"Evil Dead: The Series" Episode 17.5

"Natural Born Fingers"

By: OmarSnake

In all his days with the Beaumont County Sheriff's Department, Claude Hollister had never seen anything like this.

He stood in the middle of the Roadside Diner.... or, more accurately, in the middle of the blood-spattered wreckage that had once been the diner.

The walls were mostly intact, but the windows were shattered, tables were overturned, and out on the sidewalk in front of the diner, covered with sheets, were the remains of seven people.

Outlines inside the diner marked where the bodies had been found, not all of them intact. The owner and chef, Melvin Sharples, had been dismembered with a cleaver, one of his hands mangled from a meat grinder apparently used before he had died. One of the waitresses on duty, Vera Louise Gorman, was crushed to death under a jukebox. The other waitress, Florence Jean Castleberry, appeared to have died from a simple gunshot wound, but... inexplicably... one of her hands had been chopped off at the wrist, and was still missing.

Then there were the patrons... two locals Claude knew well, Henry Kaplan and Earl Hicks, and two out-of-towners with no ID on what was left of their bodies. All murdered, brutally and viciously, sometime just after dawn, for no apparent reason. No money had been taken from the register, and each of the victims' cars were still in the parking lot. Revenge was an unlikely motive, as all the victims had been brutalized equally.

More likely, Claude was dealing with a psycho. A nutjob who had somehow wandered into the diner and caught everyone off-guard.

"We found some fingerprints," Deputy Willy Flick called out from the blood- stained counter.

Claude headed that way quickly, and Willy silently pointed to fingerprints dotting a large splash of blood. It was a curious pattern, as if the killer had placed a hand on the countertop and tapped his fingers across the blood, leaving behind tiny fingertip prints reaching to the end of the counter.

What could it mean? Claude scratched the back of his head, trying to make sense of it.

Where all other evidence came up either inconclusive or downright baffling, the fingerprints were, at least, a start.

Especially when Claude got the word that they had found a match: Ashley J. Williams, a man living in Detroit.

He didn't have much of a criminal record: the only reason his prints were even on file were connected to an incident from Williams' college years, when he and his friend Scott Jarvis had been dragged into a barroom brawl with some bikers over a woman named 'Big Berta'. Jarvis had his jaw wired shut for months after, and Williams emerged from the fight with only a few scrapes and a cut chin. Not bad for a college boy fighting some Hell's Angels.

Claude made a few phone calls until he got hold of the right people at the Detroit police department, who seemed more familiar with Williams than Claude had expected, considering the thin file.

Yes, Williams was known to them. Yes, he was still living in the Detroit area. When Claude told them what had happened, two detectives said they would haul Williams in for interrogation.

Claude didn't expect them to find him... after all, if this Williams had been here in Kentucky on a killing spree, it was unlikely that he would have gotten back to Detroit and resumed his normal life by now..

A few hours later, Claude got a perplexing call: yes, Ash Williams was in Detroit. But no, he wasn't a suspect. The evidence must have been tainted.

Claude was outraged at the charge; there was nothing wrong with their evidence. The computers had clearly found a match between the fingerprints on the countertop and those belonging to Williams.

So how could these detectives claim otherwise?

"The prints you IDed were from Williams's right hand," Detective Lewis said calmly on the phone.

"Yes!" Claude replied angrily. "I've got them on the screen right here, there's no doubt that---"

"Williams doesn't HAVE a right hand,"Lewis interrupted.

Claude didn't know what to say.

"He says he lost it about seven years ago in an accident with a chainsaw," Lewis said. "We saw the stump. It's not new. He wears a mechanical hand he built himself, looks kind of like a glove from a suit of armor. I asked him why he hasn't gotten a more traditional fake hand, and he told me that--"

"What does this have to do with my case?" Claude interrupted.

"Nothing, chief, that's the problem," Lewis said. "Now, Williams does have a twin brother, whose prints might be very similar---"

Finally, a twist in our favor, Claude thought.

"--- but his brother Rhett has been in Scotland for the past week, on a business trip, so he's out too," Lewis finished. "Talked to him by phone about fifteen minutes ago, to make sure he was where they said he was."

"So Ashley Williams was no help?" Claude asked.

"Nah," Lewis said. "He was a bit shaken about the news of prints from his hand being found --- but then again, who wouldn't be? I told him not to sweat it, it was probably just a computer glitch."

"Probably so," Claude admitted, then thanked Lewis and hung up the phone.

And stared at it for a good five minutes, thinking things through.

What the hell?

Ash Williams paced nervously in his apartment.

It had been two hours since the police had let him go, and he had gone back home to think things through.

The first thing he had done was look around the house carefully, extremely carefully.

His fingerprints, at a crime scene.

The hand? Could it have come back? It didn't seem possible. It had been so long since it had been cut off, in that cabin back in Tennessee.

But then, it had never turned up. It didn't go back with him to the Middle Ages. The last he had seen, it was gripping the Kandarian dagger that it stabbed the professor's daughter with, before the vortex tore the cabin to shreds.

But wouldn't it have rotted to pieces by now? Maybe. Maybe not.

Perhaps he was thinking of the wrong thing. There was also 'Bad Ash', his evil doppelganger, which he had last vanquished when it resurfaced and attacked him day after Thanksgiving, more than a year ago. He made inquiries, as subtly as he could, about the body after the attack. The police told him that it had been incinerated. He had no reason to doubt them, did he?

Of course he did. Ash functioned best when he was most paranoid.

And right now, his paranoia was on overdrive.

Okay, those were two possibilities, what else? What was he not thinking of?

A 'new' Evil Ash, maybe. The first Evil Ash had been born of his flesh from one of dozens of tiny, evil replicas of Ash from his journey to Medieval England.

Perhaps one of them survived all these centuries, and somehow found a way to become larger.

If not, maybe this had something to do with Eldridge Stone and his conspiracy theories, that someone out there, someone high up somewhere, was after Ash. Was he being framed? If so, it was clumsily handled. The conspirators surely would know not to duplicate the prints of the hand he no longer had.

Assuming, of course, there were even conspirators, something Ash doubted. The forces of darkness just swirled in the shadows and attacked when opportunity arose, they didn't form secret societies and wait patiently.

Heck, maybe it had nothing do to with the Deadites at all.

Maybe.. let's see... maybe some psycho thrill-killer left the fingerprints, and by a statistical fluke, his fingerprints had been switched with Ash's in the FBI files due to some computer glitch. A Y2K bug, maybe.

If Ash could have found any bookie taking odds on the macabre, though, he would have bet on it being either the hand or Bad Ash.

But he was never good at figuring these things out. That was best left to people like Eldridge Stone, who Ash had called and was still waiting to hear back from.

Until then, Ash had looked around his apartment verrrry carefully, keeping an eye out for either disembodied hands or rancid dopplegangers.

Ash was good at fighting the forces of evil. He wasn't good at waiting. It made him nervous. Made him even more paranoid than he already was.

If the damned thing, be it five-fingered or two-legged, or something else altogether, would just Show The Hell Up!

But until it did, all he could do is wait and worry.

And Ash didn't like doing either.

In all his days driving for FreshFast Foods, Jerry Reid had never had a morning like this.

It had started normally enough. He woke up at 5 a.m. in the Starlight Motel, on exit 172, and decided to check out early, grab some breakfast at the nearby Roadside Diner, and hit the road to get his shipment to Springfield before nightfall.

As he strolled toward the diner, it had quickly become obvious to Jerry that something was wrong. The most telling piece of evidence was the broken window, and the body of a 20-year old, hippyish boy hanging out of it.

Jerry took a step back, registering the horror of the young man's body, when the doors of the diner flung open.

What happened next... well, that, Jerry hoped, would be for psychiatrists to talk him through and figure out, assuming he didn't end up dead in a ditch somewhere.

Because what he thought he saw... what he thought he was STILL seeing... was as impossible as it was insane.

As Jerry gripped the steering wheel of his rig, he caught a glance out the corner of his eye.

It was still there. Damn it, it was still there.

A hand, holding a revolver.

Just a hand, mind you. Holding that pistol, as if it were attached to a forearm that was in turn attached to a thug.

In front of the hand was a map, with a trail crudely drawn on it with drying blood.

Beside it was another hand, this one slender and female, with long press-on fingernails painted hot pink. While the male hand that gripped the pistol jerked about, as if alive, the female hand just lay there, flat and pale.

The Hand shifted its wrist-stump around, changing the balance of its weight so the pistol aimed directly at Jerry's head.

"Whoa, whoa, now," Jerry said nervously. "No need to do that!"

The hand scurried forth a few inches, still gripping the pistol with its thumb and forefinger. With its pinky finger, it tapped on the map.

"Yeah, I know, the exit's coming up in about half a mile," Jerry said, forcing a smile. "Don't you worry, little fellow. We'll have you where you want to be..."

The hand tapped on the map again, where it had circled the city of Detroit in red.