Escape From Slaughter Beach

by Jack Quaid

  Moe had been hunting slashers for a long time, and he would often brag that there was nothing he couldn’t hunt, kill, dismember, and send back to hell. He had a big, tragic backstory involving a slasher murdering a bunch of his loved ones. He’d told Parker about that back in the ’90s, but Corey hadn’t really listened, and it hadn’t occurred to Corey to ask again. What Corey could say about Moe Crazy was that he’d certainly earned his name. In his years hunting with Parker, they’d come across other slasher hunters. Most were amateurs, whom Corey referred to as “dead meat,” and others were just after that one slasher that had killed a wife, kid, husband, brother, or whoever. Then there were a few whom Corey would call pros—the hard-core killers who had sent a great many slashers back to hell. What Corey Hayes had never seen, not once before coming across Moe Crazy, was a blind slasher hunter.

  Blind as a bat Moe Crazy was. He couldn’t see a goddamned thing. At first, Corey thought it was just bullshit, because no one, Corey didn’t care how crazy they were, would go up against a killing machine like a slasher without being able to see a thing.

  Nevertheless, Team Parker-Corey and Moe Crazy had teamed up together, and within a week, the mysterious killings that had plagued South Miami High suddenly stopped. Sadly, though, Kristy Cameron seemed to be the final victim, and her body has yet to be found.

  Parker and Corey had taken down three more slashers with Moe down in the South before Moe Crazy retired to somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert. Corey hadn’t seen or heard of him in years. Hell, he didn’t even know if the old man was still alive, but considering how every single lead he had on Parker Ames was a dead end, it was worth the chance to check in on the old man.

  Corey took a sip from the Big Gulp nestled between his legs, slipped on his Ray-Bans, and scanned the miles of empty desert road ahead of him. That was all he had been looking at for hours: Empty. Desert. Road.

  Just when he was starting to think it would never end, a small speck emerged on the horizon. Corey couldn’t tell what it was. At that distance, he didn’t know if he was looking at a shack, a camper, or even just a burned-out shell of a car. But as the Eldorado cruised closer, the speck on the horizon grew larger with every mile of ground Corey covered. The speck had become a small two-story building with “US Air Force Testing Site 0012” written in faded paint on the side of the building.

  Corey brought the Eldorado to a stop and shut down the engine. The Guns N’ Roses he’d been blasting out of the CD player shut down as well. By the look of it, the old testing facility hadn’t been under military control for fifty or more years. The paint was faded and flaking, the windows were all cracked, and the sand from the desert had piled up against one of the walls.

  At first glance, to the common eye, the joint looked deserted, but if Corey truly thought it was deserted, he wouldn’t have made the drive out to the middle of nowhere, now would he?

  He climbed out of the Eldorado, pushed the Ray-Bans up the bridge of his nose, and scanned the emptiness around him. Then he settled his eyes on the old building. “Yo, Moe? You in there?”

  Nothing but the wind answered him.

  “It’s Corey Hayes,” he called out. “We sent a couple of dead things back to hell a few years ago.”

  He took one step, but one was all it took. He felt a tug on his jeans and looked down to see he had just then walked into a trip wire. There wasn’t enough pressure on the wire to blast his leg off, but there certainly was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks and turn white.

  “Bet you’re regretting some of your life decisions around about now, aren’t you?”

  Corey looked up to see Moe Crazy leaning against the doorframe of the building. “Yeah, I think that I kinda am, dude.”

  “Take a step back,” Moe said. “I’d do it at the speed of molasses if I were you.”

  “No offense,” Corey said. “But, Moe, you’re blind as shit. Should I really be taking advice from you on this particular situation?”

  “No offense, motherfucker?” Moe griped. “I can go back inside if you want.”

  “No, no, no,” Corey said. “What do I do?”

  “What I told you to do. You step back slowly.”

  A bead of sweat rolled down Corey’s cheek. “Slowly?”

  “You could do it fast, but that’s going to be on you.”

  Corey drew a breath, then as if he were in slow motion, he moved his leg backward until the tension on the wire eased and he was no longer even touching it. He wiped his brow. “Do you treat all your guests like this?”

  “Motherfucker, do you think I moved the hell out here to have houseguests? Now what do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Parker,” Corey said.

  The old man grumbled. “You better get your ass in here then.” He took his hulking frame back into the concrete box, where he had a cot, a small makeshift kitchen, and not much else floating around.

  Corey took half a glance around the joint. “I guess you’re going with that minimalist look.”

  Moe Crazy pulled up a chair and took a seat. “So you want to know where Parker Ames is, huh?”

  Corey looked around for a chair. There was only one, and Moe was already sitting on that, so Corey just stood. “Yeah, you heard anything?”

  “Why don’t you leave that girl alone? She’s been through enough.”

  “I would,” Corey said. “But something’s happened.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Hurricane Williams is back.”

  Moe leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. “Tough nut to crack that Hurricane Williams.”

  “She’s the only one who’s ever defeated him.”

  “And look at what that cost her,” Moe said.

  “If I don’t find her, that big bastard is going to keep on hacking his way through innocent folk, so if you know where she is, it would be real handy if you told me.”

  “Only rumors,” Moe said as he leaned back in his chair. “Nothing much more than rumors. About nine or maybe ten years ago, I heard that our Miss Parker Ames was down in the Deep South. Tennessee, I think. It was there that she came across a particular pesky slasher by the name of Memphis Blood.”

  “I’ve heard of him. I heard he was dead.”

  “We’ll, that part is true. What isn’t true is the account of how he died. You see, many folk down there in the Tennessee area believe that ol’ Memphis Blood was killed when the local county sheriff and a militia he put together cornered the slasher in some country barn and unleashed a barrage of bullets that would have made the shooting of Bonnie and Clyde look tame. What they didn’t know was that Parker Ames was in that shack with him, and she copped more than her fair share of those bullets.”

  “So she’s dead?”

  “Not exactly,” Moe said. “Not exactly. On that particular day nine or ten years ago, Parker Ames did indeed die. But it’s within the afterlife in which this story gets a little interesting. You see, after she died, Parker Ames found herself in purgatory, and it was in purgatory that she was visited by the angel Ramiel, also known as the angel of thunder. Now Ramiel had a deal for Parker.”

  “What was that deal?”

  “In exchange of granting her life back on earth, Ramiel wanted her to go to hell and kill the devil.”

  It took a couple of moments for those words to sink in, and once they had, Corey repeated them in his own mind a couple of times. Corey paced across the room and paused, thinking about what Moe had just told him. Then he paced back to where he’d just been to run through the same scenario again.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Corey said. “She’s in hell?”

  Moe Crazy nodded his old head.

  “Like fire and brimstone and some guy with pointy horns on his head? You expect me to believe that?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “And you believed that?”

  Moe shrugged. “The world’s a strange place, Corey Hayes. You should know that better than anyone.”<
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  Corey agreed that the world was a strange place, but he didn’t agree it was that strange. He walked out of Moe Crazy’s, thinking the old man had well and truly lost his marbles, then he climbed into his car and hit the road. Over the course of the week, he heard two more far-fetched, totally batshit-insane off-the-wall stories of the current whereabouts of Parker Ames.

  Far-Fetched Batshit-Insane Off-the-Wall Story One: Sometime during the great Space Race, NASA launched a high-tech super prison called the Dungeon into space. Now, according to the story Corey heard, the Dungeon was home to one thousand of the worst of the worst, most dangerous criminals in the country. We’re talking mass murderers, terrorists, leaders of hostile nations. Anyone who was a real mad-and-bad bastard, chances were they would end up in the Dungeon. For many years, the outer space prison system worked perfectly well. That was until 1994, when serial killer Thomas “the Dismantler” Voytilla was convicted of the murdering and eating forty-two women all along the Sunset Strip. He was sentenced to hard labor at the Dungeon. What NASA and the US Government didn’t know at the time was that the Dismantler, while he was causing mayhem on the streets of Los Angeles, had murdered and eaten one Diana Gadd. If they didn’t know that then, they certainly didn’t know that Diana Gadd had a brother in the Dungeon. There was one person who knew Diana Gadd’s murderer was on his way to the Dungeon—and that was Diana Gadd’s brother.

  So when the Dismantler arrived, he… well, he got dismantled. But he was a mean son of a bitch, and hell didn’t want him, so his reanimated body came back to life. Then the Dismantler went to work, continuing the killing spree he’d started back in Los Angeles. As one would imagine, things went from bad to worse. Every security team sent up to the Dungeon was never heard from again, and after three weeks, all hope was lost. That was when the government sent Parker Ames in.

  The story goes that she was rotting in a jail cell for a crime she hadn’t committed, and for a full pardon, she agreed to go to the Dungeon and kill the Dismantler.

  That story was told to Corey by a “reporter” who’d made a career of chasing conspiracy theories. Corey didn’t believe a single word of it and became even less interested when the reporter, who’d agreed to only meet him at the Denny’s on NC-172, stiffed him on the bill.

  Far-Fetched Batshit-Insane Off-the-Wall Story Number Two: According to Joe Freddy—and this should be absolutely taken with a grain of salt because as far as Corey was concerned, Joe Freddy wasn’t exactly the most reliable of narrators—but according to Joe Freddy, Parker Ames was now currently a slasher herself.

  Turns out, Parker went to the small town of Belle River, Louisiana, where the local townsfolk had been experiencing some unexplained deaths due to a particularly powerful voodoo queen who went by the name of Voodoo Legbra. For a fee, Legbra would curse anybody her clients desired by turning them into what they feared the most. If they feared being alone, all their family and friends would die in some freak accident. If they feared being caught for some dark act they’d committed in their past, they were suddenly unable to tell a lie. Voodoo Legbra got word that Parker was gunning for her, and instead of packing up and moving across the country to open up shop somewhere else, Legbra decided to turn her talents on Parker Ames and cursed her, turning the slasher hunter into the very thing she feared becoming the most—a slasher.

  According to Joe Freddy, Parker Ames was now cursed and traveling up and down the coast, hacking and slashing unsuspecting victims just like the monsters she used to hunt.

  After two weeks, Corey had heard so many ridiculous stories that he actually wished Hurricane Williams had killed him. Three weeks in, Corey called it quits. He figured Parker was either dead or had disappeared so deeply that the only way she was going to be found was as if she wanted to be found.

  What he needed was a bottle of bourbon, loud music, and to sleep for a week. In fact, that was what he planned to do as soon as he walked out of the Denny’s in Topeka, Kansas, but then his cell rang.

  He pushed the phone to his ear.

  “Corey?” the hesitant voice on the other end of the line said. “Is that you?”

  “This is Corey.”

  “Corey Hayes?”

  “That’s right, lady. Who’s this?”

  “A friend,’ she said. “I know where Parker Ames is.”

  Thirteen

  Megan Collins had to work up a lot of courage to pick up the telephone and call Corey Hayes. She hadn’t spoken to him in years, and if she was being brutally honest, she’d spent a significant part of her day trying to forget him, Parker Ames, and the whole bloody affair. But no matter how hard she tried, every single time she looked in the mirror and saw the scars staring back at her, she couldn’t help but be instantly transported back to the night when everything went wrong.

  She was next door, babysitting for the Beals, who had gone away for the night. Brian and Jo were seven and ten years old, and Megan never had any trouble with them. They were good kids, and they had their night all planned out. They were going to watch three scary movies and have popcorn and candy, then it was off to bed for the three of them. That was the plan anyway. But not all plans worked out.

  Earlier in the day, they’d walked around the corner to the Blockbuster and combed the horror section for a couple of movies. Even though the kids were seven and ten, they had a pretty good constitution for horror movies, and as long as they didn’t tell their parents, Megan would let them watch whatever they wanted.

  On that particular Saturday night, they’d rented The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, and The Gate. Megan had seen them all before, but she didn’t care. As long as the kids didn’t run around the house making a mess of everything that she would have to clean later, she was happy to watch all three again.

  They watched Monster Squad and Lost Boys, but when Denny went to put in The Gate, they found out that somebody had returned the wrong video. The tape that should have been The Gate was marked with one label and one label only: DO NOT WATCH.

  So naturally, they slipped it into the video player and pressed play. In hindsight, it wasn’t Megan’s best decision. The video started off in snow, the tracking kicked in, and once that was sorted out, the home video of a séance flickered on-screen. The three of them leaned forward, trying to make sense of what they were watching. Four people sat around a table in a basement somewhere, holding hands around a Ouija board. Judging by their clothes and the vibe of the whole thing, Megan figured it was maybe recorded sometime in the late seventies. They started chanting in some language she didn’t understand, and as soon as they did, a wind kicked up in the basement, swirling papers, cups, and other things around the table.

  What Megan didn’t realize was that while a wind had kicked up on what they were watching on-screen, the very same thing was happening in the Beals’ living room. All three of them shifted even closer and watched as the chants of the séance grew louder and louder until the basement erupted into a mini tornado around the table. As the chants grew louder and louder, Megan finally realized that the living room had also erupted into a mini tornado, with the chair and ornaments and VHS covers all flying around the room.

  “Turn it off! Turn it off!” she yelled.

  Brian hit the switch. The television went black, and everything that was spinning around came crashing down, leaving Megan and the two kids just staring at the screen, not fully sure of what the hell they’d just seen.

  “Let’s not watch that video again,” Brian said.

  “Good idea,” Megan said.

  But the damage was already done. The chanting crazies in the video had summoned the Maniac. When they’d played the video not thirty seconds earlier, Megan, Brian, and Jo had also summoned the Maniac, and what they didn’t realize was that the Maniac was standing right behind the couch they were all sitting on.

  Naturally, when Megan turned around and saw him, she did the appropriate amount of screaming, collected the two kids, and ran like hell. They didn’t get very far before the Maniac
cornered them on the second floor. He moved in closer, gripping his ax, and Megan thought it was all over… then she saw Parker Ames and Corey Hayes running down the hall toward the Maniac. She’d found out later that they had been tracking that evil VHS tape for weeks and had finally tracked it to the Beals’ video card.

  Parker Ames and Corey Hayes saved her life that night. But she didn’t walk away without a reminder of that horrific event. Megan Collins, now Megan McNamara, looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. It was the only mirror she would allow in the house. There also weren’t many photographs on the wall—none of her anyway. No memories of birthdays or weddings or any other kinds of celebrations.

  But there she was, standing in her bathroom and forcing herself to look at her face and remember everything that had happened that Saturday night at the Beals’. From a distance, like across the room or in a busy supermarket, Megan McNamara looked like any twenty-five-year-old newly married woman with a three-month-old baby sleeping in the other room. But up close, her face told a different story. It was covered in one hundred little scars that made her look as if she were a vase that had been broken and painstakingly glued back together.

  The doorbell rang, and when Megan made her way down the stairs and pulled open the door, she saw Corey Hayes standing on the other side. He hadn’t changed. Not one little bit. He was older of course, and he was a little more unshaven and even a little more worldly. He still carried himself like a fifteen-year-old boy without a care in the world, though.

  “Long time, no see,” Corey said.

  She threw her arms around his neck and gave him a hug, then they went inside. She made him some coffee and a sandwich—because he looked like he needed something healthy—and after some polite small talk, Corey came out with it.

  “I need to find Parker.”