Authors: Ryan Harding
I.
Gabriel saw the dead man on his way home from the video store.
He’d been thinking about the shift at Movie Heaven as he drove. Carrie and Renee had both been there, the teen pregnancies waiting to happen. And what were they wearing on a sizzling August day? As little as the law allowed. Gabriel spent the five and a half hours playing pocket pool. The clock couldn’t pass slowly enough to suit him on days like this. He fully expected them to show up in
Barely Legal
any day now.
A stack of porno movies clattered on the passenger seat. He was allowed to bring them home, but he’d waited for Renee to take someone to the tanning bed and Carrie to restock some new releases before he’d made his move. If he had any chance of going out with either of them—and the past three months had provided precious little hope of
that
—it wouldn’t help his cause if they knew he was going home with
Lesbian Airline Stewardesses
,
Carol’s Arse,
Dildo Delirium,
and that perennial customer favorite,
Gaping Anus.
It all made for a bitter obsession. Working with the hot little sirens transported him through a time wrap right back into high school, as if there were a worm hole at the check-out counter of Movie Heaven. It hadn’t been long ago at all, so his memories of countless young things in skin-tight skirts, halter tops, blouses tied at the mid-riff, shorts barely longer than their underwear, and open-toed sandals were vivid. He couldn’t talk to them then; his tongue became like the knots in their blouses.
Who the hell am I kidding?
he thought.
I can’t talk to them now either!
What ingenious things had he said to Carrie and Renee today? “Hi.” “I’m going on break.” “Could you hand me that?” “Well, see you tomorrow.”
Yeah, a real mystery that he hadn’t scored with either one of them or—as he always daydreamed—
both
of them yet. The irony was that he wasn’t a bad looking guy at all. Kind face, cobalt eyes, fair hair—the typical angel blueprint. Did Carrie and Renee sense some kind of ugliness inside him? Sometimes it seemed like they must; them and all the beautiful ones he saw at work. He’d be happy just to get a sniff of even the middle tier women who frequented the tanning beds virtually every day that ended with a Y. Well, he could think of a thing or two he’d like to do at
their
Y’s. They looked like they knew he was thinking this when he confirmed their tanning appointments . . . an uneasy disgust in their eyes with a tilt of the chin, like he had snot hanging from his nose. Even when he
wasn’t
thinking anything untoward, he felt their derision. They sensed a strangeness, as if he had a pheromone that sent them all scattering instead of attracting a single one of them.
And there was indeed something Carrie and Renee wouldn’t like if they knew about it: the
Taste of Death
movies. He was even more cautious about taking those home than the pornos. They might think he was pathetic if they knew about the pornos, but if they knew about
Taste of Death
, they’d think he was
psychotic
.
It was the
Taste of Death
series Gabriel was thinking about when he saw the dead man. He was standing on the corner of 37th and Garren, and to look at him you wouldn’t know he’d had his head blown off on
Taste of Death 5: Into the Grave
.
These weren’t simply movies where a group of horny teenagers were slain with phallic implements. Like
Traces of Death, Faces of Death, Death Scenes, Executions,
and their brothers in the mondo video line, they were known as “shockumentaries.” They provided the audience with various clips of real deaths caught on tape—accidents, murders, and animal attacks featured most prominently. Offended people erroneously called them “snuff movies,” which differed in that a snuff victim was brought before the camera for the express purpose of being murdered. According to
Channel Two News
reporter Geisha Hammond (and the lips on
that
sizzling hot piece . . . Gabriel figured he’d blow the back of her head out approximately 1.5 seconds after she put those lush lips on his ramrod) in a story about “Mr. Drill Bit” Earl Newman just a few months ago, there was no evidence to support the claim that snuff movies existed anyway. Shockumentaries merely collected random atrocities where a camera just happened to grab the money shot.
One of Gabriel’s favorites was a clip which showed a man blasted in the face with a shotgun fired off-screen. A moment after he blinked with the incomprehension of a bovine, his hapless look was erased in a shower of deep red and mushroom colored fragments, too many to count even in slow motion. Above the sounds of blood droplets and skull pieces wetting the pavement, an unnamed narrator cracked in Crypt Keeper throwback, “The world’s foremost magician—now you see him, now you don’t.”
It was swift, senseless . . . a moment allegedly grabbed by a bored passenger tracking with a video camera at a traffic light. A graphic art born of nothing, never to be forgotten once seen. Gabriel certainly hadn’t, and yet that same hapless gent now stood on the corner of 37th and Garren, unaware that his head had once been liquefied into a Sistine Chapel of Rorschach artistry. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could fix with a tube of superglue and infinite patience; there wasn’t supposed to be any sequel for you on
Taste of Death
.
The company who released the videos—Chosen Few Pictures—had clearly swindled him. He’d never suspected otherwise, even though some of the other mondo films were faked. He’d blindly trusted this series because it appeared to deliver what it promised in bloody red letters on every box: COMPLETELY AUTHENTIC! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT REAL! ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN TAKE IT?? (Funny, but he’d swear he’d rented pornos with an almost identical tag line.)
Not so. The shotgun decapitation only
looked
genuine. Unless the man was a ghost. A phantom condemned to walk the earth for failing to avoid what had to be a rather obvious murder.
Gabriel blinked, and looked for the man again. He was gone, now obstructed by the buildings on Garren.
Whatever the explanation, Gabriel felt disturbed. He’d seen each
Taste of Death
at least three times. The new one, the ninth installment, was due out next week. He’d been looking forward to another ninety minute foray into the final, intimate misfortunes of strangers. But it was for naught. That age-old certainty of death wasn’t even for sure anymore.
He drove home to his parents’ house, still wondering.
II.
The next day, he picked up each of the
Taste of Death
boxes and searched them.
They all listed Chosen Few Pictures as their distributor, but none of them gave an address for the company. As far as he knew, this was the only line of videos they had ever released. They had nothing else available for order when he searched the computer at work.
It had begun to dawn on him how strange it was that he had seen one of the “actors” from
Taste of Death
. He hadn’t recognized the scenery in the movies, so it didn’t seem possible they had been filmed in his hometown of Bartok. Of all the places in the world, it was quite a coincidence that he’d seen the actor here.
He started to question if it was a coincidence after all. The chances of the guy having a twin brother seemed even more remote. Even in the scantily-clad company of Carrie and Renee he had difficulty thinking of anything other than what he’d seen the night before. His thoughts hadn’t been this concentrated since he’d first brought home a
Taste of Death
movie, on a whim. The ways the people lost their lives, the strangeness that someone happened to be there with a camera, and just knowing there were even more of these shockumentaries out there . . . it obsessed him. Would his own death end up on a
movie? Years of being alive, having friends, making an impact—however slight—would it all be eclipsed by a bizarre equation resulting in Gabriel Reynolds dying on
Taste of Death 10, 11, 12
, or whatever? Would he stop being Gabriel Reynolds and become “that dude who got snuffed on candid camera?”
The shockumentaries were a paradox. Even when you were certain that what you were seeing was genuine, it was still a concept that could not quite be grasped. How could these people you were seeing for the first time already be dead? Their deaths seemed real, but
they
didn’t.
He ran a search on the Internet for Chosen Few Pictures. Thankfully it wasn’t one of those names that would return hundreds of thousands of results. He found what he wanted right away—an official homepage for the company that had only recently gone online. It didn’t tell him much, aside from their past releases ($39.99 per . . . thank God he could cherry pick the damn things when overstock wound up in the “previously viewed” sale bin) and the announcement that the new
Taste of Death
would be out August 6th (it had been pushed back, though, according to the Movie Heaven release schedule, and wouldn’t be out until August 20th). It did, however, give him the contact address.
Chosen Few Pictures was run out of a post office box in Bartok.
III
.
Not all of the clips could have been made in Bartok, though; Gabriel would have heard about it. For instance,
Taste of Death 3
featured a burning skyscraper where several people chose to plunge to a messy death rather than burn alive. There were no skyscrapers in Bartok; the clip had to come from elsewhere. It was probably true of most.
The common way to accumulate all this footage was to take out an ad in
Variety
or some other movie trade magazine and request news stations, police departments, departments of transportation, and the like submit videos with violent footage to the address.
Did this mean a few deaths were faked in Bartok for supplemental footage? The series was good about not borrowing from other shockumentaries. Maybe the only way to reach ninety minutes without resorting to recycling footage was to create new scenes. It made sense, and it was hardly the first time a video was guilty of false advertising.
Gabriel thought it was somehow unnatural that Chosen Few Pictures was run in his city, but of course it had to be
somewhere
. It could have just as easily been some other skyscraper-less city with a horny video store clerk who thought it almost conspiratorially bizarre that a mondo video company would have its home base there. He became less apprehensive about the coincidences, but was more curious than ever to see how the next installment turned out.
IV
.
On August 20th, he got his chance.
Taste of Death 9: Grave Matters
came out with no further delays. He took it home that night. Its plastic box seemed to radiate energy, something that promised his eagerness would be rewarded. He watched it slide around on the passenger seat as he drove, as if it would accidentally slip and reveal its true self.
The cover had been decorated with an autopsy table and a stainless steel tray featuring the tools of dissection. The back of the box warned of the violent content within, promising the death clips of a man who should have paid more attention to a DON’T FEED THE BEARS sign, movie stunts gone horribly awry, results of drunk driving on the Autobahn, alligator farm mishaps, PCP addicts in shoot-outs with the police, the final escape attempt of famed magician Isaac the Invincible, riots, tightrope walkers who laughed at safety nets, and assorted other punishments for hubris and just being in the wrong place at the right time. It promised to be the best shockumentary yet, a veritable extravaganza of morbid atrocities.
It sounded like just what the doctor ordered after an unproductive five hours of half-hearted banter that left no impressions on Carrie and Renee, or at least not any good ones.
He nuked himself a TV dinner, took it to his room, and parked in front of the screen. He was especially on the lookout for any possible Bartokians and local settings. As it turned out, they were more obvious than he would have believed.
“This young woman should have just called Triple-A,” the narrator opined, with the assurance of one who knows he has just gotten off a sterling quip. The scene was purportedly captured by a nearby security camera. The female in question was leaning underneath her car hood in an otherwise empty parking lot, hands constantly fidgeting to signal she had no idea what she was doing. The scene occurred at night and was somewhat obscured by shadows. Another figure, probably male, appeared beside the woman, his face a silhouette. He seized the car hood and repeatedly brought it down across her back and head, instantly bringing her to her knees. The killer stepped back to admire his handiwork, his face still cloaked by the night. Without the overdone shadow work, Gabriel would still have been able to assess the authenticity—or lack thereof—in this scene. Though her tormentor had remained hidden by the unrealistic lighting scheme, the victim herself had not.
It was Carrie, whom he’d been admiring at Movie Heaven a mere two hours ago.
V.
“I didn’t know you wanted to be an actress,” Gabriel said to her the next day.