The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XV:

Dream Warriors

We get on the 10, heading for the 405. They’re less likely to shut down a freeway than surface streets, but there are still so many ways they can stop us: Amber Alerts, highway patrol, traffic cameras, GPS tracking, outreach to radio stations. Garrett’s Cadillac is the kind of car everyone remembers after it passes. I might as well be driving a neon sign.

Stephanie’s phone starts playing a pop song.

“It’s my mom,” she says, showing me the screen from the passenger-side floor.

The car takes a lot of brute force to keep it in its lane at this speed. I keep my eyes on the road.

“Tell her you’re okay,” I say. “Tell her not to call the police. Tell her I’m not kidnapping you, I’m keeping you safe.”

“They’re going to think you’re making me say that,” she says as the pop song keeps drilling into my teeth. “They’re going to think you have a gun.”

“I do,” I tell her, then reconsider. “Don’t tell them that.”

“Mom,” she says, pressing the phone to the side of her face. “I’m—”

They don’t let her speak until I’m getting on the 405 North.

“She can protect me,” she finally says, then pauses to listen. “Yes, I—I, yes, I know exactly who she is.” Pause. “No, she’s not crazy. I don’t care what her doctor says. Mom?” Pause. “Mom?” Pause. “Mom!”

I reach over and already we have a rapport because she puts her phone right in my hand. Even over the Cadillac’s roar I can hear Cheryl’s voice squawking in panic. I press it to the side of my face.

“Cheryl,” I say, then again louder. “Cheryl!”

“You’d better pull over right now and let my daughter out of that car!” she shouts.

“I will keep her safe for three days,” I say. “She will not get hurt.”

She’s not listening. Between the engine rumble, keeping us in our lane, and the speaker distorting, I only catch the occasional word. I hear “lunatic,” I hear “prison,” I hear “psycho.” That one hurts. Then quiet. The next voice cuts through all the static inside my head.

“Lynnette, it’s not too late,” Dr. Carol says. “Pull over and let the girl out of the car.”

“She’s staying with me until this is over,” I say. “I’m going to protect her.”

“From yourself?” she asks.

“We both know who I’m protecting her from,” I say.

“Right now, what I know is that you’re endangering a young girl’s life,” she says loudly, playing to Stephanie’s parents, and I realize the mistake I’ve made.

I’ve left her behind to be the truth-teller, the explainer who puts all the blame on her unbalanced patient. I’ve given her all the leverage.

“Put me on speaker,” I say.

“Lynnette, I’m not—”

“PUT ME ON SPEAKER OR THIS PHONE GOES DEAD!”

There’s thumping. Then I hear echoes.

“Ken, Cheryl? Are you there?” I ask.

“My baby . . .” I hear Cheryl sob before she becomes incoherent.

“I want you all to hear me clearly,” I shout into the phone. I want every word to be branded into their brains, directly from my lips, not filtered through Dr. Carol. “You know I’m armed. You put out a bulletin on a bright red Cadillac, you report Stephanie missing, you have this car pulled over by the police, you do anything to slow us down, and I’ll kill her.” I sense Stephanie go very still. “The minute a cop pulls this Caddy over, I’ll put a bullet through her brain. She has an iPhone. We get the Amber Alerts. I’d better not see one.”

I let it sink in for a second.

“Stephanie will call you every five hours so you know she’s still alive. She’ll turn her phone off in between, so don’t try to track it. That’s the deal. You shut up, sit tight, and you’ll hear from your daughter every five hours until three days are up and you see her again.”

Then I hang up and hold the phone out to Stephanie. She doesn’t take it.

“They’ll still call the police,” I tell her. “But they’ll argue about it for a couple of hours first. That’s all I need.”

She still doesn’t take her phone.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I say. “I’m trying to save your life. Text your mom and dad. Tell them you’ll call in five hours. That’ll buy us the time we need.”

She takes the phone and gets busy while I get us to Westside Auto Recycling. They’re in the middle of closing but I convince them to stay open. It takes a lot of money. Stephanie comes with me but she walks slow and drugged, like she’s being forced at gunpoint. Like I’m holding her hostage.

We buy four used Chevy wheels and tires and I pay cash, then she helps me roll/bounce them back out to the Caddy. Two fit in the trunk, two fit in the back seat. We head toward Burbank, the car reeking of vulcanized rubber.

I can tell Stephanie wants to ask questions when I pull into the Burbank parking garage and drive up to level three, but she keeps quiet. Good girl. She checks the time when I ask. It’s only been fifty minutes. I figure we have another forty left on our head start.

There’s an empty space next to my Chevy Lumina with its four flats. I pull in and shut off the engine. The Caddy ticks to itself while I check my sightlines. Stephanie cranes around in her seat, trying to see what I’m looking at. No one’s there. Whatever conspiracy this is, they’re stretched to the limit. They can’t spare the personnel to watch an escape route they thought they’d closed last week.

I get the jack out of the trunk and Stephanie watches while I jack up the Lumina and start loosening lugs.

“I don’t like being out here,” she says.

“The faster we change these tires the faster we’re on the road,” I tell her as I work. “Change the last two yourself. I have to make some calls.”

“I’ve never changed a tire before,” she says.

“You just saw me do two,” I say. “Learn by doing.”

She starts working on the next tire and I walk away and fish my burner out of my go bag and turn it on. None of these calls are going to be much fun.

“Leave me alone!” Marilyn screams so loud I have to hold the phone away from my ear.

I told her housekeeper I was Dr. Carol so she’d transfer my call to her bedroom. She’s not happy it’s me. There’s a thump and a scuffle and I worry that someone’s attacking her, and then her voice is ugly and close in my ear again.

“ ‘A Texas debutante who never got told “no” by her father,’ ” she reads. “ ‘When they rebooted her franchise, Marilyn Torres’s descent into alcoholism was heartbreaking.’ Alcoholism?!”

“No one was supposed to see that,” I explain. “Someone stole it and sent it out to discredit me.”

“It worked,” she says.

I’ve thought hard about how to frame the next part.

“I know you hate me but you need to be careful,” I say. “Don’t leave the house. Don’t let anyone visit. You’re safe there.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she says. “You, of all people, don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Don’t trust anyone,” I say. “Not even Dr. Carol.”

“Don’t talk to me about who to trust,” she says, and her speech is a little thicker, a little slurred. “I don’t trust you.”

“How’re Julia and Heather?” I ask.

“I’m hanging up,” Marilyn says. “I don’t want you calling me back or coming around. I don’t even want to look you in the eye because I think I’d spit.”

“You have to listen to me,” I say, and I explain why for a full minute before I realize she’s hung up.

When I call back, her housekeeper won’t put me through.

I call Dani knowing she won’t answer but needing to leave a message just in case.

“What?” she asks.

“You got out,” I say, genuinely surprised.

“Bail,” she says. “Pending trial. I’m under house arrest.”

“Stay home,” I tell her. “Lock down. Don’t let anyone on your property.”

There’s a long silence, and when she speaks her voice is measured and dead.

“They found my wife’s corpse in the public park where you dumped her,” she says.

“We wanted to take her home,” I explain. “But she didn’t know the way.”

“What do you want, Lynnette?” she asks.

“You can’t trust anyone,” I tell her. “Not Dr. Carol. Not the police. No one.”

“They told me you’d say that,” she says. “Good-bye.”

“Wait!” I shout. “Who told you?”

But she’s hung up. When I call back, a recorded voice tells me that this customer hasn’t set up her voicemail.

I try Julia, but get no answer. I try Heather but that AT&T customer’s number is no longer in service. My skin feels too tight. I need them to listen but they won’t even let me speak. When I get back to Stephanie she’s taking off the Caddy’s license plates and dropping them in the garbage. I’m glad to see her taking some initiative.

We pull out. After driving Garrett’s tank, the Lumina handles like a soda can. We get on the freeway. It’s a struggle to keep the speedometer under eighty miles an hour and the car drives rough with junkyard tires. I’m so focused on the road I’m genuinely surprised when I glance at Stephanie and see lights reflecting off her wet cheeks.

“I’m not actually going to shoot you,” I say.

“I know,” she says, dully.

“Then don’t cry,” I say. “Do you see me crying?”

“I don’t even know what’s going on,” she says, and her voice hitches.

So I tell her. It takes us until the other side of Death Valley before I’m finished. I look at the clock. It’s going on two in the morning. After I get to the part about kicking Garrett P. Cannon in the balls and stealing his car, I stop, and there’s quiet for a long time.

Then Stephanie begins to choke, and shake, and I think she’s crying again and all that was for nothing, and I feel my chest flash hot, and then I realize she’s laughing. She laughs hard, and it quickly edges over into hysteria. She gasps out high-pitched peals of laughter, dissolves into hiccups, pounds on the dashboard with her heels. I let it run its course.

She just saw her friends murdered. Now someone’s trying to kill her. She’s bound to dissociate. I remember when this happened to me. Laughing when I should be crying, crying when I should be laughing, and at some point I got my emotions so mixed up I couldn’t remember how I was supposed to be acting anymore.

“Is all that true?” she finally asks, breathless, trying to recover from her laughing jag.

“Why would I lie?” I say.

Before we go any further I need to ask a question of my own that’s been tickling at the base of my brain.

“Why were you so quick to come?” I ask. “You don’t know me.”

Silent seconds slide by.

“I know who you are,” she says, serious now. “I know that what’s happened to me happened to you. I trust you.”

“I’m not even a little bit convinced,” I say.

Beyond the spill of our headlights, the desert is dark. A wire fence unscrolls on our right.

“You remind me of Alana,” she says in the dark. “Like, exactly. She was my best friend at camp. If she got to grow up she’d be you. Whenever she said anything I knew she meant it. In my head, I’m pretending you’re her.”

I leave it there. Sometimes we have to follow our guts. That’s why we survive.

“Can you get online with your phone?” I ask, letting her know the subject’s closed.

“What do you need?” she asks.

“I need to meet someone, but they won’t come if they know it’s me.”

“What do I do?”

“Go to ManCrafting.com,” I say as a car passes, washing us with its headlights.

I hope the homepage isn’t too intense for her.

“Oh.” She sounds like she pricked her thumb on a needle, and then there’s silence from her side of the car. “What is this?”

“It’s a site run by the person I need to see,” I say. “I don’t want you looking around there; don’t go on any of the other pages. I just want you to go to the contact page.”

“This shit is creepy,” she says. “What is it?”

“It’s murderabilia,” I tell her. “There’s none of it on the contact page. Go there now.”

“It’s an email form,” she says.

“I want you to type what I tell you.”

We go back and forth for a while, and I have to spell out a lot of words (“No, P as in Paul,” I repeat for the five hundredth time) but by the time we reach Tonopah we have this:

URGENT HELLO. I MUST SELL A LARGE QUANTITY OF ITEMS FOUND IN A MINI-STORAGE LOCKER THAT I PURCHASED. MY BOYFRIEND SAYS THAT YOUR SITE MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THEM. THERE ARE SEVERAL PHOTOS AND SOME CLOTHES THAT BELONG TO THE KIND OF PEOPLE YOU ARE INTERESTED IN. PEACE OUT (that was Stephanie’s touch), MARCIA

Stephanie presses send and now it’s up to Chrissy.

In the rearview mirror, a cop noses out from around an eighteen-wheeler and draws up behind me.

“Before the guy came to camp,” Stephanie says out of nowhere, “I was worried about what I wore, and whether I was skinny enough, and what to do with my hair, and what I ate, and trying to decide if I really wanted to learn coding, and maybe I should play tennis again.”

The cop hovers behind me now, nose to my tail.

“Then all I cared about was staying alive,” she says. “Everything got so clear. I wasn’t thinking about the extra bullshit anymore.”

If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s listen to a final girl.

“Every time he hurt someone I knew it was like they were just water balloons to him,” she says. “He was popping them, one after the other. But when I had to hurt him, I couldn’t do it in time. He had his back to me in the loft and Alana was screaming for help and I just froze. I could have pushed him earlier but I wasn’t strong enough. It wasn’t until he came after me. I couldn’t save anyone except myself.”

“Sometimes that’s all you can do,” I say.

An exit is coming up. I put on my turn signal.

“I don’t want to die like everyone else,” she says.

I take the exit, and the cop car keeps going. I pull over on the side of the road and sit for a minute while black dots swim in my vision. Did he run my plates? Did he write them down? Is he going to remember a dark red Chevy Lumina when he gets back to the station house? Is he going to put the pieces together?

“He hit Alana in the head with a hammer,” Stephanie says. “He just kept hitting her and hitting her. Why did he do that?”

No one’s ever depended on me for anything before, except Fine. I imagine Marilyn, drunk in her master bedroom all alone, Heather sitting cross-legged on the floor, giving one of her monologues, box cutter hidden behind one leg. I imagine Dani, sitting at her kitchen table, crying, her guns locked up in their cabinet. I imagine Julia, unconscious in the hospital, her door unprotected. I think about Skye in his mother’s house, typing on his computer, oblivious to anyone coming up behind him. I’ve never had so many other people to worry about before. I have to be safe. I have to be smart. That cop could have pulled me over, and if he had, everything would have been finished.

“You’re not going to die,” I tell Stephanie, and I’m saying it to myself, too. “No one else is going to die. I’ll make sure of that.”