by Jack Quaid
“Everyone hop on, and let’s get the hell out of here,” Parker said.
Everyone filed onto the bus in a quick and orderly manner, and without question, Terry slid in behind the wheel.
“Can you drive this thing?” Parker asked.
Terry took his Terry’s Garage & Tow hat and turned it around. “Sweetie, I can fix, drive, or destroy anything.”
“Let’s try to just stick to the drive part for now.”
He turned the key on the ignition, and that big yellow machine came alive on the first try. The sound of that V8 engine blasted all through the empty streets and was heard all across Bastard Town.
Terry peered through the window, and in the shadows by the old bowling alley that had closed back in ’83, he saw the silhouettes of slashers emerging from the darkness. “We’ve got company,” he called out. “And it looks angry.”
Parker leaned over Terry’s shoulder. “How many?”
“Twenty?” Terry said. “Thirty?”
“Let’s get out of here before this thing turns ugly.”
“I’d say things got pretty ugly around here a long time ago,” Terry said as he slipped the bus into gear and pulled away from the sidewalk.
Slowly but surely, the bus accelerated as he changed gears, and by all accounts, they were home free.
“We made it,” Terry said to himself as if he couldn’t even believe his own words. With a big grin on his face, he looked over his shoulder at the others. “We made it!”
The ragtag bunch of survivors all cheered and clapped, hooted and hollered. Even Parker let herself think that maybe, just maybe, they’d made it through this hell of a night, but when she put her eyes back on the road, right in front of the bus, smack bang in the middle of the road, was a slasher in a filthy black Easter Bunny costume!
“Terry!” Parker yelled. “Look out!”
It was too late to swerve the bus onto another path and too late for the Easter Bunny to dive out of the way, so Terry plowed the bus straight through him. There was a massive thump as the Evil Easter Bunny smashed into the grill and two more thumps as the wheels on the front end bounced over the body then the wheels at the rear bounced over him again.
“What the fuck was that?” Terry cried. The weirdness was getting to him.
“It was the Easter Bunny,” Parker said.
“Who does that to the Easter Bunny? I mean, it’s…” He ran out of words.
“I find it’s best not to think too much about it,” Parker said. “We’ll be out of here soon, and with any luck, that’ll be one of the last one of those things you’ll see.”
Nope. Not true. Not even close.
Behind the final seat of the bus, Spooky—yep, that was his name—slid off the seat, and his big feet landed on the floor. Spooky wasn’t an inch over two feet tall, and he looked like something straight out of Labyrinth. A strange little creature with wrinkles all over his body, a long nose, and big ears. With a cheeky grin on his face, Spooky walked down the aisle.
Everyone had their eyes firmly on the road ahead, and Spooky paused next to a bag of weapons by Heather’s feet. With one of the three fingers on his right hand, he opened the bag a little and looked inside. Spooky liked what he saw. He slipped his hand inside and pulled out a meat tenderizer.
Heather felt something move down by her feet and looked down. In a week of seeing weird shit, seeing Spooky standing there with a meat tenderizer still took the cake.
She screamed, and when Parker turned and saw what the hell was going on, she didn’t know what to make of the little creature.
Lee’s face scrunched up. “Goddamn!”
Everyone took three steps back from Spooky. It took a moment for the shock to die down, and once it did, all eyes were on Spooky, who wasn’t terribly perturbed about the reaction he had caused.
“Spooky is pleased to meet everybody,” the strange little creature said. “He’s looking very forward to killing you all today.”
Parker looked at Lee, who looked at Parker, and that threat lingered in the air for a moment as they all let it sink in.
Then Parker burst out laughing. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take this seriously.”
“Spooky doesn’t find this funny. This makes Spooky very upset.” His voice shifted into something darker. “And you don’t want to make Spooky very upset.”
“Look,” Parker said, “I know that you’re trying to be all scary and what have you, but you’re just so darn cute.”
Spooky didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. He took off running down the aisle and ran as ran as fast as he could with Parker Ames in his sights and a meat tenderizer half his size in his hand. He pulled that mallet back to swing, and he could actually have done some real damage, but just as he was about to deliver his first blow, Parker swooped down, grabbed him by the throat, and picked him up.
Wriggling, Spooky kicked and punched, but there was nothing he could do. It wasn’t his fault; his arms and legs were just too short to deliver any sort of damage to Parker. It didn’t take him long to realize that, and once he did, he simply just gave up and hung from her hand.
“Somebody has been a bad, bad Spooky,” Parker told him as she made her way toward the back of the bus.
“Spooky not happy.”
Parker swung open the emergency door at the rear of the bus. “I couldn’t imagine Spooky would be.”
Without further fanfare, she tossed Spooky out the door. He flew through the air, slammed down hard on the concrete, and rolled half a dozen times before coming to a stop and looking up.
“Bitch,” Spooky said.
Back on the bus, Parker slapped her hands clean. “See? It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
But everybody else froze as Evil Easter Bunny popped up right behind Parker. He hadn’t just been hit and rolled to the side of the road. He’d clung to the underside of the bus and crawled up the back.
Lee grabbed the shotgun, rammed the butt into his shoulder, and took aim. “Duck!” he yelled.
Parker didn’t know what the hell was going on, but seeing the shotgun and the look on Lee’s face, she figured the time for asking questions was later. So Parker ducked.
Lee wrapped his finger around the trigger and unleashed both barrels into Evil Easter Bunny, and although two shells wouldn’t kill a slasher, the force of the shots were enough to blast him off the bus.
Evil Easter Bunny hit the asphalt, rolled a couple of times, somehow managed to get back on his feet, and took off running after the bus again as if he hadn’t just taken two rounds to the chest.
Parker watched the slasher lose more and more ground then disappear into the night. She turned back to Lee. “Not bad for an old man.”
And that was when their plan went all to hell.
Thirty
When they reached the tunnel, Terry pulled the bus to the side of the road and opened the door. Parker was the first one out, and when she saw the entrance of their only means of escape, her heart sank. The tunnel had completely caved in. From top to bottom, it was filled with rocks, and by the look of it, the rubble probably went on for twenty or thirty feet.
“This is going to make escaping difficult,” Parker said.
Lee scratched at the stubble on his chin. “It certainly doesn’t look promising.”
Terry was the last one out of the bus, and he didn’t take the news of the caved-in tunnel particularly well. “What the fuck, man? What the actual fuck! Now what do we do? We’re all going to get fucking chopped! And in case anyone didn’t know, chopped isn’t good.”
Parker looked to Heather. “This is it? This is the only way in and out of Whittier?”
She was still processing the sight of the cave-in and looked at Parker like a deer in headlights. Eventually, Heather managed to give her a slight nod. “It’s the only way.” “There’s not another road? A path? Anything?” Parker asked, grasping at straws.
Heather shook her head. “That tunnel, it’s the only way.”
“Th
at’s a bit of a design flaw in the town, wouldn’t you say?” Parker said.
“Wait. It’s not the only way,” Terry said, and everybody turned to look at him. “We’re a fishing town. What about all them fucking boats?”
A grin grew across Parker’s face as she pointed a finger Terry’s way. “You’re an idea man.”
Thirty-One
Terry was reliable—that was for damn sure. But he wasn’t an idea man. If someone needed help putting up a new fence, fixing a truck, or moving, Terry was the man. He wasn’t the guy who won trivia night at the bar, though. He’d never had a good idea in his life, except for that one idea of climbing on board one of those boats and sailing the hell out of Bastard Town.
Terry was the first off the bus when they pulled up to the dock, and he was first to run down the pier. Because of those two things, he was the first to see that every single one of the fishing boats was floating on its side or completely underwater with nothing but its mast poking out.
“What the shit, man?” Terry said, terror and confusion both hitting his face at the same time. “What the shit? Who kills boats?”
Terry took off and ran all the way down the dock just in case one of them had somehow remained intact. It was pointless, and everybody who watched his desperate run knew it.
Parker lit a cigarette. “I suppose you don’t have an airport here in town?”
“No,” Heather said. “There’s no airport.”
“That’s shame,” Parker replied. “An airplane would have come in real handy around about now.”
“Hey,” Terry called out. “Hey, I got something.” He was over by the end of the pier and bouncing from one foot to the other.
By the time the others made it across the wooden planks and over to him, Terry was almost exploding with excitement.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Lee grumbled.
Terry pointed down into the water at a small two-man rowboat. There was nothing special about it. It was the kind of thing used by a couple of guys to fish a couple of hundred yards from shore. It was seaworthy, and it came complete with a couple of oars. But there was one thing wrong with it: the boat was tiny.
“Useless,” Lee said. “There’s no way on God’s green earth that four people are going to fit in that little boat. It’ll sink before the first oar hits the water. There’s no two ways about it.”
“I’ll go,” Terry said.
“You’ll go where?” Parker asked.
“I can row over to Sward, grab Sheriff Griffin, and be back here with the cavalry by tomorrow night. It’s win-win.”
“Well,” Lee said, dragging out the word for a couple of extra syllables. “It’s win-win for you. It might be death-death for us.”
Terry put on an unconvincing confused face. “What do you mean?”
“We don’t split up,” Parker said. “Trust me, it never works out well. Everybody always ends up dead.”
“It doesn’t even work out well in the movies,” Heather added.
“We stay together, and we stay alive,” Parker said.
“And do what?” Terry’s voice was starting to crack. “Go back to Heather’s Diner? Great plan, man! That place is real fuckin’ safe.”
“It’s safe enough,” Parker said.
“Nah,” Terry said. He was pacing, taking a couple of steps in one direction then taking a couple in the other. “No way, man. I’m not doing it. Nope. No way. I’m not going back there. I’m not dying here.”
Parker took a step forward, and her voice got really low. “The way I see it, Terry, you don’t have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter. Now get back on the goddamned bus.”
Lee’s eyebrow rose and pulled up half his face; he was impressed.
Terry paced, going back and forth and mumbling stuff to himself that nobody could really hear or understand.
“Nope,” Terry said. “Nope.” He yanked out a revolver that was stuffed down the front of his pants.
Almost everyone took a step back. Everybody except Parker.
Terry’s words hissed through his teeth. “Everybody dies here. Not me. I won’t. Not me.”
Lee racked his shotgun, making the unmistakeable chick-chick, and took aim dead center at Terry.
“Lee,” Parker said, “what are you doing?”
“I’m thinking about putting two shells into old Terry here.”
Terry swung the revolver and aimed it right at Lee.
The mean old bastard didn’t even budge. It was clearly not the first time a weapon had been pointed his way. “Parker, you wouldn’t mind too much if I put a bullet in the son of a bitch?”
Parker gave it some thought. “Let him go.”
Lee spoke through gritted teeth. “Let him go?”
She gently put her hand on the end of Lee’s shotgun and lowered it to aim at the ground. “If we kill each other, we’re just as bad as them.” She shifted her attention to Terry. “Get the hell out of here.”
Terry didn’t have to be told twice. He launched himself off the dock and into the water. It was freezing, but Terry didn’t seem to care, and a couple of strokes later, he pulled himself up and into the small boat.
He snatched up the oars and rowed through the wreckage of a fishing vessel and made it out into smooth waters.
“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” Heather asked.
Just at the words passed her lips, a bald and badly burned slasher rose up out of the water like a shark, grabbed hold of Terry, and dragged him underwater. A couple of seconds later, the water settled back down as if nothing at all had happened.
“Nope,” Parker said. “Probably won’t be seeing him again.”
Thirty-Two
Nobody was happy about being back at Heather’s Diner. They’d discussed barricading the police station, but from what Parker remembered, there were at least seven or eight corpses lying around in various states of damage, so that option was off the table. Then Lee pitched the idea of waiting out the night in the old mental asylum, but Parker was one hundred percent against that idea. She figured that if there was any place that was ever going to attract a slasher, it was an abandoned mental asylum. Nope. They had to go back to where they’d started. Heather’s Diner was already boarded up, although the strength of those barricades was questionable, and it had enough supplies to last them as long as they needed.
Parker had gathered all the weapons she could and planted them around the diner in the event that all hell broke loose and she found herself with her back to the wall, and if that was the situation she was in, she wanted to just reach out and grab a hold of something pointy, shooty, or blunt.
Heather made a plate of pastrami sandwiches, put them on the table of Booth Seven, and slid in alongside Lee. She wasn’t hungry, but Parker knew she had to eat, so she took a bite out of one of the triangles and washed it down with a mouthful of cold coffee.
“You’d think that after the bus, the tunnel, and the pier,” Parker said, “that we’d be further along than back where we started.”
It was the first time since the whole nightmare had started that Parker had actually had a chance to stop and think about what the hell was actually happening.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I’ve been to dozens of towns that had one slasher. I’ve even been to a couple of towns that had two slashers. But I’ve never even heard of something even remotely as fucked up as this.”
“Bastard Town has always been a bit…” Heather searched for the right word. “Bastardly.”
She lit a cigarette and slid into the booth.
“Goddamned son of a bitch,” Lee mumbled to himself as he lit a cigar. He was off in his own world. “Goddamned son of a bitch.”
“What are you goddamn son of a bitching about?” Parker asked.
He blew smoke out through his nostrils. “I know how this whole mess started.”
Parker and Heather threw each other a look then shifted that look to Lee.
“Would you mind elaborating
on that?” Parker asked. “Because it sounds like it could be important.”
“Goddamn son of a bitch,” he grumbled again to himself. “To tell this story, we need to go back.”
“How far back?”
“To 1944.”
“You think we could fast forward some of that?” Parker asked.
Lee’s stony face didn’t even budge. “No. We need to go back.”
Thirty-Three
The year was 1944, and back then, Lee wasn’t the grizzled-up old bastard battling the undead in what was left of Whittier, Alaska. Nope, back in 1944, Lee was just shy of twenty-five years of age, and he had been battling the Nazis for the past forty-eight months. In that time, he’d seen action in Poland, Berlin, Paris, and Navarone. He had over thirty Nazi scalps under his belt and was generally the guy OSS sent in when all else failed.
It was a little after eight o’clock in the morning in wartime London when Major Gerald Lee made his way past the jeeps, sandbags, and rubble from the blitz the night before. He may have been little less grouchy and a little slimmer around the middle, but he was still the same son of a bitch at that age as he would be forty years later in Bastard Town.
He set fire to his third cigarette for the day and stepped into an office building that looked like every other office building on the street. There was nothing unique about the outside of the building. No sign. No plaque. Nothing that said what happened on the inside.
Two soldiers stood in the lobby with Thompsons and looks on their faces that told anybody who even so much as glanced sideways at them, that if there were guys not to be fucked with and guys who could be fucked with, then these guys were the former. They let Lee pass on through without so much as a second glance. They knew his face; Lee had been there many times before.