A quick recap of what came before...
At a table in Osaka-ya, a yakiniku restaurant in the Chicagoland area, four filmmakers (Levi, Brad, Maggie, and Pathik) planned the shooting schedule of their next big project, The Shadows. But down below, in the basement of the restaurant, a doomsday cult began to plot the coming race war. Antony Meninski, restaurant owner and leader of the doomsayers, recruited all of this employees including Tracey, Kelly, Trent, Jodi, Kory, and Padma into his Nazi killing cult. Together they would initiate the race war and begin the end of the world, ensuring of course that they killed as many Nazis along the way as possible and carved out a safe place for themselves to hunker down and thus survive the chaos. As part of this plan Kelly was tasked with getting close to two high profile Nazi's in the area: Richard and Debra Miller, and their son, Brad.
Brad hired Kelly to be an actress in The Shadows and shooting began the day after a white supremacist Rally in near by Libertyville turned into a deadly riot, seeming to begin the doomsday Antony had preached of for so long. Unbeknownst to Brad and the rest of the film crew, the bloody deaths of local Nazis preceded the filming of their psychological horror flick, and business carried on as usual.
On the day of filming, however, a gruesome, mangled, half-eaten body fell from the ceiling and interrupted the first scene of the day—shattering the carefree atmosphere of their makeshift set in Brad's dad's warehouse. It was the body of Gary Stu, or rather, the actor who played the character of Gary Stu in The Shadows. Quickly tensions rose among the group and the true horror story began to unfold. (Recommended reading: parts 1 and 2.)
“Hello? God, it's dark in here. Anybody home?”
Linh reached out and hit the wall just behind her, spreading her fingers and reaching for a light switch against the empty expanse of wall. It really was pitch black in the warehouse, and cold, and she wasn't exactly sure she had managed to follow Kelly's directions correctly. The warehouse was on the edge of town in an industrial park that probably no one had been to the last thirty years but the same old plant workers and business men. Kelly definitely said she was here, though, when she texted thirty minutes ago. Definitely this warehouse, Linh reassured herself, on the edge of town, which was empty and pitch black and cold. She trusted Kelly even if she was a little bit afraid.
“Linh!?” Kelly's voice rang out in the darkness, loud and strong despite her having just been sobbing her brains out into Maggie's blue, cotton dress. Linh found the switches and flicked all of them up at once.
“Kels!” Linh started walking out into the slowly brightening warehouse. God I hope she's not making a porno. Linh thought as the last of the lights finally clicked on and she made her way through towers of racks. “Why were all the lights off? This isn't some kind of terrible kink shit right?” But really, she couldn't entertain the thought of Kelly doing a porno for much longer. Prude Kelly? Button up Kelly? A shady, college kid film in someone's dad's warehouse is one thing, but Kelly on her back for anyone was a joke.
Linh walked through a line of racks stacked practically to the top of the ceiling. The pallets were full of buckets and pails of various sizes, stacked two high, and then more on the upper racks. Most were covered with plastic wrap, the others held rows of unmarked boxes and many of them had fading, hard to read labels. But the buckets and pails definitely had some kind of chemical warning on the outside. Linh really didn't give them much thought.
She was about halfway through the warehouse when she saw the group gathered around a makeshift, low budget set. They stood close together, Kelly looking wildly around herself on the edge of the group, holding herself at her shoulders obviously shaken. Something was terribly wrong.
“Oh Linh!” Kelly didn't usually cry out like that. Kelly ran towards Linh, who could see as she neared that her face was stricken with tears, her expression an odd mix of fear and something else. Kelly didn't talk like that. Kelly didn't cry like that.
The rest of the group turned when Kelly rushed forward. They stood like a front, bearing down ahead of an attack, distrusting, on edge. Kelly looked absurd against them as she grabbed onto Linh with frantic hands, clinging and burrowing herself as far into her arms as she could.
“Who the fuck are you!?” Brad pushed past the others, stepping over a puddle of what looked like fake blood to Linh, but that was dripping off of the set and onto the cement floor from a pile of very real looking innards, and, was that? Yes, a fucking severed head. So much for a tasteful film.
“Dude, back the fuck off,” Linh let Kelly into her arms, wrapping her right arm around her and holding out the left to back Brad off. Something was definitely wrong. Kelly was crying and this idiot muscle man was ready to punch someone's lights out.
Pathik glanced up at Linh—a small girl in skinny jeans and a hoodie, a purse slung across her chest and hair pulled into a ponytail, a regular small town girl, he thought to himself absurdly, like it mattered. Holding onto his iPhone tightly, he looked back down at his screen. For a moment, with Brad distracted by the new comer and Levi holding his hand over his face where Pat had just smacked him, with Maggie staring straight ahead in shock and Kelly weeping into Linh's sweatshirt, for that short, unsure moment, Pathik thought he might dial 911. He hit the power button and the screen dimmed. He stepped towards Brad, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder, which was violently whisked away in a second.
“We're,” Pathik started, looking Linh up and down, “in the middle of a situation.”
Brad choked out a laugh. “Situation, yeah, okay Pat. Who. The fuck. Are YOU?” Brad repeated his question, his voice rising, his blood boiling under the surface.
“She's with me, dumbass.” Kelly spat back at him, her voice oddly able to change from sobbing mess to calm sarcasm in just a few seconds.
Linh rolled her eyes and then looked down to Kelly's blood-stained legs. Some of it had rubbed off on Linh's jeans, a droplet or two fell to her sneakers. She scrunched her nose.
“You stink, dude.” Linh pulled the neck of her hoodie up to cover her nose. “I'm Linh, I'm...yeah..I'm with her...that like pigs blood or something?”
The room was silent for a beat. Linh looked over at the pile of body parts for a second time, and suddenly it hit her, like a semi truck to the gut. Suddenly it didn't look so fake anymore. Brad quickly stepped out in front of her.
“What do you think you're doing?” Brad's voice was angry, but Linh really didn't care about him, she pressed forward, ducking under his outstretched arms.
He tried to further push himself in front of her, tried to stop her from getting closer to the corpse but she was already close enough to smell it, had already seen it. The parts and pieces of some person were staring her in the face. The severed head was a real head. No fucking way papier-mâché looked like that. The guts spilling out of a misplaced torso weren't like any anatomy textbook, weren't like anything she had seen in class or at a doctor's office—this wasn't a poster on the wall of your GI tract, this was someones actual GI tract. This was a very human shade of innards. There was an arm here, a leg, but parts were certainly missing. It was a man, at least she figured it might be, white. And if anything could make Kelly break down like that it wouldn't be some fake ass prop.
“Kelly?” Linh's voice sounded faraway, wavering. Kelly smacked Brad's outstretched arm away and pulled at Linh's sleeve.
“Look, maybe you should go home...”
“Who is that?”
“Well..”
“Well!? If it was fake you'd just say it was fake, but you didn't. You said 'well...', well....well fucking what!? Who is that?”
Kelly stammered and looked to Levi, as if he would know how to answer.
“Gary Stu,” he whispered, eyes blinking, his lower lip bleeding slightly from where he had accidentally bit down on it when Pat's hand flew backwards just a moment ago.
Suddenly Linh was sure that Kelly had joined a cult. There was a dead body, in pieces, it didn't just get like that. Kelly was just standing there. They were all just standing there.
“Who the fuck is Gary!?” Linh shook her head and headed straight back from where she came from. “No, you know what? Fuck this.” Linh side stepped past Kelly and Brad and stormed towards the front office, pulling her phone out of her pocket as she did so.
“NO!” A chorus of shouts rang out in the warehouse, echoing across the empty rafters of the ceiling. She broke into a run.
“Linh!” Kelly ran after her but Brad was faster, shoving past and yanking Linh back by her sweatshirt. Her whole five foot two, hundred pound frame flew backwards and too the ground in a second.
“Get the fuck off me,” Linh wrestled the man practically on top of her. Kelly caught up with them and pulled Brad's hands off of Linh with a strength he really hadn't expected from her. But even if Linh was free from Brad, she wasn't free from Kelly.
Kelly couldn't go to the cops. They'd start to investigate the death of Gary Stu and they'd start with her, covered in blood. They'd look into her life, her job, her girlfriend, her house...the basement. Her basement was full of incriminating evidence, it was where she had shucked off her bloody clothes from the rally last night. The rally where she had killed at least one of those very cops. No good, degenerate, Nazi scum. No, no way Kelly could ever go to the cops. Not for this. Not for anything. She grabbed Linh's phone from her hand, wrenching it free from her grip, and actually handing it back to Brad as she got up from the floor and let Linh go.
Linh looked back at her incredulous. “Kels...”
Give me your phone.” Brad stormed over to Pathik and held out his hand. Pathik looked back frightened but still gripping his phone so tightly his knuckles shown white. Linh scrambled up and ran towards the front office door, Kelly running after her, small pools of viscera dropping to the floor with every movement she made.
Pathik stepped backward instinctively away from Brad, the back of his shoes inching towards the corpse and the blood. Maggie watched him, narrowed in on his shoes—yellow-brown, an off-brand version of Timberlands—wishing she could look away.
Linh reached the front office door and clamored at the handle, just as Kelly was also reaching it and shoved a blood covered shin out to trip Linh.
“What the fuck Kels!?”
“You are not going anywhere,” Kelly ground out, the muscles in her upper arms rippling as she forcibly grabbed hold of Linh and pulled her back. Linh never stop clawing at her girlfriend as she was dragged back to the group.
“Give me your phone.” Brad stormed over to Pathik again, holding out his hand.
“No way.”
“You gonna rat us out?”
“Rat us...Brad...”
“No one killed anyone,” Levi stepped forward. Now in the open light, everything seemed a lot simpler. They could figure this out. They didn't need to shout at each other, they didn't need to make it any worse.
“We don't know that, Levi,” Pathik looked up at him with a worried glance.
“We were all right here, shooting the scene.” Levi pointed out, gesturing to Kelly and the once all white set behind them.
“And then the lights went out.”
“And it was Kelly and Brad over there when it happened!”
“What the fuck ever,” Kelly still held tight to Linh's upper arm.
“Okay, but the body was obviously already dead.”
There was a long silent pause while Levi paced back and forth between Kelly and Linh and the body.
“But we were all accounted for. Pat was here all morning setting up the set. Maggie too. I was still writing, Brad was there, we just sat on the floor here. Kelly came in an hour ago, at least.”
“An hour ago...” Brad interjected.
“Come on Brad,” Maggie spoke up, not sure why she felt she had to defend Kelly—she didn't know Kelly all that much anyway.
“What, an hour ago is plenty of time to kill and dismember a body.”
“Spoken from experience or?”
“Shut up!”
“She was sobbing,”
“Yeah, well, she's an actress.”
Levi stood close to the body, careful this time to keep his shoes out of the viscera on the floor, looking up at the ceiling above them. There were some racks near by, but most of the space had been cleared out for the set to be built.
“Where did it come from?” his voice was small, but when it mattered it carried.
“What?”
“The body, where did it come from?” He pointed down at the mess of Gary Stu on the floor and then backup at the ceiling which was kind of empty for having just held a bloody, gutted, half remains of a human, like, two minutes ago.
Suddenly they all rushed forward, even Linh, and looked up at the ceiling with Levi. There was a light fixture hanging almost directly over the body, there was a couple of rafters where, theoretically a murderer could jump across but they probably couldn't do that silently.
“And the lights,” Pathik spoke up this time. “Like florescents don't do that.”
“Do what?”
“You know, go on and off like that. When she came in,” he pointed over at Linh, “she turned them on again, right?”
“Right...”
“And they flickered and took what, twenty seconds to turn all the way on?”
“Yeah!”
Everyone looked all around them, like they were all suddenly detectives.
What they knew was there was a dismembered body. It fell from the ceiling. The ceiling was empty.
Levi turned towards the group. How were they supposed to figure this out. Were they even supposed to figure this out? He hadn't signed up for a dead body when he started to make this film. They were using a shadow monster. They had planned ahead that there would be no blood and guts because Pathik didn't like gore. He had told Levi that a long time ago. They weren't going to deviate into slasher. Serial killers weren't their style. It was all supposed to be in the mind. A shadow monster stands on the periphery, it doesn't drop bodies on top of you.
And then he realized it. A shadow monster was exactly what they were dealing with. He was enough of an artist to believe in magic, even his own.
“Where's the rest of the body?” Levi questioned again.
And then another body, this time fully alive and in tact, this time landing on its feet, fell from the sky.
“What the!?”
Linh scrabbled into her purse and pulled out a taser just as an extremely tall, extremely non human form stepped towards them all it's mouth dripping with blood from what could only be the body on the floor next to them. She flipped it on and pointed it at the creature and pressed hard down on the button.
A wave of electrical force flew out of the end of the taser and hit him square in the chest. The creature stalled for a second, his mouth making a kind of gruesome sound before he fell over—obviously stunned, knocked out completely.
“HOLY SHIT!” Brad screamed and jumped behind Linh. He crouched behind her, behind her tiny little body. He was big and bulky behind her, but she had the only weapon in the room and that thing, whatever it was, was freakishly horrible.
Kelly and Brad and Linh all held onto each other and took several steps back, Linh still with her hand gripping the taser and staring down at the creature now unconscious on the floor. She breathed heavily and dared not blink. It was tall and skinny. It had long gray limbs that were thin and spindly, but ended in sort of thin, sharp, hand-like claws. It's face had a scrunched up expression—like pain maybe, or shock. It's jaw had remains of blood and guts on it, a little chunk of what could have been intestine or maybe a spleen was sitting on the corner of it's lips like he had eaten really fast and not realized that it was still there.
Levi and Pat and Maggie all jumped back when Linh had tased the body down, and Brad had screamed, but they—all of them—now cautiously moved forward. Levi held up a hand at Linh who lowered the taser and then looked at it in disbelief. She had never used it before though she kept it and pepper spray on her at all times. She had used it to save them. If there were anymore of them, they might not stand at chance. As it was, though, he looked pretty much done for.
“Is it...breathing?” Linh asked, her voice shaky despite her courage from a moment ago.
“Uhm,” Levi bent down and looked straight into the face of the creature. Not a shadow monster then. Just a regular monster. “I think so?” He leaned even closer and saw the gentle rise and fall of it's chest. “Yes! Definitely breathing.”
“Is it...human?” Brad asked. Of the group he was probably the least likely to believe in the other worldly. He was notoriously bad in choosing what to believe in.
But nevertheless, Brad couldn't argue with what was right in front of him.
“I don't know.”
Pathik tried to pull Levi back, but Levi wriggled out of his grip and knelt down beside the creature anyway. Levi was dwarfed next to it. It was on the floor and seemed harmless for the moment, but it was very tall and gangly and Pathik had the distinct idea that it could wrap it's arms around Levi once, twice, maybe even three times and squeeze the life right out of him. Or, going on with the theme, could probably eat him up in a couple of bites. But Levi persisted. He had never been this close to something this strange before. This couldn't be real. This was now a very vivid dream and Levi was trying to remember all of it to put into his next big project. Shadow monsters were literary in a way, artsy even...but real fucking monsters. This real fucking monster right in front of him, god this would make for great TV.
He touched it.
He stuck his arm out and laid a gentle hand right over the creature's chest where it had been hit with the taser and knocked out. It moved up and down with it's breathing. It was room temperature. He didn't know why that surprised him necessarily, he thought maybe it would be cold and slimy. The creature stayed knocked out and Levi got braver. He leaned over the creature and stared right into it's face. It had definitely been in pain from the taser, but nothing denoted fear. It seemed like it knew what it was doing when it dropped down. Perhaps Gary Stu had simply been an appetizer.
To be continued...here
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