by Stephen Hand
Only to come screeching into the metal of the door itself.
Erin and Pepper could only cringe in terror as the chainsaw came at the driver’s door again and again and again, gnawing the primer-gray panel into twisted metal trash beneath a torrent of sparks.
Most men would have been injured by kickback as soon as the tip of the saw hit the solid wall of the van, but the maniac had had plenty of experience of cutting up the wrong things. He lived for the feel of metal grinding against metal, of metal cutting flesh, of flesh touching skin. He lived for it. He fucking lived for it.
Glass and slivers of metal shrapnel spat through the air, back into the van, hitting the two girls. They screamed in fear, the whites of their eyes reflecting the erratic diffusion of sparks.
“E . . . Er . . . Erin!”
Suddenly the saw was gone again, leaving only the odor of burning metal and a whole pile of broken van on the driver’s seat.
He was outside, walking. They could hear the saw on low revs, clutch still engaged.
Once, twice, the chainsaw motor turned, like the barking of a prairie dog circling its carrion prey.
The two frightened victims scurried away from the center of the van and pressed their backs against the side furthest away from the sound—THE CHAINSAW BROKE THROUGH THE WALL BEHIND THEM!
Erin dived forward, sparks stinging her skin. She heard Pepper cry out in terror, and the two of them almost collided as they landed in a heap on the other side of the van, as far away from the furious rending machine as possible.
Erin hated this—they were surviving on fear alone. They weren’t doing anything, they weren’t fighting back; they were just cooped up in there while that power tripping bastard took his time slicing up the van. Why didn’t he just come on in and get it over with?
Smoke billowed into the wagon as the chainsaw continued to split the side wide open, gouging a deep, jagged canal of ripped metal almost from floor to roof.
The fumes burned Pepper’s eyes, causing them to flood with even more tears. She couldn’t believe what was happening to her. Where the hell was the sheriff?
Erin looked across and saw something gleaming through one of the fresh holes in the other side of the van.
It was an eye.
Rampant. Leering. Crazed. Turning. Staring. Salivating. Through the mask.
And then it was gone.
But Erin knew that eye only too well. She remembered the same lunatic stare from when she first saw it come charging through that sliding door up at the Hewitt place. It was unforgettable. His eyes had the frenzied look of a pig being raped by a disemboweling machine.
She pressed her back up against the closed side door, clinging on to Pepper, and being hugged in return in a fearful embrace that was fully expectant of death.
“Aggghhhh!”
Pepper!
The chainsaw had burst through the side door behind them and had caught the shoulder of the girl’s down jacket, casting a plume of tiny feathers up against her cheek. But no blood.
Erin fell forward and turned to see the cutting chain laying waste to the door. The bastard was playing with them. First the rear, then the driver’s seat, both sides of the van, hunting them through the solid walls; destroying their cover, making a mockery of their hiding place.
But that last attack had been too close for Pepper. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t injured—the saw had been turning less than quarter of an inch away from her skin. If it had touched her, her flesh would have been thrown up into the air just like the bits and pieces of the van. And it wouldn’t have been sparks shooting out from the cut; it would have been her flesh and blood.
She’d had enough.
Taking hold of what tiny amount of courage she had left, Pepper scrambled over to the front of the van and got out through the mangled door on the driver’s side. She was going to make a break for it.
“Pepper!” Erin cried.
The girl was crazy. She’d never get away. She’d be throwing her life away just like the teenage girl with the revolver. They had to stick together; it was their only—
Pepper jumped out of the van and ran for her life. She hadn’t spoken another word to Erin; she’d just taken off.
Erin crawled forward, rested her shoulder against the back of the broken driver’s seat and looked out through the windshield.
The headlights were still on, and—where was Pepper?
Erin looked, but she couldn’t see the girl.
But she could see the murderer.
No.
Erin saw him run over to stand just in front of the vehicle, his leather apron folding and creasing as he shuffled along, his scalp of stolen hair flopping erratically in the breeze. His great expanse of tailored flesh quivered beneath his clothes as he held the roaring chainsaw above his head—HALLELUJAH!
He looked down into a patch of darkness below the beams and suddenly Erin felt the cold hand of fear squeezing her heart.
No.
Erin understood.
Pepper had tripped or fallen down in front of the van, dropping below the headlights—where now, standing in the full glory of the makeshift floodlights, the killer notched up the revs and leant down with the chainsaw, pushing it into the fallen girl’s face. In, in, in—he hacked into her face, the cold cutting blades mincing her vocal chords and whipping out her windpipe before she could even scream. Pepper had finally woken up from her dream.
Erin clutched her head and wept.
“Noooo!”
Outside, the insane bastard stomped like a retard in a geyser of blood and down feathers. He was swaying, shitting on the bitch’s innards with his saw, howling as her life sprayed out across the Texan dirt. But, all the while, his face was turned towards the van.
While he ground and pumped and hacked and snorted, his insane screaming eyes were constantly fixed on Erin. Almost as if he was putting on a show for her, to let her know she was next.
But Erin had gone beyond fear.
While her new friend—the young, smiling hitchhiker they’d picked up on the Mexican border—was being reduced to a flat slurry of intestine, Erin suddenly felt cold and limp. She just watched him.
He stood there, thrusting the chainsaw, and screeching insanely over the sound of gasoline fury. But Erin was numb.
She tenderly reached out a hand towards the perverse figure—her mind dealt the final blow—the saw-fucking freak was wearing Kemper’s face.
TWELVE
The features were distorted.
Kemper’s head was much narrower than the killer’s, so the face had been softened then stretched to fit. But there was no mistaking it. Erin could even see the remnants of the goatee.
“Oh my God!”
Kemper was dead.
Her boyfriend. Her lover. The father of her child. Her husband-to-be. Dead. And now that, bastard—that fucking animal bastard—was wearing her lover’s remains. He had abused Kemper’s body. He’d handled it, touched it and dismembered it.
The body that had felt warm and tender, the body Erin had made love to, was now a slab of lifeless cut meat. Her baby’s daddy had become a whole new wardrobe for that death-breathing bastard. If she could, she’d kill him right now. No guilt, no remorse, just pure revenge.
Erin felt the urge, the need to slaughter.
Out front, Leatherface looked at her from within the white light of the headlights and leered—mentally slicing her from within Kemper’s lifeless face. Her boyfriend would be the last thing she saw before she died.
Thick with the juicy puree of Pepper’s corpse, the chainsaw fired up and lurched like a heaving spastic reflex towards the windshield.
Erin yelped and almost fell out through the van door. If only she had the strength to beat the bastard!
Because that’s all he had. It was sheer brute force that gave him power over her; not authority, justice, superior intelligence or wisdom, moral right, not even cash—just raw fucking power. She could have been the president and she’d still be s
creaming in fear for her life. Violence is a great leveler. In the face of a brutal beating, all men are equal.
Yet despite this, despite the raging panic that had haunted her for most of the day, Erin was surprised by just how much she was able to deal with. She had no choice but to accept the depraved psychopathic nature of her attacker.
She could almost hold back the deep revulsion she felt at the mere sight of him, and at his need to butcher and degrade his victims. She could even block out the mental image of those insane wild eyes looking out through the moist holes in Kemper’s face.
But she couldn’t deal with the fucking chainsaw.
Every time that bastard engine roared in her face, the whole livid nightmare of her situation came falling back in on her, until she was almost buried beneath the rubble of paralyzing fear. Each time she heard the chainsaw accelerate, it cut another chunk of sanity out of her soul.
So all she could do was run. No plan. No thought. Just run. Away from the noise. Away from the chainsaw. Away.
Though it was dark now, she bolted straight off the road and into the dense tangle of the grove. If she stayed on the dirt track, he’d have no trouble finding her in the moonlight. But maybe through the undergrowth she could find some place to hide. Or maybe she could keep running until he gave up and stopped coming after her.
The chainsaw kept pace behind her, revving, calling for her, wanting her, as it was dragged left to right to left in an unpredictable twitching zigzag.
And suddenly Erin knew how a hunted deer felt.
She was running through the woods, fighting her way through gnarled tree limbs and thorny sticker bushes, fleeing from a relentless hunter who seemed to think it was a bloody game. Once, twice, she almost fell over, her foot caught by something in the vegetation, but she pushed on. Her bare arms were becoming scratched and her fingers were still sore and bleeding from her struggle with the wheel nuts, but she ignored them. Real pain was what Pepper, Andy and Kemper had experienced. These pathetic nicks and bumps were nothing. Nothing at all.
The machine was built for cutting timber. It scythed a straight path through the grove towards her, oblivious to the broken teeth and punctured eyeballs caught up in the links of the chain. She was going to die. Die bitch die.
Erin could hear him grunting and firing the chainsaw, his heavy tread falling like imperfect death close behind her. Most of the time, she was able to run flat out, sprinting awkwardly in her cumbersome platforms, but then she would come to a ditch or an almost impenetrable thicket, where all she could do was throw herself forward and hope for the best.
Her hair, clothes and skin were all dirty and in disarray. With her cuts, bruises and scrapes and with her panic-stricken eyes, she broke through the forest like the victim of a car wreck. Which wasn’t too far from the truth; that bastard had taken the van apart. He’d destroyed both the A-100 and its owner, and there was some deeply sick irony to the fact that when Kemper’s features had last looked upon his customized pride and joy, they had done so in the form of a death mask.
Who’s the daddy now?
Rushing forward over a hurdle of fallen branches, Erin half climbed her way out through the edge of the grove into a clearing. She didn’t know if this was a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, she could move more quickly but, on the other, he would know exactly where she was. And she could hear him now—the sputtering of the chainsaw calling her name.
If she lay down and surrendered to the bastard, her troubles would all be over. She could just give in to him, let him do what he wanted with her. She couldn’t stop him.
No! What the hell was she thinking?
Erin picked herself up and ran out into the clearing. It was then that she saw she had entered an old neglected trailer park. Well, it was a trailer park once. Now it was mostly a flat, empty space of dirt.
Except for the trailer.
Over across the other side of the clearing, a lone surviving trailer squatted beneath a knot of swaying trees. The trailer looked worse for wear, but there were lights on inside—she could see them through the closed drapes. There was also a lamp tied up on one of the abutting trees, throwing a pool of brilliance against the outside of the trailer door.
Erin took one last terrified look over her shoulder, then headed straight for the mobile home, both her legs and feet aching.
Surely she could find one person in this town who was halfway goddamn normal? They couldn’t all be mentally unstable morons. Frankly, Erin didn’t give a damn who was inside the trailer as long as she could find a phone and a decent weapon. Chances are the owner kept a handgun, maybe even a rifle.
As she drew closer to the trailer, Erin could see it was standing in the middle of a veritable lake of discarded propane tanks, oil drums, crates, tables and other typical trailer park junk. It looked like whoever lived there had been doing so for some time. They’d be dead in an hour, if they didn’t help her.
Erin had no doubt that the killer would come for them. He didn’t seem to care who he murdered, or how many people he had to slaughter his way through. He wasn’t worried about being seen, caught, stopped or anything. He kept steaming forward, chopping down anyone who got in his way. If the killer found Erin here, he’d trash the trailer the same way he’d torn open the van. Leatherface would come at it with the chainsaw until it was all done.
Clearly she’d got a head start on the freak because he was still cutting his way through the wood while she was almost at the trailer.
Gasping, weeping, crippled with fear, Erin ran up to the trailer door and banged on it with both hands. She was out of breath, but her hammering was furious and unmistakable. Tears ran down her dirty face, but she kept on knocking as she sank slowly to her knees on the portable steps leading up to the cabin entrance.
The chainsaw was looming nearer but she was exhausted. And the sudden pause in her urgent flight had paved the way for shock to set in and her mind to shutdown.
Suddenly the trailer door was pulled open and two massive arms seized hold of Erin, dragging the young woman to her feet. Erin screamed and tried to fight but the hands were too strong. Before Erin knew it, she’d been hauled inside the trailer.
Back up at the Hewitt house, blind screaming madness was in the air.
Andy, Kemper, Morgan—they were all there, locked inside and broken into tiny pieces. They’d been restrained, held against their will, smothered by the raw flesh of dying meat and ridiculed.
Upstairs, downstairs, the basement; all the rooms echoed with laughter. Anger, rage, humiliation and excitement—slicing through the foundations of the house like a razor—constantly defying meaning, destroying fellowship and turning the three little bastards from the van into meat puppets.
As soon as Leatherface brought those two bitches home, the whole family could settle down for the evening. Then they could really have some fun.
There were bloodstains on the white sheets hung to dry outside.
Footsteps thundered on the floorboards of the house, slamming the doors and shouting in deep Texan voices.
Blood on white sheets.
Blind screaming madness.
Erin was kicking and punching. She thought she’d fought free of the hands, when in reality—and unbeknown to her—they’d simply let her go.
The woman who’d helped Erin into the trailer was in her forties and she was huge. She wore a basic sleeveless dress that hung over her elephantine frame like a floral sack. Although her brown wavy hair was long and thick, it sat like a bad toupee on top of her enormous head, her jowls so fat that her chin seemed to run straight down to her breasts with no gap in between.
However, despite her considerable weight, the woman did take pride in her appearance. The make-up she wore was fetching and well applied, and her glasses were those feminizing cat’s-eye frames that had been so fashionable ten years ago. Nevertheless, the cramped conditions of the trailer made the woman seem like the proverbial ship inside a bottle.
Suddenly, Erin started to scream
. She knew what would happen if they didn’t hurry up and do something. But how could she explain herself? There was no time for talk, but how do you begin to convince someone that there is a psycho out there with a chainsaw and a mask made from her boyfriend’s face. How? HOW? With each passing second, he was getting closer.
Her whole body was shaking. Random words and whimpers began to spill out of her mouth.
Where was he?
Erin ran over to the nearest window and peered through the drapes, but she could only see her own reflection; it was too dark outside. She raised her hands and cupped them over her eyes and forehead to block out the reflection, but she couldn’t see. Quickly, she tried another window—and another—and as she did so, the trailer owner studied Erin with wry amusement.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” she said, pointing to an old armchair. “I’m Henrietta.”
Abruptly Erin stopped and looked at her, at the woman, as if noticing her for the first time. Likewise the trailer.
It looked cozy enough, but it was full of clutter, a lot of it tasteless like the plaster figurine of a classical female nude over on the shelf. The woman also had a lot of photographs, all in frames. Some of the pictures were up on the walls, some were standing on a small table and there were a few on the shelves. The pictures were in cheap frames but they domesticated the place all the same. Henrietta also had a couple of vases, a clock and some ornamental glassware—nothing fancy, mind. And she—
The door was open!
Erin ran over, slammed the door shut and locked it. Then she grabbed hold of the armchair Henrietta had offered her and jammed it up against the aluminum door handle. She didn’t know if the lock or the chair would hold, but she would try anything to keep him out.
Again, she pressed her face close to one of the windows and looked out.
“Please help me,” she begged quietly, finally in control of her voice.