Authors: Alan Spencer
Chapter Thirteen
Dr. Simon Unger turned over the manila file on his desk and read its contents. The analysis had passed through the offices of toxicologists, phlebotomists, detectives, forensic labs, and now, Dr. Unger, neurologist. Unger eyed Harry Newman’s file with disdain. While he read the file, Detective Christopher Ryan who stood across from the doctor, poured himself a drink of scotch.
“You might want a nip of this, Doctor, before you hear what I have to say.”
An avalanche of pictures was spread out on Unger’s desk: victims with crushed esophagi, eyes forced out of sockets and bobbing on pink cords, limbs crudely broken, torsos squeezed so the organs were forced out of mouths, and heads completely wrenched from the bodies.
“You’ve seen the victims, Doc.” Detective Ryan frowned at the doctor. “This is a nation-wide emergency. This Harry Newman guy has slaughtered over fifty people in, well, very unorthodox ways.”
“You’re understating it, Detective.”
“Then state it accurately for me, sir.”
“We’ve unleashed hell.” Unger downed the shot of booze the detective handed him. “I recognize the name Harry Newman. I remember him. We tested radiation effects on the locals in a small Arizona town called Salt Flats. The A-bomb had been used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the military wanted to know the effects of radiation contact. We stored traces of radiation in baby bottles, meat, and dusted the air with it. Four hundred locals died outright, while others suffered cancer, and tumors, and polyps decades later. But Harry Newman didn’t change. He was the only one who didn’t. As a child, he grew up perfectly healthy. Even sucking on the glowing bottle of milk, he wasn’t affected. It's like it made him happy.”
Detective Ryan pounded the man’s desk. “You acted like God, and a shitty God at that! How dare you joke about this?”
“I’ve lived with this burden since 1954. You find ways of erasing the past, whether it be with sex, drugs or booze.”
“My partner was strangled to death. Something bloody was shoved down his throat, and he was suffocated. Tell me everything about this bastard.”
“He’s dangerous.” Dr. Unger wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Harry’s had years to gestate, to grow, to improve, to enjoy what he’s become. But he’s not human. Not at all. The power’s taken over him. It’s in his bloodstream, his very essence.”
“Doctor, what in good God’s name are you talking about? Why are you talking about essences?"
“His intestines keep growing! There, I said it!” Dr. Unger bolted from his chair and stood by the window. The window shades carved bars across his face from the sunlight poking through them. “As a child, he was normal, and then once his hormones kicked in, it progressed. While dealing with acne, crushes on girls, wet dreams, his balls dropping, his intestines started to thicken. Extending. We tried to surgically cut them out, but our instruments failed. Nothing was sharp enough to penetrate them. The intestinal lining would literally melt our scalpels and saws. And they kept growing. Then one day, the bottom of his navel opened like a camera’s shutter. The intestines uncoiled, shot out as if spring-coiled, and could fire themselves across a room. They killed on their own accord, strangling, breaking bones, squeezing the bodies until blood and organs were forced up through passageways and exits. We’ve created a killing machine.”
Detective Ryan joined him at the window. “Then how do we stop these, these intestines?”
Dr. Unger removed himself from a troubling thought and made eye contact with the detective. “God help us, I don’t know how to kill…the Intestinator!”
Detective Vickers’ back ached. His feet were losing blood flow. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stay crouched and hidden in the closet. Hours had passed, and a plan of escape hadn’t occurred to him. He'd watched the film play out on the wall about the guy with super intestines. The delight on the five women’s faces in the room added to his mounting terror. These were the culprits who murdered the students and moviegoers in Iowa, and they were the ones who stole Dennis Brauman’s reels.
The nakedness of the females didn’t distract him from the fact they were slathered in blood and strings of flesh, especially around their faces. Ted Fuller and the witnesses weren’t lying; the flying creatures did exist. He clutched the shotgun, but it failed to comfort him. The question that bothered him was, why were they playing
The Intestinator
?
He could see Fuller, splayed on the bed, eyes glazed, bathed in sweat. He watched the screen in a trance, half smiling, half afraid. Was this one of his films?
Movies don’t come to life. It’s not logical.
These women are flesh and blood, not from a goddamn movie. But why are they standing around naked? What’s the point?
They’re a cult. Yes, and they’re fanatics. They had sex with Fuller, and now they’re honoring him again by watching his movies.
Vickers wanted to believe the simplicity of that reasoning, but he couldn’t. They weren’t human beings. There was something he was missing, and until he decided what it was, he couldn’t determine his next move out of the closet.
And that’s when the projected image on the wall became 3-D. A hulking boar of a man leaned out from the wall and stepped onto the carpet. His image was bright as a television screen, but once he stood in the room long enough, he was normal flesh and blood. He wore black jeans and an open red vest full of pockets. A grungy beard covered half of his face. His eyes were solid black, blacker than the hair that flowed down to his shoulders. The man reminded Vickers of a wrestler with his body type, but his midsection was unbelievable. The huge belly was surrounded by muscles to keep it taught and firm, despite its size. He had four rows of abdominal muscle, each lean and covered in veins. Vickers couldn’t stop eying the fleshly hole where his naval used to be. It was red around the edges and jelly-soft.
Before Vickers could study the man any longer, he vanished.
Where did he go?
The five women clapped their hands, sharing their joy.
“
The Intestinator
will serve us well.”
“Who else?”
“How about a holy man?”
“Someone who really pulls out the holy spirit.”
They said it together: “
Holy Redeemer
.”
Vickers watched the women change the reel. The blonde ordered, “Start playing other films in the living room. Let’s make good time. Hurry it up.”
“Nobody’s getting through the bone dome,” the redhead insisted. “We have all the time we could ever need.”
“Yes, you’re right. Plenty of time to enjoy ourselves.”
The vampires split up.
Vickers watched the film play out onto the wall as a new film played in the other room.
A preacher directed a man in a gray business suit down a set of stairs. They were descending into the bowels of a Catholic church. The walls were dark, with no lights. The man being led down the stairs muttered, “Um…I just wanted to attend confession.”
“You will,” Preacher Eric Leawood reassured the man. “Tell me now the sins you confess.”
The man named Bruce Webster began, “Okay, here goes. I’ve been cheating on my wife with…well, with hookers.”
“You can tell me everything. It’s imperative you do so.”
Bruce nodded in resignation. “Yes, but these stairs, they go on forever.”
“Don’t worry about that. Keep confessing. Confess your sins to me.”
Bruce continued, both of them descending into darkness. He shivered as the air grew colder. “The thing is I like sleeping with hookers. They do everything I want. Anal sex. Blow jobs.” He cleared his throat. “Uhh, and rim jobs.
”
“Rim jobs?”
“Yes, rim jobs,” Bruce repeated. “But that’s not all. There’s been nights,” he said, tears starting to well up, “that I’ve also slept with my wife after I’ve been with a hooker. She’s a good woman, if a bit prudish. My father told me the Webster men have libidos triple that of an average man. He cheated on my mother on a regular basis, and I don’t want to be that man. I’m not making excuses. Should I divorce her? It’s only fair. Tina deserves better.”
Bruce suddenly lost his footing. He was jerked forward and flung down the remaining stairs. The preacher shouted, “You only want an excuse to visit your favorite hooker! Blasphemer! Sinner! Corrupt youth! Desecrator of virginal wombs! Defiler of the sanctity of marriage! You reek of foul morals, you corruptible ingrate!”
Once Bruce struck the bottom, his crash punctuated by two jarring crunches, he couldn’t move. He mewled in pain, both his legs broken. “I can’t feel anything below my hips!”
He was dragged into the dark by his feet. Bruce‘s bloodcurdling screams did nothing to halt the preacher’s work. “What are you doing? This isn’t confession. Call an ambulance. For God’s sake, where are you dragging me? My legs, I can’t feel them. Help me! I trusted you. Why are you doing this to me? You’re a man of the cloth.”
The preacher said to himself, not his disciple, in feverish whispers, “Faith is fleeting in the eyes of the lord. He sees what I see. God sees through me. The soul is corrupted, but the body can reach heaven purified and redeemed.”
Bruce was strapped to a chair by leather restraints. “W-what is this? What the hell is this, you maniac!”
The preacher announced in the dark, “The soul is the root of all evil, not money, not naked flesh, not feasts of gluttonous proportions. Remove the soul, you remove the sin.”
“You’re not removing anything from me! You unstrap me right now. I’m calling the police and sending your ass to the booby hatch.” Bruce's arms and legs were spread out. “What is this about, Preacher? Why have you chosen me?”
“I haven’t chosen you. God has chosen you. And God has chosen me to discover the device that will remove your dirty, corrupt, sinful soul!”
The lights flickered on above. The shot panned to the preacher standing beside a leather-covered object. He removed the leather, and beneath it, a machine with a metal horseshoe attached to the end of it was pointed at Bruce. It wasn’t normal metal, but instead a strange metal without origin, and Bruce shook his head furiously.
“Why are you pointing that at me? You’re not removing any sin from me!”
“You’ll feel so good afterwards.” The preacher flipped the lever. An electric charge crackled. A set of sparks shot from the tip of the horseshoe and it glowed neon white. “The soul is the bones. Remove the bones and remove the sin!”
Bruce’s body convulsed. He frothed from the lips. Veins bulged in his flesh, which turned dark purple. Rivulets and spurts of blood shot up through the skin. First, his skull shot through his face. Then the entire skeleton was drawn to the polarized magnet, the bones shattering upon impact.
The preacher ignored the bones and hurried to the heap of flesh and muscle tissue leaking blood onto the floor. He poured holy water over it and gave the sign of the cross. “May your soul rest in peace… You are now pure and free of sin.”
Ted Fuller recognized the film. It was shot in the wake of
The Exorcist
by a man named William Lugg. It was a typical cash-in movie. Ted penned the script for the movie over a weekend after suffering a bout of food poisoning from bad crawfish.
He kept looking at the closet. When would Detective Vickers make his move? He was tempted to scream out to him to shoot the projectors, but then he’d only give away the man’s hiding spot.
He said to the vampires, “You’re sending horror movie characters to murder innocent people.”
The blonde turned her head to him. “In the afterlife, we’ll be equals. We’ll all be spirits. And we’ll all have so much fun together.”
“You died when it was your time!” Ted exploded. “Why can’t you let nature take its course for everyone else? You’re crazy. You're not all there in the head, you understand me? Maybe the magic you’re playing with made you stupid.”
“Silence!” The redhead’s face turned reptilian. “Or you’ll be dead next!”
Before Ted could react, the closet door shot open, and Vickers charged the vampires with gun blazing.
Chapter Fourteen
Billy gawked up at the sky. The object made no sense. The best he could tell, it was a giant helmet falling down upon the city. But it was pure bone. Shiny enamel. The crowd around the hospital was silenced at once, an awed hush coming over them. The sun was gradually blotted out. Darkness pervaded. Endless night. When the object touched the streets, people were shaken and knocked to the ground by the great concussion of its landing. A seismic wave carried up and down the city blocks and finally settled. Nelson landed on his side, Billy on all fours. Billy channeled his confusion into getting to his feet and sprinting through the police blockades to the hospital. His father was in there, and he had to know if he was safe.