My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Very importantly, Jaws also has some excellent SLASHERCAM action, which feels exactly like a giallo OR a slasher, just it's underwater this time. Jaws also has GORE and SET PIECE KILLINGS and a killer who doesn't use his words and a THIRD REEL BODYDUMP. It's just one head kind of in the middle I guess, but it still counts. And if NUDITY floats your boat into slasher land, then Jaws opens with some of that. And, did somebody say SEQUELS, that being the "killer" coming back over and over even though it's killed each time? Check. Is there STALKING? Yes. Is there SLICING and DICING? Yes, yes. Is there one of the best JUMPSCARES in all of horror except for The Exorcist III? Yes definitely. Is there a Crazy Ralph who knows what the real horror is? Yes, in the body of Quint, who knows sharks from fighting with them, but also Hooper, who has shark scars himself.

  But where is the REVENGE you promised, Jade? you might be asking.

  Let me tell you, and I have to go to the history books and also a 3rd page for this, sir, sorry, just give me extra points if you need to, I understand. But I'm talking about that story Quint tells below decks about his experience when the Indianapolis sank in the ocean and was swarmed by sharks which ate so many sailors and soldiers, the thing he doesn't say about that is that his ship then was delivering an atomic bomb called Little Boy. So this is by some views already a guilty ship, a punishable offense. But what do sharks care about bombed cities or ruined centuries? They don't, sir. But they do care about their reputation, and their reputation went bad when so many of them came in and ate the lower halves of all these floating sailors and soldiers, which started a different war, this 1 against shark kind, BY humans. So that's what sharks can be generally mad about and need justice for, their bad reputation.

  But also, why THIS shark. My idea which tracks is that since in the world of Jaws we don't know how long sharks live or if they even die, that the great white attacking Amity Island could have been AT the Indianapolis, and because we didn't know radiation shielding the same back then, maybe it even got some glowing green atomic rays in it, making it big AND smart. Even smart enough to cross over half the world and come to get revenge on a sailor soldier who escaped its teeth in 1945, but is now spreading word of sharks’ lifeless doll eyes, making everybody just shoot sharks on sight, when really they just want to swim and eat fish and stuff.

  Which is why Jaws is a slasher, Mr. Holmes. In addition to all the outer characteristics of a slasher it has, it also has the internal and most important trait of REVENGE, and it has 1 more too, that being a FINAL GIRL, who is this time a guy, Chief Brody, who starts out meek and afraid and flinchy but gets brave and killy in the scary scary open sea by the end.

  This is how slashers work, sir.

  See you in the water.

  HELL NIGHT

  There’s something wriggling on the back of Jade’s neck, multiple wet somethings, but her arms are too trapped to get at them. Maggots, she knows. She can’t fault them, though. They’re just the hungry kids muscling their way to the front of the cafeteria line, right? They want to be there waiting when the doors open, when the meat’s the warmest it’s going to be.

  Jade chuckles and then finds she can’t expand her chest out as much as it was before. Because of the weight. Because of her weakness. Because this is it.

  She’s not sure how long she was out, or even if she for sure was out. One moment there was bloody mucky darkness all around, and the next moment there was bloody mucky darkness pressing her down and down and down, the most full-body hug she’s ever gritted her teeth through. Luckily her head cocked to the side right at the last instant, probably an instinct to save her teeth from getting crunched in, or else she’d have already smothered.

  As it is, the air she’s breathing is air she’s been breathing, and has to be about eighty percent gore and rot, and some part sharp stabs of elk hair—sharp to her lips and eyes, anyway. The drowning feeling is completely real, but panicking doesn’t make any difference. She can’t move even a little. To keep from going even more batshit than she already is, she counts bodies from her and Letha’s big nightmare run through the SS Lazarus of Jason Takes Manhattan, which wasn’t the rush Jade had always imagined it to be.

  There was… first there was Ladybird Samuels in the hallway, then Ross Pangborne in the stairwell, then Mars Baker up in the window, and Tiara pedaling out through open air, and Lewellyn Singleton in the shallows. Oh, and probably Macy Todd in the room on the other side of Letha’s wall. She was really first. Except for Mismatched Gloves and Cody and Shooting Glasses. And now at the bitter end—for them anyway—Jade and Letha. Really, if Letha’s lucky, then she was crushed instantly, or got the kindness of a shattered elk rib pushing up through an eye socket, into the big off-switch of her brain.

  Faster has to be better.

  As for Jade, she imagines her skull’s going to turn up in years, when some kids not even born yet are building skeletons from this fun mess of bones, don’t even realize they’ve found the last victim of the Lake Witch Slayings.

  At least then she’ll really be part of it, right?

  Don’t laugh, she warns herself. Any space her ribs give up, she doesn’t get it back.

  It won’t be long now. It can’t be.

  Unless… are the state police already crawling over Terra Nova with dogs and cameras? Is the whole nation focused on Indian Lake again, now that not just one Founder’s died, but a whole clutch of them?

  If so, great, wonderful.

  But the dogs and cameras can’t be ranging out this far yet. They’re probably still trying to talk Lemmy and Galatea out of the cabinets they’ve wedged themselves into on the yacht, that they’re never really going to crawl all the way out of again, no matter how long they live. They’re probably trying to raise Cinnamon and Ginger on their big-girl cellphones, except those twins are long-legged, are probably down the mountain already, and not stopping until they see Texas. They probably still think Letha is in the water, needs to be fished out. And what of Donna Pangborne, Lana Singleton, and, so far as the law and the media knows, Theo Mondragon?

  Probably Donna and Lana were slashed open deeper down that hall, before Jade and Letha even woke—before Theo got to the room beside Letha’s, maybe caught a pellet or two from Mars Baker’s shotgun. And the kids could be piled down that same hallway, but… Jade doesn’t think so. Even the Dutch kids sacrificed to start this whole cycle, they were probably nineteen, weren’t they? How could they rent American cars if they weren’t? And, since them there’s been Deacon and Clate and the construction grunts and everybody on the yacht, none of whom were kids either.

  Maybe Theo’s like Jason?

  The reason Jason never takes kids, Jade’s always figured, is that he feels a dim kinship with them. Not just on a developmental level, but… his last good memories, they have to be of camp, don’t they? Of eating hot dogs in the canteen, roasting marshmallows over the bonfire, shushed laughing from the bunks after lights out?

  But, too, if kids are off-limits for Theo Mondragon, the slasher, and his daughter’s the final girl, and she’ll always be a kid to him, then… how’s it supposed to work at the big movie on the water? Will he be pulling his punches, just knocking her to the side so he can open a few more necks, split a few more shoulders, leave a few more severed arms drifting down to Ezekiel’s Cold Box?

  If Jade had any wishes left, if she hadn’t burned them all just to get a slasher to Indian Lake in the first place, she would want a few more hours of life, please. She’d wish to be there at the movie with the rest of Proofrock. To thrill in the carnage and narrate it all in her head, but… now that she’s dying she can say it, at least to herself: the reason she needed a slasher to come to town, it was so he could cleave through her dad at some point in the rampage. Or, failing that, Jade could do that cleaving herself, and let Hardy assume the slasher did it. That being a trick he’s already used himself, Tab Daniels being no friend to law enforcement, maybe Hardy’d let it slide, right?

  But now Jade’s just going to suffocate. Unl
ess of course her sternum crushes in first, splinters through her lungs. She clenches her fist as much as she can at the stupidity of it all, grits her teeth until she tastes blood. Maybe her own, maybe the elks’.

  And now she’s crying, she’s pretty sure. It’s hard to tell, but she thinks maybe she is. Probably.

  It’s because she should have done more—she could have done more. If she’d just insisted instead of been all polite and asked, Jade could have prepared Letha for all this better. What she should have done, she knows now, is kidnapped Letha, tied her to a chair over in Camp Blood, and somehow wired a TV and VCR in, force-fed this nascent final girl all the slashers she needed to have on file, to not have ended up in this cave of rotting meat. This collapsing cave of rotting meat. Slasher movies are supposed to be these grand fairy tales where the princess is a bad-ass warrior, but Jade never showed Letha that, did she? She never showed her anything, really.

  You’d have been the best of them all, Jade tells her all the same. Letha Mondragon could have swung her machete further into slasher immortality than any of the other final girls.

  But, because Jade didn’t think to kidnap her, now she’s just down here with her, or with her corpse, anyway. Which is a kindness. Or, it’s only fitting that Jade eke a little more life out, so she can soak in this rancid stew she deserves, wallow in her own failure.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says as best she can, and then she thinks the unthinkable: that it would have been better for everyone if she’d just bled out in that canoe back on Friday the 13th. Or, no, the real dream, it’s that her dad rolls his high school Grand Prix the weekend before he smiles his smile to Kimmy Daniels. Then Jade never screams her way into the world in the first place, making it easier on everyone. Sure, that means never getting sprayed with that thrillingly cold water from Hardy’s airboat, that means never finding A Bay of Blood in the bargain bin, it means never visiting the Skank Station, never sitting through detention or history class, never running away to Camp Blood over and over, coming back to find she wasn’t even missing, but it also means she doesn’t ruin so many people’s lives just by wishing a slasher to their pleasant little valley.

  Jade’s breathing fast and shallow now. This has to be the end. Her—her vision’s even starting to glow at the edges. No more putting it off with slasher facts. No more slowing the moment down with heartfelt apologies. What confirms she’s being pulled into another, even harsher reality is that the heavy dead body she’s pressed alongside writhes into sinuous motion, since—of course—it’s probably about to stand up, run away into the afterlife of elk, which is all grass and cold sunlight.

  Except this elk, once the glow suffuses down onto it, isn’t an elk at all, but Cody, because now him and Jade are just two more Indians at the bottom of the pile of massacred Indians. They’re circling the drain of history together, while Letha and Shooting Glasses and Mismatched Gloves are over at some other drain, with harps and angel food cake. But so be it. At least Jade’s not alone. Cody’s eyes are open now, his head’s shuddering like something hungry’s pawing at him, and Jade, with her foggy thinking, decides that she must be Alice at the end of the first Friday, Ginny at the end of the next one, Nancy in the closing scene of Nightmare, when the rules of reality go slack so the dream can seep in—

  And now her hand is glowing? Meaning she’s reaching for Cody’s face. Meaning she can.

  There must be a reaper in whatever next stage of death this is, some dead-alive dude who sorts people into piles for processing. No, Jade says inside, not a reaper, a Reeker, like the movie.

  “2005, Alex,” she thinks she creaks. Her mouth is trying to move, anyway.

  Unless it’s the antropophagus from 1980, of course. In which case she’s screwed, as she doesn’t think she can run right now. She’s not even sure she can raise her head. All she’s sure of, or sort of hoping for, is that a glove of knife-fingers is about to burst up from the sand, wrap its blades around her face, draw her down into a forever Nightmare, which will be her own little back alley of heaven.

  Jade starts to smile at the delicious horrible wrongness of it all, but then Cody rolls away and more light spills through, its impossible brightness blinding her so that when she looks up to who’s doing this, it’s an angel in a halo of blazing light, her hair wet with gore, face red and black with chunks, chest heaving, fingers curling open and shut like the talons they are.

  Letha fucking Mondragon, reborn.

  “You,” Jade says with what feels like her last breath.

  “Me,” Letha says, and falls down into the pile alongside Jade, spent.

  Their hands find each other in the rot and blood, their fingers intertwine like best friends, and Jade opens her mouth to the sky, breathes all this fresh crispness in.

  They’re alive, and they shouldn’t be. They made it through the night somehow. This is the other side, Jade lets herself think for a hopeful moment—this is the sun rising over Woodsboro, Gale Weathers narrating the terrible events of the night.

  Except: “Where is he?” she says, trying to push up, but her coveralls are full-body blood-glued down, so she has to peel up piece by piece, limb by limb.

  Letha looks around casually, as if being polite, and they survey this serene meadow, Indian Lake glittering out past it, going forever.

  It’s not noon on the Fourth, it’s late afternoon on the Fourth already, shading into dusk. Jade was out for… twelve hours? Seriously? Is that what breathing maggot air can do to you?

  Shouldn’t I have to, you know, pee? she thinks, but doesn’t check. All the same, hours-old urine would be an improvement.

  Letha stops scanning, as if re-hearing Jade’s words. Or, only just now actually listening to them.

  “My dad, you mean?” she asks, the insult there in her voice.

  Jade nods once, nearly falls forward from it.

  “It’s not him,” Letha says again.

  “If he’s not here, that just means he couldn’t find us,” Jade says, throwing her chin across the water. “He’s already over there, getting ready for tonight. Snorkel, waterproof chainsaw, speargun, belt sander—”

  “Stop!” Letha says, high-stepping out of the muck. “Do you know how long it took to dig you out?”

  Jade stands, her whole body stiff and bruised, her balance not quite catching up with her yet, blood rushing here and there in the least comfortable ways, but with a lot of stinging urgency.

  Both of them are head-to-feet gore.

  Jade pats her pocket for her last cigarette, tries to light it but it’s been in the lake, it’s been soaked in blood, it’s been crushed. She flicks it into the elk and it pretty much just crumbles mid-air, becomes an offering of tobacco above all these dead.

  “Why isn’t the sheriff here yet, you think?” Letha asks. “I kept expecting him to show up.”

  “Why would he call it in?” Jade says back.

  Letha hears exactly what Jade’s saying, but still says it anyway: “My dad, you mean.”

  “Your dad.”

  “Who would never do a thing like this.”

  “Who did, then?”

  Letha just sits there, and after a few seconds of it, Jade notices she’s crying. No sound, just tears.

  “The twins,” she says, about the massacre on the yacht. “And L-Lemmy. Gal.”

  Because of course the final girl doesn’t think of herself first.

  “If it matters, then… I think they’re all right, probably,” Jade says.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Kids believe in the boogeyman. They know to hide.”

  “Thought you were going to say that my dad wouldn’t do that.”

  “That too,” Jade says, uselessly.

  “So, what now?” Letha asks.

  “Want to go to a horror movie with me?” Jade asks back.

  Letha just looks up to her about this, like checking if this is even a serious question.

  “Hardy’ll be there,” Jade adds.
r />   “I know where the keys are,” Letha says, tossing her chin to the yacht. “We can—”

  “Going back on that boat is a death sentence. He—whoever it is, he’s probably there waiting. He knows we need a phone. So they’re probably all already overboard.”

  Letha looks down to what she’s wearing: her ruined camisole and pajama bottoms. No shoes. Aside from covering her in the most minimal way, the only real purpose her sleep clothes are serving anymore is to keep the gore and blood close to her, which might be good if she were going up against Van Damme in an alien suit, but Theo Mondragon doesn’t have heat vision, just slasher goggles.

  Still, instead of already having sneaked over to the yacht for a clothes-change, here she is, right?

  “Thanks for digging me out,” Jade tells her. “You didn’t have to, I know. I’m not worth it.”

  “Please shut up.”

  “You could have split, really.”

  “Jade, you—it’s not your fault, what your father… and why you’re… you.”

  “Yeah, I know, wow, it’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. You’re you, and that’s great.”

  “We should get going,” Jade says, high-stepping out of this moment.

  She swings her hurt leg ahead of her and brushes past Letha.

  “And we’ve all got daddy issues, right?” she can’t help but mumble, wincing the instant it crosses her lips.

  “My dad isn’t the one—”

  “Then why didn’t he dig you out?” Jade asks, playing with her lighter now, wishing so hard for a smoke.

  “He didn’t know where we were,” Letha says, stepping out now as well, her voice rising a bit, in defense.