My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(99)

A sound? Yeah, some sound, something jarring. A wrong sound. Her memory can categorize it as “sudden,” just can’t hear it again, quite.

She tunes in to the rest of the yacht as best she can, squinting to dial whatever it was in. Because she’s listening so hard, the footsteps suddenly pounding past the door are absolute thunder to her. She kicks back into the corner of the bed, eyes wide, mouth instantly dry, muscles tensed and getting tenser.

Moments later the doorknob rattles violently and someone slaps the door high and to the side like a cop.

Letha squirms on the futon, shaken awake.

“W-what?” she says, not able to completely open her eyes yet, her lids probably gummed together with airborne melatonin. She reaches up to rub them with the back of her wrist, which is exactly when the wall maybe six inches above her head disintegrates with a blast that can only be Mars Baker’s shotgun. One of the barrels, anyway.

Letha rolls away from the wall as if stung with shot. She spills onto the floor just as the next barrel unloads into where she was lying, leaving wisps of foam floating in the air. In the silence after the blast, a single flame flickers at the edge of the crater in the futon, and, through the hole in the wall, there’s a scream, a gurgle, and then that gurgle’s cut sharply off.

“Macy? ” Letha says about that gurgle.

Jade’s on the floor with her already, pulling her close, her breath fast and shallow, but when Letha sees her she pushes away, trying to escape.

“It’s me, it’s me!” Jade yells, running her hand over her scalp like that somehow proves she’s the same, just, with less hair.

“Jade?” Letha says, slowly getting it.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Jade hisses, fully aware her voice can now be heard through that hole in the wall.

“But—”

Letha’s cut off by a hammering on her door. Not a slap anymore but the side of a fist, pounding.

“Where’s the machete I gave you?” Jade asks, casting around. “Your dad didn’t really put it in his safe, did he?”

Letha looks over to her like Jade’s talking in possum, and she wants to watch her lips, see how an animal can be making human words like this.

Jade shakes Letha, says, “I know you’re not ready, but you have to be. It’s happening.”

“But… this is—”

“I know, I know,” Jade says. “I said tomorrow night, the party, but I was wrong, I don’t know, I’m sorry, okay?”

“The massacre?”

“It’s happening right now.”

“But who—”

“You don’t want to know,” Jade says, standing, pulling Letha up alongside her. “Now where’s that machete?”

Letha pans around the room, her eyes wide and dumb like a cow’s— I should have prepared her better, Jade’s chiding herself—then reaches over behind the dresser, unsheathes the machete from its excellent hiding place. She offers it to Jade but Jade steps away, hands high.

“This is all you,” she says. “I take that, I die fast. That’s Indy’s whip, Thor’s hammer, the Dude’s housecoat. One user only.”

She guides it back closer to Letha.

“I don’t know how,” Letha says, trying to figure where her fingers go, what the balance is, which is the sharp side. After snatching it from the air like a ninja chopsticking a fly in flight, yeah.

“You will,” Jade tells her, and steps forward, hates that she has to but does it anyway: pushes the side of her head to the door, to listen. What she deserves for that, she knows, and would even cheer for, is Ghostface’s knife plunging into the side of her skull, but the only other option is stepping out there without knowing it’s empty.

“Clear,” she says after maybe three breaths of silence, and snaps for Letha to come close, to be ready.

“Where are we going?” Letha asks.

“Off this boat,” Jade hisses back, and hauls the door in all at once.

Ladybird Samuels is lying there eyes open, mouth doubly-open—no chin, no jaw, maybe no throat either, like the skin just kept holding on and holding on. Her bloody handprints are on the door right by Jade’s face.

Letha screams until Jade turns around, covers Letha’s mouth with her hand, bringing her eyes right up to Letha’s, warning her to stop. After nodding to Letha and getting a nod back, she finally—slowly—removes her hand.

Letha draws in like to scream again, to tell the whole boat where they are, but instead she throws up her half a potato skin.

Jade doesn’t hold her hair or pat her back. She steps into the hall.

“Which way is out?” she asks.

When Letha’s just crying, probably replaying Ladybird Samuels in her head, Jade says it again, harsher: “Where to, Letha?”

Letha weakly points back the way they came, past the bathroom. Jade takes her by the wrist, then the hand, and leads her out, both of them stepping carefully over Ladybird Samuels.

“Who’s doing this?” Letha says, unable to look away, or be helpful at all.

“You’ll see,” Jade tells her, and they make it all the way to the stairs before the next body confronts them: Ross Pangborne.

He’s been ripped apart somehow, his torso up at the switchback, his legs playing catchup, though they never will.