by Jack Quaid
Most of the five families that had formed the Wolves of Slaughter Beach had faded away. The Cooks had moved to Florida sometime in the ’40s. A generation of Perrys had four daughters and no sons, and the Wolves weren’t allowing any woman into the fold at the time. The Kings moved away, and the Harrises had stepped down from the tradition sometime in the late ’70s. All that remained were the Richardsons, and although they hadn’t been active members of the Wolves of Slaughter Beach—due to the progressive nature of the law of the land and so forth—they were still committed to fulfilling their historic role within the city.
There were no longer five representatives from the founding families of Slaughter Beach, but Denny Richardson and his two boys were ready to uphold the oath that their great-great-great-granddaddy had taken all those years ago.
“In the old days,” Old Man Richardson said as he poured a couple more shots for himself and his boys, “when we knew somebody was guilty, and I mean absolutely, positively, one hundred percent knew someone was guilty, and walked away from justice because of some bullshit loophole—”
“Or because her husband was the sheriff,” Steve added.
“Or because her husband was the sheriff, it would be in our right to deliver justice and make those people pay.”
Steve held up his shot glass for another toast. “To the return of the Wolves of Slaughter Beach.”
Shots were had, backs were slapped, and the Closed sign was turned over on the front door of the Anchor Bar.
Thirty-Eight
Joe and Morgan watched as the fax machine printed out Parker Ames’s police file one painfully slow line at a time. Joe could have sworn he was watching the event unfold in slow motion. When it got to the end of the page, he tore it off the machine and read as quickly as he could. When he reached the end, the only words he could muster were simple and precise.
“Holy shit,” Joe mumbled.
Morgan snatched it out of his hands and quickly scanned down the page, and when she was done, she looked up at her boss. “And you thought you were having a bad day before.”
Joe wasn’t a violent man, and he wasn’t known for losing his temper or flying off the handle, but faced with the reality that Christine Turner was indeed Parker Ames, he kicked a trash can clear across the room. He wanted to fight and scream, but all he did was push all that anger down inside, put his hands on his hips, and shake his head.
“Goddamn it,” he said to himself. “God-fucking-damn it!”
Thirty-Nine
Parker sat quietly at the table in the interview room of the Slaughter Beach Sheriff’s Department. The table was bolted to the floor, and she was handcuffed to the table. Parker had gotten out of many tight jams before in her time, but busting out of handcuffs without a key was not one of them.
She had blood on her knuckles and smoke in her hair. Sitting there under arrest in a police station, Parker couldn’t help but find it amusing that after all those years, she really hadn’t evolved much.
The door swung open, then Joe walked in and slammed the fax down on the table in front of her. Parker knew exactly what it was.
“Can you explain that?”
“I—” Parker started to say.
“It says you were in a mental institution.”
“Joe—”
“It says you broke out.”
“Joe…”
“It says you murdered people.”
Parker took a moment, waiting for him to chill—as much as he was going to chill anyway—and when it looked like he’d cooled a little, she spoke. “Do you want me to explain it, or do you want to yell at me?”
Joe paused, put his hands on his hips, drew a breath to calm the hell down, and pulled up a seat across from her. “Go ahead then.”
“Am I talking to my husband right now, or am I talking to the sheriff?”
“I think you’ve got a lot of explaining to do to the both of us.”
Parker sighed. It was going to be hard work. She slipped her fingers into the pocket of her dress, pulled out Corey’s cigarettes, and lit one.
Watching her, he folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “You don’t smoke.”
“Joe, I think you’re going to find out that there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“Try me.”
She took a drag, blew smoke out through her nostrils, and began. “There are some men out there so evil that not even hell wants them. They stay in our world, and they hunt, and they murder and go after people they believed wronged them and anybody who stands in their way. I’ve been hunting these monsters since I was a teenager.”
Joe smirked and leaned forward. “Come again.”
“We call them slashers.”
“And you hunt them?”
“Yes.”
“Is this something you go to college for?”
“Go to hell, Joe.” She sighed.
“This is just a little bit of a tough pill to swallow, Christine. Or should I call you…” He took another look at her file. “Parker?”
“This is why I never told you.”
Joe put his hands up as if he were going to surrender that little battle. “Okay, I’m listening.”
“I was sixteen years old when I went to battle with my first slasher. My father worked for the military. He led a team of scientists, and this team were trying to record the effects of sleep deprivation. So they took a couple of military soldiers who volunteered for the experiment and locked them in a bunker. They couldn’t see in, and the volunteers couldn’t see out. To keep the volunteers awake, they pumped 2-4-5 Trioxin gas into the bunker.”
“Did it work?” Joe asked.
Parker. “For the first few days, it was just business as usual. The men just played cards and goofed off, but after five or six days, something else happened.”
“What?”
“Silence.”
“What do you mean ‘silence’?”
“Not a single word,” she said. “Three days later, the screaming started. It went on and on and on for close to a week before it suddenly stopped. The scientists later figured out it was because the men had torn all their vocal cords. After thirty days, they finally opened up the bunker.”
“What did they find.”
“It wasn’t good. Two of the subjects were dead. They had apparently torn their own organs out of their bodies while they were still alive, and the third subject… well… He wasn’t too happy about his situation either. He tore apart every single person that stepped foot in that bunker.”
“‘Tore apart’?”
“Limb by limb,” Parker said. “Nine men. After that, they called him Hurricane Williams. Eventually, they captured that mad bastard and sentenced him to death. Just before they executed him, two things happened.” She held up a finger. “One, he vowed to hunt down every single last person who was involved in the experiment and murder them and their families.” Parker extended a second finger. “And two. It took the executioner in Texas three cracks at the electric chair to finally stop his heart. Now, his heart may have stopped, but it didn’t kill him. Later that night, Hurricane Williams busted out of the morgue and began to make good on his word. First, he murdered the entire Marsden family and then Mr. and Mrs. Page, and then Hurricane Williams paid a visit to my house. By that time, my father knew Hurricane was coming for us and tried to get us out of there, but it was too late. Hurricane killed my father first, my mother second, and he almost killed me.”
“How did you get away?”
Parker shook her head. “Luck. It wasn’t much later that Deloris McCormick heard about what had happened and found and came for me.”
“Who?”
“Deloris McCormick,” Parker continued. “You see, a lot of people thought that McCormick was crazy, but she wasn’t crazy. Deloris McCormick was something else altogether. She was a hunter, and she’d been hunting slashers all her life. Just like her mother and her mother before her. Hunting sons of bitches like Hurricane Williams was the fam
ily business for the McCormicks. Those tough old ladies trained the next generation of slasher hunters, and together, they helped to rid the world of monsters. Except McCormick couldn’t have any children, so instead, she trained me. For years, we traveled the country, sending dozens and dozens of these murderous bastards back to hell.”
Parker rolled up her sleeve as best she could with her hands still cuffed, to reveal the tattoos on her arms. “I’ve got one of these for every slasher I’ve killed.” Then as best as she could, she rolled up the other sleeve to reveal the vine-and-leaf tattoos. “And one of those for every life I’ve saved.” She pulled the cigarette from her lips. “Hurricane Williams killed my father, my mother, and Sam’s father, and now he’s back.”
“You told me Sam’s father died in a car accident,” Joe said. “And that those tattoos didn’t mean a thing.”
“I lied,” Parker said. “He’s back. He’s here in Slaughter Beach. You’ve seen the bodies. He’s going to try to kill me, and he’s going to try to kill Sam. You need to let me out of here so I can put a stop to him once and for all.”
Joe climbed to his feet and let out a long sigh. He took a couple of steps in one direction then a couple of steps in the other.
“Joe,” Parker said, “what are you thinking?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He gave it another go, but still, he couldn’t find the words.
“Joe, talk to me.”
“You want to know what I think?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I think you’re fucking nuts. Cuckoo-type nuts. How the hell could I marry you?”
“I’m still that girl,” Parker said. “I’m just also this other girl too. One who happens to be really good at sending sons of bitches back to hell.”
He paused and stared at her, and Parker knew he was trying to figure out how crazy she really was. “I’ve got to think about this.”
“What?” Parker said. “You need to let me out of here! I need to find Sam. I need to get Sam somewhere safe.”
He wasn’t listening. He walked out and let the door slam behind him.
Forty
Joe leaned against the wall and listened to Parker scream and beg. He knew it was his wife in there. The woman looked like her and smelled like her, but the words coming out of her mouth were unlike anything he’d ever heard before. She was spewing crazy talk with all this business of slashers and monsters and monster hunters. If he had never in his entire life laid his eyes on Parker Ames—or Christine or whatever her name was—and listened to what she had just said in that interview, he would have picked up the telephone straight away and called for the loony bin. Case closed, let the medical profession deal with her. But being in that room wasn’t the first time and only time he had spent with her. They had been married for years. He had seen her in every light a husband sees his wife in after all those years, and nothing in their shared history had even remotely pointed to Parker being of the crazy variety.
Based on that alone, he wished he could take her home, make her a cup of tea, and hold her tightly in his arms, hoping the whole episode would pass them by. But he had five bodies on his hands, and at first glance, she was mixed up in this mess one way or another.
When Joe walked back out into the main floor of the station, Morgan was on the phone, and when she saw him, she quickly got off. “How’d that go?”
“Not good,” he said. “I better get back to the crime scene.”
“Which one?”
He paused. “All of them, I guess.”
“The fire department is at the El Wray,” Morgan briefed him. “The fire is out, but they’re still checking on the gas lines to make sure they’re safe. I’ve got Ed Burley working security at the gas station, and there’s a crime scene team coming in from Philadelphia. They should be here in a couple of hours.”
“Good,” Joe said. He was a million miles away.
“How you holding up, boss?”
He let the question slide right past him. “Has there been any complaints or calls from or around the Anderson house?”
Morgan shook her head. “Why?”
“Sam’s staying there tonight.” He picked up the telephone and dialed Jacinta Anderson’s number. “I want to check on her.”
The phone rang.
And rang.
And rang.
When it was clear no one was going to answer, Joe hung up the phone. “Ah, hell.” He grabbed his hat and coat and headed for the door. “Man, the ship. I’ll be back in twenty.”
And then he was gone.
“The ship’s looking pretty rocky from where I’m standing, boss,” Morgan said.
Forty-One
Corey sat behind the wheel of the Eldorado. He was parked across the street, a few storefronts down, and outside the glow of the streetlight. Between the darkness and fog, Corey assumed the car was out of sight… well, as out of sight as a cherry-red chrome-covered Cadillac could be anyway. It was getting late, and the couple of diners had closed up. The trick-or-treaters had all gone home, and nobody was out on Main Street. It was a ghost town.
He watched as Joe bursted out of the station, climbed behind the wheel of his Jeep, and peeled off down the road. Corey waited until Joe was out of sight before casually climbing out of the Eldorado and making his way over to the pay phone outside the video store. He dialed 911 then turned around to watch Morgan through the windows of the sheriff’s station as she and answered the telephone.
“Slaughter Beach Police.”
“Yo!” Corey yelled into the phone. “Yo! There’s a… There’s a… I don’t even know what, man! Some kinda monster, and he’s just hacking and slashing and hacking and slashing his way through people down at”—Corey looked at an address scribbled on his hand—“62 Franklin Avenue! That’s 62 Franklin Avenue! Oh, damn! He’s on his way, coming right at me!”
And when he hung up, all that fear and stress slipped from his face. He leaned back against the wall, slipped a piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum into his mouth, and watched on with a smile on his lips.
Morgan couldn’t get out of the station quickly enough. She burst through the front door, with her coat half on and half off, and within seconds, she was in the front seat of her patrol car. She turned the engine over, pulled out onto the road, and got the hell out of there.
“Works every time,” Corey said.
Very casually, as if he had all the time in the world, Corey strode back to the Eldorado, popped the trunk, and rustled around through the weapons until he found a duffel bag stashed all the way in the back. He swung it over his shoulder then slammed the trunk shut. Just as casually as he had walked to the Eldorado, he ambled through the fog and across the street to the station.
When he reached the door, he leaned down, slipping Parker’s lockpicking kit out of his pocket, and within seconds, he was inside the station. He headed straight for the interview room, which was locked as well. That barely slowed him down, though. He picked the lock just like he’d picked the front door, and a moment later, he was in the room.
Parker Ames looked up at him. “What took you so long?”
“You know,” Corey said. “Bit of this, bit of that.”
She yanked at cuffs. “Hurry up and get me out of these. We’ve got to find Sam before Hurricane does.”
“Hold your horses.” Corey dug his fingers into the pocket of his jeans and produced a key.
A moment later, Parker was as free as a bird. Parker stood, rubbed her wrists, and motioned to the green duffel bag over Corey’s shoulder. “What’s in that?”
He swung it off his shoulder and let it thump on the table. “You left it in the trunk of the Eldorado about a decade ago.”
“And you’ve been holding onto it ever since?”
“I figured sooner or later, one day, you might need it.” He unzipped the bag. “Turns out I was right.”
Parker reached inside, and her fingers latched onto something that brought a smile to her face. He
r favorite chain saw: Aerosmith. “Hello, old friend.”
Forty-Two
Corey lit himself another cigarette and sat on Sheriff Joe Turner’s desk as he waited for Parker to get changed. He was just about finished with the cigarette when Parker stepped in out of the hall, and for the first time since Corey had arrived in Slaughter Beach, Parker Ames looked like the Parker Ames he knew, all those years ago. She was rocking a pair of black Levi’s, a Def Leppard T-shirt, her leather jacket, and let’s not forget the machete strapped to her hip.
“You look like you’re just about ready to go and send some slimeball back to hell.” Corey said.
She swung the duffel bag with Aerosmith inside over her shoulder. “I’m feeling like it.”
“So are you back?”
“I don’t think so.”
They were just about to get the hell out of the station and hit the road when a voice called from out in the street, “Sheriff Joe Turner!”
“What the hell?” Parker muttered.
Corey peeked through the window and got an angle on three men standing out in the fog. All three of them had baseball bats, cloaks, and hoods. One was even holding a noose. Corey looked to Parker. “Who the fuck are these guys?”
She took a peek. “I have no idea.”
The pair of them stepped out of the station, completely and utterly confused about what the hell was going on. Both Parker and Corey had seen some weird shit in their time chasing weird shit around the country, from teddy bear slashers to Nazi zombie slashers, but whatever these guys were was completely new to them.