The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XXIII:

Resurrection

Bushes fall before my wrath. I hurl myself into trees. I keep pushing up the mountain with the balls of my feet until my calves ache the way my swollen, broken head aches.

“Stupid,” I say to myself.

But I don’t say it out loud because every sound hurts my shattered skull. My entire world is getting up this hill, one foot after the other, and no matter how much my muscles scream, no matter how much my chest burns, I don’t stop. I’ll only stop when I’m dead. Which might be sooner than I think.

“Stupid girl,” I say to myself.

I take another step.

The world spins around me.

“Stupid fucking girl.”

I take another step.

“Stupid dumb fucking girl.”

Standing up in that parking lot was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Pain nailed me to the dirt. Even getting spiked on those antlers didn’t hurt like this. The only person who could make me stand up was Adrienne.

“What are you lying there for, Lynnette?” she asked, looking down at me.

“Can’t . . .” I told her.

“You can,” she said. “You know why? Because if you don’t get up, then all that time I invested in you was a waste. It’ll mean I’ve failed. And I don’t fail. I grew up in a high-pressure household, Lynnette, so failure is hard on me. So if you give up, then little perfect Miss Adrienne has screwed up, too, and that’s going to be hard for me to reconcile.”

She knelt by my head, and I felt her hands slip beneath my armpits, and I felt my body bending in all the wrong ways, tendons screaming, muscles shaking, and then I stood, swaying in the middle of the parking lot, standing over a puddle of my own blood. Alone.

Now I’m getting up this mountain if it kills me and it just might because everything hurts so much and then I fall to my knees because the woods are gone and I’m kneeling in pine cones on the edge of Camp Red Lake. On the other side, a big pinewood sign shouts Welcome, and behind it a vast green lawn leads to the Main Lodge, its raw logs glowing orange in the pink twilight.

“Didn’t count on Billy Walker getting there first, did you?” I ask Stephanie inside my tormented, pulsating brain. “Goddamn titanium plate in my head, you moron.”

I never thought that one day a Walker brother would save my life, but after Ricky left me with half my skull caved in they had to insert a plate to hold my head together. Stephanie plinked me right in the middle of it with her little .22. Scalp wounds bleed like stuck pigs, and I’m scared to look in a mirror, but for now I’m alive.

But it hurts. Oh God, it hurts so bad. I push myself up onto my feet and stagger forward on what feel like broken ankles, eyes locked on the Main Lodge, and then I’m stumbling over hard asphalt and I look down and I’m in the circular drive that runs in front of Camp Red Lake and I look up again and I start to cry.

“No fair,” I whisper. “No fair.”

Ahead of me sits Dani’s enormous red F-150. The driver’s-side door stands open going bong bong bong and all my willpower drains out through my feet because Stephanie is already here. I haven’t heard any shooting but my head is a ringing, roaring waterfall of pain.

That climb up the hill, wanting to die every step of the way, it was all for nothing because Stephanie is already here and everyone I know is dead.

I lean against a parked SUV, probably one of Marilyn’s armored monsters, and I avoid looking at my reflection in its shiny sides. Even with the titanium plate, Steph’s bullet hurt me. My brain aches with damage.

Even if everyone else is dead, I’m going to stop her. I start limping toward the Main Lodge. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I have to stop her before she hurts more people. My stride lengthens, my feet sink into soft grass, the lodge sways from side to side, and my head is a pulsating pain bulb at the end of my neck.

I push myself up the steps, walk between the massive cedar columns still wrapped in yellow crime scene tape, and drag my legs over the pine-planked porch, push open the front door, and step inside.

Everything smells like wood. Enormous age-lacquered beams support the roof two stories overhead, its rafters and ridge piece lost in the late-afternoon gloom. A towering fieldstone fireplace anchors one end of the vast lobby and a mezzanine circles the rest. Someone’s stapled Polaroids of grinning Sisters and their families to every surface, encrusting the posts with women baring white teeth, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, while sign-up sheets, bulletin boards, Xeroxed schedules, and safety posters spin in and out of the shadows around my throbbing head.

In front of me sits the circular welcome desk and over it aged iron letters spiked to the wall spell out Sisters, all.

Except Stephanie. She’s the piece that sticks out. The one that doesn’t belong.

Where is everyone? Where are my Sisters? Are they hiding? And what about the staff? They’d closed down after Christophe Volker came, but a skeleton crew still has to be here. Eight people? Ten? A whispering voice inside my skull tells me it only ever gets this quiet when everyone is dead.

Two arrow-shaped signs hang on either side of the front desk, rope letters on the one pointing to the right reading Tuck Shop and rope letters on the one pointing left reading Dining Porch. That’s what I want. It’s almost five. People are going to want to dine.

Defenseless, I enter the Minotaur’s maze, limping left, pushing through two swinging doors made of rough wood still covered in bark, and I walk into the mess hall. Big slabs of pale pine march away from me in orderly rows like autopsy tables with empty benches on either side. An abandoned canoe hangs upside down from the ceiling, and the entire far wall consists of glass doors leading out onto the dining porch. A bloody handprint smack in the middle of one is the only sign of life.

A sign reading Salad/Sundae Bar sways gently over a pile of laundry on the floor. I lower myself, knees popping, and realize this boneless sack of clothes is the body of a woman. I turn her over. Not much of her skull is left. Her face is smeared across the floor. I wonder if she was pretty. I wonder if she was happy. I wonder who her Sisters were. She wears a Red Lake T-shirt and the nametag on her right breast is obscured by biological matter. I wipe it away with my thumb.

“I’m so sorry, Marcie,” I say, and mean it more than I’ve ever meant anything.

I look into the kitchen where another person lies facedown, their T-shirt saturated dark red. This one looks like a man.

Stephanie was here.

How many people have died because I trusted her?

Something bumps politely against a wall and I whip my head around, sending pain spiking through my temples. I see a storage closet door closed tight and make my way over and stand to one side because it has a porthole window in the middle and I don’t want whatever’s in there to see me. I give the door a push. It doesn’t move, but maybe it’s just heavy. I brace myself and push again and it rattles against its deadbolt lock. I hear something creak inside. Why would Stephanie lock herself in a storage closet? She wants to be out here killing people. I press my face to the glass.

It’s dark so I cup my hands and look. Something moves in the dimness.

“Hey?” I whisper-call.

I pray my voice hasn’t traveled too far into the building. I tap one knuckle against the glass. Whatever it is moves again.

“I see you,” I say.

Whoever it is rolls backward, deeper into the dark.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

“Lynnette?” A muffled voice wafts out through the door, down around my belly button.

“Julia?”

The deadbolt snaps. Something flashes on the edge of my vision and I duck down and spin, catching a flock of birds lifting off from the wide lawn outside. Silver sparks from their wings. Julia comes out of the closet in her chair, a low sturdy model with big rugged wheels that slant in at the top. Behind her stand two numb teenaged boys and a nervous woman who looks like she goes camping a lot.

“Lock it behind me,” Julia tells them. “We’ll get you when it’s safe.”

They obey and I feel so tired that it’s only Julia, that there are still more people left to find, that Stephanie is still out there killing.

“What the hell is going on?” Julia asks.

“It’s Stephanie,” I say. “Stephanie Fugate.”

Julia’s forehead knits in the middle for a minute and then goes smooth.

“The Red Lake girl?” she asks. “The one you kidnapped? Jesus Christ, Lynnette, your people skills are shit. She’s walking around here with a machine gun.”

“I don’t think she has a machine gun,” I say, remembering the shotguns in the back of Dani’s truck.

“Let’s stand here and argue about the caliber of weapon the girl you thought was your new best friend is using to murder everyone,” Julia says.

My brain gives a dark throb that makes me want to throw up.

“You look like shit, so I forgive you,” she says. “Cell phone service is down but there’s a landline in the nurse’s station we can try for.”

“What about Heather and Marilyn?” I mumble through numb lips as we start to move.

“Down by the lake with everyone else,” she tells me. “I came up here to get sunscreen. About twenty of the staff are having a memorial service for Adrienne.”

I’m not listening. I’m standing still. From this angle I can see past the bloody handprint on the glass doors, around the lone tree that blocked my view of the middle of the wide green lawn before. A person sprawls on the grass. I recognize the flannel shirt. Julia looks where I’m looking.

“Is that—?” Julia begins.

“You get the phone,” I say. “I’ll get Dani.”

I start outside but Julia cuts me off at the French doors.

“You think I can’t do stairs?” she snaps, and zips around me.

Julia’s already at the lip of the dining porch when I get outside. She leans back in her wheelchair, puts one hand on the banister, and practically flings herself down the three steps to the ground, her wheels absorbing the impact. I try to keep up.

“Shag your ass,” she calls back at me as her wheelchair chews up the lawn.

Running makes my head sick, so I walk fast, looking behind us, checking the approaches, left, right, ahead, behind. A scattering of trees rise from the lawn but otherwise it’s totally exposed. Clear sightlines from every direction. Far to the right sits the campfire amphitheater and stage. Ahead of us is the treeline, the air between the trunks already dark purple. Back in those trees are the cabins, and beyond them lies the lake where twenty more victims wait for Stephanie.

Dani doesn’t look good. Her legs point in two different directions, neither of them natural. She’s facedown in the dirt, mouth open. I notice with relief her shoulder blades moving up and down. She’s breathing.

“Put her legs across my chair to help with the weight,” Julia says. “We need to get back inside and get to the phone.”

I can’t.

“I’m going to rest for a minute,” I mumble to Julia, waving one hand.

I’m too tired. The ground pulls on my hips. I need to sit. I crouch, not sure how to make it down safely.

“What are you doing, Lynnette?” Julia shouts from far away.

I need to rest.

“What are you doing, Lynnette?” Adrienne asks.

She’s walking with me across the lawn. My clothes stink of cordite. She’s wearing a white sweater and jeans.

“Trying not to get killed?” I tell her/told her.

“That’s enough for you?” she asks. “Continued respiration? That’s all you have to offer the world?”

“It’s a good place to start,” I say, wishing she would stop making me feel so guilty all the time.

You have to protect your sister, my mom says, standing over me while Gilly wails into the side of her neck.

“I’m no Yoda,” Adrienne tells me. “But you think your sister died so you could quit? You think Tommy died so you could stop when things got too scary? There’s more to life than staying alive.”

“Shut up, Adrienne,” I groan.

“You wouldn’t feel so guilty if you didn’t know I’m right,” she says.

Gravity wins. My butt thuds onto the grass. A hard jolt goes up my spine. My head floods with hot blood. The lawn turns into a merry-go-round and spins me past the lodge.

Far away, back by the lodge, a black insect runs at us. I watch it get bigger and come into focus. It’s a man in black tactical gear, wearing a gas mask. There’s some kind of automatic rifle bouncing on his back, but in his hands he’s carrying an axe, just like Ricky Walker. His legs are moving, eating up the grass between us.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” Julia says, bending from the waist, pawing at Dani.

He’s seen us, and I don’t know who he is but he picks up his pace, and I feel so tired but I swing my head to the treeline and it’s not so far away.

You can, Adrienne says.

I push myself to my feet and the world gives another lazy revolution, my head swimming in a sea of pain, and I pray that not everything around here has changed too much over the past ten years.

You have to protect your sister, Mom says.

I grab Dani’s belt and try not to listen to the popping sounds as I haul her up, then sling her around and her legs hit Julia in the chest, and I let her take some of Dani’s weight and I stagger forward.

“Cabins!” I think I shout.

My stomach heaves, my brain throbs, and I stumble fast for the treeline. Julia keeps up, both hands shoving her wheels down hard, her chair flying along beside me, my head exploding with every jolting step as the treeline rocks wildly in my vision, and the back of the first cabin emerges from the trunks and I correct our course.

Something chatters behind me and the air flutters overhead. He’s stopped to shoot. I hope he’s stopped to shoot. Every foot we put between him and us is safety.

Up ahead, Heather slouches out of the trees, carrying a green beer bottle, and Marilyn emerges beside her in some kind of summer dress and big straw hat situation, a giant handbag over one shoulder, and I say to Julia, “Get that cabin open!”

“The cabin made of wood? The cabin full of windows?” she shouts back.

I scream a sharp, angry sound and then she’s tearing across the grass in her chair, tires chewing it up like a lawn mower, trusting me at last, and I’m staggering under Dani’s full weight, and Marilyn’s there, ducking under Dani’s other arm, knocking off her straw hat, and something chatters behind us again, and Dani gets shoved forward and I feel the impact travel all the way down to the aching soles of my feet.

“Haul, Lynnette!” Marilyn shouts in my ear, and we drag Dani between us, the world bouncing painfully, and then the dark trees close around us, and I see Julia make some kind of daredevil turn in her chair, the whole thing almost tipping over, spraying up big plumes of dirt, and she throws herself up the three steps into the cabin, hitting the door with her body, pushing it open, leaving her chair toppled on its side, one wheel spinning.

Heather’s in next and then I find the strength to shove myself up the stairs and through the door, hauling Dani, and Marilyn gets it closed just as Death slams into it from the other side.

“It’s made of fucking wood!” Julia screams from the floor.

Marilyn makes an animal moan deep inside her throat as she takes in the six big windows marching down the wooden walls, three on each side, glowing with afternoon light. They see the wooden walls, the splintery floor, the planks on the door, but none of them spent the time here with Adrienne that I did.

I drop Dani’s weight onto Marilyn and lunge at the bed on my right, stretching, reaching, praying. A booted foot hits the door, shaking it in its frame.

My finger slams into a knothole in the wall at the head of the bed, wood scraping the skin off my knuckle, and I rip it out, and wear the wooden square like a ring as I punch the red button it hid with my other hand.

The cabin tears itself in two. Marilyn shrieks. Heather drops her beer. Julia covers her ears as motors and gears and bolts blast machine screams into our ears. Six deadbolts shoot home in the door. Wooden boards drop from the top of the frame of each window and I run to them, dizzy, catching my hip on the edge of beds, grabbing the double handles they expose with both hands, yanking them down, slamming metal shutters over the windows.

“Help me!” I scream.

Marilyn gets two, I get four. At the end, I vomit thin gruel.

“It’s still wood!” Julia says from the floor and we hear the machine gun rip and I recognize the sound; even without the L.A. street canyon making it echo, it’s the same kind of gun that turned my apartment into a shooting gallery last week.

The cabin is dim now. The door vibrates in its frame, but no splintered holes appear, it doesn’t fall apart. Another burst. Glass shatters but the steel shutters only do a spastic shimmy as bullets tap-dance across their surface. They hold.

“Panic cabins,” I pant. “Adrienne had them built so I’d feel safe. Steel shutters. The door and walls have steel sandwiched between the wood. The floor’s poured concrete underneath the planks.”

“Cool,” Heather says, and walks to the door and screams, “Fuck you, gimp!”

Whoever it is puts another half clip in the door. We hear the bullets stitch over steel.

“Now we’re stuck,” Heather says. “Good plan, Lynne.”

“We call for help,” I say. “Whose phone works?”

“No one’s,” Heather says. “We’re essentially fucked.”

“Dani’s bleeding too much,” Julia says, applying pressure to Dani’s back. There’s fresh wet blood all over her clothes, her arms, her face.

“So we’re stuck in a cabin, there’s a killer outside with a machine gun, Dani’s going to die, and we have no way to call for help,” Heather says. “I guess I’ll have to save us all with my fucking superpowers.”

She lies down on one of the cots and flips a blanket over herself, nuzzling into the pillow.

“You’re going to sleep?” Julia asks.

“I’ve got a condition,” Heather snaps from behind closed eyes.

“I’ll call 911,” Marilyn says, reaching into her straw handbag and pulling out a phone that looks slightly thicker and chunkier than average.

“No reception,” Heather says.

“Haven’t any of y’all heard of a satellite phone?” Marilyn asks.

I can’t hear anything outside. I don’t know if the Monster is waiting by the door or if he’s gone to the lake. I don’t know where Stephanie is or what she’s doing. I don’t even know if this is Stephanie. Where did she get all this gear? But it doesn’t matter. I shove the counselor’s bed aside.

“Quit making so much noise,” Heather says, eyes still closed.

“Hello,” I hear Marilyn enunciate. “I’d like to report an active shooter situation.”

I put two fingers in another knothole, this time in the floor, and lift a larger panel to reveal a bolted trapdoor.

“What the hell?” Julia asks.

“There are twenty of Adrienne’s people by the lake,” I say.

“You can’t—” Julia begins, but I don’t listen, just release the hatch and drop through into the soft cool sand underneath the cabin. I stand up.

“Bolt it behind me,” I say.

Then I duck down and reconnoiter. The slit of light between the bottom of the cabin and the ground looks clear: no legs in black combat pants, no tactical boots. I scramble through the sand toward the front of the cabin. Behind me, I hear the trapdoor bolts slam into place. Good.

I scramble out on my hands as my knees give out and stand, swaying. The trees and cabins rock dangerously and shadows rush in around the edges of my vision, but I see a brighter light in front of me through the trees and I know that way lies the lake. The shooter can’t be there yet. They’ll have to pass three more rows of cabins, the chill-out yurt, the nature observatory, and the sweat lodge.

Behind me, the splintered façade of the cabin shows scorched galvanized steel peppered with charred pockmarks. I stumble-run to my left, heading parallel to the lake, and when I reach the end of the row of cabins, I put my hands around my mouth, pull a deep breath into my bruised lungs, and turn my body into a single shout.

“Stephanie!” I roar, and I hear my voice echo up into the tree canopy high above. “I’m still alive. You want me. Come and get me.”

I’m winded. Black spots flicker and strobe in my vision and then one of them swarms at me with a purpose, and I realize it’s dropping to one knee and I see fire flicker from its shoulder and bees scream past my face, tugging my hair in their wake.

I turn and run.

The Wellness Barn looms up ahead of me in the gloom, a big red wall of wood with peaks on either end facing me like raised eyebrows. It’s the biggest building at Red Lake after the Main Lodge, built back in the early nineties when Adrienne took over. It’s full of EMDR rooms, narrative medicine offices, art therapy studios. Lots of rooms, lots of doors, a labyrinth where I can get whoever this is lost, keep them angry, make them waste their time, stay focused on me, not the twenty soft targets down by the lake. I’ll lead them in one side, then up through the studios to the far end of the second floor where there’s a secret crawl space in the walls. It’s a game of hide-and-seek and by the time they give up the police will be here.

The French doors come up and I put out my hands to stiff-arm them open, and as I crash through them in a shower of wood and glass I remember too late they don’t push, they pull, and then I’m tripping over their shattered bottom rail, sliding across the floor of the entrance atrium on the heels of my hands.

I hurt. My head swims in a sea of pain. Everything smells like lemongrass and cinnamon, and the cool tinkling of a feng shui water feature in the corner would ease the pain in my skull if I hadn’t just gotten shot in the head. Suspended stairs float up one wall to the second floor and skylights let pink light stream in from high above. On the wall someone’s painted in flowing script:

Sometimes all we have left is a wish and a hope.

Then the air explodes behind me and bullets stitch across wishes and hopes. I force myself to my feet and there’s no time, they’re on my heels, the stairs are too exposed, and I lurch to the right and crash through the first studio door.

I barely have the door closed before a body hits it high and hard. It almost comes off its hinges, but I manage to hold it shut, pressing it into the frame. There’s silence from the other side for a moment, then the blade of the axe slaps through the wood, almost splitting my left hand. I yank it back and snap the deadbolt into place as Death hacks the door into pieces. I hear myself sob.

The door comes apart too fast. I think I might have made a serious miscalculation. The Wellness Barn is made of hopes and dreams, not galvanized steel and reinforced concrete.

The door explodes out of its frame, pancaking to the ground, almost taking me with it, and I’m running, my head a throbbing bag of blood, then something sweeps my legs out from under me and in the wall of mirrors to my right I see a bloody scarecrow going ass over heels as I trip over a yoga ball.

I turn, shove myself up, give it a kick, and the pink ball lifts off the floor, launching itself straight at the ruined door and into the shooter, knocking their knees out from under them. They fall down, letting go with their gun, and the mirrored wall explodes into silver triangles and shattered circles that rain to the floor.

Every studio in the Wellness Barn has two doors, and I fly through the next one and stumble into a wall of world music, crash through a display of healing crystals, take a massage table in the hip. The spectral sounds of the universe swirl around me, harps glissando, chimes vibrate, crystal keys plink out the mysteries of life. I stumble across tatami mats while the aching music of oneness picks me up and tries to carry me away, and I make it out the next door as the shooter comes in, crunching crystals beneath their boots.

The next studio is L-shaped and it’s music therapy and the shooter is too close for me to do anything but run. They fire and xylophones explode, cymbals roar in a frenzy as bullets shred a drum kit, and guitars explode with hollow pops, filling the air with raw spruce splinters.

I turn the corner of the L and my feet shoot out from under me and my brain splits down the middle as I hit the floor hard with one shoulder and I scramble to my feet and keep moving, but I realize my plan has failed. I can’t lose them. They’re too close. My feet dig into the carpet and I launch myself at the door ahead because I don’t have a plan anymore, and then I have a plan.

You have to protect your Sisters, Mom says as Gilly howls.

I’m the decoy, I’m the distraction, I’m the sitting duck. I just need to keep them here while everyone else gets away. I just need to run out my string.

Adrienne was right: there’s more to life than staying alive.

The door flies open under my hands but not fast enough and I hit it with my forehead, and I’m in a long room full of pink and white streamers and helium balloons in Adrienne’s favorite colors and there are cupcakes and soft drinks and I’ve gone back in time, I’m in first grade and part of my brain knows it’s a reception for after Adrienne’s memorial but part of me is a child, screaming, running, I’m quick as a bunny, Mom.

The shooter comes in behind me too fast, too close, and they squeeze off rounds that evaporate balloons and chop streamers to confetti and dig into the far wall painted with tribal designs and I’m every girl who’s ever run from a man with a weapon, every girl who ever ran for her life across spaces where she was supposed to be safe. I crash into the next studio and I’m Julia running through her dorm, I’m Heather running down her high school halls, I’m Marilyn running through the Texas afternoon, I’m Dani running through a hospital, I’m Adrienne running through this camp, this camp where there will always be a girl running and screaming and screaming, and I’m Lynnette, running at last, and he can’t catch me, I’m as fast as all of us put together, I’m faster than Billy Walker, I’m faster than the Ghost, I’m faster than the entire Volker family, I’m the fastest girl in the world.

I push myself, sprinting, legs pumping, head bouncing on the end of my neck, and this is it, this is my last race, and I slam the wooden door open and run into the humid chlorine cloud of the aquatherapy studio. I can trick the shooter into one of these pools in the concrete floor, force them down, use their heavy gear against them, but they’re already in the doorway and I don’t even have time to slam it in their face. They shove it open with their elbows, gun raised, and I fall forward, the steel tubes of a pool ladder chipping my pelvis, and one foot goes in warm water and I pull it out and slosh-limp-slosh across the room as fast as I can to the three doors in a row that are the only place left to run.

The pain in my head is so bad I’m almost blind. The door on the far right is in front of me and I’ll get inside, I won’t stop; I’ll crash through the window on the opposite wall and make it outside, and hide in the woods. I crash inside and there is no window. There is no other door.

It’s an individual hydrotherapy room, all sandstone tile and a big white tub and a toilet and a sink and a massage table and the door flies open behind me and knocks me forward and I’m tumbling, stumbling, feet flying, and I take the lip of the tub high in my thighs, and my feet go over my head and I’m sprawled across the bottom of the tub staring up at my mom as Gilly screams into the side of her neck.

I squeeze my eyes shut and black blood pulses behind my lids because I don’t want to die. I open them and my head is full of broken glass shredding my soft brain, and Death stands over the tub and it is the biggest thing in the world.

Death points its gun at me, a TEC-9, one of those video game guns that boys think are so cool. It’s a terrible gun, but not at this range. Death wears black tactical gear, covered in belts and straps and pouches and all those things little boys think will make them strong. The gas mask hides Its face. Tactical gloves cover Its hands. It’s wearing a black helmet and this is all overcompensating for how small Death feels inside. On instinct, I look at Its shoes.

Under Armour zipper tactical boots, and fire sparks inside my head.

“Skye?” I say.

Where’s Stephanie? Is she helping him? Is he helping her? Is she dead? Was I wrong and she’s one more final girl notched into his belt?

His breath rasps through his gas mask. Then he says something, and the mask muffles it, but all my strength leaves my body because I still hear the words.

“You’ll die alone and no one cares,” he says.

My mom presses a screaming Gilly to the side of her neck. You have to protect your Sisters. And I couldn’t even do that. I’m sorry, Gilly. I’m sorry, Dr. Carol. I’m sorry, Mom and Dad. I’m sorry, Mike and Liz. I’m sorry, Fine. I’m sorry, everyone.

I’m sorry I can’t fight anymore.

Skye adjusts his grip on his weapon.

I’m sorry, Adrienne.

He points his gun at my face and its muzzle is a yawning black hole big enough to swallow the world.

And Heather is on him, streaking in from out of nowhere, the heavy white porcelain lid of the toilet tank in her hands, and she brings it down on the back of his neck and follows through on her swing. The porcelain lid explodes on impact into a thousand razor shards that pepper my face. Skye’s body bends in one direction, his head bends in another, and he falls forward, catching his face on the edge of the tub as he goes down. He doesn’t get up.

For a moment, there’s no sound but the two of us breathing.

“Where’s everyone else?” I finally manage.

“Back in the cabin,” Heather says. “Locked in.”

It doesn’t make any sense.

“But how did you get here?” I ask.

Heather’s panting but manages something close to a grin.

“Like I said, I’m into some higher-level shit that you could never understand.”

After what I saw in her room at Chrissy’s museum, I don’t doubt it for a minute.

I start picking myself up out of the Jacuzzi, and Heather leans down and starts unbuckling Skye’s helmet and gas mask.

“Is he alive?” I ask.

“Mostly,” Heather says, working at his chin strap, finally getting it free.

“Don’t move him,” I say. “His neck might be broken.”

She pushes back his helmet and peels off the gas mask and I see his face, dark circles painted around his eyes, hair soaked with sweat, eyelids fluttering. It really is Skye.

He must have hated us all so much.

Heather stands and delivers a hard kick to his balls. Her kick moves his body like a heavy sack of laundry.

“We shouldn’t move him,” Heather says, punctuating her words with more kicks to his crotch. “Definitely not. Don’t want. To have. A spinal cord. Injury.”

I take a step toward her and my head spins dangerously fast, feeling like it might float away. I put one hand on her shoulder to steady myself.

“Stop,” I tell Heather. “Get his gun.”

She bends over and picks it up, then centers it on his chest, looking down through its sights at the Monster sprawled on the floor in the wreckage of the eco-friendly bathroom.

“Heather,” I say. “He’s her son.”

She doesn’t acknowledge me. We stand like that for what feels like a very long time. Finally she lowers the gun, then tosses it into the tub with a loud clatter.

“Fuck it, right?” she says.

“Fuck it,” I say. “No one else dies today.”

“Well, isn’t that a big ball of sunshine,” Stephanie says from the door.

Heather starts to turn, but Stephanie has the shotgun against the back of her neck. Through Heather’s throat it’s pointed right at my face. Stephanie stands in the square stance, motionless, butt of the gun against her shoulder, cheek welded to the stock, ready to let her body take the recoil, her nonfiring hand directing the barrel. Heather’s back is to her, I’m on the other side of Heather, Skye’s body takes up half the bathroom, and there’s nowhere left to run.

“That’s the second time you’ve saved yourself by playing possum,” Steph says. “How’d you do it?”

“Plate in my head,” I say.

“Goddamn,” she says softly. “To be honest, I barely skimmed your Wikipedia page. I’m not interested in roadkill. This skunky junkie, on the other hand, she’s big game.”

“Fucking superfans,” Heather says.

“Whatever, grandma,” Stephanie says. “My man and I have been running you for weeks like rats in a maze, and now we’re gunning you down like fish in a barrel. You stupid old bags don’t have a lot to be proud of. This was about as challenging as a wet fart.”

What sticks with me is “my man.”

“Skye . . .” I begin.

“We met online,” she says. “No one’s going to remember you losers after this. Skye and I will be heroes. People will be talking about the statement we made here for years to come. You’re just pointless nostalgia and we’re here to sweep you into the trash. Everyone needs to stop clinging to the past.”

“Pull the trigger or shut the fuck up,” Heather says, but I can see her face and it’s only her voice that’s brave. “You’re as boring as my last boyfriend.”

Stephanie smiles.

“Okay,” she says.

I have to keep her talking.

“You did all this to be famous?” I say. “You killed all these people to be on TV?”

“What else is there?” Stephanie asks.

I remember the file in Dr. Carol’s house, the one with Stephanie’s picture on it. I realize how Skye found her.

“He reached out to you first, didn’t he?” I ask.

“You don’t have time for our dating history,” Stephanie says.

“He groomed you,” I say. “He told you how evil we are because he hates his mom and then he groomed you.”

“Not even close,” she says, but I can tell she doesn’t like being an object rather than the subject.

“This isn’t girl power,” I say, panic-talking now. “You’re Skye’s puppet. In court your lawyer’s going to claim emotional coercion. You weren’t responsible for your actions. The man was in charge all the way. You’ll be just another victim of a powerful, manipulative male.”

“Don’t try to run a game on me, Lynnette,” Stephanie says. “We’re equals. That how love works these days.”

“You think it’s about you and Skye?” I ask. “This is about him and his mommy. You’re the sad daughter-in-law to his psycho obsession, a footnote in his case file. We’ll get the memorials, we’ll be the heroes, he’ll be embraced by a bunch of sad little boys on the Internet, but you don’t fit in anywhere. You’ll be forgotten because all you ever did was say ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ and pulled the trigger when Daddy said.”

“Fuck you,” she says.

“You know I’m right,” I say. “Unless you kill him, too.” I give it a brief pause. “He’s still alive.”

Heather is darting her eyes from left to right, shaking them “no,” and her mouth is mouthing no and she knows what I’m doing and I ignore her.

“He’s pretty banged up,” I say, looking down and to my right. “I bet you could finish him by hand. That would make a statement.”

I’m committed now. For the first time in years, I’m not scared.

Stephanie’s eyes narrow and they flick down to Skye and that’s all I’m going to get. I pray for speed.

Everything happens at once. I drop low and shoulder past Heather, leaping up and forward, ignoring the iron bands clamped around my skull, and one arm is going up and out and thrusting the barrel of the shotgun away like I saw Dani do earlier. The air in the bathroom explodes and my hand is on fire, palm searing, sticking to the barrel, and my shoulder breaks and the room fills with gritty gray gunsmoke. Somewhere beside me, Heather is falling into the tub.

My feet don’t touch the ground and I’m tackling Stephanie. My head clips the doorframe as I take her down and it throbs so hard I almost black out, but not enough to make me forget to land on her body. I hear all the air whoosh out of her lungs when we hit the concrete floor with my full weight on top, the burning-hot shotgun trapped between our chests.

We’re lying half-in and half-out of the hydrotherapy door and I’m too weak to hit her, or cut her, or shoot her, so I just wrap my arms and legs around her and hold on tight.

She bucks and squirms and screams and fights, trying to worm her finger into the trigger guard, but she’s just a kid after all, and I keep her on the ground, pressed to the tile; my arms keep her from getting any leverage, my legs wrap around her calves to keep them from pushing up. I use my battered chin to force her skull down until I’m pinning her head to the ground, and our faces are close enough to kiss.

She spits and screams and howls, but she’s not going anywhere, and after a while she knows it. She starts to scream in my ear, so loud my brain goes white.

Eventually I make out what she’s saying.

“Kill me!” she’s screaming, over and over again. “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”

They pull me off eventually, and by then they have flexi-cuffs on Skye, and Marilyn and Heather put a pair on Stephanie. As they drag her to the other side of the room she keeps her eyes on me.

“You should have killed me, you fucking skank,” she spits.

I’m tired. I hurt everywhere. Fresh pain creeps into every inch of my body.

“You’ll go to trial,” I say, exhausted. “You’ll go to prison.”

“Fuck you!” she screeches. “I’ll fucking escape!”

I’m so tired of all this hurting and killing and these threats and this endless litany of fear that has been my life.

“No, you won’t,” I say. “You’re not that smart.”

Let her live. Let her and Skye live. Let them live and see just how small and meaningless their murders were. She’s killed so many people and you know what? The world, just as uncooperative and stubborn as always, keeps spinning along.

Dying isn’t the important thing. It’s nothing more than the punctuation mark on the end of your life. It’s everything that came before that matters. Punctuation marks, most people skip right over them. They don’t even have a sound.