Escape from Happydale, page 12
part #1 of The Last Final Girl Series
They arrived at the party a fashionable sixty minutes late, and the plan, which they concocted that afternoon, was to make Rick Gale come to her. She would talk to everyone but him. She would laugh and joke, and occasionally, very occasionally, she was to make eye contact with Rick, but only for a second. She didn’t want to look desperate.
Everything was going according to plan. Heather’s hair looked just like Madonna’s in Who’s That Girl. She was working the room and even occasionally made eye contact with Rick, but only for a couple of seconds before looking away, just like they had planned. What they hadn’t planned on was Heather’s nerves. Her stomach was full of butterflies, and she felt like everybody was watching her. She knew they weren’t, of course, but she still felt as though they were. Consequently, she wasn’t paying attention to how many coolers she was drinking. All that she knew was that she always had one in her hand, and after an hour and a half, she suddenly felt sick and ran to the bathroom. It was awful. The smell. The sound. The embarrassment.
Nancy was there, holding her hair back while only God knew how many coolers violently blasted out of her. When it was over, she slumped between the toilet and the basin and cried. Nancy wanted to take her home, but Heather didn’t want to ruin her night as well, so she made Nancy go back out to the party while she went to Brett Hill’s little brother’s room and lay down on his bed. Despite throwing up, her head was still spinning, and all she wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep, and that was just what she did.
Heather wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep, but when she woke, the party sounded like it was winding down, with fewer voices bouncing off the walls and the music lower and smoother. She didn’t feel sick anymore. She just felt like going home, having a shower and a piece of toast, and going to bed.
The living room was dark. People sat around quietly chatting and smoking cigarettes while Devon and Rob played Atari on the television. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” played through the speakers as she scanned the smoke and darkness, looking for Nancy. At first, she couldn’t see her, but on a second glance, she found her friend on the couch, making out with a boy. That boy was Rick Gale. Her Rick Gale.
She felt ten times worse than what she had after drinking all those coolers. She felt like she had been hit in the stomach and the heart at the same time and by her best friend. She didn’t yell. She didn’t scream. She didn’t say a word. She just looked down at the floor, made her way back to Brett Hill’s little brother’s room, and waited for Nancy to come and wake her up.
Heather pretended to be asleep when Nancy came, and on the drive home, she never mentioned what she had seen. But she didn’t forget.
Thirty-Three
Nancy told Heather to pick her up from the rear parking lot, the one near the old Dunkin’ Donuts. Not the main parking lot where the nurses in the nurses’ station could see everyone who rolled up and not the staff parking lot on the east side of the hospital, but the rear parking lot. She figured that both Jessica and Irene wouldn’t even think to look back there since that end of the hospital was dark and shut down.
Heather had said fifteen minutes, and Nancy knew that she would leave straight away, so if Heather said she would be there in fifteen minutes, Nancy was pretty certain that in fifteen minutes, Heather would be at the rear of the hospital and ready to go.
She’s a good friend, Nancy thought. Too good for me, anyway.
For weeks she had been riddled with guilt. Every time she looked at Heather or heard her voice on the telephone, she felt bad about what had happened with Rick Gale. She hadn’t meant for it to happen; it just kind of had. It was a mistake, and she wished she had never kissed him. To make matters worse, he wouldn’t stop calling her.
Nancy had tried telling Heather, but every time she started, she would chicken out and change the subject. But not now. After tonight and everything she had gone through, she had come to the conclusion that life was too short for secrets and lies. Heather was her best friend, and best friends didn’t kiss each other’s crushes.
Nancy closed the door just as quietly as she’d opened it and tiptoed down the hall. She could hear the nurses chatting and figured once she was a good twenty or thirty feet down the corridor, she would be home free.
That’s what she thought, anyway. What Nancy didn’t know was that behind her, all the way down the other end of the hall, was Hurricane Williams.
He kept pace with Nancy. He didn’t speed up his pace to get closer nor did he slow down so that the gap between them could grew. He just kept a nice measured pace as they moved through the halls of the hospital.
Nancy didn’t know what it was. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she knew that something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the scary-as-hell empty hospital. Maybe it was the psycho who’d attacked her at Patrick’s Garage & Gas, or maybe it was the combination of the two, but Nancy knew something was fishy. All of a sudden, she felt vulnerable as she walked down the empty hall.
She slowed her steps and came to a stop. Behind her, Hurricane did the same. Slowly, very slowly, she looked over her shoulder and saw the hulking silhouette of Hurricane Williams at the end of the long corridor.
“Ah, shit,” Nancy muttered then took off running.
And of course, Hurricane followed.
Nancy ran as fast as she could, and when she reached the double doors at the rear of the hospital that led out to the parking lot, she busted through them and into the night air. She looked over her shoulder. Hurricane was still coming at her and closing the gap fast.
Thirty-Four
“Heather, do this. Heather, do that.” Heather was always the good friend. The reliable friend. The friend who would sneak out in the middle of the night to pick up a friend from a hospital after who knew what. The friend who would just be cool about having her boyfriend stolen. Technically, Rick Gale wasn’t her boyfriend, but she liked him, and Nancy knew that, so it was kind of the same thing. Heather was sick of being the good friend. When was it going to be her turn to make out with the Rick Gales of the world and to be the irresponsible one?
“When is my time!” she asked herself as she flicked on the indicator to pull off Old Randall Road toward the hospital.
Heather couldn’t believe she was even driving out there in the middle of the night for her best friend.
What kind of friend was she?
She was angry at herself more than anything.
She pulled into the parking lot and saw Nancy, and when seeing her face made all the anger from the past few weeks bubble up, Heather slammed on the brakes.
“To hell with you, Nancy Sinclair,” Heather said out loud. Then she slipped the car in reverse and drove home. She didn’t even look back.
Thirty-Five
Nancy watched the Rosses’ station wagon disappear down the street. “What the actual fuck, Heather?”
The car was gone. Heather was gone. And her escape was gone too.
Nancy turned, nice and slow. Just like she thought, Hurricane Williams was standing right behind her, towering over as she looked up into his bloodshot eyes that poked out through the hood.
He smelled something awful, like damp clothes and rotten eggs all rolled into one. Nancy would have dry retched if she weren’t so terrified. It was the end of the line, and she knew it. She closed her eyes and waited for the end to come.
People say that in that last moment just before a person is about to die, their whole life flashes in front of them. Nancy’s whole life didn’t flash in front of her. Nancy thought about one thing and one thing only. She wished she had more time to fix all the things she had done wrong.
Then she heard a thump then a thud. Nancy’s eyes snapped open.
The monster, the slasher, the gigantic Hurricane Williams was laid out flat on the ground. Standing behind him was Parker Ames, the girl Nancy knew as the psycho from Patrick’s Garage & Gas.
Parker was holding an oxygen tank, which she’d just used to knock Hurricane out. “You’ve got about ten seconds before he gets up again, and when he does, he’s going to be really cranky. If you want to keep all your arms and legs, come with me.”
Hurricane was already starting to climb back up onto his feet, and the way Nancy saw her situation, she was all out of options. She followed Parker back into the hospital. They ran down the corridor, and although Nancy’s knees hurt and her legs were tired, she kept up with Parker, who had barely broken a sweat.
When they reached the end of the hall, Parker slid to a stop just before they were about to take the corner. She looked over her shoulder and waited… and waited… and waited.
“What is that thing?” Nancy asked, panting for breath.
“Persistent,” Parker said. “He’s going to keep coming and coming until I can get my hands on some weapons.”
“You don’t have any weapons? Why don’t you have any weapons?”
“Long story,” Parker said.
“Maybe we should split up?”
“That never works out, trust me,” Parker said, her eyes glued to the end of the hall.
“Maybe he’ll gave up?”
“Did he look like the giving-up type to you?”
“No,” Nancy said. “Not really.”
And he certainly wasn’t. Out of the darkness at the end of the hall, the dark figure appeared. With his machete in his hand, he thumped down that hall with the two girls in his sights.
“Time to go,” Parker said, gripping Nancy’s arm, and ran down a maze of corridors where they took left turns here and right turns there. Nancy wasn’t sure that she would ever find her way back to the main entrance and the nurses’ station.
They took a corner and ran straight, smack bang into Deputy Grady.
“Whoa, whoa, everybody slow down,” he said. “What’s happening?”
“He’s coming!” Nancy yelled, pointing in the direction they just came from. “What do we do? What do we do! He’s coming!”
“You need to calm down, Gidget,” Parker said. “That’s what you need to do.”
Grady pulled his revolver. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Are you insane?” Parker asked, motioning to his revolver. “That’s not going to stop him.”
“Sweetheart,” Grady said, “this bad boy would stop a Mack truck with just one round to the engine block.”
Parker looked him up and down. “Good luck with that.” She turned to Nancy. “I need my weapons; let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we stay with the police?”
“Not if you want to live.”
Parker stepped off, so Nancy figured the discussion was off the table. She looked from Grady to Parker and weighed up her options. Should she stay, or should she go? To her in that moment, Grady looked like the cop the other cops send to go get coffee.
“Good luck,” she said to Grady and followed Parker.
Thirty-Six
Deputy Grady watched them leave. They weren’t the first people who didn’t take him seriously. In fact, nobody took Grady seriously at being a cop. Not his girlfriend or his sisters and certainly not his mother. They all treated him as if he were nine years old and playing dress up, but all he’d ever wanted to be was a cop, just like his old man.
Grady’s father was a town hero around Happydale, and not because he was known to be a fair and honest cop who always gave people a fair and honest shake or because, at every Christmas, Grady, Sr. would dress up as Santa Claus and give out presents to the kids in the orphanage.
Grady, Sr. was a local hero because of one event and one event only. In 1953, when the old man was only in his second year of law enforcement, Grady got a phone call from Mrs. Miller up on Haddon Street, saying that she thought some kids had broken into the old Nester house. It had been abandoned since old man Nester had died sometime in ’51. His two sons couldn’t agree on whether or not to sell it, and because they couldn’t agree, it’d sat empty for years. So Grady, Sr. climbed into his cruiser and headed on over to Haddon Street. He thought he would knock on the door, put the fear of God into a couple of teenagers, and head on back into town. That’s what he thought anyway.
Grady pulled up to the old double-story house, which sat atop a slight hill like a cardboard cutout of a house in the old black-and-white horror movies he used to watch as a kid. The Nester house had fallen into disrepair over the few years it had been empty, and the floorboards on the porch had grown warped. When Grady, Sr. walked up the couple of steps and onto the porch, the boards creaked with each step he took.
Now what Grady, Sr. didn’t know was that across state lines in Clovis, New Mexico, there was an all-points alert on the Eggleston gang. The gang consisted of four brothers—Howie, Daniel, Jake, and Ernest—and it was safe to say that none of the brothers were exactly the best the United States had to offer. The four of them had been in and out of one jail or another since they were ten years old, and six months ago, it’d just so happened to coincide that all four Eggleston brothers were out of the big house all at the same time, something which hadn’t happened for thirteen years. They decided to celebrate by robbing the First National Bank in Tucson. They got away with that caper, so they robbed another bank in Los Alamos. In the previous two months, they had robbed six banks, stolen just shy of a million dollars, and murdered nine people, including two cops. They had been chased across three states and were lying low in the Nester house while Ernest recovered from a gunshot to the leg. Clearly, Grady, Sr. didn’t know any of that when he knocked on the door alone and in full uniform. If he had, Grady, Sr. probably would have brought a few cops to back him up. As it turned out, he had taken Mrs. Miller at her word and assumed the only people in the Nester house were a bunch of teenagers goofing off.
When he knocked on the door, he certainly didn’t expect to be met with a shotgun blast. He hit the deck armed with nothing more than the .45 on his hip and the nine bullets in the magazine. What Grady, Sr. did next made him a legend. He could have run or hidden, but he stayed and stood his ground. He kicked in what was left of that shotgunned door, and ninety seconds later, all four Eggleston brothers were as dead as nails. After that day, in the town of Happydale, Grady, Sr. never paid for a beer in his life.
That was the story Grady had in the back of his mind when he palmed his revolver and stepped into the path of Hurricane Williams. Grady checked the rounds in the revolver—all six were ready to rock ’n’ roll. Grady leveled that big bastard up and took aim at the monster coming his way.
This will be my Nester house moment. They’ll have to take me seriously now.
Grady waited until Hurricane was in range.
And waited…
And waited…
Hurricane wasn’t deterred—he just kept on moving forward.
Grady wrapped his finger around the trigger. He drew a breath.
Hurricane kept on coming.
Sweat rolled down Grady’s cheek.
Then finally, Hurricane was within shooting range. Grady squeezed the trigger and fired. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The slasher hit the deck. He was out cold and not moving.
Grady cocked his head; even he was surprised. He smiled and gave himself a little self-congratulatory nod as he half strutted, half walked down the corridor. I did it, he thought to himself. He was finally out of his father’s shadow. He was no longer Roy Grady’s boy. He was his own man.
Then Grady went and did what no one should ever do around a slasher. He walked up to Hurricane Williams and tapped him with his foot, to see if he really was dead.
Big mistake.
Hurricane grabbed hold of Grady’s leg and ripped it clean off his body. Clean. Off. His. Body.
Naturally, Grady hit the deck, screaming, yelling, and moaning as Hurricane climbed to his feet, with Grady’s leg still in his hand. Hurricane looked down at the three-limbed cop, who was still screaming, and beat him over and over with his own leg until Grady stopped screaming and his face was nothing but mush. And even then, he kept on beating.
Thirty-Seven
Parker and Nancy heard the gunfire and didn’t look back. They pushed though the double doors and stepped out into the parking lot.
“Do you think he’s all right?” Nancy asked.
Parker scanned the parking lot, looking for a set of wheels. “Who?”
“The cop.”
“Fuck no,” she said. There were maybe a dozen or so cars in the parking lot, and half of them looked as if they’d been dumped there. “Let’s find some wheels and get the hell out of here.”
Thirty-Eight
Everybody in Texas had a gun, so when Jessica Hopkins heard gunfire in the hospital, she knew exactly what it was and hit the deck of the nurses’ station. Irene had just come back from checking in on Nancy Sinclair and found her missing. Jessica figured the gunfire and the missing girl were not a coincidence.
Quietly and in slow motion, Jessica raised her hand and patted the desktop until her fingers latched onto the phone receiver. She pulled it down and put it to her ear then reached back to feel for the buttons to dial 911.
It rang.
And rang.
And rang.
The 911 call was automatically directed to the Happydale police station, and although she didn’t know it, the place was empty, except for Morrison lying facedown on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Nobody was answering that phone.
“What’s happening?” Irene whispered.
“It’s ringing,” Jessica whispered back. “I don’t think there’s anyone there.”
The Happydale Police answering machine kicked in, and Jessica left a message with all the pertinent details. “Gunfire. Hospital. Come now!” And she hung up.
