My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  She limps back to cabin 6, the one that was supposed to have been her own private Mausoleum, her high-altitude Mortuary, her American Burial Ground, and pries the loose floorboard up, stands with the shiny-new double-bit axe she stole once upon a childhood, to deal with anyone who ever followed her out here to her safe place.

  Instead of dragging it behind like would look cool, she carries it low in front of her hips, runs for the bluff.

  The lower ten feet are dotted with old rusted rebar hammered into the rock for a climbing patch. Jade tests that rebar, gives it her weight, her shoulder screaming for mercy, her fingers just screaming, and earns her climbing patch in her underwear, in a twenty-mile-per-hour wind.

  From here on up, though, it’s all fingertips and toes, it’s all crumbling rock and untrustworthy roots, the axe hooked over her right shoulder from the front, its lower tip gouging into her back each time she has to reach farther than she can reach.

  Letha Mondragon would make short work of a task like this, Jade knows, but Letha Mondragon is receiving medical attention in a tent right now, the reporters already carving her hero’s journey in stone.

  It makes Jade jam her bloodied fingertips deeper into the crevices. It makes her scrape her knees harder against the face of the rock.

  Finally she births over the top of the bluff, lies there on her back panting, the axe clutched tight to her chest.

  It’s not over yet.

  She rolls over, comes up to a knee, then three points, and then, because she doesn’t trust herself to stand all at once without wavering back off into the open space behind her, she’s running ahead as best she can, still holding the axe with both hands.

  Ten, twelve minutes later, there’s the dam like a big toy dropped down from orbit, its top lip of concrete probably twenty feet tall. Meaning: that’s how high Jade can bring the water up, if she can just convince Jensen Banks, the dam keeper, to crank his controls that much.

  Will he remember her from all the presentations he gave to the elementary classes? Presentations Jade groaned and squirmed through, not caring about the volume, the rate, any of that stupid stuff.

  It matters now, though.

  She runs harder, the smoke engulfing her for feet at a time, leaving her bent over and coughing from the absolute bottom of her lungs—it’s like inhaling a whole pack of cigarettes at once, and then, before you’ve got your breath, inhaling another pack.

  The Girl with the Black Lungs pushes on.

  The Girl with the Stubbly Head doesn’t stop.

  Finally Jade crashes out onto the flat spine of the dam, her momentum plus the unwieldy axe nearly overbalancing her over the dry side, the long drop side.

  She reins it in by swinging the axe back behind her, just holding on to the handle with one hand.

  It works, but barely.

  Jade makes herself walk the fifty yards to the control booth, her steps stiff and mechanical again, because Jensen’s probably watching her through the peephole of his door—watching this girl in her underwear make her way to his booth, left foot dragging.

  She taps on the door with the side of the axe, and, when there’s no tap back, no anything, she knocks harder, with more insistence.

  Still nothing.

  Why didn’t she check for Jensen’s truck on the way in? But… but of course: he’d have seen the emergency lights down in Proofrock, wouldn’t he have? He’d have seen and puttered down to see how he could help. Either that or he got a heads-up from the Forest Service about the fire headed his way, so he set the controls on the dam version of autopilot, abandoned his post.

  Either way, Jade hauls the axe back behind her, swings it ahead with everything she’s got, fully intent on Jack Torrance’ing the door to splinters.

  The axe hardly makes a dent.

  The door’s metal, and thick, solid metal at that.

  Jade swings at the doorknob now, misses, but connects on the second try.

  The door handle clatters off, falls into the lake.

  The door’s just as fast, just as solid.

  “Shit shit shit!” Jade says all around, to all the nature she’s also trying to save.

  Hating having to do this, she sucks in, tightropes around to the other side of the control booth. The three sides that don’t have a door do have windows, but the one opposite the door is the only one you can actually do anything with, or to, as it’s the only one you can really stand by.

  Halfway there, Jade’s bare foot jerks up all on its own from a sharp fleck of gravel or a rusty nail head or it doesn’t matter and she throws her arms out like to keep from falling, her hands completely forgetting about the axe.

  It falls, falls, one of its two bits catching on the concrete lip between Jade’s feet instead of gouging into either of them like it should have, and that sends it cartwheeling out and back in what feels to Jade like the slowest motion ever—slow enough that even a nonathletic horror chick can plop down to her ass, her legs hanging out over the water so the top of her right foot can just cradle that axe head, guide it back up to her waiting hands.

  The fall from here wouldn’t kill her, but there not being anywhere to beach for a quarter mile would.

  Slowly, carefully, the top of her right foot cracked open like an egg, she stands again, this time paranoid about keeping a grip on the axe, trying with each step to will her back adhesive, prehensile, whatever it takes.

  It works—just.

  She steps around the corner onto the comparatively wide spine of the dam, knocks on the glass with the axe.

  Jensen’s not home.

  “I’m sorry,” she says to the idea of him, and tries to wait this next breath of campfire smoke out to swing, but the smoke’s like from a train in a tunnel, now. Just coming and coming, thicker and thicker.

  It doesn’t do anything to help Jade’s balance.

  Whenever Doc Wilson gave her a physical in elementary, before she stopped going in for them—for reasons—the portion of the test she always failed was when he’d tell her to stand on one foot and close her eyes.

  Each time, she’d waver, almost fall.

  Like now. She might as well have her eyes closed.

  She taps on the glass with the axe, not swinging it, just expecting the big window to shatter because it knows this is an axe, she guesses.

  Stupid.

  She hauls back again, isn’t sure about proper form or anything, but what she does have is a whole childhood of anger to swing, six years of the other kids’ parents sneering at her, of teachers sending her to the principal for being sick—all of it. And then having to go home to Tab Daniels and his dirty dishes.

  Jade opens her mouth in a scream she didn’t know she had and swings forward with all of her weight, and, and—

  The axe bounces off, bounces hard enough that it comes straight back for her face. She dodges it, watches it twirl past, then spin down the dry side of the dam, maybe never even hitting, it’s so far down there.

  “What?” Jade says.

  But of course: since this is glass that got shot out once, and because the woods on the Proofrock side fill with hunters, these windows are all reinforced, aren’t they?

  Of course they are.

  Still, all her effort did leave a chip deadcenter, at least. Like when gravel catches a windshield wrong.

  Through the smoke chugging all around her, Jade guides her hand to that powdery crater in the glass, pushes on it with her index finger, and, as if that were the release button, the whole window collapses in.

  Jade nods thank you thank you to the slasher gods and follows that glass in, clambering over the desk that’s there, her knees and the heels of her hands gathering crumbles and shards, her eyes roving for dials and switches, levers and wheels.

  They’re all there, and more.

  And there’s no manual.

  “Shit,” Jade hisses.

  There’s no slasher movie that can help her with this, either. Maybe there’s some submarine film or lighthouse movie that might c
ould, but probably not. Dam control booths aren’t that damn interesting—the joke whispered before all of Jensen Banks’s talks at assembly.

  All she can do, she supposes, because she has to do something, because something’s better than nothing, is… is push the biggest, most central lever from its three-quarters down point to “all the way up?”

  When the two wheels on the back wall are mostly turned over to the right, it feels like, she hauls them back to the left until they stop, imagining the dam is a giant water spigot. And it sort of is, isn’t it?

  To prove she’s doing it right here, a whole bank of lights start flashing alarm, and a robot voice comes from overhead, not asking if she likes scary movies—the question she’s forever waiting for—but telling Jensen to attend to the levels of “1” and “2,” as failure to do so will result in a reduction in flow that could lead to dangerous back pressure if left unchecked.

  “Exactly,” Jade says, nodding about her handiwork.

  She hovers her fingers over this big industrial dashboard like seeing what else she can do. When there’s nothing left to push, nothing left to turn, she opens the door from the inside, having to force it with her shoulder.

  It spills her out into open air with too much momentum but she was expecting that, knew to have a good hold on the inner doorknob.

  Now if only the control booth would blow up with a big mushroom cloud as she walks away from it, down the dam.

  How long will the lake take to rise, though?

  Will it be fast enough? What brick by the bank will the waters reach over in Proofrock?

  It’ll be soon enough, Jade decides. And: it’ll be all the bricks.

  When the control booth doesn’t explode—it’s not packed with demolition supplies, and there are no sparks in there anyway—Jade keeps walking all the same, her hands fists, eyes fixed on Camp Blood’s white bluff through the smoke, and she only stops when…

  Holy fucking shit.

  Galloping ahead of this fire is a grizzly. Not the trash bear that killed Deacon Samuels, part of her mind registers, because that cub she saw down in Proofrock earlier, it’s trying like hell to keep up. With its momma.

  “Run,” Jade says to it again, and then realizes where they’re running: right to her, right along the top of the dam.

  She turns, is running hard herself now, her one chance in a thousand to plant her bare foot on the round knob inside that door she left cocked open.

  It catches her right in the arch painfully, the door swinging out with her weight, trying to send her down and down into open space, but now her midsection’s catching the flat roof of the control booth.

  She starts to scrape back and down, the door coming back to hit her hanging legs, but… she scrabbles, she grabs, she pulls, she makes it up onto the gravel roof and whips her feet up fast, before any sharp teeth can snag them.

  When she turns to peer through the gusting smoke, though—this momma bear and her cub aren’t even halfway to the control booth.

  “Don’t fall, don’t fall,” Jade whispers to them, not wanting to give her safe place away either—nine feet isn’t much to a bear at least that tall—but… why have they stopped?

  Jade looks behind them, down the line of the dam, and—they weren’t running from the fire, they were running from what’s running from the fire: the trash bear, a big ragged boar, his fur scorched and smoking, his face scarred from claws and teeth, or maybe fights with dumpsters, it doesn’t matter.

  What does is that, just like with hamsters, Jade knows—everybody in Proofrock knows—Papa Bears eat Baby Bear every chance they get. They’re easy pickings, and tasty besides.

  Jade stands, shaking her head no, no, please.

  At the end of the dam, the air swirls clear enough for her to make out this trash bear standing, carving the air with his massive claws, his roar filling every iota of space, and then—then what Jade’s always known to be a lie, what she would never believe, what all the nature shows have been lying to her about, what starts her heart like the chainsaw it is: the Momma bear tucks her cub up under herself, steps forward over it, and roars even louder than this trash bear, her lips quavering from it, her rage-saliva misting out before her, and Jade doesn’t speak bear, but she gets this all the same.

  This mother’s saying that if this bad man wants her baby, then he’s gonna have to come through her to get it, and Jade has to look up to the sky to keep her eyes from spilling, and for a moment the smoke parts enough for a grainy line of sunlight to filter through, find the palm of her hand when she reaches up to try to hold this feeling for as long as she can.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First I’d like to thank a certain video rental clerk from Wimberley, Texas, in about 1985, 1986. Without you slipping a crew of eighth graders five or six Freddy and Michael and Jason movies every Friday after school, so long as we had them back first thing Saturday morning, then… I can’t even imagine a life so bleak, so unslashery. Next I’d like to thank one of those eighth graders’ dads, who would always wait until we were two or three tapes in to come drag his Freddy fingers on the metal door of the garage we were in. We’d fall off the saggy couch we were piled onto, we’d blast out the side door, and we’d run like I’ve never run since, tears slipping back from my eyes, my mouth actually hurting because my smile was so wide, nothing but darkness yawning open in front of me.

  I ran into that darkness, and am still running.

  Next I want to thank you, reader, for running with me.

  If we go fast enough, if we close our eyes tight enough, if we ball our fists tight enough and lean forward far enough, then we can still remember what it’s like to not just be terrified, but to be so terrified that we start grinning, and finally laughing, and then whether we get away or not doesn’t matter anymore, because whatever’s after us can never touch our smile.

  Next I want to thank some writers who are involved with My Heart Is a Chainsaw, though they don’t know it. The first is, once again, Stephen King. His story “The Raft” is shot all through Chainsaw. I may hold the record for having read that story the most times. And Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters—holy something, Batman: How could I have even pretended to write Chainsaw without her book to guide me? And, talking comic books, I maybe smuggled a certain scene from the original Secret Wars (#4) into this novel. Mostly because that issue, more than any other book ever, changed my life. And William Vollman’s 13 Stories, 13 Epitaphs is part of this as well, in kind of the same way J. R. Angelella’s novel Zombie is, the same way S. Elliot Brandis’s Young Slasher is, the same way Zachary Auburn’s A Field Guide to the Aliens of Star Trek: The Next Generation is, which is to say: me, stealing stuff. And Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides is here as well. I was so enchanted with its first-person plural delivery that all I wanted to do was hotwire it into the slasher. So, in 2013, over about three weeks, I did. I was fresh off my second slasher, The Last Final Girl, so I figured this would be easy. Wrong. Chainsaw back then was “Lake Access Only.” And, while Indian Lake and Proofrock were there, Jade wasn’t.

  I should probably say up front here too that “Jade” is the name of someone not around anymore, someone who meant a lot to someone who means a lot to me, and Letha was a girl I knew in high school, when I was seventeen and living with a different horror crew in a trailer house in a junkyard in Midland, Texas, when we were all trying to be either George Lynch or Jon Bon Jovi. Letha’s cool last name… it seems everybody back then had better names than me. I was a Jones moving among Stoneciphers and Outlaws, Ledbetters and Mondragons. But I was Jade, too, having to stand up bigger than I was in all the high schools I kept ending up in, all over Texas and Colorado. Jade wasn’t narrating this 2013 version of My Heart Is a Chainsaw yet, though. That duty fell to a boy in an iron mask, a boy I’m pretty sure was me ripping off the narrator of The Tin Drum and dressing him up like Quiet Riot’s Metal Health album art. As you do. The whole story back then hinged on what the backside of certain turtle shell
s looked like, which is another way of saying that the novel Was Not Working. So I shelved it for when I could maybe be a better writer. Four years later, fresh off Mongrels, I thought I was that better writer. Wrong again, dude. I redid “Lake Access Only” from the ground up, no more first-person plural, no more turtles, and managed to find Jade and Letha in there, Hardy and Camp Blood, but the novel still wasn’t working. So I wrote some different ones instead. One of them was The Only Good Indians—another slasher.

  Chainsaw’s heart started to beat again, like Jason’s always does.

  I started a new file, wrote it from the ground up again, and, even though I still wasn’t a good enough writer—are you ever?—I had learned that, with good enough first readers, I could fake it. So, thank you from the bottom of my slasher heart to Matthew Pridham, Krista Davis, Michael Somes, Cara Albert, Paul Tremblay, Kelly Lonesome, Adam Cesare, Matt Serafini, Jesse Lawrence—I think Jesse’s read most of these recent versions, even. But so has Mackenzie Kiera, so has my agent, BJ Robbins. Both of them pushed me and pushed me to make it better, when I kept thinking it was done, it was ready. I should know by now that I’m gonna be wrong, though. Luckily, I have people to remind me of that. And thanks too to Billy J. Stratton, for always being up for some in-depth Jason Voorhees discussion, thanks to Theo for letting me smuggle his name into this book (this is me asking for permission, Ted), thanks to Joe Ferrer for always hitting me with slashers when I need slashers, thanks to Rob Weiner for always having another title, another horror movie that, if not for him remembering it, might have been consigned to the heap. Thanks to Sandy Smith for helping me with a thorny possessive apostrophe and a lot else besides, thanks to Jessica Guess for believing in slashers—it means everything—thanks to Jason Heller for helping me with a certain t-shirt in here, thanks to Walter Chaw for always talking about horror in a meaningful, heartfelt, nothing’s-out-of-bounds way, thanks to Dan McKeithan for some nursing home details that used to be a big part of Chainsaw, thanks to Vince Liaguno for a last-moment catch, and thanks to my sister Katie, for help with a plant thing late in the game.