My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(86)

She rests her chin on her crossed hands, situates her frontside against the dirt and grass, and tells herself stories about the houses, how they’re not mansions but cabins, how this is Packanack Lodge from Friday the 13th Part 2, just down from the original’s “Camp Blood,” ha.

She’s Jason, looking through the one eyehole of her pillowcase. Watching the skinny-dipping, seeing seductive shapes through the gauzy curtains. Half the counselors piling into a car and a truck to caravan down to the local honky-tonk, the other half either already dead or in the process-of.

Over here is where all the bodies are buried, right? Mr.

Holmes was always telling them. Before there was a lake dividing one side of the valley from the other, people who caught a bullet to the gut or a pickaxe to the head would usually end up over here, stuffed into a seam, a crevice, a crack. Which would have worked fine if not for the buzzards.

According to Mr. Holmes, when Henderson-Golding was booming, that was the sheriff’s main job: watch for buzzards.

Jade rolls over, cases the sky, the sun’s position, decides she must have either slept or got Fire in the Sky’d.

Probably noon already, or one, shit.

She’s like the police officer assigned to protect the final girl’s house: dozing off on the job. Then, Clack!

“What is The Nail Gun Massacre, Alex,” she mumbles.

It’s where she knows that clack from.

Jade sits up and scooches forward, looking at Terra Nova all over again, this time with eyes pre-shaped for “nailgun.” What she sees instead pretty much stops her heart, and answers every one of her wishes.

It’s a tall male figure, moving like the Prowler from one nearly-complete house to the next one, never mind the daylight, or that it’s not 1981. At first Jade thinks he’s wearing a military helmet like the actual Prowler, or a motorcycle helmet covered in electric tape, like Bubba in Nail Gun, but it’s just… a black golf cap turned around backwards? Strapped down over that cap is a full-face gas mask with two stubby, close-to-the-face filters coming down, angled away from each other, giving his head a kind of oblong, giant-mouse shape.

“No,” Jade says, even shaking her head like to prove it.

Because this can’t be real and actual, can it? Can it?

He’s carrying that heavy nailgun as easily as a pistol, too.

This is really happening. It’s really been happening.

“Makes sense, makes sense,” Jade tells herself about the nailgun, her voice jittery. In—in High Tension, the chase runs through some road construction, so they come out with a huge and just massively dangerous concrete saw, which spins so much faster than any chainsaw. It stands to reason that this Prowler down there would pick up whatever’s handy. Well, handy and deadly. But it’s all deadly in the wrong hands, with the right intent.

Jade should be happy, too, she knows. This is proof, this is what she’s always wanted. She fumbles her phone up to take a snapshot for Hardy, but by the time she gets her phone up from her coveralls’ complicated pocket, Terra Nova’s still again, exactly like this Prowler had been a figment of her overactive, blood-soaked wishful thinking.

If she’d been making him up, though, then, first, he’d have had motorcycle boots on, most likely—those ratchet-buckles are so cool, so metal—and, second, there’d be a reason for the gas mask past just its essential scariness. In My Bloody Valentine, the gas mask is because this is a mining operation, and in the actual Prowler, the sheriff with the covered face is supposed to be a soldier who had probably had to deal with mustard gas on the battlefield or something.

Jade takes the best scent reading she can, identifies no foreign smells—no mustard gas, no horseradish—and finds herself both wanting this slasher to step out again, prove he was real, and also wanting him to have been all in her head.

She’s caught between those for, by her best guess… two hours? Has any slasher ever moved this slow? Granted, movies probably compress events that would take a lot longer, but two hours is long enough for her to spin all kinds of excuses for whoever that was down there to have been wearing a gas mask, carrying that nailgun, and wearing that black hoodie in July. Which isn’t the way to be ready, to be vigilant.

Then, finally: Clack!

Adrenaline floods all through her again, sharpening her senses. By the time it’s washing out of her system, she’s back to trying to make it all make sense. If this slasher were trying to nail someone running across the room, there’d be a barrage of clacks! This guy’s more deliberate, though, isn’t he? That game where two people hide on opposite sides of the same wall, each waiting for the other to burst out?

Evidently he’s the more patient one.

Except… except this is too early, isn’t it? This is supposed to be tomorrow night. Jade wants to stand, wave her arms for everybody to slow down, that they’re blowing their wad ahead of time, aren’t going to have any left when it counts.

She doesn’t know how far a nail from a nailgun can tumble through the air, though.

She looks up to the flurry of motion to her distant right—the yacht.

It’s Tiara Mondragon. She’s in her black bikini, her sunhat and shades on, a book tucked under her arm.

Completely unaware.

She sashays down to the—to whatever the tower part of a yacht is called, kind of two-thirds of the way back. She disappears into it. Moments later she emerges on a higher, closer-to-the-sun deck, drink in hand.