The next moment is when she realizes that lights in the high basement windows suddenly not glowing are like a flashing sign for the slasher. But it’s daytime yet, probably not even four in the afternoon. Whoever’s playing slasher out there would have to be watching these windows specifically to catch them going dark.
And, anyway: why stake out a room you’ve already killed in, right? That’s no way to hit a bodycount.
“Sorry,” Jade says one last time to Cody, and then slouches upstairs.
After watching through the window of the back door for what feels like twenty minutes—no one, nothing—Jade steps out, walks the same exact path the slasher did, going from this house to the next one over.
This time the first floor and the basement are empty, and the side door into the garage is yawning wide, the garage past it open. No nails in any doorframes, no blood misted on any walls.
Same for the second floor.
Jade steps into what she thinks will probably be a study in a month or two and positions herself just inside the broad window, enough so she can see out, not quite enough where she’s a distinct form in the glass. Just an irregular continuation of the wall, she hopes. A half-assed drape—tarp or something.
From here she can see the yacht so much closer.
Tiara’s swishing her hips along the railing, disappearing through a door. Nobody’s reading a newspaper anymore, nobody’s dropping flower petals into the lake.
Does this mean they’ve all been nailgunned in the forehead?
And then, finally, a flurry of fast motion.
It’s Shooting Glasses. He’s scrambling down a roof two houses down, is Jesse Pinkman’ing into what’s going to be the front yard, and already rolling that impact away because it’s the least thing he has to worry about. Jade watches the window he must have dove through but it’s the front door of the house that swings open instead.
The Prowler, the killer, the slasher.
His chest is heaving, his face unchanging, still gas-masked, the nailgun heavy and deadly by his thigh.
Shooting Glasses looks back, shakes his head no, holding his hands up like to ward off flying nails, and he’s saying something over and over but it doesn’t matter.
His killer steps down off the porch, is already leveling the nailgun.
“No, no!” Jade hears herself screaming, the flat of her hand slapping the glass of the window she’s up against.
The slasher stops, turns around, settles his tinted eyes in her general direction but hopefully she’s behind a glare, hopefully those tinted lenses aren’t binoculars.
Jade backs a step up and the slasher has to give his attention back to Shooting Glasses when Shooting Glasses is up and running again. He falls twice on his way to the pier but makes it there fast enough. The slasher just steadily approaches behind the whole time, until there’s nowhere for Shooting Glasses to go but into the lake, not so much a dive as a desperate jump, or a failure by the water to hold him up when he tries to run across it.
Right as he goes under, nails stitch the water all around him.
The Prowler wades in up to his knees, quilting the whole area with nails until his cartridge runs dry.
He looks at the gun and tosses it aside, lets it kerplunk down.
Now he’s looking up, to the yacht.
Letha is up against the rail, calling down. Not shrieking, not screaming, not crying, not asking what or why.
“T’s napping!” she whisper-yells, just loud enough Jade can make it out.
Below her, knee-deep in Indian Lake, Theo Mondragon peels out of the gas mask and hoodie.
“Did you get them all?” Letha calls down, apparently forgetting her injunction against waking Tiara.
Theo Mondragon shakes his head no as if disappointed with himself, then holds his forearm up as if for inspection.
“Do wasps bite or sting?” Letha calls down, leaning far out over the rail, completely unconcerned about gravity.
Theo Mondragon looks at his forearm, probably at a welt Jade can’t see from this distance, and exaggerates his shrug.
“You should be careful!” Letha says, but is kind of thrilled too, Jade can tell.
Her dad was rooting out a wasp nest or two. Thus the mask, the hoodie. Just, he redefined “wasp” to include Cowboy Boots, and Shooting Glasses.
Mismatched Gloves?
Jade looks behind her, half-expecting him to be sitting in the corner with a bellyful of nails, his fingers moving over them like accordion buttons.
Why? Why would Theo Mondragon be going after his own workers?
It doesn’t make sense. They can’t be in the justice cycle, shouldn’t be slasher vics at all.
But Clate Rodgers wasn’t exactly supposed to have been, either. And Mr. Holmes was supposed to have been around to write the sad history of this all down.
And, really, if she’s counting people who don’t deserve it, the Dutch kids were sort of extra too, Jade figures.
Deacon Samuels may be the only actual targeted victim.
Unless Theo Mondragon saw Jade through the glass, that is. Unless she’s about to be the next clean-up on aisle 9 of this wilderness re-enactment of Intruder.
Her insides clench, her airways constrict.
At least it won’t be nails, when it comes. The nailgun’s wet and buried.
And, like Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street, her chances go way the hell up if she can just keep from falling asleep. Just, there’s still the night to get through. And then tomorrow. If there is one of those.
“Here!” Letha calls down to her dad. What she’s waving in her hand—offering—is a tube of something. After-bite cream, lotion, Jade can’t tell.
Letha makes to lob it down once, twice, so Theo Mondragon can get in sync, and then she lets it drop, plummet end over tiny end. Theo Mondragon snags it from the air like the athlete he had to have been at one point.
He nods thanks, already applying the cream, and then Mars Baker is leaning out over the railing on the deck below her. With an over-under shotgun he’s just now swinging shut. Letha leans out and over even farther to see him but he’s not looking up at her, just down to Theo Mondragon.
“This is what you should have had,” he says, snapping the shotgun up so he can track a duck flapping low across the water. He fake shoots it, doing the recoil and everything.
“What’s for dinner?” Theo calls up to them, as if he wasn’t just on a killing spree.
“Not duck!” Tiara answers.
“Duck, duck, right,” Jade says to herself, lowering herself down below the level of the window so Theo Mondragon won’t accidentally clock her on his walk up the pier.
He hooks the gas mask on a rack, twists his hoodie around his neck after this hard day’s work, and saunters up into the yacht like nothing’s wrong with the world. Nothing at all.
Moments after he’s gone and nobody’s at the rail, Shooting Glasses’s body doesn’t bob up to the surface, perforated fifty times over, blood staining the water.
Probably because he’s nailed to the bed of the lake.
SLASHER 101
Okay, for My Bloody Valentine's or just even only for Valentine but also to make up for my perfect gag for the year book crew, which if you didn't see it but only missed my presence, was 6 FAKE hypodermic needles superglued to my forearm Dream Warriors style, with each one labeled Algebra and English and P.E. and the rest, including of course HISTORY, but to make up for the quiz that day, I'll pay you back and more with a little insight into how there's not enough slow motion in the whole world really for when the final girl finally stops running and turns around to fight this unkillable killer, and also WHY he's so nice slash mean to her. Emphasis on the "slash" there.
First you have to imagine what's in her head. She's been watching her friends and family and pets all get killed, and THEN she has to run down whatever hall it is they've all been put in in various and many jack in the box contraptions.
At some point this final girl has t
o realize that this is all about her, don't you think? That her friends and family and pets would all still be alive if this slasher had only STARTED with her instead of cutting his way closer and closer to her. So she feels guilty like maybe she's sort of the killer herself, like this bodycount is maybe HER bodycount.
What I'm saying here, sir, is that she's been groomed to become her secret and best self. The slasher COULD have started with her easy. The slasher doesn't HAVE to start at the outside edges but CAN just walk right into the center, apply blade, deed done, go home now, story over.
But that wouldn't be enough. Not even close.
The slasher cycle is a dance, see? Imagine a dance floor in a high school gym, the lights are down, crinkled paper everywhere, spiked punch, fancy handed down jackets and dresses, shoes it's impossible to even walk in, I know you've chaperoned some. Now who the slasher WANTS to dance with is this one quiet girl way on the other side of the gym floor, but he can't cross to her yet, instead he has to work his way across TO her, dancing with this person and then that person, the back of his hand sometimes touching the final girl's sleeve during a slow song, their eyes locking like fate, but he's waiting for the last dance, sir. The slow (MOTION) one. That's the one that matters. You don't go home with who you dance your 3rd dance with. You go home with who you're holding hands with when the music's over.
But it's not love, don't let me get you thinking that. And it's not hate either. It's deeper than both of those.
My theory or thesis from many viewings and more knowing is that the slasher has the kind of eyes that can recognize which girls have a final girl hiding inside them, which is why he targets them LAST. But is it really to kill them? I don't think so, sir. I think the slasher's life of revenge is a life of pain and misery, and the slasher knows that no ordinary person can end that. Only a very very certain kind of girl can. Only a final girl. But not in her current state or form. No, the slasher first has to help her TRANSFORM, which involves killing all her friends and family and pets, everybody except Dewey pretty much, because Dewey's basically unkillable.
So that super slow motion moment at the end when this bookish reserved quiet girl finally stops in all the swirling madness and blood and tears, turns around with a machete or a chainsaw or just even only her hands like Constance from Just Before Dawn, and she's screaming with rage, this is why slashers really wear masks, sir.
It's so you won't see them smile.
FINAL EXAM
After a thorough search of her coveralls turns her charging cable up, Jade plugs into a socket, gets no little lightning bolt on her screen, which doesn’t surprise her in the least. This isn’t a romcom, after all. But then, on what feels like a lark, she unscrews the lightbulb in the sconce on the wall above the socket and hits the switch on the wall.
Magic. Juice starts pouring into her phone. While it’s charging, Jade walks up and down the hallway of whoever’s house she’s in. Out in Terra Nova—over all of Pleasant Valley—dusk is coming in, the light going granular, the lake darkening to ink. Every few minutes she paranoids out, sure her phone isn’t on vibrate, that it’s going to ring with alerts and give her position away. And when it’s not that, then she’s just as certain that the front door’s about to open, that Theo Mondragon’s going to be wading in behind a weed whacker or jackhammer or even just a random board. A length of 2 x 4 would do the job on her just fine. Or even just a dry-cleaning bag pulled tight over her head, Black Christmas–style.
Speaking of: has there ever been an Independence Day slasher?
Yes: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. And also I Know What You Did Last Summer. More important, why does the Fourth matter to Theo Mondragon? Jade knocks on her forehead with the knuckle of her thumb, tells herself to wait for tomorrow night, all will be revealed at the Reveal, dummy, it’s not your job to figure it all out.
For right now, what she needs to concern herself with is not being seen, plain and simple. Which should be easy, with night falling. Just, the temptation to use her phone’s flashlight is strong in this one.
“Alone in the Dark, 1982,” she mumbles into the empty house, just to see if anybody gets it.
Silence. Good.
Jade promised herself to wait to use her phone until it hit ten percent, since under ten is when it tends to tank all at once, but she swipes into it at eight percent, dials before even checking the signal.
Her phone informs her that cellular data is temporarily unavailable.
“What the hell?” she asks, carrying her phone high to all corners of the room. Not even a blip, not even a thready iota of a dot that could stand up into a bar.
“Because this is horror,” she reminds herself. Not that it helps.
She executes a neat flipturn at the end of the hall, just allowing herself a glimpse of the big second-floor window before removing herself from the chance of being spotted through it.
But… didn’t she see Theo Mondragon on his cell over at Camp Blood? Didn’t Letha call her from the yacht the other night? How do Founders on the Proofrock side of the lake even call across for a ride?
Jade studies her settings to see if she’s the problem, but it’s not her. She shakes her phone because that always works, then shakes her head at how stupid she is.
So she can’t call the cavalry in. It would be a betrayal anyway, she tells herself. Indians run from the cavalry, not to them. But, were the Blackfeet the ones who scouted for Custer? Jade isn’t sure, and of course can’t look that up now.
That was a hundred and fifty years ago, though. This is now. And Jade can’t stay up here all night. Staying put in a slasher is just setup for a blade coming through the door you’re leaned up against, and splashing out your mouth.
Going slow, and knowing it’s hopeless from the get-go, Jade takes the stairs down one at a careful time, finally stepping into the long-shadowed kitchen, checking every cabinet for some leftover lunch or a stashed bag of jerky, half a bag of chips that got hidden at a last moment. She drinks from the faucet, only realizing afterward that the spigot is actually pull-down, pull-out—whatever the term is for those ones that come off, have a nifty little hose, can point wherever. Jade detaches it from its magnet base, aims it here and there around the room, understands it’s best she didn’t grow up with one of these. People with these over their sinks must be naive, overly trusting.
She magnets it back to its home, pats it like a good dog, which is exactly when a determined silhouette crosses from one side of the kitchen window to the other, not bothering to look in.
If Jade had been holding coffee to her lips, that mug would be in pieces on the expensive tile floor now. As-is, she just stands there, and a second later she knows that’s what saved her: she didn’t burst into motion in Theo Mondragon’s peripheral vision. She drops fast to her fingertips now, though, her legs gathered under her so she can explode whatever direction. When no doors creak open ten seconds later, then twenty, and when the air pressure inside the house doesn’t seem to change, signaling a door having opened, and when her bat ears can’t detect any floorboards taking on new weight, any rubber soles twisting for a better grip, she hustles into a room in the direction Theo Mondragon had been walking, just to confirm that he’s still moving away, not closer.
Through the window she sees him stepping into the one house she’s already been through.
Two minutes later he emerges, dragging Cowboy Boots—Cody, Cody Cody Cody—by his right heel, the rest of him wrapped in foggy plastic, Tina-style.
Theo Mondragon stands there casing the night for maybe thirty more seconds in which he pulls his own phone out, unlocks it, and stares into it, finally shaking it just as Jade did. His doesn’t get a signal either. He smiles to himself about it, though, nods, slips the phone back into his pocket, and walks a straight line out from Terra Nova, a flashlight or headlamp coming on once he’s in the trees. It dims a few steps later, then fades completely.
Jade wants to follow, wants to know, but her legs don’t agree.
Instead she counts under her breath until he steps back into the clearing she can see: six hundred and forty-one. Which has got to be something like ten minutes, right? Does he know of a cave over here to stash a body in? Has nothing changed since 1872?
Jade steps back from the kitchen window, careful not to be a body-shaped shadow against the tall silver rectangle the refrigerator is.
But he’s not coming for this house. Not even close to this one.
He goes to the third or fourth house back, his headlamp—she can see that now—a disc of yellow light against the windows from room to room until he steps back out onto the porch to turn the light off, his chest heaving, breath steaming.
He’s just staring at the yacht.
When he’s satisfied he’s alone, he hauls Mismatched Gloves out through the front door. Unlike Cody, Mismatched Gloves is belly-down. It’s because his back is bristling with dull golden nails. His face dribbles down the stairs, and when there’s a snag in the forward motion, making Theo Mondragon have to chock up on a shin, it’s because the top row of Mismatched Gloves’s teeth have caught on a step.
Jade blinks her eyes against the tears trying to spill, hates herself for them.
What she knows but doesn’t want to have to think is that Mismatched Gloves and Cody and Shooting Glasses shouldn’t have sold their friend for eight hundred dollars each. That’s got to be why Theo Mondragon’s doing this, doesn’t it? He found out about the accident, the coverup. So the first thing he does is take care of Deacon Samuels, who really should have known better. And now he’s taking care of the only witnesses.
If nobody knows the story about your big wonderful house, then it can just keep on being big and wonderful, can’t it? Kill the storytellers, kill the story.
Except Jade knows it too. Second-hand, but still.
“Sorry, Letha,” she says, and then shrinks forward when the voice comes from behind her, crawling over every last inch of her skin: “For what?”
It’s Letha, standing in the doorway by the refrigerator, cupping a Yankee candle at her sternum, the shadows on her face upside down, the wrongness sending a jolt up Jade’s spine that she has to consciously not let show.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 27