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  MASS MURDERER HORACE PINKER

  WAS ON THE LOOSE

  … and no one in Maryville, Ohio, slept soundly. They locked their windows. They bolted their doors. They prayed for their lives.

  Then on October 2, at 6:45 a.m., Horace Pinker was put to death in the electric chair.

  Now, he’s really mad.

  Wes Craven’s

  The electrifying motion picture from Wes Craven, creator of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET—now a terrifying new novel by Randall Boyll.

  “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR …?

  DO IT TO ME!”

  Sweat was running openly down the warden’s face now. He looked over to the guard who was waiting to pull the plug on Pinker forever. “You heard the man,” he croaked. “Do it.”

  Something buzzed loudly. Pinker convulsed in his chair with a disgusting, piglike grunt. Sparks popped and flew. Pinker strained against the straps with his eyes rolling up in his head. A blast of smoke shot out from under the copper cap, yet still Pinker grinned, and grinned, beaming with some wild brand of insane ecstasy.

  The doctor gasped. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my dear God …”

  SHOCKER

  SHOCKER

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / September 1990

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1990 by MCA Publishing Rights,

  a Division of MCA, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-425-12263-8

  A BERKLEY BOOK® TM 757,375

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  The name “BERKLEY” and the “B” logo

  are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Prologue •

  For the ninth time in his career as a television reporter, Walker Stevens, handsome anchorman and roving reporter for the Channel 8 news, known womanizer and a notorious wearer of ill-fitting wigs, was busy throwing up into somebody’s hedges.

  The killer had struck again on this damp, windy night in Maryville, Ohio. Struck again, and hard.

  It was a snoopy neighbor who had noticed that her somewhat grumpy neighbor Todd Jenkins had left his porch light on. That was at midnight, she would tell Walker Stevens when he got done barfing and got around to interviewing people, and she just knew something was out of whack. She would admit that she might have heard screams coming from Mr. Jenkins’s house, but then, it was late and windy and the noise might have been the wind hooting around the eaves and whooping across the gutters of her house. Besides, she would tell the daring reporter with the weak stomach, what happened over there was certainly none of her business.

  Nevertheless, she had tromped over to the Jenkinses’ house with her nightgown flapping and her hair tattering in the breeze, wondering if perhaps the family had dozed off without realizing their teenage daughter hadn’t come home at eleven. Though she wasn’t one to talk, the Jenkinses’ daughter was pretty commonly known as a slut, and you can bet everybody knew it.

  As it turned out, it would have been better for the daughter if she had come home just a wee bit later.

  Walker Stevens straightened with curds of vomit dribbling down the corners of his lips, his bowels still churning and his mouth pasty with the taste of fresh puke. His cameraman had mercifully not taped this ninth episode of Stevens vs. Stomach; he was busy filming the chaos that had descended upon the Jenkinses’ property since the nosy neighbor called the police, hysterical to report that everyone in the house had been butchered.

  Butchered? Walker Stevens wondered as he reassembled himself for the camera and the Eyewitness News report that would be aired in the morning. His wig was hanging askew and he hurriedly shoved it back into place on the shiny dome of his head. Yes, he thought, butchered is a good word to describe what’s in that house. Or slaughtered. Sacrificed? What kind of man could do those—things—to women and children in the dark of the night? And for God’s sake, why was he doing it? Nine times in nine months. Corpse-of-the-Month Club, just send a penny and you get twelve albums for free, each etched with the dying screams of the slaughtered …

  Walker nearly slapped himself to make the thoughts go away. He looked around, feeling vaguely guilty, as he always did after losing his lunch in the bushes while about a dozen cops and various medical people strolled around looking grim. They didn’t throw up. Why should he?

  He wiped a hand over his chin, blinking against the red and blue strobing of the police cars’ lights, almost dizzy from all the commotion. The Channel 8 van had been the second vehicle on the scene, faster even than most of the cops, thanks to Channel 8’s recent purchase of a police-channel radio because of the killings. Walker had been ready to call it quits for the night when the news director charged into his office, nearly hysterical himself, and shouted the phrase that was becoming much too familiar in Maryville: He Did It Again.

  Kind of corny, kind of cliché, but oh so very true.

  “Let’s shoot,” Walker said now to his cameraman, who was panning the house as the last body, wrapped in bloody sheets, was wheeled out on a steel gurney to join its family of corpses. “I want to get the hell away from here. Gotta get away from here. Look, Dave, are you even listening?”

  “Last shot,” Dave mumbled.

  “Christ, it’s stock footage by now. How many times can you film a dead body?”

  “I’d say about thirty times, if you count these four. What kind of background do you want?”

  “Just the house. No bodies, please. In the name of Christ, no more bodies.”

  “No problem. Ready?”

  “Think so.” Walker looked up at the sky while he adjusted the knot of his tie. Familiar stars, so far away and safe, far away and safe from these atrocities and this horror. Walker had been the third person to enter the house. The lights were on, the remains of the smashed front door flapping back and forth on its hinges. Some woman wearing a nightgown was standing by the porch, looking fairly green beneath a layer of face cream. Ignoring her, Walker had hopped up the steps while Dave got his camera ready. He had been crazily hoping for some strange and new kind of murder, perhaps a simple gunshot victim or simple stabbing. Anything to break the monotony of the hack and slash that had been going on for so long. Crazily hoping, but not ready to believe it himself.

  It was the teenage girl on the couch that had bothered him most. She was sitting in a fairly natural pose, young girl posing for her high school picture, head tipped slightly backward and resting lightly on the top rim of the sofa. Several flaws, though: her mouth hung open; she looked as if a camera had caught her in the middle of a word, or perhaps a yawn. Her eyes were also open. No harm in that. Another flaw, though, a very disturbing one. She was topless. Her nipples had been sliced off. Her stomach seemed strangely flat, almost deflated. There was a vertical cut from her navel to her chest.

  Her guts had been shoveled out of her and deposited on the far edge of the sofa. Some gray thing dangled to the floor from the pile of muck, a thick and nauseating rope of intestine.

  Walker heard the two cops puttering about in the kitchen, no doubt finding other grisly trophies the unknown slasher had left behind. He turned to leave, already feeling too sick to take any more, hating the stench of fresh blood that filled the house like some putrid swamp gas, when something fell out of the girl’s mouth and slithered down her chest on a wide trickle of remarkably crimson blood.

  It was one of her nipples.

  Walker stared at it as it performed a flip-flop between the girl’s breasts, youthful pink and no larger than a quarter, and fell into her l
ap with a slight plip! The horror was so huge that Walker was unable to pull himself away.

  The other nipple slipped out of her mouth on a drool of blood. For a moment it dangled there, a hideous pendulum on a string of bloody mucus.

  That just about did it for Walker. He charged down the steps and crashed into the hedges, remembering with terrible clarity what he had had for supper: pork chops, mashed potatoes, peas, a piece of cheesecake. They all reappeared without so much as a hello, drenching the bushes, turned now to sour mush.

  “Got you focused,” Dave said.

  Walker jerked. He had been horsing with his tie for a full minute, reliving the sight of the girl, the warm smell of blood, the way the whole house seemed to shriek death and mayhem. What had it been like in there? How long had the slasher taken to finish his ghastly work?

  Dave handed him a microphone. Walker swallowed, trying to clear his throat. The glare from Dave’s light was too bright; he hated to squint at the camera, but he had spent too much time staring into dark bushes and needed time to let his eyes adjust.

  “Taping,” Dave said, and the camera came alive with a slight buzz. “They can edit it later. Got anything in mind to say?”

  Walker shrugged. Sure he had something to say. He wanted to say that what he had seen had made him toss his cookies into somebody’s hedges. He wanted to say he had seen something no one should ever have to see, smelled things no one should ever have to smell. But he was a professional newsman, had been for the last fourteen years, and would not blow it now by going berserk while taping the morning’s hottest news.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll fake it somehow.”

  Dave pulled away from the eyepiece of his shoulder camera. “Hey, Walker?”

  “Yeah? What now?”

  “You’ve got puke on your tie.”

  He made a face at the camera and took his tie off. So what if he was going informal tonight? By morning he might be insane as well.

  “Still rolling,” Dave said. “Take one.”

  Walker nodded, and gave it a shot. He forced his face to look cool and unhurried. He promised himself that as soon as this was over, he would go home and get screaming drunk.

  “All of Maryville is awakening to a new horror on this, what should be a fine Saturday morning in our peaceful city, and Channel 8 Eyewitness News is here to report a new chapter in the savage wave of murders. Ladies and gentlemen, it has happened again …

  Chapter •

  One

  … in the early hours of this morning the killer struck once more, again killing an entire family, again escaping without being seen. And this city’s descent into frustration and terror deepens …”

  “Jesus, can that shit, would you? I hate bad news. And I don’t exactly love that guy in the wig. What’s his name, anyway?”

  The boy behind the counter shrugged. “Elmer Fudd with hair, I guess. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Coke and lots of ice. I’m sweating like a hog.”

  “Coke it is.” The counter boy ducked out of sight to fetch a cup.

  Jonathan Parker leaned hard on the wobbly plywood countertop of the open-air lunch stand, reaching to change the channel on the mini TV that was parked in the corner and blaring such bad tidings. He studied the television for a second, momentarily noticing that the reporter looked as if he’d been a little too close to an artillery blast. His hair was a wild tangle. He was squinting into the camera. He’d even lost his tie. Jonathan shrugged to himself. Must be bad business, reporting atrocities. Perhaps the chap should find a new line of work.

  He ratcheted the channel changer while the boy filled the cup, finally finding a football game on 11. Seahawks against the Browns. Not bad.

  The counter boy shoved the familiar red and white Coke cup across the counter. Jonathan snagged it easily, then drained half of it in three huge swallows. Behind him a glorious sun shown down on the practice field, where three dozen players were ambling around, half of them in red jerseys, the other half in blue. There were even a few ass-lickers doing jumping jacks to impress the coach. Jonathan snorted, chewing on ice. Nice guys, but strictly bench material. Bouncing around during a break doth not a football player make.

  He, on the other hand, had never been bench material, and didn’t intend to be. Twenty years old, junior at State University maintaining respectable grades, best flanker the university had seen in six years, admired by some as the college cocksman, envied by others for his natural good looks—if pressed to admit it, he might well say he had the world at his feet.

  That would change soon enough.

  He finished his Coke and snatched his helmet off the ground, surveying the clutch of fans and gawkers who had come to sit on the bleachers and get a tan and some free entertainment. Some of them were familiar faces, some not. Jonathan knew well enough that they knew who he was, a fact he accepted with an uneasy mixture of pride and curiosity. Why did they like him so well? What was the deal with all this admiration coming his way? He was just doing the best he could.

  “Another drink before you go get yourself killed?” the counter boy asked, grinning.

  “Tell you what,” Jonathan replied, grinning back at him. “You get your jollies by watching television murders, I’ll get mine by being mauled by eleven guys.”

  The boy stepped away and changed the channel. “The body count’s up to thirty now,” he said, losing his grin. “They’ve been running the same report every ten minutes, it seems. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a month, thanks to that creep.”

  Jonathan wormed his head into his helmet. From the bleachers came a few half-hearted claps. He gave them a Japanese-style bow. Somebody whistled. The coach began to bellow orders.

  “Better go,” Jonathan said. “Here’s a tip for your good service: if you don’t like the news, don’t watch it. Simple, huh?”

  “Oh, sure. I just hope you don’t play football like you live your life.”

  Jonathan gave him a wink, not quite sure just what the kid had meant by that, and not really caring. The teams were assembling at the line of scrimmage. He found himself grinning again. Some people in the tiny audience were greeting his return to the field with hoots and screams. One clown began to boo, but was quickly attacked by a group of girls. As Jonathan drew closer to the noise and the forty-yard line, where the players were assembling, he noticed one girl who was especially pretty, sitting quietly by herself in the fourth row. She looked somewhat familiar; he made a mental note to talk to her after practice. But until five o’clock it was strictly catch pigskin and assault friends.

  He chuckled to himself as he walked. It was a beautiful day, the air clear and bright, the sky an unending blue, and he was having fun. Nobody could ruin a day like this; such days were too rare in Ohio, where the humidity usually hung at the 80 percent mark and you could work up a sweat without moving a muscle. He flung his arms wide as if to embrace the world, spun around once, found himself feeling stupid, and decided to settle down to the business at hand. The gymnastics could come later, if he was still in one piece and in the same frame of mind.

  Coach Cooper seemed to have similar ideas. He blew a harsh blast on his whistle, pointing at Jonathan and making hurry-up motions. Jonathan broke into an easy trot to join his team, mentally preparing himself for the upcoming tosses and tumbles, trying to remember the plays the coach had spent all day drilling into the team’s heads. He joined them just as they went into a huddle.

  “No change since break, as far as I can tell,” the quarterback said. “Set? Let’s kill ’em.”

  They shouted agreement. Jonathan stayed quiet. What the hell had been the play just before break? Blue 21? Or was it Green 9? Well, whatever. He had faked it before and he could fake it again.

  He got into position and went down into his stance. The quarterback did his usual hups and hoops, the ball was snapped, and Jonathan sidestepped the defensive linebacker before he had a chance to get off his knuckles. He heard a satisfying oof as the linebacker
slapped facedown in the grass, and then he was running, running, cutting through the secondary like a deer, dodging in the graceful steamroller fashion that had made him a star. At the twenty-yard mark he glanced back and saw the football rocketing toward him, as well as Bruno Parmridge, who was about to nail him at the knees. Jonathan flitted sideways to lose this annoying coverage, and then the ball smacked into his hands and he was headed for the end zone, grinning, ready to let out a victory whoop. He glanced sideways to the bleachers and saw the pretty girl again. He tossed her a toothful smile, slowing a little to make sure she could see it, secure in the knowledge that she was undoubtedly a fan of the Boy Wonder and would demand his autograph after this touchdown.

  At which point a bulldozer plowed into him from behind, kicking his feet out from under him and making him perform one of the world’s greatest double somersaults. He landed hard on his back and the ball squelched out of his hands like something greased. He was aware of people piling all over each other in an attempt to capture the lost ball, grunting and snarling. The ball popped into the air and someone caught it. It was difficult for Jonathan to tell which team while lying on his back wondering if his spine was shattered or merely broken in several places.

  A face loomed across Jonathan’s vision, casting a shadow over him and blotting the sun from his eyes. He blinked up at Sam “Rhino” Wyndham, wondering where all the sparkling dots were coming from. A hand reached down and hauled him upright.

  “Just keep looking at the girls, Romeo,” Rhino said, and laughed. “Shit, you even make me look good.”

  Jonathan jerked away and adjusted his shoulder pads. “Lucky shot, that’s all.” The dots were fading and the world looked fairly normal again. The world also contained Coach Cooper, who was approaching at a fast trot with his whistle bouncing on his chest and murder in his eyes, his mouth working open and shut as he said every curse and epithet known to man. Jonathan shrank backward involuntarily, not liking what was about to come.