The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

  Of course.

  First, though, a fast series:

  → Brittney walking out the front of the video store, a VHS clamshell in her hand, her apron folded over her arm, that business card in her other hand.

  She stops just past the sidewalk, looks up the street, then the other way;

  → Izzy standing on a chair in her kitchen, her mother pinning a frilly dress up all around her, Izzy’s eyes completely somewhere else;

  → Ben in the basement by the red-hot furnace, beating another piece of metal into shape;

  → Dante’s car nosed up to some of those football players in the ditch, a stop sign bent under the front of their car, their car slid up it a bit, Dante not paying attention at all, his POV settled on the party house in the distance, across all that corn silk, all those swaying tassels rushing beneath us so that we’re

  → already at the house, upstairs in the master bedroom.

  It’s mostly dark, just outlines.

  And the sounds of two people finding each other in the king bed.

  “No, no, I like your hair like that,” Bogey says.

  “But my skirt—”

  “Keep it on.”

  “Well then. Study hard.”

  “I never knew.”

  “Are you—are you on the ballot?”

  “Is that like being in the box?”

  “Umm, close enough.”

  “You bring any, yeah, um, yeah . . . protection?”

  “This work?” and we hear the distinct, very naughty click of a gun’s hammer.

  Bogey chuckles, his mouth too occupied for words anymore, their fumbling shapes backlit for a moment by the huge window by the bed, and we

  → get a different angle on them.

  This one through a pair of eyeholes. Eyeholes that tilt over about twenty degrees, for a better angle.

  Those eyeholes look down to the long black sword in Billie Jean’s hand. The long black sword with the raw silver edge.

  When the motion on the bed stops for a moment, April maybe looking across the room, into these eyeholes,

  → those eyeholes step back and sideways, into the huge bathroom.

  The lights in here have been dimmed. In passing the wide mirror above the twin sinks, Billie Jean catches his reflection, turns to study it, trying to get that Hodder head tilt just right. Then he raises the sword slow by his side, like trying to show off his bicep, even though it’s buried in the blue sleeve of mechanic coveralls.

  Rounding the corner of this bathroom, then—it’s spacious enough to have corners—Billie Jean stops to study a girl passed out on the floor, by the toilet, cherry vomit sprayed over its side.

  That black sword reaches down, nudges her, and then there’s a sound in the shower.

  Billie Jean’s POV backs off, the sword springing up.

  Nothing, nothing.

  More hot and heavy breathing.

  Billie Jean steps over, getting the dim light behind him, and chocks his hand up on the sword so that, in shadow, it’s a knife.

  He Psychos it on the shower curtain, the violin tracing the movements in case we’re somehow not getting it, but then something in the master bedroom shatters in a blue flash.

  From the other side of the bed, like looking in through the window if the window wasn’t there, Bogey’s saying, “Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it”—the lamp—and we can see one of April’s hands squeezing onto one of the poles of this four poster, the whole thing rocking hard, nearly as loud as their almost-there almost-there breathing.

  Back in the monstrous bathroom, Billie Jean reaches up, tears down the halogen-white shower curtain, and it’s just as easy as it always is in the movies.

  It’s two guys in there, all over each other.

  They fall back, seeing Billie Jean, but he just stares at them, finally turning his head once to the left, for them to leave.

  Tiptoeing past the passed-out girl, they do, holding hands.

  Billie Jean’s POV looks down on this passed-out girl. He turns her over.

  Carefully so as not to wake her, he removes her cat-eye glasses, sets her head back on the tile, into her vomit, and, moving slowly, he removes her belt as well

  → just as the butt of a mag-lite knocks on the front door of Bogey’s house.

  It’s Dante.

  There’s a sock on the doorknob.

  Dante sneers, knocks harder.

  Back to the master bed, the ceiling above it shuddering with thunder—another couple launching off into space.

  Moments later, that splash, the screams of being alive, a chant of “Take it off! Take it off!”

  “Again,” April says in the darkness, her face glistening, her POV cueing in slowly to something in the open doorway to the bathroom.

  It’s a ghost. With glasses. A belt around its neck.

  She pushes back, into the headboard, and

  → Bogey sits up, turns that way and chuckles appreciation.

  “All right,” he says. “We’re terrified, aghhh,” and he stands on the bed, “come over here, though, I got something to show—”

  His POV interrupts, though: he’s stood tall enough that he’s in the fan’s space, those blades whipping around at top speed.

  One of them catches him perfectly on the bridge of the nose, launching him backwards, and we’re backed off enough that we can see it all in slow-motion:

  → his body, arcing back, leading with the head;

  → April, looking over to where he’s going now, which should be the window, but it is

  → Billie Jean, standing there with his sword jutting out from the hip.

  Bogey impales himself on that sword with a distinct crunch, its black tip erupting from his lower stomach in a splash of blood, Billie Jean stepping back in surprise, jerking his masked face over to April, who’s falling back, away from this, thunder resounding down from above,

  → her little pistol firing again and again

  → into Billie Jean’s chest.

  He paws at those craters of fabric opening up on the front of his jumpsuit, still hanging onto the sword somehow, and one of those shots misses, shatters through the glass

  → whips perfectly into Mandy Kane’s left eye as she flies through the air, cradled by Jerry.

  The force of the shot jerks her head back, spins Jerry in the air— they’re both naked except for her tights—and he drops her, has to push away from her in the air

  → just as Billie Jean is crashing back through that master bedroom window, falling in slow motion to the square shrubs below.

  Jerry comes down hard and awkward, his open mouth catching the lip of the far side of the pool for one last, especially deep kiss: it forces his chin down, his face up, curbing him Edward Norton style, and, because he’s naked,

  → underwater and from the side, too fast and bubbly for any real frontal nudity but we get the idea, his crotch slams into one of those sealed lights built into the side of the pool, and his last act is to penetrate that light’s glass cover.

  The jolt of electricity kicks his head back, but, since he’s still connected to the light, it slams his face forward again, into the edge, splitting his jaw all the way back to the ears, everybody screaming.

  Because of the short he’s creating, then,

  → all the lights go black.

  Deputy Dante splinters through the door, his mag-lite cocked over his service revolver like we’ve all seen a hundred times.

  Upstairs, he hears something break, but first he stops, listens, jerks the closet door open.

  It’s those two guys from the shower, holding each other.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he says, ushering them behind him, while

  → in the backyard, everybody’s vaulting the cinderblock fence, crashing into the corn field at top speed, absolutely blind,

  → one of their POVs racing down a row, corn grabbing at them everywhere, and it’s a football player, we can tell by the breathing

  → and by how
hard he tries to tackle the tractor tire he slams into.

  He falls back unconscious, and Lindsay kneels over him, looks behind her, drags him under the tractor, and all we see is her cell phone glowing with emergency.

  Back at the house, Dante steps into the backyard, shines his light out across the water.

  There’s Jerry, so dead.

  Crumpled on the tile just short of the pool is Mandy, dead as well, if not deader. Like a wet pretzel that fell from an airplane. A pretzel filled with jelly.

  “Shit,” Dante says, and steps

  → onto the second floor, still leading with his light.

  He cases the bedroom, finds only dolls, studies the next room which is a painting studio, mostly Corvettes in oil, then eases into the master bath,

  → his hand feeling for the passed-out girl’s pulse. It’s there.

  He takes the flashlight from beneath his chin, stands from her, steps through the second bathroom door, into the master bedroom.

  His light finds Bogey, the bed soaked black with his blood.

  “Shit,” Dante says again, and whips the light away, realizing the window’s crashed through.

  Reversed on him now, so we can see the room behind him, the fake ghost rises, stands, its eyeholes all misaligned. But still, this ghost levels something at him under the shower curtain. It starts at the waist, comes up to about mid-chest.

  Dante feels this with his Spidey sense, stops moving, angles his head back and dives just as a shot cuts across where he just was, the slug whipping out through the window,

  → shattering the glass of the tractor Lindsay’s huddled under.

  The glass rains down around her and she just glares at it, her phone still glowing at the side of her head.

  We get back to the bedroom just as that ghost whips through the doorway, the jamb exploding from two of Dante’s shots.

  Now’s where Wes does some scary shit, all through the house, cat and mouse, this ghost versus this cop, until, finally, the ghost stabs April’s hand out to the counter by the fridge, comes back with a serious ring of keys, fobs all over it.

  More important, a garage-door opener.

  April slithers to the sliding door that opens onto the backyard and pushes the garage-door opener, that grinding sound pulling Dante away, who was velociraptoring it up just above the counter she’s ducked under.

  He runs one way, she runs the other

  → ghosting through the backyard

  → getting over the fence like it’s nothing,

  → stripping the shower curtain off as she runs through the corn, trying to get her bra on at full-tilt,

  → flashing by the tractor, which is curiously not a shelter for anybody anymore

  → angling into another row when she sees cell phone glow ahead of her

  → ditching her pistol in the dirt, meaning she’s just about

  → home free, has been saved by her wits, has had sex and got away clean.

  Except for the blade slicing out of the row beside her now

  We only hear the sickening sound of it,

  → come back in her POV, looking up, dying, a shape stepping into her field of vision

  → but now we’re on her face, so calm, so serene.

  “Seriously?” she says, as if completely disgusted by who this is, then the blade we still haven’t seen goes deeper

  → sends us back to the master bedroom, Dante standing on the bedroom-side of that shattered window, surveying the damage.

  “Gonna need a bigger boat,” he finally says, and looks down for whatever fell from here.

  The ground below is that Haddonfield kind of empty. Just shattered glass, which we

  → tunnel down into and back out of, speeder-biking it out of control across the top of all this corn to a scarecrow way out there in the morning light, and that scarecrow, it’s April, most of her insides on the outside, the music shrieking about it.

  Packed in the cab of the tractor a few rows over from her, the sun just touching them, are ten or twelve of the kids from the party, the rest of them hugging themselves and each other on the plow, except for Lindsay.

  She’s sitting out on the hood, the dust on her face streaked with tears.

  She looks down to her phone

  → and its Izzy’s cracked display, Izzy’s fingers gripping it.

  She’s sleeping, the phone in her hand.

  It shakes and gives a sick beep, does it again, and finally she reaches her other hand up to it, hits the right button

  → pulls it under the covers, close to her face, her POV not making sense of anything at first.

  Slowly it comes into focus, though: “hey, lover.”

  She rolls over, clears the blankets from her face, sits up blinking. Looks to the phone again, menus up to the callback number, which she highlights, calls.

  “Who is this?” she says.

  “Just wanted to say thanks.”

  A girl.

  Lindsay?

  “Crystal?” Izzy guesses, instead.

  “Thanks for springing me, I mean.”

  “I probably don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Crystal laughs, switches ears it sounds like.

  “You mean you’re sleeping?”

  “No school.”

  “I mean after last night.”

  Izzy’s POV settles on the pink cupcake of a dress hanging on her closet door.

  “It was hell, yeah,” she says, rolling over, away from the sight of it.

  “Seen the video yet?” Crystal asks.

  “Video?”

  “I’ll send a link. It’s already on the news, too.”

  “Shit,” sitting up hard. “Something happened.”

  “Party of the year, horror girl. But hey, we’re even after this, okay?”

  “After what?”

  “That Walking Tall deputy?”

  “Series or the remake?”

  “Scratch that. That deputy from Heat of the Night? What was his name—Bubba?”

  “What are you saying, Crystal?”

  “Dante,”

  → which takes us to Crystal, face-on at first but we swing around behind her, to see what she’s seeing: Dante’s car at a fancy house.

  “He’s across the street from me right now.”

  “Across the . . . ” Izzy says, then gets it, and it’s bad enough we have to go all the way back to her face for her to say it: “Brittney.”

  And she’s flying out of bed,

  → screeching from the garage

  → fishtailing around a corner, her not-driving hand punching hard on the link Crystal’s just shot across.

  It opens a video of two naked forms hurtling off a roof in a slow pirouette, blood slinging away from them, and then, circled in the dim background and slowed down, Billie Jean crashing from a window, onto the ground.

  Izzy slides to a stop halfway up the curb of what must be Brittney’s house, just a street or two over.

  Crystal’s sitting on the hood of a car across the street, phone in hand, hair down and eyes sleepy, a wicked grin on her face—an Ariel Moore for the new century—the house behind her magnificent, opulent, decadent.

  “What is it?” Izzy yells to her. “Is she—did something happen to her?”

  Before Crystal can shrug either a no-answer or an I-don’t-care, it’s hard to tell with her and her bedroom eyes, Izzy’s running across the lawn

  → right into Dante’s chest.

  He keeps her from falling, and then she starts hitting him with everything she’s got.

  “You were supposed to keep them safe!” she screams. “You’re sup- posed to keep shit like this from happening! I thought we were on the same side!”

  Dante has no response, just takes her punches, finally pulls her into a hug, patting the back of her head.

  Izzy collapses, crying into his shirt.

  “Not her,” she’s saying, now. “Not her.”

  She pushes away from Dante.

  “What
happened?” she says, the anger back in her voice, her face. “Can I see her at least?”

  Dante rolls his John Deere-green toothpick, takes it out, inserts it back in butt-first.

  “She wasn’t at the party,” he says. “She never made it home from work last night, evidently.”

  “It was Billie Jean,” Crystal calls across, thrilled. “I saw him!”

  Izzy looks up to Dante about this and he nods.

  “I saw the video,” Izzy says, pushing him except he’s solid enough it only pushes her back. “It’s somebody in a Billie Jean mask.”

  Dante narrows his eyes down at her about this.

  “It wasn’t him,” Izzy says, then sees who must be Brittney’s yoga mom step out onto the lawn.

  Izzy runs over, hugs her, ends up just holding both her hands, looking into her eyes.

  “We hoped she was with you,” the mom says.

  “We split up,” Izzy says, letting the mom’s hands go. Looking through the front door of Brittney’s house,

  → stepping into Brittney’s bedroom, Dante hulking behind her.

  On the walls are collages of Brittney and Izzy from the last year. Izzy touches one of them with her fingertips as if seeing them for the first time.

  “You’re thinking,” Izzy says back to Dante, collecting her voice for this, “you’re thinking she’s a die-hard horror fan, didn’t want the action to stop, so she put a mask on last night, went to the party, made her own movie.”

  “If she were here I could clear her,” Dante says.

  “If she were here, I could punch her,” Izzy says, and walks across to the walk-in closet,