Night of the Slasher

by Flint Maxwell

  “I’m afraid you’re all under arrest,” the sheriff said.

  26

  He’s Back

  Once in the squad car, I started getting desperate.

  The younger guy took the Fright Squad in his backseat, while the older woman took Jason and Freddy.

  Freddy was promptly searched. They found a baggie full of old weed that he happily claimed he’d lost and ‘thanks for finding it, man!’, as well as a pipe to smoke it in and a fat stack of rolling papers. He was thoroughly disappointed when he realized he wouldn’t be getting any of that stuff back, and his argument about marijuana being legal in a few other states only brought forth laughter from the sheriff and his officers.

  We were all handcuffed too tightly, our arms behind our backs, which made it damn near impossible to sit comfortably. The seats were made out of stone, I swear, so it’s not like it would’ve been easy, getting comfortable in the first place.

  But I digress.

  The younger officer’s name was Redman. I didn’t catch his first name, nor did I really care.

  “You gotta listen to me,” I said. “You’ve seen Friday the 13th, and Halloween, all those types of movies, haven’t you?”

  Redman drove ponderously slow, as if he wanted us to get the full, scenic view of Moonfall. But this was not a town that possessed anything remotely close to a scenic view. It was all shabby buildings, dusty storefronts, houses on cinderblocks with peeling siding, and trees—a lot of trees—all towered over by the many mountains that the coal miners had dug out years ago. I felt like we were literally in the middle of nowhere.

  “Forget it,” Maddie said. She was trying to calm me down. She wasn’t doing a good job of it.

  Zack, on the other hand, was calmer than I’d ever thought he could be. The only pressing matter on his mind was what would happen to his precious PT Cruiser.

  Redman tapped the steering wheel along with a beat only he could hear. He ignored me.

  I would’ve ignored me, too.

  Still, I went on. “That Jason Voorhees fella, the hockey-mask-wearing killer? That’s what Cageface is like. He’s coming. You gotta listen to me, man.”

  This got a reaction.

  Redman laughed and shook his head. “Bullshit,” he said. “You dumb kids come up here every summer and try to prove an urban legend that’s nothing but a load of crap real. I’ve been on the force for fifteen years, and every time you guys come up here, I gotta get workin’ a little harder. Well, that just pisses me off. I was sittin’ at my desk, watchin’ the Pirates game from earlier, and now I’m here cartin’ you punks around.” He paused, shook his head again. “You know what, though? You’re the first punks with a bag full of weapons.” I caught the edge of a smile from the side of his face. “Usually we can’t hold punks like you for very long, but with those weapons, you five are in for a hell of a time here, my friends.”

  My stomach sank. He was right. We’d probably be here for the entire weekend, and go to the local court on Monday. Forty-eight hours gave Cageface a lot of time to catch up to us.

  The sheriff drove in front of our squad car. The older woman with Jason and Freddy were behind. As if being handcuffed wasn’t bad enough, we had been split up. It was our job to protect Jason (and Freddy, to an extent) and being split up made that a lot more difficult.

  Zack was shaking his head. I don’t know if it was at me or the cop’s obvious obliviousness. Probably a little of both.

  Maddie said, “If you want to live, you’ll pull off and let us go.”

  Redman laughed again. “How stupid do you think I am? You city folk are the worst, I tell ya.”

  That was when the sheriff’s brake lights flashed in front of us.

  We were in the middle of the road, not at a stoplight or a crossing. A bout of nausea wormed its way into my stomach. Fear induced, of course. Had I not been handcuffed, had I had my weapons and Jason and Freddy in plain sight, I wouldn’t have felt so worried.

  Alas, I didn’t.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Redman asked himself.

  I knew what he was doing. I couldn’t see why he’d stopped, but I knew. Deep down, I knew. Maddie and Zack seemed to know, too.

  Zack started looking over the door for an escape, an exercise in futility. There was no way to get out of the back of a cop car from the inside, not even from one of these older models.

  Maddie tensed up, and cords stood out on her neck. Somehow, she spoke slowly and calmly. “Sir, listen to me. If you want to live long enough to see the end of that Pirates game, you’ll put this car in reverse and drive in the opposite direction as fast as this bucket of bolts will go.”

  Redman ignored her. He didn’t go the opposite direction; he went forward, and pulled up next to the sheriff, stopping when their vehicles’ noses were lined up.

  “What the hell?” Redman said to himself. He looked to his right at the sheriff, but the man didn’t look back. He had a confused grimace on his face.

  “Go!” Zack shouted. “Run him down! Run him down now!”

  “Shut up!” the officer shouted back. “Don’t give me a reason to use my club.” Then under his breath, he repeated, “What the hell?”

  In the road about fifty feet away, standing hunched over, was a large figure.

  My body felt like it had been encased in ice.

  How? How did he get here so fast without a car? On foot? It didn’t make sense at all. Yet here he was. Here was Cageface.

  He turned slowly. If this was a slasher movie, a dramatic crescendo of music would’ve been playing right then.

  In both hands, Cageface held metal spikes. They were painted black, though a little rusty at the top. They looked like fence poles that he’d ripped straight out of an old, gothic graveyard.

  Redman was rendered speechless.

  In the high beams of the Fords, Cageface somehow looked worse. I saw for the first time that he had some hair on his head, wispy and gray—an ancient man’s hair. His face had steadily swelled since we’d dumped the bunk on him. And there was something else, too… Beneath the bear trap clamped over his features, Cageface looked angered.

  “Put the car in reverse,” I ordered slowly. “Put it in reverse, and stomp on the gas pedal.”

  “Enough,” Redman hissed.

  The sheriff’s voice crackled over a loudspeaker. “Put your weapons down, pal, and get out of the road. You’re under arrest for obstruction of justice.”

  I had a feeling the sheriff didn’t know the first thing about actual laws.

  A banging sounded to my left, causing Maddie and I to nearly jump out of our skins.

  “Zack, stop!” Maddie said when we discovered the source. Zack was hitting his head against the window, trying to crack the glass. “You need your brain cells!” she argued with total seriousness.

  “Get out of the road,” the sheriff continued.

  Cageface’s dead eyes flickered to his left, at the sheriff’s Ford. Then, in a blur of movement, he launched one of the spikes into the air. It whistled through the night like a bullet.

  I heard the sound of shattering glass from my place inside Redman’s car, and though I wish I hadn’t seen what became of the sheriff, I did: the spike went straight through the glass and straight through his skull, pinning it against the headrest.

  His death rattle was broadcast over the loudspeaker. It was a terrible sound.

  27

  Another Ruined Shirt

  “Sheriff?” Redman cried. “Sheriff!?”

  Maddie, Zack, and I were all looking at the aftermath of Cageface’s javelin throw. I didn’t know about them, but I could hardly hear Redman’s cries.

  The sheriff’s head was cocked up, his mouth open, forming a perfect O, his eyes wide. The spike had gone through the middle of his forehead. An expert marksman probably couldn’t have done that with a rifle, yet Cageface had done it with an old fence post and his throwing arm.

  “Holy— Sheriff!?” Redman cried again. He sounded very far away.r />
  I know it’s cliché, and I know I’ve used it before to describe a really messed up scene, but I truly mean it when I say this all played out in slow motion.

  Each one of my movements felt like a dream. Like a bad nightmare.

  “Go, you idiot!” Zack yelled to Redman. “GO!”

  But it was too late. Cageface turned his dead eyes in our direction. That twisted grimace beneath the bear trap shone brightly in the moonlight. He raised the spike, holding it next to what was left of his ear, and launched it at a throwing speed greater than a professional pitcher’s.

  At the last second, before the spike came through the windshield, Redman slammed on the gas pedal and lurched forward.

  I wish I could say that it saved his life. But it didn’t.

  With a sound like a buzzing bee, the spike drove through the windshield and stabbed Redman through the top of the head, as opposed to the middle of his forehead. The spike carried so much momentum, however, that it didn’t stop at his skull. It carried on to bash into the glass partition separating us from the front seats.

  I’m guessing that, these days, the glass partitions between the perps and the cops in squad cars are probably made out of some sort of bulletproof glass, or fiber optic polymer mumbo-jumbo (no, I don’t know what that means), but the car we were in was old. This meant that the glass partition was actual glass.

  The impact of the fence spike shattered it, which was both fortunate and unfortunate.

  Fortunate, because it was the way we’d have to escape, and unfortunate, because Officer Redman’s bloody brains then splashed through the partition and onto the backseat.

  “Aw! C’mon!” Zack yelled. He’d gotten the worst of it. “I really liked this shirt!”

  Maddie and I only got a minor splash, and since I was already sporting blood on my clothes from Tiffany, not to mention all that dirt from crawling through the underbelly of Camp Moonfall, it wasn’t that big of a deal to me. Maddie didn’t care about the splash, though.

  Something else happened, too. Something I wasn’t prepared for, but that made total sense.

  Redman died almost instantly, obviously, and upon his death, his body tensed up, those muscles hanging on for dear life. Well, the foot on the gas pedal must’ve gone rigid, because the engine howled to life, and the car lurched forward at what felt like fifty miles per hour.

  We didn’t have seatbelts on, and our hands were cuffed behind our backs.

  Unlike the deaths of the sheriff and Officer Redman, this part happened very fast.

  I looked over at Maddie—I can’t imagine how my face appeared at that moment—and we both cringed and braced for impact.

  Impact was what we got, but unfortunately, the car didn’t hit Cageface. First it clipped the sheriff’s car and kept going right by Cageface.

  If I was going to die, I at least wanted to take that bastard down with me.

  The car bumped over the curb, and I saw the building we were about to hit.

  28

  Escape from the Crashed Cop Car

  The sound the car made when it hit reminded me of two garbage trucks having sex. It was almost as terrible a sound as the sheriff’s death rattle over the loudspeaker. Not quite, though.

  Besides the ringing in my ears, I could hear other sounds. That was a good thing, I supposed. That meant I was still alive.

  The brick wall we hit had won.

  Somehow, I lifted my head, even though it weighed about a million pounds, and every muscle in my neck was burning with pain.

  The old car’s airbags had come out on both the driver’s and front passenger’s side. There was no one in the front passenger’s seat—unless you counted the pieces of Redman’s brains and skull, which I did not—and Redman certainly didn’t need an airbag, on account of him being already dead in the driver’s seat.

  White smoke and steam hissed out from the front of the crumbled hood. Somewhere from that area came a loud ticking, a sound that could drive a person crazy if they had to hear it for the rest of their lives.

  I opened my mouth to talk, but that was hard. I tasted blood, felt it running from the corners of my lips. Maybe that was saliva. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see it.

  “You okay?” I managed. “Zack? Maddie?”

  I could already feel my tongue swelling up. Even though part of my mind was yelling at me to get the hell out of the car, I had to make sure my friends were okay.

  “Ow…” Zack mumbled.

  Maddie started coughing. She lifted her head up, which made her look like some weird animal, because she was all scrunched against the lower part of the partition.

  “Been better,” she admitted.

  “Abe…” Zack said. “Maddie…”

  “Huh?” we said.

  “Remind me something, okay?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Remind me to never go camping. Ever again,” Zack said. Then he added, “I think my balls are broken.”

  Maddie replied with, “Even now? Even now, you’re gonna be disgusting?”

  He smiled sheepishly, but the smile didn’t stay around for long.

  A barrage of gunshots rang out through the night air, drowning away the ticking and hissing from the engine, and even the constant beeeeeeep in my ears.

  I managed to turn around. What I saw didn’t do well to calm me down.

  Cageface was stalking over to the squad car driven by the older woman. She proved to be braver than Redman, that was for sure, though I didn’t think what she did was the best choice.

  The siren lights painted the street in its blood-red, and the siren whooped. If there was anyone sleeping around here, they wouldn’t be much longer—what, with the crash, the shots, and the siren.

  She stood, feet firmly planted on the pavement, holding her gun the way I’d seen a million cops in a million movies hold their weapons: both hands on the pistol, one around the handle, the other underneath the butt of the gun for support. Her eyes were squinted, and the way the shadows partly covered them made her look almost asleep.

  I had to look away. I was no good to her or Jason and Freddy in the back of a crashed cop car. I had to find a way out. If not for them, then for us.

  “Zack, can you still do that thing?” I asked.

  “That’s helpful. I can do a lot of things,” he replied.

  “The thing with the handcuffs.”

  He looked at Maddie accusingly and blushed. “How do you know about that…”

  “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s definitely not what he’s talking about.”

  I shook my head. Didn’t want to know. “The thing where you—”

  “Ohhh!” Zack said. “I don’t know. I’m not as limber as I used to be. You know, age is catching up to me.”

  “Dude, you’re in your early twenties. It’s not age. It’s all the fast food and video games,” Maddie said.

  “You love me with my shirt off, Maddie. Don’t lie…”

  She smiled. It looked weird with the bit of blood running down her face. “Yeah, I do.”

  Zack tried flexing, but it wasn’t an easy task with his hands behind his back.

  The last of the gunshots stopped, and I looked back.

  Cageface was still advancing, and he still wasn’t bleeding. The cop reloaded and pulled back the slide on the top of the gun, then began blasting away again. Each bullet that hit Cageface slowed him momentarily, but he was like inclement weather: he couldn’t be stopped.

  “Hold on,” Zack said. Like a fish out of water, he flopped across our laps and started shimmying and grunting. He brought his legs back, knees to his chest, and kept wiggling. “Abe, this is the first and last free lap dance you’ll ever get from me.”

  “Shut up and get us out of here,” I said.

  Sure enough, Zack could still do the trick. He looped the handcuffs under his legs—with a lot of grunting—and got them in front of his body. He sat up and grinned.

  “Maybe I still got it,” he said.

  “Yeah,
yeah, great,” I said.

  The cop was reloading again. Cageface was maybe fifteen feet from her, and coming like a train off the track. Unstoppable. I hoped she had the good sense to get back in her car and drive the hell out of here, but something told me she wouldn’t do that.

  My guess was that, in this backwards country town, she was the only female on the Moonfall PD, and they’d only hired her because it looked good. Now the sheriff and another male officer were dead, murdered by this insane walking corpse, and she was the last (wo)man standing. It was her time to prove that she belonged on the force, maybe even as sheriff.

  Zack went at the broken partition with his elbows. The glass, already weakened by the spike driven through it, shattered easily enough, however Zack made a point of growling like some bodybuilder on his last few heavy reps.

  When he stuck his cuffed hands through the partition, he squealed. “Ugh, there’s blood everywhere. Pee, too. Redman pissed himself, poor guy.”

  “Grab the cuff keys and let us the hell out, Zack!” Maddie shouted.

  The policewoman backed up. She was crouching behind the tail of her car, letting off more shots. She would run out of ammunition soon enough.

  Zack slid through the partition, and his shirt caught on stray glass and ripped. He landed in the front as gracefully as possible, which was not very, and fished around, complaining about the blood and the pee. He finally got the keys, then exited from the passenger’s door, and let us out on Maddie’s side. I was surprised at how fast he was moving.

  The shots had finally stopped. I heard the cop’s voice.

  “Stop right there! Stop right now. As an officer of the law, I order you to stop!”

  I thought this was a little backward. Usually you shouted that stuff before you plugged the criminal. Then again, these were unique circumstances.

  With my hands free, I dove back into the cop car and grabbed the shotgun from the middle console. It probably should’ve been locked up, but it wasn’t. At least we had that going for us.