Headlights cut through the darkness of the night as law enforcement vehicles closed in on the ambulance parked off the road, half in the ditch. The lead car stopped and a man in a sheriff's uniform got out. The other cars, some of which were state police vehicles, stopped and additional men in uniform emerged. Most of them were already holding guns, some pistols, some rifles, some shotguns. They were intent on making sure Angela Baker wouldn't walk away this time no matter what else happened.
Anyone watching this would have thought that the officers were overreacting just a bit, that is if the watchers in question hadn't lived in Carpenter. There were at least thirty men in all, fifteen vehicles. Some of them had been called by the Sheriff, others had tagged along once the first members of state law enforcement had begun getting into their cars.
Two state rangers moved to the ambulance, guns aimed, whilst the remaining staties took up positions behind their car doors, guns aimed outward..
"Police! You're under arrest! Come out with your hands in the air or we'll open fire on you!" the state ranger standing nearest the ambulance shouted. Only the radio chatter from the vehicles and the echo of his voice answered him.
"Last warning!" the staty shouted.
Still nothing.
The officers nearest the ambulance opened up with bursts of automatic fire, peppering the ambulance with buckshot and high caliber bullets. The formerly flawless metal and paint job of the ambulance was now well and truly ruined, the spots hit by the rifle fire finished up looking like deadly metallic daisy shapes.
"cease fire!" the Sheriff cried, "cease fire before you kill each other you stupid assholes!
The staties lowered their weapons and moved back from the idling vehicle, allowing the Sheriff and one of his deputies to approach.
"Have you quite finished?" The Sheriff asked, his face clearly showing that he thought the state rangers to be the largest load of idiots he'd ever encountered.
No response from the trigger happy men.
Check it out!" The Sheriff shouted and motioned to two of the troopers.
"Cover them!" he called to two others.
The first two troopers separated and moved to opposite sides of the ambulance, noticing as they did that the headlights and the dome lights on top were both currently on.
"The battery in that thing's got to be running on nuclear fusion," the Sheriff thought, "that is if the lights were on like this from the time Baker disappeared."
The troopers threw the driver and passenger doors to the ambulance open and popped off a few shotgun rounds, causing the Sheriff to groan in resignation.
"Clear it!" shouted the lead state ranger.
As the staties entered the now completely trashed ambulance, the Sheriff looked about, wondering exactly when his head would begin threatening to explode. He'd started out the evening with a throbbing headache, and the shouting and shooting currently going on weren't helping matters any. He heard a reaction from inside the ambulance and moved to where he could comfortably look inside without the possibility of taking a round from one of the overly pumped up staties.
He saw a corpse in the driver's seat, one whose throat appeared to have been blown out by a high caliber bullet. Looking further, he saw two more corpses in the back of the vehicle, as well as some sort of bloody garment. One of the troopers lifted the latter object in gloved hands, revealing it to be a Camp New Horizons sweater. He photographed it and put it into a gallon-sized ziplock bag, otherwise known in the law enforcement business as an "evidence bag."
The trooper in the front of the ambulance said something, apparently cursing, considering his current expression, and hit the passenger seat with the palm of his hand, after which, he spoke again. This time there was no doubt.
"Goddamnit!"
"Nothing here, sir. It's clean," said another of the troopers.
"If you can call three dead bodies clean," the Sheriff thought.
"Jones! Get me the FBI on the line!" The staty hollering again. By God, this night was probably going to get even louder before it got quieter.
"Yes sir," Jones responded at a more normal volume.
As the sheriff moved closer to the ambulance, he began ranting. He felt he had a bit of a right to. It wasn't exactly as if things had gone either his way or even remotely well over the last day or so.
"Fuck. FUCK! Damn… Gave us the slip again, and then there's that corpse they said was her! What the fuck's going on around here?"
After saying this, he turned to one of his deputies.
MORAN, call up Howard. Tell him to get the K-9 units down here.
"Yes sir," MORAN confirmed.
"Anything, boys?" this to the staties who were now exiting the ambulance.
"Not much," answered one of the least gun-happy looking of the troopers, "a bunch of morphine and bandages are missing, as well as some other things. These guys've been dead for nearly a day, I'd say, except for the guy in front.."
"What do you mean?" the Sheriff asked, not really wanting to know the answer, but asking anyway so as not to fuck things up in front of these high-handed assholes.
"He's fresh," answered the trooper, "and it looks like he died having a good time."
"What gives you that idea?" the sheriff asked, wondering just what in the hell the guy was going on about.
"There's, I don't quite know how to say this..." the trooper began.
"Will you hurry the fuck up!" the Sheriff cried in exasperation, becoming nearly as loud as some of the staties and causing his headache to ramp up another notch.
"There's, well, cum on him, Sheriff," the trooper responded, his face going a bit red.
"Damn it! What the hell's going on around this fucking place!" the Sheriff shouted even more loudly, causing something in his head to feel as if it were loaded with about thirty pounds of C4. He threw his hat on the ground, briefly considered stomping on it like a child in a snit, reconsidered, and ran his fingers through his hair, completing the job of messing it up that he'd begun when the call dealing with the ambulance had first come in.
"I want everyone down here," he said at length, "I want these woods combed over until she's found. And when she is, we're gonna put her in her grave. No fucking around this time."
The hum of an approaching motor alerted him to the fact that someone else had just arrived on the scene. He looked around and saw a car he'd seen once before, at the carpenter County Morg.
"Oh great. There's that crazy headshrinker again.," he said as Dr. Simool got out of his car and approached the crime scene.
"What do you make of this, Sheriff?" Simool asked with no fanfare.
"Damned if I know," the Sheriff answered, deciding that if Simool was here, he'd not be gotten rid of until he got the information he was after, "looks like she killed two of these guys and then went home with the third one, fucked him, and then killed him."
"That doesn't make any sense," Simool rejoined, "she's a virgin. She always said so."
"Well, she isn't one now," the Sheriff grunted, wondering why the conversation had gone down this particular road.
"Sheriff, look what the third body has in its hand," Simool rejoined, indicating the corpse in the driver's seat.
"Yeah, I know. It's a gun," the Sheriff answered, looking at Simool as if he weren't wanted there, which, in the Sheriff's opinion, he wasn't.
"And I'll wager," Simool continued, "it's the same gun that killed him. If he was having sex with Angela, it was probably at gunpoint."
"You mean this guy raped her?" the Sheriff asked.
"Probably. Don't you recognize him?" Simool asked in his own turn.
"Of course. He's Dan Thorn," the sheriff replied.
"You don't know his history, do you?" Simool inquired.
"No," replied the Sheriff.
"He was in Blue Skies at the same time as Angela was," Simool said, "he raped and murdered his own sister. He was receiving out-patient care, but over the last few months, he stopped coming to sessions, went off his meds, and started obsessing over Angela Baker."
"So, who killed Denise Muller? Him or Angela?" the Sheriff asked, looking as he spoke like a man who was wishing that the shocks would just fucking stop hitting him out of the blue.
"Most likely him," Simool answered, "Denise Muller went missing before Angela's capture. He probably held her in his home and killed her when he got the call to come to Camp New Horizons."
"Just how many psychos do we have running around this town?" the sheriff said, his voice rising, "Jesus Ball Bouncing Christ! And what the fuck was a nut like that doing employed by an ambulance service in the first fucking place?"
Angela continued to work at stitching herself and bandaging her wounds. The bleeding had stopped, but she wasn't finished yet. She looked down at the job she'd done and found that she'd not done a much better job than Dan Thorn had done.
"Can't really do it yourself, Angey," she said to herself, "your head can't move in a way that'll let you watch what you're doing while you're doing it. You've got to get yourself some help."
"Where can you go?" the internal voice she'd come to think of as "Practical Angey" asked her, "if you try to check yourself into Carpenter Receiving, they'll catch you."
That was true. And from the sounds she was hearing from the direction of the road, the area was crawling with police. She couldn't go back that way in any case, even if she'd intended to try walking back to town.
She once again concentrated only on what she had to do. She removed a needle from the first aid kit, checked that it was full (she'd filled it earlier, but thanks to the injection she'd already given herself, that short-term memory was foggy) located a vain, and injected herself again. Fortunately for her, she'd not given herself enough the first time to overdose with the second injection. She closed the first-aid kit, moved deeper into the woods, located a spot behind some thick undergrowth, blacked out, and knew no more for nearly twelve hours. When she awakened, the police were gone, the ambulance had been moved, and the only sounds she heard were the natural sounds of the wilderness.
A day later, in a darkened apartment, a young man silently did pull-ups on a door-mounted chin-up bar and watched a late TV news report. The apartment's living room was cluttered with various items, both furniture and otherwise. The TV that occupied the man's attention sat on a rather unstable looking stand that appeared to have begun life as a rummage sale quality kitchen table, the coffee table sported several empty beer bottles, an overflowing ash tray, and a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels. The curtains were drawn, allowing only a dim ghost of the street lights outside to filter into the room. A loud discordant humming and clattering came from the kitchen, indicating that the refrigerator in there was within an ace of dying a slow and possibly painful death at any moment.
"This just in," the anchor woman on the TV said to her, no doubt, state-wide audience, "we have received word from local authorities in Carpenter New York That they have found an ambulance on the outskirts of town with Two paramedics and an officer brutally murdered. The ambulance was found at approximately 12:23 A.M. today outside the town of Carpenter, New York near Camp New Horizons. We are now being told that this was the ambulance that was supposedly being used To transport the serial killer Angela Baker to a local hospital. There is reason to believe that while being transported, Angela murdered The officer and paramedic then escaped after killing the driver. The ambulance was missing for 2 days before a resident of the area in which it was found informed police as to its whereabouts. Angela Baker has been missing for the same amount of time and local and state officials are on a state-wide manhunt For her. Angela baker, also known as the angel of death, was responsible for a String of murders at Camp New Horizons where she brutally slaughtered 14 people And before that, Camp New Horizons was formally Camp Rolling Hills where last year she murdered 19 people and was responsible for another string of grisly murders 7 years ago at nearby Camp Arawak which has been closed and demolished. For more details, here's Erica Miller."
On the screen, the picture cut to a live feed. The same reporter Angela had seen whilst watching the news in Dan Thorn's house stood in the foreground. Behind her stood the ambulance, its doors, windows, and bodywork peppered with bullet holes.
"Carpenter County was again rocked this morning by the news of yet another series of heinous murders at the nearby Camp New Horizons. The campground was littered with corpses when EMTs and police arrived on the scene two nights ago. All of the campers and counselors present at New Horizons save two teenagers have been murdered in what has been described as "one of The worst series of slayings to ever transpire in Carpenter." The killer, the criminally insane Angela Baker, was injured by one of the campers and taken into custody, but managed to escape after being removed from the scene in an ambulance. Her whereabouts are unknown at this time.
Before the report could go on any further, the young man moved with liquid speed to the coffee table, picked up the bottle of Jack, and threw it at the TV. The unfortunate piece of electronics fell from the table and smashed on the floor, sparks flying.
Angela was alive, which meant that he had a job to do. He knew that the police couldn't take her, for they'd had her once and had let her out. When he found her, she'd not be going anywhere, apart from into the ground, probably in a shallow grave. About six feet long by three feet deep sounded fine to him.
He carefully moved to the apartment's breaker box and turned off the breaker controlling the outlet powering the now defunct TV. The sparks stopped coming from the destroyed television, and the man moved to the site of its destruction, picked it up with very little effort, carried it out of the apartment, intending to deposit it in the dumpster. He'd need a new TV now, but that was easily taken care of.
Elsewhere in the country, in a particular Ohio town, two of the Camp New horizons survivors sat in a suburban house, watching the exact same newscast. Tony had come to Ohio with Marsha to be there for her, not that he knew that Angela Baker had had a dream in the ambulance in which Marsha had supposedly admitted to having a boyfriend and was playing him, and because he'd actually gone and fallen in love with her, regardless of how briefly they'd known each other. As the report began, he put his arm around Marsha, who'd begun trembling violently. It appeared that the nightmare wasn't over. Far from it.
Marsha had attacked Angela and had left her dead, after which, she'd been hauled off in an ambulance. Now the damn news media was telling them that she was still alive and out there somewhere.
"Oh shit," Tony said softly.
"She was dead," Marsha said in disbelief, "I know she was. I saw her stop breathing."
"Sometimes," Tony replied, "people can appear to stop breathing, but that's just because they lose consciousness. They're still alive, but they can look damn dead."
"They had her!" Marsha said, nearly crying, "they had her and the let her get away!"
"I don't know what happened," Tony rejoined, "neither of us do. Anything could have happened while they were transporting her. Maybe someone got careless."
"Careless?" Marsha asked in disbelief, "why would they be careless with a psycho killer?"
"Maybe they, like you, thought she was dead," Tony replied, "you're not really expecting a dead person to be that dangerous."
"Oh god ..." Marsha said, and her face went white. Tony caught her as she fell, easing her down onto the couch beside him.
The subject of Marsha and Tony's discussion was currently sitting in what was commonly known as a back-alley "Doctor's office." Not that there was anything pointing the place out as a place in which one could get medical attention of any value. As anyone who regularly frequented the streets and back alleys of Carpenter could have told Angela, it was the place where a great many criminals went to get stitched up. A lisence in veterinary medicine hung in a frame on the wall, a chair that appeared to have been lifted from a barber's shop and had been converted into an operating chair of sorts sat in the center of the room, a filthy sink stood in one of the corners, and there was a doorway leading into deep shadows at the back of the room. The man who went with this example of street medicine was balding, sixtyish, bespectacled, somewhat fat, and, as Angela had already discovered during the time he'd operated on her, stitching up her wounds, longwinded.
"You're very lucky ya got here quick, young lady. Gut wounds are nasty. One time I had to operate on a horse that had been accidentally shot in the stomach by its owner. Bad business, I'll tell ya. You're also lucky that ya got off so easy. Them street gangs usually go a step farther, if ya get me."
Angela merely nodded, having already discovered that the best way to deal with his endless chatter was to nod and agree in the right places.
"Also, in the future, don't try sewing yourself up. Ya do a half-assed job like ya done and you're likely to just make things worse."
Angela nodded again as the "Doctor" walked around to the front of the chair and helped her to her feet.
"Now I'll tell ya what I'm gonna do. I got a cot back there. I want ya to stay here a few days until you're healed up. Then ya gotta go, and I don't want to see ya 'round
here again. Ya can't tell nobody about me, okay?"
Again the simple nod. Angela couldn't speak at the moment anyway. The man had doped her up to combat the potential pain of what he'd had to do.
She allowed herself to be led to the back room, through the doorway she'd noticed earlier.
"Good. Now, I'm not gonna charge ya for this. Just stay outta trouble, all right?
This time a verbal answer seemed to be required, so she spoke with an effort.
"Thanks. I promise."
"Good. Now come on. I'll see ya to bed.
Angela allowed the Doctor to lower her onto what passed for a bed.
"Sleep well," he said.
"Thanks," Angela responded, smiling half-heartedly.
As the old man withdrew to the main area of the building, Angela's eyes closed and she sank into sleep. Her dreaming mind transported her back seven years, to Camp Arawak, to the finish of the nightmare that had begun there.
Police moved about the woods and campground in groups. One particular group had found Angela and following the discovery of her identity, had wrapped her in a blanket. She/he was resisting their efforts to move her/him, but there were too many of them for her/him to fight successfully.
As they dragged her/him along, the police officers were conversing among themselves, comparing notes.
"Can you believe this?" one of them asked.
"Positively disgusting... a transvestite!" another responded.
"They finally got him?" another officer, one Angela would come to know very well indeed, Officer Barney Whitmore, asked.
"Yeah. Took 'em a while to do it too, he didn't want to go," replied the officer who had referred to Angela as disgusting.
"How many bodies did they find?" Barney asked.
"Last count was 10, including the three that were originally thought to be accidents earlier in the summer, but I've read reports of a few more. Weather or not those reports are anything other than bullshit's sort of open right now," answered another officer.
"Have all the parents been contacted?" Barney inquired.
"We've gotten to most of them. It's really gonna hit the fan when the parents all get lawsuits on their minds," replied a young officer.
"You know, my boy Sean wanted to come here this year," Barney said, the statement seeming unconnected to the rest of the conversation.
"Mine too!" exclaimed the officer whose comment had opened the conversation, "but I just thought he was a little young for camp. Why didn't yours go?"
"I couldn't afford it. Sometimes being poor has its advantages," Barney answered.
"Really," officer Disgusting contributed.
A couple officers moved to either side of Angela as Barney approached her from behind. As he read her her rights, her awareness faded and she was no longer really there to herself at all.
Her 21 year old dreaming mind timejumped forward to her trial. She saw the courtroom, saw the spectators linking the room, saw the judge, saw the lawyers, saw herself, now dressed in women's clothes, locked into a cage and chained into a chair. Under most circumstances, such things just weren't done in the brave year of 1982, but she'd become somewhat of a legend in Carpenter. The youngest killer in the history of the area, and classified as extremely dangerous.
She moved about as much as she could, rattling the chains, causing those near her to draw back, at least a bit. She'd wanted to do that, to keep them back, to keep them off her, to keep them from doing anything to her. At first, the people in the courtroom had screamed at her in rage, spat at her, and had attempted to get at her, probably for the purpose of tearing her to pieces on the spot, but she'd discovered that if she did something, anything, to frighten them, they kept back. It wasn't a situation she particularly liked, but if they wouldn't accept her, if they wouldn't leave her alone, she'd make them fear her.
The judge's voice cut through her thoughts, snapping her back to full awareness.
"The court cannot make any kind of ruling as it has been established without a doubt that the defendant suffers from mental incompetence and is therefore not fit to stand trial," he said, "it is the order of this court that Peter Francis Baker be turned over to the staff of Blue Skies Sanitarium for observation for a time period of no less than one year after which the defendant's doctors will report to this court again and it shall be decided whether or not the defendant's mental condition has improved. Bailiff, take the prisoner to holding."
He banged his gavel, causing her to jump. The bailiff moved to Angela's cage, unlocked it, unlocked the chins holding her to the chair, took her wrists and held them behind her back as a police officer handcuffed her and led her out of the courtroom.
Angela awakened, reality coming back into focus.
"Where'd you go wrong, huh, Angey?" she asked herself, "and why that trip down Memory Lane? You know all that stuff that happened. Why are you reliving it now? Ya think ya forgot something?"