Escape From Slaughter Beach Read online

  Praise for Jack Quaid

  Escape from Happydale is part Buffy, part Halloween, with a touch of wry humor in between. A bloody good tale!

  Laura B., Proofreader, Red Adept Publishing

  This book should come with a warning and that warning should read: DON’T MAKE ANY DAMN PLANS!

  SPACE AND THUNDER MAGAZINE

  Give JACK QUAID a typewriter, a bottle of bourbon and two weeks and he’ll give you a novel that blows your socks off!

  Daniel S Perry, author of the ‘Mecha Man’ series

  Escape from Slaughter Beach

  The Last Final Girl

  Jack Quaid

  Electric Mayhem

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Quaid

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  What the Hell is this Novel About?

  You can’t keep a bad man down

  Hurricane Williams is back—and he wants revenge!

  Ten years after her showdown with deranged killer Hurricane Williams, Parker Ames has left all her hacking and slashing ways behind her. She used to spend her nights beheading slashers and washing blood from her hair. Now her nights are spent going to PTA meetings and helping her daughter with her home work… and she couldn’t be happier.

  That is until Hurricane Williams rolls into town with a score to settle.

  If you love 80s horror movies and killer books like My Best Friend’s Exorcism you’ll love Escape from Slaughter Beach.

  Who the Hell is Jack Quaid?

  Between the years 1980 and 1999, American novelist Jack Quaid produced a series of fun and wild stories where anything could happen, and with Quaid behind the typewriter, they usually did. He called these books his Electric Mayhem series.

  Jack Quaid was born in West Hollywood, California, in 1953. He won a scholarship to UCLA but dropped out after six months for a reason that, to this day, remains unknown. Two years later, he sold his first short story to Startling Mystery Magazine, but it was the publication of his novel The City on the Edge of Tomorrow in 1980 and the film adaptation starring Bruce Dern that set him on his way.

  Fearing his initial success would fade, Quaid wrote obsessively for the next two decades and published under many pseudonyms. It’s unknown just how many books he produced during this period, but despite the name on the jacket, savvy readers always knew they were reading a Jack Quaid novel within the first few pages.

  His books have long been out of print, and they now live on the dusty shelves of secondhand bookstores and in the memories of those who have been lucky enough to read them.

  Quaid’s current whereabouts are unknown.

  www.jackquaidbooks.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  1990

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  TEN YEARS LATER

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Introduction

  It was a little after midnight when Parker Ames called me. I was sitting at the end of the bar at the Burgundy Room and sipping on my second old-fashioned.

  “Parker Ames?” I repeated, just to double-check I’d heard her correctly over the jukebox and the racket of the bar.

  “Yes.”

  “You know that she’s a made-up character? Unless, of course there really are slashers and monsters and hell gates and so on.”

  “Parker Ames was named after me.”

  I sat up straight on the stool. “Is that so?”

  “Jack Quaid had a reputation for writing quickly and writing crazily, but truth be told, he was also incredibly lazy, and when it came to naming characters, he sometimes named them after whatever was close to him. When he wrote Escape from Happydale, I guess I was something close to him. I see you’ve been publishing some of his old novels.”

  “The ones I can find,” I said. “They’re not exactly the easiest to get a hold of.”

  “Have you found Escape from Slaughter Beach yet?”

  After publishing the first two novels, I’d embarked on an Indiana Jones–style quest to hunt out and find that last manuscript, and every single lead had petered out. I was starting to think the manuscript didn’t even exist, or if it ever had, it was long lost now. “No,” I told her.

  “I just happen to have my hands on that last manuscript,” Parker continued. “Would you like to come over to my place and retrieve it?”

  She gave me her address and hung up. It was some place up in the hills. I had only been up that way a couple of times. Once for Brian Austin Green’s birthday party—long story—and the second was for an album launch for L.A. Guns—an even longer story.

  I called an Uber and smoked a cigarette while waiting for it to arrive. After reading the first two novels, I had an image in my head of what Parker Ames would look and sound like, but that image was of a Parker Ames in her twenties. If this Parker Ames, the real-life Parker Ames, was indeed the basis of a character Quaid had written thirty years ago, she would be somewhere in her fifties or maybe even in her sixties. Up until that moment, I’d never once contemplated what Parker would be like at that age. The character in the books never gave me the impression she was actually going to make it to that age.

  Twenty minutes later, the Uber dropped me off at a secluded house, and a couple of moments after I rang the doorbell, the door opened. Parker Ames was standing in front of me, wearing combat boots and no makeup. She was in her late fifties but could easily have passed for a woman in her late forties. I later found out she had spent the most of the past twenty years in all the war-torn parts of the world as a photographer.

  She cocked her head, sizing me up. “Are you Luke Preston?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re in,” she said, turning around and leading me inside.

  Walking into that house was like walking into a time machine that only went back to 1976, when sunken lounges, orange shag, and mustard brown were all in vogue.

  “Don’t mind the porn vibe,” Parker said. “This was my aunt’s place. She died two years ago, and I’m not in town enough to get around to changing the décor. I kind of like it anyway.” She poured two glasses of bourbon without asking if I wanted one, handed me a glass, and slumped down into the corner of the sunken lounge. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, pointing at me with an unlit cigarette.

  “And what’s that?”

  “How a horror novel heroi
ne came to be named after little ol’ me.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “I knew Jack Quaid for about three weeks in 1989. He was writing a story for Rolling Stone, and I was the photographer paired up with him. Road House with Patrick Swayze was about to be released, and Quaid was meant to do an interview with him. I was supposed to take a couple of photos, and it was all supposed to be pretty easy. But when we got to the bar where it was all meant to go down, Patrick Swayze wasn’t there. He was running late. But Rolling Stone was paying our bar tab, so Quaid and I sat up at the bar and had a few drinks. Then we had a few more drinks, and after those drinks, we had even a few more. Patrick Swayze never showed, so I took a blurry photograph of Quaid sitting at the bar, and he filed a story titled “Waiting for Pat.” But that was the beginning of our brief and turbulent love affair. It was one hell of a roller-coaster. We would yell, and we would fight, and we would listen to records and yell and fight some more, and in between all those times, we would roll around on the floor, laughing. In those first couple of weeks, Quaid barely wrote a word. I knew he had written a bunch of novels, and I was starting to think about how he did it. The Quaid I knew barely put his fingers to a typewriter. That was until I watched him write all three of those novels in a single week.”

  “In a single week?” I took a sip from the bourbon. “Why? Kinda sounds unnecessary.”

  “Turned out, Quaid had this little brother, and the brother was no good,” she said.

  “What was his name?

  “Tom, Jim, or Roy? I don’t remember. Anyway, the little brother got arrested for armed robbery, but of course, he said it wasn’t him. It wasn’t the first time he’d been arrested, and of course, he was innocent of those crimes too. His bail was set at twenty grand, and naturally, the little brother didn’t have it, so the burden fell to Quaid. He had just published World War Metal, so he had a little money but nowhere near that much. So Quaid put the word out that he’d write anything for any amount, and the first job that came his way, he took.”

  “The producer? Marty Marshall?”

  “Awful little man,” Parker said. “He made these B-grade horror movies that were going straight to video. He wanted a screenplay from Quaid, his publishers wanted some novel tie-ins, and Quaid wanted their money, so he took the job. He came back to my apartment from that meeting with a case of beer and a carton of cigarettes and sat at the kitchen table and started writing.” She pulled out a battered Zippo lighter from her pocket and lit the cigarette between her fingers. “Seven fever-filled days later, he typed ‘The End’ on that final page. I remember him pulling out the last page from his typer—that’s what he used to call it, ‘the typer.’ He didn’t even read the screenplay; he just added that last page to the pile of pages, jumped into his car, and sped over to Marty Marshall’s office. As per Quaid’s request, Marty paid him in cash. He drove that bag of cash over to the bail bondsman so he could get the little brother out of jail, and can you guess what happened next?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “The little brother was dead. Apparently, he looked at the wrong person the wrong way, and they took it personally. Quaid had only been a couple of hours late. He took it rough, and of course, he blamed himself. He thought if he had written quicker or typed quicker, the little brother would’ve still been alive.” She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and finished her drink. “A couple of days after the funeral, I left for Berlin to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall, and when I returned, Quaid was gone. All that he left in the apartment were the three manuscripts for the Last Final Girl series, half a bottle of bourbon, and his Alice Cooper T-shirt.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  She shook her head. “A couple of years later, I started to hear some stories. I heard that he was killed in a bar fight somewhere down in Mexico. There was also another story I heard where he was doing seven years in prison, for killing a man in a bar fight.”

  “These stories have a lot of bars and a lot of fights.”

  “That seems to be the Jack Quaid way, I guess.”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  She gave some thought; a lot more than I’d thought she would. “I’m not sure,” Parker said. “But wherever it is, I’m sure he’s probably starting some sort of trouble.”

  Parker and I had a couple of more drinks and listened to some Rolling Stones records, and sometime after two in the morning, I walked out of there with the only known copy of Escape from Slaughter Beach under my arm. “Do you ever think about looking him up?” I asked as Parker walked me out to my Uber.

  She shook her head. “The Jack Quaid I knew was always running at one hundred and ten miles an hour. I’d be surprised if he’s even still alive. But there are moments where I’d love to have just one more conversation with him. When that happens, all I need to do is pour myself a drink, pull one of his books from off the shelf, and turn over the first page.”

  Escape from Slaughter Beach is the raucous, chilling, thrilling, and absolutely insane conclusion to Jack Quaid’s Last Final Girl series. I hope you have as much fun reading the final adventure of Parker Ames as I did hunting it down. I recommend reading it with a six pack of beer and some rock ‘n’ roll blasting out of the speakers.

  Luke Preston

  Fox Fire Room, Valley Village

  Escape from Slaughter Beach

  Never split up.

  Old Horror Proverb

  1990

  One

  Parker Ames had lost count of just how many slashers she’d sent to hell. She had used chain saws, machetes, and even once, in a pinch, a tenpin bowling ball. The battles were always bloody and most certainly always gruesome, but not once had she felt queasy or vomited afterward. She just simply wasn’t the vomiting type.

  Or that was what she’d thought anyway. That was because every morning for the past three days, Parker had woken up not only sick and queasy but with an overwhelming need to run to the bathroom and blow chunks. It was on that third day in the bathroom of a shitty Motel 6 that she finally bit the bullet and took a pregnancy test.

  She waited the two minutes, saw the two solid lines on the stick, read the instructions for a third time, and studied the stick again. Finally, Parker came to the conclusion that yep, there were no two ways about it, she was absolutely, positively pregnant.

  “This is totally going to complicate things,” she mumbled to herself.

  She was twenty-six years old and covered in tattoos and scars. She had no job or education, lived out of cheap motels, ate poorly, drank heavily, and didn’t have the first idea about how to raise a kid. But in that moment, she knew her hacking and slashing days were quickly coming to an end whether she liked it or not. She stubbed out what was most likely her last cigarette and walked out of the bathroom as if everything were just as normal as it had been ten minutes before.

  Parker pushed back against the wall and watched Hell as he sat on the end of the bed and sharpened his machete. She only knew him as Hell and had never thought to ask if he’d been given the name at birth or earned it later on. On that particular morning, he wore nothing but leather pants, and Parker thought his peroxided hair made him look exactly like Billy Idol in the “White Wedding (Pt. 1)” video, which was funny because Hell absolutely hated Billy Idol.

  They’d picked each other up twelve months earlier when Parker and Corey ran into a particularly nasty slasher called Slaughterhouse Clive down at Camp Hocking Hills in Ohio. Hell had been tracking Slaughterhouse Clive for some time after the slasher killed his little sister. It had taken one hell of a bloody fight, but the three of them had sent Clive back to the Devil.

  They had been a team and kicking ass together ever since.

  A week ago, they were sitting in a Denny’s poring over the local newspapers, looking for anything out of the ordinary, when Corey came across a series of disappearances in the small town of Columbia Falls, Montana. Five teenage girls had gone missing in the past two weeks,
and if Parker had learned anything in her decade of battling the supposed to be dead, it was that if slashers loved anything, it was teenage girls in small towns.

  Corey, Parker, and Hell had jumped in the Eldorado and sped over to Columbia Falls. For three days and three nights, they’d searched for the sucker, and all their efforts had turned out to be in vain, because no matter how many rocks they turned over or how many spooky cabins they found in the woods, their search came up empty. That left them with two options: Wait. Or wait and watch television on mute while listening to a police scanner.

  Footloose was playing, so naturally, Parker went with option two. But given the news she had discovered in the bathroom a few minutes before, Parker’s interest in both the slasher and Kevin Bacon had severely diminished.

  She leaned against the doorframe, sipping from a warm Big Gulp, wearing her Iron Maiden T-shirt, yesterday’s makeup, and not much else. “Hell, what do you think we’re going to be doing twenty years from now?”