The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  Running makes my head sick, so I walk fast, looking behind us, checking the approaches, left, right, ahead, behind. A scattering of trees rise from the lawn but otherwise it’s totally exposed. Clear sightlines from every direction. Far to the right sits the campfire amphitheater and stage. Ahead of us is the treeline, the air between the trunks already dark purple. Back in those trees are the cabins, and beyond them lies the lake where twenty more victims wait for Stephanie.

  Dani doesn’t look good. Her legs point in two different directions, neither of them natural. She’s facedown in the dirt, mouth open. I notice with relief her shoulder blades moving up and down. She’s breathing.

  “Put her legs across my chair to help with the weight,” Julia says. “We need to get back inside and get to the phone.”

  I can’t.

  “I’m going to rest for a minute,” I mumble to Julia, waving one hand.

  I’m too tired. The ground pulls on my hips. I need to sit. I crouch, not sure how to make it down safely.

  “What are you doing, Lynnette?” Julia shouts from far away.

  I need to rest.

  “What are you doing, Lynnette?” Adrienne asks.

  She’s walking with me across the lawn. My clothes stink of cordite. She’s wearing a white sweater and jeans.

  “Trying not to get killed?” I tell her/told her.

  “That’s enough for you?” she asks. “Continued respiration? That’s all you have to offer the world?”

  “It’s a good place to start,” I say, wishing she would stop making me feel so guilty all the time.

  You have to protect your sister, my mom says, standing over me while Gilly wails into the side of her neck.

  “I’m no Yoda,” Adrienne tells me. “But you think your sister died so you could quit? You think Tommy died so you could stop when things got too scary? There’s more to life than staying alive.”

  “Shut up, Adrienne,” I groan.

  “You wouldn’t feel so guilty if you didn’t know I’m right,” she says.

  Gravity wins. My butt thuds onto the grass. A hard jolt goes up my spine. My head floods with hot blood. The lawn turns into a merry-go-round and spins me past the lodge.

  Far away, back by the lodge, a black insect runs at us. I watch it get bigger and come into focus. It’s a man in black tactical gear, wearing a gas mask. There’s some kind of automatic rifle bouncing on his back, but in his hands he’s carrying an axe, just like Ricky Walker. His legs are moving, eating up the grass between us.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Julia says, bending from the waist, pawing at Dani.

  He’s seen us, and I don’t know who he is but he picks up his pace, and I feel so tired but I swing my head to the treeline and it’s not so far away.

  You can, Adrienne says.

  I push myself to my feet and the world gives another lazy revolution, my head swimming in a sea of pain, and I pray that not everything around here has changed too much over the past ten years.

  You have to protect your sister, Mom says.

  I grab Dani’s belt and try not to listen to the popping sounds as I haul her up, then sling her around and her legs hit Julia in the chest, and I let her take some of Dani’s weight and I stagger forward.

  “Cabins!” I think I shout.

  My stomach heaves, my brain throbs, and I stumble fast for the treeline. Julia keeps up, both hands shoving her wheels down hard, her chair flying along beside me, my head exploding with every jolting step as the treeline rocks wildly in my vision, and the back of the first cabin emerges from the trunks and I correct our course.

  Something chatters behind me and the air flutters overhead. He’s stopped to shoot. I hope he’s stopped to shoot. Every foot we put between him and us is safety.

  Up ahead, Heather slouches out of the trees, carrying a green beer bottle, and Marilyn emerges beside her in some kind of summer dress and big straw hat situation, a giant handbag over one shoulder, and I say to Julia, “Get that cabin open!”

  “The cabin made of wood? The cabin full of windows?” she shouts back.

  I scream a sharp, angry sound and then she’s tearing across the grass in her chair, tires chewing it up like a lawn mower, trusting me at last, and I’m staggering under Dani’s full weight, and Marilyn’s there, ducking under Dani’s other arm, knocking off her straw hat, and something chatters behind us again, and Dani gets shoved forward and I feel the impact travel all the way down to the aching soles of my feet.

  “Haul, Lynnette!” Marilyn shouts in my ear, and we drag Dani between us, the world bouncing painfully, and then the dark trees close around us, and I see Julia make some kind of daredevil turn in her chair, the whole thing almost tipping over, spraying up big plumes of dirt, and she throws herself up the three steps into the cabin, hitting the door with her body, pushing it open, leaving her chair toppled on its side, one wheel spinning.

  Heather’s in next and then I find the strength to shove myself up the stairs and through the door, hauling Dani, and Marilyn gets it closed just as Death slams into it from the other side.

  “It’s made of fucking wood!” Julia screams from the floor.

  Marilyn makes an animal moan deep inside her throat as she takes in the six big windows marching down the wooden walls, three on each side, glowing with afternoon light. They see the wooden walls, the splintery floor, the planks on the door, but none of them spent the time here with Adrienne that I did.

  I drop Dani’s weight onto Marilyn and lunge at the bed on my right, stretching, reaching, praying. A booted foot hits the door, shaking it in its frame.

  My finger slams into a knothole in the wall at the head of the bed, wood scraping the skin off my knuckle, and I rip it out, and wear the wooden square like a ring as I punch the red button it hid with my other hand.

  The cabin tears itself in two. Marilyn shrieks. Heather drops her beer. Julia covers her ears as motors and gears and bolts blast machine screams into our ears. Six deadbolts shoot home in the door. Wooden boards drop from the top of the frame of each window and I run to them, dizzy, catching my hip on the edge of beds, grabbing the double handles they expose with both hands, yanking them down, slamming metal shutters over the windows.

  “Help me!” I scream.

  Marilyn gets two, I get four. At the end, I vomit thin gruel.

  “It’s still wood!” Julia says from the floor and we hear the machine gun rip and I recognize the sound; even without the L.A. street canyon making it echo, it’s the same kind of gun that turned my apartment into a shooting gallery last week.

  The cabin is dim now. The door vibrates in its frame, but no splintered holes appear, it doesn’t fall apart. Another burst. Glass shatters but the steel shutters only do a spastic shimmy as bullets tap-dance across their surface. They hold.

  “Panic cabins,” I pant. “Adrienne had them built so I’d feel safe. Steel shutters. The door and walls have steel sandwiched between the wood. The floor’s poured concrete underneath the planks.”

  “Cool,” Heather says, and walks to the door and screams, “Fuck you, gimp!”

  Whoever it is puts another half clip in the door. We hear the bullets stitch over steel.

  “Now we’re stuck,” Heather says. “Good plan, Lynne.”

  “We call for help,” I say. “Whose phone works?”

  “No one’s,” Heather says. “We’re essentially fucked.”

  “Dani’s bleeding too much,” Julia says, applying pressure to Dani’s back. There’s fresh wet blood all over her clothes, her arms, her face.

  “So we’re stuck in a cabin, there’s a killer outside with a machine gun, Dani’s going to die, and we have no way to call for help,” Heather says. “I guess I’ll have to save us all with my fucking superpowers.”

  She lies down on one of the cots and flips a blanket over herself, nuzzling into the pil
low.

  “You’re going to sleep?” Julia asks.

  “I’ve got a condition,” Heather snaps from behind closed eyes.

  “I’ll call 911,” Marilyn says, reaching into her straw handbag and pulling out a phone that looks slightly thicker and chunkier than average.

  “No reception,” Heather says.

  “Haven’t any of y’all heard of a satellite phone?” Marilyn asks.

  I can’t hear anything outside. I don’t know if the Monster is waiting by the door or if he’s gone to the lake. I don’t know where Stephanie is or what she’s doing. I don’t even know if this is Stephanie. Where did she get all this gear? But it doesn’t matter. I shove the counselor’s bed aside.

  “Quit making so much noise,” Heather says, eyes still closed.

  “Hello,” I hear Marilyn enunciate. “I’d like to report an active shooter situation.”

  I put two fingers in another knothole, this time in the floor, and lift a larger panel to reveal a bolted trapdoor.

  “What the hell?” Julia asks.

  “There are twenty of Adrienne’s people by the lake,” I say.

  “You can’t—” Julia begins, but I don’t listen, just release the hatch and drop through into the soft cool sand underneath the cabin. I stand up.

  “Bolt it behind me,” I say.

  Then I duck down and reconnoiter. The slit of light between the bottom of the cabin and the ground looks clear: no legs in black combat pants, no tactical boots. I scramble through the sand toward the front of the cabin. Behind me, I hear the trapdoor bolts slam into place. Good.

  I scramble out on my hands as my knees give out and stand, swaying. The trees and cabins rock dangerously and shadows rush in around the edges of my vision, but I see a brighter light in front of me through the trees and I know that way lies the lake. The shooter can’t be there yet. They’ll have to pass three more rows of cabins, the chill-out yurt, the nature observatory, and the sweat lodge.

  Behind me, the splintered façade of the cabin shows scorched galvanized steel peppered with charred pockmarks. I stumble-run to my left, heading parallel to the lake, and when I reach the end of the row of cabins, I put my hands around my mouth, pull a deep breath into my bruised lungs, and turn my body into a single shout.

  “Stephanie!” I roar, and I hear my voice echo up into the tree canopy high above. “I’m still alive. You want me. Come and get me.”

  I’m winded. Black spots flicker and strobe in my vision and then one of them swarms at me with a purpose, and I realize it’s dropping to one knee and I see fire flicker from its shoulder and bees scream past my face, tugging my hair in their wake.

  I turn and run.

  The Wellness Barn looms up ahead of me in the gloom, a big red wall of wood with peaks on either end facing me like raised eyebrows. It’s the biggest building at Red Lake after the Main Lodge, built back in the early nineties when Adrienne took over. It’s full of EMDR rooms, narrative medicine offices, art therapy studios. Lots of rooms, lots of doors, a labyrinth where I can get whoever this is lost, keep them angry, make them waste their time, stay focused on me, not the twenty soft targets down by the lake. I’ll lead them in one side, then up through the studios to the far end of the second floor where there’s a secret crawl space in the walls. It’s a game of hide-and-seek and by the time they give up the police will be here.

  The French doors come up and I put out my hands to stiff-arm them open, and as I crash through them in a shower of wood and glass I remember too late they don’t push, they pull, and then I’m tripping over their shattered bottom rail, sliding across the floor of the entrance atrium on the heels of my hands.

  I hurt. My head swims in a sea of pain. Everything smells like lemongrass and cinnamon, and the cool tinkling of a feng shui water feature in the corner would ease the pain in my skull if I hadn’t just gotten shot in the head. Suspended stairs float up one wall to the second floor and skylights let pink light stream in from high above. On the wall someone’s painted in flowing script:

  Sometimes all we have left is a wish and a hope.

  Then the air explodes behind me and bullets stitch across wishes and hopes. I force myself to my feet and there’s no time, they’re on my heels, the stairs are too exposed, and I lurch to the right and crash through the first studio door.

  I barely have the door closed before a body hits it high and hard. It almost comes off its hinges, but I manage to hold it shut, pressing it into the frame. There’s silence from the other side for a moment, then the blade of the axe slaps through the wood, almost splitting my left hand. I yank it back and snap the deadbolt into place as Death hacks the door into pieces. I hear myself sob.

  The door comes apart too fast. I think I might have made a serious miscalculation. The Wellness Barn is made of hopes and dreams, not galvanized steel and reinforced concrete.

  The door explodes out of its frame, pancaking to the ground, almost taking me with it, and I’m running, my head a throbbing bag of blood, then something sweeps my legs out from under me and in the wall of mirrors to my right I see a bloody scarecrow going ass over heels as I trip over a yoga ball.

  I turn, shove myself up, give it a kick, and the pink ball lifts off the floor, launching itself straight at the ruined door and into the shooter, knocking their knees out from under them. They fall down, letting go with their gun, and the mirrored wall explodes into silver triangles and shattered circles that rain to the floor.

  Every studio in the Wellness Barn has two doors, and I fly through the next one and stumble into a wall of world music, crash through a display of healing crystals, take a massage table in the hip. The spectral sounds of the universe swirl around me, harps glissando, chimes vibrate, crystal keys plink out the mysteries of life. I stumble across tatami mats while the aching music of oneness picks me up and tries to carry me away, and I make it out the next door as the shooter comes in, crunching crystals beneath their boots.

  The next studio is L-shaped and it’s music therapy and the shooter is too close for me to do anything but run. They fire and xylophones explode, cymbals roar in a frenzy as bullets shred a drum kit, and guitars explode with hollow pops, filling the air with raw spruce splinters.

  I turn the corner of the L and my feet shoot out from under me and my brain splits down the middle as I hit the floor hard with one shoulder and I scramble to my feet and keep moving, but I realize my plan has failed. I can’t lose them. They’re too close. My feet dig into the carpet and I launch myself at the door ahead because I don’t have a plan anymore, and then I have a plan.

  You have to protect your Sisters, Mom says as Gilly howls.

  I’m the decoy, I’m the distraction, I’m the sitting duck. I just need to keep them here while everyone else gets away. I just need to run out my string.

  Adrienne was right: there’s more to life than staying alive.

  The door flies open under my hands but not fast enough and I hit it with my forehead, and I’m in a long room full of pink and white streamers and helium balloons in Adrienne’s favorite colors and there are cupcakes and soft drinks and I’ve gone back in time, I’m in first grade and part of my brain knows it’s a reception for after Adrienne’s memorial but part of me is a child, screaming, running, I’m quick as a bunny, Mom.

  The shooter comes in behind me too fast, too close, and they squeeze off rounds that evaporate balloons and chop streamers to confetti and dig into the far wall painted with tribal designs and I’m every girl who’s ever run from a man with a weapon, every girl who ever ran for her life across spaces where she was supposed to be safe. I crash into the next studio and I’m Julia running through her dorm, I’m Heather running down her high school halls, I’m Marilyn running through the Texas afternoon, I’m Dani running through a hospital, I’m Adrienne running through this camp, this camp where there will always be a girl running and screaming and screaming, and
I’m Lynnette, running at last, and he can’t catch me, I’m as fast as all of us put together, I’m faster than Billy Walker, I’m faster than the Ghost, I’m faster than the entire Volker family, I’m the fastest girl in the world.

  I push myself, sprinting, legs pumping, head bouncing on the end of my neck, and this is it, this is my last race, and I slam the wooden door open and run into the humid chlorine cloud of the aquatherapy studio. I can trick the shooter into one of these pools in the concrete floor, force them down, use their heavy gear against them, but they’re already in the doorway and I don’t even have time to slam it in their face. They shove it open with their elbows, gun raised, and I fall forward, the steel tubes of a pool ladder chipping my pelvis, and one foot goes in warm water and I pull it out and slosh-limp-slosh across the room as fast as I can to the three doors in a row that are the only place left to run.

  The pain in my head is so bad I’m almost blind. The door on the far right is in front of me and I’ll get inside, I won’t stop; I’ll crash through the window on the opposite wall and make it outside, and hide in the woods. I crash inside and there is no window. There is no other door.

  It’s an individual hydrotherapy room, all sandstone tile and a big white tub and a toilet and a sink and a massage table and the door flies open behind me and knocks me forward and I’m tumbling, stumbling, feet flying, and I take the lip of the tub high in my thighs, and my feet go over my head and I’m sprawled across the bottom of the tub staring up at my mom as Gilly screams into the side of her neck.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and black blood pulses behind my lids because I don’t want to die. I open them and my head is full of broken glass shredding my soft brain, and Death stands over the tub and it is the biggest thing in the world.

  Death points its gun at me, a TEC-9, one of those video game guns that boys think are so cool. It’s a terrible gun, but not at this range. Death wears black tactical gear, covered in belts and straps and pouches and all those things little boys think will make them strong. The gas mask hides Its face. Tactical gloves cover Its hands. It’s wearing a black helmet and this is all overcompensating for how small Death feels inside. On instinct, I look at Its shoes.