The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Author: Stephen Hand
Date: 2004-03-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Thriller
Description: "On August 20th, 1973, police were dispatched to a remote farmhouse in Travis County, Texas. Within the confines of the cryptic residence they discovered the butchered remains of 33 victims. Brandishing a chainsaw and wearing the grotesque flesh masks of his victims, the killer became forever known as 'Leatherface.' Now for the first time, they only known survivor of the killing spree has broken the silence and come forward to tell the real story of what happened in that macabre farmhouse. " -- Back cover.
Publisher: Black Flame

WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT FEAR . . .

. . . DOESN’T EVEN COME CLOSE!

On August 20th 1973, police were dispatched to a remote farmhouse in Travis County, Texas. Within the confines of a cryptic residence they discovered the butchered remains of 33 victims. Brandishing a chainsaw and wearing the grotesque flesh masks of his victims, the killer became forever known as ‘Leatherface’. Now for the first time, the only known survivor of the killing spree has broken the silence and come forward to tell the real story of what happened in that macabre farmhouse.

THE TEXAS
CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Pepper had tripped or fallen down in front of the van, dropping below the headlamps—where now, standing in the full glory of the makeshift floodlights, the killer notched up the revs and leant down with the chainsaw, pushing it into the fallen girl’s face. In, in, in—he hacked into her face, the cold cutting blades mincing her vocal chords and whipping out her windpipe before she could even scream.

Erin clutched her head and wept.

“Noooo!”

Outside, the insane bastard stomped like a retard in a geyser of blood and down feathers. He was swaying, shitting on the bitch’s innards with his saw, howling as her life sprayed out across the Texan dirt. But, all the while, his face was turned towards the van. While he ground and pumped and hacked and snorted, his insane screaming eyes were constantly fixed on Erin. Almost as if he was putting on a show for her, to let her know she was next.

A Black Flame Publication

First published in 2004 by BL Publishing, Games Workshop Ltd.,
Willow Road, Nottingham NG7 2WS, UK.

Distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, N.Y. 10020, USA.

Copyright © 2004 New Line Cinema. All rights reserved.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all related characters, names and indicia are trademarks and © of New Line Productions, Inc. 2004. All rights reserved.

Black Flame and the Black Flame logo are trademarks of Games Workshop Ltd., variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

ISBN 1-84416-060-2

Printed in the UK by Bookmarque, Surrey, UK.

Dedicated to Brenda Wootton, who unbelievably got to see the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre before me.

PROLOGUE

Okay, the tape’s rolling. Just clear my throat . . .

Right, that’s better. Here we go . . . August 2003. Hewitt case.

There is something very wrong with the Lone Star State.

Its deep heart is fibrillating, only nobody wants to save the patient, least of all Texas itself. Not because no one cares, but because, like any patient with a self-negating compulsive disorder, you can’t begin to affect a cure until the sufferer first admits she’s got a problem. And Texas doesn’t have any problems—ask anyone.

She’s the biggest state outside of Alaska and her natural resources are the blood and guts of the entire country. She produces more oil than any other state and provides most of the coal burned in America’s power stations to produce electricity. She is one of the country’s leaders in farming, earning over five billion dollars from the sale of crops and vegetables, and for the sheer volume and diversity of ranching Texas remains number one. Cattle, poultry, eggs, hogs, goats, sheep, wool, mohair, leather—chances are, if you’re eating or wearing something, it probably came from somewhere within the state’s two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand square miles.

Texas isn’t just about refining raw material. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, they’d traveled straight up from Houston. And last year, sixty-eight per cent of all international exports from Texas were in computer and electronic products, as well as chemicals and other industrial equipment and machinery. Texas has also invested heavily in the financial and service sectors, and has led all states in internet job creation since 1990.

The state also gave us two presidents. It was Dwight D Eisenhower from Denison, Texas, who pushed the green light on the country’s Interstate highway system. Texas itself has over seventy-seven thousand miles of road, and its airline business remains one of the healthiest and most used in America, even after 9/11.

Fighting in the face of adversity is what Texans do best. No state more than Texas is built upon the fierce tradition of liberty and independence that lies at the very core of American beliefs. Many people forget that when Sam Houston’s forces routed the Mexican soldiers at San Jacinto, Texas entered into a nine-year period as an independent nation. And much later, when General Lee had already surrendered the Confederate cause at Appomattox a month previously, the last fight of the Civil War took place at Palmito Ranch, South Texas. Even today, Texas is the only state permitted by law to fly its flag at the same height as the Stars and Stripes.

The cry, “Remember the Alamo,” is just as relevant in today’s global turmoil as it was when one hundred and ninety men stood fast against an army of five thousand and died so that you and I can be free.

When Landry’s Cowboys used to be called “America’s Team,” it was more than cheap marketing. Because to most Texans, Texas is America.

But America has got problems.

Ask some people about Texas and they’ll remember a day in Dallas 1963, when the dreams of the entire Western world were shattered by a sniper’s bullet. They’ll also remember how it was a Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson from Gillespie County, who was sworn in as president on the day of Kennedy’s assassination.

The same people might also tell you that the last time they saw pictures from Texas broadcast nightly on their TV was during the Waco siege of 1993, when a bungled joint operation by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms resulted in the violent deaths of eighty cult members, known as Branch Davidians, and their leader, David Koresh.

The fact that Koresh just happened to set up shop in Texas might be considered unlucky, but what’s not unlucky is the way extremist Texan militia groups have regarded Waco as an example of covert martial law being imposed on free-thinking, free-willed individuals by a corrupt Washington government that is variously depicted as homosexual, Satanic, Jewish, Masonic, or all of these things combined.

These same militiamen look back to San Jacinto and tell us we should take arms to defend our freedoms against a horde of politically correct perverts entrenched on Capitol Hill. And when the FBI declares these gun-wielding toy soldiers as “domestic terrorists,” the gunmen cry back, “Remember the Alamo!”

Militia groups are not exclusive to Texas. Nor are the Ku Klux Klan, who have at least five different factions in the state. And it might be unfair to single out the death of James Byrd Jr. as being in any way unique to Texas, even though the whole world was horrified to hear of that night in 1998 when Byrd was grabbed by three white men on a road outside Jasper, then tied up and dragged to his death behind a pickup truck.

So, this is the paradox: to many people, Texas is a forward-thinking, proud and powerful state, devoutly religious and welcoming to all visitors—after all, the name originates from the Hasinai Indian word, “Tejas,” meaning “friend”—to others, the state is a symbol of all things reactionary, violent and primitive. Just as the state excels in productivity, it is also seen as excelling in macho violence, freakish subcultures, and racial hatred. The Texan redneck is renowned the world over as the ultimate stock cartoon of ill-mannered stupidity.

Another way of understanding this contradiction is to log on to the website of the Texas Justice Department and look for the Death Row page. Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of the death penalty—and I’m against—it is utterly insane to misdirect the tools and promise of the information era to officially and dryly present a list of Death Row Facts, including a page of Final Meal Requests.

That’s right, you can log on to the Justice Department website and see what prisoners ate prior to their appointment with the executioner. This neat table of personal menus is made available on the Internet, solely to satisfy our morbid curiosity; we want to know if the myth of the famous last meal is true. Can convicts really eat anything they want before their lethal injection?

This is what Texas is all about: myth versus reality. And this is why Texas is the perfect American state. It represents all our ideals and nightmares. It is the extreme condition of what America could or might be. It is dystopia clashing with utopia.

In some ways, the metaphor runs even deeper than this idea of Texas as America’s psyche. It could be that Texas provides the perfect model for understanding Twenty-First Century man himself. Mankind still has not made a decisive step towards civilization. Part of us still wants to fight and to hate. Part of us remains animal, only most animals don’t kill for pleasure or create a system of resource sharing that forces millions of their own kind into poverty and starvation.

So when we look at Texas, we can see who we want to be and who we really are. But we cannot aim for greatness as long as we refuse to admit our failures.

At the outset I said that there was something very wrong in the Lone Star State. From what I’ve been talking about so far you might think I was referring to some of the state’s general problems. But I’m not. What I’m talking about is the state’s refusal to acknowledge its biggest failure in recent criminal history. I’m talking about how Texas can never embrace a better future as long as it tries to hide its sordid, unpleasant past. I’m talking about the darkest, dirtiest secret deep in the heart of Texas.

At this point, I need to come clean and admit that I’m Texan and proud of it.

I was born in Travis County, a few miles outside Abilene, where I went to school and majored in journalism. I then traveled around Texas, going wherever there was work. My first two jobs were on local newspapers, both down near San Antonio. Then in 1971 I got a position with a two-bit TV news outfit in Austin. I had a great time there. The company had no money, everyone had to cover for everyone else—it was perfect for an enthusiastic young reporter like I was at the time. You see, we worked as a team and we fairly much decided everything on a day-by-day basis. And that’s how we managed to report on national as well as local news. What we didn’t have in budget we made up for in energy.

Back in the summer of 1973, there was only one real story: Nixon.

On August 15, President Richard Milhous Nixon made his second address to the nation on the Watergate scandal. The speech was good but, as we all now know, not good enough. All the same we were giving Watergate a lot of coverage. But on August 20, that changed.

One of my law enforcement sources called me in the middle of the afternoon—I’d just got back from a long lunch—and told me that a group of investigators had been dispatched to a remote farmhouse in Travis County. This, of course, was my home turf. I hurriedly scribbled down a few details, grabbed my crew, then got down there as fast as I could.

A couple of newspaper guys had arrived before us but we were the first broadcast people on the scene. We nailed our footage long before anyone else from TV or radio showed. It was a big scoop for us that night.

You might be able to remember the clip. I cringe each time I see it. I was so young and stupid then, looking back. If you recall, I was standing on the roadside trying to talk above the traffic. The road was usually empty but a lot of local rubbernecks had turned out. Anyway, what I actually said was: “Police recovered the remains of at least thirty-three murder victims at the home of Thomas Brown Hewitt, a former head-skinner at a local slaughterhouse.”

It was terrible.

We couldn’t get close because the FBI had everywhere taped off, but we did learn that multiple locations were involved. We knew there were investigators up at a nearby farmhouse and some searching a local meat plant, and we even managed to grab some film of five agents inspecting a body lying face down in water at the bottom of a creek. Of course, we couldn’t show it on air—we actually had decency rules back then. These days, they’d probably zoom the lens right up the victim’s ass.

At first, the whole picture was confused. It was clear that something horrible had happened but the full extent of the crimes was being kept under wraps. There were also rumors that something had gone badly wrong during the opening of the investigation—which would have explained why all the authorities were being tight-lipped.

The headline of the local evening newspaper that day read: HOUSE OF HORROR STUNS NATION—MASSACRE IN TEXAS. And the strap-line ran: CHAINSAW BUTCHER KILLS 33.

And that was the first even I got to hear about the chainsaw.

Late the next day the police called a press conference. The hall was packed, interest in the story was worldwide. Everyone wanted to know more about the insane chainsaw killer and his thirty-three victims. At first, it seemed as if everyone was going to get what they came for. Accompanied by a couple of men from the FBI, County Supervisor Franklin Nash came in and spelled out the basic facts:

1. Following a call from a member of the public, police went to investigate the cause of a major disturbance at an isolated farmhouse near the town of Fuller. The name of the person who called the police was being withheld.

2. Initial investigations led to the discovery of a number of dead bodies. The FBI were called out immediately and a full investigation was set in motion.

3. During the course of the investigation, two police officers were killed: Detective Adams and Officer Henderson. Both men were murdered by the sole suspect in the case.

4. The murderer was a middle-aged man named Thomas Brown Hewitt, who had been killed by police while trying to escape arrest.

5. All families of all the bereaved had been contacted.

6. There were no other suspects in the case.

7. FBI agents had found one injured survivor who, regrettably, was medically unfit to assist the police any further.

8. The case was closed.

And that was it. The most horrific crime of the twentieth century and that’s all they were prepared to give us.

I knew a couple of guys who’d been working the crime desk for over thirty years and they said they’d seen nothing like it. There were no photos, no witness statements, there wasn’t even an inquiry into the shooting of the main suspect.

I asked Nash if he could give us more information about Hewitt, or about how the two officers were killed, but he refused. He had a whole room of angry press demanding to know the name of the survivor, but all he would say was that discussing the incident further “would be bad for Texas.” Whatever the hell that meant.

It’s times like that when you realize just how dependent news is on the cooperation of the authorities. The moment they stop playing ball, you have no material. And no material means no story. It’s a lesson I’ve learned many times over the course of my career.

To most people, the classic image of a journalist is of a determined young investigator who goes out and digs up all the facts. In reality, most journalists just take what they’re given and reword it. Investigative journalism takes time, money and contacts. And in Travis County 1973, I had only one of the three vital ingredients needed to break the Hewitt case open.

I asked my editor to let me make a news special on the murders but he wasn’t interested. He said that after Watergate I was conspiracy crazy and couldn’t think straight. Maybe he was right but I couldn’t let a story this big break on my doorstep and then just disappear.

Wrong.

The Hewitt chainsaw murders were dead and buried within a month and forgotten by everyone except yours truly.

I spent two years trying to get closer to the case but I drew a complete blank. My normal contacts dried up. I couldn’t get my hands on any paperwork. I even drove out there but the cops kept the whole area out of bounds until they’d sanitized the place. The local people wouldn’t talk either. Basically, I struck out. And, when the frustration eventually got too much, I let go.

Since then the case has received barely a mention. Occasionally, you’ll find a couple of vague paragraphs in one of the increasingly popular encyclopedias of homicide, but no one has come even close to writing the definitive version of what took place in Travis County, August 1973.

Until now.

Finally, thirty years after the murders took place, I can reveal all the facts behind the Texas chainsaw massacre, even though I suspect nobody cares anymore.

In 1981, the State of Texas leveled the farmhouse, and filled the basement with cement. The killings and the media frenzy had long stopped and the police were only too happy to close this bizarre case forever.

I quit my New York job in 1999. I’d made a New Millennium’s resolution to give up the nine-to-five grind of office politics and to try my hand at freelancing again. I’d gone freelance once before in the Eighties, but it had gone expensively wrong. This time out of the gate, however, I walked straight into a commission.

A company specializing in the production of straight-to-video DVD documentaries wanted to make a film about the Hewitt case. The CEO of the company was a crime aficionado and he actually owned a tape of my outside broadcast from that day in August 1973. He’d done some asking around, learned I had some unresolved interest in the case, and so approached me with a deal I couldn’t refuse. They wanted me to research and present the Hewitt program and would even give me book rights for a cut of the royalties.

So, over twenty years after I’d left town, I found myself back in Austin, thinking about those thirty-three dead people.

I still had good contacts there and, after all this time, the authorities were more relaxed—the case was ancient history. Also, many of the people who were involved in the Hewitt investigation had either retired or moved on. Fortunately, improvements in freedom of information over the last few decades made it easier to gain access to official documentation. Compared to the frustration I’d felt in 1973, everything seemed almost too easy, and I began to wonder why no one else had got there before me. But that was before I’d taken a closer look at the remaining evidence.

The more I discovered about the Hewitt case, the less I knew.

The first thing I had access to was the victim dossier.

I got a full list of names and details. There were photos attached: family pictures, graduation portraits, lots of smiling optimistic faces. But then I saw the scene-of-crime photos. The victims had been mutilated and butchered almost beyond recognition as human beings. And I began to understand why the county supervisor had acted the way he did. Even in our mass media age of twenty-four/seven televised atrocities, some crimes are perhaps best left in the dark.

I tried contacting some of the families of the victims but no one wanted to talk. I was just stirring up too many painful memories. Nor was there much they could actually tell me. The police had told the relatives of the deceased nothing more than they’d told the public.

In any event, my real target was Thomas Brown Hewitt.

From the moment I first started my renewed investigation, I kept coming across a bizarre name: Leatherface.

I later learned that this was a nickname given to Thomas Hewitt. But I didn’t know where the name came from until I spoke to one of the attendants at the killer’s autopsy.

She told me Hewitt’s body had been riddled with bullet holes, all of them inflicted by police firearms. But what really set her talking was the fact that Hewitt’s corpse was wearing a leather facemask that turned out to be made of human skin.

I asked if there were any photos of Hewitt’s body at the crime scene and she helped me locate a picture of Hewitt wearing the mask, sitting in an armchair. It was grotesque. He was clearly wearing a mask of some description but the top of his head had been blown wide open. As revolting as this image was, there was something far more disturbing about it, something I couldn’t put my finger on.

So I checked my old file from 1973, and found what I was looking for. It was an old newspaper, local edition. The headline ran: MADMAN GUNNED DOWN BY POLICE—TEXAS HOUSE OF HORRORS COMES TO AN END.

The paper carried an interview with County Supervisor Nash, held at the funeral of Detective Tom Adams. Nash had spoken to the press to assure people that the detective’s death had not been in vain. But I had to read the interview three times before the full implication of what the county supervisor had said fully sank in.

“I lost two guys down there. But we tracked the killer down and, while attempting to escape, Mr. Hewitt took a shotgun blast to the face. And that day, the State of Texas won.”

But the damage on the picture I’d seen didn’t look like it had been caused by a shotgun—the face in that repulsive mask was far too intact. Also, it seemed strange that Nash had said Hewitt had been caught trying to escape because in the crime scene photo I had, Hewitt was clearly sitting in an armchair inside what looked like the Hewitt house.

Clearly I needed to talk with Franklin Nash.

So I made an appointment to see him at his office and if I was puzzled before, I was completely lost afterwards.

Nash didn’t really want to talk and he wouldn’t let us film him. But I made an audio recording of our brief conversation.

“Of course the case was closed,” he said loudly. “Anybody who tells you that we got the wrong man is mistaken. I was the senior officer. I can assure you that absolutely everything was handled completely by the book.”

Now prior to him saying that, I never once suggested he’d got the wrong man. So clearly there was more to this issue than even I was aware of. And then, when Nash then showed me his scene of crime photo of Hewitt, I positively knew something was wrong.

Nash’s photo showed Hewitt sitting dead behind the wheel of an automobile. There was blood everywhere and the corpse’s face had been obliterated.

So now I had seen two completely different photographs of Hewitt’s body. Both originated from official sources but their images and corpses contradicted each other. The moment I tried to question Nash about this, he terminated the interview.

* * *

It was at this point that I decided to change my approach.

The paper trail was becoming of increasingly questionable value, so I needed to get closer to the crime itself. And the only way to do that was to find someone who’d been on the ground.

The duty roster for the time in question was pretty thorough and after a week or so of intense phone calling, I managed to find Roger Church, retired police officer.

When I met Church, it was evident that retirement had not been kind to him. I treated him to a bottle of bourbon and asked him to tell me everything he knew. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that much. Church had been on cordon duty so didn’t get to see any of the bodies or the events leading to the shooting of the main suspect. However, he did have some very strong opinions, which he said were based on conversations with his fellow officers. And he also had an amazing revelation to make.

“Yeah, we botched the case. Anybody with half a brain knew the crime scene wasn’t sealed properly. There’s a film in the Hall of Records you need to see. Shows the whole damn thing.”

The prospect of a previously undiscovered film showing anything from the Hewitt investigation was almost too unbelievable for words. I made immediate arrangements for a viewing at the Hall of Records but had to wait an unbearable two weeks before finally meeting the clerk.

I can’t begin to describe how I felt when he dropped a dusty old sixteen millimeter film can in front of me and said, “I don’t think this film’s seen the light of day for over thirty years.”

I had no idea what I was about to see but I felt like Lord Carnarvon must have done when he first opened the tomb of Tutankhamun. The wait, while the clerk spooled the film onto his old cine projector, was torture. Then he pulled down a small white screen, turned down the lights and switched on the machine.

Detective Tom Adams stepped into frame in front of the entrance to a gloomy farmhouse.

“Okay, we’re rolling,” said an unseen officer holding the camera.

“This is August 20, 1973,” Adams announced. “Time is 3:47 pm. Location is the Hewitt property, the residence where Victim One was found. I will now begin the walkthrough.”

There was a jump edit in the film and the next sequence showed the camera descending down a concrete stairway with Adams out of shot. It was so dark that the camera was struggling for a picture. You could hear footsteps as they walked down the stairs, the detective continuing his narration off camera.

“We are descending stairs to the furnace room. I see scratch marks on both walls. On the western wall there is a brown stain with what appears to be a clot of hair. And an embedded fingernail.”

The image then moved into the furnace room. A light flickered in the ceiling showing intermittent glimpses of madness. The whole room seemed to be a chaotic mess of bodies, tools and objects that were hard to make sense of.

“There’s something moving behind those shelves,” whispered Adams. “South-west corner.”

Quickly the camera turned and moved in the direction indicated by the detective. Suddenly an arm swept into view, and the ceiling light went out, plunging the room, and the picture, into darkness. There was a scream. The cameraman!

“Something just happened!” came Adams’s voice.

Followed by a dull thud and a series of hysterical cries.

“What was that?” shouted Adams. “What was that?”

Someone turned on a night-light, and it was now possible to see that the camera was panning crazily in all directions, rendering the image almost useless.

Adams spoke, again off camera: “Oh my God—”

Then the sound cut and the camera turned to show Detective Adams lying on the ground, stunned and bleeding—before the final image of someone wearing a leathery mask and waving an axe in one hand, lashing out at the camera.

Cut.

* * *

I had the film digitized and prints made from the last few horrifying frames.

I had seen him, Thomas Hewitt, in action. And I found it hard to believe that this crucial piece of film, showing the death of the two police officers, had been left to rot in the county archives. This incredible, shocking footage would form the most important part of my DVD documentary.

Not only because of the powerful, terrifying images contained within it, but also because the appearance of Hewitt in this film was different from the two dead Hewitts I’d seen in the two crime scene photos. This was new evidence, evidence which suggested Hewitt had never been found. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

The only way I could be sure was to find the soul remaining survivor from the Hewitt attacks—the person mentioned in the Nash ’73 public statement.

Again, this proved surprisingly easy.

For legal reasons, I am not currently permitted to identify the name or even the gender of the survivor. What I can say is that the survivor’s age is uncertain, but is somewhere in the fifties or sixties. The survivor lost an arm as the result of an attack by Hewitt and, unfortunately, the survivor has not spoken a single word since the day of the attack. Doctors describe the condition as near catatonia. However, the survivor is a compulsive eater of chocolates and candy which helps explain the obesity.

I showed the survivor an autopsy photo of the bullet-riddled body.

“They had a dead body with a mask,” I said. “And that was all they cared about. That was the end of their story. Do you remember anything? You haven’t said a word since that day. Can you try to remember?”

I got no response, just a floor full of candy wrappers. But I hoped that if I showed the survivor a photograph of the real Leatherface, I might be able to trigger something. So I took out the prints I’d made from the film—those last images of the masked Hewitt waving an axe. If that horrifying image didn’t get through, nothing would.

“Were you shown these police photographs?” I asked. “This is the only known footage of the man known as Leatherface. That’s him, isn’t it? The real one, I mean.”

Silence.

I arranged to meet with retired Officer Church again, and found out he’d already approached the survivor with exactly the same idea.

“You know what I did?” he chuckled. “I snuck out some of the autopsy pictures and showed them to that survivor. I guess I shouldn’t say that on your camera, huh?”

When I asked Church if the survivor spoke at all, his reply left me speechless.

“Why shouldn’t she?” he replied. “After all, she was the one causing all the trouble, telling everyone we’d got the wrong guy.”

Church was talking about someone else—another survivor. A woman who’d been saying they’d killed the wrong man, confirming every suspicion I’d been feeling.

Once more I found myself struggling to comprehend the implications of yet another part of the police investigation that had been kept hidden from everyone. How was it possible that a second survivor could have remained out of the public eye for so long?

The answer to that question came when Church gave me the woman’s details. She was in her fifties and had conveniently spent most of her life inside a mental institution. Her name didn’t appear on any of the initial police reports because she hadn’t been anywhere near the Hewitt place when the FBI broke in. She’d turned up a week or so later at a police station a few hundred miles away.

It was the FBI who’d made the connection so the woman never appeared on Travis County police records. She said she’d been at the farmhouse on August 18, and had escaped the following day. At first, there was some doubt as to her reliability as a witness but a plate check on an abandoned vehicle found near the farmhouse positively linked the woman to the crime scene.

So within three days of supposedly meeting the only living survivor of the Hewitt murders, I was going to meet a second. And the woman was prepared to appear on camera. In fact, she almost seemed relieved that I was there, as if a long burden was about to be lifted from her shoulders.

At first, her manner was shy and reserved, but I took my time and slowly we began to talk.

I decided to open the conversation with a discussion of my reservations about the way the police had conducted the case—something to which she readily agreed.

“After police interviewed me about what happened,” she said, “one officer admitted that things were mishandled from the beginning.”

I let her talk about this for a while before gently asking her if she could tell me what had happened in August 1973. But she shook her head and looked at the floor. So I changed the subject and asked her if she could remember being visited by Officer Church. Could she remember him showing her any photos of the body in the morgue?

When she answered me, she began slowly but then, almost as if I had unlocked something in her mind, the rest just started to pour out. And before I knew it the disheveled woman was telling me her story.

“Yeah, I saw the autopsy photos . . . I guess he was trying to make me feel like it was all over . . . Closure . . . But it wasn’t him . . . I know he’s still out there. I never sleep through the night . . . I remember it all. It was terrible . . . A terribly hot day . . .”

ONE

A scream ripped up the heat of the sweltering midday sun.

Up close, the full throttled shriek could have been the bloodied cry of a terrified animal. Or it could have been the two-stroke, gasoline powered wail of a forty-seven inch chainsaw. It was all noise: jagged, piercing, deafening. Only by moving away from the source was it possible to tell that the roar was actually the turbocharged thunder of an automobile engine.

It was August 18, 1973, and the customized van was steadily making its way along the deserted rural highway that cut for miles through the wide open plains of Travis County, Texas. The road was long and narrow, bordered either side by great swathes of subtropical grasses that flourished in spite of the punishing sun.

Every now and then the van would go by a tree of some kind—mesquite, cottonwood—and there were places where these bleached trunks grew in number and huddled into dense, tangled groves, having learned to adapt to the bone-dry texture of the sandy soil; its arid quality made plain by the thick clouds of dust kicked up in the van’s wake.

On one level the scenery was beautiful—green grass, the leaves of the tall trees, a clear blue sky with hardly a cloud—and at times you could see right over to the horizon. But in some peoples’ eyes, the prairie could be intimidating. It was vast and untamed, even after years of agriculture. You only had to drive through this baking sprawl to realize that the road map, with all its fancy words and symbols, really told you nothing about the place.

Break down out here and you’d be lucky to get picked up for hours, maybe even days. And there was something unsettling about the road itself—it was just too damned long. The unmarked strip of tarmac went on forever, making you feel like you were going nowhere. No matter how far you drove, the route just kept straight on ahead of you. You could join the highway at any point and you wouldn’t have a clue where the hell you were until you saw a sign. It was as if the neglected route was stagnant in time, you felt like you’d die before you reached the end of the road.

And then there was the heat. The unrelenting, sweltering heat. In some places along the way the air had been dry, in others it was humid, but all day long the heat had been a bitch. Constant late summer of ninety-two and climbing. Yes sir, with each passing minute, the road through the ass-end of Travis was getting hotter.

The van was cruising, barely tapping the true potential of its finely tuned engine. Sure, it could rip the tarmac at the push of a pedal, but the driver was in no hurry. Kemper was damned proud of his bad-ass baby and driving it was his third greatest pleasure. When the vehicle had come off the factory line it had been a plain old production standard Chrysler Dodge A-100 Wagon. But to look at it now . . .

The van had been raked—lifting the rear of the chassis to give the wagon the hunched, road-hungry tilt of a rod. The wheels had been revamped, their gleaming chrome rims wrapped in four massive tires that didn’t so much grip the road as strangle the damn life out of it. And the exhaust ended in two machine gun side-pipes encased in perforated heat shields that ran along the bottom of the van, one each side. But all this candy-coating would have meant Jack shit if the truck hadn’t also got a turbocharger slamming air into the engine like some kind of haul-ass Hiroshima.

An old joke went something like: “You know you’re a redneck if you think John Deere Green, Ford Blue, and Primer Gray are the three primary colors.” Well, Kemper was Texan born and bred and the Dodge was spray painted from roof to wheel-arch in primer gray. So what?

Make no mistake, Kemper loved his girl and there was no goddamn way he would ever let anyone else get behind her wheel. Ever. And he didn’t give a shit about redneck jokes either. Ask any Texan who a redneck is, and chances are he’ll say it’s the next guy. But neither Kemper nor any of his four traveling companions genuinely met the criteria—they didn’t even carry firearms. And there wasn’t a redneck alive who would travel in Kemper’s van as long as it had those decals on the fender—one showing a peace sign, the other the national flag of Mexico.

Mexico, for Christ’s sake! Did 1836 mean nothing to these coon-shit kids?

Music filtered out through the open windows of the van. It was Southern Rock, the guitar chords blending with the understated thrumming of the powerful, customized engine. And someone, a young woman sitting in the front passenger seat beside Kemper, was singing along with the track. She was Texan and her accent was a perfect match for the singer of the band, but she stank. Her singing was shit. Not that she cared. The music was loud and she was having the greatest time, dusting this awesome countryside at a steady fifty mph with her friends. It was a fine day—God damn it, filing her nails had never been this good! They were going to the show.

Erin held the emery board in her right hand and was using it to smooth the nails on her left. But she’d barely finished when Kemper took hold of her left hand and kissed it. That was sweet, but it didn’t stop her singing. She had her foot up on the dashboard, her scuffed brown platform shoe resting just inside the windscreen. This was a test of their relationship. Kemper could see her foot alright and Erin knew it was pissing him off. But who was it gonna be, the van or her? Lucky for Erin, sex was Kemper’s numero uno greatest pleasure. And hadn’t he just kissed her hand?

“If you don’t know what I mean . . .” bawled Erin, pausing to pull her long, light-brown hair back behind her ears as it spilled out from beneath the grimy white Stetson she knew she looked good in. She also wore beat-up flared jeans that were held in place by the kind of thick leather belt even her daddy would have respected. Nothing about Erin was showy. She was young—turned twenty last month—and naturally attractive, so she didn’t need to put on the fake chrome and bullshit that Kemper welded to his van.

The only reason Erin was showing her midriff and shoulders right now was because it was so damned hot. She’d lifted up the bottom of her white cotton tank top and tied it into a tight knot between her breasts. The two other guys in the van knew not to mess with her, not because she was Kemper’s girl, but because if there was an award for Miss Texas Tomboy, Erin would win it and she would kick their sorry little asses.

A voice came from back inside the van: “Would somebody please make her stop?”

Morgan sat rolling a joint. He was sprawled on a beanbag facing the side door which made the journey kind of interesting each time Kemper hit a bump in the road or hung a bend too fast. And now Morgan had to suffer Erin ruining a perfectly good tune. He didn’t know where to put his face. He could stare out across the middle of the van and gaze out through the side door windows at a big expanse of nothing. He could turn left and get an earful of Erin killing Lynyrd Skynyrd up front, or he could look right and suffer the frustrating sight of Andy and Pepper making out on the long backseat, which was just in front of the luggage space next to the rear door.

Some deal. Kemper and Erin up front, Andy and Pepper down back, which left Morgan flying solo. It was a total downer. Why Pepper chose to waste her time on Action Andy was way beyond Morgan. It wasn’t as if the two lovebirds even knew each other.

So right now in the land of Morgan, confusion was king and Erin’s lousy stinking noise had just been crowned queen. Hence the weed.

Not that Morgan needed an excuse. After all, the reason they’d just come up from Mexico was because Kemp—

“Won’t you stand up and scream?” Erin blasted, not giving a damn about Morgan’s whiny complaint.

Kemper smiled. He was the same age as Erin, both of them two-zero, only he had spent his last decade in a state of car-crazy dementia. As long as he could remember, automobiles had been practically his whole life. When he was a kid, he spent all his money on car magazines and books and he had a fine collection of toys and model four-wheelers of all kinds. Then as soon as he was legal, he passed his test and bought his first car—a good-for-nothing Volkswagen—but he had started messing with engines long before that. In fact, he’d lined up his first job as a mechanic long before leaving high school.

Kemper was a natural, and now he spent most of his waking hours fixing, tuning, restoring and customizing automobiles. Which went some way to explain why his clothes were always covered in oil stains, and why the black lines in his hands were soap-resistant.

Take now for instance, he was wearing a mixture of clothing from home and stuff from work. His dark denim shirt came straight from shop, which is why his sleeves were torn off at the elbow—to give him freedom to work—and there was a white and blue patch sewn in place just above his left breast pocket with the word “Kemper” embroidered in fancy letters. This suited Kemper just fine; he was proud of who he was which is why you never saw him without his baseball cap with its big monogrammed “K” dead center of his forehead. The black T-shirt and baggy utility pants he wore only completed the image of a totally dedicated gearhead.

God, if only he could do something about the heat. They had all the windows open, even the small square skylight near the back, but Kemper was still sweating some. His long, sallow face gleamed with perspiration and his black hair—always in need of a cut—was slick and sticking to his skin. Even his goatee beard, thin moustache and long sideburns were damp. Fact is, anywhere Kemper had hair, he was retaining saltwater. Which was not good.

Kemper flicked his dark eyes up to the rearview to see what was going on up back. The inside of the van looked real cool. He’d put thin drapes on all the windows, the seats had fabric covers and he’d hung some pretty neat stuff up on the walls. Sit in the not-too-cramped space in the middle of the van, look up, and you got a picture of Alfred E Neuman smiling right back down at ya. I’ll tell you what, Kemper had put together the kind of vehicle most kids would die to cross country in. What, with the turbocharger, the near-slick tires and this sort of cross-border interior design. Sure, okay, Erin had helped a little. So what?

In the mirror, Kemper could see Andy and Pepper turning up the heat, with Morgan trying hard not to look at them with a great big hunk of green-eye. Either that, or he was just too busy rolling his joint.

Kemper also saw something else. He smiled. Then noticed Erin was watching him.

“Tell me how much you love me. How much?” he grinned.

Now that she’d finally stopped trying to sing, Erin spoke with a voice that was surprisingly rich, low and mellifluous.

“This much,” she replied, and held up the thumb and forefinger of her left hand a mere inch or so apart.

“That much?” he smiled.

“This much,” she confirmed.

He lifted a hand off the wheel and spread his own thumb and forefinger as far apart as he could. “That much,” he said, then they kissed.

Up back, everybody laughed. It was a good moment. Even Morgan had to stop for a moment to enjoy the camaraderie and the obvious double meaning to what Kemper and Erin had just been measuring out.

As the laughs subsided, Pepper and Andy started to pick up where they’d left off, before the girl suddenly paused to pull her lips away. “Can you believe we didn’t even know each other yesterday?”

They sat holding each other real tight, Andy’s right hand fully appreciating the smoothness of Pepper’s moist thigh, and then her calf right down to her cowboy boot. He’d have gone higher if her thin, knee-high, pale, floral skirt hadn’t bunched up and got in the way.

Pepper was eighteen, lively and damned hot. She was the reason Free Love was invented—everywhere she went, guys wanted to screw her, which was okay but sometimes it could be a real drag.

“Just amazing,” agreed Andy, then he grabbed hold of her head and pulled her lips back into close combat.

“Know what’s even more amazing?” interrupted Morgan, finally sealing the paper on his joint.

Almost breathless from kissing, Pepper lifted her face away from Andy and looked inquisitively over at Morgan. Unlike Andy, she genuinely wanted to know what Morgan had to say.

“Each day,” smirked Morgan, “thirty-three thousand people get a sexually transmitted disease, and,” he paused for effect, “two-thirds of them are just about your age.”

The perky smile quickly evaporated from Pepper’s face and she wriggled out from Andy’s arms. Maybe Morgan had a point, you can never be too careful with VD. And what about crabs? She’d known Andy less than twenty-four hours.

Morgan lit up his joint with smug self-satisfaction. He’d stopped them in their over-excited, panting little tracks. Mission accomplished.

Behind Pepper’s back, Andy grimaced and flipped Morgan the bird. He knew exactly where his so-called friend was coming from—which didn’t stop Pepper straightening up her pink, backless camisole top.

As always, Andy’s eyes were drawn to the row of tassels hanging beneath the bra cups; they somehow reminded him of the stage curtain at a strip joint. Sure, Andy had been to strip joints. Lots of them, and so what? It was perfectly normal for a corn-fed buck like him to enjoy the fruits of womankind.

And he knew a place that was only five bucks to get in. He even took Morgan with him some times, though Morgan tried to pretend that he didn’t like adult entertainment. Which was bull-crap.

But that’s what Andy and Morgan’s friendship was all about: contrasts.

Andy was well-built through years of lifting—while Morgan was gangly and freckle-faced. Andy wore plain shirts and jeans. Morgan went for busy cotton flares with vertical stripes and a T-shirt bearing the tourist slogan “New York”, as if Morgan was somehow hip or going places. Andy had neck-length, wheat-colored hair, framing a face full of thick rough stubble. Morgan sported a mess of black curls with a center parting and a scrawny moustache that looked totally lame. And one last thing: Morgan wore glasses and talked bullshit.

Kemper flicked his eyes up to the rearview one more time. The guys were at it again. Now they were fighting over that girl they picked up yesterday. What was her name again?

Pepper was sitting upright beside Andy now. She was all straight and was combing her hands through her tousled brown hair.

Andy watched her admiringly. She said she was eighteen which made it legal. He himself was twenty and Morgan only nineteen, which gave Andy seniority no matter what crazy shit Morgan said about the clap. And if seniority wasn’t enough, Andy could always give Morgan a punch in the mouth. Or maybe he could just confiscate the idiot’s joint—that usually worked.

Suddenly, Andy could smell Pepper. And he could feel the warmth of her skin as their bare arms touched.

“You’re so damn beautiful,” he said, full of heartfelt desire for her. Morgan had stalled Pepper’s engine. Now it was time for Andy to restart it, only he popped the clutch too fast and she ignored his approach.

“What are the odds you guys passing through Laredo just as I started to hitch?” she asked with wide-eyed amazement.

Trying to hide the disappointed scowl on his face, Andy let Pepper’s question pass. Instead, he called up front. “Hey, Kemper. Can’t you do something about the air-con?”

Andy’s voice was more than a little hacked off, as if it was the heat that was bugging him. But Kemper was having none of it. “If you or Pepper get too hot,” he replied playfully, “just take your clothes off.”

Erin nudged her boyfriend in the ribs. What was he saying? Did he want to see Pepper naked or something?

“You are such a perv,” she said admonishingly. And then she noticed where Kemper hoped to get his satisfaction from: the rearview. So she lifted her foot from the dash and stretched out to tap the mirror, knocking it to face any direction other than the back of the van. If Pepper and Andy were stupid enough to take Kemper’s advice, Erin wasn’t going to be stupid enough to let him gain from it. But just in case, she called back, “Don’t listen to him, Pepper.”

“Why?” Pepper was now as cheerful and irrepressible as she had been before the thought of syphilis had raised its dripping head. “I think he’s funny.”

Erin groaned. If there was anything a man with Kemper’s ego needed, it wasn’t—

“Yeah,” agreed Kemper, looking Erin in the eye. “She thinks I’m funny.”

Strike!

“She’s only known you for nineteen hours,” Erin shot back, before turning again to Pepper. “I’ve lived with him for three years. Trust me, he’s not funny.”

Strike Two!

Morgan vs Andy, Erin vs Kemper, and every which way, Pepper was caught in the crossfire.

Morgan sparked up another joint. The first doobie had floored him, he could barely stay on the beanbag. But the second was wiping him out completely. He stared vacantly at a colorful piñata that hung from the van roof above him. He appreciated its tinsel and gaudy plastic wrap as only a true stoner could, but he couldn’t make out what the hell kind of thing the papier-mâché container was supposed to represent. Not that it mattered—appearances weren’t everything, right?

Up front, Erin was still swaying to the sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd. She picked up the case of the eight-track tape that read: “Lynyrd Skynyrd: Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd.” It was kinda funny: Skin-Nerd.

Andy and Kemper were skin-nerds, as was Morgan, but with a different kind of skin. She looked at the track list. This was the Skynyrd’s debut album. It had hit the stores only recently and had already been hailed a rock classic. And now Erin and the gang were going to Dallas to see the band live in concert. How cool was that?

“I hope they play “Free Bird,” she said.

“They better,” replied Kemper, also hoping to hear the song that would go on to define an era. “These tickets cost me a fortune.”

Erin looked out through the windshield at the vast, lonely landscape. It crept for miles ahead of them. Hard to believe that in time this remote backwater topography would give way to the glass towers and concrete of the city.

A plastic figure stood on top of the dash. It was an ornament of a dancing hula-girl who swayed this way and that, in time with the rocking of the suspension. The hula-girl wore a permanent fixed smile even though her mouth was painted and her molded body was full of metal springs.

A thick cloud burst over Erin and Kemper’s heads. Kemper grinned and took in a deep breath: pot.

Erin was not so impressed. She whipped round in her seat and fixed Morgan with a steely pair of eyes.

“Jerk!”

Morgan sat waving his joint in the air, laughing. He’d only wanted to share and Kemper seemed happy enough. The stoner laughed even more when he saw Erin lean her head out through the passenger-door window in search of some fresh air.

Almost immediately her face was thick with sweat. The draft from the speed of the van was doing nothing to cool the superheated air. The heat waves rising up from the baking highway made Erin feel as if her head was inside a pressure-cooker.

Kemper looked back in the direction of the fresh joint. “Hey, how about sending that my way?”

Morgan was perfectly happy to oblige. He slid forward off the beanbag and stumbled up behind the driving seat, where he thrust his face into the fog of grass he’d blown there a moment earlier. The fumes were thinning but there was still enough free-floating fun time for Morgan to inhale as he handed the joint to Kemper.

“Careful. This shit’s potent.”

Her face boiling in the open air, Erin quietly decided that dope was shit.

Sure, she liked the odd joint much as anybody but she couldn’t understand why some people made such a big deal over it, like it was all-important or something. It’s just a damn joint: light it, smoke it, and shut the hell up. This dope culture was just a load of horseshit.

Beside her, Kemper pinched the joint in his fingers and squeezed it tight between his lips. The paper squeaked as he sucked on it and the charred end glowed with the red of sudden oxygenated flame.

The fumes entered his mouth, his throat, his lungs.

He then exhaled.

“I think I can manage, college boy,” he mocked. But then he’d only had the one toke.

“You go to college?” Pepper asked Morgan with badly concealed surprise.

Morgan pulled his eyes away from the joint and turned to face her. “Berkeley.”

“With all the other communists,” laughed Kemper taking toke number two.

Pepper went wide-eyed.

God, her smile was loaded with such enthusiasm. It was as if simply living was the ultimate rush for her.

“That’s really cool,” she enthused, nodding her head in emphasis.

After toke number three, Kemper found himself having to stifle a cough. He prayed to God that chicken-shit Berkeley Boy didn’t notice, but he had to agree with Morgan: this was potent shit.

Finally, Kemper could hold back no more. “Damn!”

“Told ya,” bragged Morgan. “If Mexico made weed their national product, they’d be the richest nation on the planet.”

Erin still had her head out the window. From what she’d seen during their brief cross-border trip, Mexico could do with all the money it could lay its hands on. God, it was so depressing: the poverty and the deprivation. Compare that to Texas.

Kemper looked across at her. He watched the wind blowing her hair, the serious set of her face and the way she’d tied her tank neatly below her tits, pushing them up. But something was wrong. Why was she making a big deal over this? Sure, a few days cooped up in a hot van with Morgan was enough to drive anyone nuts, but wasn’t that just another reason to get stoned? A puzzled frown settled on Kemper’s brow. It was still there when he tapped Erin on the thigh and offered her the joint.

“Erin?”

She brought her head back inside. “No thanks, I’m nauseous.”

She said that in a weird way, almost prim like a pissed schoolteacher or something. But Kemper knew what her problem was. Erin was smarting because she was embarrassed. She hadn’t listened to him back in Mexico and now she didn’t want to admit it.

“Montezuma’s Revenge,” he declared knowingly. “I warned you not to drink the water down there.”

Erin was stony-faced. “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t drink the tequila either,” Kemper rebutted, almost as an attack.

“Maybe I didn’t go to Mexico to watch you get shit-faced for four days,” she fired back. And suddenly they were serious.

Erin thought Kemper had acted like an asshole in Mexico, while Kemper thought she’d spent the whole trip stressed out and uptight. She didn’t join in anything like she used to. She’d been holding back all the time they were down there.

“That’s what people do there,” he countered. “What did you expect?”

“A teardrop diamond ring.”

Wow, where did that come from?

Kemper turned to look at her and saw the most wonderful girlish grin on her face. God damn it, she’d done it again. How could a guy argue with someone like her? She always did that to him—disarmed him in an instant with a smile, with a joke, with her can.

“Here we go again,” he sighed. Although Kemper appreciated the abrupt positive upswing in mood, he knew she was singing the only real song she knew: When Are We Getting Hitched?

Erin pouted and swung her head to look forward at the road. Kemper stared at her profile and natural beauty. He would have died for her there and then. She was gorgeous.

“One day you’ll get your ring, Erin. I promise.”

No reply.

He tried offering her the roach a second time. “Peace offering?”

She smiled—thank God—and swiveled in her seat to take in Kemper and to accept the joint. His peace offering had worked. They’d reached a truce. Erin took the joint from his fingers . . . then flung it out the window!

“Hey!” shouted Kemper. “Why’d you do that?”

Erin shot him a mischievous look, but it froze on her face when she heard Morgan, still leaning just behind Kemper. “Dude, don’t trip. We got two pounds—”

Oh shit!

Morgan stopped himself too late. He’d tried to stop. He realized what he was saying, but . . . but . . . it was the dope, it made him talk. And now he’d gone and shot his mouth off and Erin had heard everything. She could see the fucked-off expression written all over Kemper’s face. So Morgan had spilled the bag or something? What the hell was going on?

Erin turned the spotlight of her suspicions on Morgan. “What did you say?”

She didn’t see it but Kemper rolled his eyes—good goin’, moron.

Down back, Andy gave Pepper a break and paid attention to what was going on with his friends. He could smell trouble brewing and he wouldn’t miss its sweet, hilarious taste for all the soft lips in the world.

But Morgan tried to make like he didn’t mean anything. “I can’t remember,” he stammered absently.

“Two pounds of pot,” said Erin, recalling his exact words. “Does that refresh your memory?”

Morgan waved a hand as if it was all getting too much. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Bad brain cells.” He began to stagger back in the direction of his beanbag. “I’ll just be back here if anyone needs me.”

The sheepish voice and bad memory routine only made Erin madder. What the heck was going on here? She turned to confront Kemper and she could see he was nervous. He was hiding something from her.

“Morgan’s baked,” he chuckled unconvincingly. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

But Erin knew better. She folded her arms then got ready to scrutinize every sweaty little unintentional expression on Kemper’s face.

“Please tell me we didn’t go to Mexico to buy pot,” she demanded.

Kemper replied overloud, repeating her words like a boy scout swearing an oath. “We didn’t go to Mexico to buy pot.”

Erin held fast and kept her eyes fixed on him, probing his defenses, looking for weakness, searching for some sign of inadvertent honesty.

Kemper glanced up at the rearview again—what was he looking at? At Morgan? The beanbag? What? What the hell was distracting him?

Kemper knew Erin wouldn’t quit so he fell back on the defensive. He knew she knew he was bullshitting her, so decided to plead for mercy . . . kinda.

“Baby, I’m not a dope smuggler,” he protested, using his sincere voice. “Just an extraordinary guy on an extraordinary trip with the woman I love.” And he gave her his best shot at a charming smile. But he was wasting his time. Funny how he only used the word “love” when he was in deep shit.

“Save it,” she replied flatly.

Then she turned and looked out the passenger window again, angling her body away from him.

Over on the backseat Andy laughed and shook his head.

The cow’s head lay at the top of a mound of mangled carcasses in the dumpster.

Piled high and broken within the rigid metal walls, the corpses bled and decomposed into maggot’s nest soup—concentrated, crushed, reduced to morbid waste, butchered into inarticulate refuse. Food and death.

The head was broiling in the summer heat. It stank. It was crawling with flies. The bovine skull had been blasted and boiled, its fat and scrapes of meat greedily clawed away for the sake of a few cents. Only one eye remained, sitting black as death in a slaughter-stained socket.

And the blood of the cow was red.

TWO

“God, what is that?” Pepper almost retched.

Now they could all smell it. Jesus, it was bad, and it was coming in through the windows. The downside of letting the breeze into the van was that it also paved the way for every shit-kicking, rat-infested stink that just happened to be hanging in the air.

Erin gagged and pulled her head back inside—not that it helped much.

God, that smell—it was awful. Sweet, bad, moldy, like shit, like . . . like . . . hard to explain, just some kind of bad stink that hit you hard in the face. It somehow shocked you . . . the smell physically shocked you. It crawled its way up your nose like a warm vapor trail of suffocating puke-shit, then suddenly kicked you, making your head rock back and your guts turn inside out. Before you knew it, you wanted to throw up.

They were all suffering, but Kemper seemed least affected. Sure, he sniffed a bit and moved uncomfortably in his seat, but he kept his hands on the wheel where they belonged and didn’t make a big fuss. That’s because he’d smelt this shit before.

“A slaughterhouse,” he said.

Immediately, everyone understood.

The van was heavy with the stench of death. Not just one death but a mass production line of deliberate, scheduled, calculated disembowelment and destruction. The reduction of life to death. Of production to consumption. Meat processing. Meat packing. Hygiene. Sanitized. Regulated. Stainless steel scalders, conveyors, spine pickers, cutting boards, shackle line washers, salvage stations, old-fashioned meathooks in state-of-the-art cool rooms. The ultimate symbol of evolution—language, science and technology culminating in mastery of the food chain, forcing birth, creating life solely to die. They don’t understand. They don’t feel a thing. They’re not afraid. Herded in at one end, shrink-wrapped at the other. Pumping the cattle with hormones and antibiotics, then taking a pneumatic stunner to their meat-bastard heads.

Broken bones and bleeding joints. Cows ingesting carcass toxins. Burgers sold with plastic toys and a smile. Human remains the very definition of hell. The killing fields of Cambodia, Ed Gein of Wisconsin. Now here, a reconstruction of Ilse Koch’s Buchenwald played out on four legs, where man has the right to kill because two legs stand closer to God. Where man has the right to kill because he alone has hands capable of holding knives.

Erin looked out and could see the buildings of the meat packing plant just off the side of the road. Before she even saw the slaughterhouse, the stench had reminded her of something. Now that she knew where the smell was coming from her memory came creeping back.

“Smells like a dead cat,” she heaved.

Not just any cat. The cat she had in mind was the one she’d found lying on the sidewalk when she was just a dumb kid. The orange tomcat had been hit by a car. One side of its head was crushed and Erin had cried for days. Her mom had tried to help by telling her all about animal heaven, but if this shit-smelling slaughterhouse was anything to judge, animal heaven must be pretty fucking full-up right now.

“Well, if we’d fire up another joint,” offered Morgan holding his nose, “it wouldn’t smell so bad.”

It wasn’t like Morgan to somehow try to use marijuana to solve each and every little problem in his life. Much!

The van was past the slaughterhouse and Erin was quickly losing sight of the hundreds of cows she saw crushed together under the low roofs of the massive holding pens.

As the van moved on, Andy and Pepper got up and knelt on the back seat to turn and look through the rear window. They couldn’t take their eyes off the place. It was like nothing either of them had ever seen before.

The girl’s jaw dropped; for once she wasn’t smiling.

So that’s what it looked like . . . The slaughterhouse . . . The building where stuff got killed . . .

“How could people work in a place like that?” she wondered aloud. “I mean think of all those poor, sweet cows—”

“To hell with the cows,” Andy cut in, like she hadn’t a clue. “Try breathing those fumes all day for minimum wage.”

“That’s mean,” she scowled, and she made sure that when they sat back down, there was some distance between the two of them—which gave Morgan the opportunity he needed to butt right in. Ducking his head out of the way of the bobbing piñata, he got up off the beanbag and leant forward, pushing squarely in between the hot-and-cold lovers, driving a physical wedge through their personal space. Then he looked back through the rear window at the distant slaughterhouse. It was hard to tell if he was genuine or not when, with a look of total seriousness, he said:

“It takes a special breed to do that kind of work. Cutting cows’ throats and bashing out brains for a living.”

Perhaps he was speaking a little too loudly to be sincere or it could have been the dope. Either way, Pepper was too upset to listen.

“Stop!” she complained. Everything was about death all of a sudden. Dead animals and their sickening, putrefying stench of death. Now Morgan was talking about butchers like they were murderers or something.

But Andy thought his skinny friend had made a reasonable point, even if he was wrong again. “Those dudes get used to it pretty quick,” Andy corrected.

“No, they don’t,” countered Morgan. “Most don’t last a year. The others either stay drunk or go insane.”

Great. First death, now insanity. Pepper looked straight at Morgan through the lenses of his glasses and right into his eyes. A change had come over the van. Some kind of anti-party cloud had descended and she didn’t like it at all. It was a bright sunny day, not a midnight campfire freakathon.

“Morgan’s the expert on the stupidest shit,” said Kemper.

He’d realigned the rearview and could see the confusion on Pepper’s face. He wanted to lighten the mood again. But having said that, as far as Kemper was concerned, Morgan was an expert on the stupidest shit. Erin however, was interested in where all this conviction was suddenly coming from. One minute Morgan’s spaced out on his beanbag, the next he’s some kind of brainiac in the shit-morbid art of meat processing.

“How do you know so much about it?” Erin asked.

“I’m a vegan,” Morgan replied, taking everyone by surprise. “It’s my job to know these things.”

This one sentence worked an incredible magic on Pepper. Her eyes lit up beneath her wavy brown hair and suddenly she was gift-wrapping her smiles for Morgan and Morgan only.

“So cool!” she gasped, beaming. “We have so much in common. I don’t eat anything that can smile either.”

“You did last night,” commented Andy with a wry grin.

“You are crude,” she fired back.

Andy was bragging, showing off that she’d tasted him yesterday, only now he was using their fun to insult her.

Pepper still found Andy’s muscles and his sweaty gray wife-beater a turn-on, and she knew he was only messing with her, but Andy was rapidly becoming Mr. Old News. While his friend, the beanpole from beanbag city, was quickly transforming into Mr. Deep, even though his hair was pretty fucked up. He didn’t eat animals and Pepper liked that. She couldn’t help but look on admiringly as Morgan drunkenly staggered back in the direction of his beanbag. Wow, he’d got totally shit-faced on weed. Maybe she should—

“LOOK OUT!”

The van swerved.

What the—

It was Erin who had cried out, warning Kemper of something in the road and now the van was all over the place.

Andy grabbed hold of the backseat and braced himself. He’d seen it all. A young woman, a teenager, had been walking aimlessly down the side of the road. She looked like she was lost or delirious or something. The moment she’d heard the van approach she’d stepped right out in front of the vehicle. There was no way Kemper could—

Acting solely on instinct, the mechanic cut the steering wheel, darting the van over onto the shoulder of the highway. The moment the A-100 hit the bumpy surface it started skidding and Kemper had to fight for control. Oh shit!

Morgan never reached the beanbag. As the van lurched to the left, he fell forward and accidentally caught the piñata with his hand, knocking it down to the floor where it cracked open.

Meanwhile, Pepper had grabbed hold of Andy and was praying to God that everything would be alright. She looked out the window and watched as the meandering teenage girl rushed by in a blur, the van barely missing her.

Was the stupid fool trying to get herself killed, or what? What was she doing in the middle of the road? And how come Kemper—or Erin for that matter—only saw the blonde girl at the last second? She couldn’t have just come out of nowhere? You can see for miles along these roads. Maybe hitching with these guys wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Kemper grappled with the wheel, trying to set his baby straight and back up on the road. There were times when the van’s awesome power could be a real pain in the ass, and now was one of them. He had to jam both feet on the brakes to get a reaction, and then had to steer into the skid to bring the van safely to a halt.

Silence.

The emergency stop had kicked up a cloud of dust around the vehicle.

“What the hell?” sighed Kemper.

“You almost hit her!” shouted Pepper from the back.

But Andy thought she was beating up on the wrong person. “What the hell is she doin’ walking in the middle of the road?” he rapped. It was a miracle that Kemper hadn’t splattered the dumb bitch’s brains all over the front of the vehicle.

Where was she now?

Still shaken, the whole group climbed back to look out through the rear window. Who was the girl? What was she doing? Kemper didn’t think he’d hit her, he certainly didn’t feel any impact, but maybe the side of the van had clipped her or something.

Erin came up last behind Kemper. As she climbed back, she caught sight of the broken piñata. It was packed solid with marijuana.

Now she got it. Kemper’s eyes had been glued to the rearview ever since their return from Mexico. And all along she thought he’d been taking in Pepper. Erin should have known better. Yeah, she took some comfort from the fact that her guy wasn’t being a pervert, but she was still pretty pissed off that he was always going behind her back like this. And what if they’d been caught at the border?

Seeing her reaction to the dope-filled papier-mâché container, Andy nervously reached out and slid the split piñata under the backseat, but he was wasting his time. Erin was pissed that everyone in the van seemed to be in on the deal except her. Did Pepper, the hitcher, know? She wasn’t even one of the gang.

Erin looked to where Kemper stood by the rear window and could only bring herself to say one terse word: “Asshole.”

Her comment was loud and clear, but the asshole in question didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy staring out back at the girl he’d almost just killed. It was clear now that the girl was a teenager—but it was hard to work out her age. Was she a smooth looking twenty or a rough looking sixteen? At first, when she’d rushed out into the road, she’d looked like a tall kid, maybe because of her knee-high summer dress. But now, her face—

“What the hell does she think she’s doing?” snapped Kemper.

They were going to Dallas. Skynyrd. But now everything was going out of joint, Goddamn it!

“I think she needs help,” said Pepper, which Erin totally bought into. She prodded Kemper and sent him back in the direction of the driving seat, then joined Pepper to peer out through the glass, the two of them having to squint in the bright sunlight.

Kemper got back behind the wheel of the van and turned the ignition.

Everyone else continued to watch the girl as she carried on walking away from the vehicle. She was a mess. Her hair was disheveled, her pale sundress was dirty and frayed, the skin on her arms and shoulders was bruised and scratched. Her flat shoes were worn and filthy, their soles blistered by the hot skillet surface of the sun-beaten highway.

It occurred to Erin that the girl might have been in an automobile accident, maybe further along the highway towards Dallas. The girl looked terrible. But the strangest thing was the way she just kept on walking—walking away with her back to the van, as if the whole incident of her nearly being run over had never happened.

Slowly, Kemper turned the van around and headed back along the highway.

Morgan sighed. Why the hell hadn’t Kemper stayed on Interstate 35 like everyone said? Scenic route, bullshit! Now they were going back, chasing some fruitcake at less then five miles an hour. At this rate, they’d be back in Laredo within the month.

Soon they’d caught up with her. The van drove slowly alongside her, the chrome rims revolving in time with her dull walking pace. And now that they were close, Erin could see the girl’s eyes: they were dead.

“Hey?” called Erin through her window. “Are you okay?”

No response. The girl’s face was impassive, vacant as she took one step after another, marching painfully along the highway that would lead her to nothing but more and more wasteland.

Immediate panic over and done with, Morgan dropped down onto the backseat. “Boys, that’s a bad acid trip walkin’ right there.”

Andy nodded in agreement, but Erin went right back at them. “Or maybe she was raped, you dip-shits.”

Typical of Morgan to bring everything down to drugs. He could be such a moron some times.

The van continued to roll forward beside the zombie-like girl. She paid no one any attention. The van didn’t exist. Erin and Morgan could have argued for hours, days and still the girl wouldn’t have noticed.

“You gonna get killed doin’ that,” tried Pepper. Anything to break through.

But nothing.

“Hello?” called Erin, louder. “Can you hear us?”

Erin was pretty pissed that Andy and Morgan weren’t trying to help. At least Kemper was helping with the driving. And then she saw it . . .

A teardrop.

Just there, caught in the sunlight. A single teardrop was rolling down the young woman’s cheek.

Even when Erin had first seen the terrible state the girl was in, she’d known that something was very wrong. And now the girl was quietly crying to herself and Morgan’s big idea was that the poor kid was on a goddamn trip?

“Stop the van!” Erin demanded.

“Fuck that!” Morgan replied. “We got a concert to go to.”

“And we’re still three hours from Dallas,” chimed Andy.

Damn bastards!

Erin looked forward at Kemper, but he’d already got to thinking. They’d make Dallas in three hours only if he broke every speed limit in the state of friggin’ Texas. But he also knew better than to argue with Erin when she had that look on her face. Erin had made up her mind.

The brakes squealed as the van rolled to a gentle halt. Kemper made a mental note to check the wheels when they got back. Probably picked up some dust from that brief excursion off-road.

Erin and Pepper opened the side door and hurried out onto the road. Jesus H Christ, it was hot! And there she was, the girl with her filthy summer dress, her arms, neck, shoulder and legs all burning in the midday heat. And her skin—God, she was covered in marks.

Pepper reached out to help when suddenly the girl spun round. She looked deranged.

She’d changed from expressionless a few seconds ago to wide-eyed and crazy. Erin couldn’t tell if the girl’s wild expression was one of anger or fear, but something about the sight of her resonated with Erin. She made Erin remember something—no, not remember—she made Erin see something. The girl was familiar . . . Erin looked at her watch. They’d been on the road how long? What day was it? Was this happening today or tomorrow? Shit, the heat was confusing Erin. It almost felt as if someone had just walked over her cremated ashes—no! There was no time for this crap.

Erin tried to take the girl’s hand.

“Got . . . to get away,” recoiled the shivering derelict, her eyes darting feverishly in all directions—looking, searching, almost as if expecting something to happen.

“What?” asked Erin, encouraged by this sudden breakthrough. “From who?”

The girl looked at Erin with her long hair, clean skin, her face concerned.

Then she looked at Pepper; about the same age as the wandering girl herself, dressed pretty, a real person. Erin and Pepper were both people. Real people. Girls like her.

The girl tried . . . She tried to . . . She wanted . . . She . . .

“I wanna go home,” she whispered, her whole body beginning to sag as if under the weight of a colossal release of tension. Her voice was hoarse as if she’d been shouting or screaming and there was dried snot between her nose and upper lip.

“Do you live around here?” asked Pepper hopefully.

No response.

The girl had finally stopped walking but now she seemed in danger of simply stopping altogether. Somehow, God knows how, Erin and Pepper had connected with the teenager but this only seemed to have unlocked something and now the girl was uncoiling to the point of collapse.

Erin and Pepper looked at each other and silently agreed that the girl needed help.

“We can’t just leave her out here,” Erin called back.

Andy shook his head and stared down at his feet. Morgan was back on his beanbag staring off into another dimension. Only Kemper seemed to be paying any attention and even he was scratching his goatee, which usually meant he was in the process of deciding whether or not something was pissing him off.

Well, tough shit.

Erin carefully reached out to the girl. “Let us help you.” And soon she and Pepper had the girl sitting on the backseat of the aerosol gray Dodge.

Time to move.

Kemper started the engine, slowly turned the van around, and then they were on their way again.

Morgan remained slovenly decked out on the beanbag, while the others gave the girl plenty of room. Andy and Pepper kept well back while Erin looked round from her place in the front passenger seat. All four of them, five if you included Kemper through the rearview, couldn’t take their eyes off their new, messed-up passenger.

She was disoriented, frightened and filthy. Her movements were erratic and she would not give in to eye contact of any kind. Mostly she stared down at her battered shoes—though Erin guessed that what the girl was actually seeing was something miles away in the landscape of her traumatized memory.

“What’s your name?” soothed Erin, only a year or two older than the girl, but feeling maternal all the same.

“California . . .” Strange name? “Are we going to California? I wanna go home.”

Big problem. California was completely the wrong way, and in any event the girl was in no fit state to travel. Her lips were cracked and dry, there were deep dark rings under her eyes and she was weak. She needed professional help.

“Oh, wow!” sang Morgan. “I’m way too stoned for this.”

By now, Pepper was beginning to think he was a complete jerk and she usually didn’t think ill of anybody. But Morgan’s veggie credentials had long since faded. The guys had been only too quick to pick Pepper up when she was hitching, probably because they thought she was an easy lay—Andy for one had already jumped her. But when they came across someone in trouble, someone who needed their help, they didn’t wanna know. No sex with the crazy girl. Thank God Erin had Kemper under some kind of control. Manage the driver, and you’ve got a winning game plan.

Erin was taking the lead. “Kemper, let’s find a hospital.”

That was the best thing they could do. The girl needed professional care, but in case Erin had forgotten, they were pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

“Give me even the vaguest idea where we can find one,” Kemper sniped, “and we’ll go there.”

Impasse. Until they heard the girl’s voice—she was crying.

“They’re all dead.”

Up front, Erin and Kemper turned to look at one another, both suddenly afraid. Then they turned their heads back in the direction of the girl and what she had just said.

Pepper was freaked. “Who?” she asked. And she couldn’t help but look out through the window. It was still the same day. The same bright, sunny morning. Nothing had changed outside and there was nobody out there.

“All the people . . . They’re all dead,” wept the distraught girl wearily.

What the hell was this? People? Dead? Dead people? Was she talking about an accident, or a car crash maybe? Or perhaps it was something to do with the weather, or some other kind of accident, or—Jesus no . . .

Morgan laughed, almost hysterical, like it was so damn funny that this beat up girl, this girl in shock was talking about people getting killed.

He looked over to Kemper and sniggered. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up hitchhikers?”

Erin ignored him and focused on the girl. Though she was crying and scared, the girl looked real pretty. She still had some puppy fat on her face and her blonde hair had last been cut by someone who really knew how to use a pair of scissors. God, what had gone so wrong for her?

“We’re people,” Erin said, trying to reassure her. “And we’re not dead.”

But the girl wasn’t listening. Her attention had suddenly become focused toward the front of the van. She was trying to see out, over past Kemper’s shoulder and through the windscreen.

Erin turned to follow her troubled gaze. There was nothing much to see, just an old wooden sign by the side of the road. The paint on the sign was faded and worn, but Erin could quite easily read the dubious words of welcome:

FULLER, TEXAS
DRIVE SLOW, SEE OUR CITY
DRIVE FAST, SEE OUR SHERIFF

Fuller? Where the hell was that? But Erin had no time to ponder this further, because behind her the girl had become frantic. She’d seen the sign and the twelve painted words had sent her into a flood of tormented tears. She gripped her head in her hands and bent forward in her seat, weeping.

Morgan laughed nervously and Andy didn’t know just where to put his face—the day had taken a real bad turn.

“Nooo!” wailed the girl, her whole body juddering with anxiety. “You’re going the wrong way!”

Erin was just about to explain why they were going the right way. Yes, it was the wrong way for California, but the right way for Dallas and for getting the girl some help. She just needed to calm down. But the girl rushed up on her feet and dived to the front of the van. Then she reached forward and grabbed hold of the steering wheel.

Kemper was caught by surprise—she was scratching the backs of his hands and pulling the van out of control.

“Holy shit! Get her off!”

This was something Andy could deal with. There was no way he was going to let this crazy kid screw up their journey any more than it’d been screwed already. But the van was already veering left and right before Andy could grab hold of her, and used his strong arms to pull her away from behind the driving seat. He didn’t want to hurt her but neither did he want the van to roll over.

All the while, the girl fought with Andy and tried to break free.

“People are out there,” she sobbed.

Still sitting on the beanbag, Morgan moved his feet out of Andy’s way, then took out his packet of cigarette papers. If Janis Joplin was going to scream and holler all the way to Dallas, he had no intention of being straight enough to hear her.

“They’re watching!” she cried. “They’re still watching!”

Who were watching?

Pepper looked left and right onto the plains but could see nothing but grass and crops and trees. There was no one out there. No one.

Andy carried the kicking girl, almost lifting her off her feet, before dropping her once more on the back seat.

“Can’t . . . make . . . me . . . go!” she panted, but he was too strong for her.

Erin looked back, concerned. She wanted to help. The girl was breaking her heart.

“I wanna go home now,” cried the girl. “I won’t go back!”

“Back where?” shouted Andy. From where he was standing, she was just plain crazy.

Suddenly the girl weakened in his arms and dissolved in a flood of tears.

Andy slowly, gently let go—ready to make his move if she ran forward again. He didn’t have to worry. She had nothing left. Her energy was gone. Her willpower was in shreds.

“He’s a bad man,” sobbed the girl, her whole body trembling. “A very bad man.”

Andy took a step back—the girl looked safe. Then he glanced over at Morgan, who’d been about as useful through all this as a left-handed handjob. The stoner smiled at Andy then nodded over at the weeping girl and silently mouthed two words: “Fucked up.” Then he went back to rolling his joint.

Up front, Kemper kept his foot on the gas and concentrated on the road. Some weird shit was playing out behind him in the back of his baby, and he didn’t want anything to do with it. Best he could do was get them somewhere fast. Then they could offload Looney Toons and continue on their sweet way to Dallas.

They’d just passed a sign, the one that made the girl freak, so they must be coming into a town some time soon. As long as his friends kept her away from him, along with her broken scratching fingernails, he’d be just fine. He just hoped that Erin was feeling damned satisfied with her Samaritan gig.

Erin herself was deeply worried. She didn’t know what to do and was fast running out of ideas. They needed help. They—

“You’re all gonna die!” wept the girl, her face abject, her eyes little more than two white beaten slits of despair.

And then she pulled a handgun out from where it had been hidden inside her sundress. The gun was a revolver, a point-357 snub-nose, and just the sight of it scared the shit out of everyone. Even Morgan stopped what he was doing.

Andy tensed for action. The girl had a gun—THE GIRL HAD A FUCKING GUN! He knew he could take her. She was upset, crying. If he just kept his cool, he could—

Pepper screamed and jumped back. The girl said they were all going to die. She was going to shoot them. They’d picked up some kind of psycho. If Kemper had just run her over in the first place, none of this would be happening.

Only Erin held it together. She began to get up out of the passenger seat and held a hand out to the girl, to try to defuse the situation.

No use.

The girl raised the revolver . . . and put the barrel inside her own crying mouth.

No!

The girl’s cheeks went sallow beneath the tear-filled hopelessness of her tortured eyes.

No!

Erin could see the muscles tense on the girl’s dirty, bloodstained trigger finger.

Pepper, Andy, Morgan; they all looked on in total horror. They each knew that this was a pivotal moment. They were standing on the brink of something awful.

The girl started to hyperventilate, her lips wrapped round the cold deadly cylinder. She was sucking it.

Kemper slammed on the brakes, his face pouring with sweat. He was saying something but his words were all but lost in the rising hysteria from the back of the van. People were shouting, screaming, crying out—frightened for the girl, frightened for their own lives. It was a millisecond of chaos that lasted an eternity.

Standing inside the windshield, the plastic hula-girl jiggled and danced like she’d never done before. Each time Kemper went off-road, she wiggled. Each time he swerved the van, she swayed with her airbrushed smile. And each time he hit the brakes, she danced the fucking hula.

Down back, the girl’s finger tightened on the trigger . . .

NO!

Blood splashed across the entire dashboard, spraying the hula girl with a warm spray of sticky, scarlet liquid and gobbets of gore.

* * *

Blood splashed across the back of Kemper’s head, soaking deep into his baseball cap. He turned.

The interior of the van had become the color of mottled death, the spattering blood tracing a glistening arc up from the backseat to the front windscreen. Kemper’s eyes swiftly followed the spray pattern, tracing its inimitable course past Morgan—motionless, unharmed.

Pepper—freaking, no bullet holes.

Andy—helpless but safe.

Erin. God, Erin; sat beside him in the passenger seat, crying, spots of blood on her tied white tank top, alive—fine. Thank Jesus God, she was fine.

And the girl. The teenage girl. She’d been afraid, anyone could see that. She’d been in shock. She’d been injured. She’d been exhausted. Her clothes were torn. She’d been hysterical. It looked like she’d been to hell and back, and now she lay there on the backseat of the van with a bullet through her brain.

She’d shot herself through the mouth, the bullet exiting through the rear of her skull. As she’d died, her blood had splattered against the rear window, painting a deep circular smear on the glass a mere fraction of a second before the bullet had continued on its way and punched a jagged hole through the center of the pane. If the blood was the target, the hole was its bull’s-eye.

It was a headshot. The girl had killed herself. Not the kind of crybaby stop-me suicide advertised weeks in advance with letters, aspirins, and phone calls. This was the real deal. No messing. No bullshit. Over and done with.

Kemper managed to park the van inside an area of shade beneath a tall tree. Within the shade, all they could hear was the sound of Pepper screaming.

THREE

The facially-disfigured corpse lay slouched across the backseat, hands drooping, legs wide open and askew, letting the smoking gun rest where it had fallen into the dead girl’s lap. The shot had done maximum point blank damage. Those parts of the rear window that hadn’t been blown through were now drenched with blood, bone chips and tiny wet chunks of think-box.

Some of the mess had spattered forward, catching the kids and even reaching so far as to hit Kemper and the front windshield. The backseat was a mess, and the rest of the van didn’t look much better.

Pepper had stopped screaming but she was now in the grip of panic. She ran across to the side door and tried to open it. It wouldn’t budge.

“Let me out!” she cried, then she started to pound on the inside of the door. Her hands hit metal and banged against the door windows. She had to get out. She—

Andy stepped forward, grabbed hold of the door handle and pulled the whole thing wide open.

Pepper hurled herself out of the vehicle and found herself side-by-side with Erin who’d stumbled out of the passenger seat and immediately thrown up all over the side of the road. Erin had been feeling nauseous for a few hours already—which is why she hadn’t taken the joint from Kemper—but now there was no way she could hold it in, not after what she’d just seen.

Erin’s sides ached as she retched up more and more acidic vomit onto the ground. It just wouldn’t stop. Her eyes filled with tears, her face turned red and her nose was stinging, but something kept hitting the puke spot at the back of her throat, causing her to hurl until she had nothing left to chuck. Soon all she could do was belch some vile tasting gut gas.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Kemper.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No! I’m not okay!” What the hell did he expect? Didn’t he see what just happened back there? She pushed him away and steadied herself in case her stomach went into spasm again.

Behind them, Morgan slowly stepped out onto the soil. He held his arms outstretched in front of him. They had blood on them—the dead girl’s blood.

“Christ! I could’ve been killed!”

Erin shook her head. Some girl goes and blows her head off and there’s Morgan worrying about himself. Okay, Erin herself had been scared when she first saw the gun, but now—

Kemper thought differently. He could see how freaked out his friend was. It was written all over Morgan’s face, just as the dead girl’s blood had dripped onto the lenses of his glasses.

“We all could have, Morgan,” agreed the mechanic.

Andy walked over to the two of them. He was looking up at the sun, the sky. “Did that really just happen?” he asked.

Kemper looked down at Erin. She was getting it together again just fine. Which somehow made Kemper realize that he himself was actually now in a state of mild shock.

“I’ve never seen anyone die before,” he murmured.

“Most people never do,” replied Morgan equally bewildered.

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?”

Morgan had no answer for his friend. Instead, he had a question; one that had been on his mind ever since they first met that crazy girl out on the road. He stared Kemper in the face and said almost accusingly, “Why did we have to stop?”

The driver had no answer. Why did they have to stop? Why hadn’t he just cut out the middle man and driven over the whacko when he first had the chance? She was dead anyhow—she killed herself—so what goddamn difference would it have made? The only difference Kemper could see was that they now had a dead body in the back of the damned van. She was lying there with a fucking hole in her head.

“She needed help!” asserted Erin, filling in the blank left by Kemper’s non-reply.

But Morgan was almost reading Kemper’s mind. “A lot of good we did her!”

Erin shook her head. There was no point arguing with Morgan, especially when he was this panicked. The guy was terrified, but then maybe that was partly to do with him being more than a little stoned.

Erin found that she was now okay to get up. Christ, her puke smelled bad. It lay on the ground in thick puddles that were already curdling in the high noon of the scorching sun. She looked around at everyone. Andy and Kemper seemed okay, but not Pepper.

The girl’s screaming had been the loudest thing they’d heard after the gunshot itself. They’d picked Pepper up just across the Mexican border. She was a hitchhiker, looking for a good time and now she’d found herself in this. She was standing by the taillights, crying for all she was worth.

Through the shimmering heat-haze, Erin could see that the girl was hyperventilating. Erin didn’t know Pepper at all but she sensed that the brown-haired girl was one of the good guys. She walked over to her, hoping to calm her down—not that Erin had had much success reassuring the teenager with the revolver.

“I can’t . . .” stammered Pepper. “I can’t . . . believe she did that . . . Why us? Why did she have to pick us?”

Erin was a little disappointed that Pepper seemed to be taking the Morgan line on this, but she supposed it was understandable. Sure, their main thought should have been for the dead girl, but then Erin wasn’t exactly thrilled by the deep shit they were in now either.

The two girls hugged and Pepper broke down in tears.

One death on the road. Hundreds, thousands of deaths in the slaughterhouse.

Kemper climbed out of the van and chucked a fifth of Jack Daniels on the ground. Tennessee sour mash whiskey all the way from Lynchburg—it was there if anybody wanted it.

He was using a shop rag to wipe the blood off of his skin, but in this heat it was drying already, changing from scarlet to deep rust. Kemper tried spitting on it, but it didn’t help much. None of them were having much success in getting cleaned up. Morgan had found a tiny piece of her skull caught up in his hair.

The girls had stepped aside, moving far away from the van. Kemper could see Erin trying her best to help clear Pepper’s head which wasn’t going to be easy in this heat. Good luck to her all the same.

Kemper stayed over by the guys. Andy was sitting on the floor outside of the open side-door, his face a study of intensity, his shoes kicking dirt. Morgan stood nearby, cleaning his arms. Both of them were breathing heavily. Kemper could hear them, their lungs moving in and out over the faint whisper of a mild Texan breeze.

“What are we gonna do?” asked Morgan.

Kemper paused and pulled his lips back against his teeth making a smacking sound. “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “We’re going to have to call the cops, I guess.”

Morgan stiffened and began to pace. “On the list of bad ideas,” he rattled, “I’d put that way up there.” Then he started to strut, and when he next spoke it was in a kind of sarcastic officious voice. “So, officers, as you inspect the crime scene that is now our van, please ignore the colorful piñata filled with marijuana you may happen to come across. It played no part whatsoever in the demise of this unfortunate young lady.”

“Keep your goddamn voice down!” Kemper chided.

He looked across to Erin to see if she’d heard. Sweat stung his eyes—it was getting even hotter out here—but Erin was still busy with Pepper. If she had heard anything, she wasn’t showing it. When Kemper turned back he saw Andy watching him with a playful expression.

“Cat’s out of the bag, man,” said Andy teasingly. “She knows what we picked up in Mexico.”

Oh . . . just great . . .

That’s all Kemper needed. Like she hadn’t been moaning enough about weed already today. And now she knew where—

Wait—what’s that?

Kemper could hear an engine. A car was headed their way, he could hear it. It was coming from the direction they were going before Miss Suicide ’73 decided to give her Smith & Wesson a blowjob.

Now the others could hear it too and an unspoken question immediately flashed between the five of them: should they try to flag the car down for help, or should they let it go? A lot would depend on who it was. If it was the police—

No.

Kemper could see it now and he couldn’t believe his eyes. The automobile drawing close to them was a 1956, pale-blue Buick four-door sedan. Only it wasn’t pale blue any more, not underneath all them layers of dirt and rust. But what could you expect for a seventeen year-old car? God damn it, Kemper thought those things had gone out with the Ark.

He tried to see who the driver was but there was too much glare across the windshield. Then he looked round at his friends—all five of them, unkempt and covered with bloodstains. He imagined what the driver must be thinking.

“Nothing wrong with his picture, huh?” he said ruefully.

He wasn’t surprised when the Buick passed them by. It didn’t stop, it didn’t pause, it didn’t even slow down to check what was happening—it just moved along, like there was nothing to see. And all that time, Kemper couldn’t make out who was sitting behind the wheel.

Morgan interrupted his contemplating. “We’ve gotta stash the weed somewhere until this bullshit is over.”

The stoner had a point. They couldn’t do anything as long as they had the drugs on board. They couldn’t call the police, they couldn’t let anyone enter the van, they couldn’t do nothing.

Okay, Kemper my man, time to turn this thing around.

Without even nodding to acknowledge what Morgan had just said, Kemper went back inside the van and came out holding the pot-stuffed piñata. He could see that the two girls were walking back over. Pepper looked much better. In fact, she looked kinda vulnerable . . . Sexy . . .

Stop right there!

Kemper shook his head and went searching among the plants and bushes for somewhere to stash the cannabis. He’d have to put it some place where it would be safe for at least a few days. And he’d have to be able to find it easily again, out here in this wide open expanse of nothing.

Over his shoulder, he heard Pepper say, “Can’t we just wait for a highway patrolman or something?” She was talking to the others.

That Buick was the only car they’d seen in the last twenty shitty minutes, so Kemper didn’t expect help to arrive any time soon. He heard Morgan reply to Pepper but didn’t listen to the answer because he’d found a dip in the earth just beyond a weird looking rock. It was a large pale stone that was wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, and dirt on the surface of the stone made it look almost like a death’s head—which seemed more than a little appropriate considering the circumstances.

When Kemper was sure the dope was safely hidden, and when he’d memorized the place where he’d buried it—the lonely tree towering above the van by the roadside—he went back to talk with Erin. He led her away from Pepper who was still trying to convince the other guys that someone might come and help them any minute now. Sure, and whoever it was would just wave a magic wand and make everything go away.

Erin was looking much better now but he knew they had a growing rift to fix up.

“Baby, I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his eyes looking over to where he had hidden the piñata. “I did that for us.”

But she was too angry to listen. The whole drug thing seemed to be getting out of hand.

“You think I’d want to be a part of that?” she snapped.

Then there was a quiet pause.

“I’m sorry,” he tried, before leaning to kiss her on the cheek.

Erin was unmoved. And she still looked pretty hacked-off even when the damp hair of his moustache brushed softly against her cheek. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe her feelings were fuelled by what had just happened with the dead girl, but then maybe they shouldn’t be having this conversation in the first damn place. Maybe Kemper shouldn’t have done anything that he needed to apologize for. Maybe he should act like a man for once.

Kemper was about to try again when Pepper’s voice came up behind them.

“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” she announced. “There is no possible way I’m ever getting back in that van.”

Which wasn’t really an option. They couldn’t stay there, waiting on the off-chance that some authority figure might calmly roll up and confidently take command of the situation. No one was looking for them. No matter what the crazy girl said before she took her own life, there was no cavalry. No one was out there.

So they were on their own and they had better get used to the idea and do something about it. And the only thing they could do was deal with the body. They had to take it some place, which meant getting back inside the van. They didn’t have to like it, but there was nothing else they could do. Which gave Pepper a choice: either she got back in the van, or they could leave her there on the road.

For a moment, Pepper gave serious consideration to staying behind. After all, they’d picked her up near the border, so who was to say she couldn’t get another ride from someone else? Hell, if Kemper had stayed on the Interstate, she wouldn’t have this problem right now—there’d be a whole lot of cars to choose from. Still, Andy was kinda cute. But the jury was still out on Morgan. And then there was the body of that dead girl.

What clinched it for Pepper was the stink of Erin’s puke. It somehow crystallized things for her. What would she do out here on her own where suicidal crazy women go around hassling strangers with guns?

Okay, okay okay!

Pepper climbed back aboard the van with everybody else and Kemper turned the ignition.

He knew they were somewhere near a town or some place from that road sign they’d passed earlier, but he didn’t expect to find a properly equipped hospital out here. Not that they needed a hospital—it was too late for that. What they needed now was a police station and a morgue.

The five of them huddled near the front: Kemper behind the wheel, Erin in the passenger seat, and the rest of them as far away from the bloody sofa as possible.

Pepper was spraying perfume all over herself—her long floral pattern skirt, her legs, boots, bare arms, back and shoulders, hair; anything to combat the stench seeping out from the dead body. The smell had only just started—probably something to do with the time it takes for a corpse to start rotting—but already it was getting real awful. It reminded Pepper of something. It reminder her of—oh God—it reminded her of the slaughterhouse . . .

The body had been propped up. It sat upright. Kemper had done it. He’d put some oily shop towels over her face. Blood had already soaked its way through the thick fabric, but better the sight of that than to have to spend another second looking at that godawful mess of a face! Sure, they’d seen it when it first happened—they’d seen the cordite-blackened hole and the chewed-up bleeding flesh. And now they had seen it again when they climbed back aboard, but that’s no reason why they had to see it every damned second of the way.

And so they’d put towels over her head. They’d dampened the horror, hidden it, muffled it by depersonalizing her. If they couldn’t see her splattered face, the dead girl somehow wasn’t real. She wasn’t dead, she was just something abstract—a thing, a macabre exhibit posed artificially on the backseat before a shattered, bloodstained window that formed a halo of flies behind her crimson shrouded head.

Instead of a corpse, she was now a necrobiotic portrait. She was the Madonna-without-Child daubed in the pigmentation of gangrene. She was meat, repackaged to disguise the moment when the bullet blew her brains out.

Andy, however, was starting to feel just fine. It wasn’t that he didn’t care—it had scared him as much as any of them—it was just that he somehow was able to bounce back quicker. And now, he couldn’t keep from staring at the dead girl.

“So that’s what brains look like,” he pondered. “Sort of like lasagna, kind of.”

The others said nothing, they just looked at him in disgust.

“Sorry,” he shrugged. He then turned his attention from the girl to the rest of the van. “Kemper, your interior is really fucked.”

They looked at Andy like he was something on the sidewalk they’d just stepped in.

“I’ll shut up.”

A few miles on, the landscape started to change. The clumps of trees became thicker, more dense. Although the earth was still dry and sandy, there were far more plants around and thickets of undergrowth. Suddenly nature had become rampant, making the air much more humid and even more sweaty and uncomfortable for the kids trapped inside the van.

God, how far was this town?

They had passed the sign a couple of miles back, but still no hint of civilization.

Kemper scratched at his goatee. “I’ll tell you this much,” he snapped, “The next hitcher is shit outta luck.”

No one rushed to disagree.

“I just don’t understand,” wondered Pepper aloud. “Why did she do it?”

Morgan’s answer was perhaps a little predictable. “Maybe it was the drugs—”

“No,” Erin interrupted. “You could see it in her eyes. There was something she was scared of.”

Then another thought crossed Erin’s mind. Something almost too much for her to deal with.

“God, she was our age . . .”

“Dude!” shouted Andy, pointing forward over Kemper’s shoulder. “Gas station.”

They could see it, maybe a hundred fifty yards on the right. A gas station. A goddamn gas station!

That meant a phone and people who could help—someone who’d know how to get hold of the police, food, cold drinks, maybe some beers and a place to rest a moment. It meant someone they could talk to. It was the end of all their problems. They could call at the gas station, get set, then be back on their way to Dallas in no time.

God damn it, no gas station had ever looked so good. It was like an oasis for the modern generation.

Oh yeah!

Kemper hooked the steering wheel and gently dabbed at the brakes. Everything had changed. From now on, the rest of the day was going to be a whole lot different.

A whole lot different . . .

FOUR

Maybe “gas station” was too generous a description.

As the van turned off the road past an old, battered sign advertising the BIG COW BBQ, Kemper thought that the place, a general store, must have been built some time around the Battle for the Alamo. The place was in poor shape, matching Kemper’s increasingly dark mood.

He brought the wagon to a halt on the dirt lot out front, stopping right beside the store’s solitary gas pump. The pump was covered in rust but looked like it still might work. There was a phone line connected up on the roof so things were already looking up.

The moment the handbrake went on, the doors flew open and everyone rushed outside, only too glad to get away from the dead body.

The entrance to the building was a double screen door, just the other side of the gas pump, but Kemper ignored it and walked round to take another look at the rear window of the van. He cursed under his breath. There was a big round hole in the glass with blood all over it. Not only did it need fixing, but right now it was like a neon sign saying something real bad had happened inside the vehicle.

While the mechanic fretted over his truck the others were taking a look around.

The store was a large, weathered clapboard building. It used to be whitewashed, but now gray boards were showing through all over and what patches of white remained only served to emphasize the neglected, aged condition of the place.

A simple porch had been built over the main entrance—plain wooden posts holding a sloped roof of corrugated iron sheets. A couple of electric light bulbs were fixed to the front of the overhang. Quite bizarrely for this time of day, both lights were on.

The yard in front of the store was a ramshackle mess with all kinds of junk lying around: wooden crates, a rack of used tires and hub caps, dented gas cylinders, propane accessories and an old van seat that was used as a porch bench.

To the side of the store, someone had hand-painted a crude sign, saying YARD SALE, beneath which was a whole lot more trash. There was a pile of used clothing, a stack of empty suitcases and other luggage—some of this stuff looked in good condition—and there were baskets, tools and other unwanted junk.

Erin and Pepper needed to freshen up so they took off in the direction of the restroom which they could see over near the yard sale. Pepper would have given anything for a clean, cold shower right now, but guessed a splash of water from a dirty washbasin faucet would have to do.

Morgan and Andy waited for Kemper.

Whoever it was who owned the store, there was no one outside. So when Kemper had finished checking the van for damage, he took a deep breath, paused to collect himself; then headed on inside the building. The other two guys followed closed behind.

Their arrival had not gone unnoticed.

Ever since the dry brake discs of the van had squealed up to the front of the dilapidated old shack, Luda May had been watching through the store’s barred windows. And if the building looked bad, Luda May looked even worse. The skin on her small withered body was leathery from years of exposure to the harsh Texas sun and from long days of being blasted by the wind and dust of the prairie.

The little old lady looked as gnarled as tree bark, but she was as hard as the local limestone. Her hair was tied back and she wore the functional cotton clothes of someone who’d never seen a designer outfit in her whole goddamned life.

She watched the kids closely—saw them almost fight their way out the vehicle.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she intoned in a heavy accent, her face impassive. “Something like this comes along, you realize just how crazy the world is out there.”

The rest followed in a whirlwind.

That young man came in—the one with the grease-monkey hands and the black goatee—and told Luda May all about some crazy girl gone done wrong with a genuine revolver. At first she thought the boy was spinning her a crock, but then that other one, the lanky streak of four-eyed piss, went and said the same thing. And so did the cute blond with the muscles.

They all stood there, just bawling till Luda May told them to show her the goddamn body: if there were such a thing. So they took her out, where she met them pretty young chickies coming out the john and they all showed her where that dead girl had blown her stupid young brains out. No wonder the five of them looked like they’d proper shit themselves. It was a terrible, terrible tragedy, no mistake.

So they headed back inside, except the two cutie darlings who stayed out by the vehicle, and Luda May went behind her counter and picked up the telephone. The kids needed help, ain’t that a fact, and Luda May knew exactly who to call.

Andy, Kemper and Morgan stood and watched across the counter as the old storekeeper rang for the police.

“It’s awful,” Luda May was saying down the phone a short time later. “There’s six of ’em all together. Includin’ the dead ’un, poor thing.”

As she continued her conversation, the guys loosened up and started to look around.

The place was totally Hicksville. It was as if the people who owned the store were scavengers, selling anything they could lay their hands on to whoever might be passing by. Morgan couldn’t believe that that redneck grandma got anything at all in the way of custom. He’d seen hardly a car on the road all day and there didn’t seem to be much around here in the way of farmsteads. Maybe they were on the edge of town like Kemper had said. Otherwise, Morgan couldn’t see how the gravel-voiced old girl could stay in business.

The air inside the store was hot and dusty and the general condition of the place was a perfect match for the rundown mess they’d seen out in the lot. There didn’t seem to be much going on in the way of refrigeration or gadgets and Luda May’s merchandise looked as if a blind man had thrown it onto the shelves and all over the floor. The thing she seemed to sell the most was meat. Morgan had found a long shelf that was piled up with nothing but beef: cured beef, cubed beef, beef jerky. He tapped Andy on the back.

“Dude. Want some beef?”

Andy smirked and pointed up to a chalkboard featuring other delectable provisions for sale: beef tongue, ham hock, head cheese. Andy couldn’t help but remember the slaughterhouse and the fact that Morgan had said he was a vegan.

“Do vegans eat head cheese?” asked Andy sincerely.

If Morgan wasn’t so stoned, and if they weren’t all in such deep shit right now, he would probably have slapped the idiot.

How can head cheese be vegan? You take a head, clean it by removing the eyes, ears and brain—though this is optional—then you break the skull up into a number of different pieces, boil the damn things, throw in some herbs and stuff, remove all the solids from the pan, grind them together, and let the resultant paste cool down and solidify in a bag of cheesecloth or something. Then, once this carrion paste has totally dripped dry into a block, you can take it and carve it up into yummy slices. So you’re eating the fucking head and chowing down on pieces of face. How the hell can that be vegetarian?

Morgan sighed. The sickly smell of treated beef was starting to bother him. Come to think of it, the whole room smelt pretty damned bad.

Besides the meat, the store was mostly packed out with more used clothing and a wide choice of old auto spares. The clothing was a jumble of all kinds of different styles and sizes: men’s jackets, boy’s pants and shoes, women’s dresses, you name it.

Some of the clothes were a little old fashioned, but some looked like they’d just come straight from the mall. It was the same with the auto parts. On a different day, Kemper would have happily searched through all the worn tires, fan belts, hoses and brake cables. And he would definitely have found something he could use from a couple of bins full of different mirrors and spark plugs.

Today, however, he was starting to feel more than a little frustrated. So far, this had been the worst couple of hours of his entire life, and all he wanted to do was get rid of the body, square things up with the law and then get back on the damn road to Dallas.

He drummed his fingers on the filthy counter top waiting for Luda May to bring the call to some kind of conclusion.

“Why don’t you come out and ask ’em yourself?” she was saying, in her harsh, rasping tones. Then she stopped to hear the reply.

“Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh . . .”

Finally, she lowered the phone from her ear and turned to Kemper. “Where’d you say you found her again?”

Kemper started to mess with his goatee.

“I already told you,” he said with barely suppressed impatience. “Ten minutes west of here.”

Luda May lifted the receiver again. “About three miles west . . . Right.”

Then she hung up, at the same time spitting a wet ball of chewing tobacco into a spittoon lying on the floor.

Friggin’ redneck.

“How soon will he be here?” asked Kemper.

Luda May stopped. She looked at him. Squarely in the eye. She was taking her damned time like she just didn’t get it.

“Sheriff said he’s headin’ over to the old Crawford Mill.”

What?

Kemper . . . He, wait . . . No . . . Kemper was . . . What did she say?

“The what?” asked Kemper, not quite sure this was really happening. He had a dead body in the back of his van and the cops decide to go on a tour of Travis County? What was wrong with these people?

The old shopkeeper kept to the plain facts. She was only telling the boy what the sheriff had told her. Wasn’t her problem if the boy didn’t like what he was hearing none.

“Wants to know,” she continued, “if y’all wouldn’t mind drivin’ out that way to make a report?”

“Yes, we goddamn mind!” barked Kemper. It was crazy. Why should they have to go out to the sheriff? It was the sheriff’s damn job to come to the scene of the incident.

During his trek through the land of bad-smelling meat products, Morgan had been listening to this increasingly heated exchange. He was still a bit high on the dope he’d had earlier, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t tell bullshit when he heard it. And he was hearing it now. Total bullshit. He’d been trying his best to stay calm. They’d dealt with the girl thing. They’d brought her here, played everything by the book, but now everyone kept dicking them around like no one gave a fuck. It was too much.

They could have thrown her body out the van any time they liked. Christ, they didn’t even need to pick her up in the first place—and now they were supposed to go driving round some fucking hillbilly back road in search of some mill they’d never fucking heard of and which probably didn’t exist on any single map known to fucking mankind. What was the sheriff doing that was so important, getting Patsy and Dolly to suck his dick off? No. No way.

“How often do girls blow their heads off around this shit-hole town?” he shouted, stepping over to join Kemper at the counter.

Like Morgan, Kemper was pretty pissed off too. This sheriff bull wasn’t what he needed to hear right now.

“We’re not going to drive around town with a DEAD GIRL IN MY VAN!” he shouted.

Luda May grabbed on to the counter with both hands, tilted her head and stared daggers at the two of them. They had no right to come on in here and talk to her like that. Not in her nigger-frigging store.

Andy could see it was getting ugly. He knew his friends were highly strung but it wasn’t the old lady’s fault. If they should be shouting at anyone, it should be the sheriff. But for all they knew, the sheriff might have had something really urgent on his hands, while the dead girl—she was finished business.

Quickly, he walked over and grabbed both his friends by their shoulders. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said warmly but with an undertone of severity. Then to his friends, “Cool it.”

Kemper looked at him—at Andy, telling him to cool it—then sighed, the air escaping through his long nose. Morgan followed suit, and stepped away from the counter. But he was ready to join in as he watched Kemper try with Luda May one last time.

“Why the hell can’t the sheriff meet us here?” whined Kemper.

“Didn’t say,” replied the storekeeper stiffly. “Just be a couple of hours b’fore he could.”

At the mere mention of “a couple of hours,” Kemper finally lost it. He leant over the counter and exploded in Luda May’s face.

“Give me a fucking break! There’s no goddamn way we’re waiting a couple fucking hours!”

But Luda May just stood there and stared right back at him. She took it all. Everything he got. Kemper was just a boy. She wasn’t going to let herself get worked up over his baby-ass whining. He could shout at her all day for all she cared.

Kemper was in her face now but she calmly crossed her arms and looked him right back in the eye. And when he quit his yapping, she coldly informed him, “Young man, what you do is your own business.”

And that was the end of it. They could either go up right now and meet the sheriff at Crawford Mill or they could wait down here for two hours with Luda May with her auto parts and her fucking head cheese. Her breath stank of pig spunk.

Kemper pushed his way back out into the open air. God, he didn’t realize just how much that festering shit hole had been bothering him. Andy and Morgan followed, leaving Luda May to watch them through the window just like when they arrived.

For their part, Pepper and Erin had agreed never to talk about their trip to the restrooms again—except maybe if drunk and trying to gross someone out in a game of “The world’s worst . . .”

The girls found it hard to believe what Kemper had to tell them. In fact, all five of them thought it was pretty damned messed up, but what choice did they have? It seemed that since they’d picked that girl up, their whole life had been on rails. And things would probably stay out of control until they got rid of the body. They were still a long way from Dallas, so now they either had to go find the sheriff or wait two hours for him to show here.

Everyone was feeling pretty damned pissed.

It was insane that they had to make a decision like this just because this backwater piss-hole had only one lousy dumb-ass cop to go around.

Erin, Morgan, Andy, Kemper, Pepper—they were all sick of the fix they were in. Which is why they quickly decided to go find the sheriff. Okay, it sucked. Okay, it was damned annoying. And, okay, it was totally crazy, but—and this was a big “but”—the sooner they found the sheriff, the sooner they’d get rid of the body. And the sooner they did that, the sooner they could hightail it and make for the Interstate. So, yeah, every which way they looked at it, the whole thing was bullshit. But at least this way, they could make the pain go away faster.

Erin was voted to go back in and get directions to the Crawford Mill from Luda May The way seemed straightforward enough and Erin didn’t think she’d have any trouble remembering it.

For her part, Erin didn’t see how Kemper and the boys could have fallen out with Grandma Head Cheese. When Erin spoke to her, the old gal seemed friendly enough. Sure, her social skills were a bit rusty, but what could you expect, working and living out here in a place like this?

No, Erin and Luda May had got on just fine. In fact, Luda May had even taken the trouble to wish Erin a safe journey and she’d asked Erin to pass on her regards to Sheriff Hoyt—something Erin said she’d be only too glad to do.

* * *

The van pulled away from the store, the big wheels kicking up a major dust storm behind them, and then they were gone. Only they couldn’t continue going the way they were headed before—the way that would get them out of this miserable place.

No. They hadn’t gone forty yards along the highway when Erin pointed out the narrow, clogged access road that turned left off their route and led deep into the plains. That was where Luda May said they had to go if they wanted to meet the sheriff.

And if they thought the road had been bumpy before, now they really knew what the word meant. Most of the paving on the access route was cracked, rutted, and overlaid by mounds of packed dirt. Kemper was constantly having to watch where he was going to keep the wheels of the Dodge on a reasonably level surface. And now the trees were really closing in—on both sides. Kemper smiled; all this dry wood had to be good for a barbecue.

“She’s starting to stink back there,” said Pepper, motioning in the direction of the corpse.

She and the other two guys had stayed up close behind the front seats. No one wanted to move down to the rear of the wagon.

“No worse than the inside of that store,” quipped Morgan, feeling contaminated by having spent just ten minutes in that godforsaken dive. “Did you guys see all that nasty beef shit in there?”

Erin didn’t want to be reminded. When she’d gone back inside to ask Luda May the way to the Crawford Mill, the stink of the place had hit her like a sledgehammer. And that was no exaggeration.

“Morgan,” she warned. “If I have to heave again, I’m doing it on you.”

But Morgan didn’t want to argue right now, because suddenly the journey had started creeping him out. He could see how hard it was for Kemper to keep going and he could see how increasingly overgrown the area was becoming with tall dry Johnson grass. Where the hell were they going? He could see the other guys weren’t impressed either.

“Maybe we should have just waited at the store,” said Morgan ruefully.

“For a couple of hours?” reminded Andy. “No thanks.”

There was only one way they could possibly go but as each second took them deeper and deeper into the middle of nowhere, the group began to feel lost. Each of them sat in silence and started to look around, trying to see something, anything, that could be an indicator to the mill or to the sheriff. Erin in particular was watching out for something. Luda May had said—

There!

A gravel trail turned right through a crowded grove of over-leaning dead trees choked with bramble, Johnson grass and vine. That was the way they had to go. It was the trail Luda May had told her about—even if it did seem pretty damned creepy.

“The lady said this road would take us right to the house,” said Erin, as much to convince and reassure herself as the others.

Kemper shook his head then turned the wheel in the direction of the trail. He really didn’t like this, he didn’t like it at all. In the back of his mind he hoped Erin had made a mistake so that they could turn round and then find the real way to Crawford Mill.

The trail they were on now was going to kill the suspension. And the place had a bad vibe to it—something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, and he was usually pretty thick-skinned. But right now, all five of them were getting jumpy. Their nerves tingled, and they found themselves looking and listening at everything with a high-strung intensity.

Well, look at that . . .

Just ahead of them a wrecked car lay off by the side of the trail. It had been there for months at least and was almost half concealed beneath dense undergrowth. Kemper couldn’t quite make out what the vehicle was, but he thought it was a Ford. God knows how it got there, but at least it meant that someone was living out here after all. They must be on the right track. Whoever Crawford was, this was probably one of his old vehicles. Like many farmers, he’d probably just left the automobile to rust in a disused corner of his own land.

Andy was less encouraged. He’d seen the abandoned car, but there was still no sign of any mill, and still no sheriff.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I didn’t take a week off work to drag a damn corpse around the prairie.”

There was a pause—then suddenly they all howled with laughter!

Christ, Andy hadn’t meant it as a joke but there was something about the timing of it all. This place, Luda May, the dead girl, the abandoned car—Andy had deadpanned the one-liner at the perfect moment—and suddenly the absurdity of their predicament had given them a moment of release, albeit one laced with an undercurrent of screaming broken glass.

Everyone was still laughing when Kemper suddenly called out, “Hey! What’s that?”

They looked forward.

Through the harrowing trees ahead of them, they caught their first sight of a building.

FIVE

The old Crawford Mill. That’s what Luda May had called it. That was her name for this . . . this . . . How could you describe it?

Their first thought was that they’d come to the wrong place; this couldn’t be where the sheriff planned to meet them. But then they went over all the directions Luda May had given Erin and this was the only place that fit. But look at it!

As he parked the van, Kemper could see a skeletal mess of angular wooden structures—rotting, dilapidated, lost, defiant, unnerving—a farmstead painted in scabs by Hieronymous Bosch using a cold steel nail-gun as his brush.

There were sloping roofs, rusty iron sheets, broken windows, coils of degraded barbed wire, bits of broken furniture, more discarded auto parts, lashed partitions, collapsing screens, old empty oil drums and junk. The whole place was overgrown with greenery.

The main building used to be a cotton mill; a classic two-level gin house. The cotton gin was a revolutionary piece of engineering in its day, but now its wheels and gears were a symbol of a long-dead past. In just the same way, this mill was also long dead.

Contrary to what the five of them had expected to find, the old mill was abandoned—how long ago, it was impossible to tell. There was no way that someone could still be living here. And yet, the area wasn’t completely free from signs of recent human activity. Far from it.

The entrance to the mill had been “decorated” with damned weird ornaments. At first glance, the objects resembled Native American art but when the kids got out of the van, they could see that this was no display of folk culture. No, what they were looking at was a form of bastard mechanical surgery.

Animal skulls nailed on the walls and on tall wooden posts, the white bones disfigured with mutated auto parts. A plastic baby doll grafted onto the skull of a cow, the sharp curved horns taking the place of her smiling arms. Her little dress was pulled up to reveal faux genitalia as if to grind her distorted abusive sexuality into your face. There seemed to be no clear point where the broken machinery ended and the decomposed animal remains began. It was a blurring of dark possibilities.

And someone had spent time doing all this. Someone had deliberately sat down, broken stuff, then stuck it together again in all the wrong ways—making these foul ornaments, fusing the known into new and revolting forms of the unknown. This was art as pain, art as dismemberment and art as abomination. And the mind that got pleasure from creating this barbaric junk was either a tortured artist or a deranged lunatic.

“No wonder there’s a law against relatives marrying each other.” It was Morgan who’d finally broken the silence.

He had reached the outside of the mill and could now see that the walls were covered in crude, obscene drawings. And somebody had scribbled vile writing on the splintered boards—wrong words jammed together to produce the same disturbing effect as the doll’s plastic cunt bolted tightly in between the horns of the dead cow’s skull.

Morgan couldn’t believe this place; it was way too scary. But then their whole journey had been like this. First they met the girl and she killed herself. Then Luda May, the beef and their fight with her. And now the old woman had sent them on this journey, deeper and deeper into the countryside until finally . . .

Now Morgan knew how Charlie Marlow must have felt. He’d read Heart of Darkness in class, but he’d never really understood it before. This was the first time he’d considered Africa and Texas in the same breath, but then Marlow was a fictional character. Whatever was going on here was real.

Most of the other kids were just as freaked out. It was one thing to drive out to an old abandoned mill, but totally another to discover a shit load of stuff that looked like it had been put together by a tribe of automotive cannibals.

Slowly they spread out, each taking a closer look at whichever artifacts were most disturbing to them. If this wasn’t art of some kind, then what—

“Ain’t no sheriff here,” said Kemper.

He’d taken in all the weird trash in no time at all and, frankly, it didn’t bother him. What did bother him was that they’d come all the way out here, like Luda May said and there was no patrol car and no damn sheriff. Only a bunch of retarded junk.

Morgan was quick to agree and he was prepared to go one forbidden step further. “I say we dump her and get the hell out of here.”

The mill was freaking him out. All the weird stuff written on the walls, the skulls, nails hammered all over the place, barbed wire, a broken lantern, chains welded together, the animal bones. He’d even found a pair of women’s shoes. And there were just too many damned shadows.

None of them told Morgan to shut up, but then none of them made a move to enter the mill either. The doorway was open—heck, there was no door—and they could see an old armchair just inside. But no one went in. No one called out, “Hey! Mister Crawford! We’re here to see the sheriff!” Everyone stayed clear of the dark open rectangle leading into the building and they couldn’t see a thing through the broken windows.

Kemper looked across at Erin. Fact is, Kemper liked Morgan’s idea. He liked it a lot. Sure, he knew it was wrong, but they’d really gone out on a limb for the dead girl and it was getting them nowhere. And now they were in redneck hell. Ol’ Sawney was probably gonna show any second with a shotgun.

Seriously, Kemper was ready to ditch the body and run. But he knew how popular that would be with Erin—goddamn why did she come on this trip? She hadn’t joined in. All she did was put a damper on things. He couldn’t do anything as long as she was around. Yeah, he looked and he could see that she was already waiting for him to say something. Suddenly he got an idea.

“Maybe we should vote on it.”

Erin was straight in his face, “Kemper. No.”

“Why not, Erin?” whined Morgan, taking a step back towards the van. “It’s a damn democracy.”

She turned on him. “How would you like it if we dumped your body out here?”

“Hey!” he replied. “Nobody asked her to blow her brains out in our van.”

“My van,” Kemper corrected, which really helped things.

Erin needed support, but with that “van” comment, Kemper had made it clear he was gonna sit on the fence. Fine. She looked round at Pepper, Andy.

“I say we dump her,” said Andy.

It was the highway all over again. Erin and Pepper had wanted to pick the girl up, Andy and Morgan had wanted to leave her and Kemper had sat on the fence thinking about his goddamn van. But, Erin admitted, that’s when everything had gone straight down the pan; the girl had shot herself. So would Pepper—even though the suicide had really got to her—back Erin up a second time or would she take the easy way out?

Erin needn’t have worried. As soon as Pepper heard Andy’s decision, she called him out. “Pig!”

But Morgan wasn’t finished yet. In fact, he was far from finished. He walked into the center of the group, rubbing a stressed hand through his thick black hair and sang out, “Cool. That’s two votes. One more and we’re out of this cow town. Kemper?”

Oh great.

Kemper the man. Kemper the chauffeur. Kemper, always in the driving seat, caught between the guys and the deep blue girlfriend.

Everybody watched him, waiting for him to say something. He kept a poker face. The swing vote was his. Two wanted to stay, two wanted to go. He looked at Erin—stern, resolute, hopeful. He looked at Morgan—scared, resolute, hopeful.

“Baby,” he said finally, looking towards Erin. “She’s dead. It won’t matter to her where we leave her.”

Morgan could have leapt up and punched the flaming sky.

When he saw Kemper look at Erin like that he’d thought it was game over—Kemper would look at her, clock the drippy expression on her face and give in. Screw logic, screw common sense, just let his woman tell him what to do like he always did. But not this time. No way, man. Kemper had just shown his girl who’s boss. They were going! They were outta here!

But Erin hadn’t given up. What the hell was Kemper thinking? It didn’t matter where they dumped the body.

“Well, it matters to me,” she complained, then softly, “if that still means anything.”

Bitch!

Morgan could have killed her. She was playing the emotional blackmail card: agree with everything I say or the relationship’s screwed.

What a bitch.

“Erin . . .” Kemper sighed.

“That girl’s got parents out there that might want her back—not dumped like some piece of trash.”

Kemper shook his head. He didn’t want to say “no” to Erin but he couldn’t agree. There was nothing about this situation he liked. The girl, the van, this weird old cotton place, nothing. He had to go with the guys on this one. He’d take the consequences when they got to Dallas—if she ever spoke to him again.

And she would. They’d been going steady for over five years now and you don’t go that long without breaking a few eggs. She’d be pissed, she’d leave his calls a few weeks and then they’d make up again. Goddamn it, they were in love. She couldn’t break up over something as crazy as this. It wasn’t as if it was any of them who shot the girl. No, Kemper had made up his mind. He’d cast his vote and they were leaving.

Straightening his baseball cap, Kemper turned and was about to make for the Dodge when Pepper said, “What if that old lady got our plates? We could get in a lot of trouble.”

“The old lady couldn’t care less,” said Andy scornfully. “You heard her: ‘What you do is your own business.’ Man, that’s like gospel to these prairie billies.”

They both had a point. Luda May might have got their plates, or she might not. Likewise, Luda May might actually give a damn, or she might not.

Kemper shrugged and continued on his way to the wagon.

Discussion over.

Morgan felt a surge of excitement. At long damned last they were doing something positive. He didn’t want to be stuck out here all day, waiting at the Norman Bates Mill for some inbred cop to show and go all psycho on their ass. And the heat and the humidity among these trees was unbearable. Well screw everything because finally, finally they were leaving!

YES!

Unnoticed by the others, Erin was going through a tough internal battle. The decision Kemper had just made to leave was nothing compared to the decision Erin was trying to make now.

The whole business about the dead girl was important. The other guys were behaving as if the whole thing somehow wasn’t real. But it was. They all had a major responsibility to do the right thing. Unfortunately, in ninety-four degrees everyone seemed to be having trouble remembering what the right thing was.

Erin ran over to Kemper and grabbed him by his open denim shirt. She saw him pull that same old face. Fine. He didn’t want any crap from her. Okay. He could sigh as much as he wanted just as long as he came round the other side of the van with her, out of earshot of the others.

Finally, she let him go.

“Why do you think I didn’t get high once on the entire trip?” she said quietly.

Kemper looked any which way except her face. “I can’t read your mind, Erin.”

This was it. She’d made her decision and was going to see it through. This wasn’t quite how she’d imagined the scene in her mind but the stakes were just too high. If Kemper dumped that dead girl’s body and quit the scene, he’d be making the biggest mistake of his entire life.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. He looked up. “You’re gonna be a dad, Kemper.”

And suddenly it all made sense to him. The way she felt sick. The way she didn’t drink any booze down in Mexico or smoke any dope coming back. The way she got so angry over the piñata. Why she was so worried about him being busted for bringing dope over the border. Kemper couldn’t believe it—he was gonna be a daddy.

“I’m not having our baby in prison,” she said. And this time, the discussion was over.

She turned to rejoin the others to let them know of “Kemper’s” change of mind, but found Andy standing right behind her. He had a great big smile on his face. And the rest of them were peering round the corner of the van. They’d heard everything.

“So, congratulations are in order,” beamed Andy. But he then saw the sour expression on Erin’s face. “I guess?”

They followed Erin back round to the entrance of the mill. She sat down on some beat up old wooden thing and Morgan stood beside her, while Andy grabbed a chair next to the doorway. Kemper sat down on the porch steps—they looked charred, blackened as if they’d been on fire.

Pepper paced in between all four of them. She couldn’t relax. The doorway was just an empty open frame leading to the dark shadowy insides of the gin and Pepper couldn’t keep her eyes off it.

Their conversation was mostly spent. They’d heard what Erin had said; Kemper was gonna be a dad and that changed everything. Except for Morgan who saw no reason why they couldn’t just dump the dead girl and then worry about Erin’s child. The chances of any of them being arrested for this were practically nil.

Pepper carried on pacing backwards and forwards, watching the entrance just in case—what was that?

She saw something move—there, inside the mill. It was too dark to make out what it was but someone or something definitely walked across the room just through the open doorway. It looked like a shadow walking in front of a black wall, a silhouette flickering briefly in front of a crack of light that was shining beyond the door.

Pepper started and stepped up to the open doorway. Her smooth tender face was scrunched with concern and more than a little amount of fear.

Everybody jumped. It was clear Pepper thought she’d seen something and now she was straining to see inside. But—

“What?” asked Andy.

“I just saw something,” she said, pointing into the darkness.

Morgan thought he’d seen it too. “Someone’s in that fucking place!”

“Bullshit,” said Erin. She knew Morgan would grab at the first chance to come up with some reason why they’d have to leave the place. And Pepper had probably just imagined it. Either way, nobody was leaving.

“I swear to God!” said Morgan again. “Something moved!”

Erin was unimpressed. She realized she’d left her Stetson back in the van, but it would have to stay there. She didn’t want anyone to get the wrong impression if she suddenly got up and walked away.

The others were now standing bunched around the doorway, looking into the abandoned mill, trying to see what Pepper had seen. Only Erin remained seated.

“You’re just trying to scare me into leaving,” she said, unimpressed.

“Erin,” cut in Kemper, his voice pleading for her to be reasonable.

“Go to hell,” she replied, then she got up and walked straight inside the mill. She moved before Kemper even had time to guess what she planned to do.

“Erin! Don’t!” he shouted, but it was no good.

Erin would show them there was nothing to be scared of. They just had to sit and wait for the sheriff to show.

The ground floor of the mill was mired in shadow. A few rays of light poked through a scattering of small holes in the ceiling, but all they did was cast just enough brilliance to show that the inside of the mill was a sewer of broken clutter and decay.

Erin took a cautious sniff: the air was damp and smelled of grave dust. As her eyes got used to the darkness, she began making sense of where she was.

It was a large room, a hall of some kind. The walls seemed to be patched with torn sheets of paper. There was garbage all over the floor. There was dirt, chairs, and what looked like an old lamp-stand with a dead bird entangled around it. There was more of that crazy skull stuff like outside. The shadows seemed full of details Erin really didn’t want to see.

Outside, Kemper waited for her to show. None of them were in any rush to follow her inside—not until they heard her scream.

Immediately Kemper grabbed hold of something from the ground—a rusted iron bar—then ran in through the open doorway. Andy was right alongside him with Pepper and Morgan following up back.

“Erin!” shouted Kemper. “Where are you?”

Hell, she was his girl. And she had his baby. Where the heck was she? His eyes hadn’t yet got used to the dark—he was practically blind.

Kemper waited but there was no response. Where was she?

Suddenly something moved, passing through a shaft of light over in the corner of the room. It was Erin.

She grinned slyly, “Thought I saw a mouse.”

God damn it, Erin!

Kemper breathed out again and relaxed. She was just playing tricks on them. Despite everything, Morgan had to laugh. All the same, he was sure he’d seen something. He wasn’t trying to scare Erin the way she’d just reeled in all of them. And Pepper had definitely seen something, no matter what Erin—

A noise came over from a corner of the large open room.

Pepper gasped.

It couldn’t be Erin this time; she was nowhere near the noise. None of them were. It was a shuffling sound, almost as if someone was crawling or stumbling around beneath the cover of the impenetrable shadow.

“Alright, that’s it,” shouted Kemper, feeling just about ready to add another body to the van. “If somebody’s out there, JUST COME ON OUT!”

He raised the iron bar and held it tight.

They took a guarded step over in the direction of the sound and now they began to see something.

The noise appeared to be coming from an old closet standing on the debris strewn floor—only the closet was partially sunken where the rotted wooden floorboards had given way.

The five of them shuffled slowly toward the closet, Kemper in front with the iron bar. Even Erin had to admit there was something going on, something she didn’t like.

The sound again . . . It was definitely coming from the sloping closet.

Kemper gestured the others to stand back, then took the last couple of paces on his own. Slowly, weapon ready, he reached out and tentatively touched the handle of the closet door.

The sound stopped.

Kemper paused, then he gently turned the handle and yanked the door wide open—just as a shrieking opossum leapt out of the closet and bolted hissing across the floor, straight out of the room.

They almost had cardiac arrests there and then—especially Kemper—but the moment they realized it was just a dumb animal, the whole gang heaved a sigh of relief and started to laugh.

Kemper was feeling dumb. He’d been caught out by the oldest trick in the book. Lowering his makeshift weapon, he rubbed the back of his neck—and suddenly realized he was staring face-to-face with someone in the darkness.

Christ!

Kemper jumped out of his skin, causing the other kids to scream out loud with him. This wasn’t funny any more—their nerves were shot.

But now all of them could see the small figure of a boy climbing off a hammock that was pushed up against the far wall, near to the sunken closet. Surely this wasn’t the kid’s home?

As soon as he had both feet on the ground, the boy scurried away into the shadows and tried to hide but Kemper could hear his scared, labored breathing.

“Who are you?” asked Kemper, sounding a little more angry than he meant to.

“What did you do to her?” came a reply, in a thin reedy broken voice.

Kemper didn’t know who the boy was talking about. “Huh?”

“The girl,” came the voice again. “The girl in the van. What did you do to her?”

The kid knew about the dead girl!

But how the hell could he? The five of them had been sat slam in front of the open doorway from the moment they’d arrived at the mill. There was no way the kid could have got out and seen the body without them noticing. But then, he must have, somehow.

“We didn’t do anything to her,” said Kemper cautiously.

Erin had been paying close attention to the boy’s voice. It had a peculiar “distant” quality to it. He seemed to be emphasizing his words in all the wrong places, as if he’d almost forgotten how to speak. Erin couldn’t quite tell where the kid was from, but judging by his accent, he sure as heck wasn’t from Travis.

She stepped forward to try and help Kemper.

“She did it to herself,” Erin said, and in her mind’s eye she could clearly see the moment when the frightened teenage girl shot herself.

There was a pause and then the boy shuffled forward where they could see him.

“Oh my God,” Erin couldn’t help it, it just escaped from her lips.

The poor boy looked so hungry—no, he looked starved. His skin was all dirty and his hair was a wild mess of badly cut dark hair. But the strangest thing about the kid was that he seemed to have no eyebrows to speak of, making his face seem more . . . cadaverous. But he was still just a kid.

“You promise you won’t hurt me?” he asked.

Erin could see he was frightened. Okay, when the kid first appeared, he’d scared the life out of the five of them. But now . . . Kemper was holding an iron bar and the kid was surrounded by strange faces, of people much older and stronger than him.

Something about the boy touched Erin’s heart. It might have been her prenatal hormones or it could have been the simple sight of this famished kid, dressed in torn soiled clothing, lying in a bunk in the darkness of a ruined mill, out in the heart of the Texan wilderness. God, if she ever found the boy’s parents . . .

Erin held out her hand.

At first, the boy didn’t want to go, but then he took it and she led him outside into the light.

It was long past noon by now and the temperature had clawed its way even higher. Although the beleaguered friends were all soaked through to the skin with sweat they preferred to sit back outside in the heat, rather than the dank shade of the mill.

Erin sat down beside the boy. She didn’t know how the kid could bear to stay in the old ruin like that. The others too found the sight of the boy strangely intriguing. What the hell was he? A circus freak? Some kind of local birth defect? A runaway?

Morgan was feeling quite himself again, now that they were no longer standing in the old dark house, jumping like jack rabbits at every tick and creak. How he saw it, their whole day was unfolding like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Finding the dirty little spaz-kid was just the next chapter. Morgan wanted to skip straight to the last page, where the five of them cleared out in Kemper’s van and lived happily ever after.

Pepper, on the other hand, felt like Erin. The sight of the boy upset her and she wanted to help him any way she could. But she would have felt more comfortable if the kid didn’t keep looking over at the bloodstained broken window at the back of the Dodge.

As for Andy . . .

Andy was just Andy. He had no interest in any of this right now. He’d made his feelings clear earlier; dump the body and go. He couldn’t care less about the boy. Finding the boy made no difference. The only person Andy wanted to see right about now was the sheriff.

It was the same with Kemper. That crazy old witch down at the store had told them to meet the sheriff at the old Crawford Mill—that’s what she said, the old Crawford Mill—and she’d told Erin how to get to the damned place. But the sheriff wasn’t here which meant either he hadn’t arrived yet, or he’d already been and gone, or this wasn’t Crawford Mill. Either way, Kemper guessed that the weird kid might have some of the answers.

Raising the visor of his cap, Kemper looked down at the boy. “Is this the Crawford Mill?”

The kid didn’t reply. Instead he turned to Erin and said, “I used to play here with my friend Billy. But he died.”

Pepper shook her head and started jigging her left leg. Why did everyone round here have to keep talking about death? And who put all those horrible animal skulls all over the place?

“What’s your name?” asked Erin quietly, but her question was about as successful as Kemper’s.

“Was she mad?” asked the boy. He was looking back in the direction of the van.

Erin didn’t get it. All the boy seemed to want to talk about was the dead girl. Why? Was it just morbid curiosity or what?

“Yes,” Erin replied. “She was real mad.”

They fell silent, the boy straining to see the suicide corpse. At least he was talking to them, that was something.

“My name’s Erin,” she ventured.

“Jedidiah,” came the reply. And he looked plainly into Erin’s face, his dull eyes watching her, her eyes, her mouth, her—

Morgan found the boy’s name just too much. He put his mouth close to Pepper’s ear and whispered, “Weren’t you in the Beverly Hillbillies?”

The remark was, of course, aimed at Jedidiah, who didn’t seem to hear. But Pepper did and she swiftly elbowed Morgan in the ribs. Erin too shot him a dirty look before turning her attention to the boy again.

He looked scared.

“I like your shirt,” she smiled. Underneath his coarse jacket, Jedidiah wore a Felix the Cat T-shirt. “Felix was my favorite,” she said.

“Who?”

Erin pointed to the print of the cartoon cat on the front of the shirt. “Felix the Cat. You know? With the bag of tricks.”

Jedidiah considered this information for a moment, then corrected her. “He don’t have no name.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, all very cozy. All very happy families. Andy pushed forward and looked down at the boy.

“Listen, kid,” he said. “We’re supposed to meet the sheriff here. Have you seen him?”

The boy raised his face to look up at Andy, “Yeah.”

This caught everyone’s notice. Kemper in particular was now eager to hear what the boy had to say.

“Where?” asked Erin.

“Home. Gettin’ drunk,” was the downright disappointing reply. And he was still staring mostly at the van.

“Cool,” said Morgan decisively. He was totally fed up. “Let’s split.”

But Erin hadn’t finished; the boy could help them.

“Does he live around here?” she queried, trying to find out everything Jedidiah knew about the sheriff.

The boy pointed somewhere off to the rear of the mill. “Other side of that grove.”

They followed his finger in the direction of an ominous mass of trees and bushes.

“Can we drive from here?” Kemper asked, even though the boy still hadn’t made it clear whether or not they were actually at Crawford Mill.

“The road don’t go to the sheriff’s,” said Jedidiah. “But it’s a pretty short walk.”

They looked again at the shambling groves the boy had indicated. None of them cared much for the idea of walking through there. The way ahead looked just like the house—thick with dark shadows—and all it seemed to do was lead deeper off into nowhere. Hadn’t they already descended through enough layers of this Texan hell?

When Morgan spoke up again, he was only saying what they were all thinking—besides Erin.

“Hey, if the sheriff doesn’t give a shit, why should we?”

Andy, Kemper and Pepper mulled this over. All day long, Morgan had been the devil on their left shoulder and Erin had been the angel on their right, but they all wanted the same thing. They all wanted to get out of the hole they were in—they just weren’t equipped to handle it. They just didn’t know how.

“Look man,” pushed Morgan. “We just got splattered with brains, our dope is gone, we’re fucking around in this goddamn hick town and I’m not about to lose these Skynyrd tickets. So let’s just get out of here!”

It was tempting. God, it was tempting.

Pepper looked to Andy. Of all the people here she felt closest to him. She didn’t know any of them properly but she’d made love to Andy and he seemed like a real nice guy. And he didn’t have to shout to make himself heard like the rest of them. Pepper reached a quiet decision that she would do whatever Andy did.

Andy looked at Kemper. They’d been buddies since school and they’d been through a lot together. Fights, girls, cars, you name it. But it had always been clear who was leader of the pack. Morgan and Andy were on the same level, but Kemper was the man. Andy trusted Kemper and he’d do whatever his friend decided.

So it was all on Kemper.

The young mechanic in question had gone with Erin when they’d first decided to pick up that insane girl, and look where that had landed them. But then he’d already gone with the guys on the marijuana issue and he supposed they could have been busted, in theory.

He’d also stuck with the guys when they’d originally decided to dump the body here. Sure, he knew they always expected him to give into Erin but that was just their horseshit. What really changed things now was knowing that he was going to be the father of Erin’s child. That one fact alone pushed the two of them closer together and made him feel the need to be more responsible. Erin had been right all along but Kemper had been sorta holding onto the past—to his youth. Now, however, it was time for him to quit fooling and become a man.

Kemper watched his girl.

He could tell Erin was also waiting on his decision. He knew what she wanted him to do and he respected her for not saying anything. This time she was leaving him on his own, to make up his own mind. It wasn’t a test, things were too far gone for her to be playing games. No, this was real and it was a mess. So, should he go find the sheriff’s house or not?

Kemper knelt down in front of the kid and said, “How do I get there?”

Erin smiled to herself. Kemper had made up his mind and he’d made the right choice. He was going to find the sheriff and Erin was sure as hell going with him.

SIX

Following Jedidiah’s instructions, Erin and Kemper had gone round to the back of the derelict cotton mill and picked up a narrow track that led through a dreary mass of dying trees. The route was originally a horse trail, but now it wasn’t much more than a footpath lost in a tangle of vine. The lack of footprints of any kind suggested that the path wasn’t used very often—at least not by people.

At first, Erin had been reluctant to go deeper into the woods, but now she was kinda glad to be leaving the old gin with its unnerving collection of mutilated junk. The thought had occurred to her that Jedidiah might have made all that stuff himself.

Perhaps what she’d previously thought of as the products of a sick mind may have in fact been the results of a twisted, dislocated form of play. But almost immediately she dismissed the idea. She couldn’t see the little boy climbing up on to the roof to bolt those crazy bone sculptures in place.

If Kemper had been a bit more patient, Erin would have spent more time talking to Jedidiah to see just exactly where the boy fitted into all this. But Kemper had wanted to get going which Erin understood completely. Like Kemper had said, the damn goal posts just kept moving on them.

The original plan was that they were meant to be waiting for the sheriff at Crawford Mill—only now they had to leave the mill to go find the sheriff’s house. They could have gone by road but none of them were sure of the way round and Jedidiah had said it was only a short walk. So here they were.

Save for the odd curse at being caught in some weeds, the two of them walked mostly in silence, their internal springs coiling tighter and tighter in an emotional holding pattern until they could finally get rid of the girl’s body then let it all out. And there was another reason—other than the heat—why the air was so heavy between them.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” asked Kemper, unable to contain it any longer.

Straight away, she knew what he meant.

“I wanted you to propose for the right reason,” she answered.

“What do you mean?”

Erin stopped walking and faced him. “I want you to marry me because you want to, not because you have to.”

Which was pretty much at the heart of Erin’s previous dilemma whether or not to reveal her pregnancy to her boyfriend. If he didn’t know and they got engaged, it could only be for love. But with the baby . . . it could be for obligation. Kemper took his duties pretty seriously, and she knew how he’d react. He’d perform his duties as a father the same way he’d diligently check tire pressure at shop.

But Kemper didn’t see it that way. He loved Erin. Okay, he might not always be the best at expressing how he felt, but she should know by now. She should know he’d marry her if he had to.

“I will, I promise,” Kemper assured her. “I’m just waiting for the right time.”

“Yeah. Sure,” replied Erin, seeming unconvinced.

Then she turned and walked ahead along the trail, making sure that Kemper couldn’t see her slight smile.

Oh, the fun, the excitement and the sheer mind-numbing tedium of watching Andy do push-ups.

Morgan and Pepper sat quietly near the entrance to the mill. What else could they do? Erin and Kemper had only been gone ten minutes or so. They’d have to find their way to the sheriff’s house, they’d have to explain everything to him all over and then they’d have to bring him here. They could easily be gone for half an hour or more. So now boredom had got the better of shock and fear.

They had a dead girl in the van; they were stuck out by what looked like a cross between a taxidermist’s, an art gallery and a death camp; it was hot. None of them had anything left to say. They were bored. Bored. B-O-R-E-D.

Though their minds had begun to adapt to the awfulness of their circumstances, Pepper still kept watching the doorway leading into the mill. Jedidiah had never actually said whether he’d been alone in there or not. In fact, everything he said was pretty much a riddle of some kind.

Well, at least Andy wasn’t going to waste any time. As soon as Kemper had set off, he’d got down on the ground and started his exercises. His tense muscles gleamed with perspiration as he raised and lowered himself from the—

“Hey!” shouted Andy.

Jedidiah had opened the back door of the van and was poking the corpse with a stick!

“You sick little mutant,” Andy called, climbing to his feet. “That’s police evidence.”

What the hell was the kid playing at? Why wouldn’t he leave the dead body alone?

Jedidiah stepped away from the door and looked dejectedly at his stick. He’d prodded the body but it hadn’t moved. And now he could see that the end of the stick was wet with blood. The girl was dead after all.

Pepper saw the strange expression on Jedidiah’s face. She thought it was a look of sadness, but she couldn’t quite tell.

“That poor boy,” she observed. “I’ll bet he doesn’t have many friends.”

Morgan took in the abandoned mill, the sprawling thicket of the landscape, the kid with the stick and snorted derisively. “I wonder why?”

“But to raise a family with you,” said Kemper excitedly, “and have a bunch of little tykes runnin’ around, teaching ’em about cars, goin’ to car shows, taking ’em on vacation every year to the Indy 500—”

Suddenly they were out of the woodland, and the air had become sunny and almost cheerful around them.

Kemper had charmed Erin. He had spent the whole way convincing her that he was the right man for her. He wanted to be her husband. He wanted to be the daddy of her kids. And Erin loved it. This was the Kemper she first hooked up with all those years back, not the dope smuggling moron showing off for his friends—though she didn’t mind him messing with his buddies as long as he did it on his own time.

Kemper had suddenly stopped talking and Erin could see why. They had reached the end of the trail and could now see the farmstead on the plains.

At first, their eyes were drawn to the tall, water-pumping windmill. Most of the steel blades were missing from the wheel perched at the top of the tower. Nevertheless, the wheel turned slowly, creaking, evenly catching the wind that was now rushing in waves through the long grass that had grown unchecked over the gentle rise that led up to the house.

Kemper took a good look at the place.

The farmhouse was a large and imposing two-storied building constructed in the plantation style, but the design of the place was almost brutal in its flatness and complete absence of curves. Likewise, the walls of the house were plain, featureless surfaces that terminated on all sides in sharp, ninety-degree angles.

Six broad rectangular columns, spaced equally apart at the front of the building, climbed up from the ground to meet a forward overhang that projected from the roof. Midway, the columns supported a crude clapboard balcony that ran the length of the upper story. Except for this front-facing balcony with its weathered wooden balustrade, and an attic room that protruded from the center of the sloped roof, the entire house was built from huge slabs of pale brick. The effect was to make the place seem more like a military bunker than a tranquil rural home.

There were windows on both floors, tall rectangular panes of glass with hanging blinds inside that masked the interior of the house. The way into the place, however, seemed clear. A double screen door made mostly of gauze stood halfway along the lower porch, dead center at the foot of the house. Just inside the screens, a pair of tall wooden doors hung wide open.

Kemper idly noticed there were a few seats and benches on the porch, along with what looked like a couple of old spring bedsteads that someone had propped up against the wall. If the sheriff wasn’t here, Kemper didn’t know what the hell to do.

“Let’s get this over with,” he sighed, then he started to walk up the low grassy bank towards the house.

Erin followed and, as they drew close, she caught sight of a rusty old mailbox standing where the house met up with the road. On top of the mailbox some bent metal letters spelled out a name, presumably the name of the people who lived here: HEWITT.

But hadn’t Luda May said the sheriff’s name was Hoyt? Perhaps Erin had misheard her. Hewitt, Hoyt—maybe it was an accent thing?

Andy was sitting on the porch steps. He hadn’t seen Jedidiah since he’d told the boy to stop messing with the body. Neither had Pepper and Morgan; Jedidiah had just taken off into the woods.

Some time passed before the boy came back. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, coming hurriedly out of the trees with a peculiar smile on his face. Andy watched the kid very carefully. He wasn’t exactly over the moon to see the little oddball.

Pepper, on the other hand, was glad he was back. She felt she still might be able to help Jedidiah in some way. Even if she couldn’t, the boy would probably be better company than Andy and Morgan right now. As soon as Kemper had left, the two guys had buttoned it.

Pepper was still sitting with Morgan right next to the entrance to the mill. She smiled to welcome the boy as he walked over to her.

“I drew a picture of you,” he said, taking Pepper by surprise. “Wanna see it?”

“Sure,” she smiled.

Jedidiah reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Gingerly, he handed it to her.

Morgan looked on as she slowly unfolded the badly creased sheet. He half expected the picture to be covered in scratchy red pen, a childish rendition of Pepper dripping with blood, but the picture was quite charming. Yes, the picture was childish, and yes it was clumsy and simple, but Jedidiah’s drawing of Pepper had an undeniable natural sweetness to it.

“Wow,” glowed Pepper. “This is really good.”

“You sure you’re not just saying that?” the boy questioned.

Morgan was beginning to find the whole thing more than a touch surreal. Here they were, stuck at the “House of Horrors”, having to satisfy the creative temperament of Jedidiah the Jungle Boy.

“No,” said Pepper firmly. “I swear I like it.”

Jedidiah watched her for any sign of a lie but didn’t see one. She looked like she really thought his picture was good. So maybe—

“Wanna see the rest of ’em I done?” he offered.

More?

“Sure,” said Pepper enthusiastically. Then at Morgan pointedly, “Don’t we?”

Morgan looked at her. Then at the kid. “Of course we do,” he managed.

Then the two of them got up and began to follow Jedidiah as he lead them round to the side of the mill.

“Hey, where you guys going?” Andy called after them. Then he jumped to his feet and ran after them. They shouldn’t be going anywhere without him like that. What if they ran into trouble?

Right up close, the Hewitt farmhouse seemed even more forbidding. It stood like a squat mass of powerful stone, almost as if the original owner sought to terrify his cotton-picking slaves through the sheer unnerving form of the building’s architecture. Yet the house seemed mostly clean. Some of the bricks were a little dirty, but that was only to be expected in a remote place like this.

As Kemper walked the three or four steps that led up on to the porch, Erin took another look at the surrounding scenery. Unlike the Crawford Mill area, the land here was mostly open and grassy. There were a few trees standing about but nothing like the overgrown trail they’d just come along.

She climbed up and joined Kemper in front of the screen doors.

They could hear classical music from a record player somewhere inside the house. The record was scratched.

Kemper hesitated, and they looked at each other for a brief moment before Erin took the lead and knocked on the wooden frame of the gauze screen.

“Hello!” she called. “Anybody home?”

No response. All they could hear was the music from what now sounded like an old phonograph.

They pressed their faces closer to the mesh and tried to see inside, but it was no use.

Now Kemper tried knocking, only more loudly.

“Excuse me!” he hollered and he could hear his voice echo on the other side of the doors as if projected down a long hallway.

“Hello!” shouted Kemper, growing increasingly annoyed.

Where the hell was the sheriff?

The music stopped.

Erin and Kemper exchanged glances. Someone had turned off the phonograph. Someone had heard them. Someone was inside.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

The voice came from within the house. It was low, booming, and had a distinct Deep South drawl about it. It sounded like an old man.

Kemper pressed his face closer to the door but still he couldn’t see in. He certainly couldn’t see whoever it was who had just called out to them. And then he heard something else, something like the growling of a small dog.

“Are you the sheriff?” asked Erin loudly.

“Do I look like the sheriff?” came a reply.

“I don’t know,” called Erin. “I can’t see you.”

Kemper scratched at his goatee. Nothing was going right today. Nothing.

Jedidiah took Pepper round to a low door at the side of the mill. He offered to let her go through first, but she just smiled until he got the message and opened the door himself.

Inside, Pepper, Andy and Morgan found themselves in a cramped area on the lower level of the gin. There was some light coming in from somewhere because, unlike the room by the front entrance, they could see in here just fine. But the light was still fairly dim and it was impossible to tell exactly where it was coming from.

None of them were quite sure what this room was meant to be. There were cracked lead pipes running the length of the ceiling, there was more junk lying around and they found more crazy stuff: dolls’ heads, broken bones, a torn photograph, a bent windscreen wiper . . .

One wall was covered with pictures, scraps of paper stuck in a haphazard spread across the splintered boards. The pictures, most with ripped edges were all drawn in Jedidiah’s simple hand and each picture was of a different person. He’d drawn men, women, children, boys, girls, even what looked like dogs, cats—pets. And now he added Pepper’s picture to the collection.

“Thanks, Jedidiah,” she said, moved by his touching gesture. “I feel so honored.”

“You sure about that?” mumbled Andy.

If the drawing of Pepper was actually meant to be a representation of Pepper, who were all the other people Jedidiah had drawn? There were dozens of pictures up on the wall. Did Jedidiah expect them to believe that all these people had come out to this shit-hole of a place? Maybe the people on the wall were Jedidiah’s imaginary friends. Whatever.

Andy followed the display down towards the end of the room, where the wall and the pictures, fell completely into shadow. Morgan stood just behind Andy’s shoulder and together the two of them were just able to make out that the half-hidden pictures were different to the stick caricatures Jedidiah had shown them. The scratched images down here were grotesque and as riddled with implied and explicit violence as the perverted figurines and skulls outside the front of the mill.

“Hey, kid,” said Morgan, unable to lift his bespectacled gaze from a crude drawing of a dagger raped heart. “You draw these too?”

BANG!

It was the sound of the door being slammed shut. It had no effect on the light.

Morgan looked round—Jedidiah was gone.

Pepper had been looking up at the pictures on the wall, Andy too. No one had been watching the kid.

“Maybe we should—” Pepper tried to say.

But Andy cut in, “Go back to the van? Right.”

Quickly, Andy stepped up and took the lead, and the three of them rushed over towards the closed door.

Outside, Jedidiah ran away as fast as he could into the tortured grove.

“Step back from the door,” the voice demanded.

Erin was certain it was an old man talking. She glanced at Kemper. He shrugged. What else could they do? They were right up against the screens.

Hesitantly, they stepped back onto the porch and waited.

Slowly, the doors opened. The squealing hinges were desperately in need of some lubricating oil. And finally the old man inside the Hewitt house revealed himself—in a wheelchair.

The old man cautiously wheeled himself out onto the deck of the porch. He seemed to be sizing Kemper up. But he also kept Erin in the corner of his eye. In fact, he was careful to make sure he could see everything as he came out to meet the two young people who’d been banging and hollering at his door.

Erin could see that the man had had a hard working life. Beneath his plain, cream-colored cap, the man’s face was like a flesh-tone model of the Grand Canyon. The sallow cheeks were a web of deep lines and creases. Even the man’s nose was thick with wrinkles. He was clean shaven, but his gray stubble was the kind of dogged growth no razor could ever wholly remove. And his eyes behind the plastic brown fade glasses were a cold steel blue.

The man was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, so Erin could see how years of hard labor had given the man’s arms and upper chest a sparse, wiry strength that still served him, as he pushed himself along in the wheelchair. A pair of fading, striped suspenders ran down the outside of his vest, fastened to his durable gray pants, which—

Oh God!

Only now did Erin notice that both the man’s legs ended at his knees. The fleshy, truncated stump-knuckles stuck out through the bottom of his pants which were pulled up around his thighs.

Erin didn’t want her nausea to show but this had caught her totally off guard. The old man was an amputee and he made no attempt to hide the fact.

A small sandy-colored dog ran out of the house and jumped up onto the man’s lap. But the old man ignored it. He remained stern as he looked at his new callers. Kemper noticed the man had a black walking cane in his right hand.

“Sheriff don’t live here,” said the man impatiently.

“That figures,” said Kemper, balanced precariously on the edge of no longer giving a damn. Everywhere they went, they kept hearing the same tune: Sheriff Not Here.

The man snapped Erin a frosty stare. “You can call him if you want.”

His offer shook her out of a daydream. Once she’d got over the sight of his twin stumps, she’d found herself watching the dog playfully pawing the man’s thighs.

“Err . . . thanks,” she stuttered. “We’d appreciate it.”

Kemper wasn’t sure whether phoning the sheriff from this place would do any better than phoning him from Luda May’s but he was prepared to try. At least the old feller was harmless, with his legs and all.

Erin practically tiptoed round the old man’s wheelchair and started to open the door.

“Wipe your feet,” barked the old man. “I like to keep a clean house.”

She looked down and saw the doormat; it was almost spotless. Quickly, she wiped her platforms, then started to head on inside. Kemper followed suit scraping the dust off his shoes, but when he went to take the door from Erin, he found the old man’s cane barring his way. The dog started to growl.

The old man looked up at Erin. “I said you can call him.” Then to Kemper, “You can wait outside. I ain’t looking for trouble.”

As he said the last few words, the man in the wheelchair lifted his cane and prodded the capped end of the black stick up against Kemper’s chest.

The young man held up his hands. “Okay, chief. Don’t shoot.”

But the old man wasn’t smiling. Not a bit of it. He removed the stick from Kemper’s chest then motioned Erin to go on inside. Then he rolled his wheelchair back inside the house before finally using his cane to yank the door shut.

Could this day get any more annoying?

Kemper shook his head and kicked the ground. It was all down to Erin now.

Inside, the man told Erin she could call him “Old Monty,” which struck her as an old-fashioned name, but then everything about Monty was old-fashioned. Even the back of his wheelchair was made of wicker or something. And then there was his house.

Unlike the grim exterior of the Hewitt farmstead, the interior was as conventional and as inviting as any American home. The long hallway had a nicely polished floor, the walls seemed tastefully decorated—if a little out of date—and there was hardly a speck of dust about the place.

She chided herself for even thinking it, but Erin could not see how Monty could keep the house like this, not in his condition. Maybe he had a housekeeper. Or maybe Erin hadn’t yet met all the family.

She looked down the hallway; it ran the whole length of the house.

There was an open door on the left and a closed door facing it on the right. Just past the closed door, a wide carpeted stairway climbed up to the second floor—and there seemed to be a space under the stairs.

Further along, various doors opened left and right off the corridor until the way finally ended in what seemed like a storage area. That part of the hall didn’t get much light, but Erin thought she could see some old boxes and bits of furniture down there. She also caught sight of something else. It could have been a door but Erin wasn’t sure.

Taking his time, the old man led Erin through the open doorway to the left into a well furnished living room, where all the furniture was draped with plastic slip-covers.

“In here,” he said. “I’ll dial him for you.”

Then he rolled over to a museum-piece telephone standing on an equally dated table, lifted the receiver and began to make the call.

“Thanks,” smiled Erin nervously.

While Old Monty waited for someone to pick up at the other end, Erin took a quick look around the room. Other than the faded wallpaper, all the ornaments and furnishings seemed to be in good condition—which wasn’t surprising if the old man kept everything under dust covers. She saw the old phonograph they’d heard earlier.

There was an old 78 on the turntable, Mozart. There were pictures on the wall, sepia tinted portrait photographs of people long since buried in their graves. There were lamps, small ornaments, a couple of vases. Erin picked up a ceramic bowl of potpourri and inhaled. It was old and had gone off. She blew through her nose to clear the bad smell, then put the potpourri back on the table.

A large brass fan was set up in the ceiling. Even though it turned, Erin could barely feel it in the closeness of the late summer afternoon.

Suddenly, Monty’s cane came into view. It reached across in front of Erin and nudged the potpourri bowl back to the exact place Erin had first found it. The girl looked at Old Monty and started to shrug apologetically, only to see that he was ready to hand her the phone.

Kemper was still kicking about outside.

Luda May. Jedidiah. And now some old lunatic with his shins blown off. Wasn’t there one normal person anywhere in this damn town?

“Thirty minutes,” Erin repeated down the phone. “Believe me, I’ll be there . . . Thank you, sheriff.”

At long last, one of them had actually spoken with the sheriff. Not Luda May, not Old Monty; one of them.

The sheriff had apologized and said he’d had to make some preparations that had delayed him. But he had confirmed that the old abandoned gin was indeed the Crawford Mill and he guaranteed he’d be out there to meet them within the half hour.

Erin smiled.

Like her momma always said: If you want somethin’ doin’, you gotta do it yourself.

And for the first time since that girl had shot herself, Erin thought things were beginning to look up. She couldn’t wait to tell Kemper. But when she turned round to thank Old Monty for his help, the disabled farmer wasn’t there.

He must have left her alone to make the call in private, and now he was busy doing something around the house. He was a gentleman. In his condition, he had every right to be suspicious when strangers called. How could he defend himself? He had no neighbors who would hear if anything went wrong. No, Erin completely understood Old Monty’s initial surliness. And as far as she was concerned, they all owed the man a debt of gratitude.

But now she was ready to be on her way.

“Thank you,” she shouted, hoping he’d hear her, wherever he was. “I’m all set.”

She paused for a minute, but there was no reply. All the same, she had to get going. It had taken her and Kemper around fifteen minutes to walk here, and now they had to make sure they were back in time for the sheriff.

Taking one last look at the antique display of a living room, Erin went out into the hallway. She could just see Kemper pacing impatiently through the screen door.

Then she heard a muffled voice.

“Please—” It was Old Monty. He sounded put out.

“I need a little help,” he called falteringly between sharp breaths. He was in some kind of difficulty. But where?

“I’m in the bathroom,” he gasped. “I fell.”

Now she got it. He’d left her alone to talk to the sheriff, gone to the john and fallen off his wheelchair. She didn’t want to be the cause of any discomfort for him, not after he’d helped her by letting her use the phone. Besides, Erin would have looked out for anyone with his kind of disability.

And now she could hear his dog. The barks were echoing, which meant the dog was probably with the old man in the bathroom.

Quickly, she set off down the long hallway. She thought about calling Kemper but didn’t want to waste any time. She could hear the old man struggling and a few moments later she found his wheelchair lying on its side in the middle of an open doorway.

Half the chair was inside the hall and the other half was just inside the large bathroom. Beyond, Erin could see Old Monty lying on the floor. He was struggling to lift himself up onto the toilet seat. As she watched, he pulled his catheter tube out of the toilet bowl, clearly embarrassed that all this was happening right in front of her. But what choice did he have?

He called out to her, “Could you just—”

Suddenly, a loud metallic whine scraped through the walls of the bathroom, drowning out the remainder of Old Monty’s sentence. A damaged faucet had kicked into life, jump-starting all the plumbing in the entire building. All around her, Erin could hear the ear-splitting groan of straining lead pipes.

Monty held out a hand to her. She couldn’t hear him, but he needed her help. Carefully, she stepped over the wheelchair.

She noticed the washbasin off to her left. Brown water was pouring in torrents from the faucet, only to run spiraling down the drain.

She reached out.

The old man took hold of her hand and started to pull. Erin braced herself, tried to lift him. For such a thin man with a good part of his body missing, the old feller was extremely heavy and his grip was incredibly strong. Erin had to pull real hard to—

Something passed in the hallway behind her.

It was hard getting in the right position. She had to kick the wheelchair aside and close the door so that she could get some leverage.

Old Monty grabbed at her, he pulled on her, he strained, the two of them groping, clutching, panting with exertion, struggling, fighting for control, getting nowhere, making no progress.

The more Erin tried to help, the more he seemed to be pulling her down. Ke . . . Kem . . .

Kemper sat on the porch swing. He thought he’d heard Erin talking on the phone a minute ago, but she seemed to have stopped. She better have good news.

He took a pack of cigarettes out from one of the large utility pockets in his pants. With the skill of someone who’s had plenty of practice, he shook a cigarette loose and popped it between his lips. He then put the packet away and indulged in the time honored ritual of flipping open his lighter with that unmistakable tink, and then slowly, coolly lighting the smoke. He put the lighter back and inhaled . . . luxuriously.

Place didn’t look so bad out here. Wide open spaces. Peace and quiet.

He exhaled and glanced at his watch. It was getting late.

“Come on, Erin,” he said out loud. “What the hell’s taking so long?”

It was damned irritating to be just one wall away from knowing what was going on. Surely the old man had seen Erin enough to realize they weren’t gonna hurt him.

Kemper took another drag at the cigarette then tossed it on the floor. Then he got up and headed inside the house. He was sick of waiting and he wasn’t going to let some old guy in a wheelchair mess him around any longer.

However, the moment he walked through the door, Kemper stopped and took stock of his surroundings. He was in a long hallway—the place looked like something from the Civil War, everything was so old. And there was a loud whining sound. It seemed to be coming from all over the place and reminded him of the noise made by trapped air in old water pipes. All the same, it was pretty loud.

He couldn’t see Erin or the old guy and, thanks to that noise, he couldn’t hear them either. So, feeling inexplicably nervous, he set off slowly down the hall.

A short way on, he came to the open stairway on the right. He didn’t think Erin would be up there, so he kept straight on down the—hold it a minute!

There was something hanging on the wall beneath the stairs. He didn’t know why, but it caught his eye for some reason. He went forward and took a closer look. But even a few inches away from the thing, he still had trouble making sense of it.

It was a tiny rodent skull with bells in its eye sockets with feathers and more bells dangling beneath it on lengths of catgut. Suddenly it hit Kemper that the skull was just like all that other weird shit they’d found back at the mill. And that’s why the curio had attracted his attention. The eerie similarity had triggered his instincts long before he actually understood what it was.

He took the skull down from the wall and turned it over in his hands. The bells jingled, a quiet but crystal-clear sound. Taking care not to make any more noise, he slowly went to put the thing back—when he noticed a door crack slightly ajar just behind him.

He reached out towards the door but forgot about the rat skull in his other hand. Before he knew it, the demented object was slipping through his fingers. It hit the polished floorboards in a cascade of ringing bells.

Dammit!

Hoping no one had heard him, Kemper stealthily bent down and reached forward—

As the blurred figure swept behind him.

—and brought the sledgehammer down on the back of his skull. The blow was merciless, pounding and bloody.

Kemper fell stunned, twitching, his limbs out of control, his bowels loosening, and his whole body relaxing in helpless defeat.

He felt something grab hold of his hair and denim jacket. He was helpless, pulled sliding along the polished floor, stunned, feeling no pain, unable to move, beaten. Something had taken control of Kemper and, through concussed rolling eyes, he could barely make sense of the grappling bulk that now had complete mastery of his flesh.

Through the descending haze, a voice in Kemper cried with fear but there was no expression of it in his brutally enfeebled limbs. A floating space of horror opened up and consumed him as he took his first glimpse of the force that had crushed him.

A man. Big, powerful, bulky, a fat-quivering excited body, howling, squealing like a pig with hard-on excitement.

The destroyer.

He had control of Kemper in a way the boy’s mind could not accept.

The face of the attacker was too much.

Not possible. Just not possible.

Thick heavy boots, pounding the floorboards as the squealing mound of fat grabbed at Kemper, pulled at him, ripped at his hair. Rough pants, filthy, stains, blood, shit, dirt, piss. The top shirt, dirty and striped, short sleeves revealing an undershirt tucked in at the elbow inside two leather vambraces, protecting and strengthening each of the forearms. And the heavy leather apron, jagged with crisscrossing lines of stitching, brown and stinking just like the dead girl in the van. An apron custom-sewn from skin.

Kemper focused on the fat fingered hands that manhandled total control of him—fingers heavy with jewelry: signet rings, graduation rings, engagement rings, wedding rings. They pushed and pulled Kemper, leaving everywhere the fingerprints of overwhelming frustration.

Kemper knew he was lost.

Something was wrong and there was nothing he could do about it; he had no power. He had been dominated, crushed and when he finally looked up into the face of the man who now owned him, he looked into the face of hell.

Two insanely staring eyes and a fat-lipped slobbering mouth full of rotting teeth encased in a mask made of human flesh. Kemper’s master was wearing a real human face, skinned, decaying and crudely stitched beneath a ripped scalp of someone else’s black hair running thick with lice.

The frustration.

Erin.

Kemper had been overpowered by Leatherface, who squealed and screamed like a fucking pig in the dying boy’s face.

“You’re not helping me!” Erin shouted. “Just relax!”

“What?” Old Monty shouted back.

It seemed as if the screeching from the faucet was getting even louder. On top of that, the damned dog wouldn’t quit barking and running around. It was driving Erin crazy. What the hell was going on here? Did the old man want her help or not? She grabbed hold of his wrists and tried even harder.

* * *

Kemper tried to resist but he barely had control of his muscles. The sledgehammer had pounded the tissue of his brain, flooding the convoluted gray mass with blood. Try as hard as he might, there was nothing the boy could do except feel the outrage of his helplessness.

Leatherface dragged Kemper down the full length of the hallway, past the closed bathroom door, to the darkened area at the end of the corridor.

This part of the house was completely different from all the other rooms on the ground floor. It seemed to be used only for storage and was a complete mess. In one corner of the room stood a pile of chairs, in another there was a linen basket and an old mattress next to a toolbox with what looked like a child’s rag doll lying in it.

But Kemper didn’t pay any notice. The only thing he sensed was the change in atmosphere from normal house to bad house. He knew from the lousy condition of the storeroom that it acted like some kind of gateway, dividing the world he loved from the world he was going to die in.

Set in the middle of the far wall was an industrial sliding door made of reinforced metal. The door was totally at odds with the rest of the farmhouse, incongruous with the plantation style. Rusty, scratched, heavy—the door was the kind you’d expect to find leading to the cold room of a slaughterhouse. And now, the door was wide open, revealing a small room bathed in a cold green light, a room with blood on the walls.

Kemper lay slumped, his head bleeding as Leatherface dragged him by the shirt towards the open doorway. The boy’s arms hung limply by his side as his body slid along the dirty floor. What he could see of Leatherface’s own skin beneath the full-head human mask seemed red and raw. Kemper tried to speak, to tell the bastard to go to hell, but he couldn’t even do that.

With one final spastic heave, Leatherface threw Kemper’s limp body in through the door and shambled in after him. He then turned and, with one final sickening whine, grabbed hold of the door and slammed it shut with a colossal crash of metal that shook the entire house.

SEVEN

“What the hell was that?!”

Panting with exertion and scared out of her wits by the crash of metal, Erin let Old Monty fall back on to the floor. Something was wrong, she could feel it.

She stepped over the fallen wheelchair, threw open the bathroom door and ran out into the corridor.

Behind her, the old man’s face cracked into a strange expression. It seemed like a smile, but more knowing. If anything, the distortion of Old Monty’s weathered features was smug, malicious—a thinly disguised sneer. His flint-like eyes were narrow with anticipation.

Out in the hallway, Erin bolted to where she thought the sound had come from. It seemed as if the whole building was still reverberating with the thunderous noise. Surely Kemper must have heard it from outside. If he had, he might already be in the house.

She turned left down the hall and came to the storage area—there was a lot of old junk in here. Something else; there was a door in the wall facing her. It was a hefty sliding door made of scored, damaged metal and it looked totally out of place. There was something about the huge sliding panel that filled Erin with irrational fear and she was only too glad to see it closed.

Shivering, she turned her back to the door, and looked down the length of the hall to the screen doors leading outside. Sunlight flooded in through the gauze but failed to reach this far down the corridor. She took another quick look through the discarded bric-a-brac lying about the place but there was nothing—nothing except damned junk.

Hell, she was sure the noise had come from somewhere round here.

She paused.

What if . . . what if the sound had come from behind that weird door?

The reluctant thought had barely entered the young woman’s head when she heard a noise behind her—from behind the door!

Erin spun round—the door was still closed.

The noise she’d just heard had sounded like a dull thud.

“Kemper?” she called. She still hadn’t seen him. Was he outside the house, inside or what?

She walked over to the door and took a closer look at it. There was a bar handle fixed near the right edge—she tried it, but it was no good. Underneath the handle was a rusty latch but she couldn’t see any way to open that either. Again she tried the handle, pulling on it with all her strength, but the sliding panel refused to budge.

Feeling frustrated and increasingly scared, she took a step back and stared at the door—and noticed a peephole!

She hadn’t seen it before. It was set up in the middle of the door and was about six feet off the ground, so Erin had to get up on her tiptoes to look at it.

As far as she could tell, the lens of the spyglass seemed to be set in the center of a disc. This wasn’t the usual simple round hole people drilled through their front doors for security; it was something much more elaborate. The metal disc encasing the lens seemed to be held in a circular mount, as if the disc with the lens were separate from the rest of the door.

Erin stretched up and put her eye to the glass but it was useless. She couldn’t see much and what she did see was tiny and distorted. The only thing she did notice for sure was that the room on the other side of the door seemed to be lit up all pale green, which was kinda weird.

Her calves started to ache so she stepped down and tried putting her ear to the door. Maybe if she listened—

Nothing.

Erin cursed. She was running out of ideas fast.

Whatever was happening on the other side of that door—and whether the loud bang had come from in there or not—Erin couldn’t see, hear or do anything. And suddenly she was wondering whether any of it was her business in the first place.

She’d only come looking because the noise had scared the hell out of her. It had been like the tolling of a giant funeral bell, and following on top of her crazy struggle with the double amputee, it had sent her into a panic. She felt the need to do something. Anything.

Kemper.

Erin turned and made ready to head straight back out to the front porch, when suddenly she heard a dry metallic squeak come from behind her.

Though Erin didn’t know it, someone had been watching her from the moment she’d run into the storage area at the end of the hallway. Someone had been observing her from the other side of the metal door, using the spyglass to intrude upon her every movement.

The lens was mounted in a pivoted rim that could be angled left and right to follow the girl as she paced back and forth across the hallway. And he had followed her. He had watched her searching every dark corner. He had witnessed her feeble struggle with the door handle. He had seen her face in fish-eye close-up when she’d looked right into the spyglass.

He was still tracking her with the moving eyepiece when the lens casing had rubbed noisily against the circular frame—metal on metal. Rusty. Screeching. Suddenly making noise. She turned!

The spyglass froze.

Erin spun on her heels and rushed back towards the door.

That sound!

The door was still closed, everything was still the same but . . . but . . .

The peephole! It had moved!

Erin was positive that when she first saw the spyglass it had been flat, flush with the door. But now it seemed to be raised on one side and depressed on the other, almost as if—

“Something wrong?”

Erin jumped.

It was Old Monty. He was back in his wheelchair and was now facing her in the middle of the corridor, blocking her way out of the house.

There was something odd about his manner. Erin half expected him to accuse her of deserting him when he needed her help, or maybe attack her for going off wandering around his house—but he said nothing. And he certainly didn’t seem to have had any trouble getting up off the bathroom floor by himself.

Suddenly every instinct in Erin’s body screamed not to trust the old man. Legless or not, this guy was dangerous. And she didn’t like the way he was holding his cane.

“Where is he?” asked Erin.

“I don’t know,” answered Old Monty defiantly. “On the porch where you left him, I guess.”

“What?” shouted the girl, her head starting to spin.

She had the impenetrable metal door behind her, and the old man sitting in front. She was trapped. Or was she?

Seizing the initiative, Erin ran forward and pushed her way right past the haggard old farmer, practically shoving his wheelchair aside, so that she could run down the hallway towards the front door.

Behind her, Old Monty massaged the sweaty right stump of his knee and leered, his dry lips glued with old spit.

Pepper sat between Morgan and Andy on the porch of the abandoned cotton mill. All three of them were now sick of the place and couldn’t wait for Kemper and Erin to bring the sheriff.

They hadn’t seen Jedidiah since he’d tried to shut them in the room full of crazy drawings. It was probably for the best because, whatever Pepper said, the kid was downright weird and both Morgan and Andy had taken a sharp dislike to his creepy little face.

Time had now slowed to a standstill. It was hot, quiet and depressing. None of them could see any bars, but it felt like they were locked in some kind of prison with no chance of parole. Not even death would bring an end to this eternity of just sitting here, waiting by the gin for nothing.

But maybe there was a God after all.

Pepper heard the car first, and soon all three of them were up on their feet.

Someone was driving up along the trail they themselves had taken from the general store. Someone was coming.

Morgan’s first thought was that it might be another weirdo. Another Luda May or another Jedidiah—some fucked-up hillbilly in a V10-powered killwagon or something. But it was Pepper who said it for all three of them:

“Thank God.”

The vehicle was a police car and the sight of it was truly manna from Heaven.

Morgan broke out into the biggest smile he’d had since his last joint, while Andy just shook his head with goddamned relief. The cops, they were finally here—he couldn’t believe it. Kemper and Erin had done it: they’d followed Jedidiah’s directions, gone up to the sheriff’s house and now he was here. Maybe the two of them were in the car with him.

The red bubble light on the top of the police car was cracked and the front end of the vehicle was dented. Matter of fact, the whole car looked like it had seen better days. If Kemper were around he’d be able to tell you just how old the model was. But that just meant the car matched everything else they’d seen round here so far.

Everything about the place was old, beat-up and rundown; no reason why the local police department should be any different. Still, all that mattered was that the sheriff should have the full power of the law behind him, so that he could come in and get this whole damn mess cleaned up.

Sheriff Hoyt pulled up behind the van but Andy was disappointed to see that the sheriff was alone: no Kemper, no Erin.

Unlike his automobile, Hoyt was tidy to the point of pristine. His uniform was crisply ironed with razor-sharp creases, his hat was firm and starched, his gold star gleamed with authority and his hair was buzz-cut with military efficiency.

The man himself was in his late forties and was solidly built. You wouldn’t want to mess with Sheriff Hoyt—not now, not ever. And for that reason alone his presence was immediately reassuring. Sheriff Hoyt was the kind of guy who immediately commanded respect simply by the way he stood with calm ramrod certainty.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said as he got out of the squad car. Judging by his voice, the sheriff was a local boy and, just like Luda May, his face was lined with wear and tear. Andy also noticed the sheriff could do with a shave which was kinda surprising.

Pepper rushed forward. “You have no idea how glad we are to see you.”

Hoyt took the girl’s gratitude in his stride as he moved round to the bloodstained window at the rear of the van.

“I’m guessing that’s where the body is.”

The sense of relief growing among the kids was palpable. At long last, things were going their way. The sheriff had come. He’d take care of everything. Once Kemper and Erin got back.

The sheriff opened the side door of the A-100 and climbed on board. Pepper, Morgan and Andy looked on, their bodies slick with layer upon layer of sweat. They’d tried to follow the sheriff inside but the stench of the corpse was too much. The moment Hoyt had opened the door, it’d taken Morgan every ounce of his willpower not to chuck on the spot.

Fortunately, the sheriff didn’t have the same problem. He’d seen it all before, many times, and neither the intense heat nor the smell of decaying flesh had any effect on him.

Pepper watched as Hoyt methodically inspected the corpse. He lifted the oily rags off of the girl’s head. Pepper almost burst into tears—that face, the poor girl’s face. He then checked her hands and her wrists. Then her ankles, which Morgan thought odd.

Then the sheriff paused and took a moment to follow the bloodstains through the van, tracing the spread pattern, the spray, the viscous arc, working out the angle of the kill. Until finally, he went and picked up the blood-smeared revolver they’d left lying in the girl’s lap.

“Who does this belong to?” he asked.

“She had it on her,” said Andy before anyone else could reply. The way he saw it, he’d have to take care of things until Kemper got back.

Hoyt nodded then raised the barrel of the gun to his nose. He sniffed it. Then he lowered the gun, cocked the hammer, opened the cylinder and checked the individual bullet chambers.

Done.

Moving sharply, he clicked everything neatly back into place—then said, “You sure about that?”

“Kemper, where the hell are you? KEMPER!”

When Erin had reached the porch, she’d found that Kemper was gone. She’d almost expected it but it still frightened and pissed her off.

Old Monty had followed her outside and told her she could go look for the boy out back if she wanted to. And so here she was, walking the perimeter of the house and calling out her boyfriend’s name.

“Maybe he went back to the old Crawford Mill,” suggested the old man as he effortlessly wheeled along just behind her, the dog standing in his lap.

Erin shook her head, more in frustration than to disagree. If this was any kind of joke, or if Kemper had just got bored and gone back to the van, he could kiss their marriage—and his child—goodbye.

The wind was blowing her long hair. She stopped and tucked it behind her ears, using the time to reconsider her options. Maybe the old man was right, maybe Kemper had gone back. And she herself had to go meet the sheriff, who was due at the mill any time now.

Kemper!

“Goddamn him,” she said huffily.

Without saying goodbye to Old Monty, she set off down the grassy rise and along the overgrown horse trail that would lead her back to the mill and her friends.

As she went, Erin failed to notice that something was moving in one of the ground floor windows of the Hewitt house. Someone was looking through the blinds, watching her, the fabric strips bending to reveal two insane eyes, savagely feeding on her tender young image.

The sheriff went and fetched a long roll of adhesive cellophane from the trunk of his automobile. Then he and the two boys began the unpleasant process of lifting the dead girl up from the rear seat of the van.

Pepper could hardly bring herself to watch. It was almost unreal seeing her friends like that, working in silence, handling the corpse. But unknown to any of them—even the sheriff—someone was watching the whole scene through the blood-rimmed bullet hole of the rear window: Jedidiah.

Taking care to avoid being spotted, the boy watched attentively as the three men lifted the girl up from her resting place and slowly lugged her carcass out of the truck. Jedidiah couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Erin walked as fast as she could through the tangled undergrowth.

Dusk was still some hours away but the sun had already begun its slow descent towards the horizon, casting long shadows all around her. And the arthritic limbs of the trees now appeared lower than before when Erin and Kemper had come this way before.

“Kemper!” she shouted. In fact, she hadn’t stopped shouting all the way back from the farmstead.

“Kemper!” she tried again, when the sudden sound of a branch snapping somewhere behind her made her stop.

“Kemper, is that you?”

Silence.

Heart pounding, the girl spun round and strained her eyes to see into the dense thicket of trees and bushes behind her. Then, slowly, she turned in a gradual full circle, scrutinizing every plant, leaf and damn blade of grass.

Still nothing.

Erin picked up and almost ran the rest of the way back to the mill.

When Andy first saw the roll of tape in Hoyt’s hand, he thought the sheriff was going to use it to seal the van, or cordon the scene of the incident. He had no idea that Hoyt was going to ask Morgan and him to help get the girl down on the floor, so that the sheriff could then use the tape to wrap her up like an insect in a damn cocoon. But that’s what he did.

The sheriff simply peeled the end of the tape off the spool, stuck the end of the tape to her feet, then pulled the spool round and round her body. Round and round the tape went, binding, encasing.

Hoyt had asked the boys to help—pick her feet up, hold her back, lift her head—until finally the dead girl looked like a cellophane mummy, the adhesive shroud so tight that only the finest drops of blood could escape through the shining, striated plastic.

When all was done, the sheriff asked the boys to help carry her body over to the back seat of the patrol vehicle.

Hoyt held the door open as the two frightened young men struggled to get the corpse inside. Rigor mortis was already starting to affect the dead tissue.

“It just seems wrong,” said Pepper, unable to believe the sight in front of her eyes, her friends carting the shrinkwrapped body like . . . like a pack of meat.

God no!

Pepper dashed that sick thought out of her mind. It was crazy. Everything must be getting to her.

“Young lady,” replied the sheriff firmly. “I have nothing but the utmost respect for the dead. But if I don’t get this girl on ice right quick, she’s sure to rot.”

Andy saw that Pepper was about to say something but stopped her. “Thanks so much for your help,” he blurted. “Really.”

Then he turned to Pepper, his face a clear signal for her to keep her mouth shut. They were getting there. Everything was almost done. Why risk pissing the sheriff off?

With Hoyt’s help, Andy and Morgan were finally able to hoist the body into position on the back seat of the police car where it lay, wrapped and bleeding.

The sheriff wiped a hand across his upper lip.

“I’d stay with you until your friends get back,” he said. “But if I do . . .” He motioned to the body on the back seat, then kicked the car door shut.

“We understand,” said Morgan enthusiastically. “I’m sure they’ll be back soon.”

“So am I,” said the sheriff walking round to the driver’s side. “Old Monty isn’t one for keeping company, anyway.” He paused. “Sure you know how to find your way out?”

“No problem,” Morgan smiled. “Thanks again, sheriff.”

Hoyt held Morgan’s stare for a moment—the kid kept smiling, willing the sheriff to be on his way. Finally, he removed his hat and climbed inside the vehicle. Then he started the engine, reversed his car away from the van, turned round and drove back down the access road towards the highway.

As the patrol car pulled away, Morgan looked down at his hands. He would’ve given anything for some hot water and a bar of soap.

Through the sliding metal door, beyond the small square room with its pale green strip light, through another door, down a long narrow staircase of rough paneled walls—the stairs made of thin wooden slats—and finally into the basement.

Kemper opened his eyes.

And wished he hadn’t.

The basement was a dark cramped expanse of nightmarish, rusted violence. Everywhere Kemper looked, he saw the disarray of a diseased fucking mind.

Shelves cluttered with tools, bloodstained knives, jars—rows and rows of glass jars filled with God knows what—pulleys, bits of broken bones lashed together with horse leathers, chains, shoes, an old mangled wheel dangling from a rope in midair, hooks, ropes, mortician’s scales, wooden beams, discarded furniture.

Pipes ran along the ceiling, up the walls, twisting through the corroded mayhem of the purposely collected psychotic debris. There was a bathtub lying on the floor in front of a blazing, ornate cast iron furnace.

There were animal snares, farming tools, bottles, items of luggage, shelves, more shelves and buckets filled with fetid shit-smelling broth. A busted-up piano. A whole pile of trash.

And a meat cleaver.

Much of the basement floor was hidden beneath two inches of filthy black water, coagulating in places into venereal sump, the mud and shit of previous acts of abomination.

It was dark down there with no real light, except for a feeble yellow glow from the furnace and a thick shaft of sunlight that shone down through a jagged hole high up in one of the walls.

There were oil lanterns scattered about but none of them were lit, leaving Kemper to stare feebly towards the sharp rays of freedom, reminding him of how he once took green fields for granted.

He choked from the stink. Nothing in the van compared to this. Nothing—not even the slaughterhouse they’d passed this morning.

Toxic.

Carnal.

Death.

“W . . . what . . . are you doing?” slurred Kemper.

He’d heard his attacker shuffling about among the cancerous implements of this blackened kill-pit, long before he’d seen him. And when Kemper finally did see the skin-stealing motherfucker, it was as a distorted reflection in the meat cleaver.

But suddenly, the heaving mound of murderous insanity was upon him.

Kemper could see the mask he’d stitched together, the skin flapping loosely as he came charging forward.

“DON’T! STOP!” Kemper shouted.

He tried to move but even if his limbs had obeyed him, he would have found that he’d been completely and totally bound.

The sharp edge of the heavy cleaver came down on Kemper, silencing his protests with the asphyxiation of blood.

Kemper felt bubbles bursting in his throat but, though he struggled, he oddly felt as if he no longer cared.

In his fading delirium, Kemper noticed the killer was wearing a tie. It was a black tie. At last Kemper understood that his body was about to become a plaything in the smothering, eager hands of the snorting maniac.

A tear formed in the boy’s staring eye and he managed silent thanks that he would not be around when the final violation of his body took place.

One desperate crumb of comfort.

One pathetic consolation in abject mortal enslavement.

EIGHT

They still didn’t want to go inside the van. All three of them just hung out, looking in through the open side door.

The interior of the vehicle was matted with blood, fragments of bone and hardening lumps of brain. The worsening putrefaction was attracting flies.

No one said it but they all knew that once Kemper and Erin returned, they’d have to all get back inside. And then they’d have to go the rest of the way to Dallas in a truck that looked like it had been the scene of a hold-up.

“Poor Kemper,” said Andy. “He’ll never get the stink out of this van.”

“Think we should try to clean it?” suggested Pepper optimistically.

Morgan took another look at the mess. “Be my guest.”

At first it looked as if the girl was actually going to give it a shot, but almost as soon as she made to step aboard she began to feel nauseous.

“You okay?” A woman’s voice.

Erin!

They could see her walking round the side of the mill just past the wreck of an old farm tractor. Boy, were they glad to see her. Unfortunately, Pepper didn’t get out of the van quickly enough.

“It’s too much,” she gulped. “I’m gonna be sick.”

Trying her hardest to keep it down, she pushed Andy and Morgan out of the way then went round to some thick grass on the other side of the van.

She puked her guts up.

The guys could hear her retching as they went to meet Erin.

Andy was worried. She didn’t exactly look happy. Where was Kemper?

“Good news,” said Erin. “The sheriff’s on his way.”

Simultaneously, Andy and Morgan looked at each other, then back at Erin.

“Uh, Erin—” said Andy confused.

“Where’s Kemper?” she interrupted.

“The sheriff was already here,” continued the boy, even more confused. Why was she asking them where Kemper was when he was with her?

And now they were all confused.

“What?” asked Erin, shaking her head.

Pepper had finished being sick and was coming round to join them. She’d heard everything and was as puzzled as the rest of them.

“He took the body,” she explained, wiping warm traces of vomit from the corners of her mouth.

Erin was dumbfounded. Were they serious?

She leant over and looked through the windshield of the Dodge. They were right; the girl was gone, but . . .

She turned to Andy, feeling utterly lost. “I don’t get it.”

Then she walked away from the van and looked up at the abandoned mill. It was exactly as she remembered it. Nothing had changed.

Frowning, she went back round towards the rotting groves and the trail up to the Hewitt house.

“Kemper!” she shouted.

Now she was near the old tractor again—it wore rust like a second skin—and Pepper went up to talk to her. They needed to figure this thing out. Everybody just had to stand still and calm down. She was about to reach out and touch Erin, when she saw something lying on the ground, something almost hidden by one of the massive rear wheels of the tractor.

“Andy,” said Erin, pacing, “where the fuck is he?”

But Andy didn’t answer. In fact, he almost hadn’t heard her because his whole attention was fixed on Pepper. The girl was standing upright looking at something in the dirt. Which would have been no big deal, except she looked scared shitless.

“Pepper?” he called gently.

But she couldn’t speak. She kept looking down near the thick tire with its deep worn tread.

And now Erin could also see how scared Pepper was—which filled Erin with dread because she didn’t need any more revelations right now. Sure, the sheriff news was good, but nearly every other surprise that day had brought them nothing but pain.

She knelt down close to the tractor, keeping beside Andy as he reached low and pulled something free from the brittle earth. Morgan stood next to Pepper, not touching her, but hoping his proximity might help her feel a little safer. At the very least, he hoped she might stop trembling.

“Shit, Andy—” gasped Erin.

He had prized loose a string of broken teeth wired together with some bent orthodontic braces. Human teeth.

“What is it?” asked Pepper, her voice wavering, but she’d already seen what it was; she just needed to hear it from someone else, to prove she wasn’t going crazy.

“Nothing,” he replied hurriedly, trying to protect her.

She wasn’t fooled.

“It’s somebody’s teeth, isn’t it?”

Andy stood up, the gold string of bones in his hand, “Pepper, just calm down.”

But Pepper was losing it.

She looked Erin straight in the eye and told her, “Erin, find your goddamn boyfriend. It’s time to go—”

Suddenly they heard a rapid squeaking sound, repeating over and over. They looked up.

It was Jedidiah. He was sitting on the tractor, jumping up and down in the driver’s seat, contracting and expanding the dead springs beneath.

Andy had no idea how the boy managed to creep up there without any of them noticing, but now he was just about ready to give the boy—

PAAAAAAHHHHHH!

A car horn! It was somewhere in the distance, back along the dirt road that had brought them to this damned place.

The sound of the horn was constant, blaring, calling them.

“I’ll bet that’s him,” said Andy with a dry smile. It had to be Kemper. It had to.

“What the hell’s he doing?” moaned Erin.

She was totally serious about canning her boyfriend if he kept up this crap. Now was not the time for childish bullshit. All the same, if it was Kemper, she could kill him and then they could get out of here.

Feeling suddenly hopeful, the four of them started to run back along the road they’d come in on. As soon as they caught up with Kemper they’d be on their way.

Jedidiah watched them go, laughing as he bounced up and down on top of the tractor. It always went the same way.

It was all so funny.

Kemper’s filthy, beaten body lay face-up in the empty bathtub on the basement floor, his hands and legs hanging out over the sides of the squalid tin vessel. His whole body was still fully clothed but his garments were soaked through with blood, dirt and piss.

Leatherface grabbed hold of the dead boy’s legs and tied his ankles together with a stout rope, which he then hooked up to a hoist hanging down from a beam in the ceiling. When everything was set, the skin-wearing freak pulled slowly on the other end of the pulley until, inch by inch, Kemper’s feet began to rise.

The sound of the horn was getting closer.

At first, Erin thought they needed to follow the access road. She naturally assumed they’d find the car they were looking for some way along it. But, as they got closer, they realized the sound was coming from somewhere off to the side.

It was Andy who found the other trail leading off the access road. The turning was so obscured by greenery that they’d completely missed it when they’d first driven in. However, there was no mistaking the tracks in the dirt; cars had been here before, and recently.

“This way,” said Andy.

It looked to him as if someone had tried to hide the turning, because the tire marks looked fairly new, and yet there were vines and branches in the way. But they couldn’t have grown like that in the short time since the tracks had been made. They must have been put there, like camouflage.

Good job Andy had thought to bring the tire iron with him from the van.

At first the going had been pretty difficult.

Morgan was the only one wearing long sleeves, which explained why he alone hadn’t picked up any scratches on his arms. But they pressed on, forging headlong through the tangled grove, fighting their way through bushes and weeds and tripping over small rocks that jutted up from the surface of the path.

The fact that cars had already been this way didn’t seem to make it any easier for them. Unfortunately, they had no choice. Each step they took brought them nearer to the blaring horn—which never once faltered or wavered. Soon the four young people managed to find their way out into a large open clearing.

Where they stopped dead.

“Looks like somebody missed the road,” observed Andy ruefully.

They had reached what could only have been described as an automobile graveyard. The clearing was strewn with the dinosaur remains of at least two dozen wrecked vehicles. There were cars of different makes and models going right back to the Forties. There were camper vans and pickups. There were station wagons, some almost brand new.

Andy looked at the plates: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, New York, Louisiana, Washington. There were automobiles from all over the place here, and none of them had any wheels!

In fact, moving closer, Andy could see that each and every one of the vehicles had been stripped for parts: auto spares like the ones they’d found lying near the Crawford place and for sale at Luda May’s. But there were no wrecking facilities here. There were no offices, no buildings, not even a shack. So it wasn’t a salvage yard. And the only way out of the clearing was the way they’d come in—that carefully concealed trail.

Andy didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.

The deafening horn sound came from a late Sixties Ford station wagon.

The windows were all smashed and the interior of the car looked like it had been ripped apart by a grizzly or something. There was broken glass everywhere, the radio had been torn out and there were kids’ toys scattered all over the floor. The toys had all been broken.

There was no one inside the driver’s seat. The horn was blowing but there was nobody there.

Andy beckoned the others to stand back then, slowly and hesitantly, he stepped up to the driver’s side. He saw the plates: California. Then he looked in through the broken window. Someone had wedged a gnarled wooden stick against the steering wheel, keeping the horn locked on. Andy reached forward and knocked the stick away, finally bringing some peace and quiet to the place.

But who’d done such a thing? Jedidiah?

Over on the other side of the car, Morgan had seen something lying on the back seat. It was something weird. Carefully, he extended his arm through a hole in the shattered glass of the side-door window.

“Be careful,” whispered Pepper.

A look of fear crossed Morgan’s face. His arm—it was trapped!

He tried to pull it loose, but his limb was held fast and now it looked as if it was starting to hurt.

Pepper gripped her head in her hands and cried out—which was Morgan’s signal to remove his hand from the car and break into a cheap laugh.

“That isn’t funny!” shouted Pepper, amazed he could still be a dick after everything they’d been through today.

Erin would have bawled him out as well but she was more interested in what he’d found. He had something in his hand.

“What is that?” she asked, her voice indicating she really didn’t want to know.

Pepper shared the same opinion. It seemed everything they’d found until now was just too creepy for words. There was all that skull stuff back at the mill and Jedidiah’s freaky drawings, and then there were the human teeth underneath the tractor. And now what?

Morgan was holding a storage jar containing a clear amber fluid—it could’ve been piss, but he wasn’t sure. And there was something else in the jar, something suspended in the fluid.

Morgan couldn’t help but slip into a nervous smile as he looked closer and realized that the thing floating upright in the liquid was made of two Polaroid photographs glued back-to-back. The pictures just hung there, slowly turning, their images refracted by the deep yellow viscosity of the fluid.

The four of them gathered round to take a closer look at the images.

On one side, the photo seemed to be the picture of a family. There were parents smiling, a teenage girl, a little boy in a T-shirt and a cute baby girl wearing rabbit pajamas—she must have been around a year old.

Pepper was freaked out.

What the hell was the photo doing here? It looked like a perfectly normal family—five happy people. But their picture was stuck in a jar of what could have been piss or oil and left on the back seat of a trashed car? Why do that? What was the point? Who would do such a crazy thing?

Although they didn’t know it, the four friends were still in a state of shock. Shock from the death of the girl in the van, shock from encountering the panoply of morons who’d dogged their way ever since and shock from having to sit around for what seemed like hours outside a redneck hunting lodge. And shock from being on the receiving end of a constant stream of visual madness.

Compound their distress with the constant frustrations they’d had to endure together with the unshakeable feeling they were never going to leave this place, and you could begin to understand why, when they turned the jar to see the second Polaroid, it took them almost five seconds to realize they were looking at a relaxed portrait of the girl who’d blown her head off.

Their minds—almost in denial—were too numb to see it, but the second photograph was definitely of the dead teenage girl.

“That’s her,” gasped Erin. “The hitchhiker!”

And suddenly they all began to see the broken pieces of a jigsaw tossed out onto the Texan landscape before them. The girl was part of a family. Before she killed herself she’d said she wanted to go to California; the plates on the station wagon were from California.

But they couldn’t complete the puzzle just yet.

“What were they doing out here?” wondered Pepper.

“Looking for the sheriff?” replied Morgan angrily.

Is that what this was? All these cars? People sent up here to look for the sheriff only to have their automobiles end up in this fuel-injected cemetery? And were the passengers broken up as well? Until they became insane? Suicidal?

Morgan put the jar down then turned to look at his friends.

A complete mood change had come over him. He wasn’t playing practical jokes anymore, and Erin could see that his knees were shaking inside his flared pants. But then she too had felt an icy wall of panic slam into her the moment she’d recognized the face in the picture.

The teenager looked a lot happier in the photo than she did with a gun barrel in her mouth.

“Who’s got the keys?” snapped Morgan as he held out his hand. His fingers were twitching. He wanted the keys to the van. He wanted to leave. Now!

Erin walked forward and tried to get by him but he pushed her back.

“You gonna stop me?” she threatened.

But Morgan received support from an unexpected quarter.

“Who put you in charge?” asked Pepper.

This was the first time the two girls had fallen out. Erin had a real fight on her hands.

“You wanna go?” she said. “Go! But we’re not leaving in that van without him.”

They still hadn’t found Kemper and Erin was not about to take off and desert him in his own goddamn wagon.

She took the keys to the Dodge out of her pocket and gripped them tight, making it clear that Morgan would have to knock her cold before she’d let him have them.

Morgan was desperate. “Andy, let’s get the fuck out of here while we can.”

Pepper backed him up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I happen to like my teeth right where they are.”

Well, Andy had wanted to take Kemper’s place and look after things while he was gone, but now he understood how Kemper really felt when they argued. Suddenly everyone was ganging up on Andy to make the decision. It was pretty clear which way Morgan and Pepper wanted him to go, but Erin . . .

She knew she couldn’t depend on Andy. They’d been at loggerheads almost all day, but Erin could really use his help right now. He and Kemper were meant to be buddies. So was Morgan, but she always guessed Andy and Kemper were closer. Now she was gonna find out just how good a friend Andy really was.

The blond haired youth was finding it tough. He didn’t know which way to go, though his heart told him to quit while he was ahead—if you could call it that.

He scratched at the stubble on his cheek before finally looking at Morgan.

“Dude,” he said persuasively, “we’re talking about Kemper.”

Erin breathed a sigh of relief. Suddenly, Morgan lunged forward and tried to snatch the car keys out of her hand. But somehow, she managed to avoid him. Then she quickly stuffed the keys back into her pocket.

“Don’t even think about it!” she warned him.

But Morgan hadn’t thought. The moment he had sensed which way Andy was going to turn, he’d panicked.

God, what did it take to get away from this damn insane place? Everyone was acting crazy. Why didn’t they just leave? Just get in the van, godammit, and go!

Erin turned and started to head back along the hidden trail. This mass grave with its twisted auto-carcasses gave her the creeps.

“Hey!” Andy called after her. “Wait up!”

Which left Morgan and Pepper nothing to do but dejectedly follow the two of them back to the old Crawford Mill.

Kemper was now hanging upside down over the bathtub. Something fell out of his pocket and landed in the metal basin with a loud clinking noise.

Leatherface looked down into the shit-lined washtub and grasped the object with his fat, grubby fingers. It was small, round and it shined brightly, catching a ray of sunlight through the hole in the wall.

Not interested.

He tossed the small metal band onto an adjacent table, where it landed atop a streak of dried blood. The room was full of things he’d taken from the people he’d brought down there.

The stitch-masked killer grabbed hold of Kemper’s dangling form, seizing the boy’s head with one massive hand and holding a long boning knife in the other.

Over on the table lay the gold and diamond engagement ring that had fallen in the bathtub.

“I will, I promise,” Kemper had told Erin earlier that day. “I was just waiting for the right time.”

Leatherface stabbed the dead boy in the face.

NINE

“I wish this day had never happened.”

The afternoon was growing pale and Pepper found herself remembering a dream she used to have a lot as a kid.

She’d be late for school and have only five minutes before the bell. So she’d hurry out of her house only to notice she’d forgotten her books. So she’d have to go back and fetch them. But when she came out again, she’d realize she’d got no clothes on.

So she’d have to go back again and get dressed. But then she wouldn’t be able to find her clothes. And when she did, she would keep getting tangled up in them, having to take them off and putting them back on, knowing full well that her five minutes were up. And even when she was finally dressed, she’d run out to catch the school bus only to remember she’d left her homework behind.

The dream would end only when she woke up. She never got to school, never stopped forgetting stuff and she never overcame her overwhelming feelings of fear and frustration—frightened of being late for class, but doing her damnedest to get there.

Only now, sitting in front of the old mill beside Morgan, Pepper was already awake—it wasn’t a dream. But the feelings of fear and frustration were exactly the same.

Morgan looked at her and smiled.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, and he put an arm round her shoulder. But she pulled away from him.

He turned, embarrassed, and looked down at the shoes on his feet, only to see something roll along the ground straight towards them. Whatever it was, it had come through the open doorway of the mill from inside the shadows of the building.

Pepper screamed!

But Morgan grabbed her forearm—just for a moment—to stop her, to make her look.

It was just a dirty, busted-up softball.

Morgan stepped up to the doorway. It was even darker inside the mill now but he could see where the ball had come from; Jedidiah was sitting on the dilapidated armchair that stood just inside the entrance. The kid was swinging his legs and rubbing his palms against the rotten armrests.

“Don’t ever sneak up on people like that!” shouted Pepper. She’d had it with being scared all the time.

But sneaking was all Jedidiah ever seemed to do—when he wasn’t poking dead bodies with his stick, or asking crazy questions. Now, however, the boy sat still in the armchair. Then, after a suitable pause, he sheepishly asked, “Is your friend really gonna have a baby?”

Christ! He’d even been listening in on their conversations when they first got here!

Morgan wasn’t cutting Jedidiah any more slack.

“Do yourself a favor, kid, and get the hell out of here.”

But Jedidiah didn’t budge. “I hope it’s a boy.”

“GET OUT OF HERE!” Morgan exploded. He was sick and tired of escapees from the local freak-show trying—and succeeding—to gross him out. What did the little bastard want Erin to have a boy for? So he could grow up to be a dirty, pathetic moron like him?

Jedidiah scurried out of the mill, scooping up the softball only to throw it ahead of himself so he could run after it. He was still playing games even when being chased off.

It was peaceful outside the Hewitt house.

Dusk was about an hour away and the wind was easing back, passing like a whisper through the leaves of the trees.

Old Monty was round the side of the building where he’d gone to water his small herb garden. As the old man leaned forward in his chair, watering can in hand, his dog scampered playfully under his wheels. So far, it had been a good day for the two of them.

Just beyond the shinless lying cripple, white sheets, bedding and other laundry billowed from a dozen lines—it was perfect drying weather. And over past the grass field with the laundry stood a tall barn.

“Kemper!”

That voice—

The old man stopped what he was doing at once, the contented smile dying completely on his tight-lipped face.

His dog started to bark. Someone was out there but Old Monty already knew who it was—he remembered her voice.

Erin walked out from round the corner of the brick building. She seemed to be alone. Well, she couldn’t have found her fat-mouthed boyfriend, could she?

“Hi,” smiled Erin nervously. “It’s me again.”

The dog ran forward and yapped at her heels. Truth be told, she wanted to kick the shit out of the hairy little bastard.

Old Monty put the watering can down on the ground and wheeled over to find out what in God’s name she wanted.

* * *

Andy watched from the cover of the long grass. The idea was that while Erin distracted the old fart, he’d nip into the house and look for Kemper.

It was Erin’s idea. Once they’d all finally sat down and talked everything through, there seemed to be no other solution. The last time she had seen Kemper was out on the porch. He never showed at the mill, he wasn’t at the clearing with the wrecked autos, so where else could he be?

Another thing: Erin said there was something suspicious about the old guy. Monty Hewitt didn’t seem to care what had happened to Kemper. And Erin still didn’t know what had made that loud noise she’d heard when she’d been stuck with the old man in the bathroom. For all she knew, that bang could have been Kemper. Maybe he was sneaking round the house. Or maybe he’d had an accident.

Either way, the only way they could be certain that Kemper wasn’t inside the house was if they went and checked for themselves. There was no point asking the guy in the wheelchair because if what Erin had said was true, he seemed downright hostile.

And so they’d come up with this plan. Morgan and Pepper had stayed with the van to make sure nothing happened to it—and because they were both too scared to be of much use—while Erin and Andy investigated. Besides, both Morgan and Pepper had made it perfectly clear they didn’t give a damn about Kemper right now.

* * *

When Andy was sure that Erin had the old man’s full attention, he gripped hold of the tire iron and then ran quickly across to the entrance of the house. The screen doors and the wooden doors beyond were both unlocked. Andy slipped through into the long central hallway. The polished floorboards creaked beneath his tread.

“Kemper!” he hissed.

How to make yourself heard without making any noise? Tough one.

He tried the living room but the place was empty. The furniture was still shrouded beneath plastic dust protectors.

So he went back out into the hallway and started to try some of the other doors, the creaking floorboards working on his position like some kind of fucking redneck radar.

As he passed by an open area underneath the stairs, he spotted a small ornament hanging on the wall. It was a rodent skull with bells—all screwy like the stuff up at the mill. Other than that, there was nothing else to see. The floor beneath the stairs, like all the boards on the ground floor, was immaculately polished.

Trying a few more rooms, he continued down the hallway until, right near the end of the corridor, he came to the kitchen.

It was bizarre.

There was no sign of Kemper but Andy felt strangely compelled to go inside and take a closer look.

It wasn’t the work surfaces, the pots, pans, cooker or the old-fashioned turn-handle meat grinder standing on the table that had caught his eye—none of these things were particularly odd or unusual. What was damned odd was the way someone had fastened coil-spring bedsteads to the underside of the entire kitchen ceiling.

Everywhere Andy looked the white painted plaster was obscured by bedsprings. And what really freaked Andy out was the sight of great hunks of meat hanging down from the springs, the flesh hooked on the ends of the twisted iron coils.

He could see beef jerky, cured beef and other slabs of meat he couldn’t quite make sense of. There was no elegance to any of the cuts; they all looked jagged as if someone had just ripped them from the animal carcass.

Andy went in and touched one of them.

It was a long, narrow piece of meat that could have come from an animal’s leg, or perhaps its flank—the boy couldn’t be sure. But one thing he was sure of, even though he was no butcher, was that meat was usually cross-sectioned into steaks, not cut lengthways like this—though perhaps “cut” was too kind a word to describe how the meat had actually been removed. Surprisingly, because it glistened in the light through the kitchen window, the meat felt dry.

Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Andy could hear the faint sound of dripping water. It was the washbasin.

A pair of nylon stockings were drip-drying over the enamel basin. Andy went to take a closer look and was disturbed to see that the color of the water coming out of the stockings was pink, even though the nylons themselves were pale brown. It was probably just dye. Everyone knows that if you mix red and green paint, you get brown, right?

That’s what the tense young man kept telling himself as he turned away from the washbasin to examine the refrigerator standing in the far corner of the room.

The refrigerator buzzed—the sound of an electric pump forcing coolant into motion. The whole thing stood taller and wider than a man, like an art deco sarcophagus. Andy knew he shouldn’t open it; did he seriously expect to find a blue-faced Kemper inside? But he couldn’t resist. The curiosity was just too much. Hell, if the people who lived here thought hanging meat from the kitchen ceiling on bedsprings was a good idea, God only knows what they’d keep in their fridge.

Holding firmly onto the crossed-metal tire iron, Andy tensed his powerful body and slowly opened the refrigerator door.

Nothing.

Other than a couple bottles of beer, a few bits of food and a couple of jugs of red liquid—soda, cranberry or something—the fridge was empty.

Andy was disappointed. He didn’t know what he expected to find in there, but he didn’t think it would be so damned normal. He quietly shut the fridge door again.

There was an overstuffed suitcase lying on top of the refrigerator with clothes sticking out of the sides. Andy wasn’t sure how he hadn’t seen it before; but now he knew it was there, he was going to fetch it down and take a look inside. Again, just like the refrigerator, the boy wasn’t sure what he hoped to find in the suitcase, but he had to look. There might be a clue, something about Kemper, or maybe even something about the girl who blew her brains out.

Gritting his teeth, Andy pressed himself against the front of the refrigerator and stretched out a hand to reach up for the suitcase.

There!

He could feel the handle on the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t quite tall enough—if he could just . . .

It was coming!

Suddenly he had the handle in his grasp and the suitcase came free—unexpectedly jerking loose and pitching forward on top of Andy.

Immediately, the case flew open, throwing clothes everywhere. But the clothes had only been in there to provide protective padding for the jars of preserved cherries that were packed tightly inside the case. One by one the jars fell, glancing off Andy’s head, hitting his waving arms, falling clean past him, until one by one they hit the ground and shattered.

“Shit!”

The sound of ten glass jars breaking on a cold stone floor was unmistakable—and damn loud.

“Andy?”

Erin had heard the crash of broken glass immediately round by the herb garden at the side of the house. She didn’t know exactly where the crashing sound had come from, but she knew it was inside and she knew it had to be Andy.

And for one terrifying moment, it felt like the Kemper thing all over again. Last time, she’d been stuck with the old man in his bathroom. Then she’d heard that bang, like the pounding of a giant hammer and never saw Kemper again. And here she was, reliving the moment, stuck out here with Old Monty, only to hear another great crash. This time, it was the breaking of glass.

What if the end result was the same? What if she never saw Andy again?

His name had barely escaped her lips when Erin turned and ran back towards the house.

Old Monty called after her, “Hey! You can’t just go in my house!”

Erin didn’t know if the old man had also heard the noise and frankly she didn’t give a damn.

Once inside—the layout of the place was still engraved in her memory—Erin ran down the long hallway, trying all the rooms and calling Andy’s name until finally coming to the kitchen right down near the end of the corridor.

Oh God, he was laying in a pool of bloo . . . Cherries? At first glance, it had been easy for Erin to mistake the bright red fruit for something else—something she didn’t want to think about.

“What happened?” she asked. “You okay?”

Andy looked damned embarrassed. “Yeah.”

He was standing in a mess of fruit and broken glass—not forgetting the scattered clothes and the empty suitcase. But luckily, other than sweat, Andy’s clothes seemed pretty dry. The cherry syrup, juice, preservative or whatever it was, had missed him and spilled out all over the floor.

“You found him?” she asked.

Andy shook his head.

Suddenly, Erin saw the bedsprings in the ceiling and the torn strips of meat. That was enough for her. She walked out of the room and back into the hallway.

Andy followed but found her hesitating in the middle of the corridor. Almost immediately behind them was the storage area and the closed metal door, the one Erin said had a spyglass in. Andy saw the battered sliding shutter for the first time, and it was pretty fucking scary. Maybe they should just go down the hall and get out while they could—after all, their plan hadn’t exactly gone very well, had it?

Old Monty slammed his cane down on the hallway floor.

“What the hell are you doin’ in my house?” he bellowed.

His wheelchair was slam in the center of the hallway, and he was rolling slowly towards them. There was no way they could get past him without a struggle. He was stopping them from leaving.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, Andy no longer wanted to leave. He’d had enough of all this bullshit. He was young, strong and held a tire-iron in his clenched fingers. What did this old guy have? No legs from the knee down and a fucking wheelchair. No, it was time to make a stand, time to find out what the hell was going on, once and for all.

Andy stepped forward, demanding to know, “Where is he?”

Old Monty stared right back at him, his cold eyes reducing the boy’s big man routine to nothing but piss and wind. “You ain’t runnin’ things, boy. ’Cept your mouth.”

The wheelchair came closer.

Old Monty was slowly heading straight at Andy, his very motion challenging the boy, daring him, mocking him.

Andy raised the tire-iron. “Don’t push me, pops.”

But it was Andy who was breathing fast, not Old Monty. It was Andy who was braced with fear and tensing every damn muscle, not Old Monty.

The old man stopped his wheelchair and laughed.

“You little turd,” he mocked, his voice broken in a deep Texan drawl of ridicule. “You’re so dead, you don’t even know it.”

Erin stood shoulder to shoulder with the boy. That was the first real threat she’d heard the old man say. Was it because they were trespassing in his house, or was it because—

“Back off!” shouted Andy, and he brandished the tire-iron threateningly.

But the old guy wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t coming closer anymore, but neither was he pulling back. He just sat there, a few yards in front of the frightened kids. And if the boy wanted to wave that tire-iron like that . . .

Old Monty lifted his cane and used it to beckon the punk towards him.

“C’mon, boy,” he boomed. “Bring it.”

Then he banged the cane down on the polished hallway floor.

Instinctively, Andy and Erin backed up, coming within a foot of the sliding metal door behind them.

“Bring what?” shouted Andy. This was crazy. It was escalating out of control. He didn’t want to hit the old man but . . .

Old Monty brought his cane down again, and again, beating a slow thunderous rhythm on the creaking floorboards.

“This guy is crazy!” said Andy in a nervous aside to Erin.

But she wasn’t so sure. Even though Old Monty was practically a silhouette against the light from the screen doors, she could clearly see the rabid violent glee in the old man’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if the cripple was crazy or just plain evil.

He wouldn’t stop hitting the floor with his cane—BANG—and laughing—BANG—and threatening—BANG—over and over—BANG—that damned cane!

Andy was gonna have to take him out. He’d either have to push the wheelchair over or hit the old man round the head with the tire-iron. He didn’t want to—his physique was for girls, not fighting—but there really was no alternative.

Erin was fast reaching the same conclusion. She was out of ideas. The old man was insane. He just kept laughing and banging the floor with the cane. Just kept banging, knocking and—

KNOCKING!

The metal door was thrown open behind them, hitting the wall with a resounding clang, and suddenly their ears were bleeding from the screaming five horsepower mayhem of a gasoline fuelled engine.

Erin and Andy both jumped on the spot, leaping with fear and turned round to see—

Some kind of ungodly death-freak standing in the open doorway. He was huge—his great bulk almost filling the metal frame. He was ugly, like shit straight from the Devil’s ass. He was wearing a decaying mask sewn-up from some poor bastard’s face. And he was gripping a fucking chainsaw.

Erin screamed out, “Oh my God!” her voice overlapping with Andy’s cry of “Holy shit!”

They couldn’t believe what they were seeing, but Erin immediately knew that this was the answer to all their confusion. Just one second of seeing this skin-wearing psychopath and almost everything suddenly made bitter, terrifying sense.

Andy lifted the tire-iron, ready to hit the motherfucker. Then he backed up with Erin right beside him.

The sharp metal teeth went round and round the cutting bar, churning up the air in front of them, roaring, the air thick with the smell of exhaust fumes.

The sheer sight of Leatherface almost paralyzed Erin with fear. Her instinct was to freeze, to put her back to the wall and do nothing. It was only Andy who kept her going.

Andy got ready to run. Maybe that sick bastard was too fat to go after them. One thing was for sure: Andy would never beat him in a fight.

They needed help.

Quickly, the boy turned to see Old Monty laughing his fucking head off behind them. Just ten paces beyond the old bastard was the door. Freedom.

Andy grabbed hold of Erin’s hand and ran.

At first, the double amputee seemed to be moving out of their way. He pulled his wheelchair back and to the side as if to leave the path clear. But he was just getting into position.

Andy started to move. One pace, two and he hit the deck!

The boy went crashing down onto the slippery floor of the hallway, the tire-iron spinning out of his hands along the polished boards.

Andy looked back—the cane . . .

The old bastard had tripped him!

Erin!

Closer, closer, closer, the engine never let up, grinding, whining, merciless.

When Andy fell, he’d had to let go of Erin’s hand, leaving her to look on in horror as Old Monty rolled over and put one of the wheels of his chair directly onto the tire-iron. And now the old man was square in her way.

She didn’t want to look back but she could hear the chainsaw right behind her.

She screamed.

Andy tried to get up. He reached for the tire-iron but it was firmly trapped under the wheelchair.

Old Monty took a swipe at the boy’s head with his cane, but the stick went wide.

Erin could see him but couldn’t believe it: the shambling heap of flesh with a chainsaw, squealing in its knotted, stitched apron made from the skin of his victims. The saw buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

She ran forward. Any second now and they’d both be dead.

The fighting—the screaming—grappling—shouting—the old man’s laughter—the bleating maniac—heavy footsteps creaking the floorboards—and everywhere the diving airplane scream of the chainsaw!

Andy was gonna be killed. He was still wrestling with the tire-iron. He wasn’t looking. He didn’t know that the chainsaw blade was heading straight for the flimsy gray cotton undershirt on his back.

Erin couldn’t let it happen. The freak had ignored her because she was doing nothing. He just shuffled right past her so that he could take out the biggest threat first: Andy.

Suddenly she

—ice cold—
was struck

—white flash—
with a realization and

—shock—
visualized Kemper . . .

Kemper and this bastard with the chainsaw.

Snarling, she dived forward and clawed at Old Monty’s groin. She quickly found what she was looking for. She grabbed the old bastard’s catheter tube and ripped the fucker right out.

Old Monty howled and bent forward in his seat.

The chair rocked back and suddenly the tire-iron was free.

Leatherface was upon them.

“ANDY!”

He grabbed the iron and rolled onto his back just as the chainsaw came crashing down.

The engine grunted and sparks flew as the boy desperately held the churning blades at bay mere inches from his face. The cutting bar and the tire-iron bobbed up and down with each renewed assault and each panic-stricken defense. But Andy couldn’t hold out for much longer.

“Erin, RUN!” he shouted.

She didn’t want to leave him, but what other chance would she get? And someone needed to go back to the others and tell them. Then they could fetch the sheriff. If neither Erin nor Andy made it, then it would just be the Kemper situation all over again. Morgan and Pepper would either get in the van and take off, or they’d come up to the Hewitt place to die. Erin couldn’t allow any of that to happen.

With sudden determination, Erin pushed the whining amputee—his stumpy pants thick with catheter piss—aside and sped down the hallway to the grayish dusk of the screen doors.

And finally she was out.

Andy had to time it just right.

The tire-iron was almost done, and any second now he knew the howling lunatic freak would get into position to finish him. He’d stand over Andy, one foot each side of the boy, then gut him like a pig with the chainsaw. If that bastard had spread his legs over Andy, it would be game over.

But Andy had seen the way he moved. He didn’t just come at you with the chainsaw, he danced like a frigging spastic, as if his sweating fat limbs were out of control. He was clumsy, erratic, deranged, so if Andy—

NOW!

Andy lashed out and kicked the bastard hard in the ankle, and suddenly the chainsaw went spinning, tearing a deep gouge through the corridor wall.

Round and round and round the engine turned, flinging shards of wood and paper into the air.

Andy slid back along the polished floor and out from under the maskfreak who had lost his balance, but who was now manhandling the chainsaw back under his insane febrile control. It was now or never.

The boy got up and ran for his life.

Erin was long gone by the time Andy hurled the screen door shut behind him.

The chainsaw ripped through the screens, tearing the front door into shreds as the lumbering maniac chewed the life out of the damn doorway.

Andy sprinted as hard and as fast as he could. He was fit. He should have no problem getting away.

But the chainsaw was getting closer—he could hear it.

The terrified youth looked back over his shoulder and saw the great heap of flesh-filth charging up behind him, shambling through the exhaust, and squealing like an epileptic death-bitch in the gasoline fumes.

Just ahead of Andy was a white picket fence. It was near to where Erin had earlier tried to divert Old Monty’s attention. He could see all the laundry lines, their crisp white sheets blowing in the wind.

Andy vaulted the fence in a single bound.

The chainsaw exploded right through the pickets.

They ran and, in a moment, were lost inside the maze of laundry lines.

Though firmly built, Andy was still lean and agile. There was no way his pursuer could hope to keep up with him as he ducked and dodged a path through the swaying linen and drying garments.

Andy swerved left, he cut right, he ducked under a line, winding a confusing path through the chaotically arrayed barriers of the laundry.

The toothed-blade drove through the washing like a tornado—ripping and tearing at the cloth like it was saturated flesh.

Andy looked back, to make sure—

“Ugh!”

He had run into a clothesline, the taut fabric rope chopping him in the throat and causing him to fall flat on his back. The line of washing went down with him.

Andy was momentarily dazed, cursing his own stupidity, but always, always, there was the sound of the chainsaw to remind him of his impending slaughter.

Andy tried to get to his feet, but he was all caught up.

The washing line—Jesus!

Somehow he’d got tangled in the fallen laundry and—no, it was just too pathetic.

Down low on the ground, Andy could see underneath the billowing laundry. He could see the grass, the trunks of the trees and two heavy boots and a pair of bloodstained, shit-soiled pants coming straight for him.

Andy struggled—

The chainsaw turned full throttle and roared!

Free!

The disentangled boy got up, threw the bastard washing line to the ground, and—

The engine came screaming, screaming, screaming . . .

Suddenly the plain white sheets were sprayed with blood, thick red jets showering the washing with droplets.

The chainsaw had hacked his left leg off, taking the limb below the knee through sheer brutal horsepower.

Andy cried out and stumbled. He tried to get away, whimpering and throwing his weight, anything to move away from—

Reverse kickback from the chainsaw sent the severed leg spinning into Andy’s face.

TEN

Erin fell to the ground and started to cry.

There was no mistaking that horrifying sound—the sudden change in cadence, the slight dip in revs, the low moan of an engine momentarily having to work under an additional load. Somewhere back up near the farmhouse, the chainsaw had found flesh. They’d got Andy.

“Noooo!” she wept.

The bastards. They’d probably got Kemper as well.

But she had to keep going.

Erin picked herself up and continued along the narrow horse trail. She had to keep going. She’d used this path three times today and each time she used it, things had only got worse. And now the sun was fading—it was starting to get dark.

The night was coming.

Andy crawled along the grass, his jaws clenched. One hand, two hand. He heaved. He pulled. He crawled. He was determined to get away.

Saliva fell from his lips as he panted and grunted with exertion. His powerful build was now standing him in good stead, as he used the strong muscles in his arms and shoulders to—

He was lifted off the ground and slung over one broad stinking shoulder like a side of beef.

That’s how easy it had been for this bastard to take him. And now Andy could see he was being carried back towards the farmhouse, the tall black windows bouncing up and down with each lumbering step.

Andy shouted for help, but there was no one to hear him.

Blood squirted from his severed leg, pumping with his throbbing heartbeat, running down onto the cured human flesh of the killer’s apron. Andy could feel his arms rub against the killer’s face—against the dead, putrid skin of the homemade mask.

It dawned on Andy, as he kicked and fought in vain, that he was punching and biting the skin ripped from another innocent body.

* * *

With nothing to do but sit and wait, Pepper and Morgan had finally overcome their revulsion and begun to do their best to clean the inside of the van. They’d been wiping up the mess with a couple of Kemper’s shop rags, but also had to use some of their spare traveling clothes.

They’d soaked the makeshift wipes in water, some of which they had on board the van; the rest Pepper had found—not too stagnant—in an open metal drum nearby. But it was hard. Barely a second went by when either one of them didn’t feel nauseous.

They totally had to forget what it was they were mopping up—in the same way that most people forget about the bolt-gun slamming between the open eyes of a cow before sitting down to a plate of beef. The fact that they were now working in hastening darkness didn’t make things any easier.

Suddenly the van rocked.

What?

They looked up from the stained back seat and saw Erin.

She’d come back, not said a word. Just jumped straight into the driver’s seat.

She looked terrified.

Erin was fumbling with the car keys. She’d pulled them out of the pocket, reached forward, but her hands were sh . . . shaking!

“What the fuck?” Morgan called, confused.

Erin was shivering all over, she couldn’t keep still.

“You okay?” asked Pepper.

Both she and Morgan had stopped what they were doing and were now stooping forward towards the front.

“Where’s the gun?” shouted Erin, referring to the snub-nosed revolver—the one the girl had put in her mouth and then used to drill a hole through the back of her head.

“The sheriff took it,” answered Pepper.

“SHIT!” Erin slammed the steering wheel with both hands. She then attempted to slide the key in the ignition.

“Erin,” tried Morgan again. “What is going on?”

Now she turned to look at them and they could see the state she was in. Her eyes were red with tears, she had snot running down from her nose and her mouth was dripping with saliva—she looked awful. Clearly, something was very, very wrong and the time for words was over.

Pepper got out and went round to sit in the front passenger seat. Morgan closed all the doors then took his place on the back seat and held on tight. Whatever it was that had happened, whatever Erin had seen and wherever Andy and Kemper were—Morgan really didn’t want to know.

Erin still couldn’t get the key in the damn ignition—she was still shaking too much.

Pepper reached over and, with a soft hand, helped Erin guide they keys into place. Finally, some action.

Erin turned the key, put the van in gear, and raised the clutch—too fast.

The van stalled.

“FUCK!” shouted Erin.

She tried to restart the engine but it was flooded. Flooded! How could it be flooded when she’d only tried to turn it once? Kemper! He was supposed to be good with cars, so how come his own goddamn wheels go ass-end-up the first time anyone turns the goddamned fucking key? KEMPER!

Morgan took off his glasses and was about to wipe them on his T-shirt when he thought he saw something slip by outside. Pepper had seen it too. But Erin only caught sight of the shadow when it passed right by her open window.

She couldn’t believe she’d come this far only to be let down by the stupid dumb clutch.

The shadow drew nearer to her window and Erin screamed.

Andy was being carried through that metal door, the same door this bastard came out of. He was lying straddled across the heaving shoulder of his attacker and could feel the dense ripples of fat undulate with each step the maniac took.

Andy tried to resist, God how he tried, even though he knew it was no use—not when someone had complete physical power over him like this. And even if he broke free, how far would he get on one useless pathetic leg? But that was his brain talking, and right now Andy was only listening to the screaming demands of sheer bloody survival.

He was being taken down a narrow staircase.

Oh God, no . . .

It was dark down there.

He reached out and clawed at the paneled walls either side of him, but his scratch marks merely added to the hundreds that were already there. He cried out in pain as one of his fingernails tore away and embedded itself in the wall. He could see it as he descended—red and clear with blood and soft tissue. The pain was agonizing, and now he could see that the way ahead of him was steeped in shadow, lit only by a blazing furnace.

And he screamed.

And screamed.

And screamed.

But nothing the boy could do did anything to slow his descent into the basement and inception of the final act of madness.

Erin’s scream had barely subsided when the shadowy figure of Sheriff Hoyt came up to the driver’s window.

“Young lady, what seems to be the problem?”

His voice was reassuring, firm and comforting, and almost immediately Erin felt like an idiot for screaming. But then none of them had seen what she had just seen up at the Hewitt farmhouse; the crazy old man and that . . . that thing!

“Thank God,” she gasped.

Now she could tell the sheriff. She could tell him about Andy, Kemper and that perverted shape of a man with the chainsaw. The sheriff could help her. He could go up there with his gun and put them under arrest, maybe even shoot the bastards. And who knows, they might still be in time to save the guys.

Only Sheriff Hoyt didn’t seem too concerned with Erin’s obvious needs right now. Her eager face, desperate for his help and his strength, was lost on him. Instead, he just looked right past the girl and stared at the open ashtray where he saw . . .

The police officer reached forward and picked a spent roach up out from the burnt ash. He smelt it. And suddenly his expression changed. He stood upright and took a cold hard look at the kids.

“Somebody care to explain this?” he asked, holding the joint towards them.

“Uh,” stuttered Morgan. “Sir, that—”

“You kids using drugs?” interrupted the sheriff tersely, his manner immediately formal.

“Not me, sir,” answered Morgan nervously.

The young man was surprised to see the sheriff back at all, especially the way he’d seemed to creep up on them like that—they didn’t even hear his car. But now that he was back, Morgan was glad to see him. Maybe the sheriff could help Erin with whatever it was she’d seen up at the farmhouse—something Morgan and Pepper still knew nothing about.

But the sheriff didn’t seem to want to listen to Erin now that he’d found the joint.

Hoyt stepped back and took a look at the van, the kids and the whole damn sorry scene.

“Not me, sir,” the sheriff repeated quietly, as if Morgan had been feeding him a line. He then closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

Morgan and Pepper quickly exchanged a look as if to say, ‘What’s that all about?’

Erin just wanted the cop to get to the point so that she could send him up to the farmstead, get the van started, and get the hell out of town.

But the sheriff kept his eyes shut and sniffed deeply before finally declaring: “I smell bullshit.”

Then he opened his eyes and looked Morgan dead in the face.

Andy screamed and cried out. He tried to struggle, he tried.

He felt the quivering fleshy hands lift him by his shoulders, pinning his arms to his side, hoisting him up in the air like he was nothing but a child’s toy.

All around Andy was the detritus of nightmares, a dark room strewn with limbs and slaughterhouse debasement. This cellar was the room where evil things were done. His eyes came to rest on the meat hook.

No!

The meat hook was high above the ground and looming closer. Andy was being carried towards it. The bastard wouldn’t let him go. Andy was completely in his power, and completely helpless.

The meat hook was almost in Andy’s face when he was suddenly turned around and lifted high.

The meat hook was behind him.

The meat hook was—

Andy was lowered and suddenly

—THE PAIN—

—ANDY SCREAMED—
the hands weren’t holding him any more. But he was still high up off the floor—his foot suddenly dangling as he forced himself to accept the fact that he’d been hung up on the meat hook.

With each thrash and twitch of his body, the hook bit deeper into his back, ripping organs, tearing meat and breaking sinew.

His cries were heartbreaking and primal, but the piercing eyes that stared up at him through the human skin mask were feverish with excitement.

Night had fallen.

All three of them were now out of the van and lying face down in the dirt in front of the old Crawford Mill. Morgan was terrified, but the tears they could hear in the darkness came from Pepper.

Sheriff Hoyt stood over them, pacing back and forth in his black leather boots. He was checking their driver’s licenses, ID, wallets, anything they had. The atmosphere was so thick with understated menace, you could almost touch it.

Erin couldn’t understand what all this was about. There was a maniac with a chainsaw up at the Hewitt place, and here the sheriff was, wasting time over a stupid joint!

It didn’t make sense. It was totally out of proportion. She’d been trying to make him listen, but he wouldn’t. He’d just kept barking orders at them: step out of the vehicle, assume the position, get on the ground. But every second that passed made it more likely they’d be too late to save Kemper and Andy.

Before Erin knew it, she was crying. She was lying there, her cheek against the soil, crying.

“Y . . . you . . . you’ve got to help him!” she wailed, trying to make the bastard listen. “He’s killing him!”

Hoyt took his eyes from Morgan’s driving license.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. Then he went and stood over Erin, leant down and bellowed, “Who’s killing who?”

She couldn’t believe it. She had encountered obstacles every step of the way. There were the murderers up at the house and now her friends were lying on the ground like criminals. The sheriff—he should help people. Erin couldn’t get the words out.

Hoyt never gave her a chance and, now that she had room to speak, there was too much she wanted to say. Oh God, it was overloading her mind. She kept coming back to the image of the guy wearing human skin over his face.

Erin pointed feebly towards the overgrown trail that led to the Hewitts. Now that it was night, it was impossible to see a thing through the trees.

Her voice was broken. She was half pleading and half screaming. “He’s right over there! You’ve got to believe me.”

As she spoke, she began to lift herself up off the ground. She needed to talk to the sheriff, to make him see reason.

Hoyt placed the sole of his boot firmly in the square of her back, and shoved the girl back down. “You keep your pretty little ass in the dirt until I say otherwise.”

“Oh my God,” said Pepper. She’d suddenly remembered what the girl in the van had said: “You’re all gonna die!”

“Officer, please—” said Morgan, sincere in his appeal to the policeman’s authority. If only Hoyt would just listen, just for one second.

Erin, however, was going way beyond the point of reason. The situation was wrong. It was impossible.

“I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS!” she screamed.

But Hoyt simply looked down on her the way he’d regard any potential suspect.

“That makes two of us,” he agreed sarcastically. She could scream as much as she wanted, but she wasn’t going anywhere—none of them were till he made some progress.

“You want to know what I think?” he said, standing so close that his boots were almost in Erin’s face. “I think your boyfriend shot that poor girl and then ran off.”

“He did not!” Erin snapped back, then under her breath: “You ignorant prick.”

“Why won’t you listen to her?” Pepper implored.

Morgan started to move. They were all getting restless.

Enough!

The sheriff pulled a gun out of his holster and fired a bullet straight down into the dirt.

Pepper and Erin screamed.

“Are you ladies gonna calm yourselves down?” barked the sheriff. “Or do I have to do it for you?”

All three of them were now crying, even Morgan. They were terrified. Their breathing was hard, fast and loud. And they were so scared that none of them noticed that the revolver Hoyt had taken from his holster was the point 357 snub-nose used by the dead girl.

Andy’s eyelids were becoming heavier and heavier.

He tried to keep watch, to see what his attacker was doing, but it was hard. The pain from the meat hook was unbearable, but not for a moment did the boy get to enjoy the blessed release of a blackout. Instead, all he could do was watch in mounting horror as his attacker shuffled about the hellish basement—moving, panting, sweating, picking up his butchery tools then putting them down again.

The brute’s movements were erratic, random, a chaotic aberrant psychopath fidgeting among a cesspool of cleavers, knives, sharpeners, meat presses, bone dusters, and jars of bleach and preservatives. This was the place where limbs were severed and where lives came to an end by the breaking of moist pink gristle.

Andy saw him reach a massive bloody hand into a barrel of rock salt. And then he came forward and was upon the boy—his corpulent body heaving with mania as he lifted the rock salt and rammed it deep into Andy’s open wounds.

Clearly at ease with the kids’ discomfort, the sheriff ambled over to Kemper’s van. Neat job. Customized exhaust, raised rear and chrome hubs—pity about the hole in the window.

He stopped by the open side door and waited. He had everything under control just fine. When they quit whining, he could continue with his investigation. Folk had to learn that they couldn’t just come driving through his town breaking any damned law they chose. Maybe people did that sort of thing up in New York or over in LA, but not here—not in Fuller, Travis County.

Tears subsiding, Morgan looked up and saw that the sheriff had been waiting for his attention. Hoyt blamed him for the joint; he hadn’t said so, but Morgan could tell. Thank God they’d dumped the piñata.

“C’mere, boy,” said the sheriff calmly.

“Why?”

“I want to know exactly what happened in this van.”

Morgan was confused. “We already told you what happened.”

It was good to see the sheriff behave rationally again, but they’d covered all this when he’d come before and picked up the body.

“You told me,” replied the sheriff. “Now you’re gonna show me.”

The way Hoyt said that—Morgan didn’t like it one little bit. He turned his head toward the girls lying on the ground next to him and he could see it in their eyes as well. None of them trusted the sheriff one damn bit. But what could the boy do?

Slowly, almost grudgingly, Morgan got up. He had dirt all down the front of his clothes, where it mingled with his sweat. Erin and Pepper almost begged him with their eyes not to go with the sheriff. But they didn’t dare say a word—not since the sheriff had fired off that gunshot.

Hoyt stood waiting by the open side door, waiting for the city boy to take his sweet little time. What these kids didn’t seem to quite understand was that Sheriff Hoyt was the law round these parts. He did things his way. There were no other officers for miles. So if he said, “Jump,” then they better learn to goddamn jump.

Still holding the revolver, Hoyt stood aside to let the boy climb aboard the van. Not a word passed between them as Morgan entered through the side door.

The boy tried to read Hoyt’s face. What were the sheriff’s thoughts? Was he enjoying this? Was he one of those sadistic lone-gun Deep South cops you had heard about? Or was he really just trying to do his job? Was this just his backwoods way of doing things, like some testosterone-fuelled gunslinger?

Morgan couldn’t tell. But, whatever Hoyt was thinking, the boy was determined to do nothing to piss him off. He would do anything and everything Sheriff Hoyt told him to. And maybe, just maybe, they’d all see their way out of the woods.

Morgan sat on the corner of the back seat as far as possible from the blood. There was a lot of mess that he and Pepper hadn’t got round to cleaning before Erin showed.

Through the open door, he could see the two young women lying face down on the ground. It was crazy.

There wasn’t much light in the van. The moon was good, but other than that they had to rely on the small interior door lamp.

“Is that where she was sitting?” asked the sheriff, standing half in and half out of the side door.

“Yeah,” replied Morgan. He couldn’t be sure but, now that they were closer, he thought he could smell liquor on the sheriff’s breath: bourbon.

“Then how did her brains wind up on the window?”

Morgan turned round to look at the bloody hole in the glass. It was clear that the trajectory didn’t add up from where he was sitting now.

“She might have been more to the middle,” he offered.

“Well?” prompted the sheriff. “Then sit more to the middle.”

Morgan looked at the blood on the seat. Bone chips and morsels of brain were still clearly visible. “But . . .”

“C’mon. It’s just blood.”

Morgan closed his eyes for a moment then reluctantly slid right over onto where the girl had been sitting when she shot herself. The round red crack in the rear window was dead center behind his head. It was freaking him out.

“Okay,” nodded the sheriff. “Then what?”

“Th . . . then . . .” muttered the boy, shaken by the recall. “She sh . . . sh . . . shot herself.”

Hoyt leaned back, withdrawing his face into shadow. “How?”

Morgan couldn’t see him. “What do you mean?”

From out of the darkness, the sheriff offered the suicide gun to Morgan, holding it out, pointing the barrel straight at the boy.

Morgan tried desperately to see the sheriff’s face, but it was impossible.

“Show me,” said the sheriff.

“What?” asked Morgan, incredulous.

It was clear what the sheriff wanted him to do, but the boy couldn’t believe it. He left the gun right where it was, in Sheriff Hoyt’s hand.

“It helps me clarify things if I have a distinct visual image,” Hoyt explained matter-of-factly.

No response.

“Take the gun!”

Morgan looked at the gun in bewilderment. His emotions had been on a ballsack of a coaster ride all day. He didn’t need this.

Hoyt tried to make the decision easy for him. “Either you’re gonna cooperate or I’m gonna arrest you for obstruction.”

The gun was still pointed at Morgan, the barrel aiming straight for him. If the sheriff wanted, he could shoot the boy here and now.

Morgan tried to see the sheriff’s face, to get a measure of him, but Hoyt made sure he stayed well back in the darkness. Morgan was terrified. He’d seen enough cop shows to know that if he took the gun, his prints would be all over it. What if the sheriff was trying to frame him? Why couldn’t the idiot simply accept it had been a suicide?

The sheriff pushed the gun forward, almost all the way into Morgan’s hand.

Morgan looked at it—the gun that had sent their day spiraling down into madness. He had no choice.

Slowly, with a trembling hand, Morgan reached out—

His jittering fingers touched the barrel.

“That’s it,” said Hoyt encouragingly. “Take the gun.”

Morgan pulled on the end of the revolver.

It wouldn’t move.

The sheriff wouldn’t let go!

Hoyt leaned forward into the light, his broad face creasing with sadistic relish. And when Morgan saw the sheriff place a callused finger on the trigger of the revolver, the boy knew he was dead.

The game was over.

Someone turned a TV on. It was loud—loud enough to stir Andy’s consciousness into feeling the searing pain of the rock salt, and the deep rending agony of the meat hook.

And the horror played on.

Mask-skin flailing, the blood-shitting freak scurried about the clutter of his domain—neatly tearing a sheet of brown paper from a dispenser, testing a pair of meat shears, oiling and taking careful, methodical care of the them.

He snipped off a length of brown twine, bustling through the corroded symbols of his spiritual pathology, working, laboring and pounding for some ultimate goal. Some senseless act of visceral human reduction.

Morgan sighed, waiting for the inevitable, when the sheriff relaxed his grip and placed the gun fully inside the boy’s hand.

The bastard!

“Show me,” said the sheriff, suddenly a picture of formality carved in razor edge uncertainty.

“You want me to . . .”

Morgan left the question unfinished. He knew what the sheriff wanted him to do, but he was determined not to do it. He couldn’t.

But the sheriff nodded.

He wanted the boy to put the gun inside his mouth. Just like the girl did. He wanted Morgan to place his own lips around the same cold metal she had kissed just before she died.

Morgan’s hand started to tremble even more. He couldn’t do it. He saw her in his mind’s eye. It was this gun. She used this same damned gun!

He started to cry.

“Come on, you can do it,” said the sheriff. “Show me.”

Only the sound of his voice wasn’t supportive or reassuring. If anything, the police officer sounded greedy. And now there was that hungry look in his eyes again, the same look he’d had when he’d teased the boy by keeping hold of the gun.

Just what did this bastard want?

Shaking, terrified, and humiliated, Morgan swallowed hard and began to raise the gun. He tried to lift it right up, to get it all over with, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t bring himself to place the suicide weapon anywhere near his mouth. And he kept his fingers well away from the trigger.

Hoyt began to grow impatient. “Quit wasting my goddamn time!”

“Please . . . No, I—”

“Morgan?” called Erin from outside. “Are you all right?”

The guys had been in the van a long time and they were talking low—the girls had no idea what was going on.

Shivering with fear, Morgan forced himself to bring the barrel under his jaw. His teeth had begun to chatter and his hand was shaking wildly. Once, twice, the end of the gun flicked up and hit him on the chin. How far did the sheriff want him to go?

Oh my God—

Morgan lifted his gaze from the deadly weapon and looked into the sheriff’s eyes. Hoyt was watching him the way the spider watches a fly, all the while preserving the thin veneer that separated investigation from intimidation, inquiry from insanity.

“You sure she did it like that?” he asked slyly.

“Y . . . yes,” stuttered the boy, his jaw still rattling freely.

Hoyt paused, watched Morgan tremble, then, “How’d she shoot herself without her finger on the trigger?”

“Oh God, please—”

“Put your finger on the trigger.”

“Please stop.”

“Put your finger on the trigger.”

A flood of warm tears streamed down Morgan’s face and he started to weep uncontrollably, verging on hysteria, with the gun still held close to his mouth.

Sheriff Hoyt had broken him. He’d used his authority and strength of will to completely crush the kid. And he’d been able to do it because everything about the sheriff made it clear that he was comfortable with violence. He’d lived with violence, had used violence, and wasn’t afraid of violence—and that’s what made him different from the three of them. And, in Morgan’s eyes, that’s what made Sheriff Hoyt inhuman. The threat of violence underscored everything the sheriff said and did.

So, although it was Morgan who held the gun, it was the police officer that had all the power.

The bedroom was a dark, depressing hovel laden with memories.

Nothing had changed over the years, not since childhood. The wallpaper was a peeling, faded print of cowboys at a rodeo. And there were old school pennants stuck on the walls. Except the pennants were stolen.

The boy who’d slept in this room never went to school. He wasn’t allowed. When all the other kids saw him, they’d screamed. Even the adults had screamed—they still screamed. The only people who didn’t scream were family; and when family were home, it was the boy who’d screamed, over and over.

His mind had grown out of a morass of retarded savagery where fighting, wounds and suppurating meat had held sway. They had beaten each other—all his family—screaming, fighting, cutting, feeding.

No, the school pennants weren’t his; they’d belonged to the cute, clever kids he’d murdered, disemboweled and worn. He’d taken everything the kids had, and their families. Now that he was much older, he still heard the squealing of the animals.

Like when he’d got a job at the slaughterhouse—the only thing he’d been good for. Where he’d beaten the animals over the head and killed them. He’d strangled them with his bare hands. He’d stabbed them in the eyes. He’d put a sackcloth over their heads and rammed a chainsaw straight through their mouths.

He’d defeated, slaughtered and ruled them simply because he could, just like family. Like people, where violence and death put food on the table. Where death created meaning and power.

Every day since he’d been born he’d lived in a slaughterhouse and this was his room, his room at the Hewitt farmhouse.

He had worked hard today—there had been a lot to get done—but it was almost all over. He could draw the brown drapes and sit down to work by the sputtering electric lamplight.

No one could see him as he sat alone, unmasked, the profile of his face horribly indented where his nose should have been.

Alone, the harvesting butcher stuffed one of his cankerous hands into a deep bowl of moist animal fat. He then scooped up a thick gobbet of shit-grease and smoothed it into the flesh resting in his lap. A newly cut face. Caressing, massaging, lubricating.

He sat in an armchair, the flaccid red skin lying softly in his groin, fingering the face, and the new expression that he might put on.

Slowly now, he wrapped the tender skin round his face and pulled the thick scalp of hair over his head. Then gently, savagely, excitedly, he took up needle and coarse thread and began to sew the new encasement tightly around his head.

As his stitching pulled the different sections of severed skin together in a suffocating helmet of murdered flesh, he began to pant with delirium. Soon he could barely move, his head firmly restricted in the new leather mask, yet still he pulled more tightly on the thread. It was smothering him, thrilling him, becoming him.

A few moments later and the job was complete. He broke the needle free from the final length of catgut with a grunt, then sank back in his chair, spent.

And for a moment he felt very, very tired.

“What’s going on in there?” shouted Erin as she lay facedown on the ground.

Pepper gave her a look of concern. They couldn’t hear everything that was going on between Morgan and the sheriff, but they’d heard enough to know that something wasn’t right.

Erin began to climb up to her feet, but the sheriff had seen her.

“Don’t you dare get up,” he threatened her, his face turning right round to scowl at her through the open side door.

She lay down again, leaving the sheriff to carry on where he’d left off. But when Hoyt turned back to look at Morgan again, he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun. Morgan was holding the revolver, point blank in the sheriff’s face.

“YOU SON OF A BITCH!” shouted Morgan, terrified yet furious that the sheriff had driven him so close to the brink of his own mortality—and sanity. “Get on the floor!” he shouted, and now his finger was on the trigger.

The sheriff didn’t budge, “Easy, boy.”

“Morgan?” called Erin—what the hell was going on?

“I got his gun!” shouted Morgan. “I got his fucking gun!”

The two young women got up off the ground. None of this was real. It couldn’t be happening.

“What the hell are you doing?” called Erin. She could see Morgan was shaking from head to toe with uncontrollable fear. He was a loaded gun full of dangerous adrenaline.

“I don’t know,” said the boy. “But he’s a fucking whacko!”

The sheriff calmly stared down the business end of the shooter. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t budge. He didn’t do a thing.

“You girls see this, right?” he said calmly. “You’re witnesses.”

Another dilemma, another crazy dilemma. All day long it had been confusion and choices. And now they had to choose between backing their friend or talking him into handing the gun over to the sheriff. Sure, Hoyt had acted like a total lunatic, but he was still the law.

Of course, neither Pepper nor Erin knew what the sheriff had done to Morgan and the boy’s mind. And now the sheriff seemed to be trying to play all three of them off against one another so that he could regain the advantage. Which might have worked if Morgan hadn’t got the measure of the sick bastard. Morgan knew what the sheriff was doing.

“I told you to get on the floor!” shouted the boy, moving the gun right up between the sheriff’s eyes.

Hoyt ignored the threat and continued to study the boy’s irresolute face, reading his every scared emotion.

“He pulls that trigger,” said Hoyt loudly, “you girls are accomplices. You know that?”

Erin and Pepper didn’t know what to do—it was all too much. They’d had the suicide, Kemper had gone missing and Erin had seen that maniac up at the farmhouse, and now what was happening? Was Morgan gonna be a cop killer?

“What should I do?” cried Morgan, almost screaming with fear.

“I don’t know!” answered Pepper, her voice torn with unrestrained emotion.

“Should I shoot him?”

Erin stepped forward. This had gone too far. They had to work things out with the sheriff. He was the law. They had to convince him to go up to the farmhouse—for Andy’s sake.

“Put down the gun, Morgan.” She tried to sound calm, but her voice cracked.

Hoyt pushed his head forward, ramming his brow into the cold steel barrel of the gun.

“You shit heel!” he shouted. No cocksucker was going to mess with the sheriff in his own town.

Morgan wavered, the gun suddenly heavy in his hand.

“I already got you for assault,” Hoyt raged.

But the boy shouted over him, “YOU’RE LYING!”

The sheriff sniffed and eyed him calmly. “Pull the trigger, you little shit, and find out.”

Erin could see it all: Morgan brandishing the gun, scared out of his wits and capable of anything; the sheriff goading Morgan, urging him on, pushing his face into the weapon. There was only one tragic way this could end.

“Morgan! Put it down!” she shouted.

The boy looked at the two girls—Pepper and Erin were now standing right up by the open side door. And he then looked at the sheriff and his leering, domineering, fat Texan fuck of a face.

“Go ahead,” sneered the Sheriff. “Pull it. If it’s loaded, you’ll get away scot-free. But folks around here don’t like cop killers.”

Tears ran down Morgan’s cheeks. “You motherfucker.”

Erin could see it coming, almost as if time was slowing down. “Morgan! Don’t!”

The sheriff’s sneering face pushed closer. “Do it, you pussy! Pull the fucking trigger! Pull it! PULL IT!”

The moment—freeze frame—

Eyes, Erin, Pepper, Hoyt, the gun, fear, mockery, panic.

The boy’s finger went tight.

The barrel was on the sheriff’s head.

The hammer cocked—

NO!

Morgan pulled the trigger.

ELEVEN

The boy stared appalled, unable to believe what he’d just done. Erin and Pepper had cried out, begging him to stop, but they were too late to keep his finger from squeezing the trigger. And now they, too, looked on in mute horror at the murder scene that had just played out before them.

Sheriff Hoyt, on the other hand, was as happy as a fag in the boys’ locker room. When Morgan had finally cracked and fired the gun, there’d been no gunshot, no bullet wound and no blood, only a faint click.

The gun wasn’t loaded.

A tear ran down Morgan’s cheek as the sheriff took the useless revolver out of the boy’s hand.

“Yep,” smirked Hoyt. “This one’s the killer all right. Only this time,” he looked at Morgan, “you shot yourself a sheriff.”

Then he reached over the front seat of the van and took the car keys from the ignition where Erin had left them. None of these kids were going anywhere until he’d completed his investigations.

A voice called to him, told him to wake up and to get out of there.

He shook his head and groaned, but the voice persisted: it was now or never, he had to do something, he had to break free.

The words were barely audible through the waves of pain that washed over him, and the meaning was dulled by the unique tiredness of blood loss, but Andy knew that the words were his own. They were a soundless rallying cry for survival, stirring from deep within his soul—only there was no use in listening.

What would be the point? He was hanging from a meat hook in the underground basement of a psychopath. He was his prisoner. He was going nowhere.

Unless Erin had got away, unless she came to rescue him, death was inevitable. He was dying. And even if he could get down from the meat hook, how could he get out of the house? How could he escape on one pathetic leg? And there was no way he could beat that second-skinned bastard in a fight. Face it, he was finished.

Yet still, the voice urged him to try.

It wasn’t about hope anymore—Andy was beyond hope—it was about the fish wriggling on the hook, the wounded deer limping away to avoid the headshot, the armadillo dragging its crushed legs off the highway rather than surrender and become road kill. It was about gaining one more second of life.

Andy moaned. The pain was so bad . . . so bad.

There was a large pipe running horizontally behind his shoulders. As best he could, he rested his upper back on it. His remaining foot dangled about a yard up off the ground. There was something beneath him, furniture of some kind, but Andy was too tired to see what it was. All he cared about was that he could see his own blood dripping down onto the wood and then rolling down to form a puddle on the wet floor.

Again, that damned voice was telling him to do something, quick, while that damn face-freak with the chainsaw was out of the room.

His attacker had left the basement some time ago—it could have been minutes, it could have been hours. Andy had expected to receive a killing blow at any moment but he’d simply been left to hang, to die slowly and painfully on the meat hook. For one darkly humorous moment, Andy recalled how he’d gone with Erin up to the house. He’d thought he was safe because he was young, strong and carrying a tire-iron.

But that bastard had taken him out with pathetic ease. He’d come after him, sliced his fucking leg off and then assumed complete control of him. And now Andy had been left hanging from a meat hook—beneath contempt, not even worth execution, left helplessly to die.

No!

He couldn’t accept it. He couldn’t go down like this, not like this—maybe fighting, running, anything. But he couldn’t just hang there and bleed to death like a total loser. He had to do something. He had to make that bastard pay.

Andy looked up—and groaned.

As he lifted his head, his neck muscles contracted and expanded, pulling on his chest muscles, abdomen, his whole dismembered and impaled body, causing agony to explode through the damage of his terrible wounds.

But now he could see.

The hook was at the end of a stout chain that came down from a sturdy crossbeam, a few feet above his head. Maybe there was something he could do after all.

He took a few moments to marshal all the strength in his broad, powerful arms—at the same time preparing himself for the overwhelming rush of broken pain that would soon be tearing into his very soul.

One deep breath—

His face was pale, ashen gray.

A second deep breath—

He clenched his jaws and snarled, wincing as he raised both hands to take hold of the iron chain above and behind his head.

The basement echoed with his piteous moans, but he’d done it. He’d grabbed the chain and was now locked in position, ready.

Fist by agonizing fist, he began to pull himself up the chain.

The links rattled, each one being no more than an inch in length, yet each seeming an impossible distance as the boy took the pain and used his muscular arms to haul himself up. All he needed was to get enough slack in the chain. Then, if he could find somewhere to brace his foot . . .

He was slipping!

Exertion had taken its toll—not in fatigue, but in sweat. His palms had become slick with saltwater, and suddenly his hands were finding it tough to grip anything.

He had dropped only about an inch, but the sudden motion of the chain pulled on the hook embedded in the soft flesh of his back. He moaned but was able to check his fall—keeping some slack in the chain.

Sweat was now stinging his eyes and his breathing was coarse and labored, but at least he hadn’t dropped all the way back down again. He paused, readying himself for a second attempt. It wasn’t looking too good; he needed all his strength just to hang on.

Again, a cry escaped his lips, and again the chain rattled as he reached up over his head and began to—

He lost his grip!

Fearing the worst, Andy tried everything he could to slow the fall. His hands clawed and grabbed at the straightening chain, but it was no use.

His body dropped, the chain pulled tight, and the meat hook tore his insides apart, breaking the bones of his spine.

And the total loser screamed his empty heart out.

The police car was moving at a leisurely pace back down the access road towards town. It was fully dark now and the silver light of the moon seemed to strobe through the silhouetted woodland of dead contorted trees.

Morgan had been arrested.

The sheriff had charged the boy with the murder of the teenage girl while under the influence of illegal substances. Then he’d handcuffed and bundled him into the back of the patrol car. Sure, the girls had complained a whole lot but as far as the sheriff was concerned, they were suspects too.

He’d told them straight out that he thought they were all a bunch of drug-taking hippie-shits. He believed the girls when they said they had two more friends skulking about the place, but he didn’t believe any of their bull crap about the Hewitt house. If there was any trouble up at the farm, it was probably being caused by those two missing boys being high on acid.

And that’s why he’d confiscated their car keys. He didn’t want them to go anywhere until he’d time to put Morgan behind bars. Then he’d come back, ask them some more questions, and then go look for the other two boys—if they actually existed.

Erin had argued with him. She couldn’t understand why she and Pepper couldn’t drive down to the station with him. Or why the sheriff couldn’t finish his questions and then take Morgan. Why keep going back and forth like that? None of it made sense. But every time she’d started to get a bit lippy, he’d threatened to run her in with the boy. As far as Hoyt was concerned, his little charade with the revolver had one hundred per cent proved the greasy haired punk’s guilt.

Morgan stared at the handcuffs holding his wrists together. There was a sense of unreality about the whole situation, something he’d felt many times during the day. If only they’d just dumped the body at the mill and left. If only they’d never picked the teenager up in the first place. If only they’d stayed on the Interstate to Dallas. If only, if only, if only . . .

Sooner or later, they’d have to bring him a lawyer and, when they did, Morgan would make sure that Sheriff Christ Almighty Hoyt would end up in deep shit. What that pig had done back up at the van was tantamount to torture. That bastard had terrified Morgan half to death. Morgan was still scared now, but was nowhere close to the pitch of fear he’d felt when the sheriff had forced him to put the gun inside his own mouth.

“Man,” he called from the backseat, “this is BULLSHIT! I got rights!”

Hoyt looked back through the rearview. The boy was just letting off steam. The cop grinned. Scrawny little heel-shit.

They drove in silence for a moment, the car rocking side to side.

Then finally, “Where were you guys headed?” asked the sheriff.

Morgan sighed, looked at his cuffs, “Dallas. Skynyrd concert.”

“I like Skynyrd,” purred the sheriff.

“Me too!” Morgan wondered whether this was just the sheriff’s idea of polite conversation, or whether he was angling for something.

The sheriff glanced at the rear-view mirror another time, studying the boy. “Guess we got something in common, huh?” he drawled sarcastically. Then after another moment’s silence, “What are you gonna do with your tickets, boy?”

Morgan looked up. His eyes met the sheriff’s in the rear-view. Was the sheriff saying what he thought he was saying?

“You want them?” he asked hopefully. “You can have ’em, man!”

No reply, and they covered another short stretch of road in uneasy silence.

A bottle of bourbon lay in the passenger seat next to the sheriff’s ass. Most of the liquor was already gone, and now Hoyt lifted the booze to his mouth and finished it off—one hand on the steering wheel, the other round the neck of the bottle. He smacked his lips and sighed. Good stuff. Then he held the empty up and took a quick look at it—all gone.

“That a bribe?” he asked slyly.

The tickets? A bribe? Morgan was unsure how to ans—

THE SHERIFF SWUNG HIS ARM ROUND AND SMASHED THE THICK HEAVY BOTTLE INTO MORGAN’S MOUTH

Blood exploded across the bottom of the young man’s face. He howled in pain, his teeth cracking and breaking loose, one of them slipping back down his throat and being swallowed in an instant. The bottle had shattered, showering glass all over the back seat and the floor.

Almost immediately, shock numbed the pain. Morgan reached a hand to his mouth and found that his lips were bound with viscous strands of thick blood. He opened up and gently prodded, tearfully finding that the middle four teeth of this top jaw had all been smashed to bits.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Hoyt mockingly. “That was rude. Did you want some?”

Morgan sobbed with pain, trying his best to hold it together. When he talked to his lawyer—

The sheriff sneered and threw the broken bottle clown on to the floor where it came to rest beside the heavy torque wrench wrapped in duct tape.

He looked back at the boy and snickered. The kid was in a real state, yes sir, a real state.

“Now we’ve got even more in common,” he chuckled.

Morgan shook his head, trying to think straight. Got WHAT in common? Skynyrd? More? What? WHAT?

He looked up and saw the sheriff’s face. Hoyt had removed a clip of false teeth from the front of his mouth and was smiling with gap-toothed malice into the rear-view.

The officer roared with laughter then hit the gas hard, pushing Morgan back into his seat, where he lay handcuffed amidst the shards of broken bottle, blood-spit and cracked teeth.

Oh God, I don’t wanna die.

The abandoned Crawford Mill looked even worse at night. The shadows, which before had been held at bay by the sun, now crept out through the open doors and windows.

Erin had now explained everything to Pepper, about Andy, about Old Monty and the house. And about that thing with the—Erin didn’t want to think about it. She’d told Pepper they hadn’t found Kemper but that she was pretty sure he was up there somewhere.

It was clear the two girls couldn’t do anything about it. If they went back up to the Hewitt place, they’d both be killed. And it was just as clear that Sheriff Hoyt was a twisted, sadistic fuck. Which meant only one thing: they were on their own.

Now they’d had breathing space to think things through, a whole lot more pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. That teenage girl, the one they’d picked up, she was half mad with fear because she’d escaped these bastards. She’d come from California with her family and had somehow taken a wrong turn that ended up at the Hewitt house.

The girl had said, “They’re all dead.” That’s exactly what she’d said. She must have meant that her family had all been murdered. Which meant that Kemper and Andy would also be murdered if they hadn’t been already.

Hell, the signs had been all over the place, but they just didn’t know how to read them: the hidden clearing with the wrecked cars, the auto spares, the luggage and clothes for sale down at Luda May’s—all taken from people passing through. Christ, some of the clothes and automobiles they saw were almost twenty years-old!

And no one knew anything about it? How could a series of murders like this go unnoticed for so long?

And what about Luda May’s yard sale?

She was the one who’d sent them up here to the mill in the first place. So either Luda May was in on it or she didn’t care too much where her merchandise came from. But something still didn’t quite add up.

Luda May had sent them here to meet the sheriff and Hoyt did eventually come out and meet them at the mill. Things went wrong only when Erin and Kemper went to the Hewitt house, thinking it was the sheriff’s place. And they’d gone there on the advice of . . . Jedidiah. It was the small boy who’d sent them into real danger. So was he part of it?

The crazy kid sure as hell seemed happy to spend most of his time up here at the mill, and he had a thing about the dead girl. Which meant the mill was probably involved as well. But then it had to be. It was near the auto graveyard and the Hewitt place—and just look at all the revolting skulls and stuff.

Suddenly they realized that they’d been sent up here, like so many others before them, to become sitting ducks. Which was all Erin and Pepper needed to figure to decide to get the hell out of there. There was no argument, no discussion, no vote.

They just needed to get the van started and make a break for it. And then they’d go straight to the State Police or the FBI and not some redneck creep with his sadistic, evil mind games. Only problem was Hoyt had taken the keys to the van.

Not that this would stop Erin.

Pepper held the flashlight steady while Erin found a Swiss army knife she kept tucked in her napsack at the rear of the van. Then Erin went and sat up front, and Pepper took a position close behind the driver’s seat, so that she could point the beam down over Erin’s shoulder. There, she watched as Erin set to work on the ignition switch with her knife.

“What do you think he’s gonna do to Morgan?” asked Pepper innocently. Gay-rape, beat-up and torture sprang to mind but Erin was busy working on the lock, trying to prize the damned thing open. But it was tough.

“I don’t want to—” The blade snapped. “Shit!”

Erin quickly slid a second blade out of its compartment in the knife and bent forward for another try. She pushed the edge of the knife into the exact same position, hoping that the cover may have at least been loosened a little by her previous attempt. The sooner they got out of here, the sooner they could get the cops to turn a spotlight on this whole rat-bastard dump. And if there a God, he’d make sure the Hewitts were sent to the chair and he’d fry the fuckers.

No! The second blade snapped.

Pepper couldn’t bear the idea that Erin might screw up and she began to cry. She was wearing her down jacket now, not because she was cold, but because it made her feel more comfortable, more protected. And now the nylon sleeve made a gentle but insistent swishing sound as her arm shook beside her body.

“Pepper,” said Erin firmly. “I need you to hold the light steady. Can you do that?”

Pepper was close to meltdown, but somehow she drew strength from Erin and began to relax a little. The beam from the flashlight fell steady on the ignition once more.

The drive had passed for Morgan.

It hadn’t passed quickly. It hadn’t passed slowly. It had just passed.

All he could think about was the pain he was in. He’d never seen so much blood in his life, especially his own, and his mouth . . .

He didn’t know where they were or where they were going, but he knew he’d be spending the evening behind bars. Maybe things would get better in the morning. The sheriff couldn’t just keep him locked up in a tiny, small town cell.

Morgan never found out what Erin saw up at the Hewitt house. She’d just come back in a panic and tried to start the van; that’s when Sheriff Hoyt had shown up again. And from that moment on, their night had eroded into mentally unstable, violent horror. But whatever it was Erin had seen, there was no way it could compete with what that bastard had just done to him.

Up front, the sheriff was talking on his car radio.

“I don’t care if you’re tired,” he said. “Get your butt in gear and get over to the Crawford Mill. Those two fillies are good to go.”

W . . . What did he just say?

Morgan shook his head, tried to clear his thoughts. Who the hell was the sheriff talking to? What did he say? Two fillies? And what did Hoyt mean by, “good to go”?

What the hell was going on?

Feeling the tension rise within him, Morgan pressed his face against one of the windows and peered out into the darkness.

Where were they?

They didn’t seem to be on any major road. There was no street lighting of any kind and they couldn’t be anywhere near town.

The headlights of the car swept forwards, scything through the black, until at last the vehicle came over the brow of a low hill and turned left onto a dirt track. At the end of the track stood a solitary building, an imposing two-storied farmhouse constructed in the plantation style, but the design of the place was almost . . .

If only Morgan could see into Erin’s mind, her memories, he would have known that he was being driven up to the Hewitt place, where Sheriff Hoyt, Old Monty and his boy, Leatherface, were going to have a whale of a time.

Now it was the can-opener’s turn.

Erin had already broken the two blades, failed with the scissors, and found the corkscrew totally useless, which left the can-opener.

Pepper was good with the flashlight now and finally Erin could see the ignition switch coming loose. Yes! It was definitely coming. The casing was moving bit by bit out of the plastic surround.

If she could just lever . . .

Erin concentrated, careful not to push too hard for fear of breaking her last useable tool. But the more the ignition moved, the faster she worked at it, until at last it broke free of the steering column.

“Finally,” Erin sighed, relieved at the sight of the exposed ignition wires.

Then she pushed the can-opener back into place and pulled out the tweezers, thinking that everything anyone had ever said about the trusty Swiss army knife was an understatement. This little baby was going to save their lives.

Something walked in the darkness towards the van.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” asked Pepper, impressed.

“In juvy. They called my youth misspent.”

Pepper looked dumbfounded. “You were in juvenile hall?”

Erin pulled out five wires that had been connected to the ignition block and began to strip the ends of them with her teeth. “Yup.”

The other girl watched her with something close to amazement. Erin was the last person she would have guessed was a juvenile delinquent. Pepper thought Erin really did have a problem when it came to dope and drugs. She’d thought Erin was straight. But if she had been that straight, she wouldn’t have gone down to Mexico alone with the three guys. So if Erin wasn’t totally square, what—?

The baby.

Erin was pregnant. Maybe it had changed her in some way.

It was the wrong time to be analyzing stuff, but Pepper’s beleaguered mind enjoyed the break, taking five from it all. She wished these guys had never picked her up. Perhaps that was unfair, but she’d come along with them and some sick twist of fate had taken a sledgehammer to her life. After today, none of them would be the same again.

Erin was oblivious to all the sweet girl’s internal thoughts. She had to concentrate on the wires, touching the bare cable ends together, trying one pair, then another, then—

The engine roared to life.

“YES!” cheered Erin, and she quickly twisted the two good wires together.

Pepper squealed with victory as Erin turned on the headlamps and put the van into gear. And this time the useless piece of shit didn’t stall.

They were outta here.

The lights were on behind nearly every window of the house. And there were other lights round the back of the building. Morgan couldn’t see the outdoor lights, but he noticed how they threw a white glare from the rear of the house, casting the brute rectangular block of stone into stark relief.

Hoyt pulled up on a grit patch in front of the main entrance. At no point during their drive did he use the cherry on his roof. Nor did he use the siren. But then he wasn’t in any hurry; he’d already made his arrest.

The sheriff applied the hand brake then climbed up out of the car. He left the headlights on and Morgan could see the beams crash up against the pale brick of the farmhouse. This was no police station.

Morgan coughed and spat more blood onto the floor of the vehicle. He’d picked up countless scratches and cuts from the broken glass of the bourbon bottle, and the handcuffs were so tight they’d rubbed the skin off his wrists. But mostly, the boy was now in shock.

Hoyt opened the rear door. He was holding a flashlight. No beam.

“Get out.”

A flat command. No communication, no empathy, no threat—just an order.

Morgan’s first reaction was to stay put. He’d already been beaten by the sheriff, so what was the bastard going to do out at this place? Maybe if there was someone inside the farmhouse, Morgan could ask them for help. They might even have a phone. If he could just persuade Hoyt or anyone, to let him phone his parents.

Best play ball.

Morgan got out of the car—clumsily with his hands in front of him—and as he stood up, the sheriff took a good long look at his swollen, bruised, cut mouth. There was blood all over the kid’s shirt.

New York, my frigging ass!

“Where . . . are we?” Morgan said, or at least that’s what Hoyt thought he’d said because the boy was struggling to get a single shit-ass word out.

“Shut up, faggot.” The sheriff had more important things to do than play twenty questions, trying to understand some fuck-wipe with a busted trap.

He snapped on the flashlight and stabbed the powerful white beam into the boy’s eyes. Morgan had only just got used to the dark—he raised his hands and squinted, his eyes watering—so he had no way of seeing the vicious shove of Hoyt’s right hand as it bolted forward and pushed Morgan over onto the ground.

The boy landed face first in the dust but quickly rolled over onto his back. It was just like the mill all fucking over again! Lying on the ground with that bastard walking around like he was some kind of god.

Hoyt just looked down at the boy.

“You and your friends should have left that girl alone,” he spat. Then he raised his boot over Morgan’s head.

Morgan’s eyes opened wide.

No.

NO!

Hoyt brought the boot down hard, stamping the screaming little shit into oblivion.

Pepper wrapped her arms round Erin and briefly hugged her from behind as the vehicle started to roll. Erin took care not to over accelerate; she didn’t want to risk slamming the wheels into a ditch or pitching the whole van forward into a tree.

She slowly turned the van round to face the narrow road they’d come in on. Then she put the beams on full, hit the gas, began to drive and—

Erin lurched, her whole body thrown forward in the seat.

Behind her, Pepper fell, landing awkwardly on Morgan’s beanbag.

They didn’t understand.

The van wasn’t moving and it felt as if the front end had dropped. The front of the van had dropped!

Erin shook her head, “What the fuck?”

Then she separated the ignition wires, cutting the engine, and grabbed Pepper’s flashlight. She had to go see what the hell had happened.

Pepper got to her feet and looked out through the side windows as Erin got out and took a look around the van. She didn’t have to look for very long. When she reached the front passenger side, she found that the whole front wheel had fallen off! But how? It was impossible.

“Come on,” she called, asking Pepper to join her.

They had to get the wheel back in place as quickly as possible and it wasn’t going to be easy. The tire was a massive racing slick and it would take the two of them to jack the van and then lift the wheel back into place. Yet another delay they could really do without. If Sheriff Hoyt came back, as he said he would, before they finished, they’d be well and truly boned.

Pepper got out through the side door and—whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa; rewind the tape a little.

The whole front wheel had fallen off.

How?

Erin shone her torch at the gleaming chrome rim lying on the ground. There was something about it. Something—

“Somebody stole the goddamn lug nuts!” she shouted.

The van had been tampered with so that once the wheel started to roll, it came free and fell off.

Who the hell?

She quickly checked the three remaining wheels and found that the nuts had been removed from all of them. They had to be around somewhere.

Not exactly thinking straight, Erin pointed the flashlight down by the fallen wheel, then under the van, and around the other side, but she couldn’t find any of the missing lug nuts.

“What are we gonna do?” shuddered Pepper.

She couldn’t believe they were still there. Just when she thought they were finally gonna get away—another problem. It was her school dream all over again, except this time she wasn’t just frustrated, she was scared out of her goddamn mind. She was sure the fear was making her crazy.

Just then, Erin saw something glinting in the torchlight.

She stepped over, praying it would be the—it was an empty bottle of bourbon. The bottle couldn’t have been there long because the remaining traces of liquor were still wet and the bottle was clean. Somebody must have dropped it there recently, maybe the person who’d messed with the van.

Damn! The search was getting Erin nowhere.

Pepper tried to help but the lug nuts had just vanished.

After a few more fruitless minutes, Erin decided to unscrew the spare down from the outside of the rear door of the van. She didn’t want the spare itself but the five lug nuts holding it in place. That way, she could put one nut on each of the wheels. It wouldn’t be perfect and it wouldn’t last forever, but it should do for getting out of town.

They’d also need the jack to put the fallen wheel back in position. The tool was stored somewhere in the back of the van and Erin planned to fetch it once she’d removed all the lug nuts from the spare.

Pepper looked on as Erin walked over to the rear door, took one look at the nuts, and cursed.

“Shit.” She rubbed a hand through her hair, “Andy took the tire iron.”

She remembered he’d taken it with him up to the Hewitt house and never returned.

Was there one, just one, thing about this day that didn’t completely suck?

They were wasting time. Sure, things were quiet enough now, but Erin didn’t know how long it would last. She couldn’t believe that Old Monty or the freak with the chainsaw hadn’t come after her yet—maybe it was because the sheriff had been here—but Erin knew they really needed to get away from this place. Something was coming, she could feel it.

And did the dark mill have to look so damned frightening? Every time she looked up at the place, it made her feel nauseous. All those revolting skulls in the moonlight.

There was someone in the woods watching.

Erin could feel it moving, or at least she thought she could.

She’d been struggling to turn the lug nut with her bare fingers for so long, she couldn’t tell whether the movement was in the metal, or in the skin of her bleeding, blistered hands.

So far, she’d failed to remove a single nut. Pepper had tried to help but only got in the way—there just wasn’t enough room for the two of them to work at the spare simultaneously. Which is why Erin had suggested shifts—though, in reality, she had no intention of giving the other girl a shot.

Pepper didn’t look like she had what it took. While Erin, on the other hand, had been forced to share Kemper with shop all through their relationship. And you can’t do that without learning a few things.

Suddenly Erin stopped.

She’d heard something, she was sure of it; somewhere in the trees behind her. Something was coming. Christ, she was positive. But the wheel—the van was on three wheels!

She looked over at Pepper. “Get in the van.”

The quiet urgency in Erin’s voice was unmistakable. But the van was on three wheels.

Pepper frowned, “But—”

“Do it!” shouted Erin, and almost immediately the two of them were back inside; Erin behind the wheel and Pepper on the back seat, the bloodstains soon forgotten in the face of her renewed terror.

Erin quickly blew on her fingers to help dry the sweat and blood, and then she took hold of the ignition wires and crossed the ones that would start up the engine.

The van rumbled and began to move forward, lumbering, unbalanced, wounded, but still moving forward.

Erin remembered reading somewhere that the average walking pace for a man was just over two miles per hour, while a fast walking pace was maybe four or five. But if someone was running, he could probably manage a speed of—

Screw it.

She floored the gas pedal and hoped for the best. If another wheel came off, it came off. But right now, she didn’t feel like she had any choice.

And from the darkness behind them came the unrelenting scream of the chainsaw. It was sudden, erupting with a jagged splutter from the cover of the trees.

No, not again!

Erin checked the rearview but it was dark outside. And she couldn’t be sure over the sound of the turbocharger whether she really was hearing that god-awful sound or just imagining it. Maybe the axle was grinding or something.

But Pepper could hear it as well.

And she couldn’t believe it.

She’d never doubted what Erin had said about the farmhouse but somehow hadn’t been able accept it—a chainsaw wielding guy sporting dead people’s faces? It just wasn’t possible. Even now, Pepper was not convinced about the ripped-off faces but she was absolutely certain there was someone out there with a chainsaw.

“Don’t stop!” she cried.

“I’m not!” shouted Erin in reply.

And she pushed the disabled van almost to its limit within the confines of the dirt trail. They only had a few more yards to go and they’d be back on the access road where she could probably pick up more speed.

Pitching and swaying like a boy with one leg missing, the van heaved forward, jolting lopsidedly between the decaying trees of the surrounding grove. The headlights were working fine, but the way ahead was a confusion of deadwood and straggling undergrowth. One wrong turn and they’d be in trouble.

Suddenly the van dipped sharply and, for one terrible moment, Erin thought another wheel had come off. She put one hand on the dash—to keep from falling out of her seat—and used her other hand to wrestle with the steering wheel.

She could hear the chainsaw now. Which meant that her worst fear had just come true; the maniac was here and he was coming after them.

When she’d faced him up at the house, he’d seemed unstoppable; he’d crushed Andy like a bug. He was totally insane. And the skin . . .

Erin had to choke back an almost overwhelming wave of repulsion caused by her memory of that sick mask with its crude stitching and torn eyeholes.

The kind of evil represented by that flesh-wearing bastard was entirely beyond Erin’s comprehension. No amount of words, abuse or psychological jargon could ever hope to explain the ugly existence of that squealing, fat pervert in his dead skin mask. His very heartbeat was an insult to humanity. The chainsaw rushed forward, grinding, turning, retching—carried by strong hands and a deviant strapped-on face. Inside the mask, his eyes were rolling like the cutting chain. Rolling inside the mask. Rolling to bring them death.

The van lurched and shook.

They could both hear the chainsaw growing nearer and Pepper was close to screaming point.

But Erin remained focused. She was trying to keep the vehicle straight when a second tire came loose and rolled out from underneath the left rear wheel arch.

Almost immediately, the van went down and dug its nose hard into the earth. Pepper fell to the floor but Erin managed to hold on to her seat, ready for the impact.

The remaining wheels continued to turn but the Dodge was going nowhere.

Erin clutched at the steering, holding it more and more tightly as if she could move the vehicle by willpower alone. She was tense, disheveled. Her great escape plan had been shot to fuck. Now she was just another victim.

She leaned forward in her seat, her face almost up against the windscreen, urging the van forward.

“FUCK IT!”

The turbocharged engine roared as she stepped on the gas, feeding more and more power into the transmission, only to grind the axles into the dirt. Yet still she persevered. They could still get away if just she tried hard enough.

The chainsaw came screaming through the window, sharp metal teeth catching the cracked edges of the bloodstained suicide hole and hurling the red crystal shards in all directions—hacking in and out of the van, spraying broken glass, screaming and spinning and filling the rutting wagon with exhaust poison. The violence ripped through the closed door, raggedly squealing for disembodied limbs.

Pepper screamed and Erin pushed harder on the gas, the laboring engine and the rampant chainsaw locked in a death dual of decibels.

Stressed beyond limit, the back window finally exploded, leaving the chainsaw free to gouge through the metal of the rear door. Dust clouds mingled with exhaust fumes, bright golden sparks erupted from the epicenter of the saw, and finally Pepper was able to look back and catch her first devastating sight of Leatherface—his facial skin encasement aglow with hot saw fever.

“What do we do?” she screamed.

The van was going nowhere and Pepper was really losing it.

Erin had to do something. But what? That bastard had them cornered. He was right outside the vehicle. If they went out, he’d catch them. But if they stayed in there . . .

Erin couldn’t think straight. It was all happening too fast, and the noise of that chainsaw was chewing up her concentration just as easily as it was now ripping random lines through the rear of the van. Kemper’s van. The roar of the maniac power tool was bearing down upon them with the blind fury of a crippling cerebral hemorrhage. Their bodies would be shaken to bloody pieces in a red hurricane of epileptic dissection.

Erin climbed into the back and grabbed hold of Pepper. They huddled in the center of the van not knowing what to do or what would happen next.

Suddenly the chainsaw moved away from the rear door and circled the van as if it was weighing up another assault—they could hear it, their eyes darting in all directions, wondering where . . .

Silence.

Then the ripping explosion of glass and gasoline fumes returned as the chainsaw came crashing through the driver’s side window and tore into the upholstery of the seat Erin had been sitting in moments before. The high pitch cutting chain slashed the seat cover apart, churned up the foam cushioning, and then withdrew.

Only to come screeching into the metal of the door itself.

Erin and Pepper could only cringe in terror as the chainsaw came at the driver’s door again and again and again, gnawing the primer-gray panel into twisted metal trash beneath a torrent of sparks.

Most men would have been injured by kickback as soon as the tip of the saw hit the solid wall of the van, but the maniac had had plenty of experience of cutting up the wrong things. He lived for the feel of metal grinding against metal, of metal cutting flesh, of flesh touching skin. He lived for it. He fucking lived for it.

Glass and slivers of metal shrapnel spat through the air, back into the van, hitting the two girls. They screamed in fear, the whites of their eyes reflecting the erratic diffusion of sparks.

“E . . . Er . . . Erin!”

Suddenly the saw was gone again, leaving only the odor of burning metal and a whole pile of broken van on the driver’s seat.

He was outside, walking. They could hear the saw on low revs, clutch still engaged.

Once, twice, the chainsaw motor turned, like the barking of a prairie dog circling its carrion prey.

The two frightened victims scurried away from the center of the van and pressed their backs against the side furthest away from the sound—THE CHAINSAW BROKE THROUGH THE WALL BEHIND THEM!

Erin dived forward, sparks stinging her skin. She heard Pepper cry out in terror, and the two of them almost collided as they landed in a heap on the other side of the van, as far away from the furious rending machine as possible.

Erin hated this—they were surviving on fear alone. They weren’t doing anything, they weren’t fighting back; they were just cooped up in there while that power tripping bastard took his time slicing up the van. Why didn’t he just come on in and get it over with?

Smoke billowed into the wagon as the chainsaw continued to split the side wide open, gouging a deep, jagged canal of ripped metal almost from floor to roof.

The fumes burned Pepper’s eyes, causing them to flood with even more tears. She couldn’t believe what was happening to her. Where the hell was the sheriff?

Erin looked across and saw something gleaming through one of the fresh holes in the other side of the van.

It was an eye.

Rampant. Leering. Crazed. Turning. Staring. Salivating. Through the mask.

And then it was gone.

But Erin knew that eye only too well. She remembered the same lunatic stare from when she first saw it come charging through that sliding door up at the Hewitt place. It was unforgettable. His eyes had the frenzied look of a pig being raped by a disemboweling machine.

She pressed her back up against the closed side door, clinging on to Pepper, and being hugged in return in a fearful embrace that was fully expectant of death.

“Aggghhhh!”

Pepper!

The chainsaw had burst through the side door behind them and had caught the shoulder of the girl’s down jacket, casting a plume of tiny feathers up against her cheek. But no blood.

Erin fell forward and turned to see the cutting chain laying waste to the door. The bastard was playing with them. First the rear, then the driver’s seat, both sides of the van, hunting them through the solid walls; destroying their cover, making a mockery of their hiding place.

But that last attack had been too close for Pepper. She couldn’t believe she wasn’t injured—the saw had been turning less than quarter of an inch away from her skin. If it had touched her, her flesh would have been thrown up into the air just like the bits and pieces of the van. And it wouldn’t have been sparks shooting out from the cut; it would have been her flesh and blood.

She’d had enough.

Taking hold of what tiny amount of courage she had left, Pepper scrambled over to the front of the van and got out through the mangled door on the driver’s side. She was going to make a break for it.

“Pepper!” Erin cried.

The girl was crazy. She’d never get away. She’d be throwing her life away just like the teenage girl with the revolver. They had to stick together; it was their only—

Pepper jumped out of the van and ran for her life. She hadn’t spoken another word to Erin; she’d just taken off.

Erin crawled forward, rested her shoulder against the back of the broken driver’s seat and looked out through the windshield.

The headlights were still on, and—where was Pepper?

Erin looked, but she couldn’t see the girl.

But she could see the murderer.

No.

Erin saw him run over to stand just in front of the vehicle, his leather apron folding and creasing as he shuffled along, his scalp of stolen hair flopping erratically in the breeze. His great expanse of tailored flesh quivered beneath his clothes as he held the roaring chainsaw above his head—HALLELUJAH!

He looked down into a patch of darkness below the beams and suddenly Erin felt the cold hand of fear squeezing her heart.

No.

Erin understood.

Pepper had tripped or fallen down in front of the van, dropping below the headlights—where now, standing in the full glory of the makeshift floodlights, the killer notched up the revs and leant down with the chainsaw, pushing it into the fallen girl’s face. In, in, in—he hacked into her face, the cold cutting blades mincing her vocal chords and whipping out her windpipe before she could even scream. Pepper had finally woken up from her dream.

Erin clutched her head and wept.

“Noooo!”

Outside, the insane bastard stomped like a retard in a geyser of blood and down feathers. He was swaying, shitting on the bitch’s innards with his saw, howling as her life sprayed out across the Texan dirt. But, all the while, his face was turned towards the van.

While he ground and pumped and hacked and snorted, his insane screaming eyes were constantly fixed on Erin. Almost as if he was putting on a show for her, to let her know she was next.

But Erin had gone beyond fear.

While her new friend—the young, smiling hitchhiker they’d picked up on the Mexican border—was being reduced to a flat slurry of intestine, Erin suddenly felt cold and limp. She just watched him.

He stood there, thrusting the chainsaw, and screeching insanely over the sound of gasoline fury. But Erin was numb.

She tenderly reached out a hand towards the perverse figure—her mind dealt the final blow—the saw-fucking freak was wearing Kemper’s face.

TWELVE

The features were distorted.

Kemper’s head was much narrower than the killer’s, so the face had been softened then stretched to fit. But there was no mistaking it. Erin could even see the remnants of the goatee.

“Oh my God!”

Kemper was dead.

Her boyfriend. Her lover. The father of her child. Her husband-to-be. Dead. And now that, bastard—that fucking animal bastard—was wearing her lover’s remains. He had abused Kemper’s body. He’d handled it, touched it and dismembered it.

The body that had felt warm and tender, the body Erin had made love to, was now a slab of lifeless cut meat. Her baby’s daddy had become a whole new wardrobe for that death-breathing bastard. If she could, she’d kill him right now. No guilt, no remorse, just pure revenge.

Erin felt the urge, the need to slaughter.

Out front, Leatherface looked at her from within the white light of the headlights and leered—mentally slicing her from within Kemper’s lifeless face. Her boyfriend would be the last thing she saw before she died.

Thick with the juicy puree of Pepper’s corpse, the chainsaw fired up and lurched like a heaving spastic reflex towards the windshield.

Erin yelped and almost fell out through the van door. If only she had the strength to beat the bastard!

Because that’s all he had. It was sheer brute force that gave him power over her; not authority, justice, superior intelligence or wisdom, moral right, not even cash—just raw fucking power. She could have been the president and she’d still be screaming in fear for her life. Violence is a great leveler. In the face of a brutal beating, all men are equal.

Yet despite this, despite the raging panic that had haunted her for most of the day, Erin was surprised by just how much she was able to deal with. She had no choice but to accept the depraved psychopathic nature of her attacker.

She could almost hold back the deep revulsion she felt at the mere sight of him, and at his need to butcher and degrade his victims. She could even block out the mental image of those insane wild eyes looking out through the moist holes in Kemper’s face.

But she couldn’t deal with the fucking chainsaw.

Every time that bastard engine roared in her face, the whole livid nightmare of her situation came falling back in on her, until she was almost buried beneath the rubble of paralyzing fear. Each time she heard the chainsaw accelerate, it cut another chunk of sanity out of her soul.

So all she could do was run. No plan. No thought. Just run. Away from the noise. Away from the chainsaw. Away.

Though it was dark now, she bolted straight off the road and into the dense tangle of the grove. If she stayed on the dirt track, he’d have no trouble finding her in the moonlight. But maybe through the undergrowth she could find some place to hide. Or maybe she could keep running until he gave up and stopped coming after her.

The chainsaw kept pace behind her, revving, calling for her, wanting her, as it was dragged left to right to left in an unpredictable twitching zigzag.

And suddenly Erin knew how a hunted deer felt.

She was running through the woods, fighting her way through gnarled tree limbs and thorny sticker bushes, fleeing from a relentless hunter who seemed to think it was a bloody game. Once, twice, she almost fell over, her foot caught by something in the vegetation, but she pushed on. Her bare arms were becoming scratched and her fingers were still sore and bleeding from her struggle with the wheel nuts, but she ignored them. Real pain was what Pepper, Andy and Kemper had experienced. These pathetic nicks and bumps were nothing. Nothing at all.

The machine was built for cutting timber. It scythed a straight path through the grove towards her, oblivious to the broken teeth and punctured eyeballs caught up in the links of the chain. She was going to die. Die bitch die.

Erin could hear him grunting and firing the chainsaw, his heavy tread falling like imperfect death close behind her. Most of the time, she was able to run flat out, sprinting awkwardly in her cumbersome platforms, but then she would come to a ditch or an almost impenetrable thicket, where all she could do was throw herself forward and hope for the best.

Her hair, clothes and skin were all dirty and in disarray. With her cuts, bruises and scrapes and with her panic-stricken eyes, she broke through the forest like the victim of a car wreck. Which wasn’t too far from the truth; that bastard had taken the van apart. He’d destroyed both the A-100 and its owner, and there was some deeply sick irony to the fact that when Kemper’s features had last looked upon his customized pride and joy, they had done so in the form of a death mask.

Who’s the daddy now?

Rushing forward over a hurdle of fallen branches, Erin half climbed her way out through the edge of the grove into a clearing. She didn’t know if this was a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, she could move more quickly but, on the other, he would know exactly where she was. And she could hear him now—the sputtering of the chainsaw calling her name.

If she lay down and surrendered to the bastard, her troubles would all be over. She could just give in to him, let him do what he wanted with her. She couldn’t stop him.

No! What the hell was she thinking?

Erin picked herself up and ran out into the clearing. It was then that she saw she had entered an old neglected trailer park. Well, it was a trailer park once. Now it was mostly a flat, empty space of dirt.

Except for the trailer.

Over across the other side of the clearing, a lone surviving trailer squatted beneath a knot of swaying trees. The trailer looked worse for wear, but there were lights on inside—she could see them through the closed drapes. There was also a lamp tied up on one of the abutting trees, throwing a pool of brilliance against the outside of the trailer door.

Erin took one last terrified look over her shoulder, then headed straight for the mobile home, both her legs and feet aching.

Surely she could find one person in this town who was halfway goddamn normal? They couldn’t all be mentally unstable morons. Frankly, Erin didn’t give a damn who was inside the trailer as long as she could find a phone and a decent weapon. Chances are the owner kept a handgun, maybe even a rifle.

As she drew closer to the trailer, Erin could see it was standing in the middle of a veritable lake of discarded propane tanks, oil drums, crates, tables and other typical trailer park junk. It looked like whoever lived there had been doing so for some time. They’d be dead in an hour, if they didn’t help her.

Erin had no doubt that the killer would come for them. He didn’t seem to care who he murdered, or how many people he had to slaughter his way through. He wasn’t worried about being seen, caught, stopped or anything. He kept steaming forward, chopping down anyone who got in his way. If the killer found Erin here, he’d trash the trailer the same way he’d torn open the van. Leatherface would come at it with the chainsaw until it was all done.

Clearly she’d got a head start on the freak because he was still cutting his way through the wood while she was almost at the trailer.

Gasping, weeping, crippled with fear, Erin ran up to the trailer door and banged on it with both hands. She was out of breath, but her hammering was furious and unmistakable. Tears ran down her dirty face, but she kept on knocking as she sank slowly to her knees on the portable steps leading up to the cabin entrance.

The chainsaw was looming nearer but she was exhausted. And the sudden pause in her urgent flight had paved the way for shock to set in and her mind to shutdown.

Suddenly the trailer door was pulled open and two massive arms seized hold of Erin, dragging the young woman to her feet. Erin screamed and tried to fight but the hands were too strong. Before Erin knew it, she’d been hauled inside the trailer.

Back up at the Hewitt house, blind screaming madness was in the air.

Andy, Kemper, Morgan—they were all there, locked inside and broken into tiny pieces. They’d been restrained, held against their will, smothered by the raw flesh of dying meat and ridiculed.

Upstairs, downstairs, the basement; all the rooms echoed with laughter. Anger, rage, humiliation and excitement—slicing through the foundations of the house like a razor—constantly defying meaning, destroying fellowship and turning the three little bastards from the van into meat puppets.

As soon as Leatherface brought those two bitches home, the whole family could settle down for the evening. Then they could really have some fun.

There were bloodstains on the white sheets hung to dry outside.

Footsteps thundered on the floorboards of the house, slamming the doors and shouting in deep Texan voices.

Blood on white sheets.

Blind screaming madness.

Erin was kicking and punching. She thought she’d fought free of the hands, when in reality—and unbeknown to her—they’d simply let her go.

The woman who’d helped Erin into the trailer was in her forties and she was huge. She wore a basic sleeveless dress that hung over her elephantine frame like a floral sack. Although her brown wavy hair was long and thick, it sat like a bad toupee on top of her enormous head, her jowls so fat that her chin seemed to run straight down to her breasts with no gap in between.

However, despite her considerable weight, the woman did take pride in her appearance. The make-up she wore was fetching and well applied, and her glasses were those feminizing cat’s-eye frames that had been so fashionable ten years ago. Nevertheless, the cramped conditions of the trailer made the woman seem like the proverbial ship inside a bottle.

Suddenly, Erin started to scream. She knew what would happen if they didn’t hurry up and do something. But how could she explain herself? There was no time for talk, but how do you begin to convince someone that there is a psycho out there with a chainsaw and a mask made from her boyfriend’s face. How? HOW? With each passing second, he was getting closer.

Her whole body was shaking. Random words and whimpers began to spill out of her mouth.

Where was he?

Erin ran over to the nearest window and peered through the drapes, but she could only see her own reflection; it was too dark outside. She raised her hands and cupped them over her eyes and forehead to block out the reflection, but she couldn’t see. Quickly, she tried another window—and another—and as she did so, the trailer owner studied Erin with wry amusement.

“Why don’t you have a seat,” she said, pointing to an old armchair. “I’m Henrietta.”

Abruptly Erin stopped and looked at her, at the woman, as if noticing her for the first time. Likewise the trailer.

It looked cozy enough, but it was full of clutter, a lot of it tasteless like the plaster figurine of a classical female nude over on the shelf. The woman also had a lot of photographs, all in frames. Some of the pictures were up on the walls, some were standing on a small table and there were a few on the shelves. The pictures were in cheap frames but they domesticated the place all the same. Henrietta also had a couple of vases, a clock and some ornamental glassware—nothing fancy, mind. And she—

The door was open!

Erin ran over, slammed the door shut and locked it. Then she grabbed hold of the armchair Henrietta had offered her and jammed it up against the aluminum door handle. She didn’t know if the lock or the chair would hold, but she would try anything to keep him out.

Again, she pressed her face close to one of the windows and looked out.

“Please help me,” she begged quietly, finally in control of her voice.

The whistling sound came out of the blue, filling the trailer with shrill piercing insistence. Erin screamed before realizing it was just the whistle of a kettle.

“Turn that thing off!” she shouted. “He’ll hear us!”

Henrietta had no idea who the girl meant, but she hurried off into the tiny kitchenette at the end of the trailer and turned off the gas. Almost immediately, the steam whistle died down and faded into silence.

When Henrietta returned, she found Erin pacing the floor and continuously glancing rapid-fire in all directions—looking at all the windows, the door, waiting, listening and watching. The big woman didn’t seem to know what any of this was about. Erin hadn’t introduced or explained herself but she was clearly in some distress, and Henrietta knew how to fix that. She left the girl to chew the carpet and went back into the kitchenette.

Erin could hear Henrietta moving about, doing something. There was clattering, cutlery, crockery, something moving on a tabletop. Erin wanted the woman to shut up, so that she could concentrate on listening to what was going on outside. Any moment now, and the two of them would be under siege.

A few seconds later and the big woman returned.

“Nothin’ that a good ol’ cup’a tea won’t be able to settle,” she said in smooth tones shot through with Travis County charm.

She had a cup of tea in her hand and held it towards Erin. But the girl didn’t even notice it. Just the same, Henrietta held on to the cup as she dropped her massive girth down into the armchair Erin had placed up against the locked door. The armchair groaned under her weight and pressed even further back.

“So there,” Henrietta soothed. “Nobody is coming through here now.”

Erin knew what she meant. The woman was trying to calm her down, and under normal circumstances the weight of her ample body would have stopped anyone from opening that door. But what the hell would the woman do when she got a chainsaw stuck up her big fat ass? No, Henrietta was reassuring no one, least of all Erin.

The girl took another quick look around the dingy trailer. “I need your phone!”

Henrietta stirred the tea and grimaced.

“Don’t have one,” she declared. “Nothing but hassles is what they are.”

Erin slammed her fist down on the table. “Don’t you get it?” she cried. “He’ll kill us! He’ll kill both of us!”

Henrietta shook her head, “No, he won’t. He knows better than to mess ’round here. Believe me.”

No . . . he . . . won’t?

He knows . . . better than . . . to mess ’round here?

BELIEVE ME?

It took Erin a few seconds to understand what she’d just heard. She couldn’t believe it at first—what the woman seemed to be saying. It was yet another twist of the knife.

“What?” asked Erin. “You know him?”

“Everyone around here knows that poor sweet boy.”

The earth fell away beneath Erin’s feet as she felt herself losing her grip on her mind. This was too much for her. The trailer, Henrietta. It was almost crazy, the matter of fact way she talked about—

Were they talking about the same person?

“Poor sweet . . . WHAT?”

After all the screaming and the running, after all the violence and the chainsaw; this moment of pretend calm, this homely display of madness.

What chance did Erin have any more? What hope? Was she the lunatic and everyone else was sane?

Henrietta smiled dismissively, “Oh, he just looks, well, ‘different’ after everything that happened.”

What was she saying?

What the fuck was she saying?

DIFFERENT?

Erin slumped to the floor in front of the armchair. There was no one to talk to, nowhere to run, no one who could help her, nowhere to hide. No hope.

She pulled her knees up under her chin and sat there, her eyes fixed on the windows, waiting for the poor sweet boy to come in and stuff her body senseless with his chainsaw. It was over. It was all over. She was mentally and physically exhausted. No matter what she did, no matter where she ran, she ended up right back at square one. Chutes and fucking ladders, and the last one to the top gets butchered.

Henrietta carried on talking, almost to herself, oblivious to the sight of the light fading from Erin’s eyes.

“There’s no harm,” she gabbled. “He always keeps to himself. Skin cancer—a real shame. He was so young when it started up, poor thing. Didn’t you look at his face?”

Erin’s jaw sagged open. Her own face was fast becoming expressionless.

“I couldn’t,” she replied. The last time Erin had seen the poor thing’s face, he’d looked just like her boyfriend.

Henrietta mulled this over. Of course the girl hadn’t seen his face; he always wore a mask didn’t he? Well, not always, but certainly since he was a boy.

Henrietta remembered only too clearly, the day the family first made Thomas hide his face. It was only natural because the boy was so pig-ugly. The cancer had messed him up so bad, no one could stand to look at him. And the doctors said his face-rot couldn’t be fixed. Called it genetic like it was somethin’ to do with A-dolf shit-Christ Hitler or somethin’. So his pa made him wear a bag over his head—if he didn’t, he got a damn good beatin’.

Course, the boy had no friends. Didn’t go to school none. The only fun he ever had was when pa gone took him down the slaughterhouse to play with all the animals—well, they didn’t know ugly from shit. He used to bring bits of ’em home, an’ he made stuff with ’em.

His first real mask was made from a pig’s head. An’ it was so funny, his pa nearly shit himself. But Ol’ Monty Hewitt was like that. He had a good sense o’ humor, an’ the stupid little Pig Boy jus’ broke him up.

It was Monty who got Thomas that job at the meat packin’ place—that was b’fore it was modernized and they both got fired. An’ it was about that time that young Thomas took to wearin’ human skin. It was heroic. He had clutched triumph outta adversity, usin’ other people’s faces to fix his own. An’ he could look like whomever he wanted, without spendin’ millions of dollars on plastic surgery.

He tried wearin’ someone’s face to work once, but got into all kindsa trouble. That was ’round the time Ol’ Monty lost his legs. Got into a fight with the boy and Thomas whupped his ass. Took the ol’ bastard’s legs off with a cleaver.

Monty was damn proud that day.

All through his son’s life, Mister Montague Hewitt had worked hard to make sure his ugly little shit grew up to be a man. It was important for their economy. The Hewitts had worked in meat for generations an’ there was no reason to stop jus’ ’cause they’d been thrown outta the slaughterhouse by some pencil-neck prick. They had a livin’ to make but Ol’ Monty couldn’t go on killin’ passersby forever. He was gettin’ too old. He needed his son to take over.

And that’s why Monty was so worried that the skin trouble might have turned his son into a Freak Boy or some kinda skincare faggot. It was only when the boy spat in the ol’ man’s face and took away his legs that Monty knew his son’d grow up jus’ fine. Thomas was gonna be jus’ like his pa.

Now, Thomas was practically head of the household. Sure, Ma and Pa were still fightin’ an’ cussin’ all the time, an’ sayin’ what’s what—and they didn’t think twice about comin’ at Thomas with a knife or somethin’—but the boy was the heart an’ soul of the place. No doubt about it.

They’d all be up shit creek if it weren’t for Thomas.

Henrietta got out of the armchair and reached a hand down to Erin’s forehead; not to check the girl’s temperature, but to gently yet firmly, hold the girl’s head in place. And the woman still held the teacup in her other hand.

Erin didn’t respond. She was too far gone, unable to think her way through this never-ending escalation of horror. She didn’t want to know any more. She didn’t give a damn.

Henrietta looked down at the steaming cup of tea.

“Just right,” she said, then she raised the brim up to Erin’s lips, coaxing the girl to take a sip. Erin did so, finding the tea both strong and sweet. Then she took another sip and another.

Slowly, Henrietta passed the cup over into the girl’s hands, then stood and watched over her.

Erin lifted the cup and tried to drink, but she was shaking so bad that she was in danger of pouring the tea all over the floor—some of the brew had already spilled down the side of the cup.

“Drink up b’fore it gets cold,” urged Henrietta.

In all truth, Erin didn’t realize just how thirsty she’d become, and the hot, soothing tea was actually doing something to raise her spirits again. All the same, she was in no rush to swallow anything Henrietta had given her. Erin didn’t know just how involved the woman was in all this. But at least she was beginning to understand why that maniac still hadn’t broken in through the trailer door.

Henrietta saw the girl’s hesitation.

“Come now,” she said. “You must be awful thirsty. I promise, it’ll make you feel better.”

Erin brought the cup right up to her mouth and gulped. Then she lowered the drink and wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

“You have no idea—” she began falteringly.

“Now honey,” the woman cut in, sitting back down in her armchair. “I know that you’ve had quite a shock. Hush now.”

Henrietta seemed about to smother Erin in a wave of reassuring platitudes, when suddenly a voice cried out from the next room. Erin was shocked to hear it was the voice of a crying baby!

“Now see what you’ve done!” chided Henrietta. Quickly she got up out of the chair again and bustled along back into the kitchenette area. A stack of unwashed dishes was cluttering up the sink and the small plastic trashcan in the corner was overfull, spilling garbage onto the floor.

Henrietta opened the refrigerator.

“My, oh my, oh my,” she chimed, hearing the baby’s hungry little cries.

She’d be with him in a moment. First, she had to prepare some scrumptious baby food.

The shelves of the refrigerator were filled mostly with the rotting leftovers of previous unfinished meals, while the few unopened provisions were mainly processed and convenience foods. Henrietta looked up at the top shelf where eight cans of baked beans stood neatly in two columns of three and one column of two. She took one of the cans off the shelf and then closed the fridge door.

Next, she tried to find a can opener. It wasn’t easy hunting one down in all the clutter and dirty dishes; she kept meaning to buy one of those new ones you stick on the wall—that way, she wouldn’t keep losing it. Maybe Leatherface could keep an eye out for one. Folk packed the strangest things on journeys these days.

Henrietta couldn’t remember who first called Thomas, “Leatherface.” She couldn’t remember when either. She only knew he didn’t particularly care much for it.

Hurrying herself along, she looked through into the adjacent room where Erin was still holding the teacup in both hands.

“Drink up,” she called. “It’ll help you relax.”

Then she continued her search for a can opener, eventually finding one underneath the pages of an old newspaper. Humming cheerily to herself and all too aware of the crying baby, Henrietta expertly opened the can and tossed the lid aside.

The serrated circle of galvanized tin fell to the floor where it was sucked to a dead stop by the underside layer of cold tomato sauce.

Now she needed something to feed the baby with.

She put the can opener down on top of the portable TV—where she’d remember it—and went searching for a spoon. She found one in the sink. Other than a bit of old cat food, it was meticulously clean.

Can and spoon at the ready, Henrietta flounced her big body back to where Erin was sitting on the floor. There, she opened a thin chipboard door that led to an adjacent room—probably the bedroom.

“I’ll be right back,” she announced cheerily, then she went on through and closed the door behind her.

Erin was still having trouble making sense of all this. It was the calm after the storm. He’d chased her all the way here only to do nothing. Was he out there? Was he sitting outside, waiting for her to come out? Was the crazy fat bitch telling her the truth when she said she was safe here? And just who was Henrietta?

It was insane the way the woman just went about her business, making cups of tea, chatting merrily as if Erin was a houseguest on a perfectly normal day. That’s not how this thing was meant to play out. Erin was supposed to have been screaming for help, Henrietta should have panicked and that goddamn frigging psychopath should have broken in and killed them both. Or scared them off, so that they could run away and meet who? Another lunatic?

Whatever the answer, Erin had to admit she was grateful for the break. Okay, she was probably still in deep shit. Okay, they were probably still gonna try to kill her. But at least just for now, if only for a moment, she could collect her thoughts and catch her breath. And if it all turned out to be some big game, some sadistic joke at her expense—and they killed her the moment she walked out the door—what the hell could she do about it?

On the positive side, if they really were as crazy as she thought, Erin might just be able to play them off against one another, or maybe slip through the disjointed cracks of their net. She just had to stay sharp, keep her wits about her and wait for the right moment. Hard to believe that only a few moments ago Erin was almost ready to give up. Yet now, if anything, she seemed strangely calm, almost relaxed. Almost too relaxed.

She began to get up off the floor but sat straight back down again. She’d got up too quickly and became dizzy.

Slowly, carefully, she tried again and had another dizzy spell. Only this time she rode it out and stayed up on her feet. But there was definitely something wrong; her head felt groggy and the room was turning.

Was it just tiredness or had Henrietta—

Erin looked at the teacup in her hands; it was still three-quarters full.

She felt her brow—seemed okay, just a little damp. But she had to concentrate as she walked, step by uncertain step, into the untidy kitchen area with its permanent odor of bacon grease.

The door to the bedroom was still closed, so Erin was completely alone as she staggered awkwardly over to the sink and poured the rest of her tea away. The brew cascaded down a stack of dirty plates like the water in a Venetian fountain before trickling off down the drain.

She turned and looked around the room. It was small, very small, and the electric lamps didn’t seem to be making much difference when it came to brightening things. But then kitchens were meant to be functional, not warm and snug. Kitchens were where meals were made, where millions of dismembered animal corpses were cut up and cooked, each and every hour of the day.

Some framed photos stood propped against the wall on the small kitchen table. Erin bent down to take a closer look at them. There were three of them—family photos taken a long time ago.

One showed Henrietta posing for the camera with a little boy in front of a Christmas tree. The boy couldn’t have been more than four years-old. Erin couldn’t tell when the picture was taken, but Henrietta looked a lot younger, if just as fat as she was now. The woman’s dress sense hadn’t changed much either.

A second photo was of the boy on his own. He was a few years older than in the Christmas scene, and he was sitting on a wooden rocking horse. Erin frowned; the boy had purple blotches all over the skin of his face.

Finally, the third photo—Jesus!

Erin stood up and recoiled in shock. Her stomach was in her mouth and her head was spinning again.

The photo.

Henrietta was hugging the same boy only he was a teenager, and his face—

Erin had stood up too fast.

The whole room was spinning, alive with the grotesque disfigurement of the teenager’s face, preserved for all time by the photographer’s lens. The image had caught Erin so totally by surprise that she felt as if she’d been punched straight in the gut. He looked so awful, ugly, so horribly deformed—the lovely smile of the Christmas kid destroyed by facial sickness.

She grabbed hold of her head to stop the dizziness and prepared to steel her nerves for another look at the photo, when she was startled by the sudden ringing of the phone.

The phone?

Erin spun on her heels and lurched drunkenly back into the living room. It was a phone—she’d definitely heard a phone.

The door leading out of the trailer was still locked—the armchair firmly up against it—but Erin wasn’t interested at all in leaving right now. Instead, she walked across to the closed door opposite the exit, the door that Henrietta had disappeared into.

Erin pressed her muggy head up against the veneered chipboard and listened through. She could hear Henrietta’s muffled voice.

No doubt about it: Henrietta was talking to someone and it wasn’t the baby.

Erin pushed the door open and burst into the bedroom. She was feeling increasingly shaky on her feet, but she still had enough sense to see that Henrietta was speaking into a damned phone!

The obese trailer trash was sitting on the bed.

She had a baby girl on her knees and a cigarette in her mouth. As she held the phone in the crook of her neck, she spoon-fed the baby a messy mouthful of cold baked beans, straight from the can.

Henrietta looked up and saw the anger and confusion on Erin’s ghostly white face.

“I better go now,” she said to whoever was on the other end of the line, and then she hung up.

Erin stared at the baby. The tiny girl was adorable: blonde hair, smooth white skin and the most perfect face. The sight of her bouncing up and down in her soft rabbit pajamas sent powerful waves of emotion sweeping through Erin’s body. The child’s innocence and playfulness were completely out of place, they seemed so wrong here. And there was something else . . .

“You okay,” asked Henrietta, glowing with motherly pride. “You don’t look so good.”

Suddenly Erin remembered why she’d charged in here. She motioned to the phone.

“I thought . . . you said you didn’t have one.”

Henrietta sniffed, blew one last puff of smoke into the baby’s face and stubbed the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray lying on the bed. But she said nothing. And the phone was plain to see. It was there, right beside her on the bed stand.

“What the hell’s going on?” Erin demanded, but suddenly she was feeling very weak and her legs started to buckle beneath her. She stomped, putting a foot behind her to try and prevent her knees from giving way.

“C’mere and lie down,” said Henrietta, patting a space on the bed cover. “B’fore you faint dead away.”

Erin gripped the side of the open doorway. She could barely stand upright.

What the hell was happening to her? Where was the guy with the chainsaw? Why hadn’t he attacked her yet? The photos.

Her head was spinning.

Henrietta was with him in the photos. That was him—the maniac as a child. No, not those photos.

Her memory struggled to tell her something, something important.

The other photos. The baby. The baby right here in the trailer, not the baby in the Christmas photo—the baby in the Polaroid, THE BABY IN THE POLAROID!

Suddenly it was clear.

That’s what had been niggling her about the baby—

She’d seen it before!

Henrietta’s baby was wearing the same pajamas as the baby in the Polaroid they’d found at the automobile graveyard. Morgan had picked up that jar from inside the smashed-up Californian station wagon, and he’d found two Polaroids suspended in amber fluid. One of the pictures was a portrait of the girl who’d shot herself, but the other was a picture of the dead girl’s family. The baby in the family photo and the baby here in the trailer were one and the damned same!

Which meant Henrietta’s baby was the suicide girl’s younger sister.

Jesus Christ!

Erin fought hard to remember everything she saw on that Polaroid. She had to understand. There was more. There were the parents, the teenage girl, the baby and someone else. Yes, there was a young boy and he wore a Felix the Cat T-shirt . . . just like . . . Oh my God . . . just like Jedidiah.

The family! The whole fucking family!

Erin began to cry, her tears an uncontrollable expression of sorrow fused with anger.

Just as her own day had been an unbelievable string of terrifying events, another story now started to unfold within her mind—a story about a family heading for California, who took a wrong turn in Travis County, Texas. A story about a mother and father, savagely murdered. And about their daughter, driven insane with fear but able to escape her captors before taking her own life with a revolver.

A story about their eldest son, stranded in the wilderness, surviving as best he could in a decrepit abandoned mill, adapting to whatever fate threw at him. And a story about their youngest daughter, a baby fostered by a lying fat maniac bitch—a baby who would never know her real family.

The whole damn bastard story was becoming clear to Erin and with it came one final unbearable revelation.

Jedidiah’s constant fascination with the dead teenage girl—it wasn’t morbid curiosity. She was his sister. They’d driven up there to Crawford Mill with her dead body in the back.

And—

Oh no.

The teenage girl had panicked because she’d seen that sign by the side of the road:

DRIVE SLOW, SEE OUR CITY
DRIVE FAST, SEE OUR SHERIFF

She’d panicked because she’d seen the sign before and she knew where it would take them. So she’d run forward and tried to force Kemper to turn around, but Andy had overpowered her, and Erin had tried to calm her down. And that’s why she’d killed herself. Because they’d ignored her. They didn’t listen to what she’d tried to tell them. So she blew her own brains out rather than risk being caught by that face-cutting freak again.

Erin could still hear the gunshot.

They’d killed the girl.

They’d ignored her.

But maybe—please God—maybe there was a way Erin could undo some of the harm. That poor little baby could not be allowed to grow up among these crazy bastards.

Still holding on to the doorframe, Erin lifted her head and glared at Henrietta.

“That . . . is not . . . your . . . CHILD!”

Fear spat across Henrietta’s piggish eyes, the bright eye shadow doing nothing to lift them from the bulbous wall of fat that was her face.

“She’s mine!” she shouted, clutching the baby tight to her breast.

The can of beans fell to the floor, spilling onto the carpet.

“YOU STOLE HER!” screamed Erin.

She took a step forward and reached out to snatch the baby, when everything suddenly moved. The floor tilted and rocked beneath her feet, while the walls of the trailer rippled and revolved, expanding out of all proportion.

* * *

“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” Erin fell to the floor as the drug took hold.

She looked up.

Henrietta had relaxed her grip on the baby, but was still carrying the little girl as she stared down at Erin sprawled across the bedroom floor.

“Everything’s going to be fine real soon,” said Henrietta sweetly. “I promise.”

Then she shifted her flabby, round head out of the way, unblocking a view up to the skylight.

Though there was a bright lamp in the bedroom, Erin could see up through the clear hatch, right up to the stars. And now she knew she’d been drugged because the stars all seemed to be moving.

A moment later and Erin was fast asleep, knocked out cold.

But the stars continued moving.

Outside, the trailer had been hitched up to a truck and the whole damned thing was on the move, rolling and bumping along the unpaved moonlit trail.

THIRTEEN

She was the last.

Kemper had vanished. He’d gone with her up to the farmhouse and just disappeared. When she saw him again, it was a few hours later in the horrifying form of a death mask.

Andy had also been lost up at the Hewitt place. Erin couldn’t be sure, but she thought she’d heard him get cut up by the chainsaw—either way, he never came back.

Pepper, she’d seen for herself. She saw how that bastard churned up her insides and wore them like freaking body lotion.

Only Morgan had got away, and he’d been arrested, which was kinda ironic.

Which just left Erin.

And even she had no idea how truly alone she was.

Liquid was splashing down onto her face. It was lukewarm and it stung her eyes. Some of it burned the tiny cuts on her lips, and surged forward into her mouth, causing her to choke. She coughed and began to heave up from the abyss of a deep sleep, shocked awake by the fluid poured all over her.

She was lying on her back.

And then there was the light. At first it hurt her eyes, so she blinked and raised her hands to shield them. But someone kept knocking her arms away, making sure that her head got thoroughly soaked.

Gradually, she began to see that she was staring up at a large rotating fan, set in the middle of a water-stained ceiling high above. She couldn’t feel any draft from the fan, only the damned splashing liquid.

She spat some of the liquid back out, and tried to move her head out of the way. It was killing her eyes, and it stank. It was bourbon. Someone was pouring liquor all over her face, and suddenly the memories of the day came rushing back, depriving her of the reassuring ignorance of sleep. Almost immediately, she knew she wasn’t in the trailer any more. The ceiling was too high and—

Jedidiah’s face popped into view.

“She’s alive,” he called out, a wide smile on his face. “Grandma, she’s alive!”

The boy was pushed aside and suddenly Erin’s view was full of Sheriff Hoyt, laughing and pouring bourbon all over her face.

She cried out.

“Give her some room,” said a voice from somewhere off to the side. It was a voice Erin recognized—a grating, old woman’s voice.

The sheriff sneered and spilled one last dash of stinging booze into Erin’s left eye before stepping away.

Erin struggled to make sense of it all.

Where the hell was she? What was the boy doing here? And why was the sheriff—

Her fear knew all the answers even before she did. Erin barely had time to articulate even a fraction of all the questions running through her brain, when suddenly she knew where she was.

No longer under the influence of the drug put in her tea by Henrietta, Erin nevertheless felt dazed and confused as she sat up and looked all around the living room of the Hewitt house.

They were all here, all of them, the whole damn town.

Jedidiah stood to the side and watched her excitedly. He was holding the baby from the trailer—and so he should; it was his little sister. But what the hell were they both doing here? Had Jedidiah hooked up with these crazy bastards? Didn’t he care that they killed his parents?

Then she saw the sheriff. Sheriff fucking Hoyt. The sadistic backwater cop was a cliché in his own uniform.

At least Erin now understood how the Hewitts had been getting away with it all for so long. There was no way they could have hidden all those wrecked cars out in that clearing all these years without at least someone becoming suspicious. And all the reports of missing people that must have come through here? Hoyt probably wiped his ass on them.

Henrietta was nowhere around, but the fact that the baby was here meant she must be someplace nearby.

And finally that voice. The voice that had told the sheriff to give Erin some room . . .

Erin turned round and saw Luda May sitting across the room from her in an armchair. Almost the last piece of the jigsaw. Suddenly Erin understood the game they’d all been playing.

From the moment Luda May had sent the van up to Crawford Mill, Erin and her friends had been delayed, confused, separated and slaughtered. In a couple of days, the little witch would be selling their clothes, luggage and their fucking auto parts down at the store. The ruthless old bitch.

Just beyond Luda May’s chair was an open doorway into another room. There was a TV on and she could see Old Monty watching it. The show had a laugh track but Monty looked as miserable as sin. He reached down and scratched his nuts, parting his knee-stump thighs to make sure he got his fingers in the crevice good and proper.

Suddenly she tensed. Where was—?

One person was still missing, the freak Erin hoped never to see again in her life. Where was he? And why had Henrietta brought her here? What did they want?

Dumb question. Erin knew what they wanted; they wanted her dead. Only they had no intention of getting it over with quickly. If they simply wanted to kill her, they could easily have slit her throat or shot her while she was drugged. But no, that was too quick for them, too clean.

From what she’d seen so far, the way it had all been drawn out, these hillbilly bastards got off on fear and intimidation. It wasn’t just about meat or death; it was also about abuse and the sheer extremities of gratuitous terror.

Erin wiped her face and blew her nose, trying to clear away the liquor. She could see the sheriff watching her, eyeing her, checking her over.

Morgan!

If the sheriff was here, where was Morgan?

The last Erin had seen of her friend was when the sheriff had arrested and taken him away in the squad car. Was Morgan here as well? And would she ever find out what had happened to Andy and Kemp—

Kemper.

Oh God, the face . . .

He’d been wearing Kemper’s face while butchering Pepper’s remains.

Suddenly, Erin was shaking. Snot dripped over her lips and tears began to fill her eyes. She looked across at Luda May but the old woman stared right back at her like she was nothing more than a bobcat turd.

And yet when Luda May had told Hoyt to move away from Erin, the broad-necked sheriff had done so, almost as if the old woman was in charge. Maybe Erin could . . .

“Please let me go,” the girl begged. “I’m pregnant.”

Perhaps she could connect with Luda May in some way—woman to woman. Maybe she could get her to feel some sympathy, or anything.

But the old woman was having none of it.

“I know you and your kind,” she spat. “You never had nothing but cruelty and ridicule for our son, and even here you don’t leave him alone.” She raised a gnarled fist and began to pound on her own sternum. “Does anybody around here care about me and my son? Huh?”

Her son?

That was it!

They were all family.

Old Monty and Luda May were man and wife, Mister and Missus Hewitt and the sideshow killer was their son. Which could have made Henrietta their daughter—Erin remembered seeing the photographs of Henrietta standing with the boy before and after his debilitating facial condition. Erin wasn’t sure where Sheriff Hoyt belonged, but she was sure of one thing.

There was no way on God’s good earth that either Henrietta or her psychopathic freak of a brother was ever going to have a family. So if nothing else ever happened to these bastards, they’d at least die of old age and take their sick mental disease with them.

“Please, Grandma,” called Jedidiah. “She’s got a baby inside her.”

The boy was actually trying to help, but what he said almost tore Erin apart. Suddenly she realized that Jedidiah and the baby were the future of the Hewitt family. They’d raise the kids up to be as perverted and evil as them. They’d probably even get Jedidiah to fuck his younger sister, just to make sure there’d be more little Hewitts on the way.

Still sitting on the floor, Erin looked pleadingly at the boy and she began to cry hard. Partly she was crying for herself, and partly she was crying for what Jedidiah was going to become. Even his name. What Californian kid would choose such an old-fashioned bible-thumping name? Somehow this madness had to end.

Jedidiah watched her sob, but there was no expression on his face other than enthusiasm for Erin’s pregnancy.

“What if it’s a boy,” he said out loud. “I could have me a brother.”

Erin sank, her head drooping to see that Jedidiah was wearing mismatched shoes. The left shoe in particular was way too large for his foot because it came from Andy.

“You just forget about that right quick,” Luda May warned the boy.

The chilling implication was obvious. Erin’s pregnancy was never going to happen. Both the girl and the baby were going to be terminated—the old fashioned way.

Jedidiah bawled and then ran crying out of the room. But Erin only had eyes for the left shoe, the one he’d stolen from Andy.

Everyone she’d spoken to, everything she’d seen and heard, everywhere she’d looked all day long, Erin had been staring into the dripping sores of madness.

The commotion was getting to him. TOO MUCH had been happening around the house these last few days!

He shuffled about the room in tight disordered circles, his breath ruffled and distorted by the loose skin flaps of Kemper’s lips. His bedroom was next door to the living room and he could hear them all TALKING AND SHOUTING through the wall because it was cracked.

He was cracked and he wanted it to stop. He had things to do and he wanted to do them to the girl.

He placed an eye up to a small, crumbling hole in the wall and panted AT ERIN in the living room.

Erin didn’t know what they wanted from her.

Luda May just stared while the sheriff started to grab at her and shove her around. She didn’t dare move or get up; she just sat there on the living room floor with her legs stretched out in front of her. But it was getting too much.

The insanity of it all, the unbearable tension, waiting for the moment when the whole situation would turn on the head of a pin; constantly skating close to the edge of violence that was sure to happen. Finally, she snapped.

“What’s wrong with you fucking people?” she cried, she just couldn’t take it any more.

Sheriff Hoyt just sniggered but Luda May shook her head disapprovingly. Those kids had shown they got no manners down at the store, but if they thought they could bring their dirty mouths into her own home, then she’d have to teach them otherwise.

“Tommy!” she called. “Thomas Brown Hewitt! Come here, now!”

Erin wept. There was only one person Thomas Brown Hewitt could be. One person.

No.

The footsteps came from just down the hallway. They were heavy, loud and forceful, making the floorboards creak under the strain. Yet the steps were also fast and irregular, almost as if the person wasn’t walking but having some kind of orgasmic fit.

He was almost inside the room. Erin could hear his breathing now, but she didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see that mask made from Kemper’s face. She didn’t want to touch his bloodstained leather apron.

She didn’t want to be smothered by his rippling, murderous fat. She didn’t want those hands to touch her breasts. She didn’t want the smell or the rotting teeth, and, oh God, she didn’t want him to kill her.

Leatherface hurled his massive quivering frame in through the open doorway and stamped his feet all around the young woman crying on the floor.

Luda May got up and pushed the ugly bastard right at Erin.

“Get her out of my sight,” she said disgustedly, and then the dam broke.

His hands were suddenly all over her, grabbing, pulling, tugging and gripping. She could feel his rank breath on her face and she could have died each time she heard him rant and squeal from inside Kemper’s face.

His thumb accidentally caught her in the eye, jabbing her with a long, dirty nail caked in corpse shit. Just like Kemper, Andy, and many others before her, Erin found there was nothing at all she could do to stop Leatherface misusing her.

Despite all her kicking, punching and screaming, he dragged her out of the living room like an old sack of potatoes—and the full horror of her ordeal returned to her. No longer could she pretend that it wasn’t real. She couldn’t hide in Henrietta’s trailer and somehow think that all the rules had changed. It was just like it was before, when she came here with Andy and when the industrial sliding door had first fired open.

Henrietta had talked about Leatherface like he was some kind of victim, and Luda May seemed to treat him like a no-good layabout son, but Thomas Brown Hewitt was screaming . . . fucking . . . terror.

“No!” wailed Erin, but she was wasting her stupid breath.

Soon she was out in the main hallway, going right past the bathroom where the old cripple had faked his fall, past the weird kitchen with its hanging strips of meat and down towards—no—the sliding metal door.

The door was already half open, revealing the sickly green light from within.

Erin screamed and tried to dig her heels into the ground, but the wooden floor was too well polished, and for a moment she was sliding in the grip of the maniac. But suddenly he shrieked—showering her face with spit—and slammed her up against the wall, pressing his body against hers, his apron of dried human skin scraping her bare arms and shoulders.

She could feel tremors of excitement shaking through his fat as he crushed his twitching mass against her, screaming full on in her face before finally picking her up and hauling her right across his shoulders.

She was helpless, her back on his back, as he bulldozed down the hall and lugged her flailing limbs through the sliding door. She had no idea where he was taking her. When Leatherface stood at the top of the basement stairs and threw her over his head, down the long staircase, she couldn’t even guess what was about to happen to her.

At first she was falling through midair, but when she finally hit the steps, the impact knocked all the wind out of her and suddenly her bones were crashing against wood and concrete in a whirlwind of uncontrolled descent.

As she fell, her head cracked against the wall, leaving behind a mat of bloody hair and it seemed as if something in her body would break at any moment. But when she finally crashed into the water-covered floor of the basement, she was amazed to find herself conscious and in one piece. And terrified.

Ignoring the pains erupting all over her body, she rolled over onto her back, got up on all fours and moved, crab-like, away from the foot of the stairs. She splashed backwards through the filthy water, not knowing if he was going to be coming down after or not.

For the moment, adrenaline was masking the agony of her fall. She didn’t seem to have broken any bones, but she was coming up in bruises, and she’d definitely damaged some muscles.

Suddenly the whole house shook with a colossal booming of metal. It was a sound she’d heard before—when she’d been trapped in the bathroom with Old Monty. She’d heard that same loud crash and had known something had gone wrong with Kemper. So she’d gone looking for him only to draw a blank . . . right outside the sliding door!

Crying with panic, she struggled to her feet and staggered over to the bottom of the stairs. She looked up. Hewitt wasn’t there, but the metal door had been closed—and that’s what she’d heard.

Hard to believe it had been only a few hours ago. But that must have been when the Hewitts had taken Kemper. While Monty had kept her tied up in the bathroom, his son—Leatherfuck—must have gone out and killed Kemper. The murderous freak was probably bringing her boyfriend down here to the basement when she’d heard the door slam.

Erin cried.

Ankle deep in shit water, she cried.

Time passed.

Erin dried her eyes and began to feel just how banged up she was by the fall, though she was lucky not to have a broken neck. She could easily have died the way he just threw her over his shoulder like that—the bastard.

Her clothes were soaking wet from the foul-smelling water on the floor and she was bleeding, tired, and in shock.

They’d locked her in the cellar of the Hewitt house and, if she was right about the sound of the metal door, then Kemper was down here as well. But Hewitt had skinned her boyfriend’s face, so if Kemper was somewhere in the basement, what condition would he be in? How could he be the father of her child if he hadn’t got a face? Would he have to wear . . . a mask?

Now, like Andy and Kemper before her, Erin took her first good look at the ramshackle deprivation of the slaughterhouse basement.

It was dark. There seemed to be a flickering light—a fire—just round the corner, but most of the place was bathed in shadow. And there was so much insane clutter strewn all over the place that Erin found it hard to take any of it in.

She closed her eyes, pushed her long hair back behind her ears, and tried to relax. She needed to pull herself together if she was going to search this place. She had to be ready for anything she might find, anything.

When she opened her eyes again, the first thing she noticed was how much stuff was up off the ground: pipes, chains, hooks, pulleys, shelves with jars and tools of all kinds.

The second thing that hit her was the smell—and she vomited, her puke splashing into the water around her feet, washing up against her calves. She raised a forearm up to her nose, but couldn’t block it out. It smelt as if someone had taken a month-old dead cow and drowned it in its own putrescent shit. But all Erin could do was get used to it.

She thought she was going to puke a second time but she hadn’t eaten all day, so all she did was spasm, racking her already bruised and battered rib cage.

A minute or two passed before she got it under control and then she slowly stepped deeper into the basement.

Up, down, left, right—her eyes flinched at the realization that she had just walked into an unholy butcher shop with strips of flesh, meat, bones, blood and organs. The soiled butcher block, crushed viscera and sweet dripping blood with needle and thread lying by the cleaver and knives—so many razor-sharp knives—the needle again, attached to a length of fishing line. And the floor was awash with blood.

She couldn’t go on. She didn’t want to know.

There were buckets of blood standing on the floor and nearby were sets of slaughter irons and meat hooks and bone scrapers and chopping blades, covered in rust and stained with decades of murder. Lying on a rack were a series of precision blades: scalpels, delicate surgical bone saws, cold steel probes. There was nothing in this godforsaken pit that spoke of painless death.

The basement squatted like a cancer at the heart of the Hewitt house and every damned square inch of the place was a physical expression of the sick ingenuity at the core of Thomas Hewitt’s depravity.

Erin stared with utter disbelief at a length of human intestine wrapped around the head of a sledgehammer and realized she may already be looking at what was left of her dead partner. It must have been Hewitt who had made all those revolting things they’d found back at the mill.

She shuddered and drew her hands in close against her aching body. She didn’t want to touch a single revolting thing, not even by accident. The basement had already cut a bleeding scar deep into her memory and she was convinced that the entire nightmarish day was affecting her mind. How else could she function down here in this dejected murder hole?

A gentle noise came from somewhere over to her left. Afraid, Erin crept round to see a rumbling fire burning in a cast iron grate. There was a cauldron suspended over the flames and above the cauldron hung some torn strips of meat nailed into a wooden beam.

Melted fat ran down the pieces of dead flesh and collected in the sizzling pot, the whole thing oozing with meat grease and stinking like an infected pig. Despite the heat of the fire, Erin shivered. In fact, she hadn’t been able to keep her hands still since she woke up in the Hewitt living room.

And now she could hear another sound emanating from somewhere behind her. Faint. Bizarrely like a piano tapping notes, repetitive, tuneless and discordant. Almost like the unstructured practice notes of a brain-damaged child.

It was a piano!

Erin turned to see where the sound was coming from.

“Oh my God.”

It was Andy. She wept uncontrollably—her hair, body and clothes already soaked and lank from having earlier crawled along the wet basement floor.

Her first thought was that he’d been crucified. He was hanging up in the air, his intact left leg dangling some three or four feet up above the ground. His shoulders seemed to be resting against a thick old pipe that ran just below the ceiling of the room, and his arms were fully outstretched, making it seem as if his hands had been nailed to the pipe.

But as Erin took a horrified step nearer her tortured friend, she realized—oh God, she realized—that he was hanging from a meat hook buried deep within his back. He’d pulled his arms back and rested them on the pipe in a desperate effort to try and take some of the weight, to relieve his agony.

And then, in the flickering light of the fire, Erin registered the condition of Andy’s left leg. His right leg was fine, though strangely bare foot. Suddenly she remembered seeing Jedidiah wearing the left shoe, and the shoes for sale at Luda May’s.

But his left leg—dear Christ—his left leg had been cut off below the knee and someone had taken the trouble to wrap the butchered stump in brown paper and twine, to staunch the bleeding. Which didn’t make any sense to Erin. Why bother to stop the bleeding, unless . . .

Andy’s right foot twitched and she heard another melodic note.

He was hanging over an old busted-up piano, the white keys thick with deep red blood, the black keys even blacker in the darkness of the basement. Each time his foot jerked spasmodically, he hit another note. Larger, heavier drops of blood and internal fluid also managed to get a sound from the delicate, light keys.

Erin was hearing the young man’s death march. Not the tune played at his funeral, but the threnody that was a personal orchestration of his actual death, notes performed in the very act of his dying. It was a hollow, edgy song for the murderers to dance to.

But was the movement of his foot a nervous reflex or . . .

His eyes opened, not by much, but they opened.

The boy had been hanging there on the meat hook for hours, and yet he was still alive. She could not begin to comprehend how he felt, the poor, poor bastard.

“Andy—”

He stared down at her. His eyes were vapid, filmy and almost unable to see. They were the sharpest measure of the dwindling life force that remained within him, but he had seen her.

Erin could barely bring herself to look at him. It broke her heart. She’d known they must have got him, and part of her had wanted to know for sure what had happened to him, but she couldn’t bear to see her friend like this. She couldn’t bear to see anyone like this, except maybe those Hewitt bastards.

Andy tried to talk, but nothing came out save for a slight hiss of coagulated breath. All she could hear was the faint plinking of the piano. She wanted it to stop.

Seizing her courage, Erin hurried forward and grabbed hold of Andy’s good leg in both her hands. Then she braced herself and lifted him up, hoping to help get him off the hook.

She didn’t know how badly injured he was—the boy looked pretty far-gone—but she had to do something. Even if they couldn’t get out of this place, at least she could try to relieve his pain, or give him some dignity.

But the truth of the matter was that Erin was thinking more and more about escape. It wasn’t a rational thought. It wasn’t based on any special plan or knowledge. No, her desire to break free was driven by the pure primal passion for revenge. She wanted to do everything she could to get out of there, save her friends, then see the Hewitts burn in Hell.

With each push and strain Erin tried, Andy cried out in pain. He could feel the sharp end of the hook twisting his vertebrae apart, the temperate curved metal scraping new furrows in his guts. He could barely breathe.

She tried again—he screamed.

She twisted—he cried out.

She gave up.

The hook was buried too deep and she just didn’t have the strength. Maybe if she could actually reach the damned thing.

Erin saw a round stool standing next to a workbench. She quickly went to fetch it, and didn’t even pause when she saw that someone had nailed animal bones around the rim of the wooden seat. After what she’d seen today, a few broken bone sculptures really didn’t bother her any more—and that scared the hell out of her. Was she becoming like them?

No.

No fucking way.

She dragged the stool over and managed to get Andy to put his right foot on it; again, the movement made him cry out. But once he was in position, he no longer felt his entire weight depending from the cruel barb gradually ripping upwards through his torso. The relief was immeasurable. Careful not to knock into him, Erin stepped up onto the footrest of the stool and reached up for the hook sticking out of a dark crimson patch in the back of Andy’s gray top. The rusty chain clattered as she took hold of it and slowly began to pull it out.

Almost immediately, the basement echoed with the staccato notching of breaking vertebrae, followed by Andy’s mournful wailing—an understated lowing that bespoke of a suffering most men never have to endure. Erin’s help was killing him.

Quickly she stopped.

Blood was on her hands, but the hook was just as embedded as when she began. It was impossible.

She tried again, but only succeeded in hurting him even more.

Erin had hoped, she’d really hoped, to be able to help him. She thought she could get him down and then work out what they’d do next. But hope had been denied to her. She couldn’t even get the damned hook from out of his back. It was just like the rest of this never-ending nightmare of a day: offer hope and then take it away.

She stepped back off the stool, her face streaked with a mud of dirt and tears.

“I’m sorry,” she cried.

He tried to cough but it hurt too much.

His vision was fading in and out, and his eyelids drooped as he tried once more to speak.

“What?” she asked, leaning closer. “I couldn’t—”

Just like before, she couldn’t hear a thing.

Andy seemed to lose all energy. His chin dropped onto his chest and his whole body went limp. But this was necessary. He had to pause, to muster up enough strength to make sure that the next thing he said did not go unheard.

“Do it,” he whispered.

Sweat dripped from his hair and landed on her bare forearm.

She looked at him, at Andy, her friend, Kemper’s best buddy. She looked at Andy and died inside because she knew what he’d just asked her to do. There was only one thing he could mean.

Do it.

She couldn’t get him down, lift him off the hook or pull the bloody thing out of his back. Which left only one alternative. Erin could relieve his pain and give back some dignity the only way open to her—she could kill him. That’s what he’d asked her to do: kill him.

Her mind went back to that sunny day on her school vacation when she’d found that orange tomcat hit by an automobile. Fine enough for mommy to talk about animal heaven, but the cat wasn’t dead when Erin found it. Half its head had been crushed, but it was still mewing and pawing pleadingly at thin air.

It was her daddy who put the thing out of its misery; he said it was for the best. So the cat had only got to animal heaven because her dad had sent it there.

Tears stung her eyes and she wondered if there were any pets in people heaven.

Erin had no trouble finding what she needed—there were cutting tools scattered everywhere about this death chamber—and, in a moment, she was holding the knife. The blade was long and thin. It ended in a cruel point and was slightly curved to ensure a good sweeping cut across the edge. Both the cracked wooden handle and the knife’s corroded blade were encrusted with dried carnivorous remains, the tangible echoes of a thousand murdered screams.

Erin gripped the knife in both hands and held it up in front of her chest as she walked back to stand directly in front of the impaled victim. Her arms trembled, causing the blade to shake as she raised it above her head. She took a deep breath—

And froze.

“I can’t,” she wept, and she began to lower the blade, unable to do what he’d asked her.

“Erin, please . . .” he croaked.

Desperation ripped his voice apart. He tried to open his eyes to look at her, to implore her. He arched his back, almost as if trying to throw himself forward onto the knife she held before him.

She couldn’t leave him like this. He was her friend but she couldn’t kill him. If she did, how would she be any different from poor sweet little Tommy?

Erin was not a killer, she was human.

And it was her humanity that now had her gritting her teeth and struggling to fight back her tears. It was her compassion that made Erin step back, look away and then rush in towards him. And it was mercy that drove the knife into his chest, the hard blade breaking through the sternum and then pushing smoothly into the vulnerable soft tissue beneath.

Yes, it was love that spilled tears onto Andy’s chest as he died.

Erin stood back and looked long and hard at what she’d just done. She prayed with all her heart that there really was a heaven—no man should end his days in such pain, fear and despair—and she begged God to show mercy for what she had just done. And she wasn’t even religious.

Once the tears had almost subsided, Erin withdrew the knife from Andy’s body. The feel of the blade sliding out through the neat pocket it had made in his moist dead flesh made her feel sick, but she couldn’t leave him like that. She couldn’t just leave him to hang with the knife in his chest.

Erin looked at the blood on her hands.

Had she just deprived Hewitt of another victim, or had she just saved him some time?

She could never know what went on in that bastard aberration of a mind, no matter how far she fell. Andy had begged her. He’d begged.

She thought she hadn’t any tears left in her, but she was wrong.

The basement lay in grim silence all around her, stretching out into corners and alcoves, daring her to look further. Would she find a way out? Would she find a weapon she could use against Leatherface? Or would she discover something else that might quicken her descent into mental oblivion?

Erin looked at the knife in her hand. She knew she couldn’t stop Hewitt that way. He was too big, too powerful and if he used the chainsaw again . . .

She was on the verge of dropping the knife when she heard the sound of someone moaning. Her first thought was that Andy had somehow survived being stabbed, but he couldn’t have. One grudging look at the pallid corpse confirmed this: Andy was dead.

Erin shook her head. Maybe she was hearing things, or perhaps the noise was coming from upstairs.

But then she heard it again, and this time there was no mistake. It was a moan, and it came from around the corner of the room.

There was no doubt that she was hearing more pain. It sounded like a wounded animal. There were no half-words or human qualities to the whimpering at all. It was more like a beaten whine. Nevertheless, Erin couldn’t bear to witness any more scenes of raw brutality. She didn’t care if it was a wild hog—she didn’t want to find any living thing suffering the way Andy had suffered.

And she didn’t want to have to . . .

She couldn’t kill again.

The creature’s moaning was louder now, as if rousing from unconsciousness, and the clearly audible undercurrents of pain and misery in the cries were lamentably familiar—but this did nothing to diminish their horror.

Everything Erin had seen down here led her to think that she was about to find yet another mutilated victim of the Hewitts. She knew that if she went round to see where the cries were coming from she would discover one more repellant denial of freewill, one more barbaric mistreatment of life. And she didn’t know if she could cope.

She was terrified of what she might see and was afraid of being attacked. What if this was all part of the game, to lure her nearer and nearer to her death? For all she knew, there could be more of them, some maniac she hadn’t yet encountered down here waiting for her. Or there could be another way into the basement and Old Monty could be hiding in the darkness, watching her with his fat psycho-spastic son.

But then she heard more whimpering and reached a decision: if she denied the tortured creature her help, then the Hewitts had already won. She couldn’t just walk away. So, clutching the knife for self-defense, Erin crept towards the corner of the room.

Most of what scant light there was in the basement seemed to be coming from here. Fiery shadows flickered on the walls and she could hear the faint crackling and snapping of hot wood and charcoal.

Her feet were still submerged in the cold stinking water but she tried not to splash or make any sound whatsoever. She didn’t want anyone to hear her approach—though once she turned the corner, there was no way she could remain unseen.

The plaintive cries grew louder, more frequent.

Erin took a deep breath, then stepped round into the furnace area.

More horror.

More degradation.

More despair.

Just as with every other part of the basement, Erin found herself looking at a crazed collage of heavy rope, hooks, crisscrossing beams, old dirty clothing, chains, buckets, and butchery tools—all covered in wet blood and shit, as if someone’s bowels had been ripped open then hurled around the room.

There were pails of stuff she couldn’t even begin to guess at—one looked like it was holding three knives, left to stand in a foamy bucket of blood and puke. If there was any kind of logic to this hellhole, Erin couldn’t begin to see it.

The furnace itself was a decorative standing-stove made of cast iron. It threw light into the room and gave off enough heat to make the ambient stench even more pungent and gut wrenching.

Sitting in front of the closed furnace grille was a bathtub. It stood in the middle of the room like a lighthouse in a sea of pulleys, sawtooths and shit. The sides of the bath were coated with the same indefinable body crap as the rest of the room—only more so—and in the bath sat not an animal, but a human being.

Erin’s mistake made her feel guilty, as if somehow she had been responsible for the destruction of this person’s identity. She should have known it was a human making that pathetic noise. She should have known.

The groaning from the figure slumped in the bathtub was strangely muted and the person showed no sign of being aware of Erin’s presence.

For her part, Erin was too frightened to say anything, but she forced herself to step forward to take a closer look. If there was any way she could help, if there was anything she could do, anything except . . .

It looked like a man, though it was hard to tell. There was a large bloody gash in the middle of his back which Erin immediately recognized from the meat hook injury she had seen on Andy. His hands seemed to be tied together, but his face was difficult to make out. They’d left him in a bathtub halfway full of brown murky, bloody water packed with ice cubes.

The bastards were keeping him fresh!

Erin took another step closer. The flickering light of the furnace shone straight at him. His head was pitched forward and he rocked gently side-to-side as he moaned. She was sick of this. Sick of all this hatred.

The man looked up and she screamed.

His face was another skin mask—the very same mask that Leatherface had been wearing before he took Kemper’s face. Only now, the eyes and mouth had been sewn up, leaving more erratic stitches to disfigure the mask’s deathly countenance. The stitches stopped the wearer of the mask from seeing anything other than the decaying eyelids of a dead man, and they also subdued the sounds of his moaning. But the mask was too large for the victim’s head, so it had become a bulbous, puffed-up distortion of a corpse.

“Oh God,” cried Erin, revolted by this further demonstration of obsessive dehumanization.

The man in the bathtub had been forced to wear a face of human skin—a face peeled off the head of a terrified murder victim—a face Hewitt had fondled, played with and sewn tightly into a mask—a face Hewitt had worn over his own cancerous features while he’d butchered Kemper and Andy. The prisoner’s identity was submerged beneath four fibrous layers of mutilation.

Suddenly he bolted upright, flinging his head back and splashing the ice-cold puke-swill over the sides of the tub. His chest billowed as the shock of the freezing water cut into his waking bones. He lashed out with his legs and, when he threw his head to the side, the mask fell off.

Morgan!

He was still wearing the handcuffs Sheriff Hoyt had slapped on him up at the old Crawford Mill. His mouth was swollen and disfigured. His lower jaw was broken. Some of his teeth had been smashed out and his eyes were bulging under the pressure of extreme terror.

Erin hurried forward, “Oh my God . . .”

Morgan wasn’t trapped like Andy had been and it looked like he could move, despite his horrible injuries. But even if he survived this nightmare, what kind of future could Morgan look forward to?

He seemed quite conscious now, but totally lost. At first, he wanted to get up out of the tub. Erin tried to help, neither of them saying a word, but he fell and she slipped screaming back onto the ground beneath a torrent of bloody bath water. She looked up; Morgan was extending his bound hands out towards her like a helpless child.

He was watching the two of them through a hole in the furnace room ceiling. He saw her help him. Saw her—saW—SaW—SAW!

* * *

Morgan stood beside the warm furnace, fighting for clarity of thought. His mind was adrift on a sea of pain, and he even had to struggle to remember who he was. But each second he was growing stronger.

And now there were two of them, Erin had found new hope.

Once she was sure she had gotten through to Morgan, she quickly set about finding somewhere to hide. Given that the basement was full of alcoves, shelves and wooden supports, it should have been easy, but she found nothing.

Erin was pleased to see Morgan come and join her—though the sight of his beaten face was soul destroying—and together they looked for another way out, but again it looked as if they were going to come up empty handed.

The basement shook with the ferocious cyclone impact of the sliding metal door.

They looked at each other in panic. They both knew what that resounding crash meant: it meant death.

“Over here!”

It was a kid’s voice. Jedidiah! But where—

There were heavy footsteps coming down the staircase, and they could hear the pull-starter being yanked . . .

“Hurry!” shouted the boy, and now Erin could see him. His head was poking out from behind an old crate and he was waving to her.

Pull once!

She ran over towards the boy, Morgan close behind her, and now she could see that the crate was concealing a large hole in the wall, leading to a tunnel.

Pull twice!

Jedidiah urged them on as Erin pushed the crate aside and helped Morgan through into the tunnel—his handcuffs were a real problem.

Three times and ROAR! Praise the Lord and pass the gasoline!

Erin could hear Leatherface hurtling down the narrow staircase. He had the chainsaw in his hands and was revving the two-stroke shit out of it.

They were in a passageway made from brick and cinderblock, interspersed with sections of crude wooden panels lashed together with rope. Jedidiah was already way ahead of Erin, his whole body aching for her to catch up.

She didn’t know what to make of the boy. He had survived a brutal attack on his family, but for what? The Hewitts seemed to treat him as if he were one of their own. What if he was? And why should the boy help Erin and Morgan? Just whose side was he on?

Behind her, Leatherface broke into the furnace room and came screeching towards the tunnel.

The chain with the cutting blades turned and turned and turned, breaking the crate up into severed wooden limbs.

Soon Erin was with Morgan and Jedidiah. The small boy flashed her a brief smile, then ran ahead down the underground passage. They could hear the engine of the chainsaw raging in the tunnel behind them—he was coming.

The tunnel ended in a small square room made of concrete—a tornado shelter. There were no lamps in the storm cellar, but seams of moonlight filtered in through the cracks in a wooden hatch above them, casting just enough illumination for Erin to make sense of their surroundings.

A couple of the walls were lined with shelf racks stacked with rows of mason jars, and there were a few boxes of junk scattered on the floor, but no weapon and no way to stop Hewitt coming into the shelter. But then, that was never the plan.

Jedidiah stood at the bottom of a stepladder that climbed up to the hatch and waved for Erin to lead the way.

She ran up the first couple of steps, but the third snapped in two beneath her, making her cry out as her leg dropped straight down. Morgan reached up to steady her, both his hands still linked by the steel handcuffs.

In return, Erin tenderly put an arm around his back and helped him up the ladder with her, and together the two of them made their way up towards the weather-beaten hatch, their ears almost bleeding from the oncoming fury of the chainsaw.

Above ground, one of the storm doors flipped open. Then another. And suddenly they could taste sweet, fresh air. Erin was still only halfway up the stairs but had helped Morgan to climb out ahead of her.

She watched him disappear through the hatch and then turned down to hold a hand out to Jedidiah. But the boy was still standing at the bottom of the steps. He just looked at her, not moving—then Leatherface entered the cellar!

The chainsaw raged like a burning scab inside the close quarters of the bunker.

And still the boy refused to come.

Erin was about to beg Jedidiah to join her, but she’d run out of time. She could see Leatherface without thought or pause making straight for the stepladder. Jedidiah tried to get in his way. He ran straight at the maniac and tried to push him back, but the boy was nothing against the killer and was easily swatted aside by one powerful offal-stained hand.

Clouds of exhaust smoke rose up the steep wooden stairs as Jedidiah crashed into one of the shelves and brought the whole lot down on top of him. Dozens of jars fell forward and broke upon the stone floor, shaking Erin out of her shock at the scene of mindless cruelty she’d just witnessed.

Leatherface had reached the foot of the ladder. He held the chainsaw in one hand, never once disengaging the cutting chain, and screamed at her, howling to be heard through the five horsepower engine.

Erin turned and scrambled up towards the open flat shutters. With only a few creaking steps to go, she reached up and grabbed hold of the sides of the hatch and began to haul herself out. Morgan, grimacing from the agony of the hook wound in his back, bent down and held out his manacled hands to help her, pulling her up.

She was almost outside, when she felt a soft clammy vise close around her left ankle. Leatherface had got her.

“No!” she raged, kicking her legs. But the sweating, dirty clamp wouldn’t let go. And now it was shaking and pulling her down towards the gasoline chain cacophony. Erin knew what would happen to her. He’d do what he’d done to Andy: slice her leg, disable and subdue her, bring her back under his power so that he could dress her up in dead skin and then kill her.

But Morgan wouldn’t let go. He was in agony, Leatherface was much stronger than he was, but he wouldn’t let go of Erin’s hand. And now the cuffs were helping him, supporting his wrists as he locked both his hands around her and pulled. His muscles tensed, and he cried out in pain, yet still he held fast.

Erin was being torn between the two of them, but it was clear who was winning. She was sliding down and Morgan was being dragged ever closer to the lip of the hatch. Her leg was being brought within full dismembering range of the chainsaw. There was only one way this could end, and yet they’d come so close to being free again . . .

“AGGGHHH!”

The cry came from Hewitt, only it wasn’t his usual demented hollering, it was more like the shrill wheezing of a poisoned rat.

Erin looked down and saw Jedidiah’s teeth sunk firmly, deeply, doggedly into the burly fetid hand holding her ankle. The boy had come up to help her. And at last Erin knew: Jedidiah was not family!

Suddenly, the crushing weight pulling on her leg was gone, and she was almost flying up through the open hatch, propelled by this unexpected release of momentum.

Outside, Erin saw just how bright the moon was; the whole area had become a patchwork of silver grass and long black shadow.

Morgan painfully helped her to her feet and then they stepped back and watched to see what was happening.

The chainsaw had fallen silent and neither could they hear any more fighting or voices. Everything within the storm cellar had grown unnaturally and abruptly quiet.

Erin peered down through the hatch and saw Jedidiah emerge from the darkness.

He was smiling. He had Hewitt’s blood on his lips and he stretched out his arms so that they could help him up.

Morgan took the boy’s left arm, Erin took his right, and they began to lift—AS THE CHAINSAW POWERED INTO LIFE AND TORE INTO JEDIDIAH’S BACK.

The tip of the chainsaw broke out through the boy’s stomach, flinging blood and child intestine onto Erin’s face.

Morgan cried out and let go of Jedidiah’s hand.

Erin realized there was nothing they could do for the boy now. She took one last look at Jedidiah’s weeping, agonized face, dripping with blood, then slammed the storm hatch shut. Jedidiah had sacrificed himself for her—and she could never do anything to repay him—but she was determined he wouldn’t die in vain.

Through the closed hatch, they could hear the lifeless ruptured body of Jedidiah fall down the stairs—followed by fast heavy footsteps and the victorious revving of the blood soaked chainsaw.

Morgan had already left Erin behind, but she had no trouble catching up with him. Together they hurried down the grassy ridge away from the farmstead.

There was no point taking the road from the house because Hoyt had the patrol car. Nor was it a good idea to follow the trail back to the mill; the van was out of action and the access road led straight back to Luda May’s. So Erin veered in a different direction and helped guide Morgan towards the cover of some nearby trees. She wasn’t sure where she was headed, but she didn’t care as long as it was away from—

The storm hatch broke open, spewing Leatherface out from the earth. And almost immediately the stillness of the night was raped and butt-fucked by the grinding chainsaw.

Neither of them spoke as they ran through the dark thicket. Morgan wasn’t even sure if he could talk any more; his mouth hurt too much to try.

Leatherface was coming after them.

By now Erin was getting used to charging through woodland. She was used to all the scratches and bruises as she tripped and blindly pushed her way through stuff. Only now, she didn’t give a damn. All she cared about was that she didn’t fall over.

Morgan, on the other hand, was in a bad way. He managed to keep pace, but every footstep sent pain tearing through his body, and he couldn’t help but cry out.

Erin took the lead and tried to knock all the branches and creepers out of her friend’s way. But it was slowing her down, and she could hear the chainsaw getting closer. She didn’t stop to look, but she was sure that Leatherface was howling through the thicket behind her, stomping on all the green shit like he was a little baby retard.

Suddenly they came out of the grove and staggered into a clearing.

Hundreds of stars twinkled on the ground before them, and immediately they knew they were looking at the myriad reflections of the moon on the chrome and broken glass of the automobile graveyard.

And another vehicle had been added to the collection. When the van had come off the factory line, it had been a plain-old production standard Chrysler Dodge A-100 Wagon. But to look at it now.

The van had been toppled and was lying on its side. The wheels had been removed, doubtless for sale at Luda May’s. The roof was a confused tangle of chainsaw gashes. But all this bloody coating would have meant Jack Shit if Kemper hadn’t already been dead.

It struck Erin that every smashed-up car in the clearing was actually a tombstone; each vehicle rested in silent testimony to the butchered and the dead who were just passing through.

Morgan gripped her hand and looked at her imploringly. She couldn’t believe just how badly battered his face was, yet he’d survived, God bless him. The meaning of his gesture was clear. They could both hear the chainsaw coming. They had to get out of there.

Erin cut a path through the silhouettes of broken transport and led Morgan to the far side of the car cemetery. There they saw the prairie stretch out, vast and barren before them, and it seemed like there would be nowhere to hide beneath the silver moonlight—but it was open, it was free, and they ran for it.

FOURTEEN

It was Morgan who saw the old house first.

The building was concealed within a clump of tall oak and there were no lights in any of the windows, yet the boy had recognized the crooked angular silhouette for what it was. Erin’s first thought was that there might be someone in there who could help them; but the closer they ran towards the place, the more it appeared that the large two-story structure was derelict.

By now Morgan was in a real bad way. All his strength seemed to be deserting him and Erin almost had to drag him by the shoulders through the geometrically intricate wrought-iron gates in front of the house. However, they were both gulping for air by the time they reached the front door.

Erin knocked.

No answer.

They hadn’t heard the chainsaw for a minute or two, not since the flat empty ground of the prairie had quickened their retreat, but they couldn’t waste a single second of their time. Either someone inside would help them, or they’d use the place to hide.

Erin tried again, but it was clear there was nobody home—at least nobody normal.

Not waiting any longer, Erin turned the door handle. The door opened and they crept forward into the house.

Inside, the building was a worm-riddled heap of rotten timber. The air was thick with dust, while the floors were covered in rat shit. None of the walls looked very sturdy; one strong gale and the place would probably collapse into a useless heap of firewood.

Surprisingly, there were glass panels in most of the windows, but there were no drapes or blinds and the panes were all coated with cobwebs and dirt. A few of the windows, however, had been boarded up. All the same, there was enough ambient light to reveal that the house was littered with scraps of broken furniture, the upholstery eaten away by vermin.

Erin took Morgan deeper into the building, away from the bare windows and further into darkness. They could hear the chainsaw now. Hewitt was outside and heading straight for the house.

Suddenly Erin had to cope with her own rising panic. She couldn’t deal with Leatherface any more. Why didn’t he just quit? Why wouldn’t he leave them alone? Why couldn’t he just fuck off and die?

Morgan sighed with pain, bringing Erin back to her senses.

Quickly, she grabbed hold of him and steered him into a room that was pitch black, except for a single hole in a boarded-up window, through which shone a laser-like shaft of pure silver.

The corner of the room opposite the window was lost in total darkness, so they staggered over into it and froze. Maybe if they kept quiet enough, Hewitt would go right past the house. He had no way of knowing they were in there. They could have just kept on running.

Morgan coughed hurriedly raising his cuffed hands to stifle the noise. But he needn’t have bothered, because there was no way Leatherface could hear anything over the deafening gas-rattle of the chainsaw. It was getting louder now; they could hear him coming closer and closer to the house. There was a squeak of corroded metal—the wrought iron gate!

Leatherface was outside.

The engine was cut. No chainsaw, no motor, no exhaust—nothing.

Just silence.

Erin could hear breathing but it took her a moment to realize that the breathing was her own. Like Morgan, she was trying to catch her breath from their running. They were hyperventilating with fear, but they needed to quiet down.

As long as that bastard had his chainsaw on, they knew exactly where he was. But now . . . now that the weapon had powered down, the psychopath could be anywhere. He might be outside the house, or he might have gone to look for them somewhere else, or he might already be . . .

The silence was killing her.

She beckoned Morgan to stay still, then tiptoed across to the hole in the boarded window. A moment later and her terrified eye was looking out through the crack, searching frantically in all directions for—

Leatherface was coming in through the front door!

Their hiding place was useless. It hadn’t worked. He was inside the house. They’d hoped he’d just walk on by, but they were wrong. They’d failed and he was coming for them. He was inside the house.

Inside!

They ran out, down along a short hallway to another room where they found a ragged couch set down on the floor.

He rushed in after them, his fat convulsive footfalls intimidating them as they fled screaming before him.

Erin slammed the door shut and then she and Morgan grabbed hold of the couch and dragged it across the room, almost slinging it down in front of the doorway.

The chainsaw spewed into life and carved its vitriol straight through the door. One diagonal slice. Then another, cutting a splintered X into the upper half of the boards. He knew they were in there; he could smell their fear.

From outside the door, Hewitt punched the chain bar forward through the center of the cross-gash, smashing a head-shaped hole in the painted wood. Erin looked over and saw his leering masked face peering through the gap. Now he was bleating in psychotic ecstasy and thrusting his bulky shoulders up against the closed door, as if to force his whole body through the jagged breach.

At first Erin considered escaping through another door that she could see leading out of the room, but Leatherface would only come after them. They had to get out of the house altogether.

She ran across to the boarded window and started to pull at some of the makeshift panels. Morgan tried his best to help but, just like Erin, he found that the boards were nailed too tight.

Hewitt’s eyes shifted uncontrollably as he looked through the hole in the door. His every twitching freak of body skin showed how badly he wanted to break in and desecrate their flesh.

Behind them, the chainsaw throttled into high gear and proceeded to carve a horizontal line at waist-height right across the door, refashioning the timber panels into a bastard form of a Dutch door. He’d be through any second . . .

Morgan punched the board near the hole Erin had looked through. The wood there was weak and it splintered with a satisfying crack under the strength of the blow. But there was no time to dislodge the broken wood and climb through—Leatherface was already inside the room!

They dashed across to the other door and found themselves sprinting through a maze of corridors and rooms with no clue where they were going, except away from the unrelenting scream of the chainsaw racing after them.

Finally they reached a room that was bare except, incredibly, for a small crystal chandelier.

Morgan saw a closet they could hide in and threw himself inside, but there was no room for Erin. The boy did the best he could to make space for her, pressing his agonized body up tight against the wall, but it was no good—and all the while, Leatherface was bearing down on them, stomping his feet and weeping for the chainsaw’s gut-ripping sanctity.

Erin stood back from the closet doorway and could see that one of the walls was hollow. And there was a hole in the wall leading through! If she could just . . .

Erin dived onto the floor and, ignoring the putrid stench of rat piss, crawled feverishly through into the wall space.

When he was sure she was safely hidden, Morgan gently closed the closet door. And waited.

Footsteps.

He was in the room.

He disengaged the clutch and the saw went low, ticking over, still pumping out exhaust fumes. They could hear his obsessive breathing, his hysterical whining. He was searching for them. Looking. Listening.

A rat crawled on Erin’s leg. She stifled her disgust and kicked it off.

The rat squealed . . .

The chainsaw came screaming through the thin wall, stabbing the space above her head. Then it was gone.

Erin managed not to scream and curled up into as tiny a ball as she could. She could do nothing but cover her head with her hands as—

The chainsaw penetrated the wall a second time, breaking through even closer to her body. Then he pulled back for a third violent thrust, which missed her head by the slightest whisper of blood. Each lunge was getting closer. Each time he penetrated the hollow wall, he came closer to cutting open the cringing little blood bag.

The chainsaw reached peak revs, then just as quickly went dead, the engine switched off completely.

Leatherface had sliced the wooden partition over and over, and now the wall behind Erin was patchily illuminated with thin angled slits of projected moonlight. But where the hell was he? What was he waiting for?

Slowly, Erin got up, her back sliding against the wall as she rose to her feet. If she could just see out through the gashes he’d made—

TWO ARMS BROKE THROUGH THE RUINED WALL BEHIND HER AND GRABBED HER BY THE SHOULDERS—LEATHERFACE!

With unstoppable force, the maniac seized Erin and pulled her back through the wall, the aged wood panel snapping and falling with her as she collapsed painfully into his power.

Then, in one disordered motion, he lifted her and chucked her over his shoulder. She screamed and punched him on the back. She clawed at his face, collecting shreds of Kemper under her nails. But there was nothing she could do. Nothing. And the sense of despair overwhelmed her.

Hewitt lumbered back into the room, Erin in one arm, the chainsaw in the other. She was struggling, trying to resist, but his attention had been grabbed by the sound of loud, rhythmic banging. Slow, continuous, repeating . . .

Morgan was standing outside the closet and was opening and closing the door, to draw Leatherface to him. The anguished youth tried to speak but, thanks to Sheriff Hoyt, his words came out as nothing but primitive grunts. Yet still, the meaning was clear.

There was sorrow in Morgan’s cries, there was pain in them, but there was also sheer blind hatred. He was calling Hewitt to him. He was challenging the psychopathic skin-fetishist motherfucker. He was trying to distract Leatherface so that Erin might break free.

“Morgan, no!” cried the girl—he couldn’t possibly win.

But Morgan ignored her and ran close to Leatherface, stepping back, dodging, weaving, and then moving closer as if going to punch him. Hewitt slammed out an arm and chopped Morgan in the throat. The boy cried out and dropped to his knees, his windpipe in excruciating pain. He’d been so winded that if he hadn’t already been struggling to breathe, he probably would’ve chucked.

Leatherface pitched his shoulder forward and slammed Erin onto the ground where he pinned her flat on her stomach by placing one of his fat spastic boots onto the flat of her back. Erin squirmed and tried to crawl free, but he was too strong, and she felt her ribs threaten to crack under the pressure.

Quickly, Hewitt dropped the chainsaw—it hit the old floorboards with the sound of a leather anvil—then picked the toothless little bastard up by the scruff of his scrawny neck. He hauled Morgan up towards the chandelier and hooked the boy’s arms up over one of the metal and crystal branches until suddenly the boy was hanging from the ornate light by his own handcuffs.

Then Leatherface let go, causing Morgan to drop, and the steel bracelets to cut deeper into the already bleeding skin of his wrists.

Morgan cried out.

The situation was helpless: Erin underfoot, Morgan hanging like a fish on a hook and Leatherface master of them all.

Morgan’s legs kicked and flailed in midair, the turbulence shaking up dust and traces of stinking rat fuck. He tried to shout but his jaw was broken and pain shot throughout his body.

Leatherface wrenched on the starting cord of the chainsaw and suddenly he was back in shit-kicking business.

Morgan wanted to scream but could only squeal like a piglet through his damaged mouth.

Erin fought all she could and hollered in sympathy for what she knew must surely be coming, but she was like a fly on the windshield of the freeway.

Thomas Brown Hewitt, on the other hand, roared through the serrated cylinder lips of the Kemper-face and lifted the rotating cutter straight up through the middle of Morgan’s legs.

Up through the groin, up through the abdomen—blue sparks flying in the dark midnight room—and up through the victim boy’s chest, roaring and killing the twitching little bastard, as he shook from the chandelier in tight-lipped self-pity. The whining pathetic coon-shit.

Blood sprayed out from the jolting corpse, splashing against Hewitt’s man-apron, forming a cologne of death on Erin’s bare neck and face below.

She looked up from beneath the bastard’s shoe and watched him struggle, as he tugged the saw up into bone and tendon. Wrench, wrench, wrench—godammit how he wrenched—until at last the saw broke free and carved its way upwards in a fountain of red cardiovascular puke.

But the sharp release of the saw from Morgan’s remains caused the killer to lose his balance. Leatherface toppled sideways and suddenly Erin was loose. She didn’t wait. The moment she felt the bone-breaking weight shift from above her, she crawled forward and rolled out from under him.

He saw her, but the chain was caught in Morgan’s neck. He gave it more revs, to crack through the spinal cord, but Erin was already bursting out of the room.

Leatherface screamed and fed the saw more and more power, so that he could disentangle it from the hanging corpse and go out after her. Flecks of neck tissue spat into his mask and he squealed, licking the blood off his lips.

Erin hurtled down the passageway and out through the front door. They never should have stopped at that old place—how did they even begin to think they could have hidden in there from him?

He probably knew every damned square inch of this town; it was his slaughter ground. And now Morgan was dead. Morgan, poor Morgan. She remembered him rolling his joint, smiling, without a care in the world. The poor bastard.

Drops of Morgan’s blood were on her tank top, where capillary action blended the iron red corpuscles into her sweat, forming a chromatography of hatred.

She was limping and suddenly realized her leg was injured. She wasn’t sure where or how. It all blurred into twelve hours of pain, and she ran.

The chainsaw sputtered and smoked in the moonlight, his screaming obese musculature wanting to kill her—kill—kill—kill.

Erin sucked the air in tired, desperate gasps. The land was uncultivated and thick with weeds. Wild branches and vines tore at her, but they meant nothing. Morgan, Pepper, Andy and Kemper were everything to her now.

He saw her hit a branch and fall. She lay there still, like a dead body. He would—No. She was rising. Please let me—PLEASE!

She heard him flick the throttle. The chainsaw ripped and roared as she got up on her feet and carried on running.

Christ, when she just fell, she saw him coming towards her, charging like a bull elephant soaked in Morgan’s blood and wearing the face of her lover. The bastard just kept on coming. Why wouldn’t he die? WHY?

* * *

They ran beneath the moonlit sky, locked in the almost prehistoric truth of man hunting his prey. There was a certain perverse beauty to the image of Erin fleeing across this traditional Texan landscape with the impossibly iconic psychopathy of Leatherface chasing after her. His mask, his chainsaw and the way he moved—they were a faultless lesson in the design of fear.

Erin came to a wire fence and vaulted over it like it was made of matchstick.

Hewitt came soon after and tried to force his way through, but collapsed in a thrashing heap of flesh and wire. He cried out as he staggered and fell, his thigh making shocking contact with the impartial horsepower cruelty of the chainsaw.

The cutting blades bit into his leg and he screamed. And as the skin of his thigh separated, it became a slick mouth of white fat, porous with vesicles of oozing blood.

BLOOD!

Leatherface screamed and thrashed about in the barbed tangle, the engine of the chainsaw matching his cries note for note.

Erin stopped to see what had happened, and had to stifle an insane giggle at the sight of the murderous bastard caught up in the wire. He was just stuck there, howling and kicking like he was poor Tommy Hewitt with his skin cancer.

Maybe Aunt Henrietta could come along and kiss his big, fat, whining ass—the stupid bitch! And while she was at it, maybe Henrietta could find a way to bring Jedidiah back to life, and the teenage girl, and all the other poor bastards they’d all killed.

Erin suddenly remembered the image of the sheriff pouring bourbon onto her face, and realized just how much these maniacs needed to suffer. She hoped the wire fence ripped the ugly fuck into shreds.

And then she was gone.

Twenty, maybe thirty yards on, Erin stumbled out of the shrubbery and was amazed to find herself standing in the middle of a highway.

Her feet were on tarmac.

She could hear the chainsaw and Hewitt’s screaming, but she had found an artery that could take her to anywhere in America. All she needed, the only thing she needed, was—

An automobile was heading along the road towards her, its headlights like champagne in the darkness of the hour.

Erin ran out and waved her arms, “Stop!”

She was begging, almost willing the car to free her from this nightmare.

The vehicle broke hard, its tires screeching as the driver worked to avoid her. The headlights bore down on Erin, on her horrified face, on her hands and arms soaked with the blood of others.

“Help me!” she screamed. “Help me!”

The lights were on full beam, and they hurt her eyes as she stepped forward and gestured frantically for the car to stop. She had to squint.

The automobile slowed almost to a walking pace, then swerved to avoid her. “Please STOP!”

But the car just crawled past the screaming, dangerous, bloodstained lunatic and began to pick up speed again.

Erin ran alongside it and pounded on the windows with her bleeding fists. But she couldn’t keep up, and with a touch of the gas pedal and an automatic shift into third, fourth and then fifth, the car pulled away, taking all her hopes with it.

“You assholes!” she cried, but what could she do?

If the roles had been reversed, would she have done any different?

Oh God—

The teenage girl they’d picked up.

And suddenly Erin was aware of her role in a bloody cycle that reached back over decades.

In the distance, she could hear the chainsaw kick back into life. He would be coming after her again—something she found both terrifying and utterly demoralizing.

He had to get tired sooner or later; his clumsy frame wasn’t built for running and the chainsaw had to be heavy. If she could just stay out in front of him, maybe hold out long enough until a car would stop for her—

Erin hurried off along the highway, her right knee now ablaze with pain. Leatherface came after her, blood seeping into his pants where the chainsaw had bitten.

Cloud was starting to creep its way overhead but hadn’t yet obscured the moon, so Erin was able to see quite some way along the road, and in the distance she saw a large building. There was a light shining through one of the windows, offering the girl yet another chance of unexpected hope.

She ran forward, despondently wishing for a phone, weapon, a place to hide—anything. The last place they’d taken refuge in . . .

Morgan’s split carcass was still hanging from the chandelier.

Her feet kicked up dust, but the chainsaw never quit for a second, as Erin and her ensanguined pursuer loped exhaustedly in the direction of . . .

“Oh God.”

Erin stopped.

She could see what it was now and almost immediately that unforgettable reek was upon her. Because the place she was fleeing to—it wasn’t just one building, it was a series of buildings all linked and connected by their lethal function. The place she was fleeing to was the slaughterhouse.

Though it seemed like a lifetime ago, they’d driven past the slaughterhouse only this morning. She remembered Morgan teasing Pepper and how they’d all reacted to the bad smell. She didn’t realize she’d run so far.

* * *

If anything, the meat processing plant looked even more sinister in the hypnotic moonlight. She could hear the sounds of cattle in the darkness, their voices like the plaintive death-cries of lost souls, or of mournful ghosts of disembowelment. The fact that Hewitt was chasing her towards the abattoir seemed bloodily apposite, her whole day sandwiched within the bookends of the meat factory.

Strip away humanity and all we are left with is meat.

Erin climbed over a wire fence, then hurried forward through the grounds of the slaughterhouse. She practically fell against the wall at the back of the main building, slamming hard against it, with all the fear and lack of control of someone running for her life. She couldn’t see any doors or windows, but there was a ramp of some description leading in.

The wooden incline smelt of bleach and was a little slippery but Erin managed to keep her footing as she ran up. At the top of the ramp, she entered a narrow, claustrophobic passageway that went into the building.

Harsh fluorescent lighting caused her to squint, but she could still see that the floor and walls of the corridor were thick with blood and animal dung. And suddenly she knew exactly where she was.

Erin was standing in the very corridor where thousands of animals had spent their last few terrified seconds on Earth. This is where the livestock came to die. This is where man proved his mastery over nature. And Erin was sick to her soul of being surrounded by the trappings of death.

She could almost feel the Hewitts clawing greedily at her flesh, mouths running with meat juices, stomachs fat with body-sauce, their reflex to kill as normal and mindless as taking a shit—her own digested remains becoming nothing more than a good hard shit.

It seemed she would never see an end to the horror that was being heaped upon her. Each time she reached a new limit, those bastards tore it to shreds. It felt as if she was being driven deeper and deeper into a dark pit, where only red meat held sway.

At the end of the corridor, she came to a cramped space that was more like an iron box. There was a hatch in one of the walls. Erin looked through and saw the stunner—the pneumatic device used by the slaughter man to inject a thick metal bolt right between the animal’s eyes, to render it unconscious before being hoisted up on a chain, stabbed through the aorta and then bled to death.

Erin was wearing leather shoes and a leather belt.

Outside, there were some cattle in a pen.

On the far side of the pen, Leatherface was cutting through a wire fence with his chainsaw, trying to break into the yard at the back of the slaughterhouse. He knew she was in there.

The sawblade tore through the barbed wire like it was cotton candy, but the squeal of metal on metal and the thick guttural blast of the gasoline engine sent the enclosed livestock into a panic.

The cows began to stamp their hooves and some of them bellowed with fear. Even at this most primal level, the beasts perceived the violence and inhumanity Leatherface represented, even though their hides were perfectly safe from him.

He broke through the fence and lumbered awkwardly through the creatures, slapping them, pushing them aside, and holding the chainsaw up above his head so that it cut like a shark’s fin through the dark sea of high ungulate backs.

And panic spread out from him among the animals in deafening waves.

Erin could hear the distressed cries coming from the livestock pen.

They injected a bolt of cold fear through her heart, reminding her again of the violent maniac at her heels. She was sure he’d love to catch her here, inside the revolting “knock box,” so that he could put her to sleep where all the other animals died. But there was a side hatch leading out of the metal cubicle, into the slaughterhouse proper, and Erin was only too glad to take it.

She went through and found herself standing inside a cool room with rows and rows of carcasses hanging from tidy steel meat hooks.

Here, death had already been water blasted, scrubbed down and sanitized. The Last Rites had been administered to these poor creatures with an air knife. And she couldn’t help but remember Andy suspended above the broken piano. Would her horror have been any less if the boy had also been stripped, washed and decapitated?

How could she feel revulsion, seeing him hanging from a hook with half a leg missing, and yet feel only a slight nervous chill when confronted with all these dismembered animal torsos—dozens of them? What barrier was there in her mind? And how had Old Monty and little Tommy Hewitt broken through that barrier and torn it into barbecue ribs?

Erin pushed her hair back behind her ears and ran out across the floor of the giant meat-filled refrigerator.

The room was dark, lit only by the moon through dirty slit windows near the ceiling, and she had to weave and duck to avoid banging into the spread-eagled beef halves. The cold air made goose bumps rise on her skin and turned the filthy sweat and slime on her clothes into ice water, but none of this penetrated the freezing terror that never once relaxed its grip on her will. This night would never end.

* * *

He pulled a massive chain that hung from the ceiling.

What was that?

Erin could hear some kind of high-pitched rattling sound, like a chain. It came from somewhere inside the cooler with her, but where? Suddenly there was a loud crashing sound, followed by a constant whirring of mechanical automation.

Erin listened, turned her head to look in all directions. It seemed to be coming from all around her, but she couldn’t see anything.

The ceiling!

She looked up and saw that a whole lot of machinery had been set in motion. The ceiling was a grid of pulleys and gears, controlling the many conveyors and meat processing systems that helped keep the plant fast and efficient.

But who was doing all this? Was there someone working here, or was it—

Something hit Erin from behind.

She screamed and leapt forward, only to see that she’d backed up into an animal carcass. The body was bloody and hanging from a vicious meat hook, but it wasn’t Leatherface. Erin heaved a sigh of relief and—

Was slammed from behind!

No. It wasn’t possible. Not after she’d come this far. Not now. Not—

It was another side of beef.

All the carcasses were moving now, their hooks being slowly pulled along by a chain system. And one of them had swung up behind Erin and struck her hard in the back. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for this twice, but her nerves were in tatters. Suddenly, she had an idea. Maybe she could use the situation to her advantage.

Hurriedly, she stepped over to the massive side of beef that had just hit her and put her back against it. She let it shield her, and walked with it, as it slowly continued on its mechanical way.

The hooks all seemed to be headed over in the direction of—

THE CHAINSAW IGNITED AND SWUNG THROUGH THE AIR TOWARDS HER!

Erin ducked and felt a rush of air as the saw-blade hacked straight through the carcass and took off its leg. The severed limb fell to the floor and Leatherface arched his back in preparation for the return swing that would take her head off. But in avoiding the first attack, Erin had lost her balance and had now fallen flat on her back.

This bought her two more seconds as the chainsaw came flailing down towards her groin. Quickly, she slid her body back along the stone floor, and spread her legs wide so that the saw could land harmlessly between them. The rotating blades should have gutted Erin there and then, but instead they whipped into an iron drain cover, showering Erin’s groin with sparks.

Seizing her chance, Erin stretched forward and kicked the bastard straight between the legs.

Leatherface howled and struggled to disentangle the chainsaw from the metal grid, but he was too slow. Erin quickly placed her other foot right on his aching balls and pushed off against him, her body sliding, then barrel rolling beneath the swinging beef carcasses. By the time Leatherface was ready to deal with the girl, she’d already got back onto her feet and started running.

But he wasn’t beaten yet; the slaughterhouse was his domain. And he knew how to bring the bitch down.

Whimpering and whining, Hewitt limped over to a heavy-duty switch set in the wall. Then he opened the throttle on his chainsaw and screamed, before burying the switch.

The self-cleaning sprinklers kicked in within a flash and Erin was running through a crazed downpour of freezing water. It was obvious what he was trying to do; he wanted to distract her, intimidate her. But she didn’t care that she was soaking wet, and she made damned sure she didn’t slip on the stone floor.

Water trickled down the pale pink skin of the dead beef as it swayed back and forth in front of her. But now she was pushing the meat out of her way, and soon she came to a door that opened onto a pitch-black stairway. She didn’t know where it would lead, but she took it anyway.

There was no light at all in the stairwell, so she had to feel her way down the concrete steps and then through another door, where she came at last to the main floor of the slaughterhouse.

Just like the cold room, the only illumination in this massive hall came from slivers of moonlight struggling to gain entrance through a row of dirty windows high up in the twenty-foot walls.

Erin could hear grunts and snorts all around her. The room was packed with livestock—pigs and cattle, some old, some very young, but all in pens and cages. They began to respond to her presence and, in a matter of seconds, she could hear them calling out across the length and breadth of the floor. Their noise was sure to bring Hewitt.

She looked desperately for another way out—there had to be one somewhere—but the first door she took led to a room full of pig cages.

The second door seemed equally useless, opening into a long, narrow locker room with no other exit. Tall lockers ran down both sides of the room, reaching all the way up to the low ceiling.

This was where the staff came and changed into their work clothes. It was also where knives were kept, the blades placed neatly in racks inside a couple of tiny alcoves. Moonlight bounced off the stainless steel edges, drawing Erin towards their deadly sharpness.

The panic-stricken girl had got so used to hearing the distant grinding of the chainsaw that when it suddenly stopped, she stopped as well.

She stood stock-still in the locker room, listening for any sign as to what Leatherface might be up to. But she didn’t have to listen very long before hearing his unmistakable, offbeat tread come charging down the staircase from the cooler room.

Taking one last look up at the row of knives, Erin ran back out into the main hall, then round into the other room with the enclosed pigs.

He knew this place well. They’d changed it. Made it new. But it was still the same as when he used to skin animal heads. And he knew where she was.

She could tell by the bleating of the livestock that Leatherface was now on the main floor of the slaughterhouse. The chainsaw purred—not in its full fury, as before—and Erin hadn’t been able to find a way out in time, but . . .

The girl was hiding inside one of the tall metal cabinets in the locker room. It was one of the first unlocked cupboards she’d found, and she’d climbed inside. And now her entire attention was focused on the slim vent slats cut into the door.

Her view was restricted almost to what was right in front of the locker, but she could hear everything. She could hear Leatherface crash mindlessly about the main hall, scaring the animals with his ugly bastard mask and his subhuman raving. She could hear him open the locker room door, then stumble awkwardly inside, his shoes slapping concrete just yards from her. Then she could hear him stagger back out through the door again.

But it was only when she was certain that he was heading away from the direction of her hiding place in the locker room that Erin screamed at the top of her voice!

Her cries echoed through every room, hallway, enclosure and knock box of the slaughterhouse, reverberating from wall to wall, driving the animals into a frenzy of night terror and telling Leatherface exactly where she was.

Hewitt stopped dead in his clumsy tracks, and drove his fat psychotic ass straight back towards the open door of the locker room.

He knew there was no other way out of there. She was finished.

The second he stormed back into the locker room, Erin fell quiet. She shivered, her whole body quaking with terror. She knew what she was doing, but couldn’t believe she was actually doing it. Her thoughts and actions now had a distant quality to them; almost as if she were someone else, looking down at her own life, watching her insane behavior unfold.

Hewitt was walking slowly, his footsteps almost nimble in the darkness, but the leather soles of his shoes scuffed against the floor tiles. She knew he was looking at all the lockers, casting his sickly black eyes over each of them in turn. Left, right, left, right—his eyes, roaming, probing and searching. Each second brought him nearer to her and the tension was almost unbearable.

Everything, the whole day, the whole bloody nightmare had come down to this moment.

What happened in the next few minutes would determine whether Erin lived or died. If her plan succeeded, then maybe the Hewitts could be stopped. But if it failed, no one would find out about them, and their string of murders would continue with as much certainty and efficiency as the pneumatic bolt stunner in the slaughterhouse.

But first, she had to get her breathing under control; it was too loud. She was too damn scared.

He stopped. There was rustling in one of the lockers—RUSTLING IN THE LOCKER! RUSTLING IN THE LOCKER!

Her eyes widened.

The footsteps were getting closer. She could smell the stench of death from his apron, shit from his ass and the nauseating fog of mass bloodshed that lingered throughout the slaughterhouse. She knew he was listening. She’d never heard him be so silent, so quiet. He was listening for the rustling sound.

She heard rattling and realized it was her teeth chattering.

She put a hand over her mouth and tried to keep her jaw still. But it was so hard, and her knees were quaking inside her jeans—oh God, she’d never been this close to death before. There was no way out of the locker. If all he did was throw open the thin metal door and jam his massive repugnant body in the way, she’d be finished. She’d made it so easy for him.

Now he was opening the lockers, throwing the doors wide open, making the metal shake and clatter, his own mask-encased wheezing adding fuel to the fire of imminent onslaught.

One locker.

Another.

He was getting closer.

She shut her eyes tightly and fought back the terror that seemed sure to engulf her—if his violent bloody mayhem didn’t completely destroy her first.

He raised a bloody hand up to the next door, but there was a loud bump in the locker BEHIND HIM!

Erin stared out through the vent and could have wept in utter despair, as she saw him spin on his heels and rip-start the fucking chainsaw!

The roar of the engine was deafening inside the cramped locker room—the rows of metal doors made the place into a bloody echo chamber. But even though the brutal din rode roughshod over the sound of Erin hyperventilating, it was too late for her; Leatherface had heard the bang in the locker and knew exactly where to look.

Livid with excitement, he raised the chainsaw, ready to inflict maximum overkill on her face, and then grabbed at the locker door. He shook and rattled the latch with fumbling erratic fingers, his hand smearing dirt on the chrome finish. Then finally, he opened the door and screamed!

The exhaust burned and the cutting chain turned—rev, rev, revvvvvvv—

But she wasn’t there.

Instead, a baby sow rooted through some work clothing lying on the locker floor. Erin had taken the animal from the adjacent room only a couple of minutes ago—and now she had Leatherface just where she wanted him.

She could see his massive, stinking back through the ventilation slats in her door. He was standing looking into the locker directly opposite hers, bearing down on the small pig she’d put there as a decoy. His back was turned towards her, sweating, heaving.

If Hewitt had taken the trouble to look more closely when he’d first entered the locker room, he might also have noticed that something was missing from one of the tool racks. And now his back was facing her—and she was holding a meat cleaver in her right hand.

Slowly, carefully, she began to open the door, and for one coldly calculating moment she enjoyed his confusion. She’d put the piglet in the locker. She’d laid the bait, and now Leatherface had taken it.

He didn’t know what was happening. He just ranted and fired up the chainsaw over and over. He was too damn stupid to realize it was time for the slaughter man to get some payback.

Erin crept forward behind Leatherface, raised the cleaver and—

Reflection. Mirror inside the locker. Girl behind. Girl in the mirror. Behind!

BEHIND!

Leatherface turned and screeched as the cleaver came down with every ounce of strength Erin could muster. He hauled the chainsaw across to deflect the blade, but in the narrowness of the room, his bulk worked against him. He was too big, too clumsy, too—

THE MEAT CLEAVER HACKED CLEAN THROUGH HIS RIGHT FOREARM.

Blood.

The blood of Thomas Brown Hewitt.

Blood of the maniac. Blood of the murderer. Blood of the psychopath. Blood of the skinner, the butcher, the cannibal, blood of the freak.

The blood of Leatherface!

The chainsaw sputtered, spat and fumed. The pig ran out from under his feet and away. Leatherface looked down at his arm, badly cut and pouring with blood. His face as Kemper was emotionless but his eyes were furious with expression. The shock was nothing. She was nothing. His insanity would not be denied. He—

THE CLEAVER HIT HIM AGAIN.

Erin snarled and buried the vicious steel in exactly the same place, plowing the same crimson furrow, and cutting right through the bone.

Suddenly, his forearm fell limp, pulled down by the weight of the saw gripped tightly in his right hand. But the arm was no longer connected to the elbow by any muscle tissue. And the bone was gone, clean cut through.

Blood was everywhere. The arm bent down at an unnatural angle—ninety degrees the wrong way to the body—and then it was gone.

Leatherface howled as his right forearm fell to the floor, still clutching the chainsaw, his fingers locked on the gas.

The moment the whole gruesome assembly hit the ground, it span out of control—the severed arm and the chainsaw turning round and round with the revving of the engine, spinning insanely within a spiral of exhaust fumes.

Erin jumped back, the whirling sawblade almost hitting her feet, and stared at Hewitt’s bloody stump in disbelief.

She had hurt him—she’d hurt him real bad.

And no one but the young woman could have understood the heady cocktail of emotions that flowed through her at that moment. She was feeling anger, hatred, terror, vengeance, joy, success, and . . . power!

She wasn’t the fleeing victim any more. She’d proved he wasn’t all mighty or invulnerable. She had taken the fight back to him and beaten him. What could he do when his arm had been crudely amputated? His chainsaw was whining out of control on the floor. Just who the hell did he think he was, playing God with people’s lives?

Erin raised the cleaver to finish him off when she remembered Andy.

The hanging boy had begged her to kill him and it had almost killed her. She couldn’t do it, but she had to. She’d taken a long knife and stabbed him through the chest and part of her had died with him.

But here, now, she wanted to take the cleaver and chop the mental Hewitt bastard up into a thousand bloody pieces. Fear and anger had completely overwhelmed her. And now she was acting purely on survival instinct wasn’t she?

Leatherface had no such doubts. Weeping and whining, his whole body shivering with psychosis, he placed a heavy boot down on his own severed arm, stomping on the bleeding butchered limb to keep it from moving any further. Then he reached down with his left hand and picked up both the unfeeling arm and the raging chainsaw.

Erin came at him again, but he was so much larger than her.

She lifted the cleaver to hit him across the chest, but he punched her across the face with his severed right elbow stump. His moist flesh and ripped shirt dragged over her lips, spilling the warm fluid of his gash into her mouth.

Erin fell back, trying to spit the nauseating shit out off her tongue.

This gave Leatherface the time he needed to pick up the chainsaw and slam it against one of the lockers, shaking the cutter free from the postmortem grip of his dead right hand. The useless limb fell to the floor, giving him full control of the weapon.

Erin steeled herself for another attempt. She lifted the cleaver, testing its weight in her hand, then moved forward, screaming, determined to kill—

Too late.

The psycho-freaking maniac had the chainsaw in his left hand, and was swinging it high up around his body, howling, squealing, slinging the power tool in lethal erratic orbits all about him, tracing deathly patterns of exhaust blade homicide in an impossible barrage of death.

The saw was everywhere and she couldn’t get near him. And now she could see that the full fury of his bubonic, syphilitic eyes was tuned upon her. Even maimed, Leatherface was still the darkest nightmare of senseless murder she could ever hope to imagine, and now her fight was hopeless.

He raged at her and screamed. He hurled the chainsaw wildly over his head, in a pure display of destructive madness.

Leatherface was degradation.

Leatherface was despair.

Erin ran for her damned life. Out of the locker room and on to the main floor of the slaughterhouse. There had to be another way out of there and this time she would find it.

She still held the cleaver, but was no longer under any illusion that she could ever be a match for him. But at least she’d won one round of the fight. No, she’d done more than that—she’d disfigured the bastard.

If nothing else came out of this execrable day, Thomas Brown Hewitt would be maimed for the rest of his wretched, miserable existence. He could go back up to the farmhouse and compare stumps with Ol’ Pappy. Thanks to Erin.

You’re welcome!

Leatherface wailed, he cried, he screamed, he came after her, he—

Stopped.

At first his whole body had been shaking with rage, but after a few labored steps, he began to stumble until finally . . .

The chainsaw fell out of his hand and crashed onto the floor, where the engine purred and sputtered, the chain disengaged and meaningless.

He dropped to his knees and then fell back against the lockers. And soon he was on the ground, moaning and clutching at his bloody stump. He was quivering. Pathetic. Bleeding.

At the end of the day, Leatherface was left sitting in the locker room, a subhuman alone among all the animals of the slaughterhouse, cowhide on his feet, humanhide on his face, only you won’t find “humanhide” in any dictionary.

Erin had shown that even stalkers bleed, and that the biggest enemy she’d had to confront was fear, not some deranged retarded cripple with a chainsaw. Hewitt had tried everything to impose his violence upon her, and he had failed. He had killed her friends, changed her life, driven her half-insane and yet she lived.

Erin lived.

FIFTEEN

By the time she had found her way out of the main hall and into the loading dock area, Erin’s mind was in tatters. If she had prevailed against the countless attacks that had been thrown at her, it was because she had fought like the enemy.

She had become a thing that had hacked off a man’s arm with a meat cleaver. She had screamed and dismembered him; letting him dehumanize her almost as much as if he had stolen her face. But within that terrible realization, a crumb of the original Erin Hardesty still survived.

And she fled, looking for the rainbow that would transport her back to her own life, to a world of innocence where the worst thing a man could do was to smuggle a piñata full of cannabis over the Mexican border. For sure, there was a part of Erin that was still pure and untouched, but right now that part was comatose.

She paused for a moment to see—to listen—if he was coming, but all she could hear was the grunting and murmuring of the animals, even the chainsaw was silent. Which meant he must have been sneaking up after her again.

Erin had no idea just how beaten he was. Crying, gripping his stump. A foot lashed out and kicked at the motionless power tool, and he sat there, head slumped, in a pool of his own blood.

The way out of the loading dock was blocked by a massive roll-top door. At first she ran down to the foot of the shutter and tried to lift it. But, although the horizontal metal segments rippled and clattered in time with her efforts, the door remained firmly in place.

Leatherface still hadn’t caught up with her.

She ran to the far side of the door and found a switch-box mounted on the wall. There were two big, round plastic buttons on the control unit: one red, one green—hardly an intelligence test. Erin thumped the green button and watched eagerly as the door slowly began to rise like an armored curtain.

Her eyebrows twitched and the cleaver was shaking in her right hand, but her face was a picture of manic joy. She had come through another labyrinth intact. First the Hewitt place, then the old house on the prairie, and finally this godforsaken slaughterhouse.

She had had enough of walls and now wanted nothing more than to be moving again. She wanted fresh air. She wanted a car on the open highway. She wanted freedom.

The first thing she noticed when she stepped out of the meat processing plant was that the sun was rising.

My God.

She’d spent almost twenty-four hours there.

The new dawn was the first clear measure of how much time had elapsed since they’d stopped to pick up the teenage girl. Erin was appalled to think she’d spent a whole day running and fighting for her life in this Texan insane asylum. Yet she was amazed that only one day had passed—it had felt like whole lifetimes in slow motion purgatory.

The second thing Erin noticed was that the sky was pouring with rain.

She was already drenched with sweat, blood and the water from the slaughterhouse sprinklers, but this rain was from God. It was fresh, pure, cleansing, and she was only too happy to let it fall down on her as she staggered outside.

She wasted no time.

She ran straight across the dusty parking lot, then sprinted along a dirt road that led back up to the highway. But after a few flagging minutes on the road, Erin slowed to a clumsy jog, then down to a dazed walk.

Her eyes darted in all directions, looking for Hewitt, watching for the sheriff’s car, almost expecting to see Henrietta’s trailer—but ultimately seeing no one and nothing but open prairie. And suddenly she was overwhelmed.

No longer in immediate danger, Erin almost collapsed beneath a landslide of exhaustion. She had been awake nearly all day, she had been running, fighting, she had been living solely on her wits; now that she could unwind, her body demanded time to heal.

She ached all over. She was beat and badly needed sleep. And her mind was a jumble—a highly-strung confusion of nightmarish images and denial, refusing to accept that what she’d seen today was even possible.

The meat cleaver fell from her hand.

It hit the road with a dull clang, but she ignored it and carried on walking.

Her hands and arms hung limp by her side. She had to bring all her willpower to bear, just to keep moving. She had to concentrate.

One foot in front of the other, one foot, got to keep moving, one more step, and another, and another . . .

The young woman had become so ravaged and disoriented that it never once occurred to her: she was heading back along the road in the direction of Mexico. Sure, the border was a couple of hundred miles away, but every step she took was undoing the progress she’d made yesterday morning with her friends in the Chrysler Dodge—not that she would have cared. The one thing she did know about the route she was taking was that it was away from the slaughterhouse, away from Luda May’s hovel and away from the Hewitt place.

Erin laughed.

And then she cried. Her feet walking along the center of the road. Bewildered. Lost. Her mind in jagged shards. Reflecting. Reflecting pieces of memory of the teenage girl in the summer dress. All her life Erin had wanted to be someone like that, walking alone—chased by shadows—a crazy hitchhiker. All her life she’d waited for this moment, hadn’t she? And what would happen after Erin? Would there be another crazy girl walking along the road? And another? And another?

No. Wait, wait, wait! She couldn’t be like the teenage girl because there was no one out here to pick her up. How could she be a crazy hitchhiker if she couldn’t get a ride? Oh God, she wanted so bad to be home right now. Dallas was like a distant—where’d the cleaver go?

She thought she heard a vehicle coming.

Erin checked her clothes. She was still wearing her tank and her flared jeans, all dirty, torn, and covered in blood, and her shoes were busted. But no summer dress, so she couldn’t be the crazy hitchhiker. And she didn’t have a gun. She just had her wild hair, and the fear in her eyes.

The noise was getting close now. It was definitely an automobile engine of some kind, low, rumbling.

Sounded like a truck, rhymed with f—

The big rig came powering along the highway, taking the quiet back route off the Interstate. Bob had done this road many times—took at least an hour and a quarter off the journey, and less chance of being caught gear jamming. He was doing eighty-five, which was good for a haulage truck of this size—but then, the diesel was a triple-digit ride.

It was raining—he had the wipers on full—but the sun was coming, so visibility was okay. The roads through here were so dammed straight, the only thing you got to look out for were some of the dips. Some of the grades could catch you out if you didn’t pay close attention.

Bob took a sip of coke and wiped his mouth. Yep, the truck was going down one of the grades right now. He hit the gas, ready for the gentle up stroke, then drove straight back up the—

What the?

There was someone walking plain in the middle of the road.

He hit the horn.

She wasn’t going to move.

Quickly, he squeezed on the brakes—gently enough to stay out of a skid, but firmly enough to avoid knocking who ever it was flat dead.

He wrenched the wheel and pulled over to the shoulder, making sure he didn’t even clip the girl as he rolled by. The engine stopped.

Looked like a young woman in a pretty bad way. Acted like she didn’t even see him; just kept walking, staring straight ahead.

Bob put on the handbrake, then climbed down from the gleaming high cabin. He was a well-built guy in his forties, but he moved toward the girl with the care and concern of a family man rather than a hard-nosed trucker.

“Hey there,” he called. “You okay?”

Flashback.

She’d said almost exactly the same thing to the dead teenager. Only then, Erin had been the one inside the vehicle, and it was the teenager who’d needed to escape.

Erin stopped.

She turned, looked at Big Rig Bob, and said something he couldn’t quite hear.

“You in a wreck?” he asked.

He could see she was in severe trauma, so he moved very slowly, and spoke as softly as an ace trucker could. Then carefully, very carefully, he placed a gentle hand on her arm and helped steer her back towards the truck. Erin flinched and drew a sharp intake of breath, but she saw his face, smiling, trying to be calm, reassuring. And she saw his truck.

A truck.

A way out of here.

So she let him help her on board, and just sat shaking in the passenger seat as he closed the door for her, then mounted up himself and got the rig underway.

Bob was sure she’d been in an automobile incident of some kind. You could be in an accident out here and not be picked up for hours. She was damned lucky he was scheduled to come along like that.

He looked at her. Guessed she was what, thirty, thirty-five? Difficult to tell underneath all that dirt, and she stank awful, like a farm during muckspreading.

“Where are we going?”

It was the first time she’d spoke. Almost caught him by surprise. But he kept his eyes on the road.

“Gonna get you some help,” he said firmly.

Help.

Help . . .

Erin felt more tears welling in her eyes.

The horizon burned with the red dawn of a new day, and, despite the rain, the landscape was awash with gold and scarlet hues.

Erin had every reason to feel safe now. She was with someone—someone who could protect her—and they were driving away.

Nothing could stop them now. Nothing. Not Hewitt with his goddamned chainsaw, not that legless freak in the wheelchair or the retarded bitch in the trailer—none of them. Not even that sadistic son of a bitch sheriff. Who was to say Hoyt was even a real lawman anyway?

Bob didn’t know what to make of the woman. Any second now he kept expecting to see the wreck of an automobile, but so far he’d seen nothing. She must have walked quite a few miles before he’d found her.

He saw a sign by the side of the road: “BIG COW—BBQ.”

Call it the power of suggestion, but his stomach rumbled. And hey, it was getting on for breakfast time.

The girl started crying beside him. In fact she was weeping, getting hysterical. Heck, he needed to get her some place.

“Honey, what’s your name?” he asked, hoping to shake her out of it.

“I wanna go home,” she cried.

“Do you live around here?” Maybe she hadn’t been in a crash after all. But then, what—?

No answer.

Bob sighed and reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette. Lit it up. He’d seen accidents before. You couldn’t spend as many years on the road as he had without seeing a whole lot of wreckage—never could understand why people were scared of flying when you see so many dead bodies on the highway every day. But there was something about this girl that wasn’t quite adding up.

“They’re all dead.”

Another memory. Another flashback. The words were the suicidal girl’s but the voice was Erin’s. Misery was repeating itself in Travis County.

Her words scared the hell out of him. “Who?”

But she didn’t answer, which unsettled him even more. No problem, he was about to get some help.

Bob had done this route so many times, he knew every stop, diner and bar along the way. And he remembered that just about a couple hundred yards past the barbecue sign, there was a hillbilly general store or something. He’d never been inside before, but he knew it was there and he reckoned it would be a good place to stop and get some help.

No . . .

Not possible . . .

Erin leaned forward and saw Luda May’s general store in the near distance. And it was getting closer.

He’d taken her back. The idiot had taken her back!

“Noooo!” she screamed, and then she was at him, kicking and punching. She scratched his hands, and tried to grab hold of the steering. It was the crazy hitchhiker and Kemper all over again, and Erin would do anything, anything to save the trucker from becoming another desiccated mask in Hewitt’s sick collection.

“You can’t make me go!” she raged, struggling at the wheel.

Bob couldn’t believe how strong she was. She fought like a hellcat. But if he didn’t do something about it, they’d probably jackknife—and with the truck as bundled out as it was, it wouldn’t be pretty.

“Get the hell off me!” he shouted, and he pushed her back into the passenger seat.

She leant forward again, but he managed to hold her down, keeping the rig under control with his other hand, while slowing on the approach to the general store.

“Take me home!” she shouted. “I won’t go back!”

She was begging him, begging him, but all she’d done was piss him off like some kind of vicious little crazy woman.

“I don’t know what the hell your problem is,” he rattled, “but it’s more than I can handle.”

Erin curled up in her seat and cried.

He was braking, getting ready to turn right into the dirt lot outside Luda May’s. It wasn’t possible. What the hell was he doing?

Suddenly she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview.

Oh God . . .

She looked again.

Those eyes. That face. The dirt. Blood. Her hair. How pale she was. The dark rings. She was the teenage girl after all—the crazy girl who’d shot herself rather than go back to this place.

Erin reached out and touched the silvered glass, tracing the lines on her reflected image, trying to see if there was anything about the girl in the mirror she still recognized.

They were almost there now. The old gas pump, the yard sale, the used tires and auto spares—Erin could remember it all. Only there was something else outside the general store building right now: a police car.

Sheriff Hoyt.

“No!” screamed Erin, and she threw herself across at the trucker, and hit him with everything she had.

The truck had already decelerated most of the way, but Bob couldn’t keep hold of the wheel. He hit the brakes, but the rig went sliding past the dirt lot and came to a stop on the highway further on.

“Please don’t stop!” cried Erin. “Not here! Keep going! Please!”

And she beat on his chest, her blows becoming more and more feeble, her weeping more desolate until she was just gulping air and shivering.

This was getting too much for Bob. He wanted to help the woman, but this was more than he could take. She was weird.

He took one more look at her tear-streaked face and then climbed out of the rig. She held her hand out towards him. She was drooling, crying, but it was no use. The sooner he got her to a hospital the better.

Bob was almost touching the ground when he realized he’d just done something plain stupid. He shook his head, got back on up, and took the keys out of the ignition. And then he left the truck.

It was still raining pretty hard and the dirt was turning into mush. Bob hunched low and walked quickly across to the store, his boots splashing in the water. Behind him, Erin jumped down from her side of the cab and didn’t give a damn about the rain as she looked for a place to hide.

She had been safe. She’d escaped. She’d been free. But now here she was again. Here she fucking was again!

Was the trucker one of them? Was this all part of the game? Is this how they wanted to finish her off—give her one last false second of freedom and then squash her like a damn cockroach?

Erin didn’t want to be seen prowling out in the rain, but she couldn’t help but look on as Bob entered the store.

Oh my God, she could see them . . .

The sheriff, Luda May and Henrietta.

What the hell were they all doing here so early in the morning? What kind of redneck-hillbilly-fuck middle-of-nowhere shop opened at dawn? But she knew the answer already. They were there because she was there. They’d probably left the farmhouse as soon as Morgan and her had broke free.

Morgan . . .

Jedidiah . . .

Bob went straight to the sheriff and started to talk, and soon all three of them were listening to him. She could see them soaking it all up, hanging on his every word. And when he pointed out the window, they all turned to look at what he was pointing at. They all turned to see the hysterical woman he’d picked up a few miles back along the road.

Erin bolted behind the cover of the rig.

She watched as the four of them shuffled through the store to the open doorway. The screen door remained shut, protecting them from the rain as Big Rig Bob gestured back in the direction of his truck. From his manner, there could be no doubt that he was telling them all about Erin and, though none of the Hewitts had ever asked her name, they possessed enough cruel cunning to know exactly who the trucker meant.

Sheriff Hoyt in particular seemed mighty concerned—which was only natural when it was the job of all police officers to handle any emergencies that might occur in their district.

Hoyt looked out into the heavy rain and smiled. The rig was parked on the road, about twenty yards in front of his own car, which was on the lot. He couldn’t see inside the truck cabin from here. But it was gonna be a real pleasure to walk over there and tie up some unfinished business.

Henrietta and Luda May had done a good job of keeping the trucker talking; Bob never once noticed Hoyt sizing him up from behind, just in case.

* * *

Outside, Erin had already moved away from the giant vehicle.

Although they’d all stood looking through the screen door, the terrified young woman had been able to crawl unnoticed down the length of the rig, and then across to the side of the store building.

She threw her back flat against the peeling whiteboard wall, the rain trickling down her face. She didn’t know what the hell to do, but there was an open window nearby. If she could just sneak up to it, she might at least be able to hear what they were saying.

She wasn’t thinking too clearly right now, but she couldn’t just let herself be captured again. She couldn’t give up. She had to think of something. She had to!

Clamping a hand over her mouth to stifle her worried breathing, Erin bent low and sidled her way up beside the window. She could hear them, but their voices were muffled—they were still over by the door. Slowly, she raised her head and peered over the window frame.

The window was at the back of the store, opening right above the counter. None of them knew where she was. She could see all of them, looking at the rig.

The driver kept telling them over and over about how the poor young thing done nearly drove them both off the road. Hoyt kept saying everything was under control.

Just then, Erin heard another voice—the baby!

The baby they’d stolen from Jedidiah’s parents was lying unattended in a bassinet on the counter. The moment Erin realized this, everything became clear: the Hewitts and their sick world of inherited violence and their depraved cycle of beatings and murder.

Poor Jedidiah, the son they’d wanted to carry on the family name before they killed him with a fucking chainsaw. Erin and the teenage girl, both crying for mercy on a remote Texas highway. And now, the baby.

Suddenly everything became clear, and Erin knew the perfect way to beat them.

When she’d attacked Thomas Hewitt, she’d become Thomas Hewitt. Now, she had a chance to reclaim her humanity and, at the same time, to break the chain of death that forever linked father to son in the dank squalor of the Hewitt basement.

Hoyt looked outside.

If he wanted to get her, he was going to have to get wet.

He adjusted his belt, then pushed open the screen door. As long as the two women kept the dumb trucker busy, there’d be no witnesses to what the sheriff said and did. He didn’t want to shoot the girl. No, she’d cost them too much to die quick. But, if she was gonna make a nuisance of herself, then she’d be shot while resisting arrest. Maybe the trucker too.

God damn, where was that dumb prick Leatherface when he was needed?

The sheriff stepped out of the store and into the rain, and was annoyed to find Big Rig Bob following straight behind him.

Erin ran as fast as she could, her broken shoes slipping in the mud.

Back inside the store, Henrietta and Luda May kept watch through the open doorway. They saw Hoyt walk over to the rig with that loud mouth trucker alongside him. The sheriff wasn’t going to like that none.

Henrietta cast a glance back over at the counter. Her darling little girl had slept like a charm through all the commotion. They’d not heard a peep out of the beautiful—

“Sweet baby Jesus!” she shouted. “The child is gone!”

Luda May turned and saw that the hooded wicker cradle on the counter was empty.

Erin lay down low on the seat and pulled the Swiss army knife out of her pocket. The last time she’d done this, she’d busted two blades, but this was a different ignition in a different vehicle.

She was running out of time. She couldn’t afford to make a single mistake. They were coming. She could hear their footsteps splashing in the rain.

Biting her lip, she dug into the steering column and popped open the ignition casing. Her hands were shaking all over.

Quick. The wires.

Hoyt reached down and put a hand on the gun in his holster. It wasn’t a standard issue weapon—it was the snub nose the girl had shot herself with.

He was standing outside the cabin of the truck. Both doors were closed and he couldn’t hear any movement from inside. So, keeping one hand on the revolver, he reached up to open the driver’s door—but pulled back.

He had a better idea.

He listened again, to make sure she hadn’t heard him, then started to walk round to the passenger side, where she’d be moaning and whining. The engine was dead, and the truck driver had the keys, so Hoyt didn’t think twice about walking right out in front of the enormous rig.

Her fingers worked frantically at the ignition wires. If she could just . . .

She’d wiped the rain off her hands and had already begun to strip away the sheathing with her army knife. There was just one stubborn piece of casing left.

Erin turned the knife in her fingers and began to chip at the last bit of plastic, when suddenly she slipped and stabbed the cutting tool into her thumb.

But she took the pain—it was nothing compared to what she was already feeling. She just kept her mouth shut, let the knife fall to the floor, and reached for the exposed leads with her bloodied fingers. All she had to do was make the right connection and the engine would be up and running.

Then, by God, she’d hit the gas!

The sheriff passed in front of the cabin and took out the gun from his belt.

Big Rig Bob was hanging back round the driver’s side, so there was no way for the trucker to see what was going on.

A callous bastard grin creased its way onto Hoyt’s face, the age lines in his skin only half as deep as the booze lines. He was almost at the passenger door. There was no chance of her getting away this time. He wasn’t some mule-brained retard with a tree-cutter; he was a killer with a twenty-five yard aim.

If Luda May had just let him rape the bitch and cut her up with a bourbon bottle like he’d wanted, she’d have been put to sleep hours ago. But no, they’d had to go and put her down in the basement with all the other hippie student faggots. And she’d busted out with that little freak Jedidiah, or whatever the brat’s name was before Luda May adopted him.

But it was all over now.

Sheriff Hoyt climbed up, took hold of the passenger door handle and then raised the gun, ready to shoot the bitch right between the eyes. Then he swung the door open and shouted at her to . . .

The words died in his mouth and he froze.

The cabin was completely empty.

Hoyt just hung there, holding on to the open door, one foot inside the truck, the rest of his body braced outside.

Where the hell was she?

He looked again, but there was no one inside.

He looked through, over to the store, and could see Henrietta and Luda May running straight for him. They were shouting something. They wanted him to come over. Was the girl in there?

Hoyt turned his head, ready to step down—and saw his own car speeding straight for him!

The patrol car slammed into the sheriff, hitting him full on before crashing through the open passenger door, tearing it clean off the side of the rig.

Hoyt fell back and his body smashed against the windshield, creating a mosaic of cracked glass outlined by his seeping blood. Almost immediately, the sheriff bounced off the windscreen and fell onto the ground, his stout body hurled rolling through the mud.

Fragments of broken glass tumbled over the hood of the car, and trailed glistening in the vehicle’s wake. What was left of the windshield was now smeared with Hoyt’s blood.

The sheriff couldn’t believe what had just happened to him.

That face . . . behind the wheel . . .

It was the girl!

Erin had been inside the squad car all along. She’d hot-wired it, got it started and then ran the sheriff down the first damned chance she got.

And she wasn’t through yet.

She turned the car in a tight one-eighty, her hands gripping the wheel and her face set cold in a thousand yard stare.

Luda May and Henrietta were cussing and stamping in the mud and dirt, but Erin couldn’t hear them or have cared less. Neither the fat deranged lunatic or the mad old storekeeper would come after Erin. Nor would the truck driver.

No, the only real threat to Erin now was . . .

Hoyt scrabbled across the ground, trying to find his gun. It had been knocked out of his hand when that BITCH had ran into him. But she was gonna pay . . .

The sheriff snarled with pain and rolled over to where the revolver lay in the dirt. It hurt him to breathe—reckoned she broke his ribs—but he could still take her out. Gritting his teeth and trying to shake the damned rainwater outta his eyes, he grabbed the gun and rolled over onto his back.

He could hear her coming again, the whore.

He sat up . . .

She hit the gas, was coming straight for him.

His eyes went wide.

He raised the gun and aimed for her stupid little face and—

“Fuck you!” spat Erin, and she drove the police car straight over his body.

The vehicle bounced up and down on its suspension as the wheels broke his legs, pulverized his groin, crushed his ribs into his heart and lungs, and burst his head wide open like a fucking overripe melon.

Erin turned on the wipers—there was just too much damn blood on the windshield—then she was gone.

Luda May and Henrietta raged as the car pulled away from the store and tore off down the highway. Their arms flailed wildly, their faces contorted with hatred and sheer bastard insanity.

Erin had stolen their baby and the rain poured down.

There was a flash of lightning in the distance, and Erin could hear the brooding rumble of thunder overhead. The sky had broken and the fall had become almost torrential in its ferocity. But the water was purifying the car, washing away the final grubby stains of the sheriff’s death.

Erin had won.

Ahead of her, the sun was rising high above the horizon, casting more and more glorious light down upon the wide open prairie of Travis County—the new day undiminished, despite the storm.

Lying in the passenger seat next to Erin, snuggled in soft rabbit pajamas, was the baby girl.

Erin had snatched the child through the open window of the store, rescuing her from the living homicidal hell of growing up as a member of the Hewitt family.

The young woman behind the wheel of the police car had been to the slaughterhouse and back. She’d saved an innocent child and now they were both on the road to Dallas.

Erin looked grim and determined.

She was just passing through.

EPILOGUE

It was difficult to imagine the distraught middle-aged woman before me as the carefree teenager who’d gone with her friends to Mexico thirty years ago. If only half her story was true, it was half too much.

All her cuts and bruises had healed a long time ago, but the fact that she was talking to me from within an institution was proof that her mental scars would probably never go away.

Now that I’d heard Erin Hardesty’s story, I had even more questions that needed answering. Where was the baby she took? What happened to Luda May, Henrietta and Monty Hewitt? And just what did happen to Leatherface?

On August 19, she left him seriously injured at the slaughterhouse. On August 20, Leatherface killed Detective Adams in the basement of the Hewitt house, so where was Leatherface now?

I showed Erin the autopsy photo and I described to her the photo shown to me by Franklin Nash.

“They killed the wrong man,” she told me. “They had a dead man and that was all they cared about. So they closed the case.”

I asked her, “How do you know it wasn’t him?”

Erin looked me straight in the eye and said, “The bodies in the photos had both arms. He had only one.”

Then I remembered, she’d cut off his arm with the cleaver.

A one-armed man. An obese one-armed man, like the survivor I went to see only a few days ago. The survivor who hadn’t spoken since the day he was found. The survivor who compulsively chewed on candy and chocolate. The survivor who had only one arm.

There was no other survivor.

The man I spoke to three days ago—was Leatherface.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Hand is the author of Freddy vs Jason, three fantasy books, and has also written for Fear, Edge, Prediction and Develop magazines. He has designed five board games including Chainsaw Warrior, Fury of Dracula and Star Wars: Escape from the Death Star, and is the producer of over twenty video games, among them the international million-seller blockbuster Grand Prix 2. Stephen lives in the southwest of England with his wife, Mandy.

Table of Contents

- Back Cover
- Preview
- Titlepage
- Copyright
- Dedication

- THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

- PROLOGUE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- EPILOGUE
- About the Author