Escape from Happydale, page 6
part #1 of The Last Final Girl Series
Eleven
Parker rolled over and sat up in her cot. It was the middle of the night, and the warehouse was deathly quiet. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but Parker knew that something just wasn’t right. Moonlight poured through the windows and sent shards of light beaming into the darkness. There was no wind in the air and no distant sounds of traffic and police sirens.
She hung her bare feet over the edge of the cot, quietly planted them on the floor, and pushed herself up as she scanned the warehouse for anything out of the ordinary. The Camaro was exactly where they had left it. She saw the machetes, knives, and chain saws on the bench, exactly where they had left them, and then she looked to the shark cage to find that Beast was absolutely not exactly where they had left him.
The door was open, and he was gone.
Shit, Parker thought. Shit, shit, shit.
She looked at McCormick’s cot; she was gone. McCormick had trouble sleeping, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to spend half the night walking, but unless she had taken Beast for a run, Parker had a problem on her hands.
She shrugged off grogginess from the sleep she was in thirty seconds earlier and headed straight for the weapons. The first one her fingers wrapped around was a chain saw she had named Aerosmith. With a weapon in hand, she felt marginally better, but it was the tiniest of margins.
Parker scanned the room. Beast was nowhere in sight.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Her heart pounded, and sweat rolled down her cheek. “You got this… sure. No problem,” she whispered to herself.
She had been training for this. For six months, she had been punching, and rolling, and stabbing, but aside from Hurricane Williams, Parker Ames had never faced a slasher all by herself. And when it came to Hurricane, he had damn well almost killed her.
I should run, Parker thought. I should run and get the hell out of here. Climb in behind the wheel of the Camaro and get the hell out of Dodge. See you later, Detroit.
She thought of her mother and father, and then she pushed that thought clear out of her mind.
There was a groan in the darkness, then the absolutely gigantic slasher stepped out into the moonlight.
“Oh, hi,” Parker said. “Have you lost weight?”
Weight must have been a touchy subject, because Beast charged at her as if he was in the horror Olympics.
Parker pulled the cord to crank up the chain saw. Zip! Zip! Zip!
Aerosmith wouldn’t start!
“Shit.”
Beast was still coming at her.
She took step back and quickly glanced over her shoulder. Right behind her was an open shipping container—absolutely the very last place Parker wanted to be trapped in with a slasher and a defective chain saw. She yanked the cord again. Zip! Zip! Zip!
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Getting ready to swing, Beast raised his ax when he was only a half a dozen steps away.
Zip! Zip! Zip! Zip! Zip! The son-of-a-bitch chain saw wouldn’t kick in.
Beast was on her. He swung.
Parker was almost mincemeat, but at the very last second, she ducked and rolled. Just like McCormick had trained her to do. Six months of hard work and training turned into instinct. She could do this. Maybe she could really do this…
When Parker ducked out of the way, the hulking bulk of Beast couldn’t slow down in time. Beast ran straight past her and into the open shipping container. He disappeared into the darkness of it. Parker climbed to her feet and smiled, then when she yanked on the chain saw cord, Aerosmith finally roared to life.
“Got you now, you son of a bitch,” Parker said as she moved in with Aerosmith dangling down low, and when the edges of it tapped the concrete, sparks flew. Half a dozen steps later, she disappeared into the darkness of the shipping container.
For a moment, everything was quiet. Not a sound or a whisper. Nothing but absolute silence. Then there was a grunt… the sound of a struggle… and a scream. The chain saw roared, then there were sparks and flashes of light in the darkness. As the battle inside the shipping container raged on, there was movement in another part of the warehouse.
In the darkness, McCormick’s figure stepped out from behind the Camaro and into the moonlight streaming in through the windows. There was no concern on her face, and she certainly wasn’t in a hurry. She casually made her way over to the container, wrapped her fingers around the handle of the container door, and swung it closed. It hit with a clunk, and when she rotated the big metal arm and pulled it down, the container door was locked with Parker and the slasher inside.
She’d planned whole thing. Every. Last. Single. Detail.
“Hey!” Parker yelled from inside, panic in her voice. “McCormick! Let me out! Let me out! McCormick!”
McCormick didn’t budge a muscle. She just stood in front of the shipping container, listening to the brutal fight inside.
Twelve
Three hours later, morning sunlight blasted through the windows of the warehouse. McCormick sat on a stool with a cigarette between her lips. She pulled the smoke back to the butt then crushed it under her foot and left its corpse on the concrete floor alongside all the other butts. The container was quiet, and it had been for hours. McCormick had sat there, listening to the battle that must have been unfolding in near darkness, for close to an hour. It’d escalated dramatically before suddenly falling silent. Then everything was as quiet as a drunken mouse. It was unclear who had survived. Parker or Beast? It really was anybody’s guess, and although McCormick hoped Parker had made it, she knew from experience that slashers were a difficult breed to kill. She gave Parker a thirty percent chance of survival. Hell, even that was generous.
So when McCormick climbed to her feet and made her way over to the container, she didn’t have high hopes. McCormick unlocked the door and swung it open.
Sunlight blasted inside. The walls were covered in splashes of blood, and there was Beast, on the floor, minus his head.
Leaning against the wall of the container was Parker with her new best friend, Aerosmith, in her hand. “You’re totally out of my cool books,” she said when she saw McCormick.
McCormick took a couple of steps into the container, where the inch of blood on the floor rose up around the leather sole of her boots and the thick smell of death hung in the air.
She raised her eyes from the slasher to the brand-spanking-new slasher hunter. “You’re ready.”
Thirteen
Eighteen months later Parker and McCormick sped through Wessex County, New Jersey, in the Camaro. They made one hell of a team as they traveled from one side of the country to the other, chasing monsters and saving lives. The skull-and-crossbones tattoos on Parker’s arm began to grow, and so did the intertwining vines and leaves on the other. Since that long night in the shipping container, the pair of them had taken down twenty-three different slashers, and at that very moment, they were on their way to take down one more.
They barreled past a freshly painted sign: Welcome to Camp Sterling Lake.
“Now this goddamned place,” McCormick said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on this for years. You see, way back in the ’50s, it used to be a summer camp, and of course, naturally something horrific happened there, and now the bastard of a joint is haunted by a slasher. In the summer of 1953, a young boy named Clinton Jones attended the camp. He was small and shy and didn’t have many friends. His father thought going to the camp would toughen him up, but things didn’t really pan out that way. Kids can be cruel and at Camp Sterling Lake, they were particularly cruel. They would steal his clothes when he was in the showers and make him run back to his cabin in front of all the girls. They’d steal his letters that he wrote home, pleading for his parents to come get him, then read them in front of everyone. But the worst of it came when the kids had to go out rowing. Clinton didn’t want to go, but the counselor made him. You see, Clinton couldn’t swim, but nobody knew that at the time. So when one of the kids knocked him out of the canoe, he kicked and screamed and cried for help, and while everybody pointed and laughed, Clinton slipped under the water. By the time they realized something was wrong, it was way too late. He never resurfaced.”
“Never?” Parker asked.
“Well, not straight away. The police came and went. There were searches and divers. But the body of Clinton Jones was never recovered. The camp closed down for the rest of the summer, but the following year, it was business as usual. For a few weeks, everything was fine. The camp counselor ran activities, and everybody seemed to be having fun. That was until one morning when the kids woke up and found that every single counselor was missing. For an entire day, it was a complete mystery. Nobody knew what happened to those teenagers. Then the tide went out, and they discovered what had happened. All ten counselors had boulders chained to their feet, and they were pushed off the pier into the lake.”
“They all drowned?”
“And the camp was closed again,” McCormick said. “It stayed that way until yesterday, when it reopened.”
“You think he’s going to come back, this Clinton Jones?”
“Slashers aren’t exactly known to let go of a grudge, if you know what I mean.”
Thirty minutes later, McCormick slowed the Camaro to a stop at the entrance of the camp. At first glance, it looked like every other summer camp Parker had ever seen, with a dozen or so cabins, a main hall. It was all right by the lake. It was humming and buzzing with kids running around laughing, smiling, and having fun. The place was the perfect hunting ground for a slasher.
“I’ll be at the motel a couple of miles down the road,” McCormick said. “At the first sign of anything hinky, get on the phone, and I’ll be down here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, with a chain saw and a machete.”
“Hinky?” Parker repeated with a smirk.
“Yes, hinky. It means…”
“I know what it means. I just never thought I’d hear it come out of your mouth.”
“Do you know what else is hinky, young lady?”
Parker’s eyes dipped to the floor of the car. “My attitude.”
“Exactly,” McCormick said. “Now, if you see anything hinky, call me, and we’ll take him out together.”
Parker gave her a nod and climbed out of the car. Instead of the leather and denim battle uniform Parker usually wore, McCormick’s young protégée wore a cheerleading uniform. She didn’t exactly look comfortable in it either.
Parker leaned back in through the window of the Camaro. “Bye, Mom.”
McCormick wasn’t having any of it and flipped her the bird. Then she slipped the car into reverse, and Parker watched as she backed out of Camp Sterling Lake. When the Camaro was out of sight, Parker shifted her gaze up to the banner hanging over the entrance of the camp: Welcome to the First National Cheerleading Camp!
“I can’t see this ending well,” Parker muttered to herself.
Nothing attracted a slasher more than a summer camp. Sex, drugs, booze, and teenagers all rolled into one isolated location made for the perfect prey and the perfect hunting ground. It wasn’t Parker’s or McCormick’s first foray into summer camp hunting. In the previous year, they’d hit up Camp Takago, Camp Timberlane, and Camp Fayette and taken down the three slashers picking off teenagers. They had a pretty good system about it as well. There was no way in hell either one of them could rock up with a chain saw and a machete and tell everyone they were there to go beheading. Nope, they had to be a hell of a lot more subtle.
Generally, Parker would go undercover as a camp counselor and pretend to just be another regular teenage girl with a summer job. During the day, she would she would do activities and chores, but at night, she would patrol the camp, looking for whichever slasher they suspected of being there. It was a good system, and truth be told, it was easy hunting. Any camp where some kid died more or less had something hinky going on with it. All they had to do was keep an eye out for camps with tragic histories and take a sharp weapon.
As far as anybody at the camp knew, Parker Ames was Diane Peters from Minnesota. She’d been assigned a bunk in a cabin with four other girls, given a tour of Camp Sterling Lake, and walked through her itinerary for the next upcoming weeks. She had dinner in the main hall, made polite small talk, and pretended that it was so exciting to be there.
Later that night, after everybody had gone to bed, Parker lay in her bunk, still fully dressed in her uniform and with a machete right there by her side. She checked the time on her Swatch watch in the moonlight; it was a little after midnight. Parker was going to wait until one in the morning and then go on a patrol to see if Clinton Jones was primed to make a comeback.
When she heard giggling outside the cabin, she rolled over onto her stomach and peered out the window. A handful of girls ran toward the lake. They were obviously up to something that they probably shouldn’t have been, which meant that if Clinton Jones was going to make a comeback, a handful of girls sneaking off to the lake the middle of the night was probably as good of a time as any.
Parker rolled off the bunk and gently lowered her feet to the floor. There was a girl in the bunk beneath her, and that girl opened her eyes when she heard Parker. Then those eyes widened when she saw the machete in Parker’s hand.
“I’d go back to sleep if I were you,” Parker said.
And the girl’s eyes snapped closed as if she hadn’t seen a thing.
Parker followed the sounds of laughter and fun through the camp and to the lake. She only had moonlight to guide her way, but as she got closer, she saw the scene.
A couple of girls peeled off their clothes and jumped off the pier.
Skinny-dipping. Check.
There were a couple more girls drinking beers with a couple of guys.
Underage drinking. Check.
And over by the woods, there were a couple more naked kids were rolling around.
And teenage sex. Check.
Parker let out a disappointed sigh. “Some people really just asked to be hacked and slashed.”
Then there was a scream. It was long, it was loud, and it was full of panic.
Parker’s head snapped in the direction of the pier. Clinton Jones stood at the end of it. He was big, bulky and soaking wet. In one hand, he held a fillet knife, and in the other, he held up a cheerleader by the throat. She kicked and struggled, but her feet were far from the ground. No matter how much she kicked and struggled, she wasn’t going anywhere. The slasher held that blade up in the air, and within a matter of seconds, he gutted her like a fish.
Naturally, everybody in the vicinity screamed, and really, who could have blamed them? The naked girls gathered their clothes and ran. The guys by the fire didn’t skip a beat either, and they, too, took off running. Even the couple in the woods were getting the hell out of there.
Parker stopped one of the girls running past her and pushed a crumpled-up piece of paper into her hand. “Call that number and tell the woman on the other end that Clinton Jones is here and he doesn’t like what he sees.”
“What are you going to do?” the girl asked.
“Get started early,” Parker said as she looked back over at Clinton Jones just as he tossed that poor girl into the lake.
By the time Parker made it down to the pier, the screaming teenagers were all gone, and it was just her and Clinton.
She looked the slasher up and down. “Sorry to break up the party.”
Clinton Jones didn’t say a word. Slashers weren’t exactly chatterboxes.
Over the past eighteen months, Parker Ames had become something close to a samurai with a machete. She could duck and weave her way through any slasher going on the attack. She may have been faster than the slasher and may have been more nimble on her feet, but the truth of it was, in order to go toe to toe with a slasher, she needed to be. The slasher would always have two advantages over her, no matter what. They were always going to be stronger—Parker could hit the weights all day long in the gym, but no matter how many weights she lifted, she would never, not in a million years, be as strong as a slasher. Parker’s other disadvantage was that she could stab, slice, and beat up on a slasher all day long, but unless she separated the head from the body, none of it mattered. So when it came down to going into battle, Parker needed to be faster. She needed to not be stabbed, sliced, or beaten along the way… Thankfully for her, she had gotten pretty good at that too.
But not as good as she’d thought.
Parker ran as fast as fast as she could toward the slasher, and with one big kick, he sent her flying back and slamming into the ground. The blow took the wind out of her, and it took Parker couple of deep breaths for her to get herself together. When she did, she climbed to her feet, dusted herself off, and picked up her machete off the ground.
“Okay, you son of a bitch. Let’s try that again.”
Clinton Jones raised that fillet knife, and Parker knew he was going to throw it—there was no doubting that. Parker knew the body language and exactly what it looked like the very moment a slasher was about to throw a blade. Eighteen months ago, Parker wouldn’t have recognized those movements until it was too late. But that was eighteen months ago, and Parker was no longer that little girl from Hell House. So when Clinton Jones pulled his arm back to throw that blade at her, Parker was ready.
She watched as he thrust the blade forward, as it left his fingers, and as it spun through the air. Just as it was about to strike her, Parker ducked.
Somebody who hadn’t seen all of those things was Delores McCormick. She didn’t dive, duck, or anything, and the knife hit her square in the chest. It took a moment or two for the shock of it to sink in, and when it had, McCormick dropped to her knees and let the chain saw in her hand slip from her fingers.
“That was unexpected,” she said.
Parker looked from McCormick to Clinton Jones, and she saw red real fast. She gripped that machete tightly in her hand and charged at the slasher with so much speed and anger that the bastard didn’t stand a chance. She swung that machete, and she separated the slasher’s head from his body in one swoop and sent Clinton Jones back to hell.
