Escape from Happydale 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 Happydale

  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

  * * *

  At the end of every horror movie, one girl always survives the deadly slasher… In this case, Parker Ames not only survives, she turns the tables and dedicates her life to hunting and destroying the monsters that stalk slumber parties and campsites all across the country.

  * * *

  Ten years after the horrific events known as the Massacre at Coffin Bay, Parker’s world has been flipped totally upside down. She’s no longer the nerdy teenage girl who would run and hide from the things that go bump in the night. Now Parker is the thing that goes bump in the night.

  * * *

  After years of traveling the country and hunting some of the world’s most dangerous slashers, Parker returns home when she hears that Hurricane Williams, the deranged slasher who slaughtered her family, has resurfaced and continued his killing spree. Armed with her trusty chain saw, affectionately named Aerosmith, she sets out on a path of revenge and redemption.

  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

  TWELVE HOURS EARLIER

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  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

  SIXTY ONE

  SIXTY TWO

  SIXTY THREE

  SIXTY FOUR

  SIXTY FIVE

  SIXTY SIX

  SIXTY SEVEN

  SIXTY EIGHT

  Also by Jack Quaid

  Introduction

  The book you hold in your hand has had a strange and unusual path to publication. It’s a story which involved failed movie deals, gunfire, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s very own Mia Sara, who played Sloan. But to tell the story of how this novel happened to be discovered, we need to go back to the ’90s—1995, to be exact.

  Now, back then, I was fifteen years old, and I’d never heard of Jack Quaid, Escape from Happydale, or any of the other unknown number of novels Quaid happened to punch out of his typewriter between the year 1980 and the year 1999. I didn’t discover Jack Quaid until he was all but forgotten and his books were long out of print, but I can still remember that very first moment I held one of those books in my hand and all the promise the pages held within.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and I had nine dollars in my pocket and an entire afternoon to kill. At that age, any money I had was spent on either ex-rental videos or secondhand books. The VCR was broken, so I caught the train into Chicago with one destination in mind: Galaxy Books on Wabash. The secondhand bookstore specialized in two types of novels and two types of novels only—science fiction and horror. If you wanted romance, crime, or heaven forbid, literature, you were shown the door and ridiculed later by the proprietor, Gary G, whom I never saw wear anything other than his Camp Crystal Lake T-shirt.

  The shelves were always overcrowded, and books were even stacked on the floor, reaching all the way to the ceiling. At first glance, the place looked like a panic attack, but to me, those thousands of dusty books were gateways to fantastical worlds, distant planets, and alternate dimensions where all kinds of crazy stuff could happen. It was from those stacks that I pulled my first Jack Quaid novel, World War Metal, from the bottom of a tower of books that was dangerously close to toppling over.

  The paperback looked as if it had been read a thousand times by people who were in a hurry and on the move. The cover was creased and worn white at the edges, and the spine was cracked in a couple dozen places. At some point in the book’s life, somebody had let a cigarette burn down in their fingers while reading, and it had singed a bunch of pages. Despite the wear and tear on that copy of the book, it didn’t detract from the absolute madness of the faded art on the cover, though. Among the mayhem of robots and battle spiders was the heroine of the story, Abigail Storm, firing two blasters while jumping backward out of a burning building. I didn’t even read the blurb; I just handed over my three dollars and walked out with my very first Jack Quaid novel. Up until that point, World War Metal was the most insane novel I had ever read. It was set in a 1980s vision of the future where the world’s robots rise up to destroy humanity and the only thing standing in their way is a supermodel hell-bent on stopping them. It was John Carpenter, ’80s neon pop, and Cyndi Lauper all rolled into one.

  I read it in one night, and from that point on, I was hooked. For years, every single time I walked into a secondhand bookstore, I made a line for the Q section with hope that maybe, just maybe, I would discover another Jack Quaid novel. Most of the time, I left empty-handed, but every once in a while, in the dusty basements of bookshops and at secondhand fairs, I would find a new title. Over the years since I discovered World War Metal, I’ve found The City on the Edge of Tomorrow, Star Blaster, San Angeles, and a handful more. The worn and beaten paperbacks of Jack Quaid were the realms of mad bastards of literature where all bets were off, and if there were any rules to break, his books went out of their way to break them.

  Fast forward fifteen years and three thousand miles, and I’m sitting in the office of schlock horror movie producer Marty Marshall. Three days earlier, Marty was at a party and mentioned that he had an idea for a horror movie and needed a writer. Somebody gave him my number, and there I was, sitting in his office above a tattoo parlor on Sunset Boulevard. The joint was a mess, with stacks of yellow-paged screenplays against the wall and the posters for Chopping Mall, Girls Nite Out, and The Day After Halloween on the walls. Each and every one of them was a hack ’n’ slash classic.

  Marty sat behind a big oak desk that was too big for the room. He had an oxygen tank by his side and a cigarette between his lips. “Listen up,” he barked. “You’re gonna love this title.” He paused for a dramatic buildup. “The Return of the Killer Kangaroos from Outta Space.” He slapped his hands together, smiled, and killed his cigarette in the ashtray. “What do yer think?”

  I didn’t think much. “Do you have any money for a script?”

  “Money!” Marty snapped. “Hell no! You write the script, we make the movie, and everybody gets paid.”

  As if I needed another reason to get the hell out of there, just in that very moment, I heard gunfire, and a round blasted through the floor from the tattoo parlor below.

 
I nearly had a heart attack. “What the hell was that?”

  Marty hadn’t even flinched. “Oh, that,” he said. “The guys downstairs get a little excited when they watch soccer and shoot their guns off.”

  There were a dozen or so bullet holes in the ceiling right above my head. “I think I’m probably going to go now, Marty.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about. Trust me.”

  “No, Marty,” I said climbing to my feet. “I think it is something to worry about.”

  “What about the movie?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” I said, making my way to the door and trying to get the hell out of there as soon as I possibly could.

  I was halfway between the massive oak desk and my escape when one of the manuscripts piled against the wall of Marty’s office grabbed my attention. The cover page was old and yellow. At some point, somebody had spilt coffee or whiskey on it, but despite the mess, I could still make out the lettering on the cover.

  ESCAPE FROM HAPPYDALE

  by Jack Quaid

  In all my years of combing secondhand bookstores, I had never seen or heard of anything called Escape from Happydale. I picked up the three-hundred-page manuscript, brushed the dust off the first page, and held it up to Marty. “What’s this?”

  The vintage producer picked up a pair of thick ’70s-style glasses from his desk and pushed them up the bridge of his nose. It took a moment for his eyes to focus and read the cover, but when they did, he wasn’t impressed with what he saw. “That son of a bitch, Jack Quaid.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I hired that son of a bitch, Quaid, sometime back in the ’80s to write me a horror movie for Mia Sara.”

  “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Mia Sara?”

  “She was going to be a big star.”

  “But she wasn’t.”

  “Which is why the movie was never made.”

  I thumbed through the first few pages. “This isn’t a screenplay. It’s a novel?”

  “Tell me about it,” Marty said as his nicotine-stained fingers reached for another cigarette and lit it. “He was one of those overachieving types. I gave that son of a bitch twenty K for a screenplay, and he delivered three novels and a goddamned screenplay. He told me that they were a trilogy. Back then, nobody knew what the hell a trilogy was. Nowadays, it’s trilogy this and trilogy that.”

  “Do you have the other two novels?” I asked.

  “Ah,” Marty said with a swipe of his hand. “Who knows?”

  “Can I read this?”

  “Keep the damn thing,” Marty said. “And if you see that son of a bitch, tell him he’s a son of a bitch from me.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He ran off with my wife and stole my Cadillac. I didn’t care too much about the wife, but that Caddy, that was a good vehicle.”

  Two more rounds blasted through the floor of Marty Marshall’s office, and I got the hell out of there. A couple of blocks later, I walked into the first dive bar I found, ordered a drink, and turned over the first page of the battered manuscript.

  For the rest of the day and half the night, I was fifteen years old again and grinning ear to ear as I read every single last word. That manuscript, dear reader, is the novel you now hold in your hands.

  Escape from Happydale is Jack Quaid at his most rebellious, at his most sincere, and certainly at his most unpredictable. For those of you who have read Jack Quaid over the years, welcome back. You’ve been here before, and you know what you’re getting into. But for those of you who are experiencing a Jack Quaid tale for the first time, I have a word of advice. Draw the shades, pour yourself a tall drink, turn some rock ’n’ roll up loud, and strap in.

  See you on the other side.

  * * *

  Luke Preston

  Barkowski, Santa Monica

  Escape From Happydale

  Only one of you will survive.

  Old Horror Proverb

  1988

  One

  Nancy Sinclair was in the middle of nowhere when the fuel light on the dashboard lit up. She peered through the dirty windshield then into the rearview mirror and saw darkness in both directions.

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

  The year was 1988, and if there ever had been a time when it was safe for a nineteen-year-old girl to be stranded in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, that time had certainly passed. She was somewhere between Cedar Springs and Happydale on an old dirt road that officially didn’t have a name. Unofficially, the kids called it Resurrection Road. The story went that back in the ’60s, a series of young girls had disappeared while traveling along the old road and were never seen or heard from again. Some believed they were abducted and murdered by a crazed lunatic who roamed the rural outskirts of Happydale. Others believed the girls were sacrificed by a satanic cult. A few even believed the disappearing girls were the work of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre–style family who lived off the grid, killing hitchhikers and tourists whenever they had the opportunity. Nancy always thought the stories were rubbish. That was until she found herself on Resurrection Road with no fuel and no idea how far away the next gas station was. But she always believed one thing—no matter how mad or crazy a story was, deep down, there was always a hint of truth in it.

  Nancy nervously tapped her thumb on the steering wheel, kept her eyes glued to the dark road ahead, and prayed for a miracle. Then out of the darkness, like a desert oasis, that miracle came. She leaned forward, peered through the windshield, and saw the flashing neon lights of Patrick’s Garage & Gas emerge from the darkness.

  Relief washed over her as she pulled her mother’s 1979 Chevy Nova into the filling station and shut the engine down by the single fuel pump. She glanced out the window at the empty worn-down, beat-down service station and saw nothing but empty shelves through the dirty windows and no sign of life whatsoever anywhere inside.

  Nancy was two seconds away from declaring the joint abandoned. She was about to turn the engine back over and hit the road when she saw a dark figure off to the side of the gas station.

  He held something in his hands. Nancy couldn’t really make out what it was. She leaned forward to get a closer look. The figure swung the object high up above his head where the moonlight caught it before it slammed back down hard and fast.

  It was an ax.

  “Oh, to hell with this,” Nancy said to herself as she turned the key to crank the engine, but the son of a bitch wouldn’t start. It just chugged and chugged, and all that chugging drew the attention of the dark figure with the ax, and ax in hand, he started to make his way over.

  Nancy pumped the gas. She yelled, and she cursed, but nothing was starting that Chevy Nova. The dark figure moved closer, and with his every step, she saw more of him. He was a big bastard, must have been close to six and a half feet tall, with massive hands and skin like leather. Then as he neared the car and stepped into the light, Nancy could see that maybe he wasn’t really all that menacing at all. Despite being huge and slightly creepy looking, he could easily have passed for any other regular guy… maybe.