by Stephen Hand
Erin ran alongside it and pounded on the windows with her bleeding fists. But she couldn’t keep up, and with a touch of the gas pedal and an automatic shift into third, fourth and then fifth, the car pulled away, taking all her hopes with it.
“You assholes!” she cried, but what could she do?
If the roles had been reversed, would she have done any different?
Oh God—
The teenage girl they’d picked up.
And suddenly Erin was aware of her role in a bloody cycle that reached back over decades.
In the distance, she could hear the chainsaw kick back into life. He would be coming after her again—something she found both terrifying and utterly demoralizing.
He had to get tired sooner or later; his clumsy frame wasn’t built for running and the chainsaw had to be heavy. If she could just stay out in front of him, maybe hold out long enough until a car would stop for her—
Erin hurried off along the highway, her right knee now ablaze with pain. Leatherface came after her, blood seeping into his pants where the chainsaw had bitten.
Cloud was starting to creep its way overhead but hadn’t yet obscured the moon, so Erin was able to see quite some way along the road, and in the distance she saw a large building. There was a light shining through one of the windows, offering the girl yet another chance of unexpected hope.
She ran forward, despondently wishing for a phone, weapon, a place to hide—anything. The last place they’d taken refuge in . . .
Morgan’s split carcass was still hanging from the chandelier.
Her feet kicked up dust, but the chainsaw never quit for a second, as Erin and her ensanguined pursuer loped exhaustedly in the direction of . . .
“Oh God.”
Erin stopped.
She could see what it was now and almost immediately that unforgettable reek was upon her. Because the place she was fleeing to—it wasn’t just one building, it was a series of buildings all linked and connected by their lethal function. The place she was fleeing to was the slaughterhouse.
Though it seemed like a lifetime ago, they’d driven past the slaughterhouse only this morning. She remembered Morgan teasing Pepper and how they’d all reacted to the bad smell. She didn’t realize she’d run so far.
* * *
If anything, the meat processing plant looked even more sinister in the hypnotic moonlight. She could hear the sounds of cattle in the darkness, their voices like the plaintive death-cries of lost souls, or of mournful ghosts of disembowelment. The fact that Hewitt was chasing her towards the abattoir seemed bloodily apposite, her whole day sandwiched within the bookends of the meat factory.
Strip away humanity and all we are left with is meat.
Erin climbed over a wire fence, then hurried forward through the grounds of the slaughterhouse. She practically fell against the wall at the back of the main building, slamming hard against it, with all the fear and lack of control of someone running for her life. She couldn’t see any doors or windows, but there was a ramp of some description leading in.
The wooden incline smelt of bleach and was a little slippery but Erin managed to keep her footing as she ran up. At the top of the ramp, she entered a narrow, claustrophobic passageway that went into the building.
Harsh fluorescent lighting caused her to squint, but she could still see that the floor and walls of the corridor were thick with blood and animal dung. And suddenly she knew exactly where she was.
Erin was standing in the very corridor where thousands of animals had spent their last few terrified seconds on Earth. This is where the livestock came to die. This is where man proved his mastery over nature. And Erin was sick to her soul of being surrounded by the trappings of death.
She could almost feel the Hewitts clawing greedily at her flesh, mouths running with meat juices, stomachs fat with body-sauce, their reflex to kill as normal and mindless as taking a shit—her own digested remains becoming nothing more than a good hard shit.
It seemed she would never see an end to the horror that was being heaped upon her. Each time she reached a new limit, those bastards tore it to shreds. It felt as if she was being driven deeper and deeper into a dark pit, where only red meat held sway.
At the end of the corridor, she came to a cramped space that was more like an iron box. There was a hatch in one of the walls. Erin looked through and saw the stunner—the pneumatic device used by the slaughter man to inject a thick metal bolt right between the animal’s eyes, to render it unconscious before being hoisted up on a chain, stabbed through the aorta and then bled to death.
Erin was wearing leather shoes and a leather belt.
Outside, there were some cattle in a pen.
On the far side of the pen, Leatherface was cutting through a wire fence with his chainsaw, trying to break into the yard at the back of the slaughterhouse. He knew she was in there.
The sawblade tore through the barbed wire like it was cotton candy, but the squeal of metal on metal and the thick guttural blast of the gasoline engine sent the enclosed livestock into a panic.
The cows began to stamp their hooves and some of them bellowed with fear. Even at this most primal level, the beasts perceived the violence and inhumanity Leatherface represented, even though their hides were perfectly safe from him.
He broke through the fence and lumbered awkwardly through the creatures, slapping them, pushing them aside, and holding the chainsaw up above his head so that it cut like a shark’s fin through the dark sea of high ungulate backs.
And panic spread out from him among the animals in deafening waves.
Erin could hear the distressed cries coming from the livestock pen.
They injected a bolt of cold fear through her heart, reminding her again of the violent maniac at her heels. She was sure he’d love to catch her here, inside the revolting “knock box,” so that he could put her to sleep where all the other animals died. But there was a side hatch leading out of the metal cubicle, into the slaughterhouse proper, and Erin was only too glad to take it.
She went through and found herself standing inside a cool room with rows and rows of carcasses hanging from tidy steel meat hooks.
Here, death had already been water blasted, scrubbed down and sanitized. The Last Rites had been administered to these poor creatures with an air knife. And she couldn’t help but remember Andy suspended above the broken piano. Would her horror have been any less if the boy had also been stripped, washed and decapitated?
How could she feel revulsion, seeing him hanging from a hook with half a leg missing, and yet feel only a slight nervous chill when confronted with all these dismembered animal torsos—dozens of them? What barrier was there in her mind? And how had Old Monty and little Tommy Hewitt broken through that barrier and torn it into barbecue ribs?
Erin pushed her hair back behind her ears and ran out across the floor of the giant meat-filled refrigerator.
The room was dark, lit only by the moon through dirty slit windows near the ceiling, and she had to weave and duck to avoid banging into the spread-eagled beef halves. The cold air made goose bumps rise on her skin and turned the filthy sweat and slime on her clothes into ice water, but none of this penetrated the freezing terror that never once relaxed its grip on her will. This night would never end.
* * *
He pulled a massive chain that hung from the ceiling.
What was that?
Erin could hear some kind of high-pitched rattling sound, like a chain. It came from somewhere inside the cooler with her, but where? Suddenly there was a loud crashing sound, followed by a constant whirring of mechanical automation.
Erin listened, turned her head to look in all directions. It seemed to be coming from all around her, but she couldn’t see anything.
The ceiling!
She looked up and saw that a whole lot of machinery had been set in motion. The ceiling was a grid of pulleys and gears, controlling the many conveyors and meat processing systems that helped keep the pl
ant fast and efficient.
But who was doing all this? Was there someone working here, or was it—
Something hit Erin from behind.
She screamed and leapt forward, only to see that she’d backed up into an animal carcass. The body was bloody and hanging from a vicious meat hook, but it wasn’t Leatherface. Erin heaved a sigh of relief and—
Was slammed from behind!
No. It wasn’t possible. Not after she’d come this far. Not now. Not—
It was another side of beef.
All the carcasses were moving now, their hooks being slowly pulled along by a chain system. And one of them had swung up behind Erin and struck her hard in the back. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for this twice, but her nerves were in tatters. Suddenly, she had an idea. Maybe she could use the situation to her advantage.
Hurriedly, she stepped over to the massive side of beef that had just hit her and put her back against it. She let it shield her, and walked with it, as it slowly continued on its mechanical way.
The hooks all seemed to be headed over in the direction of—
THE CHAINSAW IGNITED AND SWUNG THROUGH THE AIR TOWARDS HER!
Erin ducked and felt a rush of air as the saw-blade hacked straight through the carcass and took off its leg. The severed limb fell to the floor and Leatherface arched his back in preparation for the return swing that would take her head off. But in avoiding the first attack, Erin had lost her balance and had now fallen flat on her back.
This bought her two more seconds as the chainsaw came flailing down towards her groin. Quickly, she slid her body back along the stone floor, and spread her legs wide so that the saw could land harmlessly between them. The rotating blades should have gutted Erin there and then, but instead they whipped into an iron drain cover, showering Erin’s groin with sparks.
Seizing her chance, Erin stretched forward and kicked the bastard straight between the legs.
Leatherface howled and struggled to disentangle the chainsaw from the metal grid, but he was too slow. Erin quickly placed her other foot right on his aching balls and pushed off against him, her body sliding, then barrel rolling beneath the swinging beef carcasses. By the time Leatherface was ready to deal with the girl, she’d already got back onto her feet and started running.
But he wasn’t beaten yet; the slaughterhouse was his domain. And he knew how to bring the bitch down.
Whimpering and whining, Hewitt limped over to a heavy-duty switch set in the wall. Then he opened the throttle on his chainsaw and screamed, before burying the switch.
The self-cleaning sprinklers kicked in within a flash and Erin was running through a crazed downpour of freezing water. It was obvious what he was trying to do; he wanted to distract her, intimidate her. But she didn’t care that she was soaking wet, and she made damned sure she didn’t slip on the stone floor.
Water trickled down the pale pink skin of the dead beef as it swayed back and forth in front of her. But now she was pushing the meat out of her way, and soon she came to a door that opened onto a pitch-black stairway. She didn’t know where it would lead, but she took it anyway.
There was no light at all in the stairwell, so she had to feel her way down the concrete steps and then through another door, where she came at last to the main floor of the slaughterhouse.
Just like the cold room, the only illumination in this massive hall came from slivers of moonlight struggling to gain entrance through a row of dirty windows high up in the twenty-foot walls.
Erin could hear grunts and snorts all around her. The room was packed with livestock—pigs and cattle, some old, some very young, but all in pens and cages. They began to respond to her presence and, in a matter of seconds, she could hear them calling out across the length and breadth of the floor. Their noise was sure to bring Hewitt.
She looked desperately for another way out—there had to be one somewhere—but the first door she took led to a room full of pig cages.
The second door seemed equally useless, opening into a long, narrow locker room with no other exit. Tall lockers ran down both sides of the room, reaching all the way up to the low ceiling.
This was where the staff came and changed into their work clothes. It was also where knives were kept, the blades placed neatly in racks inside a couple of tiny alcoves. Moonlight bounced off the stainless steel edges, drawing Erin towards their deadly sharpness.
The panic-stricken girl had got so used to hearing the distant grinding of the chainsaw that when it suddenly stopped, she stopped as well.
She stood stock-still in the locker room, listening for any sign as to what Leatherface might be up to. But she didn’t have to listen very long before hearing his unmistakable, offbeat tread come charging down the staircase from the cooler room.
Taking one last look up at the row of knives, Erin ran back out into the main hall, then round into the other room with the enclosed pigs.
He knew this place well. They’d changed it. Made it new. But it was still the same as when he used to skin animal heads. And he knew where she was.
She could tell by the bleating of the livestock that Leatherface was now on the main floor of the slaughterhouse. The chainsaw purred—not in its full fury, as before—and Erin hadn’t been able to find a way out in time, but . . .
The girl was hiding inside one of the tall metal cabinets in the locker room. It was one of the first unlocked cupboards she’d found, and she’d climbed inside. And now her entire attention was focused on the slim vent slats cut into the door.
Her view was restricted almost to what was right in front of the locker, but she could hear everything. She could hear Leatherface crash mindlessly about the main hall, scaring the animals with his ugly bastard mask and his subhuman raving. She could hear him open the locker room door, then stumble awkwardly inside, his shoes slapping concrete just yards from her. Then she could hear him stagger back out through the door again.
But it was only when she was certain that he was heading away from the direction of her hiding place in the locker room that Erin screamed at the top of her voice!
Her cries echoed through every room, hallway, enclosure and knock box of the slaughterhouse, reverberating from wall to wall, driving the animals into a frenzy of night terror and telling Leatherface exactly where she was.
Hewitt stopped dead in his clumsy tracks, and drove his fat psychotic ass straight back towards the open door of the locker room.
He knew there was no other way out of there. She was finished.
The second he stormed back into the locker room, Erin fell quiet. She shivered, her whole body quaking with terror. She knew what she was doing, but couldn’t believe she was actually doing it. Her thoughts and actions now had a distant quality to them; almost as if she were someone else, looking down at her own life, watching her insane behavior unfold.
Hewitt was walking slowly, his footsteps almost nimble in the darkness, but the leather soles of his shoes scuffed against the floor tiles. She knew he was looking at all the lockers, casting his sickly black eyes over each of them in turn. Left, right, left, right—his eyes, roaming, probing and searching. Each second brought him nearer to her and the tension was almost unbearable.
Everything, the whole day, the whole bloody nightmare had come down to this moment.
What happened in the next few minutes would determine whether Erin lived or died. If her plan succeeded, then maybe the Hewitts could be stopped. But if it failed, no one would find out about them, and their string of murders would continue with as much certainty and efficiency as the pneumatic bolt stunner in the slaughterhouse.
But first, she had to get her breathing under control; it was too loud. She was too damn scared.
He stopped. There was rustling in one of the lockers—RUSTLING IN THE LOCKER! RUSTLING IN THE LOCKER!
Her eyes widened.
The footsteps were getting closer. She could smell the stench of death from his apron, shit from his ass and the nauseating fog of mass bloodshed
that lingered throughout the slaughterhouse. She knew he was listening. She’d never heard him be so silent, so quiet. He was listening for the rustling sound.
She heard rattling and realized it was her teeth chattering.
She put a hand over her mouth and tried to keep her jaw still. But it was so hard, and her knees were quaking inside her jeans—oh God, she’d never been this close to death before. There was no way out of the locker. If all he did was throw open the thin metal door and jam his massive repugnant body in the way, she’d be finished. She’d made it so easy for him.
Now he was opening the lockers, throwing the doors wide open, making the metal shake and clatter, his own mask-encased wheezing adding fuel to the fire of imminent onslaught.
One locker.
Another.
He was getting closer.
She shut her eyes tightly and fought back the terror that seemed sure to engulf her—if his violent bloody mayhem didn’t completely destroy her first.
He raised a bloody hand up to the next door, but there was a loud bump in the locker BEHIND HIM!
Erin stared out through the vent and could have wept in utter despair, as she saw him spin on his heels and rip-start the fucking chainsaw!
The roar of the engine was deafening inside the cramped locker room—the rows of metal doors made the place into a bloody echo chamber. But even though the brutal din rode roughshod over the sound of Erin hyperventilating, it was too late for her; Leatherface had heard the bang in the locker and knew exactly where to look.
Livid with excitement, he raised the chainsaw, ready to inflict maximum overkill on her face, and then grabbed at the locker door. He shook and rattled the latch with fumbling erratic fingers, his hand smearing dirt on the chrome finish. Then finally, he opened the door and screamed!
The exhaust burned and the cutting chain turned—rev, rev, revvvvvvv—
But she wasn’t there.
Instead, a baby sow rooted through some work clothing lying on the locker floor. Erin had taken the animal from the adjacent room only a couple of minutes ago—and now she had Leatherface just where she wanted him.