Escape From Slaughter Beach

by Jack Quaid

“What the hell is this?” Parker asked.

  Richardson was the one under the hood and holding the noose. “Is the sheriff in?”

  “No,” Parker said. “You might have to come back later.”

  There was a long pause. “Nevertheless,” Richardson said, mustering up some sort of misguided sense of authority. “We’re the Wolves of Slaughter Beach, and for generations, the Wolves of Slaughter Beach have served as an instrument of justice. When the scales of justice have failed, we’ve been there. When the guilty have gone free, we’ve been there. When justice needed to be dealt, we’ve been the dealers.”

  Unimpressed, Parker glanced at her watch.

  “Christine Turner, it has been deemed by the Wolves of Slaughter Beach that you must be punished for the murders of Lloyd Fairweather, Mary Brown, Lily Brown, Bob Brown, and Ricky Moore.

  “And we’re here to bring justice to your victims,” Nathan said.

  “If you come peacefully, nobody else will get hurt,” Richardson continued.

  “What if I don’t want to come peacefully?” Parker asked.

  The hoods all swapped a glance, then both Nathan and Steve raised their bats a little higher.

  “Then we’ll come and get ya violently,” Steve said.

  Parker sighed. “I totally don’t have the time for this shit,” she muttered and reached into the duffel bag and pulled out Aerosmith.

  She cranked up that bad boy and let it chug-chug-chug in the quiet night. “All right, boys. Who wants to go first?”

  The hoods all froze, and none of them said a word. They stayed that way for a couple of moments as Aerosmith idled. Then, almost as if they were on cue, they each took a couple of steps back, which quickly turned into a full-blown retreat where they turned on their heels, took off running, and quickly disappeared into the night.

  “Looks like you’re back to me.”

  Parker shut down Aerosmith. “Well, maybe for just one night.”

  Forty-Three

  From the outside, the Anderson household looked completely normal as Joe climbed out of his Jeep and made his way up to the front door. There were no screams of horror and terror from inside. A couple of lights were on in the house, and a blue glow leaked out from between the living room curtains. Joe figured it was probably just from the girls watching Butcher Ben’s Twenty-four-hour Monster Film Festival of Terror on the television.

  He was almost relieved, and as he rang the doorbell, the panic started to leave his body. He still had one hell of a nightmare on his hand with everything that had happened at the service station and the El Wray Motel, but he couldn’t handle it if something happened to Sam. He wasn’t her biological father—they both knew that—but he was still her dad, and she was still his daughter. He’d been there at the very exact moment she was born. He had been there for late-night feedings and diaper changes. He was the one she ran to whenever she fell off her bike or out of a tree.

  But as he rang that doorbell and waited for what felt like a lifetime, that panic he’d felt in his muscles and heart slowly crept back with every passing second. He rang the doorbell a couple more times, and when those rings weren’t answered, Joe took to banging on the front door. And still, nobody answered.

  Enough of this shit, Joe thought as he tramped over Jacinta’s flower bed to peek in through the living room window. Between a small gap in the curtains, he saw a body lying on the floor.

  Man?

  Woman?

  Child?

  He had no idea. What Joe did know was that one way or another, he was getting into that house. Filled with fear, panic, and anger, he made his way back over to the front door. Joe lifted his leg and kicked in the front door of the Andersons’ house. Splinters flew out everywhere.

  Joe yanked out his revolver from the holster and frantically stumbled into the living room, but once he was there, he stopped dead in his tracks. The room was one great big, bloody mess. Blood had splattered all over the white couch, halfway up the walls, and across the television screen, which was still playing some horror film.

  Joe counted three bodies. Judging by their sizes, there were two adults and one girl, and it was the girl that drew Joe’s attention.

  He took very hesitant steps toward the smaller body lying in front of the television. Facedown in the blood-soaked carpet, it could have been Sam, Marcy, or anyone else.

  Tears were already in his eyes as he knelt next to her. Joe reached out, placing his hand on the girl’s pajamas, and slowly turned her over. It was Marcy Anderson—beaten, bloody, and gone. Joe was horrified and relieved at both the same time.

  Then sound came from upstairs. Footsteps. They were heavy and loud. For a moment, Joe thought he’d just imagined it, that it was all in his head. Then he heard it again. Joe froze.

  “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “He’s still here.” Joe took a couple of steps over to the staircase and craned his head to look up. He couldn’t see much in the darkness, but he could hear the movement.

  Joe’s throat was dry, but he tried to swallow anyway. His legs were shaking, but that didn’t stop him from quietly taking the first couple of steps up that staircase. That meant taking each step as slowly as humanly possible, and after a dozen or so cautious steps, Joe found himself up on the second floor of the Andersons’ home. He was looking at four rooms—two on each side of the hall and what he took as a bathroom at the end.

  Like with the stairs, he took things slowly until he reached the door of the first room in the hall. With his finger wrapped around the trigger, Joe raised his revolver. He took a step and… found the room was empty.

  He was drenched in sweat, which was starting to drip into his eyes. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his coat and sighed with relief. Then Joe shifted his attention to the room across the hall and followed his revolver in that direction. Because he was moving so slowly, he only saw around the doorframe in tiny increments as he inched forward. And that was when Joe saw him. He was huge, brooding, and just standing there with his back to Joe. He had no idea Joe was there, and he was just how Parker had described him—monstrous, with an orange jumpsuit, a hood, and a machete.

  It was true… all of it. Hurricane Williams was real, and he was looking for something… most likely Sam.

  Joe had always thought it was too much for a kid to handle, but since Sam was very little, Parker had run drills practicing what to do if somebody broke into the house and was trying to “get” her. She’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake, Joe had thought at the time, but he suddenly saw it differently. In those drills, Parker outlined a set of rules. She did it so often that even Joe knew those rules by heart.

  First: Always run. Always.

  Second: Never run upstairs unless you absolutely have to.

  Third: Hide.

  Fourth: Don’t cry.

  Fifth: Never assume the bad guy is dead or gone.

  If she’d followed the rules, Sam was hiding. Joe just needed to find her before Hurricane Williams did.

  As quiet as a church mouse, Joe backed off down the hall. There were two more rooms. The first one Joe passed had nothing to hide in or behind—no wardrobe or bed, only a couple of reading chairs and a bookcase. That left the last room, Marcy’s room.

  Joe stepped inside and went straight for wardrobe. He wrapped his fingers around the handle, paused, then pulled the door open. Sam was inside, covered in other people’s blood. She was about to scream her head off but quickly caught herself when she saw Joe. Instead, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tightly.

  “We have to be very quiet,” Joe whispered into her ear.

  “There’s a monster,” she whispered back.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m going to get you out, okay? It’s all going to be all right.”

  She nodded.

  “We have to be very quiet. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go downstairs and get in my car.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’re going to drive away real fast. Soun
d like a plan?”

  She nodded. “I like this plan.”

  Joe was the first to step out of the bedroom and out into the hall with Sam not far behind. All of Joe’s plans came to a screeching halt when he saw Hurricane Williams standing at the end of the hall, staring right at them with that big old machete in his hands.

  Fear shot through Joe like a heart attack, and he froze for a couple heartbeats before he could muster up words. “I’m Sheriff Turner. Now here’s what I want you to do, all right? I want you to put down that weapon now. Nice and calm like. Are we clear?”

  Hurricane raised his machete and gave it a curious look.

  “I’m not sure he’s getting the message,” Sam said.

  Joe raised his revolver and had his aim square on the slasher. “Are we clear?”

  Hurricane raised that machete high and took off running as fast as he could toward Joe with his big heavy feet thumping on the wooden floor.

  They were not clear. Joe was shit out of options. He wrapped his finger around the trigger, drew a breath, and made sure his aim was dead certain. Letting the air leak out of his lungs, he pulled the trigger.

  The round exploded out of the barrel of his revolver with a flash that lit up the entire hall. It hit Hurricane squarely in his chest… but didn’t stop him. Not one little bit.

  Joe fired off another round, but Hurricane kept coming. Then he unleashed everything he had.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang!

  All of those rounds hit him hard in the chest, and finally, after all that shooting, Hurricane hit the wooden floorboards with a massive thump like some elephant that had just been taken down by a hunter.

  Joe holstered his revolver as Sam huddled in a little closer to him.

  “We should probably go,” he said.

  “Good idea.”

  Together they took a handful of cautious and careful steps down the hall, taking extra special care as they made their way past the body of Hurricane Williams and to the top of the stairs. Just as they were about to begin the descent, a god-awful groan came from the slasher.

  Joe looked over his shoulder and saw Hurricane Williams starting to climb to his feet. “Oh, shit.”

  “What do we do?”

  Hurricane snatched his machete from the floor, rolled back his shoulders, and stood almost as tall as the ceiling.

  “Joe?”

  He thought of Parker’s rules—specifically her number one rule—and turned to Sam. “Run!”

  Forty-Four

  For a moment, everything outside the Anderson household was calm and peaceful—then Joe and Sam burst out of the house as fast as they could with Hurricane Williams hot on their trail. The pair of them jumped into the Jeep, then Joe cranked the engine and sped away from the curb as fast as that Jeep that would take them.

  When they’d made it down the road about three or four houses away, Joe finally drew a breath of relief and looked over his shoulder and back down at the street. Hurricane Williams was in the middle of the street right behind them. At first, Joe didn’t think the slasher was much of a threat to a moving vehicle. What could he do? He was fifty feet away, and that distance was growing by the second.

  Then Hurricane swung that machete back and hurled it at the speeding Jeep. The sheriff saw what was coming and slammed the gas pedal to the floor, but he wasn’t quick enough. The machete blasted through the rear window and buried itself in the dashboard.

  The shock and madness of it all shook Joe. He struggled with the wheel, but he lost control. The Jeep jerked violently toward the side of the road and crashed into a parked Mazda, crushing the entire side of the smaller vehicle. The Jeep rolled onto its side and scraped along the road before finally coming to a stop. Inside the hunk of scrap metal with water and gas leaking all over the place, Joe’s eyes snapped open. He was all kinds of cut up, and his leg was a mess, but he was alive. He was groggy, but everything that happened in the last couple of minutes came rushing back to him. He knew he had to hurry the hell up and get out of there. He reached over, grabbed hold of Sam, and shook her until she snapped awake. “We gotta go.”

  He crawled out of the trashed Jeep, dragging Sam with him and stumbled onto the road.

  They may have been alive, and they may have known that they had to get the hell out of there ASAP, but they were both still shaken up. When Joe tried to stand, he stumbled and dropped to the ground. His leg was in worse shape than he’d thought, and he could barely put any weight on it at all.

  “Come on,” Sam said as she tried to pull him to his feet, but it was no good. Joe was too big, and Sam was too small.

  Joe saw something emerge out of the fog—he squinted to get a better look. There was no mistaking it; Hurricane Williams was coming right for them. Both his big hands balled into fists that looked like they could beat a confession out of a refrigerator. It looked like it was all over red rover for Joe and Sam.

  Then, out of nowhere, Parker Ames appeared and stood as the only shield between the mass murderer and her family. Hurricane paused, and the two of them stared at each other.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” Parker said.

  Hurricane cocked his head at her then shifted his gaze to Corey, who casually made his way to Parker’s side.

  “What do we do?” Joe said, looking up at the unfolding situation.

  “Oh, if I were you,” Corey said. “I’d run like hell.”

  “Get Sam somewhere safe. Hurricane and I have some business to deal with here,” Parker said.

  Joe climbed to his feet as best as he could and, with Sam’s help, hobbled off down the street.

  Corey waited until they were gone to open his mouth. “Now what?”

  “We run away real fast,” Parker said.

  “That’s your plan?”

  “It’s not my entire plan. But it’s the beginning of it?”

  Forty-Five

  Nothing moved on Main Street, not even the fog. Slaughter Beach’s main street sat frozen in time like a Polaroid picture of a quaint row of stores staring across the street at another row of quaint stores. The streetlights were on, but the Slaughter Beach fog was so thick that anyone standing under one of them could look directly up and still not see its glow.

  Then at the other end of the street, the fog shifted and parted. Hurricane Williams moved down the center of the empty road with his trusty machete gripped in his hand. He made it about halfway down the street and came to a stop just outside Oscar’s Ice Creamery. He looked left then right. He was searching, hunting. The son of a bitch was in his element, and the conditions were perfect for him.

  That was until the streetlights cut out and the entire street was covered in darkness, fog, and uncertainty. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something. It was too dark to see for sure.

  A flash. A flurry. The glint of a machete. A slash across his thigh.

  Hurricane grunted and swiped randomly at nothing, but in the darkness, it was useless, his attacker was gone. He spun around in a circle, but he was surrounded by nothing but darkness.

  Then, out of nowhere, came another slash, right across his back. He grunted in pain and stumbled forward. Hurricane tried to swing back and attack with his machete, but he couldn’t hit a thing. He couldn’t even see a thing. The hits were too fast and hard, coming from every direction, and all he saw were fog and darkness. Then came another slash… and another slash and another.

  The hunter had become the hunted, and he grew more and more frustrated, swinging the machete wildly and hitting absolutely zero. His attackers swiped and disappeared… swiped and disappeared.

  He was getting cut to shreds… and then the worst sound he could have possibly heard in that moment roared through the night. It was a chain saw. It’s idling motor chug-chug-chugged under cover of the darkness. He followed the sound as it quickly moved closer to him. As the roar of the chain saw motor was almost upon him… Hurricane ducked.

  The teeth of the chain saw cut
through the fog right above his head. Hurricane swung his big fist and smacked it straight into Parker’s belly, sending her stumbling backward. He heard the chain saw slide across the concrete.

  Coughing, Parker rolled onto her hands and knees. She was hurt. She was hurt really bad, but she wasn’t out for the count. She just needed a couple of moments to catch her breath.

  While she was doing that, Hurricane stepped over to the chain saw and scooped it up. Parker’s beloved chain saw looked very at home in his hand, and he gave the trigger a couple of revs.

  Parker looked over her shoulder. “Oh, shit.” She scrambled back to scurry out of the out of the way of the approaching slasher.

  Hurricane raised that chain saw above his head, ready to attack, and just when it looked to be about all over red rover for Parker, a voice called out, “Parker!”

  Corey was behind Hurricane, armed with his own chain saw. He slid it across the concrete and right into Parker’s hand. A moment later, she was on her feet, and that 58cc motor roared to life.

  Needless to say, Hurricane wasn’t too happy about that, and he threw a massive backhand across Corey’s face, sending him straight to the ground, out cold.

  “That’s not cool,” Parker said.

  But Hurricane didn’t care about what Parker Ames thought was cool or not, and he held up that chain saw, revved it, and let out one hell of a war cry.

  And then it was on!

  Hurricane charged toward her with one dirty boot slamming on the road after the other while Parker did the same, and when the two warriors collided, sparks erupted from the collision of chain saws. They swung and clashed, and they danced, circling each other, looking for that death strike that neither of them seemed to be able to land.

  Then suddenly, Parker missed her footing and slipped. Off-balance, she spun around. Hurricane went in for the kill, but Parker wasn’t down and out just yet. At the last moment, she turned around and swung her chain saw upward to block the blow.

  Their weapons locked, entangled. Their faces were so close together that Parker could feel the heat of his breath on her face. Hurricane lifted his knee and pounded a big heavy boot into Parker’s stomach, sending her flying into the street.