The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  Stephanie reverses back to where I lie and turns off the truck. She gets out. I want to see where she’s going but I can’t turn my head. I hear car doors opening and closing and then I space out for a little while and when I come to I’m hearing footsteps crunch through the gravel toward me.

  “You stupid statistic,” she says, squatting down next to me.

  Did she think Dani was going to hurt us? Or was too suicidal to be trusted? Was she confused? Did I do something to make her think I would hurt her? But I know what the real answer is. She’s not one of us. She’s never been a final girl. Chrissy was right. She’s a Monster.

  “It’s a pussy pistol but it’s the thought that counts,” she says, holding up my dainty little pistol. “You idiots with your machetes and your martial arts. If you want to rack up an adult-sized body count you need some Smith & Wesson.”

  I feel limp, squeezed out, empty. All I can do is lie on the ground and die. I look up along her long arm and see that her face is a black sun radiating waves of hatred and contempt.

  “You think you’re such a badass,” Stephanie says. “Do you know how pathetic you are? I’ve watched one person after another take you down, and when it was my turn it was even easier than I thought. You’ve had other people holding your hand for your entire life. You’re not even a real final girl.”

  She leans down and holds her finger under my nose.

  “Fuck,” she says. “You’re still breathing. Okay, I guess I need something a little heavier. Don’t go anywhere.”

  She crunches over to the truck, and I hear the door chime going bong, bong, bong, as the back opens. I hear the zippers of gun cases. There’s a shotgun being pumped. Then her sneakers crunch back over the rocks and reenter my field of vision.

  I’ve been played. I’ve been a moron. I brought her right up here into the heart of Red Lake. I was wrong about Skye. I was wrong about everything. And now I’m going to die.

  Death actually is a moment of clarity, and in this instant I know Steph’s right—I’ve needed other people’s help my entire life. I keep thinking I’ve cut myself off, but there’ve always been other people. The only thing I’m going to do on my own is die.

  My head is enormous and numb and even blinking gives me a headache so I stop and stare up at Stephanie standing over me. She’s very, very tall and I see that she has one of Dani’s shotguns hovering over my face. She steadies the barrel. The big empty circle rests right over my forehead. My brain sends my body signals to run, to move, to get out of the way, but my muscles have all gone on strike.

  “I really freaked when you showed up at my front door,” Steph says. “I thought you’d actually figured something out, but then you took me on a super-bonding soul sisters road trip? You’ve wanted someone to put you out of your misery for years, so relax, you Suicidal Tendency. I’m the final final girl, and you’re just last year’s—what’ve you got to smile about?”

  She snarls that last bit because my eyes have shifted to the right and I can’t help it, I’ve twitched my mouth up just a little. Steph follows my gaze and her face falls.

  “Shit.” She sighs.

  Dani is gone.

  I hope she’s running right now, I hope she’s on her way up to Red Lake to warn everyone, to get help, to get ready for this Monster. Let me be the sacrifice that buys them time, let Dani get to them and then they’ll come down on Stephanie like the wrath of God.

  Steph walks to the bushes, holding the single-barreled shotgun to her shoulder, barrel down at a forty-five-degree angle, ready to bring it up and punch a hole through Dani the second she spots her. She pauses and looks back at me, debating which way to go.

  I want to shout Run, Dani! Go! but my head is mush and I think I can make my right cheek twitch if I concentrate hard enough, but that’s about it. I wonder how I look with half my skull missing.

  Maybe I moved, because Steph cocks her head at me, then gives up and turns back to the bushes, but she’s too late. She may have been ready for me, but she’s not ready for Dani. Six feet of ranch-hard muscle rises up out of the bushes and grabs the barrel of the shotgun and deftly turns it away from herself and then Dani punches Stephanie in the throat.

  The blow snaps Stephanie’s chin to her chest, and the gun goes off. Dani stands crooked, hunched over, in pain, something broken inside her, but she controls the barrel of the shotgun and keeps it pointed away while punching the side of Stephanie’s head with her fist over and over again. Then she twists the gun, and it comes out of Stephanie’s grasp, and Dani brings the stock down on the small of Stephanie’s hunched back.

  Stephanie hits the ground face-first, and Dani limps away from her, coming toward me. Her face looks pale, her lips move soundlessly, her teeth are caked with blood. She drops heavily to her knees, sets the shotgun down, and I realize she’s crying. I’m pretty sure it’s from the pain.

  “Lynne,” she chokes, reaching a cut-up hand to the side of my face.

  That’s when Steph rises up behind her.

  Dani senses something is wrong and she turns, right into the butt of the shotgun smashing down onto her forehead. I want to shout something, I want to warn her, but my face isn’t working. I think my brains might have seeped out into the gravel. The butt of the shotgun takes her dead center in the face. Something thick crunches. Stephanie is grinning, and then Dani grabs Stephanie’s ankle and pulls, dumping her on the ground, and then she’s up and running, hobbling fast, limping away from me, leaving big fat droplets of blood in her wake, disappearing back into the bushes. Steph scrambles to her feet, aims the shotgun, pulls the trigger. It explodes fire.

  Steph runs to where Dani disappeared, pumping shell after shell into the shotgun and firing again and again, then stopping and scanning to see if she can detect Dani, then firing again. I don’t think this thunder will ever stop. Finally, there’s silence. A bird starts to sing.

  Stephanie stands over me again. I realize that I have to play the oldest trick in the book, the one I used before with Ricky Walker. I play possum. Stephanie bends over and feels for my breath, but I’ve stopped breathing. I dimly feel her tug on my right earlobe and I think she’s pinching it, but my head is made of wood. I don’t move. She spits on one of my wide, staring eyes. I lie still. Then she laughs.

  “This one doesn’t even count,” she says. “She basically killed herself.”

  She walks over to the truck and throws the shotgun in the passenger seat. Shotgun riding shotgun, I think stupidly to myself. She starts the engine. The truck idles for a minute and I think she’s changing her mind, but I can’t allow myself to turn my head to look because I know she’s watching me.

  Relief floods my veins like a drug when she roars out of there, leaving a cloud of white dust hanging in the air. I lie still for a minute, brains spilling out in the dirt, and I wonder who’s going to go warn Red Lake. I wonder if Dani made it up there to tell everyone what’s happening. I wonder if Steph is going to get there first and cut through them like a bullet. I lie there, and I wonder who’s going to save the day, and blood pools around my head, and I die.

  —speech by Adrienne Butler, Cincinnati, Ohio, January 2010

  THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XXIII:

  Resurrection

  Bushes fall before my wrath. I hurl myself into trees. I keep pushing up the mountain with the balls of my feet until my calves ache the way my swollen, broken head aches.

  “Stupid,” I say to myself.

  But I don’t say it out loud because every sound hurts my shattered skull. My entire world is getting up this hill, one foot after the other, and no matter how much my muscles scream, no matter how much my chest burns, I don’t stop. I’ll only stop when I’m dead. Which might be sooner than I think.

  “Stupid girl,” I say to myself.

  I take another step.

  The world spins around me.

  “Stupid fucking girl.�
�

  I take another step.

  “Stupid dumb fucking girl.”

  Standing up in that parking lot was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Pain nailed me to the dirt. Even getting spiked on those antlers didn’t hurt like this. The only person who could make me stand up was Adrienne.

  “What are you lying there for, Lynnette?” she asked, looking down at me.

  “Can’t . . .” I told her.

  “You can,” she said. “You know why? Because if you don’t get up, then all that time I invested in you was a waste. It’ll mean I’ve failed. And I don’t fail. I grew up in a high-pressure household, Lynnette, so failure is hard on me. So if you give up, then little perfect Miss Adrienne has screwed up, too, and that’s going to be hard for me to reconcile.”

  She knelt by my head, and I felt her hands slip beneath my armpits, and I felt my body bending in all the wrong ways, tendons screaming, muscles shaking, and then I stood, swaying in the middle of the parking lot, standing over a puddle of my own blood. Alone.

  Now I’m getting up this mountain if it kills me and it just might because everything hurts so much and then I fall to my knees because the woods are gone and I’m kneeling in pine cones on the edge of Camp Red Lake. On the other side, a big pinewood sign shouts Welcome, and behind it a vast green lawn leads to the Main Lodge, its raw logs glowing orange in the pink twilight.

  “Didn’t count on Billy Walker getting there first, did you?” I ask Stephanie inside my tormented, pulsating brain. “Goddamn titanium plate in my head, you moron.”

  I never thought that one day a Walker brother would save my life, but after Ricky left me with half my skull caved in they had to insert a plate to hold my head together. Stephanie plinked me right in the middle of it with her little .22. Scalp wounds bleed like stuck pigs, and I’m scared to look in a mirror, but for now I’m alive.

  But it hurts. Oh God, it hurts so bad. I push myself up onto my feet and stagger forward on what feel like broken ankles, eyes locked on the Main Lodge, and then I’m stumbling over hard asphalt and I look down and I’m in the circular drive that runs in front of Camp Red Lake and I look up again and I start to cry.

  “No fair,” I whisper. “No fair.”

  Ahead of me sits Dani’s enormous red F-150. The driver’s-side door stands open going bong bong bong and all my willpower drains out through my feet because Stephanie is already here. I haven’t heard any shooting but my head is a ringing, roaring waterfall of pain.

  That climb up the hill, wanting to die every step of the way, it was all for nothing because Stephanie is already here and everyone I know is dead.

  I lean against a parked SUV, probably one of Marilyn’s armored monsters, and I avoid looking at my reflection in its shiny sides. Even with the titanium plate, Steph’s bullet hurt me. My brain aches with damage.

  Even if everyone else is dead, I’m going to stop her. I start limping toward the Main Lodge. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I have to stop her before she hurts more people. My stride lengthens, my feet sink into soft grass, the lodge sways from side to side, and my head is a pulsating pain bulb at the end of my neck.

  I push myself up the steps, walk between the massive cedar columns still wrapped in yellow crime scene tape, and drag my legs over the pine-planked porch, push open the front door, and step inside.

  Everything smells like wood. Enormous age-lacquered beams support the roof two stories overhead, its rafters and ridge piece lost in the late-afternoon gloom. A towering fieldstone fireplace anchors one end of the vast lobby and a mezzanine circles the rest. Someone’s stapled Polaroids of grinning Sisters and their families to every surface, encrusting the posts with women baring white teeth, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, while sign-up sheets, bulletin boards, Xeroxed schedules, and safety posters spin in and out of the shadows around my throbbing head.

  In front of me sits the circular welcome desk and over it aged iron letters spiked to the wall spell out Sisters, all.

  Except Stephanie. She’s the piece that sticks out. The one that doesn’t belong.

  Where is everyone? Where are my Sisters? Are they hiding? And what about the staff? They’d closed down after Christophe Volker came, but a skeleton crew still has to be here. Eight people? Ten? A whispering voice inside my skull tells me it only ever gets this quiet when everyone is dead.

  Two arrow-shaped signs hang on either side of the front desk, rope letters on the one pointing to the right reading Tuck Shop and rope letters on the one pointing left reading Dining Porch. That’s what I want. It’s almost five. People are going to want to dine.

  Defenseless, I enter the Minotaur’s maze, limping left, pushing through two swinging doors made of rough wood still covered in bark, and I walk into the mess hall. Big slabs of pale pine march away from me in orderly rows like autopsy tables with empty benches on either side. An abandoned canoe hangs upside down from the ceiling, and the entire far wall consists of glass doors leading out onto the dining porch. A bloody handprint smack in the middle of one is the only sign of life.

  A sign reading Salad/Sundae Bar sways gently over a pile of laundry on the floor. I lower myself, knees popping, and realize this boneless sack of clothes is the body of a woman. I turn her over. Not much of her skull is left. Her face is smeared across the floor. I wonder if she was pretty. I wonder if she was happy. I wonder who her Sisters were. She wears a Red Lake T-shirt and the nametag on her right breast is obscured by biological matter. I wipe it away with my thumb.

  “I’m so sorry, Marcie,” I say, and mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything.

  I look into the kitchen where another person lies facedown, their T-shirt saturated dark red. This one looks like a man.

  Stephanie was here.

  How many people have died because I trusted her?

  Something bumps politely against a wall and I whip my head around, sending pain spiking through my temples. I see a storage closet door closed tight and make my way over and stand to one side because it has a porthole window in the middle and I don’t want whatever’s in there to see me. I give the door a push. It doesn’t move, but maybe it’s just heavy. I brace myself and push again and it rattles against its deadbolt lock. I hear something creak inside. Why would Stephanie lock herself in a storage closet? She wants to be out here killing people. I press my face to the glass.

  It’s dark so I cup my hands and look. Something moves in the dimness.

  “Hey?” I whisper-call.

  I pray my voice hasn’t traveled too far into the building. I tap one knuckle against the glass. Whatever it is moves again.

  “I see you,” I say.

  Whoever it is rolls backward, deeper into the dark.

  “Are you hurt?” I ask.

  “Lynnette?” A muffled voice wafts out through the door, down around my belly button.

  “Julia?”

  The deadbolt snaps. Something flashes on the edge of my vision and I duck down and spin, catching a flock of birds lifting off from the wide lawn outside. Silver sparks from their wings. Julia comes out of the closet in her chair, a low sturdy model with big rugged wheels that slant in at the top. Behind her stand two numb teenaged boys and a nervous woman who looks like she goes camping a lot.

  “Lock it behind me,” Julia tells them. “We’ll get you when it’s safe.”

  They obey and I feel so tired that it’s only Julia, that there are still more people left to find, that Stephanie is still out there killing.

  “What the hell is going on?” Julia asks.

  “It’s Stephanie,” I say. “Stephanie Fugate.”

  Julia’s forehead knits in the middle for a minute and then goes smooth.

  “The Red Lake girl?” she asks. “The one you kidnapped? Jesus Christ, Lynnette, your people skills are shit. She’s walking around here with a machine gun.”

  “I don’t
think she has a machine gun,” I say, remembering the shotguns in the back of Dani’s truck.

  “Let’s stand here and argue about the caliber of weapon the girl you thought was your new best friend is using to murder everyone,” Julia says.

  My brain gives a dark throb that makes me want to throw up.

  “You look like shit, so I forgive you,” she says. “Cell phone service is down but there’s a landline in the nurse’s station we can try for.”

  “What about Heather and Marilyn?” I mumble through numb lips as we start to move.

  “Down by the lake with everyone else,” she tells me. “I came up here to get sunscreen. About twenty of the staff are having a memorial service for Adrienne.”

  I’m not listening. I’m standing still. From this angle I can see past the bloody handprint on the glass doors, around the lone tree that blocked my view of the middle of the wide green lawn before. A person sprawls on the grass. I recognize the flannel shirt. Julia looks where I’m looking.

  “Is that—?” Julia begins.

  “You get the phone,” I say. “I’ll get Dani.”

  I start outside but Julia cuts me off at the French doors.

  “You think I can’t do stairs?” she snaps, and zips around me.

  Julia’s already at the lip of the dining porch when I get outside. She leans back in her wheelchair, puts one hand on the banister, and practically flings herself down the three steps to the ground, her wheels absorbing the impact. I try to keep up.

  “Shag your ass,” she calls back at me as her wheelchair chews up the lawn.