by Jack Quaid
“Come on,” Kevin said as he kissed her neck and tried to get back into action. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
She pushed him off. “What do you mean it’s nothing to worry about? There’s a maniac out there.”
“He’s probably long gone by now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He’s not going to kill a bunch of people in Columbia Falls during the day and then hang around all night just to get caught,” Kevin said. Then he tried to kiss her again.
Belinda wasn’t in the mood and pushed him away. “Take me home. I want to go home.”
“Why?” Kevin said. “Because of that radio thing?”
“Yes! There’s nothing more of a mood killer than a serial killer.”
Kevin let out a disappointed sigh. “All right,” he said, sliding in behind the wheel. “But you’re worrying over nothing.” He wrapped his fingers around the key and turned.
All the car gave him was a chug… chug… chug… and nothing much else.
“Kevin?” Belinda said. “What the hell’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. Let me try again.”
He did, but all he got were a couple more chugs. “Oh, this isn’t good…”
“What do you mean ‘this isn’t good’?”
Kevin turned, and she could see in his eyes that he wasn’t fooling. “I think we’ve broken down.”
Belinda couldn’t believe that shit. “I’m totally breaking up with you.”
“It’s not my fault. I swear.” He gave it some thought. “I’ll look under the hood.”
“You can’t go out there.”
“I gotta go.”
“He could be out there.”
“Who? The guy from the radio?”
“Yes!” Belinda said. “Hurricane Williams.”
“Come on, you don’t believe that, do you?”
“I don’t know, Kevin! It’s sounding pretty convincing, don’t you think?”
“Look,” he said. “I have to go out there and check. We can’t stay out here all night.”
Belinda looked out the window. They were the only car up on the lookout, and it was one long walk back down the mountain. “Be quick, please.”
Kevin wrapped his fingers around the door handle, let out a nervous-sounding sigh, and stepped into the cool Montana night. The entire town of Columbia Falls was laid out in front of him with its twinkling streetlights and quiet streets. But that was at least half a mile away. The lookout was dark, with nothing but a million places for a deranged killer to hide.
Kevin popped the hood, took a quick look at the engine, fiddled with a few things, then peered around the side of the car to see Belinda. He was about to call out and tell her to turn the engine over when he saw something that made his heart stop dead.
It took him a couple of moments to speak. “Belinda,” he whispered, “you might want to take a look at this.”
She wound the window down and poked her head through. “Does it require me getting out of the car?”
“Yeah, it will,” he whispered.
“Then no,” Belinda said. “I really don’t need to take a look at that.”
“I’m not playing, Belinda,” he said, his tone even quieter. “You need to get out of the car and take a look at this.”
It was the last thing she wanted to do, but after a moment of working up some courage, she opened the door, climbed out, and looked at Kevin. “What? What is it?”
He pointed a shaky finger to the back door of the car, where a big bloody handprint was smeared on the middle of the Chevy door.
“Oh,” Belinda said. “That’s not good.”
“Belinda!” Kevin yelled and pointed behind her. “Look out! Look out! Look out!”
Out of the darkness, a man that matched DJ Max Crawdaddy’s description of the crazed maniac appeared. He wore the very same orange prison jumpsuit and the very same executioner’s hood over his head and carried the very same machete.
He came at Belinda hard and fast, and naturally, when he came at her, she screamed at the top of her lungs because, hell, if there was ever a time to scream at the top of her lungs, it was then.
Belinda dropped to her knees and threw up her hands to shield herself from whatever horror was coming her way, then at the very last minute, the deranged psycho stopped dead in his tracks. Everything fell silent.
It took a moment or two for Belinda to work up the courage and pry open her eyes. When she looked up, he wrapped his fingers around the hood and yanked it off his head. It wasn’t a deranged psycho killer at all. Underneath that Hurricane Williams costume was nothing more than a sixteen-year-old kid with bad skin.
“Andy?” Belinda said.
“Gotcha!” He burst into laughter. It wasn’t just any kind of laughter but the bent-at-the-waist, almost-rolling-around-on-the-floor kind of laughter. To Andy, what he had just witnessed was the funniest thing in the history of humor.
Still in shock, Belinda looked over her shoulder at Kevin, who was laughing his ass off too.
“You…” Kevin managed to mumble out. “You should have seen your face!”
Belinda climbed to her feet, still trying to come to terms with what the hell was going on. “It’s not funny.”
“Yeah,” Andy spat through his laughter. “It’s funny as shit!”
“But…” Belinda muttered. “The radio. I heard the news broadcast…”
Andy put on his best Max Crawdaddy voice. “Welcome back, friends and fellow countrymen. This just in, there is a maniac at large.”
“It was a CD,” Kevin said. “We recorded it yesterday.”
Kevin and Andy high-fived, but Belinda didn’t see the funny side at all.
“I hope both you assholes die,” she said.
Now, she should have been more careful what she wished for. Suddenly, a machete slammed out of the front of Kevin’s chest and sprayed blood over Belinda’s and Kevin’s faces.
“Holy fucking shit!” Belinda yelled.
There were no more laughs and no more smiles from Andy. He stood frozen by fear and could do nothing but watch the blade yanked back out of his buddy’s chest. With the blade no longer holding Kevin’s corpse up, it slumped to the ground, revealing none other than the infamous, the feared, the bloody, and the damn brutal Hurricane Williams standing right behind him. DJ Max Crawdaddy’s description was one hundred percent correct. The son of a bitch was back.
“What the—” was all Andy managed to spit out before Hurricane Williams hacked Andy to pieces with three quick whacks of his machete.
After watching those two assholes die, Belinda wasn’t sticking around. She’d already turned on her heels and was running through the woods. The moonlight shining through the trees was the only light she had to go on, and she could only see a few steps ahead of her. Branches slapped Belinda’s body as she sprinted through the woods, and she’d seen enough horror movies to know that looking back or tripping would get her killed, so she just kept on running as fast as she could and let those branches cut into her skin.
Out of breath, full of fear, and with her heart pounding at thousand miles an hour, Belinda broke through the tree line and stumbled out onto Spruce Mountain Road and straight into a pair of headlights. The driver slammed on the brakes, and the old pickup truck slid along the road, finally coming to a stop just a couple of feet from hitting Belinda.
She held her hand up to shield her eyes from the light and peeked through the windshield to get a good look at the driver. She saw the overalls and the long white beard and knew it was Old Man Canton.
The door swung open, and he climbed out. “Goddamn. Are you all right, young miss?”
She shook her head. “He’s back.”
“Who’s back?”
“Hurricane Williams.” Then she screamed, “He’s back!”
Those screams bounced off the mountainside and echoed for miles around, sending chills down the backs of people who faintly heard the name Hurricane Williams on th
e wind.
Eight
Sheriff Knox had heard all the stories about Hurricane Williams, and up until that night, he’d thought each and every one of them was bullshit, nothing more than tall tales that got passed around in small towns like Columbia Falls all across the country. According to local folklore and secondhand stories, Hurricane Williams was some sort of unkillable killing machine that had torn apart victims from Illinois to Texas, and even Columbia Falls close to ten years ago, when he’d taken thirteen lives down at that First Mantus Church near Halfmoon. They were good stories, Knox had to admit, with just enough suspense that whoever was listening had to lean in to hear what happened next. They lacked enough detail for anyone to verify with any certainty any of what they were being told. The stories changed with every telling, and Knox always thought they were a bit of fun. So he’d never taken them too seriously.
But Sheriff Knox wasn’t originally from Columbia Falls. He’d been born and bred all the way out in North Carolina and had only come out west to retire. Those plans had all gone to hell after he lost all his savings when an investment company he invested in went belly up. At sixty-two, he’d lost everything, including his second wife. Without much choice, he’d strapped a gun back on his hip and gone back to work.
Columbia Falls had just under five thousand people, and by all accounts, it was a small town. When Knox became sheriff, he’d figured on issuing a couple of parking tickets, throwing a couple of local drunks into the cells for a few hours, and letting little kids hit the lights on his patrol car. He never, not in a million years, thought he would have to chase down the boogeyman. But after seeing the two dead bodies up on the lookout and talking to the girl who had survived, he knew that no matter how wild and inflated the stories of Hurricane Williams were, there very well may have been some hint of truth in them.
Knox ran his fingers along his handlebar ’stache and looked over his three deputies. “By all accounts and the two dead youngers up there at Lover’s Lookout, it’s shaping up that we’ve got ourselves a bit of a nightmare on our hands. I want two-man teams armed with Remington twelve-gauge shotguns and extra ammunition patrolling our fine town of Columbia Falls. I want your eyes open and your fingers wrapped tightly around those triggers, and if you happen to see this Hurricane Williams, if indeed that mongrel dog does exist, I want you to shoot on sight. There’s no point winging the son of a bitch. When you shoot, you shoot to kill.”
The deputies stared at him with blank looks on their faces. They were good men, each of them. Knox knew that much, and when the day came for him to step down, each of them would have his confidence. By the looks on their faces right there in the station house, he doubted that he had theirs.
His right-hand man, Evens, slipped his hat on top of his head and took the couple of steps forward to stand in front of Knox. He unclipped the badge from his belt and looked at it in the palm of his hand for a moment before he shifted his eyes back up to Knox. “We’ve all heard the stories. None of us want to die.” He tossed the badge on the desk and walked out.
Knox eyed the badge with disgust, and with that same disgust, he looked up at his remaining two deputies. “What about you two?”
One by one, they pushed themselves up off the desks they were leaning against, unclipped their badges, mumbled some sort of weak apology, tossed them on the desk, and walked out along with any respect Knox had for them.
He scooped up all three badges and held them in his hand for a moment before tossing them in the top drawer of his desk and mumbling a profanity under his breath.
Belinda Hastings watched him from the other side of the room. The blanket wrapped around her didn’t stop the slight shiver coursing through her body. It was out of fear, not a lack of warmth. She had nothing more than superficial cuts and bruises, and Knox had patched her up as best he could. But she didn’t have a guardian to come and collect her. Her old man was out of town. He was on his way back but probably wouldn’t make it there until morning, and there was no way on earth Belinda was going to stay in her house all by herself, so she was staying at the station for the time being.
There was something on the tip of her tongue.
“You got something to say, girly?”
“What about her?”
“What about who?
“Parker Ames,” Belinda said. “She sent Hurricane Williams back to hell.” Belinda lit up one of her menthols. “That’s what the stories say anyway.”
Knox crossed his arms, leaned his ass back against the desk, and gave that idea some very serious thought. In all the versions of all the stories about Hurricane Williams, there was always one consistency—Parker Ames. According to folklore and bullshit, Parker Ames was the hero who saved the day and sent Hurricane back to the hell he’d come from. How she did this differed, of course, with whoever was telling the tale.
Arthur Fox down at Jerry’s Luncheonette claimed that Parker Ames beheaded Hurricane and set his corpse on fire. Meg Nance down at the Last Jar said that she opened up a portal to hell and karate kicked him into said portal before it closed. Then there was Glynn Coll who, after one too many Budweisers, had told Knox that Parker Ames chained Hurricane to an engine block and sank it in the reservoir. Of course, none of those people telling the story were there when any of those things happened. They had all heard the stories from a someone’s cousin or a friend of a friend or something like that.
Knox cut across the office and pulled out the drawer to one of the old and dusty filing cabinets. He fingered through the files until he found the one he was looking for. The folder was three inches thick and labeled “Massacre at the First Mantus Church.” He quickly thumbed through the pages.
Belinda leaned forward. “Is she in there?”
“I don’t know yet,” Knox said, spreading the contents of the folder across the desk. In among the gruesome crime scene photographs and artist’s renditions of something truly awful were the 1990 mug shots of Parker Ames, Corey Hayes, and somebody called Hell, who had no last name listed.
Knox’s eyes darted around the files, looking for something in particular, and bingo! His finger slammed down on one specific thing.
“What is it?” Belinda asked.
Knox looked up at her and smiled, and this was a man who rarely smiled, even at things that made him happy, but there he was, grinning like an idiot. “There’s a phone number.”
It was handwritten next to the photograph, and whoever had scribbled it in hadn’t initialed it according to procedure, but there it was.
Belinda smashed the cigarette into the ashtray and leaned forward. “Are you going to call it?”
Knox wrapped his fingers around the nearest telephone, wedged it between his ear and his shoulder, and dialed.
It rang.
And rang.
And rang.
Belinda leaned forward, held her breath, and waited.
There was a click on the other end of the phone.
Knox listened. “It’s an answering service.”
“Are you going to leave a message?”
He pulled the phone from the crook of his neck. “Damn right I’m going to leave a message.”
Nine
And that’s just what he did.
The message was simple. It was clear. It could not under any circumstances have been misunderstood by anybody who heard it. It simply said: “Hurricane Williams is back in Columbia Falls.”
That had been four hours ago. Four hours of pacing the station. Four hours of drinking coffee. And four hours of staring at the phone as if staring at the damn thing was going to make it ring any sooner.
Belinda was asleep in one of the office chairs with her knees tucked up to her chest, but there was no chance of Knox sleeping. Not with all the coffee and adrenaline pumping through his veins.
Knox dragged a chair across the room and planted himself in front of the entrance with a shotgun sitting in his lap, locked and loaded. He stayed in that position for the next handful of hours, waiting and lis
tening and just waiting some more.
Finally, he heard a noise out in the quiet street. He had been so on edge that he wasn’t even one hundred percent convinced that what he heard was even real. It could have been just some trick his mind was playing on him. So he sat up straight, leaned forward, and did his best to minimize the creaks of the chair under his ass.
He waited and listened, and just when he thought the noise was something he’d imagined, he heard it again. It was a footstep, and it wasn’t alone. Somebody was walking around outside, and considering that every one of his deputies had quit, he had only one idea who it was.
Knox raised the shotgun and squeezed the butt firmly into his shoulder. The footsteps grew louder as they worked their way up to the entrance then paused on the other side of the door. Knox quietly rose to his feet. He took aim at the door, drew a breath, then wrapped a finger around the trigger. And as soon as he heard another footstep on the other side of that door, he squeezed that trigger.
Boom!
The shell exploded out of the end of that shotgun, tearing a massive hole in the door. Belinda jerked awake with fright, but Knox wasn’t concerned with her right then. He took a small step forward and peered through the gaping hole that looked out into the darkness outside.
“Who goes there?” Knox yelled out.
“Dude, isn’t that something you should have asked before you started shooting?” The voice was young—or youngish—and male, and whoever it was, he was some sort of smartass.
What the fuck is going on? Knox lowered the shotgun as a healthy dose of confusion washed over him. “State your business, pal.”
“Hunting slimeballs and sending them back to hell.”
The door slowly opened, and Knox relaxed when he saw Corey Hayes standing on the other side with his hands up to show that he was no threat. Corey was twenty-five, and in the ten years since the events at the First Mantus Church, he’d grown up and filled out. He was unshaven, his Levi’s were ripped, and his leather jacket looked as if it had been chewed up, spat out, and chewed again. Despite the clothes and the whiskers, the cheeky grin he had on his face all those years ago was still there.