Jade waits until she feels Stacey Graves’s nose right above her forehead, and then she shoves her right hand, her non-suicide hand up through the surface of the water as fast as she can, her fingers forcing their way between the blackened stumps of Stacey Graves’s teeth, because—because the only weakness Stacey Graves has, aside from maybe iron dredging hooks, is her messed-up jaw.
Jade yanks down on it with everything she has, feels bone creaking against bone somewhere in Stacey Graves’s small skull, and she falls back with it as hard as she can, forcing all her air out again, no preparation, and—yes, yes yes yes—Stacey Graves’s face plunges down through the surface, followed by her whole little body.
Her sharp broken teeth bite into and it feels like through Jade’s fingers, but she keeps pulling, keeps dragging, Stacey Graves no longer mad but scared, shrieking under the water, clawing up, up, for where she belongs.
Jade pulls her deeper, deeper yet, until they reach a still point and Jade can hug Stacey to her, hug her tight with arms and legs, caging her, her small body bucking and writhing at first, but then, gratefully and by slow degrees, stilling, stilling enough that… is that music Jade’s hearing through the water, or the end of the movie?
She lets go and Stacey Graves just hangs there, motionless in the silt.
At least until a large pale hand comes up through the muddy water, wraps around her thin ankle, and pulls her away all at once, down into the real and permanent darkness of Ezekiel’s Cold Box.
Jade panics, her last lungful of air long since used up, and now she’s the one bucking, now she’s the one unable to climb up to the surface, but… but it was worth it, wasn’t it? To die killing the slasher? To have got to actually and really be the final girl, right here at the very-very end?
Jade full-body convulses, her traitorous mouth opening to suck water in, the lake suffusing her chest, with its icy-everywhere-at-once fingers, and, and this is what death is like, some part of her realizes, and it’s not soft or easy at all, it’s a panic you’re both trapped in and distant from, and it’s—
Another hand coalesces a foot in front of Jade, which is… which is up, from above, not from below? Before Jade can process it anymore it has her by the front of her coveralls, is ripping her to the surface.
It’s Letha Mondragon.
She’s not slow-motioning it through the science hallway of Henderson High, though, her shampoo-commercial hair billowing behind her. No, now she’s gasping, blood sheeting down over her face from a gouge across what used to be her eyebrow, and that eye’s not moving with her other one anymore, but that’s nothing—her jaw. It’s been wrenched out of place, cracked away at the hinges, so her chin’s hanging low and crooked. The only reason it’s still even close to in place, isn’t torn away and tossed aside to sink, is… it’s her moisturizer regimen, isn’t it?
Her skin was elastic enough to hold on.
And if she can make it through that kind of violence, then taking a header into a boat isn’t going to end her.
Some girls just don’t know how to die.
Jade wants to reach for Letha, to hold on to her, to be held by her, but there’s a coldness surging up through her chest, there’s a new burning she knows is air, wonderful air, and then she’s puking lake water onto Letha. And Letha just lets her, lets her, doesn’t drop her or anything. At least not until she has to, the last of her strength spent on Jade.
Jade reaches for her, for real now, to try to save her back, but she doesn’t have to: Banner Tompkins is standing with her in his arms, is the one doing the saving here, his surge of water pushing Jade away.
“She—she did it!” Banner calls out, turning around so everyone left can see the hero, Letha Mondragon.
The final girl.
“She did it!” Banner repeats, louder, standing higher now with Letha, holding her like a trophy, like a hero, and Letha’s a good-enough person to shake her head no about this, try to give slasher credit where slasher credit’s due, but the effort to try to rise from Banner’s arms to direct attention back to Jade is finally too much. Letha passes out into Banner’s heaving chest, her long hair trailing down into the water, which somehow makes the whole scene more dramatic, more perfect.
Jade wouldn’t just be the bad guy for messing with it, she’d be the worst guy.
Worse than Proofrock already thinks she is, anyway.
She lowers herself into the cold water so as to disappear and frog swims to the side, having to navigate all the half-sunken floats, all the cold dead arms hanging down, all the blood swirling around her outstretched fingers.
Underwater, it’s not really crying.
But it is cold, now.
Jade surfaces with a gasp, the night air not doing much to warm her, and stabs a hand out for something to help her stay up.
The town canoe.
Jade clambers up, over, in, shoulder screaming, fingers throbbing, her hurt leg dead and heavy.
Collapsed down between the seats, her face to the green fiberglass, she laughs and sobs and hates everything, but she loves it all too, wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Finally she rolls over and there’s nothing but stars overhead. She drifts like that, just checked out, spent, imagining she’s on a raft of the dead, imagining there’s credits rolling somewhere in her foreground, imagining—
Her hand finds the machete under the bench.
She lifts it, inspects it like the wondrous thing it is, and, trying to be cool like Quint, slams it down into the side of the canoe. It falls over so she tries again, standing to swing, and just gets the edge to chisel in enough so the machete can stay there like it’s supposed to.
Sideways in the canoe now, Jade hooks her legs over one side, hangs her head back over the other side, and for the thousandth time she’s Alice at the end of Friday the 13th, Alice in the long sigh after all the screaming, Alice reclining back into that dream which would wedge the door of sleep open for Freddy, for this whole Golden Age.
Just for a moment, before Jason bursts up from the water, hugs her from behind, everything’s pretty all right, isn’t it? Pretty perfect, really. The horror’s been dealt with, this long night is over, and there aren’t even any hard questions to be answering yet.
It’s the best tease in the long and storied history of teases.
It makes Jade breathe in, to get ready for the next part, her hand finding the handle of the machete on pure instinct.
“One last scare,” she recites.
On cue, a great splash rises behind her, and, because she’s ready, because she fucking knows this genre, Jade is already coming up to her knees and spinning, already swinging, already screaming for all she’s worth.
But, again, her machete doesn’t cut all the way through. Because evidently machetes don’t really do that.
What they are good at, it would seem, is going a few inches in and stopping.
Except—except this isn’t Stacey Graves?
It’s Jade’s dad, it’s Tab Daniels, somehow floated out here too, just trying to survive, one eye and part of his head gone, the rest of him latching on to whatever he can, grabbing on to Jade to pull her back into the past with him. Because of course Letha’s nail-plus-board didn’t really kill him, now that Jade’s having to think it through. Letha’s too pure to kill unprovoked like that. The world won’t let her deliver a blow that deep, that permanent.
Leave that for the Jades of the world.
The machete isn’t even halfway through his neck, but that’s far enough.
His blood—his life—slips out for real this time, coats the blade, and the one eye he has left is locked on Jade’s, and she says it to him at last, what she always meant to, the only thing she ever had: “I trusted you, Dad.”
When she pulls the machete back, he slips under, Indian Lake slurping him down, Drown Town calling his name, and Jade, the guilty party now, the Indian with her ear to the train tracks, feels her senses prickling, looks over to the side.
She’s not as
far from the pier as she thought, is she?
And, who she felt watching her, it’s—it’s Tiffany Koenig.
She’s still recording all this on her phone.
“No,” Jade says to her, trying to explain but not nearly loud enough, “you don’t understand, he—he—”
She gives up.
Why even try?
Instead she covers her face with her hands and screams into her palms, screams and kicks, and when she looks up the next time, she’s drifted farther out, and there’s red and blue lights in Proofrock now, there’s helicopters beating in over the trees.
So it begins.
Jade watches, her heart reaching across the water but her bloody hands staying right here. She uses one of them to pat her chest pocket for a cigarette she knows isn’t going to be there, and then she works the lid off the little cooler, uses it like a paddle, two groaning pulls on the right side, two on the left, and going gradual like that, gradual and silent, she drags herself across the dark water.
She’s crying again, because this is it. This is her last time to run away. No way can she go back now, not with what Tiff’s got recorded on her phone. With Jade’s luck, all the stories of this night’s massacre are going to coalesce around her until she didn’t just kill her dad, but everyone else too—all this blood in the water was her calculated revenge against the town that never accepted her, that treated her like it had treated Stacey Graves, once upon a time. They can even dig in her old history teacher’s student files for her papers. They’ll be all the proof needed, and more.
Theo and Letha weren’t framing Jade, Jade’s been doing that all on her own, all these years.
No, there’s no going back. This is it. It has to be. Mr. Holmes is dead, Sheriff Hardy’s dead, and she’s officially a killer now.
Even if Proofrock would have her, there’s nothing for her there.
She ships her oar—the cooler lid—runs her fingers up to the name-patch on her coveralls, works the two earrings loose. One’s the comedy face, one’s the tragedy face, right? Add them together and you’ve got a slasher, pretty much. That would have been her last paper for Mr. Holmes, she thinks. How the slasher is a bloody coin flipping through the air, showing a smile for a flash, then a frown, and then another smile.
Jade would have that coin never land.
She makes one last fist around the two earrings, the back of her fingers seeping from Stacey Graves’s teeth, and then she holds her hand out over the water, lets the earrings go, closing her eyes for that small plunk, and so she can see them in her head, swirling and sinking, one laughing, one crying.
Before her on shore is a string of dark cabins against a chalky bluff. Camp Blood. If she had a best friend with her, or any friend at all, she’d point ahead with her lips, say how she was conceived there one bonfire night, she’s pretty sure. And now—now they’ll find her starved and frozen in one of those dark cabins, won’t they? The horror chick turned into a leathery mummy, scavenged on by turtles and raccoons and crows, her knees still hugged to her chest, her heart finally buried in the only soil that would have it.
But she had a moment, didn’t she? She screamed until that’s all there was in the world and then she stuck her hand as deep into the killer’s mouth as she could. Maybe for as long as that lasted she sort of was a final girl? Just a little?
Close enough.
Jade drops her name-patch over the side, lets “JD” sink as well, and then she peels out of her coveralls and shirts and pants, why not, pushes them over the side, holding herself against the cold at first but then remembering, taking the cooler lid up, dipping it over the side again and again. She doesn’t want to die out here, in this green canoe, but up there.
“Momma, I’m coming home,” she says between pulls, her teeth chattering, shoulders twitching, hands numb, and the mom she’s talking to carries a hunting knife at her belt, the mom she’s talking to would kill a whole camp of counselors if anybody so much as looked at her daughter wrong.
Jade pulls harder at the water.
She can’t wait.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
What brings Jade out from her chosen cabin isn’t dawn glowing behind Terra Nova, but she thinks that’s what it’s going to be.
It’s the fire she guesses she probably started. The fire from the lighter she left flickering in that pile of elk. It finally singed some hair enough to rough a little flame up, and that flame caught some more hide, found the grass, felt across to the trees, and… and now Caribou-Targhee National Forest is burning. For the first time in fifty years. Every Idahoan’s worst fear is climbing tree after tree, the crowns bursting sparks and embers into each other like an endless stand of matchsticks.
Jade shakes her head in apology, in regret, and kind of smiles a bit on accident, even.
This too, slasher gods?
“The Burning,” she says, obviously. “1981, Alex.”
It’s the main slasher to have made of fire something formative, but, for an actual forest fire, not a misdirected prank, you have to dial all the way back to The Prey, Jade guesses. The Prey opens with a fire that burns across an innocent family, leaving one of them disfigured enough to Cropsy back up years later, when partying teens show up for a camping trip. But The Prey was only in theaters for a week at most in 1983. Or was it ’84? Never mind that it was actually shot in 1978, meaning that, unlike all the other slashers of the Golden Age, The Prey wasn’t really riding Halloween’s coattails, was probably surfing the same cultural wave that spit Halloween up onto America’s screens in the first place, that wave being the sweet spot where the grindhouse of the seventies and the giallo of the sixties overlapped with someone with Herschell Gordon Lewis dollar signs in their eyes—Sean Cunningham in early 1979, pretty much, taking out an ad in Variety to fund a little horror movie set on Friday the 13th that he wanted to make.
Call it what you want, Jade tells herself. The truth is, the same as you can’t be cruel to animals in the production of your slasher—that poor innocent snake in Friday the 13th—you also can’t light some random woods on fire just to make your movie cooler. What else she tells herself is that she kind of always knew it was going to come to this, didn’t she? Her citing slasher trivia to herself over here in Camp Blood.
Who else would even listen?
She was always trying to be Randy from Scream—the Cassandra Scream 2 would nod to, who would become a literal Cassandra-on-videotape in Scream 3—but she knows that, if anything, she’s Crazy Ralph.
Definitely not the Girl Who Saved Proofrock. Or, as much of it as she could, anyway.
Hugging herself from the chill—it’s always coldest just before dawn—she looks away from the flames consuming Terra Nova and the national forest and probably all of Idaho behind it, considers Proofrock watching this same tragedy unfold across the water.
As if ten or fifteen people floating in pieces in the water isn’t enough, now there’s a fire to try to deal with.
“Sorry,” Jade says, wishing Mr. Holmes were around to shake his head at this prank to end all pranks. In trying to turn her back to it so as to maybe soak up at least the idea of some of that wonderful warmth, she finds herself facing the chalky white bluff behind Camp Blood, the one Hardy said it used to be a big joke to climb, so you could moon everyone at once.
Sounds like fun.
Jade grins a guilty grin—this is no time for smiling—and rocks back on her heels, imagines the cliff of water to the left of that bluff, that she used to dream of someday releasing down-valley, just for kicks and grins, and because she kind of wanted to see Drown Town, not just make dioramas of it for art class.
Now, after the fire feels around this side of the lake, ravages through Camp Blood on its way to taking Proofrock down, now the next generation’s dioramas are going to be of Pleasant Valley, before it burned to cinders.
It’s a foregone conclusion: that’s the way the wind’s blowing, and the skies are clear, no clouds building to release nature’s fire extinguish
er down.
Jade can try to climb the cliff when the flames get close, but… does she really want to? Better to just sit in her cabin hugging her knees and rocking. Maybe imagine that the flickering on the windows is from a bonfire burning into the night. Maybe the ghosts of the kids killed here will feel that heat, even, and raise their voices in some campfire song, the rhyme-y one about the dam bursting, and—
Jade stops rocking back and forth on shore.
She looks to the chalky bluff again.
Hardy didn’t just tell her about that mooning stunt, did he?
He also made that big deal about… how long ago was this? Sophomore year, was that when Jade had to do her interview project a second time? Shit.
But: yeah. That story about that other old sheriff, the one who saved Pleasant Valley from the last fire by shooting out the windows of the dam’s control booth and raising the level of the lake, dousing the flames.
Jade looks up the bluff again.
Could she?
If the wind’s blowing the fire towards the lake, and the lake’s rising, then… it should work, shouldn’t it?
Hardy’s not around to drive up to the dam and shoot the windows of the control booth out, though. And everybody in Proofrock’s probably still got shriek-faces on about their dead friends and family, and everybody else is packing their cars and trucks, because this is the big one, this is the end of Pleasant Valley, the end of what Henderson and Golding started so long ago.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Jade lowers her hands, trying to shake blood back into her fingertips, and for the fiftieth time she wishes hard for her coveralls. It was a good and necessary gesture last night, but dealing with that gesture in the morning is seriously sucking.
But this tracks, too, doesn’t it? All of her armor’s been stripped away, is part of the lake already, but there’s still one fight to fight. Jade hates Proofrock through and through, doesn’t have enough fingers or toes or math to even count all the ways she hates it, but that doesn’t mean she can watch it burn, either.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 37