by Jack Quaid
Twenty-Five
A few cars sat scattered around in the parking lot of Heather’s Diner. But only one had all its windows fogged up. Inside, Courtney and Darren were getting it on.
Courtney had conned herself into thinking that she had a thing for bad boys, and it was as clear as sunrise that Darren had all the bad-boy trappings. His hair was long like Bon Jovi’s, his Levi’s were ripped, he drove a fast car, and he didn’t give a shit about authority, school, or any of that other stuff. If there was a hair band to come out of the Sunset Strip in the mid-to-late 1980s called the Bad Boys, every member of that band would most likely look exactly like Darren. But if she were being honest, and she really wasn’t, Courtney was in the back seat of that de Ville with Darren simply because the reality of how alone she was had kicked in after the rush of killing Hatchet Bob wore off. She needed to feel something other than the overwhelming sadness.
Darren was in the car for a much simpler reason: Courtney was hot.
What they didn’t know was that while they were getting all hot and heavy, a hulking figure emerged from the fog. At first, the darkness and fog obscured the figure. But as that figure took more and more lumbering steps, the details became clearer in the moonlight shining down on the street. The figure wore an apron and a hairnet and carried a frying pan and they were all covered in blood. There was no mistaking it was a slasher. She was called the Lunch Lady, and in typical slasher fashion, the Lunch Lady was not in a hurry. There was no need for her to be. The streets of Bastard Town were quiet, and there wasn’t another soul in sight. That was, of course, except for Courtney and Darren getting it on in the back seat of that de Ville, completely oblivious to the hell coming their way.
The Lunch Lady took her time as she approached the de Ville, and when she reached the big boat of a car, she slowly and carefully, as if really taking the time to savor the moment, circled the car as sounds of love and lust filtered out into the night. After a lap around the car, the Lunch Lady paused at the rear door, crouched down, and pushed her nose right up against the glass.
Twenty-Six
Courtney stopped. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Darren asked.
They were both as quiet as a pair of drunken church mice as they listened. Neither of them could hear a thing, and with the windows all fogged up with condensation, they couldn't see jack shit.
“It’s nothing—” Darren started to say.
But Courtney cut him off. “Shhh!”
He shushed.
Courtney listened. Everything was calm. Everything was quiet.
Just when Courtney was about to forget the entire thing, she slowly tilted her head to the condensation-covered window—the very same window that the Lunch Lady was on the other side of.
Somehow, she knew. Courtney just knew something was there. She put her hand up to the glass, and just as she was about to wipe away the condensation away—
“Wait,” Darren whispered. “Don’t do it.”
“Why?”
“What if there’s something on the other side?”
She whisper-yelled. “Like, I know! I have to do it.”
Darren gave that some thought and nodded.
Courtney drew a breath, moved her hand closer to the glass, and wiped the condensation away from the window.
Not a single thing.
The Lunch Lady was gone.
“See?” Darren said. “Told you it was nothing.”
But that wasn’t exactly the case.
Then they both heard a thump on the roof of the de Ville and looked straight up. The Lunch Lady was on the roof of the car, and in her hand was the blood-soaked frying pan. She swung it up and down, hard and fast, and it crashed through the roof like a wrecking ball.
Through the twisted metal and smashed glass, Courtney and Darren looked up at the scariest lunch lady any school had ever seen.
They both screamed.
Twenty-Seven
The screams were so loud that everybody inside Heather’s Diner still heard them over the noise of Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” blasting out of the jukebox.
Lee was the first out the door, and he skidded to a stop at the sight of the Lunch Lady smashing the absolute hell out of the de Ville. Any chance of Courtney and Darren walking away from that horrific attack was zero.
Heather threw her hand up to her mouth to muffle the sound of her scream when she saw the blood, bone, and hair crushed into the twisted metal, but she screamed so loud that it echoed around the empty streets of Bastard Town and came back at them.
The Lunch Lady stopped beating the de Ville into scrap metal and reset her attention on Lee, Heather, and Terry, who were all watching on in horror.
None of them even dared to move a muscle.
“Friend of yours?” a voice said.
Everybody turned. It was Parker Ames, and in her hand was her trusty machete.
“Does she look like a friend of mine?” Lee said.
Parker shifted her attention to the slasher she was about to attack but then paused. “Are you a lunch lady?”
The slasher didn’t answer.
“Now, I’ve beheaded cannibal slashers, leatherface slashers, and even teddy bear slashers, but never a lunch lady slasher!”
“I’ve got this one,” Lee said, pulling a hammer from his waistband.
The Lunch Lady jumped down off the de Ville and hit the concrete with a thud. Then she screamed a long and loud scream that came straight from the depths of hell.
The hairs on the back of Lee’s neck stood straight up. He turned to Parker. “Maybe we should take this one together.”
“I thought you’d say something like that,” she said.
Parker and Lee circled their newest slasher, and for a moment, it looked as if they had the upper hand.
All she has is a fry pan in her hand, Lee thought. How hard could it be?
Then the Lunch Lady slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out a butcher knife.
Parker tightened her grip on the machete, and Lee did the same with the hammer in his hand. Compared to the fight he was about to go into, the hammer all of a sudden looked completely inadequate.
“Bet you’re regretting bringing that hammer around about now,” Parker said.
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
The Lunch Lady took a swing at Lee, but he ducked, avoiding the knife altogether.
Parker seized on the moment and struck. The machete went straight through the Lunch Lady’s chest and clean out through her back. For brief moment, the Lunch Lady was taken aback by being skewered. It was as if even the possibility of something like that happening had never, not in a million years, crossed that slasher’s mind.
She looked down at the machete, looked at Parker, then looked back down at the machete again. Compared to the machete, the butcher knife was small, and the Lunch Lady didn’t appear to really like the idea of that. She dropped her puny little blade, and it clunked on the asphalt. Then the Lunch Lady wrapped her rotted hands around the handle of the machete hanging out of her chest and pulled it out inch by inch.
“This can’t be good,” Lee said.
And it wasn’t. All of a sudden, she had a whole new weapon in her hand—Parker’s weapon. And what did Parker have in her hand to battle evil with?
Nothing.
She looked at Lee. “I’ll be back in a minute.” And with those words, she turned on her heels and ran off into the darkness.
“What the hell?” Lee grumbled as he watched her leave. “Are you coming back?”
But she was gone, long gone.
“Goddamn it!” Slowly, he shifted his gaze back to the Lunch Lady. “Let’s be reasonable about this…”
But there was no reasoning with a slasher. They were simply just not the reasonable type. The Lunch Lady swung the frying pan, swung the machete, and swung the frying pan again.
Lee ducked and dodged every blow, and when he had an opening, Lee took it and swung that hammer up, sma
shing it into the Lunch Lady’s chin.
The blow would have taken the head off any normal person, but it barely registered with the slasher.
“Oh, hell,” Lee grumbled.
She swung the machete, and it cut through the air.
One swoosh!
Two swooshes!
Three swooshes!
And with each swoosh, Lee stumbled back. The blade missed his face by mere inches, but by the third attack, Lee was completely off balance. He tripped, falling flat on his back with the world’s worst lunch lady standing over him.
She swung that frying pan back above her head, and judging by the hunk of scrap metal she’d turned the Eldorado into, Lee didn’t have to use much of his imagination to figure out what it was going to do to him. He was all out of moves. He winced, ready to take the blow and say goodbye to that cruel, cruel world when—
“Hey, bitch!” Parker called out from behind the slasher.
The Lunch Lady paused mid-blow and looked back over her shoulder. Parker Ames was standing there with a chain saw, which she had named Aerosmith, in her hand.
“School’s out, motherfucker,” she said.
Lee breathed a sigh of relief.
Ready to start hacking away, Parker yanked the cord to crank the chain saw, but the son of a bitch wouldn’t start. It simply did not start!
“What the hell?” Lee yelled.
“Give me a minute,” Parker said as she yanked at the cord.
“We don’t have a minute!”
The Lunch Lady started to swing the frying pan down again. But just as she was about to shatter Lee’s skull over the asphalt, the chain saw roared to life. Parker rammed that little bad boy right through the Lunch Lady’s back, stopping her dead in her tracks.
Parker pulled on the trigger a couple of times, revving and roaring the hell out of it, then with all her might, she pulled that chain saw upward toward the stars, slowly and surely cutting The Lunch Lady in half—in half!
By the time Parker was finished, she was covered in blood, Lee was covered in blood, and everyone watching had a look of shock on their faces at the chain sawing they’d just witnessed.
Parker looked down at the two separate parts of the slasher by her feet. “That’s a first,” she said as she shut the chain saw down.
“Jesus,” Terry said. “That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen.” And then he vomited.
“I thought there was only one of them?” Heather said. “And I thought we got him?”
“Everybody chill,” Parker said. “Everything is just dandy. There’s nothing to worry about. A town with one slasher is rare. A town with two is rarer still, but, and I emphasize the word but, it’s not entirely unheard of. Now, a town with more than two slashers—that simply never happens.”
At that moment, everybody standing outside Heather’s Diner shifted their attention from Parker to what was behind Parker, and if it were possible, the horror on their faces had doubled.
Parker turned and saw what they saw. “Oh, hell, this is going to suck.”
Out of the fog rolling off the bay were not one or two or even four or five slashers but well over ten slashers emerging from the fog. Parker saw the standard masked madmen with machetes, but there were also clowns, freaks, puppets, and even a football mascot. Then there were the truly horrible demons with horns and knives for hands. One was walking down the street, holding his own head in his hands.
Parker turned back to the good folk of Bastard Town. “Forget everything I just said and run!”
Twenty-Eight
Parker was the last through the door, and she made sure she locked it the very instant it slammed. Then she looked through the square window in the middle and saw the horde of slashers coming their way.
There was only one thought running through Parker’s mind: What the fuck is going on?
By the time she made it back to the main floor of the diner, everybody was losing their shit and panicking. Terry was walking around ranting about how they were all going to die, while Lee gathered up as many weapons as he could and was tossing them on one of the tables in the middle of the diner.
“Christ,” Terry said, frantic. “We’re all going to die. One of those things almost killed us. Now there’s…” He didn’t know how many. “Shitloads!”
“We’ll work it out, Terry,” Heather said. “It’ll be okay.”
“Work what out? Who’s going to be hacked up first?”
“Shut the hell up,” Lee said.
“What do to mean ‘shut the hell up’?” Terry said. “Did you see them?”
Lee got in his face and pointed a finger. “Your bitching and moaning isn’t going to get us out of here.”
“Nothing’s going to get us out of here!”
“There is one thing,” Lee said.
Terry peeked through a gap in the wooden slats on the windows. “Yeah, and what’s that?”
Lee loaded shells into his shotgun and racked it. “Violence.”
Terry’s face dropped. “Oh, man, we are so dead.”
Parker climbed onto a table and yelled nice and loud so that they all could hear and she didn’t have to repeat herself. The room piped down, and everybody threw their attention Parker’s way.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “This looks bad. But it’s not all doom and gloom. This place is strong. We can hunker down here. If we can survive the night, we can survive this nightmare.”
Heather gently slipped her fingers between Terry’s and gave him a reassuring smile. “We can do this. It’s all going to be okay.
A fist—a big violent fist—punched through the wood right behind Terry’s head. The whole arm came through, wrapped around his neck, and tried to pull him through. He was too big, but that wasn’t stopping the slasher.
“Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” Terry yelled before he ran out of breath.
Parker was already one step ahead of him and cranked up the chain saw. Exhaust fumes and smoke filled the room as she ran over to Terry.
Parker lined the dangerous end of the chain saw up to the slasher’s arm and only inches from Terry’s head. “I wouldn’t move if I were you.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he managed to get out.
She lowered the chain saw, and the chain tore into the slasher’s arm. A couple of seconds after that, the arm separated from the slasher and hit the floor.
Terry coughed and spluttered, trying to get as much air back into his lungs as he could. A second or two later, he was able to speak, and he pointed down at the severed arm. “Do you still want to stick around here?”
Before she could even answer, the arm lying on the floor used its fingers as feet and ran away to somewhere in the kitchen. Even for Parker, that was some pretty weird shit.
“Folks,” Parker said, drawing everyone’s attention back to her. “Change of plan.”
“Yeah, and what’s that?” Terry asked. “Dyin’?”
Parker’s eyes hardened. “Evacuate Bastard Town.”
Twenty-Nine
Even in the darkness and staring through a small gap between two of the boards up against the window of Heather’s diner, Terry could tell that all the cars in the parking lot were trashed. The slashers had torn out engines and ripped tires, but Terry did have a solution. Three blocks away was a yellow school bus that, according to Terry, had been on the road a week ago. Maybe the slashers hadn’t made it that far into town yet. It was a big maybe, but it was all they had. Three blocks were three blocks, and that would have been hard enough with one slasher on the loose hacking people up. Throw in eight or nine more, and the odds of surviving those three blocks dramatically decreased. They had one chain saw, two machetes, one shotgun, and an assortment of knifes and blades from Heather’s kitchen. It wasn’t the best arsenal, but it certainly wasn’t the worst.
The door to Heather’s Diner opened up a tiny crack, and Parker peered out. She looked left and right, but all she could see were the empty streets of Bastard Town.
Lee was right behind her. “Where’d all these bastards go?”
Parker racked her brain and couldn’t think of any reason why they weren’t all running and screaming from the horrors with the knifes. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
And that’s just what they did.
Parker waved Heather and Terry through the door, and they all made their way down the street with their eyes peeled and feet ready to run. Parker had been in some pretty tough spots before, and there wasn’t one of them where she didn’t feel fear. It may have been there in the pit of her stomach, in the shake of her hand, or even when it turned her legs to jelly. But it had never been a problem for Parker Ames. Not once. She always admitted to herself when she was going toe to toe with some slasher twice her size, who had a weapon twice the size of hers, that yes, she was scared. But she never let the fear stop her from pushing forward, from climbing up when she’d been knocked down, or from stepping into a dark room with no idea what was hiding in the shadows. The fear was part of the job, she knew. Before her, her mentor, Delores McCormick, had known it, and if Parker was honest, the fear kept her sharp. But out on the street that night, Parker wasn’t afraid. She was terrified… and that feeling was new to her.
“Is this how you thought your visit to Bastard Town was going to go?” Lee asked.
“Pretty much.”
Somewhere behind them, the groan of a slasher rumbled out of the darkness.
“Can’t say I’ll be coming back,” she said.
Two blocks later, they came across the yellow school bus. It was the same exact model that had taken generations of American children to schools all across the country. Yellow and bulky, it wasn’t terribly fast, but by all accounts, it was reliable. Terry figured it should start pretty easily despite the cold. Parker still couldn’t figure out if it was the perfect escape vehicle for their current situation or the worst. Either way, they were stuck with it, and she really didn’t have much choice in the matter.