Post by Tamika Strader on May 20, 2022 2:19:04 GMT -5
May 14th, 2022
Outside Houston, Texas
Tamika Strader has done many things in her life, ranging from normal to crazy, and being a Strader, usually meant something crazy. All Tamika can do is stare at the piece of paper in her hand that has a polaroid photo being held by a paper clip in the top left corner. She wasn’t on her Sportster or one of her Indian Scout motorcycles; she was in her dark metallic hunter-green 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass that almost looked black in a certain light. The American muscle car sits idling in a rest area off Interstate 45 southbound as Tamika keeps reading over the letter in her hands while “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors is playing on the radio. The rain droplets bead on the wax job of the car from the night sky rain clouds. She looks sick to her stomach as her eyes move all over, reading the words. Lightning lights up the picture of her big sister tied to a wall like an action figure in its plastic prison, tied at her wrists, down her sides, around her ankles bound together, and around her neck.
The letter doesn’t say much, just the words “Come alone” and an address that Tamika recognizes. It is an old slaughterhouse that her dad had purchased as a source for laundering his cocaine money from the ports down in Texas to Louisiana all the way up the Eastern Seaboard to the Port of the Île de Montréal. A few years before Scott Nash Strader found his way on the business end of a gun, he had shut down the slaughterhouse as he couldn’t hide his underworld profits anymore. The layoffs triggered a lot of anger from the men and women employed at the facility, and she had to wonder…
“Is it some angry former employee?”
But it didn’t matter. Whoever it was, it didn’t matter. This person followed them to Djibouti and was able to get Meghan back to the States on their own jet.
Tamika puts the letter and photo of her sister on the passenger seat, drops the transmission into drive, and the old American muscle car’s tires squawk as she peels out of the rest area towards the old slaughterhouse. She looks to her right at the glovebox and reaches over, opening it up. Tamika pulls out a gift from her twin brother (the motorcycle club president), a silver Glock. She grabs the three full extra clips he gave with it, placing them in her black leather jacket.
What should’ve been a forty-minute drive was over in twenty as she pulled into the lot. Looking up at the ominous building, she could feel a shiver roll down her spine, and her legs felt shaky with fear as the lightning illuminated it, giving it an eerie look like it was alive. Tamika turns the key, killing the engine, and she lifts her handgun, pulls the slide back, arming it, and tucks it into the back of the waistband of her blue denim jeans. She grabs her keys and is about to get out, but she stops.
“What am I doing? I have seen too many horror movies for me to take my keys. I’ll leave them under my seat.”
Knowing she is probably being watched, she carefully places her keys under the driver's seat but keeps her head looking forward. She takes a deep breath and steps out into the rain, her hair falling flat over her face. She moves the hair out of her eyes, walking towards the entrance. The rumble of thunder makes her jump slightly, and the lightning reveals words written over top of the double doors.
“Well, fuck. That’s not ominous at all,” she says quietly. “Here goes nothing.”
She doesn’t even step all the way inside before the smell of decades of hot southern Texas summers mixed with dead bovine hits her nose. With a hand on the wall, she stops, concentrating on putting herself past the smell of it all.
WOOSH! BANG!
Tamika is barely able to duck but dodges the penetrating bolt gun, missing her head. She turns around, and her eyes go wide as an ominous figure, the size of Tyler Mane, stands there breathing heavily in all black with a hood covering The Stalker’s face. Tamika’s eyes widen, and she starts to back away from this massive creature looking down on her.
“Whoa, you’re a big bastard, aren’t ya? Listen, I don’t know why you are doing this, but I’m telling you big guy, this isn’t the way to go about it,” she says, slowly backing away as the figure slowly walks towards her. Her right hand inching around her side to her back to grab her gun. “Where’s my sister? I saw the picture. I read your note. I came alone. Like a damned idiot, I am here alone, so why don’t we–”
Tamika cannot finish her sentence as his massive arm and hand swing at her making her duck again and stumbles back. She pulls out her gun and fires at him.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The six shots make him stumble backwards, but all it does is slow The Stalker down for a few seconds. He looks down at his chest and gut and back up at her. Her eyes widen again as he stares at her.
“Well, Willie Nelson’s Whiskey River, that’s not good.”
She turns and starts running towards the slaughtering line as The Stalker follows her, but what frightens Tamika the most is how light her assailant is on his feet. She realizes quick she’ll never be able to hear him coming.
Meanwhile…
A barely clothed Meghan Strader, bound and tied like an action figure hanging on display at Toys’R’Us like Tamika's photo, heard the gunshots. She has been wiggling, trying to loosen a knot, any knot.
“Please let that be the cops and not my sister.”
Meghan knows it was wishful thinking as she didn’t hear sirens but the rumble of the V-8 Rocket 350 engine of her baby sister's Cutlass, which their dad gave Tamika for her twenty-fifth birthday.
“YES!” she thinks to herself as her hands don’t feel as tight anymore. “Gotta get out of here, gotta find Meeks before that fuckin’ monster does!”
While Meghan is trying to get loose, Tamika has made her way into the stall area where they used to keep the cattle together. It had been a few years since any cattle had been through the building, but the splash her feet made as she crept through made her realize that something had been killed in here recently. Suddenly, she is greeted by the cause of her splashing as she walks into a corpse hanging on a hook.
“Jimmy? Oh, fuck…”
Tamika recognizes him as a Brother of Mayhem. John Nash Strader had been keeping the Texas nomads around the compound since the murder of SNS. Unfortunately for this killer, dead bodies don’t scare our Final Girl. Being the daughter of SNS had only brought a lot of death to her door, and she had put a bullet in the back of a man’s head twelve earlier, saving Meghan in Panama, but that is a story for another time. Tamika looks down the line seeing four more members of her brother's club.
“Oh, John-boy, he’s going to be devastated. Stay focused, Meeka, that big son of a –”
WHAM!
Tamika gasps for air from being struck in her abdomen, causing her shortness of breath as the hooded monster turns to her, his shoulders lifting up with every breath. Tamika, being smarter than the monster could imagine, doesn’t expect her to come running at him, but she baseball slides underneath him, using the blood like a slippy-slide and is up on her feet, weaving in between the hanging dead bikers. She can hear him on the move behind her.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The dead bikers go flying off the meat hooks with his heavy arms swatting them away like flies, the dead weight of them being nothing to him. Tamika stops as she can that it’s a dead-end, but her eye catches a grate on the floor. The drainage trap.
“That’s it. I hope whatever is down below leads out of here.”
She moves quickly, kicking the grate off and goes down feet first. She can see that it does seem to go under the wall, and she starts running, her feet splashing the blood around from the dead bikers, and he is hot on her trail; lights from the grates give a grated light over, but they slide off the back end of her as The Stalker rips them and reach under with his hand as he does, being too big to fit under.
Meanwhile…
Meghan’s right-hand breaks free and out in front of her as the momentum from the pressure trying to pull it out and free causes it. She had dislocated her thumb to do it. It took a few minutes to untie herself but still rather impressive nonetheless. She holds in a yelp as relocates her thumb. She can hear a commotion below, feeling her sister's presence, one of the things that made them such a dangerous tag team over the years. Looking to her left, she is rewarded for her efforts as her clothes are lying on the floor. She has a brief flash of being told to strip by him, grabbing onto her collared button and pulling the buttons free since he wasn’t the speaking type.
“Not now, Meghan. Meeks is down there.”
She hurries getting herself dressed, feeling that strong family bond among all of them.
Tamika gets underneath the wall and sees a grate to escape. She pushes it open and crawls out as quickly as possible, covered in the blood. The Stalker isn’t far and so light on his feet that she knows she has to keep moving. To her left, she sees a set of stairs, and her emerald green eyes follow them up to an office.
“Tamika! Think! Look for your sister, don’t go up those stupid stairs!”
Tamika decided to head for the corner to her right, where she could see what would be a quality control station as it watched the cattle be ushered in for slaughter, judging by the giant double doors. She looks behind her to see if she can see The Stalker. Seeing he isn’t behind, she turns around and runs smack dab into Meghan but rears her arm to punch, but the Matriarch holds her hands up to grab onto Tamika’s jacket by the zipper. She feels the blood on the zipper as Tamika looks down at Meghan’s hands and back up at her.
“Oh yes, thank Yahweh, you are alive. I shot him SIX times!!” exclaims quietly, knowing The Stalker could be anywhere.
“Of course you did, Dr. Loomis! I heard them! Meeka, we need to get out —”
Meghan doesn’t get her words out before THE STALKER appears behind the Queen of the Strader Family, grabbing her hair, lifting up and throwing her across the floor. He turns from looking at the fallen Meghan, who has had the wind knocked out of her, to Tamika.
“Dude, what do you want from us?! Why are you doing this?!” she yells, and if it had the power of wind, The Stalker would be flown through the wall behind him. She looks behind herself at the stairs and back to him. “No one else has to die. We can forget this night even happened; why don’t we —”
She’s cut off as he swings his massive right hand towards that he has armed with the penetrating bolt gun to kill the livestock that once went through the plant. Tamika pivots and goes running towards the stairs. It leads to where Meghan had been tied, a dead end. She gets up to the top, runs inside the office where Meghan was, and hides under the desk as The Stalker makes his way up the stairs slow and methodical.
“Oh, man. You get past this, Meeks; Sadie Ko won’t stand a chance.”
She peaks her head around the side and quickly pulls back after catching a glimpse of him. She knows she has trapped herself. The door opens to the office.
“Megz, please get out of here. Save yourself. Your babes' Clay, Lizzie, Veronica, Cara and my little boy Lil’Scottie… are going to need you.”
She takes a slow breath in as The Stalker’s hand reaches under the desk, grabbing her by the neck; he pulls her out. She looks into his eyes; they are the blackest she’s ever seen, with no remorse, no fear, no empathy… just empty like the abyss. She slowly creeps her right hand behind as her left tries to fight him off. He tilts his head at her when she stops fighting and gives him the Strader Sneer. She speaks to him through his grip on her throat, giving her a gravelly sounding voice.
“I take your power… bogeyman!”
BANG!
He loses his grip as she fires the last round into his kneecap. He drops her, and she bolts for the door, her goal to reach her sister and the car.
TO BE CONTINUED…
