Escape From Bastard Town 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 Bastard Town

  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?

  Stephen King meets Quentin Tarantino

  Jack Quaid’s sequel to the 1980s horror movie in paperback ramps up the carnage and skull-smashing thrills in the first installment of this series.

  Parker Ames is back… well, kinda. She’s been out of the hacking and slashing business for over a year. The killer teddy bears, haunted cars and the downright weirdness of it all was just too much for her. But when a couple of kids from an isolated Alaskan town need her help with a slasher that’s putting a severe dent in the population, she can’t say no.

  But does Parker still have what it takes to confront evil head on?

  If you love 80s horror movies and killer books like My Best Friend’s Exorcism you’ll love this next installment of Jack Quaid’s Last Final Girl series.

  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

  1988

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Chapter 6

  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

  Note From The Publisher

  FORTY SEVEN

  FORTY EIGHT

  FORTY NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Also by Jack Quaid

  Introduction

  I literally took a bullet for this book. It was right through my left leg, and unlike the hero in every ’80s action movie I’ve ever seen, I didn’t just shrug it off with a cool quip then take out all the bad guys like Chuck Norris. Nope, when I got shot in the leg, it hurt like hell, and all I wanted to do was sit down and cry.

  Before getting to the gunfire, I need to go back to the few days leading up to my brush with death. Three days to be precise. I had just discovered Escape from Happydale, and I knew there were at least two other novels in the series. I had become obsessed with finding them, and that had proven to be a hell of a lot more difficult than I’d anticipated. Jack Quaid had a wife somewhere, a daughter somewhere else, and a collection of ex-girlfriends and drinking buddies, but none of them had heard from Quaid in years. Every lead ended in a dead end—except one.

  Quaid’s old agent, Albert Harris, was still alive and kicking, and living in Ventura. He was ninety-one years old, and although it was a long shot, I figured that maybe, just maybe, he would know where Quaid or any of his old manuscripts were.

  Ventura was about fifty miles north of West Hollywood, and according to Google Maps, traveling there would take about an hour by car. My buddy Randall was out of town in Vegas and had left me his beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville to drive around. It was cherry red and covered in chrome. The only problem was I couldn’t park the son of a bitch. The one time I took it out, I went to the In-N-Out Burger on Venice Boulevard and almost had a panic attack in the drive-thru. My plan was to leave the de Ville in the garage until Randall came to pick up the big bastard, but the possibility of laying my hands on another Quaid novel far exceeded my fear of driving that devil car. So I pulled that beast out of the garage and hit the road at a safe, conservative twenty-five miles per hour.

  Sometime in the ’80s, one of the previous owners installed a tape deck in the glove compartment, and Randall had a collection of Dire Straits cassettes, so I drove up 101 blasting “Money for Nothing,” “Romeo & Juliet,” and “Sultans of Swing” until I reached Ventura.

  Albert Harris’s house was a three-bedroom place that looked straight out of an episode of Dragnet. I crossed the lawn, jogged up the couple of steps to the porch, and pressed my finger to the doorbell. A couple of moments later, Albert Harris pulled open the door, and I was most likely looking at the fittest ninety-one-year-old on the face of the planet.

  “What do you want?” he barked.

  I told him my name. “We spoke on the phone?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I’m a writer…”

  “I’m not in publishing anymore, sorry.”

  “No,” I said as he was already halfway through closing the door on me. “I’m a screenwriter.”

  Harris paused. “Oh, so you’re not a real writer?”

  I let the dig slide. “We spoke about Jack Quaid.”

  It took a moment or two for those words to sink in, and when they finally did, a grin grew across his face. He slapped a big hand on my shoulder and welcomed me into his home. Bookshelves filled with novels covered every wall, and in the
middle of the room, instead of the usual furniture that most people had, like couches and televisions, were rowing machines, dumbbells, a bench press, and a whole bunch of other exercise equipment that I didn’t even recognize.

  Harris offered me a seat on the bench press, picked up a dumbbell, and started pumping. “I’m going to live forever.”

  By the look of him, he was probably right. “You said on the phone that you had an unpublished Jack Quaid novel.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Quaid.”

  “Who the hell is Jack Quaid?”

  I ran my fingers through my dirty hair. “A writer from the eighties. He wrote World War Metal 1, 2, and 3, Star Blaster… you used to represent him?”

  “Jack Quaid?”

  “Yeah, Jack Quaid,” I repeated.

  “He’s a son of a bitch,” Harris said, still pumping weights. “What about him?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said under my breath. “I’m looking for an unpublished novel of his called Escape from Bastard Town.”

  “That sounds vaguely familiar. There were three of them.”

  “Escape from Bastard Town is the second one,” I said. “You told me you had one of his unpublished novels. Was it that?”

  “Jack left some things here back… When was it? Back in ninety-one, I think.” He put the dumbbell down next to all the others lined up against the wall. “I’ll take a look.”

  Close to ten minutes later, Albert Harris returned with a briefcase that looked as if it had been taken out of a 1980s display case in a museum about the 1980s. When he handed it to me, I pushed the two gold tabs back, and the locks flicked open. Inside was a three-hundred-page manuscript and what looked to be over a dozen cassette tapes, all of which were numbered from one to fourteen.

  I picked the manuscript up and read the title:

  ESCAPE FROM BASTARD TOWN

  BY JACK QUAID

  I flicked through a bunch of pages, skimmed a few lines, and quickly stopped just in case my eyes latched on to a spoiler or something.

  The cassettes were curious. “What’s on these tapes?”

  “Beats me,” Harris said. “Do you want a beer?”

  “Sure,” I answered, and Harris disappeared into the kitchen.

  When he returned, he had two cans of beer in his hand and a confused look on his face. “Who the hell are you?”

  And I looked up at him. “Really, man?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “We just went through this? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know you that well.”

  He put the two cans of beer on one of his bookshelves, slipped his hand into his waistband behind his back, and pulled out a .38. At that point, I figured I may have overstayed my welcome.

  “I’m not putting up with no thieves in my house,” Harris barked.

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “Then why do you have that manuscript in your hands?”

  “You gave it to me!”

  “Why would I do that?”

  I put the manuscript on the bench press and slowly rose to my feet with the briefcase still in my hand. “All right, all right, all right, no need to overreact here.”

  Bang!

  Albert Harris shot me.

  I may have been a little overdramatic when I said I took a bullet for Escape from Bastard Town. Technically, I did take a bullet, but the wound was nothing more than a scratch on the side of my leg. Later on, I cleaned and bandaged it, and the leg hasn’t fallen off since, so presumably, I’m going to survive. What I will say is that it hurt pretty bad.

  I winced and kind of motioned to the door. “I’ll show myself out?”

  And that’s just what I did. Slowly, so as to not spook another bullet out of Harris, I hobbled over to the door, wrapped my hand around the doorknob, and stepped out into the Ventura sunlight. He called me a son of a bitch, and I closed the door.

  A couple of seconds later, I was behind the wheel of the de Ville with the engine running, and I pulled away from the curb. And so I thought that was the end of the story, that the next instalment of the Last Final Girl series was lost to the world… until I was stuck in traffic fifteen minutes later and completely sick of listening to Dire Straits. My eyes drifted over to the briefcase sitting on the seat next to me. I pulled out the first tape and pushed it into the deck. The voice of a man who must’ve smoked three packs of cigarettes a day drifted out of the speakers.

  “Escape from Bastard Town by Jack Quaid.” There was a slight pause. “Chapter one…”

  Jack Quaid never wrote Escape from Bastard Town; he dictated it.

  For the following seven hours, I drove around California, listening to Quaid munch on chips, smoke cigarettes, and drink coffee while he narrated the story you’re about to read. Escape from Bastard Town is Jack Quaid’s continuing saga of Parker Ames and her rampage across a 1980s America filled with madness, hope, and redemption.

  Luke Preston

  The Harbor Room, Playa Del Rey, California

  Escape from Bastard Town

  Never read from the Book of Evil—not even as a joke.

  Old Horror Proverb

  1988

  One

  Not every teddy bear is evil. But there are some out there that, given the opportunity, would tear a human being apart limb by bloody limb. Although nobody knew it at the time, the Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot that had arrived by mail earlier that day, addressed to six-year-old Danny Connor, was one of those bears.

  April, the babysitter, didn’t like the look of that bear from the very first moment she laid eyes on it. He was approximately two feet tall, and by all accounts, Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot was just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill bear. He had plastic eyes, a plastic nose, some brown fur, and a little vest that many would say made him look very dapper indeed. But there was something wrong about the bear. April couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but the bear just gave her the creeps.

  Growing Pains had just finished, and usually when April babysat for the Connors, she let Danny stay up late to watch The Wonder Years. She had every intention of keeping up their little tradition that night, but for the last half hour, she could have sworn the Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot on the couch next to Danny had been staring at her, and she simply couldn’t stand to be in the room with it for one minute longer.

  April bribed Danny with a bowl of ice cream to get him to go to bed early. The bribe worked, and after his ice cream, Danny brushed his teeth and climbed into bed with the Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot wrapped tightly in his arms. She tucked them both in and gave Danny a kiss.

  “Can Teddy have a kiss goodnight too?” Danny asked.

  April looked down at the bear. “I don’t think Teddy needs a kiss.”

  “But he really wants one.”

  She gave it some thought but couldn’t bring herself to actually put her lips to his fur. “He’s just a bear, sweetie. He doesn’t need one.” She turned off the bedside lamp and made her way over to the door. Just as she was about to leave the room, April looked back. “Sleep tight, all right.”

  Then she walked out and closed the door. Her footsteps faded off as she made her way down the hall. With the moonlight on his face, Danny closed his eyes and let out a small sigh. A couple of moments after that, he was in a deep sleep and out to the world.

  The room sat quiet, and for a couple of moments, everything was peaceful, then… Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot opened his eyes.

  April was right—there was something very wrong with that bear.

  He climbed out from under the covers and slid off the bed, where his little padded feet hit the floor with a very quiet thud. He tiptoed to the door, and although it was a struggle, he was just tall enough to stretch out, put his little furry paw around the doorknob, and turned. It opened a crack, and Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot poked an eye through, just enough to see if the coast was clear, and from all account
s, it was. The bear made his way into the hall and quietly made his way along the floorboards, taking extra care to be very, very quiet.

  April was in the kitchen, washing the dishes and bopping away to her Sony Walkman, and when Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot appeared in the doorway, she didn’t even know he was there.

  The smile that every child knew from the hit television show, Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot Loves You, was gone and replaced with something angry, menacing, and downright mean. The bear’s little bear face scrunched up into a snarl. “Hey, bitch! Where’s my fucking kiss?”

  April didn’t turn, budge, or even move. She couldn’t hear a thing with her Walkman blasting in her ears.

  “Son of a bitch,” the bear grumbled. He moved over to a chair then dragged that chair over to the island bench in the middle of the kitchen. Teddy-Hugs-A-Lot climbed on up, and as soon as he was there, his eyes zeroed in on the knife block that was just in arm’s reach. The bear took a couple of steps toward it, wrapped his three-fingered paw around one of the handles, and drew out the blade.