My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(109)

“Hardy’ll be there,” Jade adds.

“I know where the keys are,” Letha says, tossing her chin to the yacht. “We can—”

“Going back on that boat is a death sentence. He— whoever it is, he’s probably there waiting. He knows we need a phone.

So they’re probably all already overboard.”

Letha looks down to what she’s wearing: her ruined camisole and pajama bottoms. No shoes. Aside from covering her in the most minimal way, the only real purpose her sleep clothes are serving anymore is to keep the gore and blood close to her, which might be good if she were going up against Van Damme in an alien suit, but Theo Mondragon doesn’t have heat vision, just slasher goggles.

Still, instead of already having sneaked over to the yacht for a clothes-change, here she is, right?

“Thanks for digging me out,” Jade tells her. “You didn’t have to, I know. I’m not worth it.”

“Please shut up.”

“You could have split, really.”

“Jade, you—it’s not your fault, what your father… and why you’re… you.”

“Yeah, I know, wow, it’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. You’re you, and that’s great.”

“We should get going,” Jade says, high-stepping out of this moment.

She swings her hurt leg ahead of her and brushes past Letha.

“And we’ve all got daddy issues, right?” she can’t help but mumble, wincing the instant it crosses her lips.

“My dad isn’t the one—”

“Then why didn’t he dig you out?” Jade asks, playing with her lighter now, wishing so hard for a smoke.

“He didn’t know where we were,” Letha says, stepping out now as well, her voice rising a bit, in defense.

“If he felt that collapse, or heard it, or smelled it, whatever,”

Jade says, finally getting a strong flame going to occupy her eyes, give her somewhere else to look, “then… then either he thinks we’re dead, which is score one for the good guys, or he went for help.”

“Instead of digging us out?”

“How long did it take you?”

Letha narrows her eyes across the lake, considering this.

“He’d have had to go all the way around,” she says, liking this.

“And his leg’s like mine now,” Jade adds with a shrug.

“He used to play football,” Letha says. “He says he played one game with his kneecap all the way behind his knee.”

“There you have it,” Jade says, moving her lighter back and forth, daring the flame to flicker out. “But”—and she does look up for this—“why isn’t anybody here yet?”

Letha flicks her eyes away.

“Whatever you believe or want to believe or won’t believe,”

Jade tells her. “We have to get across the lake. We can’t stay here. Here’s done.”

“Terra Nova.”

“Terra Nova’s done, yeah.”

Letha steps past Jade for the boat garages.

Jade shrugs to herself, and, being sure Letha’s clear enough, tosses her lit lighter into the dead elk, trusting the pent-up methane to catch that lick of flame, whoosh up into a bulbous explosion, one Jade can walk away from in slow dramatic motion.

Instead her lighter just adheres to a low wall of meat and hair, is upright enough that it’s still flickering a weak flame.

“Thanks,” Jade says to it, and turns on her heel, following Letha through the trees, Letha’s long legs eating up the ground, Jade’s limp still there so Letha has to stop, wait for Jade to catch up, then offer her a shoulder.

“You don’t have to,” Jade says, latching on.

“I’m not leaving you,” Letha says. “I know you think this is some big horror movie we’re in, and that you’re going to get to choose your death, but—this is real life. A tragedy, but it’s real, and it doesn’t have to follow any rules.”

Jade doesn’t argue, tells herself to let the unfolding events prove her case.

Now that she’s moving, though—

“I have to pee,” she says, stopping them.

Letha extracts herself, steps away, turns politely around but that’s not quite enough for Jade. She limps to a tree, pushes off it to the next, and the next, struggles twenty or thirty feet between her and Letha before feeling through the gore for the snaps and gummed-up zipper of her blood-matted coveralls.

When she’s shouldering back into them is when she hears the groan. She radars in on it, the rest of the world falling away.

A low, long shape maybe fifteen feet back in the trees.

Theo Mondragon.

Clamped around his leg—same one, different one?—is another bear trap. One he didn’t have the strength to push apart, apparently. Is he passed out from blood loss, from fatigue, from grief, what? Where’s his kneecap now?

“Doesn’t matter,” Jade says, actually out loud, just, very quiet. “You’ll get out just in time, won’t you?”

Unless it’s not him, Letha says in Jade’s head.

But still, right? Jade knows for sure and certain that he put nails in Shooting Glasses and Cody and Mismatched Gloves.