Final Girls(103)

All I know is that I’m wet and bleeding and more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. When I whimper, Rodney says, You’ll be okay. We’ll both be okay.

He’s huddled beside me, one of the quilts from the wall thrown over his shoulders. There’s blood in his beard.

Where’s Betz? I whisper.

Rodney doesn’t answer.

Outside the room, everything is quiet. Even the crickets. Even the trees and the leaves. But then a sound emerges on the other side of the door.

Footsteps.

Slow, cautious ones that slosh through the water in the hall. Each one reminds me of my mother’s mop sliding across the kitchen floor.

Slick-swish.

Slick-swish.

They stop just on the other side of the door.

I look to Rodney, my eyes asking the question I dare not speak. Did you lock the door?

He nods. The doorknob rattles.

Then something slams against the door, bending it, wood bulging outward. Fear lifts me to my feet as the door is rocked by another slam. It bursts open and I see a knife, glinting darkly.

I scream.

I close my eyes.

The knife pushes into my gut. Filling me. A steel-sharp rape. I take a rattling breath through gritted teeth as the blade is pulled out and I slump to the floor.

Quincy, no!

It’s Rodney, pushing past me, throwing his body in front of mine. I don’t open my eyes. I can’t. The lights have gone out. All I can do is listen to the scuffle moving out of the room and into the hall. I hear Rodney grunting and cursing and shoving.

Then a single, strangled yelp.

Then nothing.

Later still.

I wake again in the wet room. My room.

The cabin is silent. So are the crickets and trees and leaves. Everything’s either dead or fled. Everything but me.

I sit up, the pain at my stomach surpassing the pain at my shoulder. Both still bleed. My dress is soaked by both blood and water. Mostly blood. It’s thicker.

Somehow, I get to my feet. Somehow, these weary legs take me through the open door. And somehow, I remain upright in the hall, even after I spy Betz dead in the other room, liquid from the knife-pierced waterbed spilling over her.

Rodney is further down the hall, also dead. I avoid looking at him when I step over his corpse.

It’s not real, I whisper. None of this is real.

I don’t see Him until I’m all the way into the great room, standing by the fireplace, shivering from cold and blood loss. He’s on all fours next to Amy, like a dog sniffing at a carcass, wondering if it’s worth consuming.

Strange sounds rise from the back of His throat. Tiny whimpers. The dog’s in pain.

Then He notices I’m there, head whipping around to face me. The knife is on the floor beside Him, black with fresh blood. He grabs it, lifts it over His head.

I was leaving, He says, breathing hard. I heard screams. I came back. And saw—

I don’t hear the rest because I’m too busy running. Terror and hurt and rage burn through me, mixing together, bubbling under my skin like a chemical reaction. I keep on running.

Out of the cabin.

Into the woods.

Screaming all the way.





CHAPTER 42


The memories arrive all at once. A zombie horde back from the dead, grasping at me with peeled-skin hands. I try to fight them off but can’t. I’m surrounded, overwhelmed and convulsing as memory after memory returns. All those sounds and images I had kept at bay for so long. They’re all back, lodged into my mind, unshakeable as they play over and over in an endless loop.

Amy and her dead doll eyes.

Craig being dragged from the SUV.

Betz and Rodney with their palpable horror and desperation. They saw more than I did. They saw it all.

Yet I saw something they couldn’t. I saw Him. Crawling around Amy, whimpering, grabbing the knife, raising it.

That image is the one that repeats itself the most often. There’s something off about it, something I can’t quite comprehend.

Breaking free of Tina’s grip, I rush down the hall, my numb legs propelled only by the insistent tug of memory. My breathing is shallow. My heart clangs in my chest.

I don’t stop until I’m in the great room again. Right back where we started. I stand exactly where I stood a decade ago, staring at the spot where I last saw Him. It’s almost as if He’s still there, frozen in place for a decade. I see the raised knife in His hands. I see His smudged glasses. Behind the lenses, His wide and uncomprehending eyes are full moons of fear.

Of me.

He was afraid of me.

He thought I was going to hurt him. That I’m the one who had killed the others.

I drop to my knees and gasp, inhaling dusty air, coughing.

“It wasn’t him,” I say between body-rattling coughs. “He didn’t do it.”

Tina swoops toward me, the knife lowered, now forgotten. She kneels in front of me and grips my arms tight. So tight it hurts.

“Are you sure?” Hope colors her words. A trembling, uncertain, pitiable hope. “Tell me you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

I now understand why we’re here. Why Tina sought out Lisa and me. She wanted me to remember everything, to prove His innocence, to declare once and for all that He didn’t do it.

It was all for him.

For Joe.