Presidents day a slasher.., p.1
President's Day: A Slasher Force Adventure (Slasher Force Adventures Book 1), page 1
PRESIDENT’S DAY
A Slasher Force Adventure
By Jack Moon
~~~
Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2017 by Jack Moon/T. Wescott
Cover art design by SelfPubBookCovers.com/Ravenborn
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people unless so designated by the publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Stop by and talk chop shop with Jack at www.facebook.com/Jackmoonbooks
Or
If you’re cool like that, pick up his tweets @Jackmoonbooks on Twitter
Contents
Prologue: Alone on a Country Lane
Chapter 1: The Brothers McShitz
Chapter 2: A Secret Place
Chapter 3: Welcome to Cobblers Grove
Chapter 4: A Crazy Man with a Gun
Chapter 5: The Old Mansion in the Woods
Chapter 6: Reunion in the Cellar
Chapter 7: What’s Behind the Door?
Chapter 8: Asshole P. Coletrain
Chapter 9: Escape Plan
Chapter 10: Bloodbath in the Forest
Chapter 11: Raisin Man Lays a Plan
Chapter 12: The Great Escape
Chapter 13: An Offer He Totally Can Refuse
Chapter 14: Second Thoughts
Chapter 15: The People You Meet in Old Rooms
Chapter 16: Close Cuts
Chapter 17: Escaping the Past
Chapter 18: Horseshoes
Chapter 19: Hand Grenades
Chapter 20: Prez Dispenser
Chapter 21: Slashed Force
Chapter 22: Life Is Good in the Bloody Study
Chapter 23: Prezurrection
Chapter 24: Night Flight
Chapter 25: What History Doth the Future Hold?
Chapter 26: Detroit Rot City
Chapter 27: Dead Presidents
Chapter 28: An Old Warehouse in the Dead of Night
Chapter 29: Time to Get Tricky
Chapter 30: Colonial Corpses & Disco Dicks
Chapter 31: A Rendezvous at Chip’s Diner
Chapter 32: Deads of State
Chapter 33: Show Time
Chapter 34: The POTUS with the Mostest
Epilogue: All’s well that ends... Weeeell!
Author’s Note
To Mandy
Thanks for sticking around
Also from Jack Moon
Coffin Dirt
A Novella of Literary Horror
A short story of regret, redemption, and a father’s love for his son
“I don’t know who this writer really is, but ‘wow’ can he write! This tale was beautifully expressed and it did what every great story should do…it moved me. Bravo! I loved it!” – Amazon Review
DOWNLOAD NOW FOR ONLY $0.99
Prologue
Alone on a Country Lane
Jennifer stepped from the tarnished wood floor of her house and onto the cold concrete of the steps that trailed down to the acreages of brown and green surrounding her old ancestral home.
She enjoyed the juxtaposition of the three textures on her bare feet: the hard heat of the wood, the cold roughness of the concrete, and the soft fingers of grass. They wrapped around her toes as though they wanted to pull her down and have their way with her.
Thousands of tiny blades all pointed right at her.
She held her flip-flops in her hand in preparation for the gravel path that shimmied past the tree line and ran roughly one-mile to the paved road that would take her into Cobblers Grove. Her friends would be waiting at the library for a late-night cram session. The annual George Washington Clambake was only three days away and once again Jennifer had been drafted into the decoration committee by her more civic minded friends. If Jennifer were honest with herself she’d admit that she didn’t mind. There is precious little to do in this one cell tower town and she was grateful for any distraction while biding her time waiting to ace her SAT and hitch her wagon to the first car, truck, or hoopty headed out of this time capsule and to the big city. Any big city.
But for the time being she was here in Cobblers Grove: a pleasant, peaceful village that seemed to be stuck in a time vortex somewhere between the 17th and 21st centuries. Lord knows there are worse places for an 18-year-old girl to find herself, and a part of her connected to the history of this place; a part that her grandmother would have called an old soul.
She tossed her flip-flops down on the gravel path pointed east towards town and slid in her feet. There were no streetlights this far out, but the moon was high and the smoky blue light coursing through the trees and bouncing off the white gravel would provide suitable illumination. She looked up at the cloudless sky and wondered, as she often did, if the big cities had the same sky, or if it was dark and gritty like they showed in the movies; stained with factory smoke and car exhaust and all the dirt and grime that had no other place to go because the streets, the buildings, and even the people, already carried all the dirt they could. The thought both revolted and excited her.
Cobblers Grove was known for two things. First, there were the cobblers who gave the town its name. Dating from the 15th century this town had been home to the finest shoemakers in New England. Secondly, and most strange, was the village’s dubious connection to our first president. It is said that while still a general, George Washington would bring his mistress to Cobblers Grove to enjoy the anonymity that only such an isolated community could offer. It was also said that while here, he and his unnamed courtesan would partake of an endless supply of oysters. This event was commemorated each year by the George Washington Clambake. Clams are substituted for oysters because it was decided that any suggestion of an aphrodisiac would be improper and scandalous. It somehow escaped the attention of the village elders that celebrating an illicit extramarital affair was about a scandalous as a Baptist community could get. But its questionable connection with George Washington was the town’s only claim to fame. Its only brush with celebrity.
The village population quadrupled with tourists during the weekend of the clambake. That’s to say nothing of history buffs, clam connoisseurs, and the bored denizens of the small neighboring communities that weren’t so fortunate as to have been used by a historical figure as his personal bordello.
The night was calm, the air still, and the wild life appeared to be taking it easy; all except for a horse galloping wild in the pastures of one of the nearby ranches.
The calmness of the night and the occupation of her mind by her village’s inglorious legend led Jennifer’s thoughts further astray to the even more unbelievable continuation of the story. It wasn’t enough that George Washington might have used Cobblers Grove as a seedy motel, but folk stories have it that he retired here after his supposed death to live in secret. Some would have it that he never left. Never died. Some would say he can’t die and is in fact responsible for the many mysterious deaths that have occurred in and around the sleepy village over the last 200 years. It’s not a story that Jennifer, or anyone she knows, has ever put any stock in, but its cold fingers tickle at her back on evenings such as this when the sun is gone and she finds herself alone on a dark path.
She’s not frightened of a zombie president. That’s a thought too sensational and ludicrous to even entertain. But there’s no denying that people have been murdered. Many people. Over many years. Few of those deaths have been explained. The most recent was just last summer. Jennifer didn’t know the girl well, but she knew her, and that brought the legends home. Her name was Welinda Holmes and she had been two grades behind Jennifer in school. Her mom ran the laundromat at the end of Shoe Leather Lane. When the search party went out it was Welinda’s mother who had the misfortune of finding the first parts. A foot and an arm. After that she stopped looking and left it to the men to discover the rest of what had once been her first born.
The coroner said it was a hatchet that done it. But not like any of the hatchets sold at old man McGurney’s hardware store. The blade had been thinner and curved, like what they had used in the old days to chop down small trees.
As they had done in the past when similar murders were committed, the town officials brought in investigators from the larger, outlying burgs, but the murder could be traced back to no one. The more superstitious among them felt there was a curse on the village and this curse was somehow tied to the village’s one blessing.
George Washington.
Jennifer tried not to think about it as she flip-flopped over the dirt and gravel that had been laid by men dead generations before she was born. She would soon reach the paved streets of the village proper where there would be lights and the comforting sounds of humans living and breathing. These familiar streets would take her to the library where awaited her frie
nds and safety. She never spoke to them about her irrational fears, but she wondered if - in their private moments - they shared in her irrationality.
She could still hear the horse galloping in the distance, only now the sound was not so distant, nor were its footfalls muted by earth as they had been. The horse was on gravel now and heading towards her. This made no sense, thought Jennifer, because the ranchers in her area were careful to fence in their horses. It’s not impossible that one had gotten out, but she couldn’t remember the last time one had done so. She imagined it must be one of the men out on a late evening ride. It had to be Mr. Sexton, who is known for his late-night dalliances with village barmaids, although such local knowledge would come as quite a shock to the blissfully ignorant Mrs. Sexton.
Jennifer was no stranger to horseback riding and hoped that her mysterious rider was indeed the salubrious Sexton, as a wink and a smile should be enough to buy her a ride into town. But she would play aloof and wait for him to sally forth beside her and ask why a nice girl like her should be out walking alone on a dark country path. The horse drew closer. She could smell the gravel dust it sent up in its wake. She got her best smile ready, equal parts innocent and seductive. Strange, she thought, how to many men those disparate dispositions were interchangeable.
Mr. Sexton was upon her now, but she continued to pretend that she was alone on the rock strewn lane. Then she felt the sting. No, it was pain. Her ear burned as though he’d smacked it with his riding crop. Was it on purpose? Why would he do that? It must have been an accident.
She reached her left hand up to the side of her head and felt wetness. What she didn’t feel was her ear.
She stopped in her tracks and spun. The horse, now about 12 yards ahead of her, did the same. The air was thick with dirt and gravel dust, making it hard to see. But her sense of sight wasn’t what mattered now. It was her sense of feel that seemed to have betrayed her. Where she should have found the swinging Eiffel Tower earring there was only blood. Confused, she reached her dripping red fingers up to the right side of her head as though she expected to find the same mess. There should have been a sense of relief when her fingers met the soft, rubbery texture of her earlobe and pinched the metal disk that dangled from it. But the familiar sensation only served to illustrate the absurdity of the foreign new land that was the left side of her head. A giant hole where there was once structure. Her own private Ground Zero.
She didn’t notice that the horse and the mysterious stranger atop it had both turned their attention towards her. She didn’t notice because something in the lane caught her eye; something red, something wrong. Although her good ear was now turned in its direction, she did not hear the horse pick up its feet and step towards her. As she knelt in the cloud of white chalk dust beside the piece of debris that had once been a part of her, she thought she could see the slight glimmer of light bouncing off metal. So struck was she by the ludicrous reality of standing apart from and yet looking upon a part of herself that she failed to notice the large metallic object hanging from the stranger’s arm.
And then her ear, or whatever this discarded fleshy lump was, disappeared. No, not disappeared. Went black. What precious few rays of moonlight had been able to cut through the trees and into the flying clouds of dirt and rock mist had become blocked. Something had stepped in the way. She looked up and saw herself, her own face, looking back at her. Small, distorted, like looking in a fun house mirror. It was her, all right, but what she looked into was no mirror. It was curved on one side, and thin, but narrowed and thicker at its other end, where it attached itself to a stick, or some thick piece of wood. Her eyes traveled down the wood and came to rest on a hand so impossibly thin and white that she imagined she could see the dark brown grain of the wood through the flesh and bone of the fingers that gripped it. Before she could be certain of this, the hand moved. It moved up, pushing the shiny metal object into the sky where it caught the moon. It was enchanting, she thought, like a teardrop turned on its side, or a spaceship coming to say hello.
“Cursed whore,” said a voice unlike any she had ever heard. It was, she was sure, not a voice that belonged here. It was what she imagined the gravel at her feet would sound like if it could speak. But the sound came from above her, over her head. Not the horse, of course. It must be the aliens. She was right, it is a spaceship! And they’re coming down just to see her! She looked up just in time to see that she was right. The object indeed came down, just for her.
Chapter 1
The Brothers McShitz
Pernicious McShitz looked George Washington in his green, wrinkly face. “We could sure use a lot more of you.”
His brother, Auspicious, grabbed the dollar bill from his hand. “And we’d have a lot more of these if we ever figured out how to earn money faster than we spend it. What did we get on the last job? Fifty dollars in ones and quarters?”
Perny stretched his legs out across the back of the van and shrugged his shoulders. “The poor lady, it was more than she had. What could we do, say no? She had an evil clown trying to take off her head. It killed three of her friends, for craps sake. At least it turned out to be human. I’d say we got off lucky.”
“Damned lucky,” said Sally from the driver’s seat. “I was sure we were dealing with a supernatural. A wronged returner from another time, you know, like that demon plumber over in Allentown last year. Remember that?”
“Remember it?” Aussie fingered a spot on the back of his head. “How could I forget? I still got the dent in my head from his lead pipe as a permanent reminder.”
Perny grabbed one of the many empty clips setting by his side and, one by one, filled it with bullets. “Maybe we didn’t get rich on the clown gig, but that woman was one hell of a cook. It was nice to be served by someone other than a pimply teen in a red shirt for once. And to sit at an actual table.”
Josh looked up from his laptop. The headset he wore made his glasses crooked and sent his hair in all sorts of directions, giving him a sort of mad scientist look. “Hey, watch what you say about pimply teens in red shirts. That was me before I took this job, and that’ll probably be me if we don’t get another gig soon.”
Josh was the latest in a long line of young interns. They never seemed to work out for long, though not because they were fearful, or incompetent. Indeed, Sally always managed to find the right person for the job. The issue was mortality. They simply kept dying. Better them than us, Aussie had once said, and Perny was certainly inclined to agree with him. But it would be nice, he thought, if they would just stop dying. He liked Josh, as much or more as he’d liked any of his predecessors, and decided he’ do what he could to keep him around for as long as possible.
They chased slashers. That’s what they did. They chased them, caught them, killed them, and banished them. Whatever they had to do to keep people safe. They didn’t ask for the job, they inherited it. The brothers McShitz, Pernicious and Auspicious - Perny and Aussie for short - came from a long line of monster stompers. Their father, Malicious, had coined that term, but Perny preferred to think of himself as a slasher basher. Monsters, Perny decided, was too outdated. The word, that is. Only the word.
Monsters are real, he knew. He’d seen them, touched them, and damn near lost his life to more than one. But he preferred to think of them as slashers. Somehow that made it less real, like the movies of his youth. He liked to think of his life as a movie because movies have happy endings. Good always triumphs over evil. Real life didn’t always work out that way, so he liked to imagine that he had a doppelgänger living in some distant land - like Paris, or perhaps Barbados - and this alternate version of him was burdened with living his real life while he played the movie star. Time after time, job after job, he was just a movie star. The good guy. He always won. And always would. He didn’t believe this, but he wanted to, and wanting to believe this kept him from going crazy.
