“There you go,” he says. “Someone installed TeamViewer.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s a program that allows them to remotely operate your system,” he says. “It’s been on there a while. You got hosed.”
I’m embarrassed my security was breached and even more embarrassed that it took him approximately five seconds to find out. I’ve gotten sloppy.
“How’d it get on there?” I ask, feeling defensive. “I didn’t do it.”
“Probably something you downloaded,” he says.
“I’ve got a good firewall,” I say. “I’ve got antivirus software.”
“Yeah, but once this was in they could install permissions, so your system ignored it,” he says.
“How did it get there in the first place?” I ask. I feel my skin tighten. “Did someone come in here?”
“They could have,” he says. “But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. It could have been hidden in an attachment you downloaded.”
“I don’t download attachments,” I say. But I do.
I’ve downloaded them from the Utah Department of Corrections. I’ve downloaded them from Amazon. I’ve downloaded them from the other final girls in the group. I’ve downloaded them from Dr. Carol.
My mouth tastes like garbage. I was so arrogant to think I was safe. Arrogant and stupid, the way I was before I met the Walkers. The world has gotten more sophisticated and I haven’t kept up. While I was guarding my door they snuck in through my computer windows.
“Get unplugged,” I say, taking out my multitool, angry and curt.
He puts his laptop to sleep and disconnects the cables. I unscrew the back of my CPU and take out the hard drive, my screwdriver constantly slipping out of the tiny screw slots. By the time I’m done, the knuckles on my right hand are shredded and sore. I grab Fine, tuck the hard drive into my bag, then close up the CPU and take it with us.
“Leave it,” Skye says. “It’s useless.”
I don’t answer. I close the padlock behind us, my pupils dilating painfully in the bright hall, and I replace the crime scene tape, trying to make it look like no one was ever inside. There’s nothing I can do about the Burbank police seal, but hopefully they’ll chalk it up to nosy journalists with flexible ethics.
We truck the CPU down the fire stairs, Skye complaining in whispers all the way that this is stupid, that I don’t have to take it, but he’s a kid. What does he know? Some cop will come back at some point and if this is sitting there with its hard drive missing even the geniuses in the Burbank PD will realize I came back to get it because it’s important. And I don’t want anyone looking for my hard drive.
Because it’s got my book on it.
* * *
—
Back in Skye’s car, I put the CPU in his back seat and peel off a hundred dollars.
“Here,” I say. “An extra hundred to toss that in a dumpster at a McDonald’s or a Jack in the Box. Any fast-food place. Their garbage gets picked up by private contractors later tonight or early in the morning so it’ll be gone faster.”
“Where are you going?” he asks.
I peel off another hundred.
“This is for giving me a ride out to Bel Air and not telling your mother.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he says. “We keep a pretty honest house.”
I peel off sixty more.
“Do you have a number where I can reach you?” he asks, taking the money.
“Why?”
“I’ll keep you in the loop,” he says. “Fill you in on whatever my mom knows.”
“No,” I say. “After you drop me off, your whole family should stay far away from us.”
“Is it always so dramatic with you guys?” Skye asks.
“No,” I say. “But it’s never safe. The things that happened to us never end.”
Standing outside makes me nervous, so I get on the floor. Skye slides behind the wheel and locks the doors. Good. He’s learning.
“I feel sorry for you,” he says as we pull out of the parking lot. “My mom talks about the six of you all the time. It doesn’t sound like much of a life. Why don’t they just execute the guys who did this to you? Then you could actually move on.”
“It’d just be someone else,” I say, putting Fine on the seat. “At least this way I know where the threat is coming from.”
“Are those guys really that scary?” he asks.
“Scarier than you can ever imagine,” I answer.
He stares down at me.
“You look like an idiot. Come on, it’s totally dark.”
For some reason looking like an idiot makes me feel self-conscious in front of this kid. Not a kid. He’s twenty-six years old. By the time I was his age my life was pretty much over. I hoist myself up into the seat, careful not to hit the gearshift, and strap on the seat belt.
“Doesn’t that feel better?” he asks. “It’s almost like you’re a normal person.”
He throws me a smile. This kid’s a charmer. I give him my best smile back, but even I know it’s not worth much.
We drive for almost forty-five minutes. We get onto the 405 and head for the hills. I hate being outside this way, but at least moving seventy-five miles an hour on the freeway feels like the odds are more in my favor. We turn off into the boring little neighborhoods that cluster around Sunset, pass UCLA, and head through the West Gate, which feels like driving onto some old studio backlot, and then we’re lifting off into the hills.
I haven’t been around a stranger like this in sixteen years. It lulls me. It feels normal. I check the back seat to make sure no one’s hiding there. Then I check it again. Layers of my skin peel off and flutter away behind me onto the shoulder of the road. I risk a look over at Skye. He’s got Tommy’s profile. It reminds me of how different things could have been, of what a different person I might have become, and it takes everything inside me not to reach out and lay my hand over his on the gearshift.
I feel nervous, twitchy, like I want to talk. My skin crackles, galvanized, and little prickles run up and down my forearms. I keep myself under control. I wait until we’re a few blocks from my destination before speaking.
“Drop me at the corner,” I say.
He pulls up and puts the car in park. We sit in the front seat like lovers at the end of a first date. The moment becomes loaded with meaning. It becomes uncomfortable. I see the peach fuzz on his cheek, backlit gold by the streetlight. He’s looking at me, and my breathing is high and tight in my chest.
He has no armor. No protection. He looks like Tommy right before the doorbell rang that night. Suddenly, I want to give him something, something to keep him safe, something he can remember me by. Something that would be just his, that might make the difference if anything ever happened to him, that might keep him from turning into one of us.
I lean over and he gets very still. His chest stops moving. I press my mouth to his ear, and feel my warm, moist breath cupped by the coral-pink curl of his ear.
“Don’t ever let your guard down.”
It isn’t much, but it’s all I have.
Then I push myself out of his car and I’m gone.
—“The American Dream Girl’s Nightmare Life” by Rusty Squires III, The Believer, August 2008
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP VIII:
Night of the Final Girls
I don’t move until I hear Skye make a three-point turn, brake lights flaring against the trees, then he’s heading back down the hill, and I step backward into the shrubbery and wait, scoping the street, making sure he doesn’t come back, making sure no one is following me.
My go bag is heavy with the hard drive and it presses into the small of my back. It weighs a ton. Why shouldn’t it? It’s full of everyone’s secrets.
I blame Russell Thorn. He was one of those bott
om-feeders who viewed a talking-head slot on CNN as a career high. He’d interviewed almost all of us at some point, and along the way he’d figured out that I made extra money self-publishing romance ebooks under a couple of fake names. It’s a bad joke, right? A woman who’s never had a serious relationship writing about secret billionaires’ second chances with their high school sweethearts, or rugged ranchers and the free-spirited animal rights activists who break their hearts. I don’t disagree, but I’m good at it, and I need to make a living. Maybe I’m good at it because for me, all romance is a fantasy. I don’t have any real-life experience to get in the way.
Russell got in touch and tried to blackmail me without blackmailing me.
“I don’t know what to do, Lynnette,” he said over the phone. “I could sell this article to a big outlet, maybe get a book deal.”
“If you go public I can’t write anymore,” I said, nauseated at the thought of being stripped naked in public again, of every stalker and gutter-crawling media creep thinking Lynnette Tarkington is just a girl who wanted to find true love. I’d have to delete everything. Years of work. “I need to pay my rent.”
“If you want me to spike it, you need to offer me something of comparable value,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Why not bring about the demise of two birds with one stone?” Russell suggested, pretending this hadn’t been his plan all along. “Why don’t we co-author a little literary endeavor of our own?”
He promised he could get us a six-figure advance for a book giving the inside scoop on final girls with both our names on the cover, but it had to contain new material and it had to be about more than me. The title just popped into my head: The Final Girl Support Group. Dr. Carol had done well building a career based on her work with trauma survivors like us; maybe it was time I cashed in, too? I told him to go ahead and field offers, but to keep it quiet. I think he envisioned that I’d feed him information and he’d turn it into deathless prose, but after I hung up I realized: what did I need Russell Thorn for?
I decided to write the book myself and once he came up with an offer I’d do an end run around him and approach the publisher directly. It was a sleazy move, but Russell was a sleazy guy. Then I started writing and changed my mind.
Normally I write fantasies involving helicopter skiing and private islands, but writing about something that cut this close to the bone destroyed my defenses. Everything came out: Dani’s guilt, Heather’s addictions, Julia’s intellectual pretensions, Marilyn’s denial, Michelle’s cancer, Dr. Carol’s hunger for celebrity. I wrote it in a white-hot burst and immediately regretted every word. Sentence by sentence, it was nothing but betrayal. I couldn’t publish it, no matter how badly I needed the money, so I cut off all contact with Russell and buried the document deep in my hard drive. I can’t face throwing my writing away, and I foolishly thought it was safe, but I should have known that none of us is ever really safe.
Russell went berserk trying to get in touch, but I just blocked his number and put his email address into my spam filter. He must have been humiliated, having to go back to some editor empty-handed, and humiliation is a trigger for men. Did Russell stage the scene in my apartment? Was he wearing a bulletproof vest? Was he really dead when I ran away? Did he steal the book off my hard drive? It makes no sense for him to take it and then wait for Julia, though. But who else knew about the book? I never should have written that book.
Every few months, I reread the pages I wrote and sometimes add something new, but I know the only right thing to do is to drag the document into the trash. Somehow I never got around to it and now someone has gotten their hands on it and they know more about our lives than they should, and Dr. Carol wants to take me to the cops so I’m running to the only safe place I know anymore.
The street is clear, so I head uphill, going slow like I’m out for a casual stroll carrying a pepper plant in a soup pot, although the only people who walk in Bel Air either have a dog leash in their hands or a leaf blower strapped to their backs.
I stop at the corner and check out the entrance. Next to the front gate is a linebacker in a black Tom Ford suit and steel-toed combat boots wearing an earpiece. She’s hired extra security. Smart. I decide to go over the wall. I hide Fine in some bushes, much to his irritation, and then I take a running start, jump up, catch a mass of creeper vines clinging to her enormous privacy wall, and haul myself up.
The leaves rustle too loudly and I pause at the top to make sure no one heard. I’m clear, but it’s too high to jump, so I turn around and hang by my hands, dropping into the bushes on the other side.
I land on a bush and it sends me stumbling into another bush, and then I’m eating dirt. I stagger to my feet and get away from my landing zone as fast as possible. I figure with a guard at the gate I’ll go in the front door, but as I get closer to the long private drive I realize she’s running valet service.
Shit.
Marilyn’s having a party.
You don’t separate Heather from her drugs, or Dani from Michelle, or Julia from her feminist theory, and you don’t separate Marilyn Torres from her social life. It’s her religion. The week she got into that van to head out into the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, all she was dreaming about was being a debutante. She’d already spent months practicing the Texas Dip for her debut at the Women’s Symphony League of Austin Jewel Ball.
But the rumor had been going around that someone was digging up graves and desecrating cadavers, and the thought that the mummified remains of the family patriarch might wind up wired to a headstone with his picture on the front page of the paper was enough to send Marilyn’s mother to bed with Valium in one hand and vodka in the other. After all, they were some of the original Spanish land grantees in Texas. They had an image to uphold. So Marilyn, her brother, and three friends headed off into that broiling hot summer day to make sure that Granddaddy Torres’s corpse was still reposing respectably underground.
That was when one old Austin family ran into another.
I try to avoid stereotypes, but in the case of the Hansen family they literally were inbred rednecks. Former slaughterhouse owners fallen on hard times a couple of generations back, their last women had died off earlier that year and the boys were feeling the need to breed. Here came this van full of firm young flesh and they fell on it like starving tourists at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
There are two lines you can’t come back from once you cross them. Killing people is one. Eating people is the other. Marilyn’s talked about what happened in group before, a long time ago, back at the beginning, and a lot of it had to do with straight razors, and being forced to wear a leather suit made out of human skin, and sledgehammers, and rendering vats. Most of us try not to remember the details.
Marilyn was the only one who survived. From July to August she stayed in her room, hiding from the press, then two weeks before the Jewel Ball she emerged and declared that she was going to the dance. Her parents warned her against it, her doctors warned her against it, the police warned her against it, but she went, and on the night of the ball she wore her big puffy white dress and while Johnny Mercer sang “Moon River” she folded like a rose and executed a perfect Texas Dip. A few folks called her shallow, but we know why she did it. Some people may have seen her do the Texas Dip that night, but us final girls all saw a raised middle finger aimed at the Hansens.
A year later, the surviving members of the Hansen family showed up at the radio station where Marilyn had gotten a job as a late-night DJ, hoping to anchor the local news one day. She made short work of Uncle Tex and the police took care of Viper, but Buddy chased her up the broadcast antenna. She Maced him in the face and sent him plunging eighty-five feet onto a squad car.
It’s hard to hold your head up in society after something like that, so she moved to Dallas and then, after a failed first marriage, tried L.A., where she set her sights on the son of the founde
r of Rehabilitation America Partners, a private company that owns and operates forty-eight correctional facilities in thirty states, running something like eighty-five thousand beds. Now she’s a committed vegan, an ardent social climber, and monstrously rich. And tonight, all three of those parts of her personality have converged at this party.
Another Escalade with tinted windows cruises to a stop, the driver comes around and opens the back door, and a fresh and dewy young woman in a peach gown gets out, led by an elderly mummy in a tuxedo who holds on to her arm like a leash. The driver gets back into his land yacht and cruises away and I get a wash of party sounds as the mummy and his shimmering pet pass into the house.
I really, really, really hate to break up Marilyn’s big event, but more important things are happening. I decide that I’ll slip around back, where there’ll be less security, find her, and discreetly have a word. She might be angry with me at first, but once I’ve warned her about what’s happening I’ll ask her to let me stay. Just until I know where I’m going next. She can’t say no.
“Excuse me,” a man calls from behind. “May I help you?”
I don’t even look. I know what security sounds like. I turn to my left and make my way down the shadowy side of the house, over the grass, toward the lights and laughter in the backyard. It feels like I’m backstage, getting ready to step into the spotlight.
“Excuse me,” the man says, and his voice is closer this time.
Before I can break into a jog, a hand clamps down on my shoulder.
“Stop—”
I don’t let him finish. I spin, brushing his arm off and stepping in close to deliver a knee to his balls. He twists and takes my knee on his thigh. He’s a big guy in a dark suit and I panic. I reach for my fanny pack and my gun; I should have had it drawn in the first place. Before I can yank my zipper, he grabs my wrist and rotates my forearm so it’s facing up, putting pressure on my elbow. I should have kept my distance because once a man gets his hands on you it’s all over.
The Final Girl Support Group Page 9