The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP IV:
Return of the Final Girls
BZZTgoes the buzzer that releases the latch on my apartment door. I take the shooter’s stance that I practice every night, the one that means everything has gone wrong if I’m taking it inside my apartment. I aim the barrel well above Julia’s head, exactly where I think the center of the Ghost’s torso will be, and my arms are shaking, my wrists are weak, my fingers are numb. I can’t tell if my forefinger is on the trigger or outside the trigger guard but I’m too scared to take my eyes off the door to check. The cage will be my kill zone. I can’t worry about my backstop now. I can’t think about what happens to the bullets that punch through the front walls of the apartment across the hall.
I feel embarrassed.
I’m overcommitted. I’m overreacting. I’ve made a mistake. I’ve never pointed a gun at a human being in my life. You don’t do things like this, not in a city, not in my house, but I’m too scared to put my stiff arms back down so I stand there like an asshole, holding my gun like I think I’m some kind of badass, like my world isn’t falling apart.
The feet of Julia’s wheelchair push the door open as she enters the cage, and my muscles make a microscopic snap-contraction but I don’t shoot. I need to take some deep breaths before I pass out. The mesh is too thick for me to see Julia’s face, but I know exactly how she feels. I’ve felt it before. Until you’ve been through what we’ve been through you have no idea how scared a human being can get.
There’s a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I see the cage in the center of my vision and everything around it is covered in gray haze.
I’ll protect you, I reassure Fine in my mind. He can’t get through the cage.
I don’t know if I’m talking to Fine or to myself.
The Ghost enters behind Julia. I don’t think, I pull the trigger, and that’s when I learn the answer to my question: my finger was outside the trigger guard. Sweat-slicked, my finger slips off the gun and my ice-cold hands lose their grip and I fumble. I squat fast and catch my slippery gun with my fingertips right before it hits the floor and I don’t even bother to stand up or get a firm grip; my finger finds the trigger.
“Lynnette! Lynnette!” Julia’s shouting.
I’ll save us, Fine.
The Ghost tears at its mask, and it’s weird behavior, but I’m not stopping until I’m safe.
“Lynnette! Stop!” Julia shouts.
I squeeze the trigger.
The sound stabs me in both eardrums. The room fills with smoke. My wrists snap backward and I punch myself in the face, I taste metal on my teeth. Suddenly I’m sitting on the floor.
“I pissed,” a muffled male voice shouts. “I pissed myself.”
“Lynnette! It’s Russ. It’s Russell Thorn!”
I’m climbing to my feet again, gun in my left hand. I switch it to my right.
“Lynnette,” Julia shouts again. “Jesus Christ. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. What’s your safe word? Jesus Christ.”
I raise my gun again. The Ghost is tangled up in its black robes, trying to open the door back out into the hall, but it’s stuck between the door and Julia’s chair.
“Help me!” it screams. “Helpmehelpmehelpme!”
I find the center of its torso with the barrel of my gun.
“Lynnette,” Julia shouts. “This is Russell Thorn. He interviewed you.”
I know that name.
“Russell Thorn,” I repeat, but mostly I’m wondering what stopped my bullet. Why isn’t the Ghost dead? Why is the Ghost Russell Thorn?
I pull the trigger again.
The cage shakes but this time I keep my stance. This time it only feels like I broke my wrists.
“Stop shooting at us!” Russell Thorn screams.
His mask is off and I see his ginger beard and he’s climbing over Julia in her wheelchair, and inside the cage it’s a writhing mess of arms and legs.
“It wasn’t my idea!” Julia shouts. “But you wouldn’t open the door for me.”
I am very, very tired. My tongue is thick. My eyelids are made of lead. The room is dim from gunsmoke, and it burns my eyes, makes me sleepy.
“I opened your envelope,” Julia says. “Because we have to talk.”
I have lived here quietly for so long, and now I have fired a gun twice, and in five minutes the police will come, and more people will enter this apartment in the next half hour than have come through that door in sixteen years.
My face goes numb. I punch the code into the keypad and the locks slap open. Julia wheels inside.
“You need to get a towel for Russ,” she says, voice shaking. “I can’t believe you shot at me. Holy crap, I’m having a heart attack.”
“That doesn’t come in,” I say, pointing at the Ghost mask and robe.
I’m still holding the gun. Russell drops the robe like it’s on fire.
“In the hall,” I tell him.
He falls all over himself throwing it outside, and then he slams the door. Fine doesn’t like this. He prefers when it’s just us. He doesn’t want strangers in here.
“It’s too late,” I tell him.
“What?” Julia asks, one hand pressed to her chest.
Russell is looking at me the way you look at a crazy person. He’s measuring the distance to the door. I walk over, slam the cage door shut, and the bolts bang home. Russell jumps. When I turn back from the cage he’s sitting in my chair.
“Sit on the treadmill,” I say. “Your pants are wet.”
His face turns red beneath his beard but he moves. He’s taking in everything at once, and his sticky eyes crawl all over my walls, my computer, my screens, taking notes inside his head, composing sentences about me (“A spartan one-bedroom with industrial-yellow walls”), writing paragraphs that judge me (“Curtains tightly closed as if she fears the sunlight almost as much as she fears the man who hurt her all those years ago . . .”), coming up with pat thesis statements (“A woman trapped inside her apartment, serving a sentence much like the man who . . .”).
He pretends we weren’t speaking just last week.
I study my cage. There’re two scorched dents. The guy who built it assured me that a round from a .38 would have no problem penetrating it, but he either lied or was stupid. How many other plans have I made based on wrong information?
“Wow,” Julia says, trying to sound brave, fingering the dents with one shaking finger. “You really shot at us.”
“It was supposed to penetrate the mesh,” I say.
“Well I, for one, am really fucking glad that it didn’t,” Russell says from down by the floor where he sits on the treadmill.
“You’re not supposed to open my letter unless I miss a check-in,” I say to Julia.
“It’s urgent,” she says.
“This is a violation,” I say. “A total violation.”
“Someone in group is writing a book,” Julia says. “Mr. Volker’s nephew knew about it.”
Suddenly, I have the flu.
“Why’d you come here?” I mumble.
Someone starts banging on my door.
“Go away!” I shout.
“I’m calling the police,” a woman’s voice shouts back.
I check my camera. It’s the actress who lives down the hall, wearing sweatpants and unlaced running shoes.
“We’re rehearsing a scene,” I shout at her.
We all watch on the screen as she walks back down the hall and goes into her apartment.
“Why did you come?” I repeat.
“Because I know it’s Heather,” Julia says. “I need you to help find her.”
Russell glares at me from down by the floor, getting his confidence back. Julia wants answers. The man who killed Adrienne knows that someone in our group is writing a book. Julia thinks Heather is writing a book?
“I need a minute,” I say. “I need you both to shut up for a minute.”
Julia’s killer was the Ghost. He wore black robes and a Halloween mask and he turned out to be her boyfriend, a horror buff who wanted to transform her into his very own final girl their senior year of high school. He shared his Ghost costume with his best friend and together they carved their way through the student body of their graduating class. To them, all those dead girls were one big meta-joke.
They were clever kids with good SAT scores and college in their future, kids who didn’t take anything seriously because they assumed they were smarter than everyone else. The one thing they didn’t think through was that if Julia was going to be their final girl she had to kill them. Turned out Julia didn’t have a problem with that. She said the worst thing was their quips. No matter how many times she shot her boyfriend he kept making stupid quips.
America had lost its taste for final girls by the nineties, but when Julia went to college her sequel happened and suddenly America perked up. We call it a sequel because they almost always come back. One of her classmates, hungry for his fifteen minutes of fame, took on the Ghost disguise. He killed five people, got arrested, got his capital sentence commuted to life, and made Julia a star in the process. Everyone loves a comeback queen.
The way she stopped the second Ghost was by tackling him out a window to save her roommate’s life. She received an incomplete fracture of her L1 vertebra for her trouble. Ever since, she’s been in a wheelchair with only partial mobility of her upper legs. They left that part out of the movie when they cast a doe-eyed, able-bodied ballerina in her place. And it turns out she broke her back for nothing. Her roommate died on the way to the hospital. That’s life: always kicking you when you’re down.
Julia’s physiotherapist got promoted to husband and convinced her to hit the talk show circuit. I know what it’s like. You don’t want someone angry at you, especially a man, so you say yes to things you don’t want to do because there’s no road map for where you are, nothing to guide you except a neon sign in your head that says Do not make men angry.
The talk show circuit didn’t count on how pissed Julia was. She says she didn’t realize it either. Her first appearance was with Sally Jessy Raphaël. Sally called her an inspiration. Julia looked her dead in the eye and said, “Then why don’t you get inspired to put in some goddamn wheelchair ramps around here.” The producer for her next booking called halfway through the show and left a voicemail saying they were so sorry but she was being bumped for Ed Begley Jr. and his biodiesel car. They never rescheduled.
Adrienne was the one who brought Julia into group. We almost didn’t take her because all she did was pick fights. Julia even fought with Heather, and within ten minutes of meeting her you know that fighting with Heather is a waste of time. Then, after a session in which Julia spent fifteen minutes lecturing Marilyn about American imperialism, Adrienne invited her out to Camp Red Lake for the weekend. Julia stayed for a week. She won’t say what happened, but whatever it was worked. When she came back she buried herself in books and earned her paralegal degree, got a master’s in sports medicine, took self-defense classes, learned to shoot from her chair. She started shutting up, as much as Julia is capable of shutting up.
She also figured out that her former physiotherapist, and current husband, had “misappropriated” all her money. A divorce kept things from getting worse, but it took a while to put her life back together. Once a year, Ray Carlton, the second Ghost, files an appeal and once a year, the judge swats it down. Julia does the paralegal work on her own case. The prosecutor’s office is happy to get the free set of hands, and it gives Julia a sense of satisfaction.
“You’ve endangered my life,” I say to her.
“It’s a plastic knife,” Russell says.
“That’s not the issue.”
“We’ve got bigger problems than your paranoia,” Julia says.
“You endangered my safety,” I repeat.
“Ladies,” Russell says. “Before the catfight commences, maybe we can have a more substantive discussion.”
His tougher-than-leather attitude is undermined by his whiny voice and wet crotch.
“How do you know someone’s writing a book?” I ask Julia.
“I told her,” Russell says.
I am at a loss for words. Whatever script I was given, he just took it in a direction I don’t understand. My go bag hangs from a hook by the cage. I can grab it and be out of here in seconds.
“Christophe Volker,” Julia says. “You’ve seen the news? You heard what he did to Adrienne?”
I don’t trust myself to speak, so I nod.
“That Stephanie Fugate, the survivor in yesterday’s Camp Red Lake killings,” Julia says. “She told the police that Christophe was a Chatty Cathy. The entire time he was coming after her he would not shut up about women this, single mothers that, the homosexual agenda, Obama’s birth certificate, FEMA death camps. One of the things she remembers him saying is that he’d talked to someone in our group. That they were writing a book and asked him for details about his lawsuits with Adrienne.”
“Essentially,” Russell says, “you ladies have a leak. And this lunatic knew about it.”
“It’s Heather,” Julia says.
Julia doesn’t use the words most people use like I think or in my opinion. She just states her opinion like it’s a fact.
“Heather wouldn’t do that,” I say.
“She doesn’t feel the same loyalty we do,” Julia says. “She tried to write a book before, so we know she’s not opposed to the idea, and she always needs money.”
“It can’t be Heather,” I say.
“Of course it’s Heather,” Julia says. “I tried her halfway house, but she hadn’t come back from group. It’s likely she heard about Volker and took off because she knew we’d kick her ass.”
“But you think I’m crazy,” I say.
“What?” Julia asks.
“At group. You said that I was the reason group stuck together, not Heather. That I was the crazy one. You made a big thing out of it.”
“Well . . .” Julia looks around my apartment. “This doesn’t exactly look like the product of a healthy mind.”
“Not to be rude,” Russell says, “but I had no idea you were a total lunatic.”
“Shut up,” Julia tells him. “Lynnette, I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings and violated your trust. But right now, Heather is writing a book and that puts us all in danger. Any book about group is practically a how-to manual for every unstable fan with an urge to take a shot at the castrating mommy figure who killed their psycho supergod.”
“Heather doesn’t have the patience to write a book,” I say. “And she’s too selfish to split the money with a ghostwriter. The book’s not important. How’d Volker get Adrienne’s home address?”
“He’s a stalker,” Julia says. “They stalk. You’re missing the point. Do I really need to explain what will happen if some Final Girl Support Group tell-all comes out courtesy of Heather DeLuca?”
We’ve all spent a lot of time in the public eye, but the public doesn’t know about group. I think of our monsters rotting in prison and on death row and their fans on the outside; I think about the press who suddenly seem to have a taste for our blood again now that one of us has been murdered. I think of what would happen if they knew we met once a month in a church basement in Burbank.
“I still don’t get why he’s here,” I say, pointing at Russell with my chin.
“He called me about what that kid said about Volker,” Julia says. “He also asked if I knew where you live. I didn’t know he was going to follow me here.”
“I did manage to get your door open,” Russell brags, as if his pants aren’t stained with his own piss. “Proving that I am not unresourceful. You’ll find that cooperating with me will only be of benefit.”
“He told you what Volker said?” I ask. This obnoxious bottom-feeder has been a mosquito in all our ears for years. Maybe I can still turn this around. “How do you know he’s not lying to you?”
Russell lets out a frustrated sigh, probably wishing we were men because then he could communicate with us like adults, and he strides to the window, pausing dramatically by my blackout curtains, striking a pose known as Counselor Addressing the Jury.
“You ladies have always underestimated me,” he says. “I suggest, however, we enter into a new spirit of cooperation.”
He has my curtains parted, looking down at the street. I never open my curtains. It presents a target. The windowsill is thick with dust and dead spiders.
“Close them,” I say.
“Someone called the police,” he says, looking out at the street. He yanks my curtains back. The flood of light drives me deeper into the room. “This block is positively crawling with law enforcement.”
“California has castle doctrine,” I say. “I am perfectly justified in firing my weapon inside my home.”
Glass breaks with a metallic snap and the street noise gets louder as something slaps the opposite wall. Plaster dust puffs up. Thunder rolls down the street outside.
slap-pow boooom
There’s another one. The curtains in Russell’s hand twitch and something shoves Julia backward in her chair, her head making a hollow-coconut thonk on the floor. Fresh air blows through two holes in my window. I stare at a shard of glass that hangs for a second, then separates and tinkles off the windowsill. Then my windows explode.
slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow boooom
My castle becomes a shooting gallery. Lead teeth shred the curtains into tatters, blast glass across the floor, chew the plaster walls into chips. White dust chokes the air and coats my throat. A sniper. I see pale muzzle flashes from the roof across the street. It’s higher. They have perfect sightlines. I never thought of a sniper. I never thought they’d try to kill me from so far away.
The noise sounds like my world ripping itself in half and it’s never going to stop.
Russell cowers on the floor, shoulders hunched, holding his hands over his head.
Everything goes silent.
“They’re shooting!” Russell shouts in the sudden silence. “They’re shooting at us!”
Electricity races down my spine and I drop my gun, rising to a crouch, sprinting across the room, making for Fine.
Got you, I think at him, as I scoop him up. I’m not leaving you behind.
Then I turn to where Julia lies tangled up in her chair. She doesn’t move. I take one long step toward her and the world explodes again.
slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow boooom
“No! No! No!” Russell shrieks. “Help me!”
I try for Julia but the wall divots in front of me, plaster dust covers my eyes. I reverse, digging my feet into the floor, overbalance backward, and go down hard on one hip. Fine spins across the floor, trailing dirt.
“Fine!” I shout as he comes to a rest in the far corner. Russell launches himself off the floor and runs for the front door, stepping down hard on one of my hands.
slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow boooom
He flies sideways and hits the wall limp, then drops to the floor. I am on my feet, trying again for Julia, but the gunfire drives me back, makes my brain go red, and before I can think I’m changing direction, grabbing my go bag, slapping in the code on the keypad and the bolts smack open. I prepare for a bullet to tear through my back. Everything I’ve spent years being terrified of is happening all at once. My old scars ache like fresh wounds. My entire field of vision is the door to the hall. I’m not looking so paranoid right this minute.
slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow
The cage vibrates all around me.
slap-pow slap-pow slap-pow
I owe that guy a thank-you for selling me defective mesh. I throw the hall door wide, and I run.
I’m sorry, I think over my shoulder at Julia and at Fine.
Lynnette!Fine shouts after me, or maybe it’s Julia. Don’t leave me!
Then I’m in the hall, leaving my home behind, leaving my best friend behind, leaving Julia behind. It turns out that when push came to shove, I only saved myself.