The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XIX:

Final Girl’s Revenge

What have you found, Keith?” Chrissy calls when we reach her living room. “What do you have there?”

Keith swings open the storm door with his hip and lugs in a bag of bones. He’s holding her underneath her arms and she’s limp. His eyes are red and raw. My heart sinks because Steph must have sprayed him and it didn’t do shit.

“She’s dead,” I say.

“Assuming makes an ass out of you and me,” Chrissy says, putting a hand on my arm. “Keith will let us know if he decides to go in that direction.”

The storm door swings shut on the back of Stephanie’s calves and makes a scraping sound as Keith yanks her inside, shucking off one of her fake Chuck Taylors. He half throws, half dumps her onto a sagging armchair in the corner that’s covered in dirty clothes.

“You found someone nosing around, didn’t you?” Chrissy asks, like she’s talking to her dog.

He casually tosses the Mace on top of the layer of McDonald’s bags on the coffee table.

“Girl,” Keith mumbles.

I think he has an erection. He presses the back of his forearm against the crotch of his jeans.

“Stephanie,” I say, starting to walk toward her.

Her face is pale and blood drools from a black dent in her forehead. Leaves stick to her hoodie. Her eyes are open but I’m not sure she’s seeing me.

“Don’t,” Chrissy says, grabbing my belt and pulling me backward. “Crowding Keith is a bad idea.”

She looks me dead in the eyes and holds my gaze until I nod, and then we both consider Keith. He’s squatting on his heels, elbows resting on his knees, hands on Stephanie’s leg, looking like a giant squirrel staring up into her face.

“What are we going to do with her, Keith?” Chrissy asks in a kindergarten teacher’s voice.

“It’s Stephanie,” I say. Repeating a potential victim’s name creates empathy. I don’t think it’ll have any effect on Keith, but if it can even get him to hesitate for a second it might make all the difference. “From Red Lake.”

“We know who she is,” Chrissy says.

Chrissy stares down at Keith, and Keith stares up at Stephanie, and Stephanie’s eyes roll around the room until they stop on me.

“Lynnette?” she says, thick-tongued. “I came.”

I need to keep her thinking I can protect her. Right up until the end. Even if I can’t. She won’t die scared.

“We should go,” I tell Chrissy, remembering her in the museum: Sometimes he needs to be let off his leash. “We should go and not bother you anymore.”

“You’re so cute,” Chrissy giggles.

Keith hunches his neck down and practically wriggles with pleasure. The room is charged and at any second someone is going to commit to the next step and none of us will be able to go back.

“I want to go now,” Steph says. “Okay? Can we please go?”

Gillian got that same hitch in her voice on Christmas Eve. I heard it when she walked into the living room, not understanding what was going on even when Ricky Walker turned around and saw her.

“Lynnette,” she’d said as he’d started toward her. “I want to go back to bed now. I won’t tell anyone I saw Santa. Tell him that I won’t tell. Please, Lynnette?”

And I hung there, pretending to be dead because I was so scared that when Ricky ran out of victims he would take a closer look at me and I didn’t want to die.

“Lynnette?” Gillian said right before he picked her up and she started screaming, and it’s Stephanie saying it now and we’re in Chrissy’s junky living room and I need to get out of here.

Keith stares hard at Chrissy.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Want,” Keith demands.

And Chrissy looks at me, then at Stephanie, then at me again, performing some kind of mental arithmetic, adding up the pros and cons, and then she smiles. It’s a smile that I’m growing to associate with nothing good.

“An artist needs to practice or his tools lose their edge,” she says. “I don’t want Keith getting dull.”

“My head hurts,” Stephanie says.

“You don’t understand,” I say, and inspiration makes me brave. “She’s a final girl. Keith can’t do anything to her; he has to save himself for you. She has her own monster.”

Chrissy shakes her head and smiles.

“This isn’t a religion,” she says. “It’s not like Keith’s going to Hell if he goes off his diet.” She turns to Keith and gets his attention. “You need to make her last, lover.”

Keith nods and holds up two fingers.

“Two days,” he says.

“It’s a good thing all the neighbors moved away,” Chrissy says. “She looks like a screamer.”

“You can’t do this,” I say. “She’s a final girl.”

“You need to get going, Lynnette,” Chrissy says. “Once Keith starts it’s hard for him to stop. I’m not in any danger, but you’ve got a destiny to fulfill.”

I’m playing all my cards and they’re not making any difference.

“With her,” I say. “She needs to go with me. I promise you, Chrissy, just let her go with me. She’s a final girl.”

Keith stands and begins to search through the piles of garbage on the floor, then puts his chest on the carpet, his butt in the air, and he reaches underneath the couch.

Chrissy goes and sits in Stephanie’s lap and plays with her bangs. Steph jerks her head away, and Chrissy grabs her chin with her fingers and holds it in place.

“This one’s no final girl,” she says. “She’s a little monster. Keith loves to work with this kind of material.”

Keith stands up from the couch, a dented and stained aluminum baseball bat in one hand.

“Lynnette?” Stephanie says because now she sees the bat and she sees me edging toward the front door, and her eyes are big and wet over Chrissy’s shoulder.

“ ‘He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love,’ ” Chrissy recites, holding Stephanie’s chin and looking into her eyes. “ ‘Skin the rabbit,’ he says! ‘Off come all my clothes.’ ”

Keith takes a practice swing with his baseball bat. It makes a sound that goes schwoop.

Chrissy turns around and raises her eyebrows at me.

“You’d better run,” she says.

Keith takes another swing with his bat. This time, it scoops a dent out of the wall.

I run.

I close the distance to the door in two long strides, and out of the corner of my eye I see Keith notice my movement and take a step toward me, and I crash through the screen door, not even opening it first, and I hear the clear plastic panel in the center split, and the back of it bang off the side of their crappy house. It almost drowns out Stephanie’s screams.

“Lynne!” she shrieks, over and over again.

Even out here, I can hear Chrissy laughing.

I’m down the steps in a second and my feet slip on the gravel driveway, but I pump my arms and drive my feet down into the dirt and I run as fast as I can, putting distance between myself and the house and Stephanie’s screams. I only have a few seconds.

I tried to take Keith down before and I might as well have punched a tree. I race down the dark driveway, shadows on either side, panting and crunching gravel, forcing myself to run faster. I need to be faster.

You need to protect your sister.

I reach the Chevy and slide inside. The ignition turns and the engine hums to life and I’m wrenching the wheel to the left and plowing down the dirt driveway toward Chrissy’s house. I keep pressing down on the accelerator, passing twenty-five, passing thirty, passing thirty-five. The car’s tires barely cling to the dirt. I’m hitting potholes and ruts so hard the top of my head slams into the ceiling. The tires leave the road and come down hard again and again. If they land wrong I’ll slide into a tree and die. Passing forty, passing forty-five. I switch on my headlights, and Chrissy’s white house springs into view dead ahead. The house is made of sheet metal and vinyl siding, probably cost twenty-four thousand dollars in the sixties when her parents bought it, and as structurally sound as a wet cardboard box.

I left Julia behind. I left Fine behind. I won’t leave Steph.

The world jogs crazily up and down in my windshield. I’m clinging to the steering wheel. Passing fifty, passing fifty-five. The sound of the tires goes quiet when I leave the gravel driveway.

I’m going sixty miles an hour when I slam into the front of Chrissy’s house.

The wall fills my headlights, then it fills my windshield, then it’s exploding and the house is collapsing onto the car and the world sounds like it’s splitting in half. The airbags explode into my face and my sinuses are full of white powder and I feel like someone just broke my nose.

It takes me a minute to notice that the car isn’t moving anymore. The only sound is the engine revving while I dumbly mash down on the accelerator. I’m trapped in a world of rubble. I put it in reverse and the tires spin, then catch, then there’s drywall sliding off the roof and down the windshield and falling off the hood as the Lumina drags itself backward out of the house. There are sick, wheezing sounds coming from beneath the hood and one of the headlights is dead. I see the damage. The entire side of the house is caved in, and shattered sheets of drywall avalanche out of the entry wound. As I watch, the roof slowly sags sideways, and the kitchen ceiling collapses in an explosion of white dust.

I leave the car running and get out but it instantly stalls. It’s shocking how quiet the night is. The only thing I can hear are crickets. I pick my way through the rubble the house vomited across the dirt. I tried to aim the car at the front door, away from the corner where Stephanie sat, but by the time I made contact I was barely in control. I grab the edge of the hole I tore with the Lumina and haul myself inside. Big slabs of drywall slide beneath my feet. Thick white dust hangs in the air. A wave of wreckage smashed into the opposite wall, but to my left, the room looks pristine. Stephanie sits in her chair, frozen in shock, hands wrapped around her head, knees pulled up to her chest. The car kicked up the TV and it took Chrissy square in the chest, smashing her backward through the Sheetrock. Her jeans-clad legs stick out from underneath. I don’t see Keith anywhere.

I turn away. I don’t want to look at Chrissy’s body. I make a blind spot in my mind and swear not to look in that corner of the room again.

“Steph, I’m here,” I say, wrenching my hips out of joint as I pick my way over the rubble to her. “Are you okay?”

“You drove the car into the house,” she says, numb.

“I came back,” I say. “I came back.”

I help her up out of the chair and jump when something grabs my ankle. I’m so keyed up I scream even before I look down and see Keith’s bloody white arm sticking out from under a pile of drywall, hand clamped around my leg.

“No, no, no, no,” Steph says, seeing it and backpedaling out of my arms, shaking her head.

“Steph,” I say. “Don’t panic.”

The hand bears down, pressing my bones together, and I bring my other foot up and stomp on his fingers, hard. I hurt myself more than I hurt Keith. The pile of rubble shifts as Keith starts to haul himself out. I kneel, pick up a long wooden splinter, and punch holes in his hand again and again, the splinter getting slick with his blood. His hand finally spasms open and I yank my foot away.

The rubble erupts as Keith stands, silent and unstoppable. His spine has been twisted out of shape and he’s bending over too far to one side. I’m frozen, just a few feet away, Steph in my arms. Keith takes a step forward and his legs give out. He goes down on his hands and knees, then turns his red-rimmed puppy-dog eyes to me.

“Hurts,” he says.

I hear vertebrae popping as he stands back up and the spell is broken. Limping, hobbling, slipping, falling, I drag Stephanie through the hole and out of the house. I get her to the car and shove her into the passenger seat. Her eyes fix on something over my shoulder and I turn. Behind us, Keith has dragged himself out of the shattered side of the house, hunched over but moving, his baseball bat held in one hand like a cane. I slam the door and run to the driver’s side, going around the back of the car, not wanting to pass too close to Keith.

I get in and lock the doors. Keith keeps coming. I turn the key and nothing happens. Keith takes another lurching step. I turn the key again and the starter grinds but the engine doesn’t catch. Final girls learned a long time ago not to rely on things other people take for granted. We all know that elevators and telephones never work when we need them. And cars. Especially cars.

Keith lets go of the side of the house and takes three fast steps toward the headlight, and then he sees me through the windshield and focuses, and comes for me.

I turn the key again. The starter grinds and I sob as the spark catches and it roars to life. For a second, I contemplate stomping on the accelerator and crushing Keith between the front bumper and the house so that black blood fountains out of his mouth, and then I think of Chrissy’s legs sticking out from beneath the television set and stomach acid scorches my throat.

I throw it into reverse and get the hell out of there.

The Chevy screams at me all the way, and its engine keeps racing for no good reason, but I get us to a doc in a box out on the highway and for five hundred fifty dollars they throw six stitches in Stephanie’s scalp and give her some Demerol. Back on the highway I get us eighty miles away, then find a Motel 6, and I drag Stephanie to bed. I get her shoes off, make sure she has water, because waking up with dry mouth from Demerol can be horrible, and then I put the chain on, push the chair up against the door, and slump down in the bathtub and cry.

I’m a murderer. I killed Chrissy. I stopped the life of a human being. Chrissy was terrorized like me. Stalked like me. Saw her friends die like me. And I killed her. I bite a towel while I scream because I don’t want Steph to hear. The other final girls were all blooded, they all had to kill their monsters to stay alive, but not me. I possummed my way out. Killing was what the Walker brothers did to me, not what I did to anyone else. Like Chrissy said, I create, I don’t destroy.

Of course, what have I ever created except an empty fortress that I locked myself inside, a life with no friends except for a plant that was only alive inside my head? And my book? And those letters?

All I ever created was shit.

My thoughts feel heavy and absolute, irrevocable and final. I have murdered someone. Whenever I watched a movie and some hero refused to kill the villain because “then I’ll be as bad as he is,” I dismissed it as a bunch of moralistic hand-wringing by balding Hollywood scriptwriters who had only ever killed the last roll of toilet paper. But they tapped into a universal truth. I’m living in a new world now, and in this world I am a murderer.

I can’t take it back, I can’t fix it, I can’t make it better, but I can do one thing about it.

I can never do it again. I swear harder than I’ve ever sworn anything since I was a little girl: I will not kill again. No matter how many lives it will save. No matter how much it puts my own life at risk. No matter what. No more killing.

At some point I fall asleep because when I open my eyes I’m cold and I have a headache and my neck is sore. I stand up and stretch, feeling the vertebrae in my back pop one by one. A slit of sunlight pours through the windows where I didn’t get the curtains quite closed. Stephanie lies in the exact same position I left her in, but after a nervous moment I see her chest softly rise and fall. I relax. No one else is dead.

I lost my fanny pack in Chrissy’s house, so it won’t be long before the cops find my Dr. Newbury ID and then they’ll contact Dr. Carol and she’ll tell them about me, and they’ll have my name and last known location. While the cops hunt me down, she’ll isolate everyone someplace. Sagefire, probably, her yuppie wellness retreat outside L.A. I need to warn them.

I lift Stephanie’s phone off the bedside table and step outside. I’ve seen her tap in her PIN enough times to memorize it (1223) and I unlock her home screen and don’t read any of the eighteen unread texts because I respect her privacy. I try Dani but the phone just rings, same with Marilyn, Heather’s number is still not back in service, and that’s it. Julia’s still unconscious in the hospital, and then I realize: Skye. He wrote down his number, and I dig out that piece of paper, and I call.

“What happened?” he asks, picking up on the first ring.

“Skye?” I say. There’s a long pause. “It’s Lynnette Tarkington.”

“I figured,” he whispers. “Who else would call me at six forty-five in the morning from a number I don’t know. Dude, what did you do?”

“Nothing they say about me is true,” I warn him.

“They say you abducted that girl,” he whispers. “They say you stole some retired cop’s car and beat him up and left him on the side of the road. They say you escaped custody and are a fugitive who’s wanted for questioning.”

“Yeah, well, okay,” I admit. “Those things are true but everything else is a lie.”

“My mom’s super pissed,” he says.

“You need to go stay at a friend’s,” I say. “Get your little brother and go someplace. Get out of your house.”

“Can’t,” he says. “Mom’s taking everyone on a road trip.”

“No,” I tell him. “That’s a bad idea.”

“She’s pretty passionate about it,” he tells me. “She’s taking Pax and me and a bunch of people up to Sagefire. Pax loves it up there.”

“What people?” I ask. “Who’s going?”

“Look,” he says. “I’ve got to go. She’s going to kill me if she finds out you called.”

He hangs up and when I call back I get voicemail.

It’s too far back to L.A. Sagefire is only an hour and a half outside the city. We can’t get there in time. I imagine her loading up Marilyn and Dani and Heather, going to the hospital to pick up Julia. Getting them all alone at her retreat. I can’t think about it.

I call Julia, because even though I’m going to get her voicemail I want to hear someone’s voice.

“Who is this?”

Her voice is strong and clear.

“Julia?” I say.

“Oh, Jesus,” she says. “Lynnette?”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I’m not okay. I got shot three times in the legs. Did you abduct a kid? Are you insane?”

I need to assess her condition.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“Getting shot in the legs?” she asks. “What, because I’m paralyzed? You think it doesn’t hurt? Here’s an idea, Lynnette. Why don’t you go get shot in something you don’t use, like your head, and report back, okay? Jesus Christ. Dr. Carol told me you’d had a breakdown.”

“Have you seen her?” I ask.

“She’s picking me up later,” Julia says. “They’re discharging me this morning. You were right about one thing—we are all in danger. From you. Dr. Carol’s taking us somewhere safe until you’re in custody.”

“Sagefire,” I say.

“Well, there goes that plan,” Julia says. “I can’t believe I came to you thinking Heather had written that book and it was you. And now you’ve kidnapped a child. I thought I knew you.”

“It’s Stephanie Fugate,” I tell her. “The girl from the Camp Red Lake massacre. I’m keeping her safe. Listen, I saw Chrissy—”

“You’re keeping a kid safe and you took her to see Crazy Chrissy?” Julia shouts. “You really are out of your mind.”

“Julia,” I say. “You know me, so please, listen for one minute. How did Christophe Volker get Adrienne’s home address? How did he know how to sneak into Camp Red Lake? Why did Harry Peter Warden and Billy Walker both implicate Dani and me at the same time? Someone shot you. Someone tried to kill me in jail. Someone’s coordinating all this and Chrissy knew who.”

“And?” she says.

“It’s Dr. Carol,” I say. “I’ve seen proof.”

“Proof from Crazy Chrissy?” Julia says.

“Trust me,” I tell her.

“You’ve made that an impossibility,” she says.

“Then be safe,” I say. “Don’t trust anyone. I’m begging you. Call Marilyn and get her security guys to pick you up, and get her and Dani and Heather and just go anywhere for forty-eight hours. That’s all I’m asking. Don’t tell me where you’re going. Don’t tell Dr. Carol where you’re going. Just go. We’re alive because we were the smart ones. We’re the ones who didn’t go in that basement. We didn’t open that door. Please.”

There’s a long silence.

“Are you still there?” I ask.

“Well, I’m not going to tell you if I’m doing it or not,” she says.

“Right, of course, great,” I say, and then I think about Pax and Skye. “Wait, before you go, Dr. Carol has two kids. See if they’ll come with you. I mean, they’re her kids but I don’t think she should be around anyone right now. Not until I’ve . . .” Fact is, I don’t know what I’m going to do. “Not until I’ve talked to her.”

“Good-bye, Lynnette,” Julia says. “I hated your book.”

I feel drained. I go back into the room, put the phone back by Stephanie’s head, and I’m drinking a cup of terrible in-room tea when I notice her looking at me. She touches her stitches.

“Am I okay?” she asks.

The shaft of sunlight coming through the curtains is strong and bright and dust motes dance where it bisects her stomach.

“They said you didn’t have a concussion,” I tell her. “Drink some water.”

Steph sits up in bed, grabs the bottle, and gulps it down.

“You saved me,” Steph says, unable to believe it. “You saved my ass. He was going to beat me to death with that bat and all of a sudden everything exploded and that TV knocked her block off.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.

“She deserved it,” she says.

“I’m not a killer,” I say, which is going to make it very hard to deal with Dr. Carol.

“That’s not a good survival instinct,” Steph says.

I’m irrationally angry with her for making it sound so easy, but I don’t want to fight. I open up my go bag and focus on lining up what I have left on the table. Leatherman, small Maglite, lockblade, GPS, twenty-five feet of nylon rope, four pairs of flexi-cuffs, $830 in cash.

“Ugh, I stink,” Steph says. She gets out of bed and paddles to the bathroom on stiff feet and drinks from the tap, then fills her bottle again and gulps it down.

“If it’s me or them,” she says, wiping her chin, “it’s going to be them, every time. That’s all there is to it. You better get used to that.”

“I don’t want to get used to murder,” I say.

“I didn’t realize you were such a bleeding heart,” she says, flopping back on the bed and adjusting the pillows behind her.

My .22 is the last thing I take out of my bag. I put it on the desk.

“We’ll throw that off the first bridge we find,” I say.

“Hell, no,” Stephanie says, getting up and crossing the room. “No one’s making me their punk again. You may have gone all kumbaya but I still want some stopping power.”

She picks it up and aims it at the door, holding it to one side like she’s seen in the movies.

“I don’t want to kill anyone else,” I say.

“Then leave it to me,” she says in a voice that’s too tough, too confident.

She doesn’t know what murder really is. But I let her have the gun. Eventually, she’ll learn how useless it is.

At the bottom of my go bag is War Ghost, Pax Elliott’s homemade comic book. It feels like he hustled me out of a hundred dollars for it two months ago, not seven days ago. I hope Julia does what I asked. I don’t want to have to deal with those boys when I go see Dr. Carol up at Sagefire.

“We’ll head for L.A.,” I tell her. “We can refill your prescription on the way.”

I flip through the comic book. The drawings are about what you’d expect: amateurish and horrible. I can barely tell what I’m looking at.

“I don’t think the car can make it,” Steph says. “We may have to rent one. Do you have a credit card?”

I’m looking at a page in the comic, and I can’t answer. An oversized figure with his mouth wide open, full of jagged teeth, and Xs for eyes, has sunk his talons into a lion and is ripping its head off. Red scribbles are everywhere. A wide-open mouth is a sign of sexual abuse; claws for hands represent possible violence, as does the oversized body in relation to the small child he looms over. Overuse of one color may be a sign of emotional imbalance. So are the Xs for eyes, and the fangs. But it’s what’s written on the monster’s chest that takes my breath away.

Sky.

“If you have a credit card we’ll just rent a car, right?” Stephanie repeats.

Sky Man is so evul he tears the head off cats, the caption reads. Big cats, little cats, our cats, neighborhood cats. Sky Man hates cats.

My hands go numb.

“Are you listening to me?” Steph asks. “You say this is so urgent, so let’s get back to L.A. But we have to rent a car.”

I page back with trembling fingers and read from the beginning. Page after page features a monstrous Sky Man looming over PX-1, a tiny robot who cowers from his rage.

Sky Man can shoot a gun real fast, the caption reads.

“I can shoot through a building from across the street,”Sky Man brags in a word balloon, holding a rifle with a scope. “I kill all the Last Ladies!”

Sky Man is burning down a building.

“Take that, Dream King!”he shouts.

Sky Man will kill the Mean Girls, the caption reads over a picture of Sky Man chopping off the heads of six women. One is in a wheelchair. Crayon blood fountains from their necks. Six necks. There are six of them. Six final girls.

“Are you totally spaced out?” Stephanie asks. “Hello?”

Sky Man says that when he is finished, the caption reads, we will be the only people left in the world and all the enemies will be deaded. Sky Man will kill them all the enemies! Then mommy will come home again!

Sky Man. Skye Elliott.

I think about Chrissy getting an email from Dr. Carol’s account.

I remember standing in Skye’s room and him saying, I set up all the email servers for my mom’s business.

Dr. Carol’s son. Her home office. Her computer. How he got my book. How he saw her notes. How he knew all about us. How he got us to do his work for him. The monster is coming from inside the house.

I drop the comic into my bag.

“We need to go,” I tell Stephanie. “Grab your phone, get your stuff, we need to get to L.A. We’ll call Julia on the way.”

We call her fourteen times before we reach the state line. She doesn’t pick up once.