The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP VII:
Son of the Final Girls
I’d really prefer it if you didn’t sit on the floor,” Skye says, shifting gears.
I’m folded into the leg well of the passenger seat, knees at my chin, back pressed against the door, the glove compartment shoving my head forward. There are eyes outside, looking for me. I’m not taking any chances.
“It’s not up for debate,” I say.
Skye sighs and keeps driving, headlights from oncoming cars stroking his long face from right to left. Right to left. Riding in cars always makes me sleepy, bouncing my head, making my eyelids heavy, filling my chest with sleep-smell.
He makes a right-hand turn and the door handle digs into my back. My go bag is on the seat, partially unzipped, and my hand rests inside holding my .22. The rough grip feels sweaty.
“What kind of stuff?” Skye asks.
“What?” I say.
“In my room you said you’d seen stuff that makes the stuff I was looking at look like Dora the Explorer,” he says. “Like what?”
That’s one of the warning signs, abnormal sexual interests. I’m not sleepy anymore. I make sure my grip is secure on my weapon.
“Sorry,” he says. “That sounded pervy.”
He flicks his eyes down to me and gives an embarrassed half smile. I remember how ashamed I felt of every single thing that came out of my mouth when I was only a little younger than he is now. I cut him a break.
“There’s a guy named Kenneth Hampson,” I say. “He worked Boy Scout camps outside Laredo under the name the Desert Reaper. He’s got a scam going in prison where he sells vials of his semen under the name Reaper Seed.”
“No!” Skye says. “Get out!”
“A guard sneaks it out in his thermos,” I say. “Then sells it online.”
“How do you know?” he asks.
“There’s a whole world out there,” I say. “Everyone wants a piece of these psychos. They call it murderabilia. Dirt from the graves of their victims. The prom dress Colleen van Deusen was wearing when the Knight in White Satin chopped off her head. That sold for eight thousand dollars.”
“How do people get away with it?” he asks.
“Her parents are the ones who sold the prom dress,” I say. “Sometimes you need the money more than you need to live with yourself.”
“Have you ever done that?” he asks.
It’s a fair question, but I’m angry. He’s stuck his finger in a wound. I count to five to calm down.
“No,” I lie.
“You like this stuff,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question, and there’s judgment in his voice, just like his mom.
The car’s taking a curve and then he’s twisting his shoulders around to watch traffic before he merges. Now we’re moving so fast that I have to shout to be heard over the engine.
“Tell me how I chose this,” I say. “Tell me how I picked this life. I was minding my own business and a monster came through my door. Not because I ignored the Keep Out signs and snuck into the old asylum, not because I built my house on top of an Indian burial mound. I didn’t ‘ask for it,’ this was done to me.”
“Yeah,” he says, loudly. “But you keep dwelling on it. I mean, Mom says this happened, like, a hundred years ago. You could move on.”
My back is killing me. The way I’m sitting crushes my left kidney, which hasn’t been in great shape ever since Ricky Walker stopped by. I fight the urge to haul myself up into the passenger seat.
“You’re right,” I say. “None of us have to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to her. Unfortunately, those things have a bad habit of coming back and trying to kill us again. After a while, you start to realize that your life isn’t the thing that happens between the monsters, your life is the monsters.”
“But you don’t have to look at a guy selling his jizz online,” he says, making a left. It takes some pressure off my poor kidney. I’m holding my pistol with my left arm and my shoulder burns.
“Do you read the newspaper?” I ask.
“No,” he says with contempt.
“Online news?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Why?” I say. “None of that stuff is going to happen to you. If you didn’t know about Deepwater Horizon you’d get through your day just fine. Why bother?”
“Because I want to know what’s going on in the world,” he says.
“Exactly,” I say.
He thinks about it, then shakes his head.
“It’s not the same thing,” he says. Before I can point out to him that it’s exactly the same thing, he says, “We’re coming to your street.”
He takes a right. Kidney pinch.
“Cruise by slow,” I say. “Look for any vans with TV station logos on the side or big antennas.”
He’s driving too slow, twisting his head from side to side too conspicuously, but he’s the only partner I’ve got. I just hope he doesn’t get spotted and blow it for both of us. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want Dr. Carol to find out I’ve dragged her kid into this mess.
“Three vans,” he says. “KTTV, KTLA, and one unmarked, but they’re all parked together.”
“Okay,” I say. “Now keep looking for any late-model four-door sedans with two men sitting inside doing nothing.”
We’re almost at the end of the block.
“There it is!” he whisper-shouts. “Gray Pontiac Bonneville. Two guys, one black, one white, drinking Red Bull.”
“Keep driving,” I say. “Take a right at the end of the block. Don’t speed up, don’t slow down. Just cruise through.”
He does what I tell him and I guide him to the parking lot of the apartments behind my building. I reach up and unlatch the door, then haul my aching bones out. The first thing I do is scan the lot to make sure we’re alone. Like I expected, no one thought to put anyone out back where the sole door can only be opened from the inside. I transfer my pistol to my fanny pack so it’s easier to reach.
“You had a gun in my car?” he asks in disbelief.
“In my bag,” I say.
“Was it pointed at me?”
“No,” I lie.
“You totally had it pointed at me!” he says.
The orange sodium streetlights turn his face into a pumpkin and his eyes into panda circles of shadow. I grab a Trader Joe’s bag out of his back seat.
“Man up,” I say. “Here’s what I need you to do. Take some crap from your car and fill this bag. Walk around the building and go in my front door. Here’s the keys. Don’t rubberneck, don’t pause, don’t look around. Walk like you belong there, sort of bored, sort of bossy. Take the elevator to two, then come down the back stairs and use this to open the fire door.”
I hunt around and find the paint scraper where I tossed it behind the building yesterday.
“You were going to shoot me,” he says.
“You want the rest of your money?” I ask.
I’ve only paid him two hundred dollars so far. He nods. I peel off the bills.
“Make sure you don’t press the alarm bar when you open the back door,” I say. “Repeat it back to me.”
He does, and then, bag crackling by his side, he walks around the building. His back is orange, then silhouetted, and then it’s gone. If his shorts were high and tight instead of low and baggy, if his hair were shaggy and long instead of styled and close, he’d be a ringer for Tommy.
Julia had a theory.
“We’re just the high school quarterback, talking about the touchdown pass he threw in ’72,” she said. “High school was everyone’s glory days. For us, high school is all tangled up in memories of our trauma. We have the same normal nostalgic inclinations as other people, but when we walk back in our minds to this supposedly wonderful time we have people trying to kill us. For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”
I think about her in the ICU, face bruised, a machine breathing for her, spine probably shattered again. I try not to feel like it’s my fault.
Something fumbles at the other side of the door, metal scrapes across metal, and then the door clicks open and light spills into the parking lot. Moths hurl their bodies through the crack in the doorway as I slip through.
“Did they see you?” I ask.
“I totally strolled right past them,” Tommy says. I mean, Skye. That’s what Skye says.
“Let’s go,” I say, hitting the stairs.
“We’re not going to take the elevator?” he asks from behind me, still standing on the first floor of the stairwell, looking up at my ass.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “It’s only three floors.”
He grumbles but after a second I hear his sneakers scuffing up the stairs behind me. I wait for him to catch up with me on three, then carefully crack the fire door. My hall is clear, and I move down it fast. I don’t want someone peering out their peephole and spotting me. Skye ambles along like he doesn’t care.
Three strips of yellow police tape cover my door and there’s a paper Burbank PD seal over my lock. There’s also a padlock hanging from a newly installed hasp.
“Shit,” Skye says. “I guess that’s that.”
I dig into my go bag and pull out a small Velcro pouch. From it, I pull an Allen wrench I ground down, and I insert it in the padlock’s keyhole, put some downward pressure on it, then use a hacksaw I filed into a lockpick and in about twenty seconds I pop the lock.
“Wow.” Skye whistles.
“Hush,” I say proudly.
I slice the seal and push inside. My cage hangs open. They must have taken sledgehammers to it. The hinges are torqued and the door is almost bent in two. The room is flooded with orange from the streetlights. My curtains lie in tatters on the floor. Through the broken windows I can hear a couple walking by talking about where they parked and the girl laughs. Everything in my apartment is gone. It’s empty.
“You got ripped off,” Skye says, crowding in behind me. “That sucks.”
“It’s evidence,” I say.
I do a walkthrough, making sure Skye stays by the front door. A book lies open in the middle of the living room floor with a boot print stamped across the pages right next to brown drag marks—Julia’s blood. In the bathroom, a lonely bra hangs over the shower rod. All four of my safes have been drilled, and they all gape open, empty.
In the living room, Skye crouches in the corner looking at something.
“They trashed your plant,” he says.
I shove him aside.
Fine!I think at him, relieved he’s safe.
I get nothing from him but icy silence. He’s lying on his side in the corner, a forlorn little twist of garbage. His roots cling to a ball of dirt. I find a soup pot in the kitchen and scoop up as much of his soil as I can and put him in. It’s too big. I water him in the sink.
“Is that what you came back for?” Skye asks from the kitchen door.
“No,” I say. “But there’s no point in killing my plant.”
Or running away and leaving him behind to die, Fine adds in my mind.
I’m sorry, I tell him, but he’s gone back to the silent treatment.
I carry Fine into the living room. The treadmill is still there and so is my desk. I put Fine on the treadmill, then squat in front of my desk.
It’s clear of monitors; there’s no keyboard, no mouse, even my printer is gone. They took the CPU that sat on the floor beneath my desk, but I press a panel I chopped in the drywall behind a tangle of wires, and it pops open to reveal my actual CPU. The one they took is a dummy. One is none, and two is one.
“I want to get into that,” I tell Skye, hauling it out.
“Sure, we can bring it back to my mom’s,” he says.
“Can you do it here?”
“I’ve got a busted-out laptop in my trunk,” he says. “It can double for your monitor and keyboard.”
“Go get it,” I say. “Go out the back way and leave the door propped open.”
While he’s gone I head into the kitchen and open the cabinet under the sink. A board on the bottom of the cabinet comes up, and I brush aside bottles of cleaner until I can stick my arm into the space between the cabinet and the floor. My fingers snag slick plastic.
I drag out the big Ziploc freezer bag. Inside is three thousand dollars in twenties wrapped in three fat, heavy rolls. I slip them into my go bag.
Twenty minutes pass before Skye comes sauntering back, whistling, a laptop and cables under one arm. The younger generation really needs to learn what “hustle” means.
“What?” he asks as I give him a look. “You said to act natural.”
It’s another few minutes before he has his laptop hooked up to my CPU. We sit on the floor next to each other. It takes all my willpower to hold still. Three news vans downstairs, one unmarked cop car, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes upstairs to check out the crime scene. All my senses are on high alert for the sound of the elevator doors opening or footsteps in the hall. I’m worried they’ll see the missing padlock and come inside. Or someone on the street will see the laptop light on the ceiling. Or our knees might touch. I tell Skye to work fast.
“It would help if I knew what I was looking for,” he says.
“Something I may have downloaded, or that would have installed itself,” I say. “Some way that someone could have taken a file off my computer without me knowing.”
Skye taps around in the unadorned code for less than a minute, briskly sifting the punctuation mark soup that actually powers my computer.
“There you go,” he says. “Someone installed TeamViewer.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s a program that allows them to remotely operate your system,” he says. “It’s been on there a while. You got hosed.”
I’m embarrassed my security was breached and even more embarrassed that it took him approximately five seconds to find out. I’ve gotten sloppy.
“How’d it get on there?” I ask, feeling defensive. “I didn’t do it.”
“Probably something you downloaded,” he says.
“I’ve got a good firewall,” I say. “I’ve got antivirus software.”
“Yeah, but once this was in they could install permissions, so your system ignored it,” he says.
“How did it get there in the first place?” I ask. I feel my skin tighten. “Did someone come in here?”
“They could have,” he says. “But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. It could have been hidden in an attachment you downloaded.”
“I don’t download attachments,” I say. But I do.
I’ve downloaded them from the Utah Department of Corrections. I’ve downloaded them from Amazon. I’ve downloaded them from the other final girls in the group. I’ve downloaded them from Dr. Carol.
My mouth tastes like garbage. I was so arrogant to think I was safe. Arrogant and stupid, the way I was before I met the Walkers. The world has gotten more sophisticated and I haven’t kept up. While I was guarding my door they snuck in through my computer windows.
“Get unplugged,” I say, taking out my multitool, angry and curt.
He puts his laptop to sleep and disconnects the cables. I unscrew the back of my CPU and take out the hard drive, my screwdriver constantly slipping out of the tiny screw slots. By the time I’m done, the knuckles on my right hand are shredded and sore. I grab Fine, tuck the hard drive into my bag, then close up the CPU and take it with us.
“Leave it,” Skye says. “It’s useless.”
I don’t answer. I close the padlock behind us, my pupils dilating painfully in the bright hall, and I replace the crime scene tape, trying to make it look like no one was ever inside. There’s nothing I can do about the Burbank police seal, but hopefully they’ll chalk it up to nosy journalists with flexible ethics.
We truck the CPU down the fire stairs, Skye complaining in whispers all the way that this is stupid, that I don’t have to take it, but he’s a kid. What does he know? Some cop will come back at some point and if this is sitting there with its hard drive missing even the geniuses in the Burbank PD will realize I came back to get it because it’s important. And I don’t want anyone looking for my hard drive.
Because it’s got my book on it.
—
Back in Skye’s car, I put the CPU in his back seat and peel off a hundred dollars.
“Here,” I say. “An extra hundred to toss that in a dumpster at a McDonald’s or a Jack in the Box. Any fast-food place. Their garbage gets picked up by private contractors later tonight or early in the morning so it’ll be gone faster.”
“Where are you going?” he asks.
I peel off another hundred.
“This is for giving me a ride out to Bel Air and not telling your mother.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he says. “We keep a pretty honest house.”
I peel off sixty more.
“Do you have a number where I can reach you?” he asks, taking the money.
“Why?”
“I’ll keep you in the loop,” he says. “Fill you in on whatever my mom knows.”
“No,” I say. “After you drop me off, your whole family should stay far away from us.”
“Is it always so dramatic with you guys?” Skye asks.
“No,” I say. “But it’s never safe. The things that happened to us never end.”
Standing outside makes me nervous, so I get on the floor. Skye slides behind the wheel and locks the doors. Good. He’s learning.
“I feel sorry for you,” he says as we pull out of the parking lot. “My mom talks about the six of you all the time. It doesn’t sound like much of a life. Why don’t they just execute the guys who did this to you? Then you could actually move on.”
“It’d just be someone else,” I say, putting Fine on the seat. “At least this way I know where the threat is coming from.”
“Are those guys really that scary?” he asks.
“Scarier than you can ever imagine,” I answer.
He stares down at me.
“You look like an idiot. Come on, it’s totally dark.”
For some reason looking like an idiot makes me feel self-conscious in front of this kid. Not a kid. He’s twenty-six years old. By the time I was his age my life was pretty much over. I hoist myself up into the seat, careful not to hit the gearshift, and strap on the seat belt.
“Doesn’t that feel better?” he asks. “It’s almost like you’re a normal person.”
He throws me a smile. This kid’s a charmer. I give him my best smile back, but even I know it’s not worth much.
We drive for almost forty-five minutes. We get onto the 405 and head for the hills. I hate being outside this way, but at least moving seventy-five miles an hour on the freeway feels like the odds are more in my favor. We turn off into the boring little neighborhoods that cluster around Sunset, pass UCLA, and head through the West Gate, which feels like driving onto some old studio backlot, and then we’re lifting off into the hills.
I haven’t been around a stranger like this in sixteen years. It lulls me. It feels normal. I check the back seat to make sure no one’s hiding there. Then I check it again. Layers of my skin peel off and flutter away behind me onto the shoulder of the road. I risk a look over at Skye. He’s got Tommy’s profile. It reminds me of how different things could have been, of what a different person I might have become, and it takes everything inside me not to reach out and lay my hand over his on the gearshift.
I feel nervous, twitchy, like I want to talk. My skin crackles, galvanized, and little prickles run up and down my forearms. I keep myself under control. I wait until we’re a few blocks from my destination before speaking.
“Drop me at the corner,” I say.
He pulls up and puts the car in park. We sit in the front seat like lovers at the end of a first date. The moment becomes loaded with meaning. It becomes uncomfortable. I see the peach fuzz on his cheek, backlit gold by the streetlight. He’s looking at me, and my breathing is high and tight in my chest.
He has no armor. No protection. He looks like Tommy right before the doorbell rang that night. Suddenly, I want to give him something, something to keep him safe, something he can remember me by. Something that would be just his, that might make the difference if anything ever happened to him, that might keep him from turning into one of us.
I lean over and he gets very still. His chest stops moving. I press my mouth to his ear, and feel my warm, moist breath cupped by the coral-pink curl of his ear.
“Don’t ever let your guard down.”
It isn’t much, but it’s all I have.
Then I push myself out of his car and I’m gone.