Authors: Alan Spencer
“This movie is super rare and hard to find. The movie itself was seized before it got to play in theatres back in the late seventies. A group of upright Christians seized the prints. Later on, I heard someone else stole the original reels, made a print of it, and then put it back into the safe they stole it from to avoid prosecution. They distributed it on-line to start a cult following. Nothing really happened, though. Me and some other people were interested, and that’s about it. I don’t think anybody would watch this and be inspired to blow themselves up over it.”
“People are crazy enough—crazy enough to pirate bazillions of movies like you.”
Nelson clinked his glass against Billy’s. “Free movies are the way to be. Viva revolution.”
The credits to the film rolled; Billy missed the final scene. “What else do you have on tonight’s viewing list?”
“Maybe
Flesh Eaters from Mars
.”
Billy rolled his eyes. He fake yawned. “Yeah, I’m suddenly tired. Thanks for the nightcap, sport.”
“Hey, I’ve got other movies. How about
Lesbian Cab Rides Part 8
.”
“Now you’re entering porno territory.”
“Would Jessica kick your ass?”
“She’d tell me all the horror stories of the porn industry.”
“She’s the type to guilt limp you, huh? That’s a shame. I guess the real thing is always better.”
Billy headed to the door. “Maybe this visit has cured my insomnia.”
“What, me helping you to realize you’re not a loser?”
“You’re not a loser either,” Billy insisted. “I got lucky with Jessica. She literally moved right into my life. I wouldn’t know her otherwise if I hadn’t replied to that ad on line.”
“Maybe I should be replying to ads of all kinds.”
“The personal ads are a nightmare.” Billy opened the door. “Maybe you should start a movie club or something. You’ve got the movies.”
“That I do. All right, good night. Try and get a few hours sleep.”
Billy returned to the apartment. Jessica was still asleep.
After sneaking back into bed and falling asleep himself, images from
Death Reject
filled his dreams.
Chapter Nine
Chuck Muelman received a knock on his apartment door at nine-thirty p.m. The delivery was two hours late. Peggy Sue’s Bakery Creations delivered a pie every Thursday. His wife was a member of the Pie of the Week Club. Brandy loved blueberry pies, and this week's pie was blueberry.
Blueberry is a super food
, Brandy claimed.
I’ve never been sick once since I’ve eaten them.
Chuck knew the claim wasn’t true. Brandy had the flu last year and a bad sinus infection. Health food was a mental market. Nothing was good for you anymore, Chuck believed, and everything caused cancer. But he enjoyed the taste of blueberry pies and didn’t complain when it was his turn for a slice.
The stranger who delivered it was unfamiliar. Nine times out of ten, it was a teenager—usually Jayne, the well-endowed number who also worked at Hooters. Jayne sported enough cleavage to merit a five-dollar tip. But today the deliverer was a man. Chuck was startled by the deliverer’s expression. Ogling eyes. Jackal’s stare. His mouth was shiftless, the contradiction of expressions bordering on insanity. The man could reach out and bite his nose off at any moment, Chuck thought. On each side of the man’s head, a tuft of curly red hair bulged from the scalp.
“You’re a new guy,” Chuck said. “You’re late.”
“I’m the pie guy, yes. I’m late for a reason. My pie will blow your mind. It took
extra
long because it’s
extra
special.”
Chuck grasped for a reply. “Okay then, yes, thank you.”
He handed the man twenty dollars. The deliverer didn’t bother to break change and Chuck was too put off by the man to demand anything back.
“I take great pride in my pies, sir.” The deliveryman clearly wasn’t impressed with the tip and didn’t appear to notice Chuck’s generosity. “Please come by the shop for other treats. Anytime, seriously. I’ll show you how the pies are made in back and everything. I always welcome my customers into my pies—I mean into my business.”
Chuck pasted on a smile and accepted the pink box. “Thank you much. I’m sure I’ll take you up on that sometime. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, valued customer.”
Chuck shut the door.
Even the man’s invitation came off as strange.
Brandy snatched the pie. “It’s about time.”
“Nobody’s going to deny you your precious dessert, honey.”
Chuck moved to the kitchen and popped the tab of a beer. He returned to the living room and spread himself out on his favorite chair. He waited for Brandy to return to the living room with a plate of her pie. The wait was punctuated by a shrill scream.
He bounded into the kitchen. “Brandy, what is it?”
Her face had lost all color. The box from the bakery had been opened. Chuck noticed the pie wasn’t a circle, but a large square cut from a much bigger pie. With a twist of his stomach, Chuck observed what Brandy had found and covered his mouth in shock. Then he said, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there’s a boob in your pie!”
The five vampires soared through the Chicago night. They hovered close together, hidden from sight by the darkness. They scoured every sector of the city. Lake Michigan. Navy Pier. The museums and night clubs and skyscrapers. The Rapid Transit System. The suburban section of Chicago that contrasted against the low-rent communities at East End, Chicago. Judging by the stillness of the night, the city wasn’t in a state of panic—yet. The possibilities far exceeded Anderson Mills, Kansas, their last conquest, the town filled with woods and hills. Last year’s slaughter was a pre-game formality. This was the big leagues. Now that they had the city memorized, they could forge ahead with tomorrow’s devastation. But first, they were going to have some fun.
The blonde vampire—nameless, created purely for looks by Ted Fuller—led the pack of vampires. They descended upon the Neo Night Club in human form and without clothes. The line outside the club gawked at what descended from the night sky. The bouncer, an Irish-American named Charlie, approached the five. “You ladies need clothes to enter here. No shirt, no shoes, no service, catch my drift? But if you want to hook up later at my apartment…”
The blonde snatched the bouncer’s neck with her claws. Her face deformed into a reptile’s, her snout convoluted, the flesh plated black, and her teeth extended as they bit down on his trachea and slurped what the jugular spat down her throat. The four others joined in, intertwining their tongues, masticating, sucking, lapping and kissing each other in their violent bloodlust for warm red blood. The blonde lifted the bouncer up by his neck and launched him across the street. The crowd dispersed immediately. Screams rocked the streets and echoed into parts of the city that had no idea the threat of monsters was so close to them.
And then an explosion rang from within the club. The front window shattered when a pelvic bone was hurled through it. Human bones served as bullets cutting through customers running from the chaos. Two eyeballs penetrated a man’s chest and spat out the other side of him. Intestines wrapped around a woman’s throat and hanged her from the street lamp. Ribs, spine, humerus, tibia, coccyx and femurs all served as anatomical shrapnel.
The blonde seized a fleeing young woman wearing a triangle-shaped, backless top. The vampire returned to human form and hugged her close to her body. She forced her tongue into the woman’s mouth, which tasted of cranberry and vodka. The woman clawed at the monster's face to escape. “Crazy bitch, no—!”
“I’ll always keep a part of you inside me.” She clamped on the woman’s tongue and reared back. The tongue tore from the stringy stump and hung limply in the vampire's mouth. She shoved the woman onto the street, her screams laced with crimson bubbling. The blonde vampire devoured the tongue, easing it down her throat.
The others went to work swooping down and wrenching heads off random partiers and spiking them back onto the road. The redhead hoisted a yellow Hummer and thrust it into four cowering friends, each college aged. They were stamped into the brick wall.
Police sirens played out against the backdrop of Chicago.
The blonde caught a shotgun blast into the side. A chunk of her spattered onto the asphalt. She lunged at the bar owner and shoved his face into her guts. “Drown inside me, baby! It’s warm just for you.”
He choked to death in minutes.
A fire broke out within Neo Night Club. Suddenly, the dead bodies on the ground jerked. The bones embedded in their heads and torsos freed themselves and flew back into the club. A man rose from the flames standing proud. The man, the star of
Death Reject
, otherwise known as Ray Hampton in the movie, moved on down the street content with his work.
The blonde advised him, “Tomorrow, you’ll be joined by so many more us.”
Ray was unaffected by their talk. He hid in the alley, running from the whine of enclosing police and ambulance sirens.
The five vampires took flight in unison.
There was one more item on tonight’s docket of terror.
A pin drop could be heard in the recovery unit of Heart of Chicago Medical Center. The late-night shifts were uneventful, but not this dull, Nurse Sherry Miller thought. Sherry made her rounds at midnight, and then she restocked the syringes and hypodermic needles. Since she was the new girl, the seasoned staff gave her odd jobs to fill in the downtime. Pretty soon her superiors would run out of errands for her. A ham sandwich and a diet soda waited in the fridge, and her stomach was already growling.
She reentered the main hallway. Nobody was at the nurse’s station. “What, did everybody go on break while I was in the stock room?” Sherry raised her voice. “Where is everybody?”
Sherry moved to the main station. All five nurses were lying on the floor. Dead. Desiccated. Their flesh was like parchment clinging tight to the bones, every drop of fluid and blood absent. Their mouths were pulled back in deadly screams, their leathery tongues rolled back into their throats. The desk, the main hallway, the black and white tiles, all of it blurred together in a moving kaleidoscope as the horror sank in.
An ear-drum-shattering animal call arrived: “
Shraaaaaaaaaaaaah
!”
A form—no two, now three, and then five—shoved open patient room doors and casually moved about the hallway. Their heads were bent forward and their spines curved as if they could race at her on all fours at any moment. Red eyes glowed bright. Flesh and blood were embedded in their teeth.
Sherry ducked into the nearest room and hid. It was room 413, Wayne Carton’s room. The patient lay in bed, a cast around his pelvis. He was gutted and picked clean of anything internal. His face was the only part of him left unscathed and even that was glazed in red.
The door was kicked from its hinges. Sherry ducked for cover behind the bed. She convulsed in terror. Sherry cowered in the corner, paralyzed. Tears rolled down from her eyes. That’s when a warm hand caressed her cheek. Blue eyes met hers. A kind human smile. A caress she hadn’t felt in months, not since her lover, Iris, left on Peace Corps assignment to Germany.
“You miss your Iris, don’t you?”
Sherry’s head snapped up at the woman. She was naked. Sherry had no chance to register the removal of her blouse and white scrubs. Flesh to flesh, warmth to warmth, their hearts could sense one another beat through the shell of each other’s bodies.
“I miss her so much.” Sherry wept. “She’s not coming back for a year.”
“It’s okay,” the woman said with long flowing black hair and perfect breasts, much like Iris’s. “You can touch me. I’ll be Iris. We all will be your Iris.”
She was enveloped by five women. They circled her. Buried her. Caressed her. Kissed her. Aroused her. Sherry melted. Fear cast aside, she was so entrenched in their bodies, she touched them back, lavished in their sex. Soon Sherry was closing in on a climax even Iris couldn’t deliver. Before she could complete her orgasm, a forked tongue forced itself through her eye and cut into her brain. Her skull was split down the middle, the others supping on what spilled from her sinuses and skull cavity.
The vampires left Sherry a dead pile and continued through the fourth floor until every patient was drained of their precious blood.
Then they flew back to Ted Fuller’s apartment.
Chapter Ten
Detective Vickers demanded Officer Baker drive faster. Time was of the essence. He was following this investigation by the book since he felt like he was near the closing of the case. Ted Fuller was connected with the crimes at Iowa University and the stolen reels belonging to Dennis Brauman. Whatever else Ted had planned to commit to hype his films, Vickers couldn’t give him the time to perpetrate it. Officer Baker was driving him to Judge Howard Bullard’s house to argue for a search warrant.
Officer Baker was full of questions about Ted Fuller. “Is that director into smut or something?”