Escape from Happydale, page 5
part #1 of The Last Final Girl Series
Parker caught it, took aim at Evil Santa square in the face, wrapped her finger around the trigger, and squeezed.
Bang! Bang!
She put two in his chest, and Evil Santa hit the deck.
Parker threw a cocky smirk McCormick’s way. “And that’s how it’s done.
McCormick crossed her arms. “Is it?”
There was a groan. They both heard it at the same time, and there was little doubt as to where that groan came from. Evil Santa tossed and turned, then the scary son of a bitch climbed to his feet as if nothing at all had happened.
The smirk dropped from Parker’s face. She pulled the gun up again, took aim, and…
Bang!
Bang!
She put two more in his chest, and just like before, Evil Santa hit the deck.
There were no more smirks and no more cockiness from Parker—that was for sure. She kept the gun in her hand and her aim on the slasher.
Then… Evil Santa groaned, moaned, and again climbed to his feet. And just like before, he came at her, and with one lunge, Billy the Evil Santa wrapped his fingers around Parker’s throat.
“What the fuck!” she snapped, but that was about all she could get out because Evil Santa’s fingers were squeezing tight.
“He’s a slasher, sweetheart,” McCormick said as she slid a machete from the bench and held it in her hand. “And with a slasher, you either take the head, or you go home.” With one violent swing, she separated Evil Santa’s bloody pillow-cased head from his body and sent it bouncing along the floor.
Parker dropped to her hands and knees, gasping for air. After a couple of deep breaths, she managed to slow her heart beat down, and her mind began to come to terms with what the hell she was dealing with. “They won’t die.”
McCormick pulled a rag from her back pocket and wiped the blood off the machete as she leaned down to Parker. “Don’t be mistaken. They die. Some die a lot harder than others. We don’t know why, but if you shoot them, stab them, or beat them, they will regenerate, and they will come back after you. The one thing they all have in common is that if you take their head, they go to hell and never return.”
She offered Parker a hand and helped her to her feet. The apprentice patted herself down and regained her bearings. It was in that moment, Parker noticed another shark cage with another sheet over it.
“Who’s in there?” she asked.
“Oh,” McCormick said. “You’re not quite ready for him yet. But you will be.” Her eyes hardened. “You will be.”
Nine
The next morning, McCormick woke Parker up at five o’clock, and her training began. It started with a five-mile jog, followed by hand-to-hand combat, where McCormick taught her karate and jujitsu. Then in the afternoon was another five-mile jog, as apparently with slashers, there’s a lot of running, so cardio is very important. After the jog, it was weapon work, and to a hunter of slashers, anything and absolutely everything could be used as a weapon. McCormick had once sent a slasher right back to hell with a spork. A goddamned spork.
Then in the afternoon, it was time for school.
“If you’re in the business of hunting slashers, and we are very much in that business, then there are a few rules a young heroine needs to abide by.” McCormick held up a finger. “Firstly, never under any circumstances read aloud from a demonic book. In the history of reading aloud from a demonic book, no good has every come from it. Secondly, if you’re staring into a mirror, never say the name of a slasher five times. Thirdly, if anybody says they’ll be right back, chances are, they won’t. Which leads me to my next point. If someone suggests you split up, they’re probably going to die.” Her voice downshifted to something much more serious. “Lastly, never assume the slasher is dead. You can shoot the slasher. Bury the slasher. Chain the slasher to an engine block and drown them at the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake. But unless you behead the son of a bitch, they will always return.”
Every single day was like that, and after three weeks, Parker was exhausted.
“Can’t we just do this in a Rocky montage or something?” she said.
“A what montage?”
“A Rocky montage.”
“What’s a Rocky montage?”
“In the movie Rocky, Rocky Balboa tries to become a better boxer by doing push-ups, chin-ups, and chasing chickens, and instead of showing you every single little thing he did, they crammed like months of training into a snappy two-minute montage to some inspirational music.”
McCormick looked at her like she was an idiot. “No, we can’t do this in a Rocky montage.”
“Can we at least have some inspirational music?”
“No.”
And it went on like that for six months. Now, showing you, dear reader, six months of intense training may not be the best use of your reading time. Do you really want to know about how McCormick made Parker throw a machete into a slasher dummy three thousand times before the blade finally struck the dummy in the head? Well, I do not. So let’s go with Parker’s idea and do this in a montage. Throw a cassette in that tape deck, blast some inspirational music, and let’s get into this montage. I recommend “You’re the Best” from the 1985 hit movie The Karate Kid.
Parker woke up in the morning, and she didn’t want to get up. She had never been a morning person, and it was cold in Detroit. Nevertheless, Parker climbed out of her cot, stretched her back, slid on her sneakers, and hit the cold Detroit street, where she jogged through the winter fog for five miles.
Back in the warehouse, Parker ran her finger across the various weapons on the workbench, trying to decide which one to choose. She paused at the machete, picked it up, and admired it in her hand.
With that machete in hand, she walked out of the warehouse, across the street, and into the empty lot that was littered with abandoned furniture and trash. She walked up to one of the trees in the lot and lined the machete up to it.
She took aim and swung. Donk! The machete got stuck in the tree. She tried to pull it out, but it was buried in there deep. It was going to be a long road—that was for sure.
“The slasher very rarely appears in the daylight,” McCormick said. “Everything you can do in the light, you need to be able to do in the dark.”
Parker was at a bench with a blindfold over her eyes and a dozen different parts of a chain saw in front of her.
“You’ve got twenty seconds.” McCormick yelled, “Go!”
Parker’s hands frantically rushed around and fumbled over the various parts.
“Fifteen seconds!”
She tried putting two pieces together. The wrong pieces. She slipped, dropped them, then tried two more.
“Ten seconds!”
Finally, she got two pieces together. Then a third!
“Five seconds!”
She connected the chain. With just one more piece to go, she was just about to do it—
McCormick slammed her hand on the table. “Times up! You’re dead! Do it again!”
Parker swung the machete into the tree then pulled it out and swung it again and again and again. There were dozens of trees around her, and each and every one of them had the same battle scars from Parker attacking them with a machete.
Blindfolded, Parker assembled the chain saw. She was getting faster.
Parker hacked into the tree with the machete. She was getting faster at that too.
Again, Parker assembled the chain saw. Her hands knew exactly what they’re doing. Each piece she grabbed connected to the one before it. Quickly and efficiently, she slid the last piece into place, and when she was done, Parker pulled off her blindfold and looked up at McCormick and her stopwatch.
“Sixteen seconds,” McCormick said proudly.
Out in the empty lot, machete in hand, Parker hacked away at a tree.
Hard.
Fast.
There was a big dent in the side. She didn’t let up. Parker just kept on hacking. Wood splinters flew around everywhere and floated in the air. There was not much left of the tree, and a couple of big swings was all it took for Parker Ames to take the whole damn thing down. She swung hard and fast, and with a crunch of wood, the tree collapsed to the ground with a thud.
Out of breath and covered in sweat, Parker looked over at McCormick, who gave her the slightest smile of approval.
And with the hacking down of a tree with a machete, Parker Ames had completed the six-month transformation from the scared little girl at Hell House into a slasher-killing machine.
Ten
McCormick was out stocking up on supplies when Parker pulled a chair over the cracked concrete of the warehouse and placed it in front of the shark cage with the sheet draped over it. Since Parker’s very first day there, that slasher had been kept under wraps. She could hear him, of course. Mostly at night and mostly just groans. For the first week, the noises kept her awake, but six months later, she had grown used to the sounds that would give most people nightmares for eternity.
McCormick had told her not to take the sheet off, and in all the time she had been there, she did what she was told. She obeyed McCormick’s order for one simple reason. Seeing another slasher would make it real. Parker remembered little of the night Hurricane Williams had rampaged through her house, and what she did remember was in fragments. That night felt like something she had simply made up, and seeing another slasher would make everything too real. For a long time, she wasn’t sure if she was ready for real.
Ready or not, though, she climbed off her chair, took a couple of steps over to the cage, wrapped her hands around the sheet, and yanked it off. The slasher inside was a triple-plus-sized bastard. Literally, he was the size of a refrigerator. And ugly! His face looked like it had been stitched out of a whole bunch of other older, uglier faces.
Parker looked him up and down, from his massive bare feet all the way up his tattered clothes, and settled on his mangled face. “Have you ever considered a mask?”
He didn’t even budge. The slasher just stared straight ahead as if she weren’t even there. She had to give it to the slashers—they were a patient breed.
Parker was standing there, studying him, when the garage doors opened and McCormick’s Camaro cruised in out of the Detroit night. When she climbed out and saw Parker standing in front of the cage, there was no yelling or chastising. McCormick just made her way across the floor and stood shoulder to shoulder with her protégée. For a moment, all the pair of them did was stare down the slasher.
“Ugly motherfucker, isn’t he?” McCormick said.
“Probably won’t be winning too many beauty pageants, I’d imagine.”
“No, I couldn’t imagine he would.” McCormick spat some tobacco on the ground. “Unless it was an ugly motherfucker beauty pageant.”
“Probably not too many of them.” Parker lit a cigarette. “Where’s he from?”
“Alabama. He’s one of the oldest slashers I’ve ever seen. His name was Anika, but they called him Beast. Not at first, but that was the name he would become to be known as.”
“He looks old.”
“Over two hundred years old. A little less than two hundred years ago, back when Beast was twenty-two years old and people called him Anika, he was a slave that lived on the Steve P. Vincent plantation. Now the Steve P. Vincent plantation had a reputation of being a somewhat undesirable plantation. Big Daddy Vincent was a particularly cruel man and encouraged that behavior in his overseers. Beatings, rapes, and even the occasional lynching was commonplace on the plantation, and Beast here grew up on that plantation. He wasn’t born on some other plantation and sold to Big Daddy Vincent; he was born and bred on the Steve P. Vincent plantation. As a matter of fact, he had never stepped foot off the plantation in all of his twenty-two years. He was always a big boy, but he was also gentle, so people naturally assumed that he was dumb, and naturally, because they assumed he was dumb, they saw him as a non-threat and pretty much left him alone. As long as he picked his fair share of cotton, Anika was free to roam the plantation. There were rules: he had to stay on the grounds, and he couldn’t go into the big house. Nobody was allowed to go into the big house. And for his entire life, Anika obeyed those rules. Except for that one time. That’s all it took—just once. The story goes he was out the back of the big house, where Big Daddy kept his prized chickens. It was Anika’s job to tend to the chickens, and he took the responsibility seriously. So there Anika was, tending to the chickens, which he loved and treated as his own, when Belle—Big Daddy’s youngest, and some would say most precocious, daughter—came to the back door. You see, Belle was the kind of young lady that some would refer to as a…” McCormick struggled to find the right word.
“A slut,” Parker offered.
“A slut,” McCormick repeated. “Precisely. Now, people may not have used that exact word when describing her, but if they did, they wouldn’t be far off. Now what Anika didn’t know was that Big Daddy had recently denied Belle a trip to Birmingham, and she was looking for a way to get back at him.”
“And sleeping with the help was how she was going to do that?”
“Now Anika might have been a gentle soul, but ever since he was sixteen and Belle was thirteen, he’d had a crush on her. So when Belle invited him into the kitchen for a glass of iced tea, he knew he shouldn’t have gone, but he went anyway. When she invited him up to her room, he knew he shouldn’t have gone, but he went anyway. And when Belle invited him to sit on her bed, he certainly knew that he shouldn’t have done that. But he did it anyway. What Anika didn’t know was that on the other side of the plantation was a man who, from a distance, vaguely, if you squinted, looked, somewhat kinda like Anika. And this Anika look-alike just happened to jump the fence of the plantation on his way through, and that man was mighty hungry. As he was cutting across the land, he came across Big Daddy’s prized chickens and thought to himself, ‘Damn, I’m hungry. I’m going take me one of those chickens.’ And that’s just what he did. Now when Big Daddy found out that one of his prized chickens was missing, presumed eaten, well, Big Daddy, he wasn’t too happy about that.
“Big Daddy rounded up his overseers, and they rounded up Anika, who by that time was back with his people at the rear of the plantation. It had been a while since they had themselves a good old-fashioned lynchin’, and Big Daddy thought it was time to set an example. So Big Daddy gathered up everybody on the plantation, including his five daughters, which included his youngest, Belle, and they all gathered around a big oak tree just by the big house. They tossed a rope over one of its biggest branches and slipped a noose around young Anika’s neck. Then Big Daddy asked him if he’d killed and eaten one of Big Daddy’s prized chickens. Now, of course, Anika knew that he hadn’t, but he was no fool. He knew that he couldn’t tell Big Daddy that at the time his chicken went missing, presumably eaten, he was bedding the young Belle. If he did, there would be a noose around Belle’s neck as well, so when Big Daddy asked for a second time if he had killed and eaten the chicken, Anika looked at Belle and told Big Daddy what he wanted to hear. Two minutes later, Anika was swinging from a rope. A minute after that, he ran out of oxygen, and not long after that, he was dead. “
“Only he wasn’t,” Parker said.
“Not in the traditional sense anyway,” McCormick continued. “In the last gasping-for-air minute of his life, Anika prayed. He didn’t pray to be saved; he didn’t pray for a quick death. The gentle Anika prayed for revenge, for in his mind and in his heart, he didn’t deserve what he got.” McCormick circled the cage. “God didn’t answer his prayers. But the devil did.”
“I assume it didn’t end too well for Big Daddy Vincent.”
“It didn’t end too well for anybody,” McCormick said. “Sometime just after midnight, Anika pulled himself out of the grave the other slaves had put him in and walked into the big house with nothing but a hammer in his hand. He went through that house room by room, and he put that hammer through their skulls. Twelve people in total.”
“What about Belle?”
“That’s just it,” McCormick said. “What about Belle? Hers was the last room he reached, and when he did, she was awake. She knew what was happening. She hid under the bed, but it wasn’t the best hiding place, you see. Anika found her, and when it came time to split her skull in two like everybody else’s in the house, Anika just couldn’t do it.”
“He let her go?”
“He did,” McCormick said. “Curious behavior for a slasher. If Anika had left his bloody rampage right there on the Steve P. Vincent plantation, then he and I wouldn’t have any problems.” McCormick turned to the cage. “But you didn’t, did you, Beast? No, you took your show on the road. Southern gentlemen disappeared all over the South for a couple of hundred years. He tore them apart limb by limb and earned himself the nickname of Beast.” McCormick shifted her attention back to Parker. “Not all slashers started out as evil. The vast majority of them were turned evil by people who thought they were good.”
“It doesn’t matter how many of these things we kill. They’re just going to keep coming and coming, aren’t they?” Parker asked. “What we do isn’t really going to matter in the end. Not as long as there’s evil in the world, and I figure there’s always going to be evil.”
McCormick rolled up the sleeve on her left arm to reveal rows of skull-and-crossbones tattoos just like the kind on the fuselages of World War II planes. “I have one for every slasher I’ve taken down.” Then she rolled up the sleeve on her other arm, where she had an elaborate tattoo of a vine full of leaves. “And a leaf for every life I’ve saved.”
There were many, many more leaves than skulls.
“What we do matters,” McCormick said.
