The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  The Last Final Girl

  by

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Lazy Fascist Press 2012

  Portland, OR

  PRAISE FOR ZOMBIE BAKE-OFF

  “Mixing doughnuts and the walking dead proves to be a deadly combination in Stephen Graham Jones’ latest novel, Zombie Bake-Off, a slim volume of experimental fiction that wastes no time or word count on superfluous detail or arbitrary introspective riff-raff. Jones constructs a bare-bones horror tale by combining clever, offbeat humor with a familiar, yet unpredictable plot.”

  —RUE MORGUE

  “Jones doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to describing the zombies’ relentless pursuit. He describes it with gusto and an obvious love for this bloody brand of literature.”

  —THE DENVER POST

  “The narrative gets rolling with a good dose of smart humor and the uncomfortable weirdness that comes from inserting larger-than-life characters full of bulging muscles into the relaxed, Martha Stewart-esque world of ladies sharing baking recipes. Then it moves to pure, adrenaline-pumping horror before jumping to what reads like the best intellectual tribute to campy zombie films. The best way to explain Jones’ prose to those not familiar with it is to ask them to imagine Chuck Palahniuk’s blind bastard child with Harry Crews writing a funny, gory novel while trying to channel Joe Lansdale’s subconscious.”

  —HORROR TALK

  “Let the zombie mayhem ensue! [...] Zombie Bake-Off proves that Stephen Graham Jones has talent and style to burn.”

  —CHIZINE

  “[...] if you’re a fan of good books, well written books, and fun books that just so happen to have cavorting corpses in them, then you’ll love Zombie Bake-Off.”

  —HORROR WORLD

  “This is what Twilight would be like if it had balls, what The Walking Dead would be without the boring, whiny characters.”

  —MOURNING GOATS REVIEWS

  A LAZY FASCIST ORIGINAL

  Lazy Fascist Press

  An Imprint of Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant Street

  Portland, Oregon 97211

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-051-3

  Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Graham Jones

  Cover art and design copyright © 2012 by Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All of the victims in this book are used fictitiously, and are not meant to portray any actual victims

  Printed in the USA.

  Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.

  —Heathers

  A ct 1

  A wide grimy blade cuts into a neck hard before we can look away, the blood welling up black around the meat, the sound wicked and intimate.

  Before we can even process the rest of the scene—it’s night time, it’s that cabin in the woods we all know, it’s a blonde girl standing there shrieking—we back off this kill, come around behind this guy’s body that’s already twitching, is only held up now by the blade, we back off so we can see through the new wedge carved out of his neck. So we can see the blonde girl framed by it, her bikini top spattered with blood and gore, her chin moving with her mouth, her mouth trying for a word but—

  Nothing.

  The screen doesn’t fade to black, it slams there, takes us with it, takes us straight to

  → a girl’s voice, shaky like this is a second try: “I guess it probably started when that Halloween supply truck crashed off the road.”

  Beat, beat.

  “I didn’t even know there were Halloween trucks, right?”

  Nervous laughter, the weepy kind, then close on this voicing-over girl’s delicate white fingers twining her short blonde hair, and we stay there for the next bit:

  “I guess that’s where he got the idea, though. The mask, anyway. And then, well, we were just out there for some free costumes, you know? It was just supposed to be a fun weekend, and I mean, they’re not biodegradable, would probably just kill fish—just kill the raccoons—” but her voice is already breaking up again, because of all this

  → violence in the woods, that night.

  We’re still behind the action. It’s exactly where we left it.

  The jock who had his neck cut into, his head rolls too far over then folds back, is upside down, looking straight at us, his eyes still alive.

  A boot chocks up on his thigh, pushes him down, away. Discarding him.

  Then that blade—it’s an actual longsword?—it points across at the girl, is Morpheus calling Neo in to spar, is Christopher Lambert being polite before the beheading, and we see what this girl’s seeing: some complete freak in an unlicensed Michael Jackson mask.

  The pale, grinning lips have had their redness scrubbed off but are locked into some latex grin, and the eyeholes are sagging, and there’s more eyeliner clumped on, but it’s him, right down to the red and gold letterman’s jacket.

  In case we don’t get it, though, that Thriller baseline digs in.

  It’s chase music.

  The girl’s turned, is running hard through the trees, her labored breathing the main sound now.

  This slasher watches her go, looks around at the carnage. The half-decapitated guy on the ground twitches and the slasher watches him die, is fascinated.

  Once the guy’s dead, the slasher steps past, after this girl, and we cut ahead, to

  → her crashing through the trees blind. Scratching her arms on the branches, crying, her bikini top trying to come off but she’s just managing to hold onto it.

  “Help!” she screams, “it’s—it’s Billie Jean!”

  Behind her, the slasher hears this. It stops him. He looks down to his jacket, all around, such that we can read his mind: Billie Jean?

  Still, this is what it is.

  He slices an innocent sapling out of his way, steps through with authority, and, now, because of what she’s calling him, there’s some legitimate anger, too. Like, before it was just business for him.

  Now it’s personal.

  Yards ahead of him, the girl bursts from the trees, almost goes falling off a sudden cliff.

  A hundred feet below is a river, moving so fast we can even see the whitewater at night, and hear it all around.

  “No no no no no,” the girl’s saying, casting around for a bridge, a hang-glider, a parachute, a zip line, a magic door, anything.

  Instead, behind her something huffs air, announcing itself.

  Something big.

  She steps back, so close to the edge that the sole of her left shoe is in open air, little flakes of shale crumbling off into space behind her.

  Is this it?

  Then she sees the eyes, and they’re too tall, too wide.

  She’s just shaking her head now, mumbling a prayer, making a deal, and it must be a good deal because what steps out isn’t the next monster in this nightmare, but a tall, regal horse, its skin jumping in the moonlight, steam coming from its nostrils.

  “Wildfire?” she says, at which point the screen sucks down to black again, taking us back to

  → her voice, coming from the blackness: “I hadn’t ridd
en since the—since my dad, you know. I’m the one who found him in the stall that day. But—but he’s the one who taught me to ride, right? But he’s also the one who taught me to moonwalk. Or what he thought was a moonwalk.”

  She smiles, remembering.

  We can hear it.

  “Come here, boy,” she says, holding her hand out. “It wasn’t your fault, I know, he shouldn’t have tried to ride you, he knew I was the only one who could—”

  Wildfire stamps, blows. Isn’t ready for any apologies yet, apparently. But there’s a reason: Billie Jean’s standing there, just past the trees. The girl backs perilously close to the edge again, even has to wave her arms, and’s about to go over when—

  The longsword thrusts out, cuts into her shoulder and out the back, holding her there, a drippy ribbon of blood draining down the blade to the cross guard, those drops plummeting down to the crashing river, the river pulling them instantly away.

  Back to the cliff, though.

  The girl’s trying to scream now, doesn’t have the breath anymore.

  “I thought I was dead,” she says in voiceover. “I thought that’s why Wildfire was there. That I was in heaven. But Billie Jean had followed me there too, so I knew it was . . . it was the other place.”

  Billie Jean dials the blade over as if in response to being called that again, opening the girl’s chest for more blood to pour out, the sharp edge pushing on the bikini strap now, like a blood-slick breast is exactly the thing we all want to see.

  Still, Billie Jean seems interested, is acutely aware he’s about to cut through that delicate string, is so concentrated on it in fact that he doesn’t feel the horse’s head, suddenly long and alien beside his own, those massive jaws practically resting on his shoulder.

  He shoulder-butts the horse but the horse just blows.

  Billie Jean hauls the girl around to the side, over ground instead of a hundred feet of nothing, and fixes his boot in her chest, slides her off his sword. Then he turns to face this interfering horse, maybe the only thing big enough to finally take him down once and for all.

  The horse rears, slashing with its hooves, and Billie Jean has no choice but to fall back.

  “Kill him, Wildfire!” the girl screams from her place on the ground, one hand trying to hold her shoulder together, her face tear-streaked, her bikini top even more tenuous now.

  When Wildfire finally comes down, Billie Jean steps forward, swinging his sword like a baseball bat into shoulder meat, stopping short at the bone.

  Shaken, he steps back, remembers his fencing.

  He feints at Wildfire’s shoulders but cuts across the face instead, a little slow-motion on that blade-through-eyeball number, the horse screaming in a way that hurts our heart.

  “Nooooo!” the girl screams as well, reaching, having to hold her bikini top on now.

  It’s too late, though.

  Billie Jean’s going to work, is slicing into Wildfire from wherever he wants, just flaying the horse open, getting the other eye as well.

  Finally he brings the sword all the way back to swing for the bleachers, go for the horse decap we’re all secretly waiting for now that it’s gone this far, but something’s got his blade.

  He turns.

  It’s the girl.

  She has her bikini top wrapped around the sword.

  “You won’t write this part, will you?” the voiceover says. “I wouldn’t ever take my top—I just really really wanted to live, I mean . . . ”

  The slasher, like he’s scared of her breasts, takes a stumbling step back.

  It leaves him just right at the edge of the cliff.

  “And then I remembered my Sunday school,” the voiceover says, and we’re right there with her that night, her on her knees, topless but somehow not showing any skin, and what she’s doing, it’s some David and Goliath action: using her bikini top as a sling, a grapefruit of a rock going around and around.

  “I guess I’m lucky I’m a C cup,” the voiceover says just as the girl releases the rock.

  It slams into Billie Jean’s lower face, just crushing it

  → but the voiceover interrupts: “That’s how it was supposed to go, I mean.”

  The do-over is in painfully slow-motion: that rock in her left cup, rolling out end over end over end.

  For all her screaming, though, and even though she nails the follow-through, still, this rock, it hurtles past Billie Jean’s face, and because he’s a slasher, he doesn’t even flinch.

  His mask doesn’t show it, but still, there’s a smile in there.

  At least until the bikini top reaches the end of its length, whips its string out like a dry tentacle, right into the eyehole of Billie Jean’s mask.

  Without meaning to, he flinches back, steps behind himself for a brace.

  There’s only open air.

  “But sometimes you get lucky,” the voiceover goes on, and Billie

  Jean reaches forward for balance, isn’t going to find it.

  He looks to the girl as if she’s betraying him here.

  “Moonwalk now, you fucker,” she says to him, and he doesn’t, can’t. He just falls and falls, and, in case it looks too much like a sequel set-up, he catches a couple of shattering ledges on the way down, and, on the chance that’s not enough, we go

  → under that dark water with him, bubbles and blood roiling everywhere.

  It’s that slowed-down moment when he’s touching the stony bottom of the river with his back, hard.

  An instant later, the sword comes down, right through him.

  Above, on the cliff, there’s a kind of musical sigh, dawn even starting to break.

  The girl’s just getting her bikini back on, favoring her injured shoulder.

  “Let’s go home,” she says to her now-blind horse, and lets him smell her hand then rubs her hand along his neck to his mane, grabs a handful of that to haul herself up. “I’ll be your eyes,” she says, about to fall over herself, and we pull off this sentimental image, a girl and her horse, go higher and higher, finally

  → come down upriver, on the river, where that Halloween supply truck crashed.

  It’s still leaking masks.

  “So he’s really and finally dead,” a male voice says, intruding, and we open up onto

  → a hospital room. The voiceover girl’s there, shaken up by her own story, dabbing at her eyes instead of rubbing them. Because of her make-up.

  A young, good-looking guy is putting his equipment away, just jabbing down one last note, an imposing Sheriff’s deputy parked across the room, his pythons crossed over his chest, his haircut pure jarhead, and proud of it.

  The girl’s shoulder is wrapped. Her hair’s been professionally done, it looks like.

  “It was terrible,” she says. “I never—I never—but it’s over, right?” “They only come back in the movies,” the guy says. “If I need to confirm anything, I can just . . . ” He does the phone-mime thing, obviously fishing for her number, and the Sheriff’s deputy looks away, disgusted.

  The girl nods, her eyes welling, her hands clenching the sheets, and, like we’re ducking into her nightmare,

  → shuffling through the eventual police photos. All the crime-scene stuff. The camera-shutter sounds advance each gruesome slide. This is documentation of what the investigators found in and around that cabin: the girl’s goodtime friends in watery sepiatone, six of them, each not just split down the middle or spiked onto a deer head or lying on the floor, their head turned around backwards, but some of them have been staged as well: pinioned in complicated rope-and-pulley systems that evidently dropped them down when somebody opened the door.

  There’s a head behind the medicine cabinet mirror, there’s a cheerleader with a pom-pom in place of her head, each shot suggesting what it must have been like for our final girl, crashing through, finding all her friends dead, all her hope gone.

  Finally getting to the partial decap job out front, we realize we’ve been seeing these in order, such that next is L
indsay and Wildfire, home at last, collapsed in front of a majestic barn—snap—then the ambulance carting her away, and then—snap—somebody in front of a grocery store, shielding their face with a magazine, and—snap— the double doors to the local high school, a wordless black banner draped across them, a sign closing school down until further notice, and—snap, snap, snap—finally a more recent photo of those front doors, stacked with roses and beer bottles, maybe a week’s worth, and . . .

  → snap. The glare of the flash dies down and we cue in to what just got memorialized: a space at the top of a gigantic trophy wall in the entryway of a high school.

  That space is sword-shaped. Longsword shaped.

  Underneath, “Danforth Titans” is littered around, so we know where this ‘sword’ came from.

  It’s that reporter guy taking the picture, too. His nametag just says Jamie, and his police escort is towering right there, that same bodybuilder deputy from the hospital.

  “So it’s been a week and a half,” Jamie says, looking through his camera, but, in

  → his POV, he’s no longer focusing on the trophy case, but the mirror backdrop every other panel has.

  There’s students in that mirror, behind him, watching.

  A studious girl in pigtails. Snap.

  A tall, hot girl in a plaid skirt that’s micro enough that it’s practically a belt. Snap, snap.

  A young Anthony Michael Hall, all the way in character— unfortunate haircut, pasty face, something about his posture confirming for us that, yes, he was born with his shirt tucked in.

  Jamie keeps his camera moving, settles on the clear reflection of this one particular girl, streaks of purple in her cropped hair, Buddy Holly glasses, hoop in her nose, stud in her eyebrow, combat boots, probably something written in ballpoint on the back of her knuckles.