Escape From Bastard Town

by Jack Quaid

  Fifty years ago, each and every one of those words were lost to him. He didn’t know what they meant, how to say them, or what would happen once they were put in order. But Susan had taught him. They’d spent an hour every day for years just in case something bad happened when she wasn’t around and somebody else needed to read from the book. Considering that there weren’t many people around who could speak ancient Hebrew anymore, she’d figured Lee had better hurry up and learn.

  “Y'ai ng'ngah, yog-sothoth. H'ee—l'geb. F'ai throdog. Uaaah.”

  The more words Lee spoke, the darker the church became. The wind outside kicked up, and from all indications, there was one hell of a storm brewing outside. The shutters on the church windows opened and slammed, and even the double doors at the front burst open, and cold air hit Lee like a punch in the face.

  He kept going. “Y’ai ng’ngah, yog-sothoth. H’ee—l’geb. F’ai throdog. Uaaah.”

  The wind and the darkness didn’t give Lee so much as an ounce of doubt. He had been through every hellhole World War II could produce and had come out the other side. A little bit of bad weather wasn’t going to stop him.

  What Lee didn’t know and wouldn’t know for a couple of more minutes was that right above the church, high in the sky, a rip to hell had opened up, and hell didn’t look good. Fire and decay were on the other side, and the screams of one thousand maniacs filtered out.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Parker looked up from the slashers at the ass end of the Eldorado and in the general direction of the church. More accurately, she looked up at the great big gaping hole that had just blasted open in the sky above it.

  “Holy shit,” Parker said to herself. She had never, not in all the years of witnessing all the weird shit that she had, seen a gate to hell open up.

  A slasher with the traditional hockey mask and a machete struggled to keep pace with the car. He tried to stomp a foot forward but couldn’t get it to hit the ground. It was almost as if something were dragging him back.

  Then whoosh! The slasher was sucked into the air and blasted through the sky and into the hell gate as he was sucked back into hell.

  “It’s working!” Parker yelled. “It’s working!”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Lee was still reading from the Book of Evil, the wind was still blowing, and he was still determined to put an end to the horror. He clutched the Book of Evil tightly in his hands and read out the words over the wind and the rain.

  “Ogthrod ai'f, geb'l—ee'h, yog-sothoth, ngah'ng ai'ay, zhro.”

  One thing was for sure: the Book of Evil was a tough read. A best seller, it was not.

  “Y’ai ng’ngah, yog-sothoth. H’ee—l’geb. F’ai throdog. Uaaah.”

  The winds grew stronger and bolder, and Lee knew deep in his heart that closing the hell gate wouldn’t make up for opening it in the first place, but it was a start. He was determined to make up for the hell he had brought upon the world.

  Then the double doors of the church opened, and that whole plan he had set out in his mind all went to shit. Standing at the other end of the church, looking not a day older than she had the very first day he laid eyes on her in Castle Hohenwerfen, was the love of his life, Susan Wake.

  Lee stopped chanting and stared at the woman he had spent fifty years of his life with. Even after all those years, when he laid his eyes on her, his heart still skipped a beat.

  Amid the wind and the madness, she calmly walked down the aisle with not even a hair out of place, and when she reached Lee, she put a hand on his cheek. At the simple touch, a tear rolled down his face.

  “Oh, Lee,” Susan said. “What did I tell you about fooling with that book?”

  “Not to do it.”

  “And here we are,” she said.

  “I just wanted to see you again. I had to tell you all the things I never got to tell you before you left.”

  “Come on,” she said. “How about you go and put that book down.”

  His eyes dipped to the Book of Evil and rose back up to the love of his life. “I know you’re not real.”

  “I’m whatever you want me to be.” She threaded her fingers through his fingers, holding their hands together.

  “But you’re not her.”

  “Sure I am,” Susan said with a smile, but that smile had a double edge, and he knew it.

  Lee slipped his free hand around behind his back and pulled a US military blade from his waistband and wrapped his fingers tightly around it.

  “You don’t want to do that,” she said. She couldn’t even see the blade, but she knew it was there.

  Lee filled his lungs with a long deep breath as he brought the knife around so that it was between them. His hand shook, and Lee’s hand hadn’t shaken in decades. Not kicking in doors all over Germany during the war. Not even when he was battling Gustav on the roof of a cable car one thousand feet above land.

  “I know what I need to do,” Lee said. “Yet, I look at you, and I can’t.” He let the blade slip from his fingers and fall to the floor. “Can you just hold me?”

  For a moment, Susan didn’t say anything, then she wrapped her arms around Lee and held him tightly. It wasn’t the same—Lee knew that—but it was close. He closed his eyes, and his mind filled in the gaps. If he didn’t think too much about it, his mind was tricked into believing that this Susan was his Susan.

  And that was the way they stayed for a moment… until Susan’s mouth opened up to a horrifically massive size and devoured Lee from his head all the way down to his chest in one bite. The other half of him slumped down on the floor with a thud.

  That thing masquerading as Susan wiped the trickle of blood from the side of her mouth, turned around, and walked down the aisle… alone.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  The Eldorado was swamped by slashers. Parker took pot shots at the ones closest to the car, and she was getting a bunch of them. But there was no way she could keep it up. Sooner or later—most likely sooner rather than later—the slashers were going to completely overwhelm Parker and Corey, and they would be toast.

  Parker looked up at the hell gate above the church just in time to watch it evaporate into the dark sky as if it had never been there to begin with.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Parker snapped.

  “What?” Corey called out. “Are we fucked?” He looked over his shoulder at where the hell gate had been. “Oh, we’re so fucked.”

  “Turn around,” Parker said.

  “What? Fuck no,” Corey snapped back. “What are we going to do, drive headfirst into every slimeball coming at us?”

  Parker looked back. Corey wasn’t wrong—a tsunami of slashers was coming right for them. Her first instinct was to push the kid out of the driver’s seat, put pedal to the metal, and get the hell out of there. But where would she run? Parker didn’t know.

  Maybe she could just survive until daylight, find some place to hunker down, really hunker down and hope, with all her fingers and toes crossed, that somebody would eventually come to check on the town, and then they would be saved. That was best-case scenario. Worst-case scenario was that the sons of bitches would eventually find a way out of Bastard Town and go on a killing spree that could spread all across the country. If they made it out of Bastard Town, there would be no stopping them—that was for sure.

  “Turn the car around,” Parker said. “We’re going back.”

  Corey looked back, and in her eyes, he saw two things: that she was deadly serious and that she very well may have been crazy.

  Corey gripped the wheel of the Caddy. “Okay, hold on, lady. We’re going for a ride.”

  The fourteen-year-old whose feet barely touched the pedals floored that massive boat of a Cadillac, and the beast rocketed forward. He gave it some gas for a couple hundred yards, then in an Evel Knievel move, he hit the brake, swung the car around one hundred eighty degrees, and aimed it toward the church. They just had to make it through the herd of slashers coming right at them, get the Book of Evil, and save the worl
d.

  Parker slipped on her seat belt, and when Corey heard it click in place, he turned to face her. “Are you scared?”

  “Hell, yeah!” Parker said.

  “Good, I’d hate for it to be just me.” He floored it. Parker gripped the handle on the door as the needle on the speedometer rose.

  Ten miles per hour.

  Twenty miles per hour.

  Thirty miles per hour.

  Forty miles per hour.

  There were two slashers right out in front of them. Parker winced as they smashed into the grill and bounced off. The Caddy hit a couple more, and a couple more bounced, but after the first two pieces of squashed meat on the front of the car, the others got the message and jumped out of the way.

  All except one. There was one brave, colossus-looking bastard rocking a police uniform standing in the middle of the road, and by the look of him, he wasn’t in the jumping-out-of-the-way kind of mood. He wanted to go one-on-one with that 1959 Cadillac Eldorado!

  The Eldorado was big. It was red. And was a Caddy. Being red didn’t really matter so much, but being big and being a Caddy meant that when it came to swerving or stopping at the last minute, the car simply just didn’t do it. Corey had no other choice than to keep his hand on the wheel and his foot on the gas and just power through, and that was just what he did.

  Just as the grill of the Caddy was about to collide with the slasher, Corey closed his eyes and let out a scream. “Ahhh!”

  At the very last second, the slasher jumped. He didn’t jump left or right. The slasher jumped up and high, and when he came down, he landed squarely in the center of the hood. The back wheels of the Caddy got air time for a couple of seconds before slamming back down on the road.

  The slasher, a.k.a. the Enforcer, had an elaborate backstory about being viciously murdered by a street gang called the Furies then coming back from the dead to seek vengeance on those reckless youths. We really just don’t have the time to go into all that right now. The Enforcer rose to his feet on the hood of the speeding car and looked down at Corey and Parker.

  “Get him! Get him! Get him!” Corey yelled.

  “I suppose I should,” Parker said as she gripped Aerosmith, cranked that bad boy up, and stood on the front seat of the Caddy.

  And just as it was about to be on like Donkey Kong, Parker saw something right behind the Enforcer, and it was coming up fast. It was what all people in that situation should most likely fear the most: a low-hanging branch. “Shit.”

  Parker dropped back down and slammed into the seat of the Eldorado just as the branch took off the Enforcer’s head in one clean whop! It went flying through the air, hit the road, rolled like a half-flat basketball, and ended up in the gutter.

  Parker looked over her shoulder at the head. “That was lucky,” she said before shifting her attention to the slashers running behind them. “Corey… floor it.”

  He checked the rearview mirror and saw what she saw. “Oh, man, I hate these guys.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  A couple of blocks later, Corey slammed down hard on the brakes, and the Eldorado slid to a stop right outside the church. It was the first time he had been behind the wheel of a car without crashing into a whole bunch of stuff. Wait… he had hit several slashers, so scratch that.

  Parker and Corey jumped out of the car and ran into the church. Before closing the doors, Parker looked down the street and saw the silhouettes of all those bastard slashers coming to slash the hell out of the last two remaining human beings in Bastard Town.

  “This was totally not the way I thought this day was going to go.” Then she slammed the doors and locked them.

  Half a dozen steps into the church, Parker and Corey stumbled to a stop, seeing the remaining half of Lee’s corpse.

  Corey didn’t take it well. “Jesus fucking Christ!” He freaked. “What the hell happened to him?”

  “Something bad,” Parker said as she stepped around what was left of the old man. She’d liked Lee, and she was sad he was dead. Everybody would be dead if she took the time to stop and have a cry, though, so Parker scooped up the Book of Evil and thumbed through the bloody pages until she came across a passage next to a blood-drawn image of a giant hell gate.

  “This is it,” Parker said as she pushed the book to Corey. “It’s that passage.”

  “Why do I have to read it?”

  “Because I have to go and chain saw all these horror movies,” Parker said. “Unless you want to swap?”

  “No,” he said, snatching the book from her. “I’ll do the reading.”

  They split up.

  Corey ran to the altar, and Parker ran to the double doors at the entrance. She gave them a good shake. They were about as locked as they were ever going to be.

  Back at the altar, Corey frantically flicked through pages of the Book of Evil. He had no idea what that madness was he was looking at. “I can’t read… whatever this is,” he called to Parker.

  “Just sound out the words,” she called back as she cranked up Aerosmith and gave him a couple of revs.

  Corey took a breath, let the air out of his lungs with a sigh, and began. “Ogthrod ai’f…” That’s about as far as he got. “This is dumb,” he called out.

  Parker could hear the heavy pounding footsteps of the slashers surrounding the church. “You’re dumb! Do it!”

  He took another breath and looked back down at the Book of Evil. “Ogthrod ai’f, geb’l—ee’h, yog-sothoth, ngah’ng ai’y, zhro.”

  The wind kicked up, and it got real, real, dark.

  “It’s working,” Parker yelled. “Keep going!”

  Corey did. “Ogthrod ai’f, geb'l—ee'h, yog-sothoth, ngah’ng ai’y, zhro.”

  Like before, the sky above the church ripped open, and the Hell Gate blasted open in a blast of flames.

  “Keep going!” Parker yelled. “Keep going!”

  Corey continued to chant. “Y’ai ng’ngah, yog-sothoth. H’ee—l’geb. F’ai throdog. Uaaah.”

  There were a couple of thumps and bumps on the front doors. Parker ran down the aisle and slid to a stop. All that evil on the other side was banging and pushing on the door so hard that it was starting to bulge and bow. It would be just a matter of time before all those murderous maniacs were through the doors and streaming into the church.

  Parker gave Aerosmith a couple of revs then rammed that chain saw right through the wooden door. She had no idea what she was hitting, but she knew she was hitting something. When she pulled Aerosmith back in, the blade was covered in blood. She picked another part of the door and rammed it in again and again. She hit something bloody and bony on the other side. She revved Aerosmith a couple of times, and the slashers on the other side of the door grew less ambitious. The rattles on the door slowed and stopped.

  For a brief moment, everything was deathly quiet except for Corey chanting from the Book of Evil.

  That moment didn’t last long. There was a thump against one of the walls, followed by another and another. Parker hustled over and listened to the thumps while staring at a blank wall.

  Thump!

  Thump!

  Thump!

  Then a machete smashed through, pulled out, and smashed through again.

  “Shit,” Parker said. “They’re hacking their way in.” She snapped her head over to Corey. “Do you think maybe you could speed this up a little?”

  Without missing a word, Corey gave her the middle finger and continued on with his chanting. From all around the church, Parker watched machetes, axes, and sledgehammers pound through the walls and into the church. There were no two ways about it. It was just a matter of time before the church was overrun with those monsters.

  Corey watched on as he nervously read from the Book of Evil. “Ogthrod ai’f, geb’l—ee’h, yog-sothoth, ngah’ng ai’y, zhro.”

  A slasher with a sack on his head, coveralls, and a sickle was the first to bust through a wall.

  “There!” Corey quickly yelled out before returning to
the Book of Evil.

  Parker snapped her head, saw the farmer slasher, and hit the floorboards as fast as she could run. She slid up to him and, without so much as a second thought, chain sawed the hell out of his neck, cutting into the old leathery skin, spraying blood and bone everywhere. Blood painted the walls as she hacked off his head.

  Parker let it hit the floor with a dull thud then wiped the blood from her eyes, but there was no time to chill out and rest. In another part of the church on another wall, another slasher was pounding through the wall with an ax.

  Parker ran, and when she made it over to that second slasher, she unleashed all the furious anger Aerosmith had to offer. Within seconds, that second slasher was in pieces on the floor.

  Out of breath and covered in blood, Parker looked over her shoulder. She counted at least five slashers hacking through the walls, and without a doubt, there would be more right on their trails. No way she could get them all before one got Corey before he finished reading from the Book of Evil. She ran as fast as she could across the wooden floors of the church and stood alongside Corey.

  “What about those slimeballs?” Corey asked.

  Parker’s eyes hardened. “They’re going to have to come to us.”

  They didn’t need an invitation. It didn’t take long for a mob of slashers to bust into the church, and not long after that, they all turned their attention to Parker and Corey, and surrounded them in a circle of rotten flesh and bad attitudes, even the most optimistic person in the world would have taken one look at the situation and thought they were as good as dead.

  Parker’s throat was dry, and when she swallowed it wasn’t easy. She gripped Aerosmith and gave it a few revs, just getting ready to hack away at some slasher scum… but then… at the worst possible moment… Aerosmith died.

  Out of gas?