The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

by Stephen Hand

  “We all could have, Morgan,” agreed the mechanic.

  Andy walked over to the two of them. He was looking up at the sun, the sky. “Did that really just happen?” he asked.

  Kemper looked down at Erin. She was getting it together again just fine. Which somehow made Kemper realize that he himself was actually now in a state of mild shock.

  “I’ve never seen anyone die before,” he murmured.

  “Most people never do,” replied Morgan equally bewildered.

  “Is that supposed to make us feel better?”

  Morgan had no answer for his friend. Instead, he had a question; one that had been on his mind ever since they first met that crazy girl out on the road. He stared Kemper in the face and said almost accusingly, “Why did we have to stop?”

  The driver had no answer. Why did they have to stop? Why hadn’t he just cut out the middle man and driven over the whacko when he first had the chance? She was dead anyhow—she killed herself—so what goddamn difference would it have made? The only difference Kemper could see was that they now had a dead body in the back of the damned van. She was lying there with a fucking hole in her head.

  “She needed help!” asserted Erin, filling in the blank left by Kemper’s non-reply.

  But Morgan was almost reading Kemper’s mind. “A lot of good we did her!”

  Erin shook her head. There was no point arguing with Morgan, especially when he was this panicked. The guy was terrified, but then maybe that was partly to do with him being more than a little stoned.

  Erin found that she was now okay to get up. Christ, her puke smelled bad. It lay on the ground in thick puddles that were already curdling in the high noon of the scorching sun. She looked around at everyone. Andy and Kemper seemed okay, but not Pepper.

  The girl’s screaming had been the loudest thing they’d heard after the gunshot itself. They’d picked Pepper up just across the Mexican border. She was a hitchhiker, looking for a good time and now she’d found herself in this. She was standing by the taillights, crying for all she was worth.

  Through the shimmering heat-haze, Erin could see that the girl was hyperventilating. Erin didn’t know Pepper at all but she sensed that the brown-haired girl was one of the good guys. She walked over to her, hoping to calm her down—not that Erin had had much success reassuring the teenager with the revolver.

  “I can’t . . .” stammered Pepper. “I can’t . . . believe she did that . . . Why us? Why did she have to pick us?”

  Erin was a little disappointed that Pepper seemed to be taking the Morgan line on this, but she supposed it was understandable. Sure, their main thought should have been for the dead girl, but then Erin wasn’t exactly thrilled by the deep shit they were in now either.

  The two girls hugged and Pepper broke down in tears.

  One death on the road. Hundreds, thousands of deaths in the slaughterhouse.

  Kemper climbed out of the van and chucked a fifth of Jack Daniels on the ground. Tennessee sour mash whiskey all the way from Lynchburg—it was there if anybody wanted it.

  He was using a shop rag to wipe the blood off of his skin, but in this heat it was drying already, changing from scarlet to deep rust. Kemper tried spitting on it, but it didn’t help much. None of them were having much success in getting cleaned up. Morgan had found a tiny piece of her skull caught up in his hair.

  The girls had stepped aside, moving far away from the van. Kemper could see Erin trying her best to help clear Pepper’s head which wasn’t going to be easy in this heat. Good luck to her all the same.

  Kemper stayed over by the guys. Andy was sitting on the floor outside of the open side-door, his face a study of intensity, his shoes kicking dirt. Morgan stood nearby, cleaning his arms. Both of them were breathing heavily. Kemper could hear them, their lungs moving in and out over the faint whisper of a mild Texan breeze.

  “What are we gonna do?” asked Morgan.

  Kemper paused and pulled his lips back against his teeth making a smacking sound. “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “We’re going to have to call the cops, I guess.”

  Morgan stiffened and began to pace. “On the list of bad ideas,” he rattled, “I’d put that way up there.” Then he started to strut, and when he next spoke it was in a kind of sarcastic officious voice. “So, officers, as you inspect the crime scene that is now our van, please ignore the colorful piñata filled with marijuana you may happen to come across. It played no part whatsoever in the demise of this unfortunate young lady.”

  “Keep your goddamn voice down!” Kemper chided.

  He looked across to Erin to see if she’d heard. Sweat stung his eyes—it was getting even hotter out here—but Erin was still busy with Pepper. If she had heard anything, she wasn’t showing it. When Kemper turned back he saw Andy watching him with a playful expression.

  “Cat’s out of the bag, man,” said Andy teasingly. “She knows what we picked up in Mexico.”

  Oh . . . just great . . .

  That’s all Kemper needed. Like she hadn’t been moaning enough about weed already today. And now she knew where—

  Wait—what’s that?

  Kemper could hear an engine. A car was headed their way, he could hear it. It was coming from the direction they were going before Miss Suicide ’73 decided to give her Smith & Wesson a blowjob.

  Now the others could hear it too and an unspoken question immediately flashed between the five of them: should they try to flag the car down for help, or should they let it go? A lot would depend on who it was. If it was the police—

  No.

  Kemper could see it now and he couldn’t believe his eyes. The automobile drawing close to them was a 1956, pale-blue Buick four-door sedan. Only it wasn’t pale blue any more, not underneath all them layers of dirt and rust. But what could you expect for a seventeen year-old car? God damn it, Kemper thought those things had gone out with the Ark.

  He tried to see who the driver was but there was too much glare across the windshield. Then he looked round at his friends—all five of them, unkempt and covered with bloodstains. He imagined what the driver must be thinking.

  “Nothing wrong with his picture, huh?” he said ruefully.

  He wasn’t surprised when the Buick passed them by. It didn’t stop, it didn’t pause, it didn’t even slow down to check what was happening—it just moved along, like there was nothing to see. And all that time, Kemper couldn’t make out who was sitting behind the wheel.

  Morgan interrupted his contemplating. “We’ve gotta stash the weed somewhere until this bullshit is over.”

  The stoner had a point. They couldn’t do anything as long as they had the drugs on board. They couldn’t call the police, they couldn’t let anyone enter the van, they couldn’t do nothing.

  Okay, Kemper my man, time to turn this thing around.

  Without even nodding to acknowledge what Morgan had just said, Kemper went back inside the van and came out holding the pot-stuffed piñata. He could see that the two girls were walking back over. Pepper looked much better. In fact, she looked kinda vulnerable . . . Sexy . . .

  Stop right there!

  Kemper shook his head and went searching among the plants and bushes for somewhere to stash the cannabis. He’d have to put it some place where it would be safe for at least a few days. And he’d have to be able to find it easily again, out here in this wide open expanse of nothing.

  Over his shoulder, he heard Pepper say, “Can’t we just wait for a highway patrolman or something?” She was talking to the others.

  That Buick was the only car they’d seen in the last twenty shitty minutes, so Kemper didn’t expect help to arrive any time soon. He heard Morgan reply to Pepper but didn’t listen to the answer because he’d found a dip in the earth just beyond a weird looking rock. It was a large pale stone that was wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, and dirt on the surface of the stone made it look almost like a death’s head—which seemed more than a little appropriate considering the circumstance
s.

  When Kemper was sure the dope was safely hidden, and when he’d memorized the place where he’d buried it—the lonely tree towering above the van by the roadside—he went back to talk with Erin. He led her away from Pepper who was still trying to convince the other guys that someone might come and help them any minute now. Sure, and whoever it was would just wave a magic wand and make everything go away.

  Erin was looking much better now but he knew they had a growing rift to fix up.

  “Baby, I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his eyes looking over to where he had hidden the piñata. “I did that for us.”

  But she was too angry to listen. The whole drug thing seemed to be getting out of hand.

  “You think I’d want to be a part of that?” she snapped.

  Then there was a quiet pause.

  “I’m sorry,” he tried, before leaning to kiss her on the cheek.

  Erin was unmoved. And she still looked pretty hacked-off even when the damp hair of his moustache brushed softly against her cheek. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe her feelings were fuelled by what had just happened with the dead girl, but then maybe they shouldn’t be having this conversation in the first damn place. Maybe Kemper shouldn’t have done anything that he needed to apologize for. Maybe he should act like a man for once.

  Kemper was about to try again when Pepper’s voice came up behind them.

  “Well, I’ll tell you this much,” she announced. “There is no possible way I’m ever getting back in that van.”

  Which wasn’t really an option. They couldn’t stay there, waiting on the off-chance that some authority figure might calmly roll up and confidently take command of the situation. No one was looking for them. No matter what the crazy girl said before she took her own life, there was no cavalry. No one was out there.

  So they were on their own and they had better get used to the idea and do something about it. And the only thing they could do was deal with the body. They had to take it some place, which meant getting back inside the van. They didn’t have to like it, but there was nothing else they could do. Which gave Pepper a choice: either she got back in the van, or they could leave her there on the road.

  For a moment, Pepper gave serious consideration to staying behind. After all, they’d picked her up near the border, so who was to say she couldn’t get another ride from someone else? Hell, if Kemper had stayed on the Interstate, she wouldn’t have this problem right now—there’d be a whole lot of cars to choose from. Still, Andy was kinda cute. But the jury was still out on Morgan. And then there was the body of that dead girl.

  What clinched it for Pepper was the stink of Erin’s puke. It somehow crystallized things for her. What would she do out here on her own where suicidal crazy women go around hassling strangers with guns?

  Okay, okay okay!

  Pepper climbed back aboard the van with everybody else and Kemper turned the ignition.

  He knew they were somewhere near a town or some place from that road sign they’d passed earlier, but he didn’t expect to find a properly equipped hospital out here. Not that they needed a hospital—it was too late for that. What they needed now was a police station and a morgue.

  The five of them huddled near the front: Kemper behind the wheel, Erin in the passenger seat, and the rest of them as far away from the bloody sofa as possible.

  Pepper was spraying perfume all over herself—her long floral pattern skirt, her legs, boots, bare arms, back and shoulders, hair; anything to combat the stench seeping out from the dead body. The smell had only just started—probably something to do with the time it takes for a corpse to start rotting—but already it was getting real awful. It reminded Pepper of something. It reminder her of—oh God—it reminded her of the slaughterhouse . . .

  The body had been propped up. It sat upright. Kemper had done it. He’d put some oily shop towels over her face. Blood had already soaked its way through the thick fabric, but better the sight of that than to have to spend another second looking at that godawful mess of a face! Sure, they’d seen it when it first happened—they’d seen the cordite-blackened hole and the chewed-up bleeding flesh. And now they had seen it again when they climbed back aboard, but that’s no reason why they had to see it every damned second of the way.

  And so they’d put towels over her head. They’d dampened the horror, hidden it, muffled it by depersonalizing her. If they couldn’t see her splattered face, the dead girl somehow wasn’t real. She wasn’t dead, she was just something abstract—a thing, a macabre exhibit posed artificially on the backseat before a shattered, bloodstained window that formed a halo of flies behind her crimson shrouded head.

  Instead of a corpse, she was now a necrobiotic portrait. She was the Madonna-without-Child daubed in the pigmentation of gangrene. She was meat, repackaged to disguise the moment when the bullet blew her brains out.

  Andy, however, was starting to feel just fine. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—it had scared him as much as any of them—it was just that he somehow was able to bounce back quicker. And now, he couldn’t keep from staring at the dead girl.

  “So that’s what brains look like,” he pondered. “Sort of like lasagna, kind of.”

  The others said nothing, they just looked at him in disgust.

  “Sorry,” he shrugged. He then turned his attention from the girl to the rest of the van. “Kemper, your interior is really fucked.”

  They looked at Andy like he was something on the sidewalk they’d just stepped in.

  “I’ll shut up.”

  A few miles on, the landscape started to change. The clumps of trees became thicker, more dense. Although the earth was still dry and sandy, there were far more plants around and thickets of undergrowth. Suddenly nature had become rampant, making the air much more humid and even more sweaty and uncomfortable for the kids trapped inside the van.

  God, how far was this town?

  They had passed the sign a couple of miles back, but still no hint of civilization.

  Kemper scratched at his goatee. “I’ll tell you this much,” he snapped, “The next hitcher is shit outta luck.”

  No one rushed to disagree.

  “I just don’t understand,” wondered Pepper aloud. “Why did she do it?”

  Morgan’s answer was perhaps a little predictable. “Maybe it was the drugs—”

  “No,” Erin interrupted. “You could see it in her eyes. There was something she was scared of.”

  Then another thought crossed Erin’s mind. Something almost too much for her to deal with.

  “God, she was our age . . .”

  “Dude!” shouted Andy, pointing forward over Kemper’s shoulder. “Gas station.”

  They could see it, maybe a hundred fifty yards on the right. A gas station. A goddamn gas station!

  That meant a phone and people who could help—someone who’d know how to get hold of the police, food, cold drinks, maybe some beers and a place to rest a moment. It meant someone they could talk to. It was the end of all their problems. They could call at the gas station, get set, then be back on their way to Dallas in no time.

  God damn it, no gas station had ever looked so good. It was like an oasis for the modern generation.

  Oh yeah!

  Kemper hooked the steering wheel and gently dabbed at the brakes. Everything had changed. From now on, the rest of the day was going to be a whole lot different.

  A whole lot different . . .

  FOUR

  Maybe “gas station” was too generous a description.

  As the van turned off the road past an old, battered sign advertising the BIG COW BBQ, Kemper thought that the place, a general store, must have been built some time around the Battle for the Alamo. The place was in poor shape, matching Kemper’s increasingly dark mood.

  He brought the wagon to a halt on the dirt lot out front, stopping right beside the store’s solitary gas pump. The pump was covered in rust but looked like it still might work. There was a phone line connected up on the ro
of so things were already looking up.

  The moment the handbrake went on, the doors flew open and everyone rushed outside, only too glad to get away from the dead body.

  The entrance to the building was a double screen door, just the other side of the gas pump, but Kemper ignored it and walked round to take another look at the rear window of the van. He cursed under his breath. There was a big round hole in the glass with blood all over it. Not only did it need fixing, but right now it was like a neon sign saying something real bad had happened inside the vehicle.

  While the mechanic fretted over his truck the others were taking a look around.

  The store was a large, weathered clapboard building. It used to be whitewashed, but now gray boards were showing through all over and what patches of white remained only served to emphasize the neglected, aged condition of the place.

  A simple porch had been built over the main entrance—plain wooden posts holding a sloped roof of corrugated iron sheets. A couple of electric light bulbs were fixed to the front of the overhang. Quite bizarrely for this time of day, both lights were on.

  The yard in front of the store was a ramshackle mess with all kinds of junk lying around: wooden crates, a rack of used tires and hub caps, dented gas cylinders, propane accessories and an old van seat that was used as a porch bench.

  To the side of the store, someone had hand-painted a crude sign, saying YARD SALE, beneath which was a whole lot more trash. There was a pile of used clothing, a stack of empty suitcases and other luggage—some of this stuff looked in good condition—and there were baskets, tools and other unwanted junk.

  Erin and Pepper needed to freshen up so they took off in the direction of the restroom which they could see over near the yard sale. Pepper would have given anything for a clean, cold shower right now, but guessed a splash of water from a dirty washbasin faucet would have to do.

  Morgan and Andy waited for Kemper.

  Whoever it was who owned the store, there was no one outside. So when Kemper had finished checking the van for damage, he took a deep breath, paused to collect himself; then headed on inside the building. The other two guys followed closed behind.