The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP VIII:
Night of the Final Girls
I don’t move until I hear Skye make a three-point turn, brake lights flaring against the trees, then he’s heading back down the hill, and I step backward into the shrubbery and wait, scoping the street, making sure he doesn’t come back, making sure no one is following me.
My go bag is heavy with the hard drive and it presses into the small of my back. It weighs a ton. Why shouldn’t it? It’s full of everyone’s secrets.
I blame Russell Thorn. He was one of those bottom-feeders who viewed a talking-head slot on CNN as a career high. He’d interviewed almost all of us at some point, and along the way he’d figured out that I made extra money self-publishing romance ebooks under a couple of fake names. It’s a bad joke, right? A woman who’s never had a serious relationship writing about secret billionaires’ second chances with their high school sweethearts, or rugged ranchers and the free-spirited animal rights activists who break their hearts. I don’t disagree, but I’m good at it, and I need to make a living. Maybe I’m good at it because for me, all romance is a fantasy. I don’t have any real-life experience to get in the way.
Russell got in touch and tried to blackmail me without blackmailing me.
“I don’t know what to do, Lynnette,” he said over the phone. “I could sell this article to a big outlet, maybe get a book deal.”
“If you go public I can’t write anymore,” I said, nauseated at the thought of being stripped naked in public again, of every stalker and gutter-crawling media creep thinking Lynnette Tarkington is just a girl who wanted to find true love. I’d have to delete everything. Years of work. “I need to pay my rent.”
“If you want me to spike it, you need to offer me something of comparable value,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Why not bring about the demise of two birds with one stone?” Russell suggested, pretending this hadn’t been his plan all along. “Why don’t we co-author a little literary endeavor of our own?”
He promised he could get us a six-figure advance for a book giving the inside scoop on final girls with both our names on the cover, but it had to contain new material and it had to be about more than me. The title just popped into my head: The Final Girl Support Group. Dr. Carol had done well building a career based on her work with trauma survivors like us; maybe it was time I cashed in, too? I told him to go ahead and field offers, but to keep it quiet. I think he envisioned that I’d feed him information and he’d turn it into deathless prose, but after I hung up I realized: what did I need Russell Thorn for?
I decided to write the book myself and once he came up with an offer I’d do an end run around him and approach the publisher directly. It was a sleazy move, but Russell was a sleazy guy. Then I started writing and changed my mind.
Normally I write fantasies involving helicopter skiing and private islands, but writing about something that cut this close to the bone destroyed my defenses. Everything came out: Dani’s guilt, Heather’s addictions, Julia’s intellectual pretensions, Marilyn’s denial, Michelle’s cancer, Dr. Carol’s hunger for celebrity. I wrote it in a white-hot burst and immediately regretted every word. Sentence by sentence, it was nothing but betrayal. I couldn’t publish it, no matter how badly I needed the money, so I cut off all contact with Russell and buried the document deep in my hard drive. I can’t face throwing my writing away, and I foolishly thought it was safe, but I should have known that none of us is ever really safe.
Russell went berserk trying to get in touch, but I just blocked his number and put his email address into my spam filter. He must have been humiliated, having to go back to some editor empty-handed, and humiliation is a trigger for men. Did Russell stage the scene in my apartment? Was he wearing a bulletproof vest? Was he really dead when I ran away? Did he steal the book off my hard drive? It makes no sense for him to take it and then wait for Julia, though. But who else knew about the book? I never should have written that book.
Every few months, I reread the pages I wrote and sometimes add something new, but I know the only right thing to do is to drag the document into the trash. Somehow I never got around to it and now someone has gotten their hands on it and they know more about our lives than they should, and Dr. Carol wants to take me to the cops so I’m running to the only safe place I know anymore.
The street is clear, so I head uphill, going slow like I’m out for a casual stroll carrying a pepper plant in a soup pot, although the only people who walk in Bel Air either have a dog leash in their hands or a leaf blower strapped to their backs.
I stop at the corner and check out the entrance. Next to the front gate is a linebacker in a black Tom Ford suit and steel-toed combat boots wearing an earpiece. She’s hired extra security. Smart. I decide to go over the wall. I hide Fine in some bushes, much to his irritation, and then I take a running start, jump up, catch a mass of creeper vines clinging to her enormous privacy wall, and haul myself up.
The leaves rustle too loudly and I pause at the top to make sure no one heard. I’m clear, but it’s too high to jump, so I turn around and hang by my hands, dropping into the bushes on the other side.
I land on a bush and it sends me stumbling into another bush, and then I’m eating dirt. I stagger to my feet and get away from my landing zone as fast as possible. I figure with a guard at the gate I’ll go in the front door, but as I get closer to the long private drive I realize she’s running valet service.
Shit.
Marilyn’s having a party.
You don’t separate Heather from her drugs, or Dani from Michelle, or Julia from her feminist theory, and you don’t separate Marilyn Torres from her social life. It’s her religion. The week she got into that van to head out into the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, all she was dreaming about was being a debutante. She’d already spent months practicing the Texas Dip for her debut at the Women’s Symphony League of Austin Jewel Ball.
But the rumor had been going around that someone was digging up graves and desecrating cadavers, and the thought that the mummified remains of the family patriarch might wind up wired to a headstone with his picture on the front page of the paper was enough to send Marilyn’s mother to bed with Valium in one hand and vodka in the other. After all, they were some of the original Spanish land grantees in Texas. They had an image to uphold. So Marilyn, her brother, and three friends headed off into that broiling hot summer day to make sure that Granddaddy Torres’s corpse was still reposing respectably underground.
That was when one old Austin family ran into another.
I try to avoid stereotypes, but in the case of the Hansen family they literally were inbred rednecks. Former slaughterhouse owners fallen on hard times a couple of generations back, their last women had died off earlier that year and the boys were feeling the need to breed. Here came this van full of firm young flesh and they fell on it like starving tourists at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
There are two lines you can’t come back from once you cross them. Killing people is one. Eating people is the other. Marilyn’s talked about what happened in group before, a long time ago, back at the beginning, and a lot of it had to do with straight razors, and being forced to wear a leather suit made out of human skin, and sledgehammers, and rendering vats. Most of us try not to remember the details.
Marilyn was the only one who survived. From July to August she stayed in her room, hiding from the press, then two weeks before the Jewel Ball she emerged and declared that she was going to the dance. Her parents warned her against it, her doctors warned her against it, the police warned her against it, but she went, and on the night of the ball she wore her big puffy white dress and while Johnny Mercer sang “Moon River” she folded like a rose and executed a perfect Texas Dip. A few folks called her shallow, but we know why she did it. Some people may have seen her do the Texas Dip that night, but us final girls all saw a raised middle finger aimed at the Hansens.
A year later, the surviving members of the Hansen family showed up at the radio station where Marilyn had gotten a job as a late-night DJ, hoping to anchor the local news one day. She made short work of Uncle Tex and the police took care of Viper, but Buddy chased her up the broadcast antenna. She Maced him in the face and sent him plunging eighty-five feet onto a squad car.
It’s hard to hold your head up in society after something like that, so she moved to Dallas and then, after a failed first marriage, tried L.A., where she set her sights on the son of the founder of Rehabilitation America Partners, a private company that owns and operates forty-eight correctional facilities in thirty states, running something like eighty-five thousand beds. Now she’s a committed vegan, an ardent social climber, and monstrously rich. And tonight, all three of those parts of her personality have converged at this party.
Another Escalade with tinted windows cruises to a stop, the driver comes around and opens the back door, and a fresh and dewy young woman in a peach gown gets out, led by an elderly mummy in a tuxedo who holds on to her arm like a leash. The driver gets back into his land yacht and cruises away and I get a wash of party sounds as the mummy and his shimmering pet pass into the house.
I really, really, really hate to break up Marilyn’s big event, but more important things are happening. I decide that I’ll slip around back, where there’ll be less security, find her, and discreetly have a word. She might be angry with me at first, but once I’ve warned her about what’s happening I’ll ask her to let me stay. Just until I know where I’m going next. She can’t say no.
“Excuse me,” a man calls from behind. “May I help you?”
I don’t even look. I know what security sounds like. I turn to my left and make my way down the shadowy side of the house, over the grass, toward the lights and laughter in the backyard. It feels like I’m backstage, getting ready to step into the spotlight.
“Excuse me,” the man says, and his voice is closer this time.
Before I can break into a jog, a hand clamps down on my shoulder.
“Stop—”
I don’t let him finish. I spin, brushing his arm off and stepping in close to deliver a knee to his balls. He twists and takes my knee on his thigh. He’s a big guy in a dark suit and I panic. I reach for my fanny pack and my gun; I should have had it drawn in the first place. Before I can yank my zipper, he grabs my wrist and rotates my forearm so it’s facing up, putting pressure on my elbow. I should have kept my distance because once a man gets his hands on you it’s all over.
I try for my fanny pack with my left hand, but he gets my right arm in a wrist lock that commands my full attention, pushing my fingers back toward my chest like he’s folding my palm flush with the inside of my wrist. My radius and ulna creak from the strain. He puts me on my knees, then folds me over onto my stomach, using my hyperextended wrist to control me.
Before I know it, his foot is on the small of my back, my fanny pack is unclipped and out of reach, and he’s on his earpiece.
“We’ve got an intruder, armed,” he says, low and urgent.
I stretch, reaching for the razor blade taped to my ankle, and he shifts his weight and brings his other foot down on my wrist.
One thing I have to say about Marilyn, she pays for top-shelf security.
Flashlight beams hit my face and someone zip-ties my wrists together. This has all gone wrong. What are they going to do to me? I try to struggle but they keep me in place with no effort.
“Call the police,” one of them says. “We’ll put her in the garage until they get here.”
There’s a pause and then scattered mutterings of “Ma’am,” “Ma’am.” One of them rocks me up off the ground so I’m seated, bound wrists behind me. In front of me stands Marilyn in a pale gray flowing thing that looks expensive. Constructed of well-bred bones, deeply moisturized skin, and a fabulous thick mane of dark hair, she’s about the size of one of these security creeps’ biceps.
“Oh, Lynne.” She sighs. There’s a glass of wine in one of her hands. “It is so sweet of you to drop by, but you can’t be here tonight.”
“We have to talk,” I say.
“Okay, miss,” one of the bruisers says to me. “You need to stop speaking right now.”
I start to scream. That’ll bring someone running.
The second my wail splits the air, Marilyn’s face looks stricken, and one of the goons drops to a knee and clamps his hand over my mouth.
“Bring her around back,” Marilyn says. “We’ll put her in the guest cottage.” She turns to me. “We’ll talk later, sweetie?”
I bite the soft salty palm over my face, grinding my teeth down, really sawing through his flesh. He doesn’t flinch.
“If I have him take his hand off, will you be quiet?” Marilyn asks.
I nod. He takes his hand off. I start to scream.
“Lynnette!” Marilyn snaps. I stop screaming. “I have guests! Whatever you’ve come for can wait. I am broken up about Adrienne and Julia, too, and we can talk later and that will be wonderful, but right now this is a benefit for retired circus animals. It is very important to me, do you understand? These lions have suffered enough.”
“One hour,” I say.
“Of course.” She sighs again. “You are such a sweetheart to want to come and visit.”
She leans forward and gives me a big “Mwah” on my cheek, leaving lipstick behind. Here behind her walls with her cameras and her security team she can be the flighty socialite she always wanted to be.
Security creeps lift me to my feet and lead me around the perimeter of the backyard.
“Unclip her hands,” Marilyn says. “This isn’t one of Jerry’s prisons.”
“One hour,” I remind her as a goon snips my cuffs off.
We skirt the edge of the lights. The yard sprawls on my right, strung with Chinese lanterns and rich old men and trophy wives standing under tall metal outdoor heaters that loom like watchtowers. No one’s watching their backs, or checking the exits, or showing any spatial awareness whatsoever. On my left are the lights of Los Angeles, scattered across the blackness below the hills, looking cleaner and crisper than they have any right to be. The view from up here can trick you into thinking the world is a beautiful place.
“Keep going,” one of the goons says, propelling me forward with a hand in the small of my back.
Up ahead, on the other side of the glowing blue pool, is a two-story Mediterranean cottage with a red tile roof. It’s big enough for a small family. In the glow of paper lanterns hanging from the trees I see a goon standing at parade rest by its French doors, hands clasped behind his back.
They pop the door’s hermetic seal and I get professionally propelled out of the cool night air and into the dry warmth of central heating. The guest house is lit up, full of Mission furniture, laid with heavy terra-cotta floor tiles, walls covered in tasteful Mexican art that’s all colored dots and electric lines. There are cut metal sculptures peeled into the shape of rabbits, and jaguars, and parrots, and snakes tucked into all the corners. It’s a cottage full of things I could never afford, things I could never own. Nice things. Settled things. The kind of things you have when you don’t need to be able to run out the door the second trouble comes looking for you. The kind of things you have when you can afford the security to protect them.
In the middle of all this jealousy-inducing luxury sits Heather, feet on the coffee table, watching TV, smoking a cigarette and ashing on the floor.
She looks up at me, all casual cool.
“What’s up, Lynne?” she asks. “Shitty party, right?”