Escape From Bastard Town

by Jack Quaid

  Terry’s eyes hardened, and he wrapped his fingers tightly around the bat. He wasn’t going to sit around and wait to be killed. No, sir, not Terry Brown. Nobody in Bastard Town thought much of Terry. Sure, whenever somebody needed an oil change or a new starter motor, Terry was their friend. But out on the street, people didn’t treat Terry much better than they treated one of those immigrants coming in from down south. But if he killed Hatchet Bob? Well, they would have to look at old Terry Brown differently. They would have to look at him like a hero.

  So Terry took very careful and precise steps toward the shadow at the other end of the garage, doing his very best not to make any sound on the floor. A bead of sweat rolled down his cheek and jumped from his chin.

  Was he afraid? Absolutely, but he was going to be a hero, and that was all Terry was thinking.

  I’m going to get you, you son of a bitch, Terry thought. I’m going to get you.

  The figure was right around the corner of Danny Jenkins’s pickup, and when Terry took those steps around the vehicle, he didn’t even think twice. He swung as hard as he could, and it was a direct hit right in the skull.

  The figure hit the deck like a sack of shit, and for a brief moment, relief washed over Terry. For the first time in his life, he’d done something good for once. He wasn’t the loser everybody thought. Nope, not anymore.

  Then he looked down. He hadn’t crushed Hatchet Bob’s skull with his childhood baseball bat. It was Dale’s skull he’d split wide open. His best friend.

  “Oh, no,” Terry muttered as the bat slipped from his fingers. “What did I do?” He hit himself in the head over and over again. “Stupid… stupid… stupid.”

  Then outside, he heard a car pull up. It was the guys from the diner. It had to be. He took one last look at his friend, turned on his heels and ran through the garage. He burst out into the street and smack into a Pontiac and the barrel of a shotgun. The sight of the barrel stopped him dead in his tracks, and when he looked past that, he saw Lee behind the trigger, and he wasn’t alone. Some blonde with a machete and Darren James were with him.

  “Where’s Dale?” Darren asked.

  It took Terry a moment to muster up the words. “He didn’t make it.”

  Everybody let those words sink in for a moment. Most of all, Terry let them sink in.

  “You better get in,” Parker told him.

  As Terry walked to the car, he looked over his shoulder back at the garage, back at Dale. Climbing into the back seat of the Pontiac, he kept his eyes on that garage and didn’t look away until it was nothing but a speck in the darkness before blending into it altogether.

  Twenty-One

  They were all going to die. That was the general consensus of the room. Not only were they all going to die, but they were also all going to die horrible deaths at the hands of Hatchet Bob. Everybody from Bastard Town may have had that thought, but Parker Ames wasn’t from Bastard Town. So she had come to the conclusion that no matter what happened, there was no way she was going to die there.

  They all argued about what to do. Should they run? Should they hide? Where do they run and where do they hide? For close to ten minutes, Parker listened to the arguments filled with fear, panic, desperation, and just all-around hysteria. She sat by herself in a booth in the back, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, until eventually, she’d had enough of listening to their arguments.

  “Hey,” she called out.

  Everybody shut up their whispered arguments and turned to her.

  “You want to get out of here, you talk to me,” she said. “Otherwise, there’s a fair-to-good chance that at least some of you—and most likely all of you—are going to wind up dead by sunrise.”

  She had seen that scene play out over at least a dozen small towns across America when a slasher rolled into town and started killing the local folk. Sometimes, the ones who ran got away, and sometimes those who hid survived as well. Running and hiding was not always a guarantee of living, though. There was only one guarantee, and that was unless Parker Ames chopped some bastard’s head clean off, people died.

  “What do you suggest?” Heather asked.

  “Yeah,” Terry added. “Have you got a plan or something?”

  Parker smiled. “I’ve got a plan, and you’re going to love it.”

  Twenty-Two

  Nobody loved Parker’s plan. Courtney especially didn’t love Parker’s plan. In fact, she thought Parker’s plan was the worst plan in the history of plans. But there she was, right in the middle, and it was too late to pull out.

  Courtney sat behind the wheel of a 1978 Cadillac de Ville that belonged to the cook at Heather’s Diner. Nobody had seen or heard from him for three days, but it was safe to assume that he probably wasn’t coming back for it, considering the circumstances and all.

  Courtney had seen enough horror movies to know there were things people trying to escape a blood-crazed slasher certainly didn’t do. They didn’t cruise down Main Street at five miles per hour. They didn’t drive with the windows down and the doors unlocked. If they did do those things, they certainly didn’t do it wearing a bright-yellow Whittier Community School cheerleading uniform and very little else. Courtney knew exactly what she was, and that was slasher bait. Nobody ever wanted to be slasher bait.

  She didn’t like to think about it, but deep down, she knew that her mother hadn’t come to pick her up because Hatchet Bob had mostly likely found her and… Well… Courtney didn’t want to think about that. She just knew that if, by some miracle, she survived the night, if the sun rose and her heart was still beating, she was going to get the hell out of Bastard Town and see all the places she saw on television. She was going to go to Paris and drink coffee. She was going on safari in Africa. She was going to see the world and all it had, because if she knew one thing, that one thing was that some maniac could always be hiding around the corner, ready to hack her into a hundred tiny pieces. That was what her mother would have wanted anyway.

  Christ, Mom… She pushed back tears when she thought about her mother. When she saw the splattered blood on her yellow uniform, she thought about how disappointed her mother would be that it was dirty. She vowed to herself, in the quiet of her mind, that if she made it through the ordeal, she would scrub the uniform clean with her own hands, because that was what her mother would have wanted. But first things first, she had to make it through that ordeal.

  The only other time Courtney had been behind the wheel of a car was an hour earlier, when she was behind the wheel of Brandon Coates’s car, and that didn’t end terribly well. Terry had given her a crash course back in the parking lot of Heather’s Diner, but he’d run through ten summer school driving lessons in just under two minutes, slapped her on the back, and told her she had it down pat. Courtney didn’t feel like she had it down pat. Her fingers gripped the wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white. Her eyes darted from mirror to mirror to mirror, just scanning the darkness for Hatchet Bob.

  What are you doing, Courtney? What the hell are you doing? she asked herself, and judging from the look on her face, she had absolutely no idea. Just when she thought the whole plan was going to be a big fat waste of time, something appeared in front of the car!

  Courtney slammed on the brakes, and everything in the car lurched forward. She peered through the windshield, expecting the worst, but in the headlights, she saw nothing much more than a porcupine. Just a simple, run-of-the-mill porcupine frozen in the headlights. As she stared down at him, the porcupine’s eyes stared back up at her, and Courtney sighed a sigh of relief.

  “Phew,” she said to herself with a laugh. “Just a porcupine.”

  But right behind that porcupine was Hatchet Bob! He raised the hatchet in his hand and, in one fell swoop, cut that poor spiky creature in two. Courtney screamed… and screamed… and screamed.

  Parker told her the plan, told her the plan again, then told Courtney to retell the plan back to her, but sitting there behind the wheel of that de Ville, face-to-f
ace with Hatchet Bob and the two parts of what used to be one porcupine, Courtney couldn’t think of anything other than getting the hell out of there. She buried the gas pedal of the de Ville into the floor, and the car blasted forward.

  Hatchet Bob was too slow and too big to get out of the way, and the de Ville hit him dead center. He rolled over the hood, the windshield, and the roof then crashed back down on the concrete behind the de Ville as it shot forward.

  The plan, Courtney told herself. Remember the plan.

  She got a hold of herself, and just as quickly as she’d slammed on the accelerator, she slammed on the brake. Her eyes snapped to the rearview mirror, and she waited. All she could hear was the thump in her chest of her heart beating at one hundred miles an hour.

  Then in the rearview mirror, she saw Hatchet Bob rise to his feet. He may have just been hit with a piece of Detroit steel, but he wouldn’t have been a slasher if a single blow from a car could take him out.

  He shook off the hit as if it were nothing then stalked toward the car with most likely nothing on his mind other than hacking poor Courtney into a thousand pieces. Then suddenly, the trunk of the de Ville popped open, and there was Parker Ames.

  “Surprise, motherfucker.” She held two things in her hands: her trusty old machete and a chain.

  Hatchet Bob cocked his head. It was hard to tell with one hundred percent, absolute certainty, but there was a fair chance he was contemplating which part of Parker Ames to cut off first.

  That was if he got the chance. Just at that moment, the sound of an engine roared out of the quiet Bastard Town night, and the headlights of a ’56 Chevy lit up the street.

  Behind the wheel of that Chevy was Terry. He turned his trucker’s cap around one hundred eighty degrees, as if signalling to the world that he wasn’t messing around. He wrapped his hand around the column shift and floored the V8. It wasn’t his car, but he knew the car well. It belonged to Curtis Henderson, and Terry had serviced the car for the past eight years since Curtis brought it from a guy in Portage. He knew every inch of that Chevy, what was under the hood and exactly how it was going to handle when he kicked it in the guts.

  He spun the wheels, and the Chevy blasted forward. He watched the needle go past twenty miles per hour. Then thirty miles per hour. Then forty miles per hour.

  Hatchet Bob grew bigger the closer Terry sped up to him. At the very last moment, Terry slammed on the brakes, spun the wheel, and sent that big Chevy into a one-eighty-degree turn, putting the ass end of the car no more than ten feet behind Hatchet Bob.

  “Oh, yeah!” Terry whooped when he nailed the move. “Oh, yeah!”

  Twenty-Three

  The trunk of the Chevy popped open, and up came Lee. Just like Parker, he held a chain in his hand.

  Almost as if on cue, both Parker and Lee jumped out of the trunks of their respective cars and swung the chains over their heads like a couple of 1950s television cowboys. Parker went first and looped the chain up and over Hatchet Bob’s head and waist. She pulled it tight around his middle.

  Confused, the slasher looked down at the end of the chain and followed it all the way to where it ended—chained to the chassis of the de Ville. Before Hatchet Bob could do anything about that, Lee looped his chain around the slasher. Again, Hatchet Bob followed that chain all the way to the end. It was chained to the Chevy.

  He was chained to both cars at the same time, and in the time given, there was absolutely zero he could do about it.

  Parker gave him a little wave. “See you later, alligator.”

  Behind the wheel of the de Ville, Courtney slammed her Reebok down on the accelerator, and the tires burned rubber. Then at almost the same time, Terry floored the pedal of the Chevy, and that beast of American hot-rod muscle burned rubber as well. Both the Chevy and the Eldorado gained traction at almost the very same time and shot off in opposite directions.

  The slack on both chains disappeared, and Hatchet Bob was torn in two.

  Two. Separate. Pieces.

  Legs and feet on one end and arms and head on the other.

  The two cars sped away for half a block before coming to a stop, then both Terry and Courtney slipped the cars into reverse and rolled on back.

  Courtney and Terry joined Parker and Lee, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, looking down at what was left of Hatchet Bob. Even after literally being ripped in two, Bob was dragging his torso along the road with one thing and one thing only in his sights—his hatchet.

  “I’d say one thing about Hatchet Bob,” Lee said. “He’s a persistent son of a bitch.”

  Parker gripped her machete. “Well, persistence isn’t everything.”

  She swung that machete high up above her head and slammed it down so hard and fast that the machete cut through Bob’s neck in one clean blow. There was even a spark on the ground when the blade smacked down. Parker stepped back and wiped the blood from her face.

  Hatchet Bob was no more.

  Courtney looked at the blood-splattered Parker. “Are you okay?”

  Parker Ames looked at the hand that gripped the machete. It had been shaking for the past twenty-four hours, but after beheading her first bastard in over a year, it was as steady as a rock. “As good as new.”

  Twenty-Four

  Most women Parker’s age washed the makeup from their faces at the end of the day.

  Parker wasn’t most women. At the end of her day, it was blood that she washed away. Heather had given her some old towels, which she’d brought into the bathroom to clean herself up with, and when it came to cleaning up blood, Parker was a pro. She knew from experience that she needed to make sure she washed the back of her neck, cleaned behind her ears, and scrubbed her nails. Those things didn’t bother her. It was her hair that was always the problem. No matter how hard she washed or what kind of product she used, at times, completely eradicating all the traces of blood from her blond hair was simply impossible. After a solid twenty minutes of working at it in the bathroom of Heather’s diner, the best she could do was dull the bright crimson to a shade of hot pink spattered with dark-pink dots.

  She tossed the ruined towels into the wastebasket. Considering everything else, Parker didn’t think Heather would mind sacrificing a few bloodstained towels. She pushed through the door and stepped out into the hall. Some Romantics song that Parker couldn’t remember the name of blasted out of Heather’s jukebox, and the remaining citizens of Bastard Town were all sitting up at the counter. They laughed and joked, retelling the tale of how they’d defeated the murderous and infamous Hatchet Bob and saved what was left of Bastard Town.

  Heather pushed plates of burgers and fries in front of everyone, and they took nips from a bottle of bourbon Darren had stashed away in the bottom of his bag for such an occasion. There would be time for grief and tears later on, but for the moment, they were just damn lucky to be alive, and they knew it.

  Parker leaned against the wall, watching the smiles and laughter, and she knew that all the killing, the blood, and the plain strangeness of it all was worth it. But no matter how many slashers she killed and how many lives she saved, she would never be one of the survivors. For them, as soon as the slasher was beheaded and sent back to hell, all the strangeness was over. They got to move on and rebuild their lives. They wouldn’t be the same lives. They would be different, but they would be lives nonetheless. But for Parker, there would always be another slasher in another town, and the strangeness was never over. She wasn’t a survivor. She was a hunter, and there was always something new to hunt.

  Parker pulled her leather jacket from the back of a chair, slipped it on, and took one last look at the lives she’d saved before heading for the back door. She was halfway across the parking lot when she heard the door she had just came through open and close behind her.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re running off to?” Lee asked.

  Parker turned, rubbed her hands together, and blew into them to keep warm. “Oh, you know… places to go, slashers to
slash.”

  “Come back inside. It’s cold.”

  Parker gave that option the briefest of consideration then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  After taking a moment to size her up, Lee said, “You’re in the habit of this, aren’t you?”

  “The habit of what?”

  “Not saying anything that even so much as resembles a goodbye.”

  Parker looked at the ground and shuffled her feet a little like a schoolgirl who’d been caught smoking in the bathroom. “I’m not really that good at them.”

  “Horseshit,” Lee said. “You’re running away.”

  “I’ve never ran from anything in my life,” Parker said.

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “Where’s your family?” Lee asked.

  “They’re dead.”

  “Where’s your friends?”

  The question stumped her. “You wouldn’t know them.”

  “I get the impression, girly, that you don’t run from the monsters that go bump in the night. You run from getting close to people.”

  Parker gave that some thought as she took a couple of steps toward Lee. “Do you know what truly scares me? What absolutely, positively scares the living hell out of me.”

  Lee gave it half a beat’s thought. “What?”

  “Milli Vanilli,” Parker said.

  Lee shook his head.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Parker continued. “I think it’s the hair.”

  “Laugh it up,” Lee said. “But you’re laughing alone.”

  Her smile slowly faded.

  “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” he said.

  She did and gave him a nod. “See you around, old man.”

  Three blocks later, Parker was standing in front of her Charger, which was exactly where she’d left it: outside the Murray household with a great big bloody machete buried in the hood. She had forgotten the car was toast, and when she saw it, Parker let out a long sigh. “Typical,” she muttered.