by Jack Quaid
Parker dug her fingers into the pocket of her uniform, pulled out the napkin, and read the address in Bastard Town under her breath.
Maybe, she thought. Maybe she could do something to help.
“Hey, sugar tits,” Denny yelled from his booth on the other side of Al’s Diner. “Bring us the bill.”
Parker raised her eyebrow and shot a glance at Denny. Ellis Bell would have whizzed on over to the cash register, rung up his bill, and rushed it over to the asshole’s table. But Ellis Bell wasn’t there anymore. Only Parker Ames was.
Al saw the look in her eye and must have known what was coming down the line. “Don’t you dare.”
But Parker did dare.
She buttoned up her shirt, turned on her heels, and cut across the floor of Al’s Diner with Denny’s table in her sights. The asshole was laughing it up with his buddies, completely oblivious to what was coming his way.
“Hey, Denny,” she said, balling up her fist. Before he could open his mouth to say something stupid, Parker was already swinging. She broke his nose on the first blow but didn’t stop there. Parker knew she was a twenty-five-year-old ex-cheerleader and Denny was a thirty-five-year-old ex-football player, so one punch wasn’t going to get the job done. So she threw another punch and another one after that.
Blood splattered across her face. Blood splattered across the faces of Denny’s buddies. Then after a couple more blows, Parker knew he was down for the count. He slumped in the booth, covered in blood and teeth.
She looked around. All eyes in the diner were on her, and all jaws were well and firmly dropped to the ground. Nobody was brave enough to say a word.
Parker rubbed her tired and bloody knuckles. It was the first time she had felt like herself in over a year.
Ten
The people of Calumet City believed that the derelict house on the corner of Greenbay and Wilson was haunted, and they had good reason due to the horrific murders that had taken place there in 1978.
Jenna Boffard, the real estate agent with the listing, must have had the property on her books for close to ten years. In that time, she hadn’t even had a single offer. People would call up and inquire, and some would arrange a time to meet her. Together, they would go out to the property for an inspection. They would walk around the house, which had deteriorated with each passing year, and talk about its potential and the colors they could paint the walls, but each and every single potential buyer grew very cold feet as soon as they discovered the house’s unofficial name was Hell House.
In the spirit of full disclosure, Jenna ended each inspection with the details of the events of April 26, 1978, when a crazed maniac broke into the house, murdered two people, and escaped. They would smile politely, thank her very much for her time, and get the hell out of there. Jenna’s follow-up calls rarely garnered a response.
A cloud of fog casually drifted past Hell House as Parker stood at the gate, still in her pink Al’s Diner uniform. She’d left in such a hurry that she’d forgotten her coat and bag in her locker. Parker wrapped her arms around her middle to stay warm as she crossed over the dead grass of what used to be the front lawn, and when she reached the door, it was already open a couple of inches. With her long index finger, she pushed it open even farther and stepped inside.
Moonlight poured in through the windows, and Parker could see that the place had been trashed by local kids drinking, partying, and laughing it up. Neon graffiti covered the walls, the windows were cracked, and the whole place smelled like vomit, piss, and pot all rolled into one. When she reached the living room, Parker felt something under her shoe and stopped. Even though it was dark and the floor was a mess, she could see it was the shape of a picture frame. She kneeled down, picked it up, and looked at the cracked frame. The photo behind it was dirty and faded, but that didn’t matter because Parker could still make out the people in it—her mother, her father, and sixteen-year-old Parker. She smiled at the faded memory and slipped the photo out from behind the broken glass and into the pocket of her uniform.
It had been a long time since she’d survived Hell House. Although the worst of the worst had taken place there and it barely resembled the house she remembered, it still felt like home. She remembered the birthday parties, the Christmas mornings, and staying up late on Friday nights to watch The Rockford Files with her father.
She made her way to the kitchen, where her mother used to make her macaroni and cheese, and over to the door that led to the garage. Unlike the rest of the eyesore of a house, the door to the garage had a fairly new and extremely expensive lock fastened to a three-inch-thick steel-reinforced door. Given the current difficulties in gaining any market interest in the property, the door was likely the most expensive part of the property.
Groove by groove, Parker slipped the key into the lock. It clicked open, and Parker stepped into the garage. Her hand found the switch in the darkness and flicked it on.
Unlike the rest of the worn-down, beat-up house, the garage looked as if it were part of another place altogether. Inside was a complete arsenal of slasher-hunting weapons lining the walls. Everything she could possibly need in the business of beheading evil was hanging in Parker’s garage. She had machetes, chain saws, battle swords, and pistols. In the middle of the garage was Parker’s tip-top 1969 Dodge Charger, which was so chocked full of muscle that it would need a drug test if it ever got itself into a race.
Parker went to a cabinet at the back of the garage and opened one of the drawers. Inside were her old slasher-slaying clothes: a pair of black Levi’s, a black leather jacket, and her Doc Martens. Parker stripped off the Al’s Diner uniform and swapped one uniform for another. When she was dressed, Parker looked at her reflection in the Charger’s window. She looked like a cross between Mad Max and Joan Jett, and there was no mistaking it—Ellis Bell was long gone.
Parker collected an assortment of her favorite weapons and loaded them into the trunk, then she slid into the front seat and wrapped her fingers around the wheel. Finally, she felt at home. The only thing that bothered her was that her hands hadn’t stopped shaking since she walked into the garage. One thought and one thought only ran over and over in her mind, and it was a simple one. What if I can’t do this anymore?
If that turned out to be true, Parker thought, it was going to be one hell of a short trip.
Eleven
If hell had frozen over, then Portage, Alaska, would have been the town sitting right on the edge of civilization. It was one of the last small towns of a string of small towns that grew smaller the farther north Parker traveled. For close to one hundred years, it had been a mining town, but since the mine closed in the summer of ’85, it was just a town struggling to get by. There wasn’t much night life in Portage, and people could do one of two things: they could go home and sit in front of the fire and watch television, or they could go to Woolley’s Bar & Tavern to sit in front of the fire and watch television. At least Woolley’s Bar & Tavern had beer—and Big Christy Woolley.
Woolley’s Bar & Tavern was her joint, and she treated everyone who walked through that front door of hers, whether stranger or kin, like they had just walked through the front door of her very own house. She had been the owner and proprietor of Woolley’s Bar & Tavern since her father, Slippery Legs Justin Woolley, died close to forty years ago. Before that, JP Woolley ran Woolley’s Bar & Tavern after traveling north sometime after arriving in the US from Albania. Woolley’s Bar & Tavern was more of a home to Christy than any other home she had ever known. So anyone walking through the door essentially was walking through the front door of her house.
On that particular evening, Craig and Tom were sitting at one of the tables by the fire, talking about the dog Craig had owned when he was a kid and how that dog was one of the best damn dogs a man could have. Tracy and Chad were at another table, watching an episode of Perfect Strangers on the TV, and old Hank was sitting down at the end of the bar, staring into the bottom of his bourbon. All in all, it was just another re
gular Friday night.
Then the door opened, and Parker Ames walked in. Big Christy took Parker Ames for what she appeared to be—a pretty young blonde who should have been in college somewhere and not in the middle of nowhere. Everybody in the bar turned and looked at her for a moment before going to back to the various things they had been doing before she walked in. Taking it in stride, Parker made her way to the bar and pulled up a stool.
“Don’t worry too much about them,” Big Christy said. “We don’t get all that many visitors around here, if you know what I mean.” She laid a napkin out in front of Parker. “What can I get you?”
“Do you have something to warm me up?”
“There’s only two ways to get warmed up around here,” Big Christy said. “The first one is to find yourself a fella, but to be brutally honest”—she motioned around at the patrons of Woolley’s Bar & Tavern—“the pickin’s are kinda slim.”
“And this other way?” Parker asked.
Big Christy wrapped her fingers around a bottle of bourbon and poured Parker a shot. “This should get you halfway there.”
Parker downed the shot in one hit and enjoyed it, then she shifted her eyes from the glass and back up to Big Christy. “One more please.”
“My kind of girl.” Big Christy poured Parker a shot then poured one for herself while she was at it. “You sticking around or passing through?”
“Passing through,” Parker said. “I’m my way to Whittier.”
At that point, everybody in the bar got real quiet real quick. Parker looked over her shoulder, and the eyes staring back at her all had the same look in them—fear. All of a sudden, the patrons of Woolley’s Bar & Tavern were no longer small separate groups of people hanging out in a bar, but a bunch of folks all having the same conversation. Chairs shifted and aimed toward Parker while Craig grabbed his beer and pulled up a stool at the bar.
“You might want to think twice about that destination, if you know what I mean,” Big Christy said.
Their newfound interest wasn’t lost on Parker. “I kind of get the feeling that there’s something you all want to tell me,” she said.
Everybody looked at the floor or in their drinks—anywhere but at Parker.
Then Hank, the old relic sitting at the end of the bar with his bottle of beer, his shot of bourbon, and his Red Man chewing tobacco in front of him, spoke up in a voice that wasn’t much more than a croak. “It’s not that they don’t want to tell you. It’s just that they don’t really know how to say it.”
“Do you know how to say it?” Parker asked.
“I can give it a go,” he said. “Probably about the best I could do.”
“And that’s probably about all that should be expected of anyone.”
“I’d drink to that,” Hank said. “Then again, I’d probably drink to most things.” He finished his shot and took a sip from his beer.
Big Christy poured him another then another for Parker. It was clearly a two-drink kind of story.
“Bastard Town wasn’t always called Bastard Town, but over the years, that’s just what people tended to call it,” Hank said. “And I can tell you that son-of-a-bitch place has certainly lived up to its name. On any map, Bastard Town is known as Whittier, Alaska. And Whittier was always a unique town to begin with.”
Craig looked up from the cigarette he was rolling. “It shouldn’t even be a town.”
Hank spat a gob of tobacco into the empty glass sitting next to his beer. “That’s right. Damn well shouldn’t be. You see, Whittier is as cold as my first two wives combined, and I’m here to tell you, that’s pretty damned cold.”
“I can attest to that,” Craig said.
“And he was married to one of them once himself,” Hank said. “Anyway, there’s only two ways to get yourself into Whittier. The first way is to get yourself on a boat and sail those cold, miserable waters down the channel.”
“And the other way?” Parker asked.
“The tunnel,” Craig said.
“Yeah,” Hank said as he chomped on a fresh piece of chewing tobacco. “The tunnel. You see, Bastard Town is surrounded by the Chugach Mountains on three of its four sides. The forth being covered by the aforementioned water. Those mountains are so tall and dangerous that climbing over those sons of bitches is impossible. And trust me, folks have tried. “
“They say there’s gold up in those mountains,” Big Christy said.
“Yeah, they do say that, don’t they?” Hank said. “And they’re probably right, too, but it’s too damned cold to go up there and find out.”
Parker took a sip of her drink. “What’s this other way to get into Whittier?”
“The tunnel,” Craig said. “Two and a half miles of a single-lane tunnel that cuts straight through the mountain.”
“A tunnel?” Parker said. “This Bastard Town doesn’t sound so bad. Sounds like I’ve been to more bastardly kinds of towns.”
Craig finished rolling his cigarette and lit it. “The isolation and the weather is not the reason we call it Bastard Town.”
“Bastard Town earned its moniker the old-fashioned way,” Hank said.
Parker took a sip of her drink. “How was that?”
“By being a bastard,” Craig said.
“Nobody could quite put their finger on it,” Hank continued. “Whittier was just a strange place where strange accidents happened. It was a town known for being unlucky. At first, it was just boating accidents.”
“Then it was freak accidents,” Craig chimed in.
“Usually, somebody fell off something or became impaled on something,” Big Christy said.
“Then the murders started,” Hank said, spitting into his tobacco glass again.
“When did that happen?” Parker asked.
“It’s hard to say for sure,” Hank said. “As I said, Whittier had always been an unlucky type of town, but if my back was to the wall and I had to guess when Whittier turned from a small sleepy hideaway into Bastard Town, I would say it was about three months ago, Christmas day.”
Parker finished her drink.
Big Christy poured her another.
“That’s one hell of a specific guess.”
“Well, it was one hell of a specific Christmas.”
“Christmas of ’88 was when the murders started,” Craig said.
“The entire Henderson family,” Big Christy said.
“And the Charles family,” Craig said.
“And the Jenson family,” Hank said.
The room fell deathly quiet.
“What about the killer?” Parker asked. “Did they find him?”
“Not a single thing,” Hank said.
“Now, they board up their houses over there in Bastard Town,” Craig said. “They lock their doors up real good.”
Hank coughed. It sounded like he was about to cough up a lung. “And they never—and I mean never—leave their houses after dark. If I were you, little miss, I’d get back in your vehicle and leave Bastard Town to be a bastard without your involvement.”
Probably not bad advice, Parker thought.
Twelve
The air in Portage was damn cold. But it wasn’t as cold as the air coming through the Whittier tunnel from Bastard Town. It flowed through as if it were running from something big and bad and washed over Parker’s face. She was at the mouth of the tunnel, sitting on the hood of the Charger, a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her hands buried in the pockets of her leather jacket. No matter how hard she squinted, Parker couldn’t see the other end of the tunnel. It appeared to just go on forever, without any guarantee that an end even existed, and if one did, what the hell was she walking into on the other side?
She pulled her hand out of her pocket and pulled the cigarette from her lips. It was then that she noticed her hand shaking. It was her right hand, the very same hand she’d used to wield her chain saw, her machete, and that Louisville Slugger with nails hammered through the hitting end. In short, it was her killing hand.
She eased her foot off the gas pedal and cruised down the main street of Bastard Town. On one side was the bay, where a couple dozen fishing boats idled with the ebb and flow of the calm water. On the other side of the road was a collection of storefronts that were essential for any small American town like a police station, a diner, a couple of bars, and even a video store.
During the summer months, Bastard Town had a population of close to three thousand, but during the winter, that number decreased drastically to just under a few hundred. It was the weather; most people just couldn’t handle it.