Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

“I’ll eat at my desk.”

Angie brushes Brit’s long blond bangs from her eyes. “You shouldn’t let them work you so hard.”

“It’s part of the job, Angie. You know that.”

“Doesn’t mean I like it.” She turns her attention back to her plate.

Carter feels Brittany’s eyes dig into him. He takes his meal to the den and locks the door. The meatloaf sits untouched and forgotten as he picks up the remote and presses play. He turns the volume down next to nothing

Black. Static.

The woman running through the trees.

Stop. Rewind. Play. Stop.

Rewind.

Two hours later, he ejects the video from the VCR and places it in its black plastic box. He opens the bottom desk drawer and buries the box beneath a stack of Playboys. He locks it and forces a smile on his face before leaving the den.

After a month, the tapes wear down, a white static veil shrouding the image. He needs a fresh face, a new scenario. He leaves his money in the hiding place; an empty videocassette case nestled inside the hollow of a maple tree in a nearby park. An even fifteen hundred dollars cash. The first one was only five hundred dollars, and he sees the cleverness of it now. He would have balked at fifteen hundred the first time. Now it seems reasonable. He needs them.

When he comes back later in the evening, he scopes out the park, and when he’s sure no one is watching, he pulls the cassette box from the dark maw of the maple. It now contains a videotape. He can only speculate as to its contents. But he doesn’t watch it right away. He waits irritably for the long night to end.

He calls in sick the next day and drives downtown to a large hotel. Before entering the revolving glass doors, he looks up at its facade. It looks back down at him, the sun a harsh wink in each of its many windows.

In the room, he puts the chain across the door and shuts the thick maroon curtains. He takes off his clothes. Pops the video into the VCR. Picks up the remote and presses play.

Black. Static.

Then—

INT. AN OLD ABANDONED BARN — DAY

Sunlight pours in through the worn wooden slats of the walls like spotlights. Straw is strewn about the floor as well as splintered pieces of wood, beer cans, fast food wrappers, cigarette butts. A twenty-something prostitute enters the picture looking back at the camera and smiling. She chews gum, wears too much make-up, sports badly frizzed hair. She has the voice of a serious smoker.

“I don’t know about this. You shoulda brought a blanket.” Her steps slow as she searches for a place to sit down. “You grow up here? Is that the deal?”

She finds a place where the straw isn’t too moldy. She tosses aside some large rusty nails. “Is this where you want it?” She winks at the camera.

The cameraman’s hand comes into view holding three hundred dollar bills.

She frowns at first, perhaps because the camera is recording this transaction, but she takes the money just the same and tucks it into the pocket of her tight skirt and raises an eyebrow in mock seduction.

Her expression suddenly changes. The cameraman’s hand comes back into view holding an evil looking hunting knife. Its large blade reflects the incoming sunlight into her wide-open mouth. She screams for the first ten plunges as her blood speckles the camera lens. There’s a dull clang as the knife is dropped to the ground. The camera zooms in slowly on her face. The cameraman’s breath pounds the microphone in quick, distorted bursts.

Again, there is that miracle captured as her life vanishes, her breath making a final, hasty exit through the heavily lipsticked moat of her lips.

Stop. Rewind.

Play .

“Where’ve you been?” Angie asks, the moment Carter walks in the door.

His briefcase is tight under his arm. “What do you mean?”

“I called work. They said you called in sick.”

“No.” Carter shakes his head. “No, that’s not right. Who told you that?”

“The receptionist.”

“No. I was there. She must not have seen me come in.”

“I left five messages in your voice mail.”

“I didn’t get them. I had meetings all day.”

Angie’s eyes burrow into his skull.

“Who took your call? Was it Denise? If it was Denise, she doesn’t know her head from her a-hole.”

He watches her as she mulls this over.

She exhales, her entire body deflating in front of him. “Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you of—”

“Of what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Can I put my briefcase away?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Of course.”

He guards his checking account like a rabid wolf, keeping two sets of check registers. There is the real one with the monthly fifteen hundred dollars deducted kept at work. Then there is the doctored one he keeps on his desk at home meant for Angie’s eyes. The videotape — he only keeps one at a time — is kept deep in the locked desk drawer.

Brittany has started playing soccer. She comes home after practice with grass stains on her clothes, her knees and elbows rubbed raw from her rough style of play. Angie spends more time with her, helping with homework, watching rented movies on the VCR in the living room. Carter knows it’s nearly impossible, but can’t help imagining Brittany accidentally finding one of his tapes and sliding it innocently into the VCR out of curiosity. The thought makes him nauseous.

But the time spent locked in the den only increases.

Another month goes by. The tape of the barn has become overcome by a fuzzy snow, the prostitute’s screams garbled as if the television speakers have been immersed in sewage.

When he leaves his fifteen hundred in the empty video box, he finds it still there when he returns to collect the tape. Only now there is a note attached to it.

PLEASE DEPOSIT $500 MORE.

He freezes with anger. He’s been ready to see something new, has been anticipating this for the last three days. But he lets the anger melt off him and goes to the bank, withdraws five hundred dollars in cash, and places it along with the previous fifteen hundred in the box. When he reaches in the hollow of the tree two days later, there is a new cassette. No labels. Only a shiny black plastic shell, the miracle it surely contains palpable in Carter’s sweaty hands.

INT. AN EMPTY HOUSE — DAY

She’s a real estate agent — maroon blazer, black pants, a name-tag that says BARBARA WHITEHALL in crisp black letters. She leads the camera through the rooms smiling, pointing out the features of the house.

“You’d be surprised at how many people bring a video camera to these showings,” Barbara says. “I thing it’s a great idea.”

She climbs a set of stairs covered with beige carpet. The camera follows her up. She turns at the top.

“Right this way.”

She leads us to an empty bedroom, turns a circle, then slides open the closet.

“Decent closet space. Southern exposure.”

Indeed, the sun spills in through the blinds, it’s light spliced with lines of shadow as it splays over her body. The cameraman likes this and zooms in on the interplay of light and dark on her neck. He only backs off at the moment the scalpel appears and makes a quick, precise cut across her jugular. The blood appears only slightly before her eyes register confusion, then terror. She reaches up to her neck as the color of her blazer becomes saturated. The scalpel enters the picture once again and makes short work of her hand. It cuts through her fingers as the sound of the cameraman’s breath, so close to the microphone, cuts through the woman’s piercing screams. He cuts deeper, and the screams abruptly stop as the lens follows her to the floor. The fountain of pumping blood diminishes to a slow seep, and again, the exact moment of her death appears on-screen in glorious color, captured like a butterfly in an empty peanut butter jar.