Larry

  LARRY

  Adam Millard was born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1980, and grew up in Wolverhampton. He is the author of the zombie novels, Dead Cells, Dead Frost, and Dead Line, the bizarro novellas, Vinyl Destination, Skinners and Hamsterdamned! and the supernatural novels, Deathdealers and The Susceptibles. He can be contacted through www.adammillard.co.uk.

  Also By Adam Millard

  Only in Whispers

  The Ballad of Dax and Yendyll

  Grimwald The Great

  Dead West

  Dead Cells

  Dead Frost

  Dead Line

  Deathdealers

  The Susceptibles

  Olly

  Skinners

  Divided

  Chasing Nightmares

  Peter Crombie, Teenage Zombie

  Peter Crombie Vs The Grampires

  The Secret Diary of Peter Crombie

  Hamsterdamned

  Vinyl Destination

  Larry

  Adam

  MILLARD

  Copyright © 2014 Adam Millard

  This Edition Published 2014 by Crowded

  Quarantine Publications

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All characters in this publication are fictitious

  and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

  form or by any means without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

  cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  Crowded Quarantine Publications

  34 Cheviot Road

  Wolverhampton

  West Midlands

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  “I was a great killer, once upon a time. Now I can’t even sneeze

  without pissing down my leg.” – Larry Travers

  1

  Camp Diamond Creek – 1978

  The girl ran through the woods, breasts bouncing like two bowling balls in a cheaply constructed knapsack, tripping over things that most children could have knocked aside without too much effort. She was tired and terrified, and tired of being terrified. The nightmare seemed to be neverending, and yet it had ended for Billy, and Roger, and Deborah, and Kaycee, and twelve other kids that she couldn’t name even if you gave her a thousand attempts.

  The bastard in the creepy pig mask had killed them all.

  He’d decapitated Billy with an axe. Roger had been forced through a wood-chipper, and had come out the other end looking like something you would fry with onions. Deborah and Kaycee had been getting it on in the middle of the woods, and had been just about to go down on one another when Pigface had decided to beat them both to death with Billy’s severed head. The twelve other kids…well, they were all in pieces back at the main cabin. It would take some poor bastard forever to figure out whose arm was whose, whose leg had been shoved up the fat kid’s ass, whose head was floating in the toilet, whose penis was floating in the kettle.

  They were all gone.

  She was the final girl.

  And the pig-faced maniac was closing the gap on her.

  She tripped, for the umpteenth time, and followed it up with an involuntary cartwheel. Landing on her backside with enough force to rattle her teeth, she thought, Why can’t I stay on my feet? She had always been quite good at walking – she’d done it since she was a kid – and running was just walking but at a quicker pace, was it not? And yet here she was, struggling like some one-year-old amateur wearing oversized jelly-sandals.

  Then, he appeared from behind a tree, the pig-masked maniac, swinging his axe the from side to side, taking the tops off nettle- and raspberry-bushes as if they’d done something to offend him. “Squeeee!” he said. The girl didn’t know what that meant, but she had a feeling he wasn’t offering her a truce or apologising for butchering her friends – and twelve others that would, if this were a movie – remain uncredited.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed, clambering to her feet with the faux optimism that she would stay there. “Fuck you, you pig-faced fuck!” Her mother would have reproached her for using such foul language had she been present, but the girl was in shock, and it was a known fact that shocked people liked to say fuck a lot.

  “Squeeeeeeee!” Pigface said, reached behind his back. When his hand reappeared it was clenching Billy’s decapitated head, which was swinging to and fro by its hair. Billy stared out at her, almost accusatory.

  What did I do? she thought. It wasn’t my fault your head was so loose. It wasn’t my fault you got in the way of his axe-blade. Quit looking at me like that you…

  “Reeeeeee!” the killer said, kicking the head away. It didn’t get far. In fact, it came back to him by way of a tree, but that was the thing about woods. You couldn’t move for all the goddamn trees.

  The girl turned and ran once again. She had a stitch in her side, and her bare feet were battered and bloody, but she still had a head, and while she had a head, she had a chance…

  As the girl crested the hill, she saw a cabin. Her heart sank as she realised she’d completed a full circle and was back at Camp Diamond Creek. How was that even possible? Had she not been running in a straight line? Was one leg marginally shorter than the other? Whatever it was, the girl could have cried as she went ass over tit down the hill, rolling toward the familiar cabin at a speed that gained her a few hundred metres on Mr Bacon, who was squee-ing and reeee-ing behind her like some weird human siren. She hit the side of the cabin, and would have gone all the way through it had it not been constructed from only the finest logs. It hurt, but she could walk – at least, she could walk in pretty much the same way a drunken geriatric could walk – and she wasted no time in getting to her feet and rushing around the side of the cabin.

  “Squeeee!”

  It sounded far away, but the woods had a way of distorting things – like rotating when people are walking in a straight line just to fuck with their minds. She could trust the woods no more than she could trust the porcine psycho pursuing her.

  “You didn’t bring him back?” a voice whispered. The final girl almost shat her knickers. She snapped her head to the left and found another girl staring back at her, all wide eyes and fearfulness. Obviously one of the counsellors, she wore the yellow and black uniform and a sticker with her camp name on it: Moose. Quite apt it was, too. “You did, didn’t you? You brought him back to the fucking camp?”

  The girl shrugged. “I didn’t mean to,” she whispered. “I was running, and I kept falling over, and I must have got disorientated, and I don’t know why I’m trying to explain myself to you, Moose, not when he’s still out there.” Then, something hit the girl, something terrible, and it was all she could do not to scream.

  She wasn’t the final girl. There was a fifty-percent chance Moose was the final girl, the one destined to survive long enough to relay the previous night’s horrific events to the police. Those weren’t great odds.

  “Who is he? What does he want from us? Why is he wearing a pig mask?” All reasonable questions, the girl thought.

  Moose pushed herself up against the cabin and took a quick peek. “I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t know what he wants from us. All I know is that he’s really fucking angry. He killed the other counsellors, which is a bit of a pain in the ass as I really liked one of them.” She stared sky
ward, as if recollecting a pleasant moment, or one that might have been had pig-face not hacked everyone to death. The half-smile disappeared from her face. “You can’t be here. I’m the final girl. There can’t be two final girls. You’re just going to have to carry on running through the trees until he finds you.”

  The hell I will, the girl thought. “What makes you so special?” she said. “The counsellors never survive. You might as well just lie down and wait for him to get you.”

  “I’m not just a counsellor!” Moose said, and then lowered her voice to add, “I’m also a virgin. Everyone knows that the virgins don’t die. How many miles of cock have you had?”

  The girl shook her head. “None of your damn business,” she said. “But being a virgin doesn’t guarantee you safety. One of the guys I was camping with, Roger, he was bug-ugly even before he went through the wood-chipper. There’s no way he wasn’t a virgin, and yet Pigface got him.”

  “Hookers,” Moose said. “Your friend Roger must have been paying for it. If he’d laid off on the crack-whores, he’d still be alive now.”

  The girl considered Moose’s theory for a moment, and quickly dismissed it as bullshit. “Why don’t we just split up?” she said. “That way, Pigface will get whoever he gets, and the other will live to tell the tale.”

  Moose was about to speak when an axe appeared behind her. Attached to the axe was the porcine maniac. Before Moose had time to open her mouth, the axe came down, splitting her head in two like a chunk of firewood. Blood sprayed out at the girl – the final girl – and she backed away, wiping it from her eyes. For a moment, everything was blurry and bloody. It was like looking through a pink lava lamp. Still, she could make out Moose’s split face, the way the nose lopsidedly dangled to the left, the way one of her eyes had popped from its socket and now hung there like a busted yoyo.

  “Squeeee!” Pigface said, yanking the axe from Moose’s not-quite-evenly divided head. There was a crunch, which reminded the final girl of her younger brother at breakfast-time. Noisy little bastard chomped like a starving camel.

  Moose the Unfortunate Counsellor dropped to her knees, her head and face hanging down like a half-peeled banana. Blood pumped from lord knows where, peppering the ground around the final girl’s feet. For some reason, it made her need the toilet. Now, however, was not the time. It was time to run, to run away from Pigface. She didn’t know if he was aware of the ‘final girl’ rule. Out there in the middle of nowhere, there was a good chance he hadn’t heard of Speak and Spell or russet flares, either.

  She turned and ran as fast as she could, which wasn’t that fast, but Pigface didn’t seem to be in any rush to go after her. Maybe he had heard of the ‘final girl’ rule after all.

  Reaching the cabin she’d spent the last week in, she searched for something – anything – to protect herself with. It was just after midnight, and all of the trucks and cars parked up on the gravel at the front of the main cabin, including the VW camper she and her friends had travelled to Camp Diamond Creek in, had fallen prey to a pair of garden shears. Wires and tubes hung from their hoods as if they had been disembowelled.

  The girl was trapped, her chance of escape about as realistic as Christopher Reeves’ flying scenes in a film she’d caught at the pictures the previous week. And so it made perfect sense to equip herself as best she could.

  Rifling through the drawers, pushing aside Deborah and Kaycee’s marvellous collection of dildos and grimacing as she did so, she found a box of matches and a small Swiss Army knife that might have answered the question about why the Swiss weren’t terribly good in wars.

  It was better than nothing – just – and though it would hardly put the fear of day into Pigface, she felt vaguely better armed than she had been unarmed.

  Slipping out into the night, the girl edged around her cabin. From where she stood, she could make out the big cabin on top of the hill – often a place of joy, of Kumbayah and handclapping, of woodwork classes and foraging expeditions, and now…well now it was a morgue, only warm and full of flies. She didn’t want to go up there, but she knew that’s where it would all end.

  The big finale.

  You couldn’t hope to defeat an axe-wielding maniac without a big finale. She could run around in the woods all night long, and he would be there, just a few feet behind. If she was the final girl (she was taking nothing for granted, not since the Moose episode) they could be at it until winter broke, or until she starved to death, whichever came first.

  No, she had to go up to the main cabin, to where the decimated bodies of her friends lay around like Jeffrey Dahmer’s scatter-cushions. It was Pigface’s hub, the place she knew he would return to once he was bored of searching for her. It was best to get up there and catch him unaware. Maybe set some traps, or whatever traps were possible from a box of – she opened the matchbox – two matches and a knife that was primarily made up of toothpicks, nail-files, and screwdrivers.

  The thought sent a shiver along her spine. Go with your friends, her mother had said just last week. Go, have fun, it’s your last chance before college.

  Thanks, Mom. I’m having a fucking blast, you old bat.

  The girl opened the knife out onto a particularly savage looking pair of toenail clippers and headed up the hill, listening out for any twig-crunches that weren’t her own. Pigface wasn’t behind her, or in front of her, or at either side of her, which was great news as far as she was concerned, but then she thought, What if he’s underneath me, or swinging through the trees like some swinish Tarzan? If nothing else, it made her walk a little faster.

  As she neared the main cabin, she heard music drifting along on the breeze. Bob Dylan was babbling on about how the answer to various questions was blowing in the wind. It transpired that the wind was, in fact, a bothersome know-it-all.

  Someone must have left a record on the player. Or maybe Pigface had decided a little music was what the night needed, something to break up the constant, awkward silences that passed between predator and victim – when he wasn’t squee-ing and she wasn’t squealing.

  Upon reaching the door, the girl took a deep breath. The music was louder now, which tended to happen the closer you got to something. The song finished, and then there was an almighty scratch before it started over from the beginning.

  Someone was in the cabin already.

  Pigface?

  She glanced down at the toenail-clippers in her hand. He had an axe. It didn’t seem fair. Like pitting a tiger against a shih-tzu. Didn’t final girls usually get a kitchen knife, or a set of knitting needles, or the killer’s accidentally misplaced machete? It didn’t bode well for her survival.

  She stepped into the main cabin and slowly made her way past the acoustic guitars lining the hall. That was when the stench hit the back of her throat. God, it was pungent. The dead kids were starting to pong. Worse than when they were alive. The only thing ‘blowing on the wind’ in that moment was the stench of a dozen slowly-rotting hippies.

  The girl managed to swallow back the vomit and, stepping over what looked like two arms holding hands, made her way into the assembly hall.

  It was worse than she remembered, though she had previously only caught a glimpse of it. I don’t care who you are, the sight of a blood-drenched, axe-brandishing maniac in a pig mask has the tendency to set your feet a-running. And run she had, and trip over repeatedly she had, and whimper, well that wasn’t something you could control when you were running and tripping over…

  There seemed to be a lot more bodies in the hall now…or a lot more pieces of the same bodies. Yes, that was it. Arms and legs had been quartered. Heads had been split. Genitals had been de-sacked and rolled along the floorboards like some sick game of bloody marbles.

  “Gurgh,” the girl said. It wasn’t a word – except in Haiti, where it meant ‘fish bollocks’. Luckily, one of the attachments of the Swiss Army knife was a little vial of smelling-salts. She felt better once she’d had a couple of snorts.

  The Bob Dyla
n song stopped, and this time it stayed stopped. The girl didn’t like the silence, which was ridiculous since she was standing in a roomful of hewn teenagers. Silence was the last thing that should have unnerved her.

  “Squeeeee!” Pigface said, stepping from behind the brightly-painted backdrop she and her friends were going to use in their amateur performance of The Wizard of Oz. His axe dripped with viscera, his white apron was…well, not white at all. He looked even more maniacal than ever standing in front of the Emerald City.

  She held both hands out and took a deep breath. “Have you not heard about the final girl decree?” she said. It was worth a shot.

  “The final girl what?” Pigface said, lowering his axe for the time being. It was the first time she’d heard him speak. He had a soft voice, which she hadn’t been anticipating at all. It was the kind of voice one might expect from a pilot just before he broke all laws of physics and carted three-hundred people toward the heavens.

  “It’s how this works,” the girl said. “Everyone knows about it.”

  “Well I don’t,” he said, his words slightly muffled by the mask. “Why does no-one tell me anything. When did this start?”

  The girl scratched her head. “Only this last year or so. Shit, you’re having a bad day, aren’t you?”

  Pigface snorted. “Story of my life,” he said. “So you’re the final girl then, are you?”

  “Since you killed all the others except for me,” she said, gesturing to the bits and bobs that were obviously female scattered across the floor, “I guess I am.”

  “Well that’s a nuisance,” he said, shrinking. He was clearly annoyed at this new information. “I’ve been chasing you all night long. I’ll bet you were wondering what the hell was going on, weren’t you.” He sniggered and leaned the axe against the theatrical backdrop. It now looked as if one of the munchkins was giving the handle a BJ.

  “I did think it was a little odd,” the girl said, smiling. “I mean, if I’d’ve known you didn’t know about the final girl decree, I’d have hollered back over my shoulder. Saved us both a bit of energy.”