My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Letha squirms on the futon, shaken awake.

  “W-what?” she says, not able to completely open her eyes yet, her lids probably gummed together with airborne melatonin. She reaches up to rub them with the back of her wrist, which is exactly when the wall maybe six inches above her head disintegrates with a blast that can only be Mars Baker’s shotgun. One of the barrels, anyway.

  Letha rolls away from the wall as if stung with shot. She spills onto the floor just as the next barrel unloads into where she was lying, leaving wisps of foam floating in the air. In the silence after the blast, a single flame flickers at the edge of the crater in the futon, and, through the hole in the wall, there’s a scream, a gurgle, and then that gurgle’s cut sharply off.

  “Macy?” Letha says about that gurgle.

  Jade’s on the floor with her already, pulling her close, her breath fast and shallow, but when Letha sees her she pushes away, trying to escape.

  “It’s me, it’s me!” Jade yells, running her hand over her scalp like that somehow proves she’s the same, just, with less hair.

  “Jade?” Letha says, slowly getting it.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Jade hisses, fully aware her voice can now be heard through that hole in the wall.

  “But—”

  Letha’s cut off by a hammering on her door. Not a slap anymore but the side of a fist, pounding.

  “Where’s the machete I gave you?” Jade asks, casting around. “Your dad didn’t really put it in his safe, did he?”

  Letha looks over to her like Jade’s talking in possum, and she wants to watch her lips, see how an animal can be making human words like this.

  Jade shakes Letha, says, “I know you’re not ready, but you have to be. It’s happening.”

  “But… this is—”

  “I know, I know,” Jade says. “I said tomorrow night, the party, but I was wrong, I don’t know, I’m sorry, okay?”

  “The massacre?”

  “It’s happening right now.”

  “But who—”

  “You don’t want to know,” Jade says, standing, pulling Letha up alongside her. “Now where’s that machete?”

  Letha pans around the room, her eyes wide and dumb like a cow’s—I should have prepared her better, Jade’s chiding herself—then reaches over behind the dresser, unsheathes the machete from its excellent hiding place. She offers it to Jade but Jade steps away, hands high.

  “This is all you,” she says. “I take that, I die fast. That’s Indy’s whip, Thor’s hammer, the Dude’s housecoat. One user only.”

  She guides it back closer to Letha.

  “I don’t know how,” Letha says, trying to figure where her fingers go, what the balance is, which is the sharp side. After snatching it from the air like a ninja chopsticking a fly in flight, yeah.

  “You will,” Jade tells her, and steps forward, hates that she has to but does it anyway: pushes the side of her head to the door, to listen. What she deserves for that, she knows, and would even cheer for, is Ghostface’s knife plunging into the side of her skull, but the only other option is stepping out there without knowing it’s empty.

  “Clear,” she says after maybe three breaths of silence, and snaps for Letha to come close, to be ready.

  “Where are we going?” Letha asks.

  “Off this boat,” Jade hisses back, and hauls the door in all at once.

  Ladybird Samuels is lying there eyes open, mouth doubly-open—no chin, no jaw, maybe no throat either, like the skin just kept holding on and holding on. Her bloody handprints are on the door right by Jade’s face.

  Letha screams until Jade turns around, covers Letha’s mouth with her hand, bringing her eyes right up to Letha’s, warning her to stop. After nodding to Letha and getting a nod back, she finally—slowly—removes her hand.

  Letha draws in like to scream again, to tell the whole boat where they are, but instead she throws up her half a potato skin.

  Jade doesn’t hold her hair or pat her back. She steps into the hall.

  “Which way is out?” she asks.

  When Letha’s just crying, probably replaying Ladybird Samuels in her head, Jade says it again, harsher: “Where to, Letha?”

  Letha weakly points back the way they came, past the bathroom. Jade takes her by the wrist, then the hand, and leads her out, both of them stepping carefully over Ladybird Samuels.

  “Who’s doing this?” Letha says, unable to look away, or be helpful at all.

  “You’ll see,” Jade tells her, and they make it all the way to the stairs before the next body confronts them: Ross Pangborne.

  He’s been ripped apart somehow, his torso up at the switchback, his legs playing catchup, though they never will.

  “W-what could do that?” Letha says, trying to fall to her knees, give up.

  “Shotgun, chainsaw,” Jade says, not letting Letha give up, just pulling her deeper into this.

  “But what did he do to—to deserve this?” Letha asks, and Jade lets a grim smile touch her lips: if Letha’s already seeing these deaths like that, as the consequence of previous bullshit, then there’s hope.

  Jade eases them around Ross Pangborne, trying not to step in the blood as that leaves red footprints.

  “We can’t just—” Letha starts.

  “We have to,” Jade completes, and then they’re to the top of the stairs, in the tower part of the yacht, she’s pretty sure, are having to step over a shattered shotgun to see—

  Letha falls back shaking her head no, no, and Jade doesn’t want to look, but has to: Mars Baker has been thrust headfirst through the big window, and his jaw has been pulled off too, so his mouth is locked into a forever scream.

  Letha falls back shaking her head no, no, and now it’s Jade’s turn to throw up. Just into her mouth at first, but when she can’t swallow that, all the salmon and potato skins and lavender and melatonin comes up and out, splashes her boots and Letha’s bare feet, and it’s not purple, and her eyes are hot and leaky so she guesses that means she’s crying because there’s vomit burning her nasal passage, and now more’s coming up, and Letha’s hand is on her back, the same as it was for Tiffany K, once upon a puking.

  Jade reaches out, steadies herself on the thin blue knee of Letha’s sleep pants.

  “Who’s doing this?” Letha says, a kind of checked-out quality to her tone now, her eyes practically flashing vacancy, tilt, like she’s pulled some internal eject lever on this whole situation. Like she’s reached the maximum amount she can sustain, so the rest can now just wash over her.

  “Where’s the machete?” Jade asks.

  Letha looks down to her empty hand, and then they both hear it: scraping on the ceiling above them. Meaning somebody’s a floor up in the tower.

  “Dad?” Letha says, and leads Jade out onto the deck to look up to the top.

  With both of them already straining to see, Tiara comes sailing out over the railing of the deck above them, pedaling her legs, waving her arms like there’s anything to grab on to.

  “T!” Letha screams, rushing the railing, slamming into it like if she could have just got there a second earlier, she could have reached out, snagged the hem of Tiara’s shirt.

  Jade tracks Tiara’s ragdoll body all the way down to one of the posts built into this modular pier. The post isn’t sharp, is flat and blunt, but all the same it plunges up and through Tiara’s chest, splashes out the back, and when Tiara’s face slams into the wood or plastic or plastic wood, whatever it is, Jade feels her own cheek tingle in sympathy.

  “This can’t be happening,” Letha says.

  “We’ve got to get off this boat,” Jade says back, hauling Letha up and casting around for—for whatever’s next. They have to get off this boat, right? Right. Jade steps to the railing, chances a look down to the lake side of the deck. It’s dizzying. This yacht is a monster.

  “How deep is it down there?” she asks.

  “The water?” Letha asks.

  “The water,” Jade
confirms, having to lead this final girl along.

  “The valley is steep on this side,” Letha pretty much recites from Mr. Holmes’s rambling talks, “that means… that means—”

  “It’s deep enough,” Jade says, and, steps up onto the rail, holding Letha’s hand to steady herself.

  “No, if we—”

  “There’s nowhere safe here,” Jade says, pulling Letha up onto the rail, which nearly overbalances her.

  Letha steps up in her dainty athletic way.

  “My dad,” she says, peering around from her higher vantage point to the deck Tiara was just launched from.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” Jade says. Not that she probably just missed him in the costume closet. “He’d—he’d want you to be safe. That would be his first concern, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t he throw you over this railing himself if that’s what it took to keep you safe?”

  Letha looks down and down, to the water.

  “If he were here, he’d tell you your first job is to survive, wouldn’t he?” Jade asks, and before Letha can answer, Jade pulls her arm hard enough that it’s jump or fall—also hard enough that she’s committed now herself, is already tumbling, wheeling her arms, pedaling her legs just like Tiara was, breathing in as deep as she can with all the air sucking away from her. Once in the open, no footing, she loses Letha’s wrist immediately, which she tells herself is probably for the best, as they don’t want to come down on each other.

  Seconds later she hits the surface of the lake with a thought-erasing slap, is slamming down into Ezekiel’s Cold Box, all the breath she thought she was saving gone in an instant, the water around her thinner than makes sense—made of bubbles and speed and thrashing, but in slow motion too, like it’s not a body of water Jade’s fallen into, but a nightmare pool, the kind you can never surface in.

  She hits the slanted bottom, her face scraping rock, and pushes up clawing for air, certain beyond certain that a large hand is about to wrap its cold dead fingers around her ankle. When she surfaces, half of her comes up out of the water, and she’s not a human anymore, is a gasping machine. Five, six seconds later she’s treading, treading, and, way above, can just see Letha, still perched on the railing in her clingy camisole and pajama bottoms.

  Of course she was able to regain her balance. Of course a doof like Jade wouldn’t be enough to pull a majestic creature like Letha Mondragon overboard. Now that Jade’s free, though, Letha’s just looking down at her, head cocked over like Michael’s, like Jason’s—like Jade’s a dead thing, a dying thing.

  It makes her spin around in the water for whatever’s coming for her.

  Nothing.

  And then—no.

  “Behind you!” Jade screams as loud as she can, pointing with both hands, which makes her face nearly slip underwater.

  There’s a head of long hair blowing in silhouette from the railing of the deck above Letha.

  Synthetic hair, Jade wants to tell Letha, but in the moment it doesn’t matter.

  Ross Pangborne’s dead, Mars Baker is dead, Deacon Samuels was dead before this night even started, and Lewellyn Singleton can’t have enough backstory to be any kind of slasher, can he?

  Leaving one man up there in a Norman Bates dress, a Samara wig: Theo Mondragon. Who else could get close enough to Tiara to toss her over like that? Who else would have that upper body strength?

  “Jump!” Jade screams up to Letha, and, instead, Letha looks behind her, sees this mask-face from much closer, and this does dislodge her.

  It’s a fall that should crunch her ribs in on the railing of one of the three decks below, break her in half, ground her for life if she’s so lucky, but Letha’s Letha: one of her bare feet finds the solid railing she just slipped from and pushes out hard from it so Letha’s no longer going straight down but is arcing out, her body stretching out into a dive so perfect Jade almost gasps.

  Three seconds later Letha slips into the water with less splash than a dagger, porpoises up maybe twenty feet out, meaning she turned back for the surface the moment she broke it, to be sure not to mar her face against the stony bottom.

  Good for her, Jade says inside. Smoke em if you got em, and this final girl most definitely does.

  Jade slaps the water like a beaver tail to get Letha’s attention and Letha clears her hair from her eyes, looks around, awake again. She takes a long, easy stroke Jade’s way, then another, and, right before she’s going to get there, Jade kicks away, going for around the front of the boat, for shore that doesn’t involve the pier.

  “Camp Blood,” she manages to get across to Letha. “We have to—”

  Letha stills, stops swimming alongside Jade.

  “We have to,” Jade says, swirling her hands to stay afloat.

  “No,” Letha says, and Jade can tell from the set of her lips that she’s seeing Deacon Samuels all over again. At Camp Blood.

  “But—”

  “I can’t,” Letha says. It’s not a plea, just a fact.

  “Shit!” Jade says, slapping the water in frustration now, but then she turns back the other way, to the ass-end of the boat, where it’s darker. Where they can hide better, if they can slip into the trees? Maybe bunk in the woods, take the long long way around to Proofrock, through the national forest? Show up sometime in early August?

  “Where are we going?” Letha asks, having to swim slow to not pass Jade up.

  “Land,” Jade says, struggling through the water.

  They’re almost there when Jade’s hair is sticking into her eyes in a way it hasn’t been—at which point it registers that she doesn’t have hair. And it’s not hair anyway, but a thick coating on her whole face, chunky like canned dog food that’s been poured into the lake and then let spread out until it’s thin. She looks over to Letha, and the chunks on the pale shoulders of her camisole are red in the moonlight. Jade’s next awkward stroke brings her hand into a warm cavity like a floating bowl of oatmeal, a floating bowl that’s… Lewellyn Singleton’s caved-in face? What, is this a Fulci film?

  She spins away, swims under the floating body, no breath this time, hits bottom almost immediately with her fingertips. She pulls ahead rock by rock, finally stands in the shallows, well clear of any floating dead people.

  Letha’s already there, chest heaving, her eyes locked on Lewellyn Singleton’s pale form.

  “Is it over now?” she asks.

  “Not even close,” Jade tells her, and they trudge up into the mud and grass, then scramble for the trees hand in hand, groping through the darkness when the moon’s gone above the trees, and… was this what it was like for Stacey Graves a hundred-plus years ago, when she made it across the new lake? Was she scared like this?

  Except she was younger, Jade reminds herself.

  And what she was scared of, it was herself.

  More important, it’s now, not then. And no, Letha, this isn’t over yet.

  “We’ve got, we’ve got to—” Jade tells her, pulling her away from the yacht, away from the yacht, that’s all she knows right now.

  “Um,” Letha says back, in a way that makes Jade follow where she’s still looking: a space between two trees, like trying to confirm what she just saw. Except why would what she just saw hang around where it just was? Jade looks two trees to the right from that, which is away from the lake, then three trees ahead, focusing on a jagged slash of moonlight, and—

  A hunched shadow flits from one blacked-out tree to the next, as skulky and silent as any Ghostface ever was.

  “He’s coming,” Jade says, Letha’s hand in hers again.

  “He?” Letha asks, panic rising in her voice.

  “Run.”

  They do, Letha pulling ahead without effort, dragging Jade now, and… and this is what it’s like for a final girl to save you, isn’t it? Jade was at the periphery, watching this slasher happen on a drive-in screen she could barely see through the telescope of all her hopes and self-assigned homework, but now she’s right at the center of it all. It’s terrible bec
ause it means she can die at any moment, but here at the center of the hurricane, dead bodies down this hall, through that window, falling from the sky, it’s kind of a goddamn wonder, too, isn’t it?

  Until the toe of her boot catches under a rock and her left leg stays in place while the rest of her tries to keep going. Letha loses her grip, falls ahead, has to touch her fingertips lightly to the dirt to keep from spilling. But she’s already looking around, probably thinking a wall of fishhooks have slung forward to hook into Jade’s face, pull her soul apart.

  Well—no, Jade corrects. That’s what the horror chick’s thinking. The final girl doesn’t know Hellraiser from Hannibal, and why would she.

  “My foot?” Jade hisses, feeling down her calf with her hands.

  It’s not a root.

  “Oh, shit,” Letha says.

  It’s a bear trap. Of course.

  “What the hell?” Jade says, trying to wedge her fingers in between the metal teeth.

  “We thought the bear might come back,” Letha tells her, taking a knee.

  “To this tree?”

  “All those dead elk?”

  Jade looks ahead and nods, remembering them at last.

  “My dad had some of the guys stack them up in a pile.”

  “Interesting,” Jade says, meaning pretty much the direct opposite, still trying to get her fingers into the metal teeth.

  “Here,” Letha says, chickenwinging her arms out and breathing in for the coming effort. “Cinn and Ginn aren’t even supposed to come out this far.”

  “Me either,” Jade mutters, and draws her lips back from her teeth when Letha jams her fingers down along her calf. That she can at all tells Jade there’s blood. But it bit shut from side to side instead of front and back, meaning her shin bone isn’t involved, just her muscle.

  “Do it,” she hisses, looking behind them.

  A head-height pinpoint of light is bobbing through the trees, taking an indirect line towards them.

  “One, two,” Letha says, and on three she gives all her muscles and weight and effort to the bear trap, and, impossibly, it creaks open. Jade guides her foot up, up, and… her boot.

  “You—have—to—” Letha strains out, her shoulders starting to tremble.