cheap-suited goon. He's only trying to stall things. He's wrong about the dead. Not everybody hates the living. And not everybody suffers eternal damnation. There's a reason for everything, Jules. So get in and join the fight. We don't have much time.”

Jules hurried into the van.

From the passenger aside, a female corpse who looked to be eighty or ninety years old, fleshed in gray, marbled, decomposed skin, unloaded an Uzi at the four raccoons who hurled themselves at the van. They were shredded by the bullet fire.

“Come on, Sonny, no time to fuck around getting reacquainted!” The granny corpse shouted, re-loading the Uzi and unleashing another stream of gunfire at the incoming vermin. “Spitting bullets will only hold the little fuckers back so long.”

A neon green arrow formed on the grass. The dead driver followed the arrow. Jules couldn't believe he was in a van with three corpses. This was too much!

His uncle's eyes were deep-set in the sockets. “You messed up big time helping those evil spirits prepare those reels of film.”

“I didn't mean to, I didn't know my wife was actually—”

“Yes, we know. Many like you have been fooled by the same trick. Theatre owners everywhere. It's happening across the world, Jules, and there's only one way to fight back. We need you. You have to stay strong and not get killed.”

The van sped up as a group of cannibals in loincloths hurled sharpened sticks at them. The granny in the seat launched a grenade at them. Before it went off, they'd already left the tribe in the dust. The van was driving on a road, though everything was cloaked in fog. Jules had no real way of knowing where they were headed.

“We've only got minutes left before our soul energy runs out and our bodies melt. Don't ask me the rules of this shit, Jules. If you head south on this road, you'll eventually come upon an apartment complex called Stone Gate Commons. Go to the fourth floor. Room 431. There, you will find a man by the name of Max Alabaster. He has a collection of movie reels. You must take them by force if you have to. Then get in the building's elevator. From there, you'll know which floor to get off on. It'll take you to where you need to go next.”

The top of the van was peeled back like a tin of sardines. Five flying vampires with black-plated skin and burning eyes peered inside the van. The corpses, including his uncle, opened fire on them. His uncle opened the sliding van door and pushed Jules out.

Jules tumbled backward. When he hit the ground, he started rolling. Once he stopped, he looked forward. The van kept driving down the road until the whole vehicle burst into flames. He could tell the old woman had used the grenades to blow them and the vampires to hell.

Right in front of him, the only thing in sight because of the fog that kept growing thicker and thicker, was an apartment building.

Stone Gate Commons.