by Jack Quaid
On the surface, Bastard Town looked perfectly normal, like just another small town in a country filled with small towns. When Parker peered through the windshield and took a closer look, though, it became pretty clear that something wasn’t quite right in Bastard Town. For a start, it was empty. Completely and utterly empty. Not a soul in sight. Not a car on the road. Not even somebody out on the sidewalk, walking the dog.
Parker slowed the Charger to a stop in the middle of the road and climbed out. It was cold, but she’d expected that. The emptiness, considering what she had been told about Bastard Town, didn’t come as a surprise. What she hadn’t been expecting was the silence. Complete and utter silence. There wasn’t a sound in the air. Not a car alarm in the distance. Not a television playing too loudly. Absolutely nothing but the idling engine of the Charger by her side. It was the silence that scared her the most.
Parker was about to climb back into the car when she saw the blood on the sidewalk. She kept her hand close to the .45 on her hip as she crossed the road and stepped over the gutter and onto the sidewalk. It was blood all right. Parker had seen enough of it to know what it looked like splashed over concrete. The blood ran from outside the video store all the way up to the end of the block, and from half a glance, which was all Parker really needed, it was clear that the blood was from a body being dragged.
“That’s not reassuring,” Parker mumbled to herself.
She hightailed it back over to the Charger, slid behind the wheel, and hit the road. Steering with one hand, she dug her fingers into her pocket and pulled out the scrunched-up piece of paper with the address Anna and Blaine had left for her. She didn’t have a map, but Whittier wasn’t exactly difficult to navigate. Parker could have sworn that over the past few years, she had been to over a hundred small towns all across America with the exact same grid design all named with the exact same system: First Avenue, Second Avenue, and so on. Those towns always had a State Street, a Main Street, and a spattering of Union, Lafayette, Washington, Elm, and Lake streets. Even if it was her first time in an American small town, 99.9% of the time, she found it pretty easy to get around.
Three blocks later, she pulled the Charger over on Washington and climbed out in front of Anna and Blaine’s address. Every window on the house was boarded up, and when Parker looked down the street, she could see that it wasn’t the only house with boards on it. The people of Bastard Town were hell-bent on keeping something out of their homes, and judging by the smashed-in front door of Anna and Blaine’s house, not all of them were successful.
Parker leaned back into the Charger and pulled out her nail-spiked baseball bat from the back seat. Gripping it in her hand, she walked across the open yard, up the couple of steps, and in through the broken door.
At some point in its past, the house at 23 Washington had been a warm and friendly place, and Parker could tell that the Murrays were good and kind people just by the photographs all along the hallway wall that greeted her when she stepped inside. They captured decades of birthday parties, family vacations, first days at school, and a whole lifetime of laughs and love. But that was all gone now. Those photographs on the wall were sprayed with blood, mostly likely belonging to the people in those photographs.
Parker followed the path of blood into the dining room and paused. It was one hell of a mess. At half a glance, she counted two bodies.
One was facedown on the floor with a pickax through the back of the skull, and the other was in the corner with all bendable parts bent the wrong way. Parker crouched to get a better look at the poor bastard on the floor. It was Blaine Murray. The body in the corner was his sister, Anna. The mess was fresh, not even a few hours old. The way Parker pieced it together, she figured the kids had only arrived in Bastard Town a couple of hours before her, got home, and shortly after that got themselves killed.
There had once been a time when Parker could walk through a sorority house of murder victims while eating a cheeseburger and not even feel remotely queasy. That time had passed. Parker stood up, leaned against the wall, and vomited.
A couple of minutes later, she was finished and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She didn’t feel any better, but there was just nothing left in her stomach to bring up.
Then she heard a short and sharp metal-on-metal crunching sound from outside. Parker grabbed her Louisville Slugger and hauled ass into the front yard. There was no movement or sound on Washington Street.
Parker got very still and gripped the bat in both hands, ready to attack whatever the hell was out there, and at first glance everything looked… well, normal. That was until she saw the machete buried through the hood of the Charger and halfway through the engine. The beast of automotive engineering was trashed.
“Who murders a car?” Parker asked herself.
One empty town, two dead bodies, and one murdered Dodge Charger told Parker that standing still long enough got people killed in Bastard Town, and she wasn’t comfortable being idle. She made her way over to the Charger and opened the trunk. She tossed the Louisville Slugger inside, strapped her .45 to her hip, and picked up her trusty old machete from the treasure trove of weapons before slamming the trunk closed.
She had driven past the police station on the way into town, and Parker figured that was the best place to start to make sense of the mess. It was only a few blocks away, and although it was cold, it wasn’t cold enough to make getting there impossible. She started off and kept her eyes peeled.
Parker took careful steps. They weren’t too fast, and they weren’t too slow, but measured and ready to attack in the event that something tall, dark, and violent jumped out of the darkness.
A couple of blocks later, she’d seen nothing but empty streets and heard nothing but her own footsteps on the road.
Parker slid the machete from one hand to the other and wiped the sweat from her palm on her jeans. She heard a twig break—something was out there in the darkness. In the silence of Bastard Town, the simple sound of a broken twig under a foot sounded like a thunderclap.
Parker turned and swung that machete up, ready to start hacking away, but when she turned, there was absolutely nothing there. Not a single thing.
It took a moment for her heart to stop pounding, and when it did, Parker continued down the street toward the police station. Her hand shook, and Parker knew it was shaking, but she ignored it, secretly hoping that ignoring it would simply make it go away. Deep down, she knew it was only a hope.
Thirteen
The neon light of the Whittier Police Station gave off a hum and a buzz as Parker walked underneath it and up the three steps to the front door. Walking into a police station and telling the sheriff an unkillable psycho killer is roaming the streets killing people was always a bit of a tough piece of information to deliver. It was usually met with a healthy dose of laughter and someone telling her to get the hell out of there. But occasionally, very occasionally, she would come across a sheriff who would be open to such wild tales of killers and monsters.
Parker pushed open the door to the police station and stepped right into the aftermath of a massacre. The entire Whittier police department had been decimated. Bullet holes peppered the walls. Bloody bodies were strewn around and hanging over desks, and half a dozen were piled up at the back door. By the look of it, they had been trying to escape, but there were too many of them to get the hell out the door all at the same time. So they’d all bottlenecked at the door, and the slasher had killed them where they stood.
As far as massacres went, it was a hell of a bloody one.
“Hey, girly,” a gruff voice said from somewhere at the rear of the police station. “Do you mind closing the door? You’re letting in a draft.”
Parker squinted and saw there were a couple of cells at the back of the station, and in one of those cells was a great big hulk of a man. He must have been close to sixty-five, and despite the gray flattop and the lines as deep as canyons on his face, he looked like he could punch his way through a brick
wall. He was the kind of man they sang country songs about, and men like him were usually called something like Big John or Wood Cutter Johnson. His hands were the size of saucers and covered in scars, and when Parker took one look at him, she could tell instantly that he was a bastard. His name was Lee. First name? Last name? Nobody knew.
Parker stepped over the various body parts littered all over the station and eventually made her way to the cell. “What happened here?”
“Well, all these people here on the floor used to be a hell of a lot more happier. I can tell you that,” Lee said as he stood up. “Looks to me like you picked a bad time to visit Whittier.”
“This isn’t exactly a social call,” Parker said. “I’m here on business.”
“What business is that?”
“Killin’ sons of bitches.”
“It looks like you’re in the right town then,” Lee said. “It sure does look like there’s a son-of-a-bitch problem around here.”
“What am I dealing with here?” Parker asked. “And there’s no point sugarcoating it.”
“So you want to know why all these poor bastards are getting hacked to pieces, huh?”
“Yeah,” Parker said, lighting up two cigarettes. Then she handed one through the bars to Lee. “I wouldn’t mind knowing who’s hacking these people all up.”
Lee took a drag. “Then you’re probably going to want to know about Hatchet Bob.”
“I guess I am.”
“If you grew up in Bastard Town in the thirties, then you grew up knowing the tale of Hatchet Bob. It was from this point on that the town of Whittier was henceforth known as Bastard Town.”
“I’ve been here less than an hour,” Parker said, “and I can say that in my opinion it’s a pretty accurate description.”
“This town…” Lee continued. “This town earned its name. From the very first settlers who pitched a tent on this cold bastard, all the way up to this very day. But out of all the bad days this town has had, that one concerning Hatchet Bob was pretty dark, if I do say so myself. In the beginning, Hatchet Bob was just plain old Bob McKee. He didn’t get the hatchet part of his name until later. Now, Bob McKee wasn’t known for being an intellectual, but that was okay because he had no intention of being a so-called intellectual. What Bob was, though, was one hell of a fisherman. My daddy used to say that Bob McKee could take his boat out onto the water, and the damn fish would just jump right on in like it was their idea all along.”
Lee pulled back on the last drag of Parker’s Newport then stamped it out under his boot. Parker offered him another one, and he took it, lit it, and continued his story. “Now, if my memory serves me correctly—and I’m pretty sure that it does—Bob McKee had been out on the bay for just under a week. So on his way home, he picked up three bunches of flowers. One for his lovely wife, Joan, and one each for his two daughters, Barbara and Mary. It had been a week since he had been home, and he was looking forward to seeing them, but when he walked through the doors, he didn’t find his family. Not in any way he remembered them.”
“What happened to them?” Parker asked.
“Dead as nails, they were. Had been for days.” He tapped his cigarette against the bars of the cell, knocking off the ash, and slipped it back between his lips. “He buried them the very next morning, and you know what?” He didn’t even pause for an answer. “The flowers he picked up on his way home the day before, he placed on their graves.”
“If Bob McKee didn’t kill them…”
“Then who did?” Lee said, finishing Parker’s sentence.
Parker nodded.
“What nobody knew at the time, except for Joan and her two girls, was that there was a drifter passing through town. This was smack bang in the middle of the Depression, remember, and a lot of folks were doing it, though. This one particular fella in particular offered to fix the McKees’ fence, which did need fixing, in exchange for fifty cents. Joan told him that her husband would fix the fence when he returned home, thank you very much, and sent him on his way. The drifter, crazed with hunger and bad luck, grabbed Joan by the shoulder and shook her until she agreed to give him fifty cents to fix the fence. She slipped, fell back, and hit her head on the bottom of a step. The drifter panicked, and instead of confessing to Sheriff Holbrook, he thought he would silence the two girls who witnessed the entire ordeal.”
“What happened next?”
“The townsfolk didn’t just blame Bob,” Lee continued. “They wanted his blood, and Whittier in 1936 wasn’t like the rest of America in 1936. It wasn’t even the Wild West in 1836. Bastard Town was one cold son of a bitch, and there was only one law that mattered—frontier law. Boon Wilson, Levi Harris, Sam Bell, and a couple of dozen others formed a posse and marched all the way up to Bob’s house on Sixth Street. They dragged that poor bastard out kicking and screaming and grieving, and no matter how much he said it wasn’t him, it didn’t matter. The town wanted blood. They hung him in the town square. I saw it with my own two eyes. The drifter confessed to the crime years later, in the seventies, but by then, it was too late.”
“Why weren’t they arrested?” Parker asked.
Lee shrugged. “Some towns are funny like that. Whittier is one of those type of towns.”
“And now he’s back or something? Is that it?” Parker asked.
“He’s back, all right,” Lee said. “And he wants to kill every single last citizen of Bastard Town.”
That certainly sounded like a slasher backstory to Parker. She shifted her attention back to Lee and gave him a sidelong glance. “Why are you in here?”
“Five days ago, the good sheriff of Whittier thought he was dealing with a plain old run-of-the-mill murderer. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe he was dealing with something a little more…”
“Undead?”
Lee nodded. “I was hunting Hatchet Bob and almost caught up with the bastard, too, when the sheriff caught me with an ax and a shotgun. Naturally, he mistook me for the murderer, and I’ve been in here ever since.”
Parker gave that some thought. “If I let you out, do you promise to be on your best behavior?”
“No,” Lee said. “I can’t say that I will.”
“Good.”
Fourteen
Heather didn’t want anyone to know she was crying, so she went to the storeroom of the diner, sat down on a box of canned tomatoes, put her head in her hands, and let loose. She hadn’t cried five days ago when her best friend, Katie, was killed. She hadn’t cried three days ago when she found the body of her high school music teacher slaughtered on Ninth Street. She hadn’t even cried when her mother disappeared the day before.
At least I have Jimmy, Heather thought. At least I have my Jimmy.
Heather and Jimmy were high school sweethearts, and exactly one week after they were married by Judge Gadd—exactly one week—Jimmy was arrested at the Bear and Boar after a bar fight he didn’t start ended when he threw a punch that killed Chuck Winslow. It hadn’t mattered to the court that Chuck Winslow had a long history of starting fights in bars, and it also hadn’t mattered to the court that he’d started that particular one when he tried to force Heather to sit on his lap. All that mattered to the court was that Chuck Winslow was dead and that her Jimmy had made him that way. The judge had sentenced him to seven years like it was nothing.
Heather had taken the vows, and when she said the words, she’d believed them. So for every weekend for seven years, she’d made the three-hour drive to Palmer Correctional to visit her husband for forty-five minutes before climbing back behind the wheel of his Trans Am with no heating or air conditioning and driving the three hours of hard road back to Bastard Town.
For the rest of the week, Heather worked her ass off. She kept two jobs, one over at the mine in Portage and a second waiting tables over at Misty’s, and she saved every single cent she earned. So when the Templestones retired and wanted to sell their diner on Main Street, Heather had enough money to put down a deposit. She changed t
he name to Heather’s Diner and instead of working day and night for other people, she worked day and night to build a life for herself and for Jimmy when he got out. By the time Jimmy was released from prison, they had technically been married for seven years, but in that time, they had spent only seven days as husband and wife. On the way home from Palmer, they couldn’t even make it back to Bastard Town without pulling over to the side of the road to make love.
For a couple of days everything was perfect. Then the killings started.
The day before Jimmy got out, she had dyed her hair with streaks of red, yellow, and pink, just like Cyndi Lauper, but considering everything that had happened, her hair just made her feel foolish, and now she wished she hadn’t done it. Heather wiped the tears from her eyes with the napkin from her pocket of her apron, grabbed the ax by her side, and walked out of the storeroom.
Winter was always tough in Bastard Town, and half the population always migrated south until the cold passed and the sun returned. Those who stayed were a special breed of tough. Heather, Jimmy, and Jimmy’s little brother, Darren, were of that breed. Not to mention Jimmy had just gotten out of the can, and no weather, serial killer, or mythic Hatchet Bob was going to send him running. The boys had spent the better part of the afternoon hammering plywood over the windows and making sure the doors were as secure as Fort Knox.
Jimmy was making Darren his famous three-meat-and-cheese sandwich when the telephone rang. The room had been so quiet that it sounded like an air horn going off. Jimmy jumped on it, pushed the receiver to his ear, and listened very carefully to the words he was being told. Both Heather and Darren leaned in closer, trying to figure out what was happening, but the look on his face made it impossible.
Heather nervously lit a cigarette and paced the floor of the diner, just waiting for Jimmy to finally hang up and tell her what the hell was going on. When he finally did hang up, Heather stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray and looked up at him.