Authors: Alan Spencer
Follow the plan, and nobody else will die.
He loaded five shells into the Thompson pump action 12 gauge.
Jesus Christ, am I really going through with this?
This is ridiculous.
Until I do it, I won’t stop thinking about it.
Ted strapped the shotgun over his shoulder and approached the reel. He attached it to the projector, and it played onto the wall.
He braced himself.
There was no warning. In a split-second the shotgun was torn from his hands. He was thrown onto the bed, suddenly stripped of clothing, and surrounded by four naked women. The darkness carved out by random flickers and the changing colors of the reels displayed his night visitors. He couldn’t focus on defending himself or making sense of anything. Tongues licked his nipples, teeth playfully bit at his neck and lips hungrily kissed him on the mouth. The sweet smell of clean skin, perfume and lust consumed and intoxicated him. His instincts diminished. He put down his defenses.
“You brought us back,” a Kathleen Turner-esque voice purred in his ear. “We were beginning to think we would be shelved forever.”
“Play time,” another rasped, stroking her fingernails up and down his thighs. “Oh, I can’t wait!”
“So many possibilities.”
“Once isn’t enough.”
“This time, it will last forever. We’ll overtake the city, and every city.”
Breasts played across his lips, one pair after another. He tasted, sucked and slopped on what was granted him in unending abundance. Warm bodies lay next to him, cradling him, absorbing him, attempting to put to rest his fears. And then the blonde woman from the booth in the theatre was above him. She played his hands over her milky breasts and then steadily brought her fingers down across her downy pubic hair to her open sex.
“You have nothing to be afraid of,” she moaned, biting her lip with a groan of pleasure. “We are indebted to you. Our bargain will be honored. Without you, we are nothing.”
“But you slaughtered innocent people,” Ted said, muffled when the raven-haired beauty to his left shoved her fingers into his mouth. “
Mmmuh
—but you’re monsters.
Ki-wuahs
.”
“Deep down you wanted the world to see us again,” the blonde insisted. “You wanted us to be alive when you wrote that screenplay, when you hired the models. You wanted to fuck every one of them…
and now’s your chance
.”
“We won’t hurt anybody,” a strawberry-haired wanton said before she kissed the blonde on top of him, tongues mingling, fingers teasing flesh, nails raking blood between fits of delight, their kisses and masochistic sex worthy of any lesbian vampire tramp. “We only want to play. It’ll be fun. You’ll see. You can watch. I like it when you watch, Teddy.”
“You’ll find my movies then.” He was unable to resist them. He relaxed and allowed their pleasures to bloom. “And you won’t hurt anybody else, right?”
The blonde stroked him, playing with his hardening shaft until Ted was full, and then she took him between her legs, warm and wet and deeper than any woman he’d ever experienced. His argument was snuffed dead. Impulses and shudders ran throughout his body, bringing orgasms that weren’t real to life. Electric. Repeating. The sex was illusion. Manipulated by the ghosts of the dead who wielded magic beyond any living master’s abilities. But Ted didn’t know that. He couldn’t think past the four delectable beauties gratifying his every male impulse.
He also didn’t see the fifth vampire exit his apartment and fly into the Chicago night.
Chapter Two
The Claims and Lost Possessions Branch of Chicago was a ten-floor skyscraper, a dark brown and black brick building. The building was unimpressive against the backdrop of dominating cityscape, compared to the Willis Tower and the John Hancock Center, and in the further horizon, Lake Michigan and the ever-glowing lights of Navy Pier. The branch was designed for acquired properties from the recently deceased, repossessed items from debtors and five floors of offices for the processing of the goods. An avid buyer could buy a dead man’s leather couch for less than a hundred bucks if the auction on the second floor had low attendance. The basement level was a different entity altogether. The hall, with its freshly waxed tiles, contained private storage rooms. Four keys were required to enter the premises. Each corridor harbored steel lock boxes by the hundreds. One key was designed for the entry door, another for the private room, and two for each individual lock box. Two guarded sentries roamed the basement floor at all hours. Security cameras scoped out every angle. And still, the auburn-haired vampire managed to slip through the shadows. She was in human form, clothed in a tunic and pleated pants she stole from a late-night raver bumbling out of the Excalibur nightclub. The monster had snapped the woman’s neck and heaved her into a dumpster. Not a single drop of blood had touched the outfit. Now she sought the reels that once belonged to Ted Fuller. It wouldn’t be long before Al Denning, the late-night security guard on the east wing of the basement floor, would cross paths with her, tossing his silver Maglite from hand to hand to keep himself occupied.
When Al Denning came upon the woman walking, two thoughts crossed Al’s mind:
Why is this woman here so late?
She better have a key, or I’m giving her ass the boot.
Al cleared his throat to soften his tone. Many investors and clients used the basement for a variety of reasons. The upper class stored jewelry and valuables, others spare cash, while others stored keepsakes and copies of wills or other official documents. The woman who was roaming about lost—perhaps she’d forgotten in which room her storage lock box was located—was curiously attractive. Slim hips, wide thighs, firm buttocks, a pair of tits that sang songs to a man’s libido and a flawless and smooth white face and healthy lips. Her scent was alluring.
“Good evening,” Al said. He checked his watch: 5:58 a.m.
Wow, it’s late. Or should I say early?
“What brings you here at this hour? Can I direct you somewhere, ma’am?”
The woman turned around, offering him a confident smile. “I’m looking for Lock box #4213. This place is a maze. I’ve got a key. It’s an emergency.”
He waited for the woman to expand on the meaning of “emergency” but didn’t push the issue when she kept it to herself.
“Absolutely.” He walked her to the west end. Number 4213 was a seized property section. He wasn’t briefed on the details. His supervisor said some things kept here he was better left in the dark about. “It gets really quiet in this place late at night. Eerie sometimes.”
“Do you get
scared
by yourself?” The query came off as too interested.
“Wayne is on the other side, so no. We talk, chat the hours away, and keep a good eye on the place.” Al removed a tape measure from his back pocket. “At the end of my shift, I tell the boss I measured every corner, and I say ‘Sir, the place hasn’t moved an inch’.”
“That’s funny.” She touched his shoulder. "You’re cute.”
“Huh?” Al was confused, the spot she touched panging with the same intensity as his blushing cheeks. “Y-yeah, but the boss doesn’t laugh. His sense of humor is, well, lacking.”
“You do a good job,” she said, placing her fingertip on her tongue, her hazel eyes penetrating his. “It’s really quiet down here. It’s too bad Wayne’s nearby. We could, you know, rearrange the walls—it all depends on how hard you wanna fuck me.”
“Excuse me—?”
Nothing changed about the woman’s face except the jagged-tipped fangs that tore through her gums. Before Al could duck or dodge, his trachea was clamped through and torn clean. A rip in his neck belched blood. Al flopped to the ground, seized by a heart attack at the sudden loss of blood. He clutched the wound, his fingers entering inches deep and touching the wet, slick walls of his esophagus. The woman then slashed her nails across his chest, licking and sucking up blood. Then she released Al’s flaccid body.
The rest of her turned plated, metamorphosing into a reptilian vampire creature. Her feet clicked on the tiles. Her fist slammed like an iron bludgeon into the nearest door. The hinges exploded from their posts, the wood caving in. She scanned the walls for box #4213. The Private Film Coalition of Public Morals had used the building to store Stan Merle Sheckler’s and dozens of other directors’ banned films seized throughout the late seventies to 1985. This lock box was larger, three huge Greyhound bus lockers combined. She hurled her fist into the front until the lock dented to the point it loosened and clanked to the ground. The door opened by itself. She snapped her fingers, and three more of the snarling vampires entered the room. Working together, they each carried out rubber bins containing hundreds of reels. They were unmarked, the dust unsettling from the tops.
Each of the five vampires looked down upon Al’s body, his left leg twitching randomly.
The blonde laughed. “He wants more, doesn’t he?”
“You didn’t kill him good enough.”
The five hunkered down upon Al and finished him off. Afterward, they flew from the halls and into the night and swiftly returned to Ted Fuller’s apartment to plan a horror film marathon. One vampire stayed behind to finish the final part of the job.
Security guard Wayne Carton froze in place. The wicked blood-boiling roars of agony carried from the opposite end of the corridor to him. His first impulse was to sprint to the source, but first he phoned the police. Then the whup-crash sound of bending steel caused him to hesitate. He wasn’t dealing with the average late night visitor trying to gain access to their lockbox. The
shaleehs
and
schaws
and outright jaguar-deep growls wrenched beads of sweat from his flesh. His instincts begged him to turn around and run. Twelve thirty-five an hour and a decent pension weren’t enough to run headfirst into harm’s way. He was fifty-eight, and what could an old man do with a bottle of mace, a pair of handcuffs and a walkie talkie?
Before he could strategize, a rush of wind struck him. He was punched in the chest and thrown five feet onto his back. Three ribs snapped upon landing, and his pelvis shattered. His sternum remained intact, but he was bleeding heavily from the chest. Three quarter-inch slashes exuded red, the muscle tissue beneath glossy and wet. Wayne’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he issued a silent prayer for Al and one for himself before passing out.
Chapter Three
Forty-five minutes after the security guards were attacked, Billy Carton, Wayne’s son, had signed on for work. He was the meter man on the surrounding blocks of Corporate Square. He drove in a modified golf cart with a four-cylinder engine. Billy rubbed the Batman sticker symbol he placed on it on his first day of work. He rubbed it every morning for good luck.
Batman fights crime in Gotham, and I fight parking violations in Chicago.
Secretly, he patted the Batman sticker on the headboard of his bed before he made love to his live-in girlfriend, Jessica Prager. It was a superstition that amazingly worked wonders for his sex life.
Between 6:45 and 9:30, morning rush hour, was the busiest ticket writing time of the day. People forgot to pay the meters or swipe their meter cards in their haste. Others failed to parallel park correctly or they created illegal spaces of their own on the streets. Billy had been on the job for almost two years since dropping out of the police academy.
Billy drove up 131
st
Street and caught the dreaded Pontiac Bonneville double parked at the metered section. It was Dr. Adamson’s car. The physician was still in his vehicle sipping his morning coffee and blasting Elton John’s “Rocket Man”. Billy parked his cart in reverse with a beep-beep-beep sound. His stomach clenched. Every encounter with Dr. Adamson went sour, and this occasion wouldn’t be any different. And it didn’t help that Dr. Adamson had been the on-staff physician and general medic at Illinois State Police Academy when Billy attempted to graduate the academy and failed. The doctor knew he'd faked a medical condition to get out of the police academy.
Dr. Adamson finished his coffee at his leisure and rolled down his window. “Hey Billy, top of the morning. Aren’t you hitting the eighth hole by now in that cart you call a vehicle?”
“The city issues the vehicles, and if it were up to me—”
“Hey, I’m late to work.” Dr. Adamson jokingly eyed his watch. “But a doctor’s got time for his patients. How’s the colon? Has it gone spastic again?”
“The colon's dandy. Thanks.”
Billy groaned.
Then he blushed.
Dr. Adamson had the goods on him, and damn the luck, Billy thought, that Dr. Adamson would later become his parking violation nemesis. Dr. Adamson signed a waiver at the police academy to give him the semester off—and half tuition reimbursement—for suffering from bouts of spastic colon. The problem was, he didn’t have spastic colon. He hated the police academy and begged the doctor for an out. He couldn't just drop out. His father would've been disappointed, so this was the next best option. Billy was grateful for that “out” Dr. Adamson provided. Dr. Adamson considered the secretarial fibbing as a way to avoid having negligent cops on the beat.