My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(79)

On the other hand, he did save Jade when she was bleeding out, and he did get her the custodian gig after freshman year, and he does run her dad in whenever he can—could the enemy of Jade’s enemy even be a slasher?

Jade doesn’t know, but what she does know is she can’t stop running. The slope’s got her now. All she can do is… is sling the machete as far out into the water as she can, dispose of that evidence, not give him a reason to take her in. Never mind that there’s nowhere to go after she does, nothing to do, no way to hide.

Halfway up the pier she catches on that Letha’s leaning over the rail, is watching this hopeless little effort.

Jade changes her grip on the machete so slightly, but it makes all the difference.

“Letha!” Jade yells up to her, and Letha cocks those bug-eyed shades up on her forehead, which is all the invitation Jade needs. She stops hard, her combat boots finding traction for once, and turns all that momentum into one desperate throw.

The machete goes twirling up into the night, Mars Baker turning around to track it, Hardy’s tires screeching, all of Jade’s hopes and prayers in that spinning blade, now.

It climbs, it climbs, and, just when it should be lodging in Letha’s chest, instead her hand stabs out as only a final girl’s can, and catches that machete by the handle as perfect as anything, so perfect that Jade hardly even feels it when Hardy tackles her.

SLASHER 101

So for a slightly late Christmas present, sir, please accept this gift of a last ingredient of the slasher, whose season will be upon us again soon in only 10 short months, by which time you’ll be having to get your slasher information from some other horror fan, since this girl will be graduated and GONE.

And you would never guess it in a 100 years unless maybe you were Clear Rivers from the Final Destinations, but this ingredient is tied to the incident in the cafeteria just before winter break. But in my defense though Manx wouldn’t believe it, I really was projectile puking from sudden onset sickness. This wasn’t my attempt to spit pea soup like Regan in The Exorcist. And also it wasn’t a prank, sir.

I think if anyone else had been sick then the cafeteria monitor would have made tracks to get that student to the nurse’s office instead of sending her to the principal’s office based on only past History of trying to make high school a fun or just less terrible experience. But that was last year as they say. Well, as everybody says except Billy Loomis, or in 1958, Pamela Voorhees.

You’ll also have to start getting excellent jokes from somewhere else, sir, sorry about that.

But, since we’re already talking puking, that’s what final girls are all better than me at not doing in the Third Reel Bodydump. There aren’t autopsies to prove this but I think final girls must have an extra valve in their esophagus that keeps them from upchuck city, sir. How else to explain them not losing their lunch when, about 2/3rd’s or even 3/4th’s through the slasher movie they’re in, suddenly they stumble upon the dead and necrogymnastic bodies of their friends and families? Think Laurie Strode in Halloween for example, finding so many of her friends surprisingly dead and suspiciously posed in that bedroom across the street, which would become the basic model to repeat not just for the Golden Age, but all the way to now, sir, which I won’t walk you all the way through since you always mark all of them out as extra like that swimming pool of bodies in House on Sorority Row, which I’m not even mentioning. This Third Reel Bodydump though is a most important part of the final girl’s development. Or instead, being faced with all this definite PROOF of what terror she’s up against is carving away of the rules of her once sane world. It pushes her over the edge, and when she climbs back up again, she’s different and more dangerous.

The question that’s never answered here though is why the slasher DOES this, which I’m sure you’re right now asking out loud at your desk. Well, WHY he does and HOW he learns all these knot tying and spring loading bodies from ceilings tricks, but if you start thinking like that then Michael Myers would never have learned to drive the car he steals to get back to Haddonfield, and nobody wants to have to think like that, sir. Especially not Yours Untruly.

But there is a reason the slasher does this kindness, sir, but since I’m nearly at my 2 page limit here I’ll save that for a My Bloody Valentine to you, I think. But don’t feel cheated either. Really, I’ve put my own beating heart into every one of these already.





DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE

In A Nightmare on Elm Street, after Rod’s been jammed up for Tina’s murder, he doesn’t know not to fall asleep. So, when he does, Freddy’s able to twist a sheet into a noose and hang him, make it look like a suicide, which is pretty much an admission of guilt as far as the cops and parents are concerned.

Nancy knows better.

So does Jade.

All night in her cell, each time her head started to nod forward into sleep, she’d jerk awake, check the bars and cinderblocks for a hidden face, watch the drain in the middle of the floor for bladetips reaching up. And it’s not just Freddy to watch for in a place like this. Wishmaster could step into the passage between the two cells, use his drug dealer voice to ask her if she’d like to walk through these solid bars to freedom, and if Jade was tired enough, she might not remember to word this wish with utmost care, and end up being pulled like taffy through the steel bars.