BLACK CHRISTMAS
Abby Grandlin must be in her backyard. In the summer. That’s when her dad cooks his venison sausage on their wood-pellet grill, and then cuts that long horseshoe of meat into thick greasy coins on the big white platter and waiters it around to everyone he’s invited over, handing them a toothpick to select their own bite, then watching as it bursts tenderly in their mouth.
It’s that done-but-not-too-done smell that Abby remembers best.
But he’s… he’s burning them? Definitely. Her heart thumps, her throat constricts, her ears try to dial in that laugh he does when he’s sneaked more beer from the cooler than he’s supposed to have.
Where are you, Dad?
She sits up fast, instantly reeling, her forearm shiny with whatever grease the skin exudes as last defense when it’s nestled up to a flickering Yankee candle.
Abby hits that hot glass tube of a jar with her elbow and it clatters away, the wax splashing, the flame guttering, guttering… gone.
That burnt deer sausage smell isn’t venison, either. But that’s the least of Abby’s concerns, she’s realizing.
She sits up straighter and nearly falls sideways. Not from pain, though there is pain, but—dizziness. And then, like she’s not part of her body anymore, she clocks what’s going on: her eyes are no longer in stereo. They’re sending data into her head that her head’s not exactly ready for. Because… because her eyes are taking in a wider field of view than they should be, than they ever have?
Abby covers her right eye with her wet right hand, and the next sensation she’s never felt in her life is half the world squishing, and then going red. Her eyeball is hanging out on its stalk and when the heel of her hand presses against where her cheekbone should be, what she’s really doing is smushing her right eye into some new cavern in her face.
She throws up but doesn’t lean forward to do it, so it just burbles down her chin.
“Dad,” she says, or tries to.
She knows she should scream, that that’s the right thing to do at a time like this, but, even more than that, she doesn’t want to break this soft perfect silence of the gym at night.
It’s dim in here, only two candles burning now, maybe three if that sideways one at the free throw line can count, so she can’t see where Wynona and Jensen are, but they’re not her concern anymore, she knows.
She should be dead, she’s pretty sure.
And, also, she almost is dead.
Keeping her loose eyeball cupped under her chin, afraid that if it falls out any farther then the stalk it’s on is going to turn out to be the first part of a tendril loosely coiled in her head, a ball of enervated muscle wound tight that she’s been using for a brain this whole time, and once that starts to uncoil, she’ll go with, never come back, she uses her left hand to pull herself forward across the hardwood. Her legs are to the side and tucked back very ladylike, but that’s just because that’s all she can get them to do: contract.
Somewhere ahead of her is her purse. Her phone.
She never should have come here with Wynona, she knows now. But it wasn’t exactly “with” Wynona, was it? No, the real reason she came, it was Jensen. Not because she’s at all interested in him—yuck?—but because she didn’t trust Wynona with him. When Jensen had knocked on Wynona’s door, Abby and Wynona had been having a perfectly good time without any boys. But then Wynona had held her finger up to tell Jensen to wait just one minute for her to slip into something warm, and she’d stepped into her room and taken her grey sports bra off, arranged herself into the bright yellow one, like she had a couple of Easter eggs to present to him.
Abby didn’t want to let her do something she’d regret.
And, for all she knew, Jensen was taking Wynona to some grand and traumatizing prank being staged by Kristen and Cinnamon and Gwen, the bitches three.
Which led to this, whatever this is.
Abby pulls herself to one of the candles, rests for a moment, almost passes out, then makes herself keep going, keep going, the candle riding in front of her now. This one she’s careful not to tip over. She needs it.
Two minutes later she’s to the sideline, where the team sits when there’s a game.
It’s also the parking lot for the ball racks. Which are on wheels.
One by one, Abby uses her left hand to push the balls through, out the back side of the rack. Her right hand is still trying to hold her eye in, clap it in darkness so her brain can… not “work,” exactly, but fail less, anyway.
And, so, where is Jensen? Wynona? Weren’t they here when Abby stumbled in, to warn them? Did they see her, turn tail, pull some eject lever, never mind the one who just saved them?
Abby turns her head as much as it will, trying to locate Wynona’s bright white t-shirt in the darkness, but no luck.
She got out, then. She got away. Because she didn’t blunder down the hall to the nurse’s office for fucking hydrogen peroxide, to save an article of underclothing that shouldn’t have even been on display in the first place.
Not that Abby ever made it to the nurse’s office.
She pushes the last ball out of the rack and works her armpit up to sort of hang on the third shelf—not really shelves, more like parallel rods for the balls to sit in. Doesn’t matter: it takes her weight. It wants to fall over, but she can push back with her feet a little, now.
It’s enough. Not quite the wheelchair she needs—what she needs is a stretcher, and three ambulances, maybe a helicopter—but it rolls faster than she can slide.
“Nona!” she manages to yell, hoping.
Nothing.
Her purse is by the door, that’s where it is. Half a court away, now, and she forgot the stupid candle, and her arm still smells like crispy venison, and she can’t do this.
But then she imagines that the stands are full.
The whole house is watching her.
All the women up there have their hands balled into fists, to give her strength, and all the men are hovering over their seats because it’s all they can do not to launch down to the gym floor, help this girl, this daughter, this sister.
This is all on her, though.
No, this is on her mom, isn’t it? Her mom the basketball star. Even went to college on it. Taught Abby proper form before… before Abby had to say goodbye to her in that hospital down in Idaho Falls.
After which she quit the team, because she wasn’t playing for them anymore.
The game was personal to her, now. It was between her and her mom. And she was out on their driveway draining shots and pulling spin moves every weekend, snatching down rebounds and throwing elbows.
She’d considered taking it easy on Jensen and Wynona in their big HORSE game, but then she decided that that would just make it last longer—that a quick, naked death was much better for Jensen. If she could just get him out of the picture, then maybe Wynona could retain some shred of her dignity.
Just to give it away some other day. But not this one, anyway.
And now, now here’s Abby Grandlin, motherless baller, out on the gym floor, playing the game of her life, and every seat has an ass in it, and even the kids are watching, taking a lesson from this, being part of this moment.
Abby pulls with her left knee, pushes with her right foot, blood seeping from her face or her head or she can’t tell, but it’s soaking her, and she’s almost there, she’s almost there, she’s—
Not even past the scorer’s table yet.
Letha shouldn’t be on the stoop of the sheriff’s office when the phone at Meg’s desk rings, but she is.
It’s Banner.
She’s watching him on the snowcat.
She knows from him calling in on the radio—which isn’t as user-friendly as he’d guaranteed—that he’s biting the bullet and swinging by Lonnie’s to gas up.
From the stoop she can see him at the second of the two pumps. He isn’t even wearing his right jacket, the long black trench that looks military, not Wall Street, so he has his bare hands in his armpits, and is coming up onto his toes over and over, either to try to generate some heat or to will the diesel to come faster.
But: not fast enough.
Letha cringes for him when Lonnie ambles out, inspecting his precious snowcat from all sides before sidling up to Banner.
Five minutes later, the tank evidently topped off, Lonnie’s squatted by the rear tracks, and moving them up and down like to show the slack to Banner, and probably telling him about what disastrous end that slack could lead to. When Lonnie climbs up behind the wheel and backs the snowcat into the first bay, Banner just stands there like a second-grader, raising his shoulders in apology to Letha.
She nods to him that she can hold things together.
He’s right there, after all.
After double-checking every door and just blocking off the women’s restroom altogether, since that stupid little window in there won’t come down, she’s back on the stoop, ready to see Banner churning through the snow to her, the tracks or whatever tightened—that disaster averted, thank you, Lonnie.
This time checking on the snowcat’s progress, though, or lack of progress—nothing against Lonnie, but she’ll buy the county a fleet of snow machines if it means he doesn’t get to nitpick each one—her heart swells when there’s a form trundling through the snow.
Whoever this is, they’re not in county khaki, but some giant blue parka, and… waders?
“What?” Letha says through her teeth.
Who would be out in this?
She steps back when the answer rises, unbidden: Dark Mill South, that’s who.
Except… except the mug shots of him on the news always show him with his hair down. And whoever this is, they’ve got the parka’s hood pulled up and over, then ratcheted tight against the wind, so there’s only one little black tunnel for them to look through.
“Keanu Reeves,” Letha hears herself saying. “The Watcher, 2000.”
It’s the one where he wears a hoodie, not a mask. But he’s definitely into the whole killing thing—which is to say, after Letha had burned through all the slashers the first time, she cruised through its first and second cousins, taking wider and wider loops so she could be ready for whoever came calling. Mr. Brooks, Henry Lee Lucas, Citizen X, John Doe, Francis Dolarhyde, anybody with a necktie fetish and a British accent, all taxi drivers and single white females. Technically, she knows, Dark Mill South is from that shelf. But really he’s Kane from See No Evil, he’s Frank Zito from Maniac, which puts him square in horrorland. And, since he’s not a poltergeist or a zombie, a werewolf or a vampire, then, by default, he’s a slasher. Or, doing business as one, anyway.
The real proof will be whether bullets can stop him or not, Letha supposes. If they can, then he’s a serial killer. If it takes a final girl to put him down, though, then he was a slasher all along.
And, this has to be him out there, doesn’t it? He’s tall and big, hulking and dangerous.
What if it can all stop here, right? By someone with the right resolve?
And… what’s he doing?
He’s picking things up from the snow. Stiff stuff: ski clothes? He holds them up just like a normal person, trying to make sense of them. It’s like… it’s like whoever was wearing them just blipped away, to some safer place.
He goes from this jacket to those pants, that ski mask, this glove, balling them under his arm. They’re obviously too little for him to wear, but who knows why monsters like him do what they do.
And the phone’s still ringing on Meg’s desk.
Already, Letha’s had to stash Adrienne in Rex Allen’s office and unplug the phone in there, just so—maybe—Adie can catch a nap. Never mind all the staplers and binders and eyes-only files a toddler can redistribute, but that’s later’s problem.
Right now’s problem is that there’s this blue-parka’d killer trundling through the snow. Not coming to the sheriff’s, not angling over to Lonnie’s either, but… is he going to the pier? Does he not know Cinn’s at the retirement home, the other way?
“It’s good that he doesn’t,” Letha mutters to herself.
But, too, he’s going to be looking for her, isn’t he? And the logical places are here, where Adie is, and the house, where Donna and Gal are. Neither of which is an option. Not while Letha’s around.
Meaning: it’s time to see just what kind of monster he is—serial killer or slasher.
Letha steps back into the warmth of the office, doesn’t realize her retainer’s stiffened in the cold until she tries to adjust her chin like she needs to, but there’s no time for that. She pulls up the tangled mass of keys Banner left.
One of them works for the gun case on the wall.
She runs her finger along the rifles and shotgun, finally settles on Rex Allen’s goose gun, which she knows he’s paranoid someone else is going to fire someday.
“Welcome to today,” Letha says to him, hauling the long gun down and thumbing in the first shells she can grub up from the shallow drawer. They’re 7 ½, which she knows from the videos she watches is birdshot, but oh well. No time to find double-aught or a slug.
The phone’s still ringing when she sweeps back past.
She nods to it, telling it she hasn’t forgotten it, then backs through the first glass door like rolling off the side of a boat into the water. Meaning, standing in the entryway, facing up to the second glass door, she can still elect to not do this, and nobody will have to know, nobody will see her backing down from this responsibility.
Standing in this institutional foyer only gives her more resolve, though.
She knees the outside door open, having to really push it against the snow already drifted up against it, and two steps later she’s in the muck, the sucking cold. Standing on the stoop again, she racks the first shell in, brings the long gun up, leads that blue parka a couple steps, and, before she can talk herself out of it, and without blinking, she lets go.
Because this A5 is full-choke, it whips her shoulder so hard it spins her around. From the videos she watches, she’s memorized the how and where and what to do with all types of firearms, even up to AK’s, but the guys doing the mansplaining in those videos all have sixty or eighty pounds on Letha, and also have their feet set for the recoil.
Letha slams back into the front door of the sheriff’s office, feels it giving, and her whole body tenses, time slowing down for her: she can see Adrienne down in the office alone, while her mom bleeds out right here. So, she tightens every muscle against the glass shards she knows are coming.
One of those muscles is her trigger finger, and this goose gun’s an auto.
It blasts again, even harder this time, driving Letha down through the breaking door.
She pulls her left arm over her face to save her eyes, doesn’t know what’s going on with her back anymore.
Five seconds later, frozen in place by fear, she takes a peek.
The little concrete and steel overhang above the stoop has a big crater in it now, and there’s still pieces crumbling down.
More important—Letha sits up, feels slivers of glass all under her—Dark Mill South out there isn’t walking anymore.
She hit him.
He’s laid out, slapping at himself. Because: birdshot. Plus his parka, and whatever layers he’s got on under that.
What this means, though?
He wasn’t stopped by a gun. He is what he is.
Letha extracts herself gingerly from the door, feels behind for blood, but there isn’t any. She leans Rex Allen’s prize goose gun into the corner and—
It blasts again.
Because she’s closer to the business end of it this time, the powdered brick stings the parts of her face it can still get to, a hundred tiny pinpricks of flame that Letha isn’t near fast enough to slap away. All she can do is flinch, jerk.
That sends her tumbling off the stoop, out into the snow, which is deep-deep. It swallows her whole, her nostrils instantly filling with powder, her eyes packing shut with coldness. But this isn’t an avalanche. And just because she can’t open her mouth to suck air doesn’t mean she’s suffocating. She knows her way up. She knows how to blow her nose clear.
Calm, calm, she says inside.
Never mind that Dark Mill South has to know who just lobbed birdshot at him. Never mind that she can’t see him at the moment.
Letha clambers up as fast as she can, and, when no giant is about to tackle her, she wipes herself down. Breathes.
More of the little awning is crumbling down now, all around her, and there’s a big gouge in the brick, and the narrow window alongside the door is shattered too. And all those stony flecks and glassy slivers are raining down on that pretty shotgun, probably scratching the stock.
There’s still two shots in it, though. “A5” means auto-5: five shells, if there’s not a plug. Rex Allen, being an officer of the law, probably should have a plug, but Letha’s pretty sure he doesn’t. That would mar the original design.
Letha steps back up onto the stoop, hauls the shotgun to her again, staying well clear of the open end of the barrel, since this thing has the definition of a hair trigger.
She only realizes she’s mostly deaf when the muted yells filter through.
She cranks around to Dark Mill South, and Banner and Lonnie are already to him. But Banner’s pistol isn’t drawn, and Lonnie doesn’t have a crowbar or a chain, just that bucket he keeps by the pumps, with the windshield squeegee in it.
“No!” Letha screams, and holds the shotgun at port arms, sets her feet, and fires again, into the sky, the big gun jumping, but not getting away from her this time.
Banner turns to her, holding his hands out to tell her enough, enough, and Lonnie stops advancing, wary of this woman with a shotgun.
“It’s him!” Letha calls out, the sound filling her head, her teeth unable to unclench, and as if to prove it, Dark Mill South stands, still slapping at himself, and peels out of the parka—it’s smoldering, its synthetic down or whatever evidently flammable when hot lead sears through it.
And, and—
“Shit,” Letha says, letting the gun fall away, into the snow.
It’s Rexall.
He was… he was probably heading up to Main to trudge down to the high school to take care of a burst pipe, or adjust the boiler, or it doesn’t matter.
She didn’t just shoot Dark Mill South. She shot the town janitor.
“I’m sorry,” Letha says, mostly to herself, and that damn phone will not stop.
Pissed, she turns, pulls the doorhandle. It comes away in her hand, so she just steps through the remains of the door, trying to avoid the jagged edges.
Aren’t all the phones down? How can whoever this is be calling so much?
And, of course: Adrienne’s crying down the hall.
It’s not her fault, though. There’s loud noises. This is a strange place. Crying is how you tell your mother you’re scared, that you need her to come get you, pat you safe.
Letha turns that way, to round the reception counter, skirt Meg’s desk, beeline Rex Allen’s office, but: that phone.
She stops, hisses out breath, and yanks it up, says into it as best she can, “What?”
On the other end, there’s just breathing at first.
Letha switches ears, presses the phone tighter, which is when the inside door, the first, blows open all at once, the storm forcing its way in.
The door slaps the wall hard enough that it shatters just like the other door, the dull aluminum frame swinging back in slowly, now that the cold wind can’t keep it propped open.
Great. Wonderful.
Down the hall now too, the women’s restroom door is clattering because there’s a hard draft pulling under it, trying to dive out the window.
This is too fucking much.
Kid crying, Rexall shot, glass everywhere, snow blowing into the entry.
“Billy?” Letha hisses into the phone, just for her own get-back—he’s the sick caller in Black Christmas.
“N-n-no,” the girl on the other end says, and she’s either way on the other end, or Letha’s hearing’s still dampened.
“Who is this?” she says, switching the receiver to her left hand now, so she can pull her cell up from her back pocket.
Sure enough: one flickering bar.
The cell tower’s been in and out all day.
Meaning: this is one lucky-ass call.
“Fast, fast,” Letha says, not sure how long this connection can last.
“It’s Abby G-Grandlin,” the girl barely on the other end says. “You need—you need to come up here.”
“Up where?” Letha says.
“The gym,” Abby manages to say. “They’re—they’re all dead, I think. Including… me.”
Letha closes her eyes, makes herself open them, and, holding the phone to her throat, stretches its spiral cord around Meg’s desk so she can see Banner through the broken door, out in the storm. He and Lonnie are wrestling with Rexall, and it doesn’t look like they’re winning.
“We’re coming,” she tells Abby.
Banner is on his ass again, and he’s thinking that he should maybe just stay there.
If he struggles back up, gets Rexall under control, then—then the rest of this day’s just going to avalanche down over him: the snowcat, out of service for the moment; a killer in town, targeting Cinnamon Baker, and carving through all her friends to get to her; no backup; this storm; his wife, who’s just supposed to be covering the phones for Meg, not taking potshots at citizens; that citizen resisting… not “arrest,” but he was just peppered with shot out of nowhere, maybe isn’t thinking right.
It’s Rexall, though. Has he ever been thinking right?
On one of his early patrols, Francie’d told Banner what she knew about when Rexall had gotten the hell out of Proofrock for a year and a half about ten years ago, to find gainful employment down in Idaho Falls. Which turned out to be at a funeral home. It was just a part-time thing, vacuuming and dusting afterhours. But then the snapshots started showing up. They were from Rexall’s flip phone, so were grainy, but you could see what he was seeing well enough: dead women. Not completely stripped out of their funeral clothes. But, stripped enough. Rexall was unbuttoning their shirts and propping a pale, bloodless breast out, then arranging a candle on the edge of the coffin as backdrop, and then opening his phone, getting the angle just right.
Because the funeral home didn’t want a lawsuit, and because proving the source of these photos would take police involvement, which would end up public, the owner’s cousins had come to town, manhandled this afterhours custodian into the bed of their truck, trussed him hand and foot, stuffed his mouth with an oily red rag, glued his lips shut over it with that Zip Lip stuff they use for corpses, then driven him back up to the address of his last reference—Golding Elementary, where he’d swept and mopped in high school.
But Banner and Lonnie aren’t those manhandling cousins, obviously. And Rexall is what Banner’s dad would call a hoss: after pushing Banner back onto his ass again, he slings Lonnie out into the snow like a human Frisbee.
There’s dots of blood on one side of Rexall’s face, from the goose gun. Banner knows it by sound, but, too, it’s the only gun in the rack in the front office that’s full-choke—the only one that could have reached out these fifty yards. Letha knows her firearms, he’s got to give her that.
She perhaps needs a little guidance yet on target selection, however.
And Rexall might have even come quietly, except then Letha started in firing again, and again.
Because she’s protecting Adrienne, Banner tells himself. There’s nothing she won’t do to keep that little girl safe. Just—all those horror movies she watches, right? They’ve taught her to shoot first, ask questions never, because there’s no on-ramp to danger, there’s not any slow and boring escalation. It’s always immediately life and death, with Letha Mondragon-Tompkins.
Banner loves her for it. It lets him feel safe out on patrol, when he can’t be there. But it is kind of messing with his whole “being a deputy”–thing, he guesses. If he can be completely honest.
And, no, Rex Allen is not going to be thrilled about Rexall getting shot. But—it is Rexall. What’s really going to get Banner’s ass in a sling is that goose gun. It’s from Belgium, is supposed to be being kept safe, in a position of honor.
That’s later, though.
This is now.
Banner fights up from the powder, untangles from the earbud cables that must be from Rexall—is that rap coming through them?—and, using the form Coach always told his linebackers they had to use when the idiot with the ball’s both bigger than you and has momentum, he drives forward, catching Rexall in the side, an illegal spear, and then he pushes not back but up, a spleen-ripper.
It’s not that he wants to sideline Rexall for the season, so much. It’s that he doesn’t want to get his own ass stomped any more than it already is. And the trick to that when you’re out-sized, it’s taking the ground away from this tight end, this fullback—this janitor—and then letting his own weight slam him down.
It finally works.
All of Rexall’s three hundred or however many pounds is on Banner’s right shoulder, and he’s rising, rising… and then falling on his back. Banner can tell it takes his wind away.
Except, now Lonnie’s wading in not just with the heavy duty long-handled squeegee he keeps in a white five-gallon bucket for cleaning Proofrock’s windshields, but with the squeegee and the bucket. Not on purpose, but because the blue wiper fluid he keeps in that bucket’s frozen around the squeegee head. It must weigh forty pounds, and it confirms what Rex Allen told Banner once: that Lonnie waters that shit down to save money. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t be frozen right now.
But Banner can’t stop to think about that.
Lonnie’s already swinging it overhead like a giant hammer, to come down onto Rexall’s face. Which is going to do a lot more damage than a goose gun at half a football field away.
Banner rolls to the left, freeing his right side, and draws his snow-packed Glock, racks the slide back, and shoots twice from the ground.
The white bucket of frozen blue explodes into chunks above Lonnie’s head and his swing is just the long handle of the squeegee now. It overbalances him, nearly lands him splat in the middle of Rexall, still gasping for breath.
“Stop! Stop! Stop stop stop!” Banner screams, trying to stand, his legs numb, the world muted.
Lonnie steps back, his lips trembling the way they always do when he’s about to fall into a stuttering hole.
Banner angles the pistol down onto Rexall and Rexall raises his hands too, showing all his fingers.
This fucking day.
To make it worse, there’s a distant buzzing worming its way through Banner’s deafness.
He shakes his head, conks himself on the side of the head in case his ears are just plugged with snow, and what he sees is a square headlight coming fast.
“Shit,” he says, and dives out of the way, which turns out to be right onto Rexall, who gathers Banner to him and rolls hard away, probably saving him.
The snowmobile skids sideways, spraying snow onto Banner and Rexall and Lonnie.
Banner clears his face and stands, leading with his pistol, Rexall and Lonnie forgotten.
At the edge of the floating whiteness, he can see Letha in the doorway to the sheriff’s office. She’s reaching down for that shotgun again. Meaning this is about to seriously all go to hell if Banner doesn’t—
“There’s more,” Jennifer Daniels says from the snowmobile’s seat, cocking some ski goggles up onto her forehead.
“More what?” Banner says.
“More dead kids,” Jennifer says back, then sees Rexall. “What’s he doing here?”
“Getting shot?” Rexall says back, leaning forward to blow splatty snow from his nose. Then, “Hey, Jade. Missed you at your dad’s funeral.”
“I was there at his death,” Jennifer hisses back, her hand still on that throttle like she wants to fire her bad machine back up, jam the skids into her dad’s best friend, just for old times’ sake.
“They should have sent you up,” Rexall says, lumbering to his feet and keeping a weather eye on Lonnie, whose lower lip is still spasming with stacked-up words.
“Yeah, well,” Jennifer says, stepping down and looking back to the sheriff’s office. “Can’t say they didn’t try.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rexall says, then shrugs like this is no big thing. “He’s back anyway. And he’s bigger than he was. Gonna take more than some puke-ass machete swung by a girl to—”
Bam!
Banner nearly falls down, trying to get his pistol around to whatever this was: Letha, walking in, firing the shotgun straight up.
“Will this do?” she says in her close-mouthed way, staring daggers into Rexall that are probably more dangerous than whatever she’s thumbed into that A5’s tube.
Jennifer doesn’t smile, but she sort of does, her lips pursed, and for a little frozen moment, Banner sees her and Letha side by side, the main two survivors from the last round, ready to go again, if that’s what it’s coming down to.
Except—“Everybody stop!” he hears himself insisting, with all the volume he has. “Nobody’s shooting anybody, okay? Okay?”
To prove this, he makes a slow show of holding his pistol high and light, and guiding it into the snowcone his holster is, the barrel surely stuffing with slush, but screw it. De-escalation is more important now than proper firearm maintenance.
Letha shrugs about this new rule that nobody’s shooting anybody: it’ll hold until it doesn’t.
“Adie good?” Banner asks her, and she nods a curt nod.
“There’s three dead at Pleasant Valley,” Jennifer says then.
Banner feels something in his chest falling off a metal shelf, and clattering into pieces in his stomach.
“Who?” he says.
Jennifer squints to remember, then nods, says, “Kristen? Mark?”
“Seniors,” Letha fills in. “Cinn? Ginger?”
Jennifer shakes her head no, not them. But she does add, “And—I don’t know his name. He worked the front desk?”
“B-b-b-b-b-b,” Lonnie says.
Rexall’s amused by this.
“B-b-blond hair?” he finishes for Lonnie. “That’d be Jocelyn Cates’s kid.”
“Philip,” Banner fills in. “One L.”
“He was supposed to come here on this,” Jennifer says, patting the snowmobile. “But when I went to check on what was taking him so long, he had a—it was a dry-cleaning bag, I think. Over his head.”
Banner turns away. The cold doesn’t even matter anymore.
What’s this, five high schoolers dead, now? And, what are Letha and Jennifer communicating to each other now, with their eyes?
“What?” he says to them.
Letha shakes her head, as if there’s too many ears here.
“But they’re all already dead, right?” she says to Jennifer.
Jennifer nods once, and Letha comes back to Banner.
“There’s one still alive at the high school,” she says. “Abby, um—”
“Grandlin…” Rexall plugs in, emphasizing it in some gross way that gets Jennifer stepping forward, like she’s going to climb him, reach into his mouth, pull his heart out and then feed it back to him.
Banner stops her, pushes her back harder than he needs to, considering her size.
But these are extraordinary circumstances.
“She’s hurt?” he says to Letha.
Letha nods.
“Fuck!” Banner can’t help but say, almost scream, both his hands to his head now, trying to hold all these emergencies inside so he can maybe make sense of at least one of them.
“We go to the one who needs help,” Jennifer says. “The high school. The nursing home can wait.”
“How did—she called you?” Banner says then, to Letha.
“Signal was back,” Letha explains.
He palms his own phone, sees that one thready dot that’s the first of his bars.
“He’s coming for you, count on that,” Rexall says to Jennifer. “Little family reunion,” he adds for her, with some approximation of a wink, except about a thousand times more lecherous.
“Can we lock him up?” Jennifer says to Banner, without breaking eye contact with Rexall.
“Seconded,” Letha says flatly.
“Thi-thi-thi—” Lonnie says.
“It’s unanimous,” Jennifer says, saving Lonnie the trouble.
“I’m the victim here?” Rexall says, holding his parka out to show all the little fountains of singed white puff.
“For your own safety,” Banner tells him, and knows for sure, now, that his contract won’t be getting renewed.
But maybe he can still save Abby Grandlin.
Back when, Jennifer had a ring of keys on a pullcord that would get her into any door of Henderson High.
Then, when those were taken away, she threw a trashcan through the front doors, she seems to recall.
It all used to matter so much.
Everything was a statement, a gesture, a challenge.
All of that’s sucked into the past, though. It already feels like it maybe happened to somebody else. Like she saw it all through the tracking lines of her old television in her bedroom.
Now her room isn’t really even her room anymore, though.
The house she has the title to—she refuses to call it her father’s house, doesn’t want to have to live like that—it was evidently Proofrock’s party pad for a season or two. Meaning her bedroom was probably hookup station number two, number one being the bigger bedroom at the end of the hall.
The two nights she’s been there, she’s curled up on the caved-in couch. The old console television in the living room’s had its screen kicked in, and been home to a few listless fires, it looks like—very 2029, Kyle Reese’s Cyberdyne-wrecked future.
It’s starting to line up with Jennifer’s wrecked present.
The one where her hand goes to the pocket of the coveralls she’s not wearing, for the keys she doesn’t have, which would open these front doors of Henderson High.
“Deputy?” she says to Banner.
It’s him and her and Doc Wilson. When the good doctor wouldn’t rouse from their insistent knocks on his door, Banner had finally kicked it in.
Doc Wilson was sitting at the card table in his kitchen, dealing himself some vodka.
“What?” Banner says about the locked door they need to get through. “We should have asked Rexall, shit.”
Jennifer shakes her head no about that.
It was bad enough riding three to the snowmobile, Doc Wilson’s hands gripping her right under her breasts. Having Rexall as a fourth would have probably meant… sitting in his lap?
Not likely.
“How’d they get in?” Banner says just aloud, as if lodging the right objection will get these doors open.
“We have time to figure that out?” Jennifer asks back.
When Banner’s just staring, his two brain cells swapping back and forth and coming up with zilch, Jennifer steps over to the trashcan, to take a running start with it, fling it into that pristine wall of glass.
But the trashcan is bolted down.
It wrenches her back, forces painful blood back into her frozen fingers.
“Shit!” she says. Then, to Banner, “Shoot it! Abby’s dying!”
Banner looks behind him, like expecting Rex Allen to nod that this is okay, and, when he reaches down for the butt of his pistol—
“No,” he says.
His holster’s empty.
In a glance, Jennifer can see how it happened: his holster was packed with snow, meaning his pistol wouldn’t jam down deep enough to catch. Add bouncing around Proofrock on a snowmobile, and, bam: a pistol that’ll only show up when all of this melts. ’Long about May.
That doesn’t mean Banner isn’t checking the ground all around him now, though. And then backtracking to the snowmobile.
“How is this party injured, did you say?” Doc Wilson asks, already sipping straight from his thermos of coffee that smells like it’s flammable.
Jennifer shakes her head, disgusted with this situation.
She turns sharply, not answering Doc Wilson, and steps back to the snowmobile, connects the kill switch without hooking it onto her jacket, and pulls Philip Cates’s goggles down over her eyes.
“No, no, don’t!” Banner says from the fluff of snow he’s now inspecting for firearms.
“For Abby,” Jennifer says, firing the snowmobile up, the engine screaming over her voice—screaming as her voice.
She twists the throttle back hard, her whole right shoulder going down with it, and the snowmobile fishtails a bit then launches, those glass doors coming fast-fast.
Jennifer dives off ten feet shy, slides at an angle away, a girl-shaped snowball, and looks up through the foggy goggles just in time to see the snowmobile crash into Henderson High.
The glass keeps falling for about thirty seconds after the snowmobile’s parked itself in the trophy case.
“Go, go!” Jennifer says to Banner and Doc Wilson when Banner starts to step over, haul her up.
They do.
Jennifer rolls over on her back, stares up into the swirling whiteness.
Almost instantly, her goggles are coated in powder. The result is she loses her bearing, feels like she’s falling—like she’s been falling for four years, and now she’s splatted down right in front of the high school she never graduated from.
She shakes her head no, not wanting this feeling, and tries to roll out of it, slinging the goggles away so she can find herself again.
Another slab of glass falls pendulously down from the very top of that big frame, and, instead of shattering, it stabs into some of the snow that had been packed up against the door, stabs in and stands there at an angle.
Jennifer clambers to her feet, steps well around that glass, and immediately spots the snowmobile’s kill switch, hooked onto the top left corner of the display case—Banner’s tall, doesn’t think not everyone is. It was good he pulled it, though. The air still tastes like exhaust, meaning if he hadn’t, they’d all be swimmy in the head in a few minutes.
“Thanks, Deputy,” Jennifer mumbles, taking a slow look around.
This is the first time she’s been back in this building since that summer, isn’t it? Since she carved The Lake Witch Slayings into the tender blue metal of a restroom, and Hardy had to fire her.
That is what they turned out to be, though.
Even if that’s not what it says in her court transcripts, or in any of the newspapers or books.
Not that Jennifer kept up, once she figured out which way the wind was blowing.
She crunches forward, her purple-leather boots mostly wet by now. They were made for being tucked under a defendant’s table in court, not for wading through killing fields. She would have taken Philip Cates’s boots like she’d taken his ski gear, but boots had felt more intimate somehow, and she knew she would have felt bad, leaving him barefoot in the snow.
In hindsight, it was a stupid decision, but being smart’s not as easy as everybody makes it out to be.
Jennifer looks behind her, just to be sure she’s alone, and—shit. Right over there’s the Quiet Room, where you go when the world’s too much and you just need to sit in a room with zero stimulation for a half hour.
“Can I live there, please?” Jennifer mumbles.
On the way past the display case, she tippy-toes to pull the kill switch down on the sly, pocket it. She doesn’t want to hear the snowmobile firing up without her. Banner’s trying to take care of them, but he’s not even a real deputy yet.
Jennifer walks down the center of the hall, her tightrope the blurry shadow in the middle where the emergency lights don’t quite touch.
Behind her, the storm’s whistling through the open door.
Come spring semester, there’s going to be some serious clean-up for Rexall, and whoever his apprentice is now. Pipes are going to freeze, animals are going to have found their way in, papers are going to be blowing all around.
There’s going to be some bloodstains too.
Then in a few months it’s going to be one of those graduations where, instead of all the seats filled, some are going to be left ceremonially empty, right? Whoever’s principal now will give token diplomas to the dead kids’ parents, along with a single red rose, and, if there’s any justice, any decency, the media won’t be there to document this.
No reason for it to live forever. Just let it be the beautiful terrible thing it is, and then keep moving, keep moving.
That’s what Jennifer’s doing.
She shuffles past the two chemistry labs, gives English the same leery eye as ever, and then—no, she’s not ready.
History.
Her breath catches in her throat, and she’s telling herself there’s a life on the line down the hall, maybe lives, that there’s a killer to be figured out, found, and put down, but, all the same… she steps into the doorway of the old classroom, her eyes hot, and now she’s reaching for him with her fingertips, and also at the same time pulling her hand back, to hold it to her chest.
Mr. Holmes.
She shakes her head no, that she can’t do this, but she’s already stepping the rest of the way in.
Just like she knew there’d be, there’s still stupid quotes from “historical” people on posters all around the room. There’s dates and names and places, half-erased on the chalkboard. There’s the desks all in sort-of rows, the same as it had been since kindergarten.
But there’s no Mr. Holmes leaned back against his desk, spinning them what feels like another bullshit story about people in Henderson-Golding looking up from their oil lanterns, up into the tall blackness of what would become Caribou-Targhee, and seeing the distant sparks from mining picks chipping into rock.
Jennifer always thought he maybe wanted to go there, to Drown Town before it was Drown Town, that he was one of those who thought he was born too late. And it wasn’t that he could have been somebody back then; it was that he could have been nobody.
From her holding cell over five weeks, draft after draft, she’d written his wife—his widow—a two-page letter. About how her husband had been a dad to her, sort of, in secret. How he let her write papers about horror instead of history, just because he could tell that’s where her heart was. That every time she hears a buzzing in the sky, she looks up, sure it’s going to be him, that he really got away that night, that he’s still up there in his ultralight.
She tore all those letters up, though.
None of them said it even close to right.
Finally what she sent, which had to go through her lawyer, not the approved way, was a single unsmoked cigarette, with a light little grey heart drawn in pencil on the side of that white paper.
Who even is the history teacher now?
Jennifer steps in between the desks, her heart swelling from being here again.
Whoever it is, they can’t be doing even half the job Mr. Holmes was. They don’t know the real Proofrock, the real Fremont County, the real Idaho. They didn’t grow up getting their summer buzzcut down on Main Street. They never stood on shore and watched Hardy sling his airboat around, misting all the kids lined up on the pier. They were never pirates on the high seas of Indian Lake.
They shouldn’t even be teaching history here anymore, Jennifer thinks. They should give it a rest for four or five more years, in honor.
And now she’s up to what was his desk.
She touches it with her fingertips, knows it’s his headstone.
“Sir,” she says, trying to keep her breathing normal and failing so fucking hard.
Her tears splat on the papers and she drags her sleeve across her face, can’t be doing this.
She turns to face the empty classroom.
Because nobody’s watching, she tries to do that slow little heel-spin Mr. Holmes had down, that he used as a part of his lectures, his rambles, and now she’s facing the chalkboard.
She nods and it’s real now, it’s real again, he’s really gone.
When she finally walks back out, Grady Bear Sherlock Holmes is written in the high corner very small, not with chalk but a black Sharpie. The blackest Sharpie. And if Rexall uses some solvent to remove it, she’s officially kicking his ass up one side of Main and down the other. Twice.
Not sure where the action is, or was, she drifts down the halls. There should be wet footprints, but it’s dark, and she’ll get there eventually.
Or, she is there: where the main hall goes to either the science wing or the art wing.
Some idiot’s mounted a bull elk there, to stare everybody down? Like some gatekeeper making them choose “science” or “art”?
“What bullshit is this?” Jennifer says. About the elk, sure, but, more, about the guy speared over its face.
There are antlers poking up through his chest, and his eyes and mouth are open.
Jennifer watches him for a solid minute, isn’t sure what she’s waiting for. Just, she knows she doesn’t want to let it in. Not yet.
“Shit,” she says, aware of how not cued into her surroundings she’s been, and looks suddenly behind her, because you’re never as alone as you think you are.
It’s just empty hallway again, still. The memory of backpacks and secrets and hushed laughter.
Not Slaughter High, like Jennifer used to always imagine. The teachers from The Faculty aren’t out to get her. Neither is Mrs. Tingle. She’s just, like Brad Pitt, cutting class, doesn’t want to end up a student body.
“1981, Alex,” she mutters, for Student Bodies, just so she won’t say “1984,” which would be Silent Night, Deadly Night, which this kill with the elk most definitely is, no matter how much she doesn’t want it to be true.
But no. No no no. She doesn’t think like that anymore. She’s just… she’s hiding in the video store, like Letha was saying. She’s seeing connections that wouldn’t even be there if she didn’t know all the shit still swirling around inside her.
Saying it out loud or not, though, this kid is still speared on these antlers, isn’t he? And there’s still two—no, three—dead high schoolers over at Pleasant Valley. Counting the two from the motel parking lot, this makes… six. And that’s not counting whatever Banner and Doc Wilson are wading into, down… which direction?
Jennifer looks down the science hall, down the art hall, and ends up making wet tracks for her old bathroom—the Skank Station. Instead of stepping in, though—
“Hello?” she says through the cocked-open doors of the boys’ gym.
Doc Wilson has his sleeping bag of a jacket off, has the white girl with the red face wrapped up in it.
She’s jerking. Her whole body.
The gym is big and dark, but over in the stands there’s a flashlight—Banner.
He’s locating the dead, Jennifer knows.
Have they seen the kid on the elk yet, even?
“What can I do?” Jennifer says, taking a knee by Doc Wilson.
“Coffee,” he says without looking up. Meaning: he needs steady hands to save this life.
Jennifer finds the thermos, pours the lid full, passes it over. When Doc Wilson takes it from her, she sees—has to see—this girl’s bulging, leaky eyeball, and it takes her breath away.
This isn’t corn syrup and latex, air bladders and hand pumps.
Jennifer holds it together long enough not to spill the coffee, then stumbles away, is leaning against the slick-brick wall when suddenly Banner’s standing beside her.
“How’s she doing?” he asks, about this girl.
“Abby,” Jennifer dredges up, like saying her actual name can be a lifeline she climbs back up.
“Wynona Fleming’s over there,” Banner mumbles, his tone telling Jennifer that it’s not pretty. That it’s the direct opposite of “pretty.”
“Why is he targeting high schoolers this time?” Jennifer says.
“I don’t even know if this is all of them,” Banner says.
Jennifer, doing finger-antlers, says, “You saw the one on the—?”
Banner nods.
“Maybe she was texting with whoever did that to them?” he says then. “Kids do that, you know, they text all the—”
“I’m not from 1989,” Jennifer tells him, and together they find Abby’s bloody phone, its screen glowing awake under all that tacky red.
Jennifer takes it to the girls’ restroom around the corner, and, when there’s no light, she calls Banner in.
He steps in gingerly, like this is a trap.
“I’m not going to turn you in,” Jennifer tells him, finding the paper towel roller in the beam of his flashlight. “But I don’t guarantee you’re not being recorded.”
“What?”
“Proofrock’s very own Chester the Molester,” Jennifer says, tilting her head up and around, to the idea of hidden cameras.
“Oh yeah,” Banner says. “Rexall.”
“He’s not the most upstanding citizen,” Jennifer tells him, wiping the phone, having to wet the paper towel, which is zero-bit absorbent. “Unless, of course, he’s watching one of his recordings…”
“This is the time for jokes, yeah,” Banner says, stepping in to burn his bright beam onto the screen, and Jennifer’s fingertips. After being so frozen, the light’s warm.
“We can cry instead if you want.”
“Did you really do it?” Banner asks then.
Jennifer tries not to change the carriage of her shoulders, the tilt of her eyes, the steadiness of her fingers.
But it’s not easy.
“My dad, you mean,” she says.
“Since we’re talking about his best friend.”
It tracks, Jennifer knows. You don’t think about Rexall without Tab Daniels stepping in from those same shadows.
Still, “The court cleared me,” she says.
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Did I swing a machete into him?” Jennifer says, the phone almost done. “You saw Tiff’s video, didn’t you?”
“She printed all the frames out,” Banner says. “She’s got, like, a photo album of it, moment by moment.”
“A flipbook. And they call me twisted?”
“Did you?”
“I thought he was someone else,” Jennifer mutters, presenting the mostly clean phone and staring right into Banner’s eyes. Then, “Ask your wife, she might remember something about him that night.”
“Letha?”
“Unless you’ve got another wife.”
Instead of dignifying that, Banner’s looking around the women’s restroom like a fourth-grader.
“Everything you expected?” Jennifer asks. “Over there’s where we put lingerie on, have pillow fights.”
“ ‘Skank Station,’ ” Banner reads slowly, from above the last mirror.
“Home sweet home,” Jennifer says, and steps over, feels up there for the eyeliner pencil these four-years-later girls probably don’t even know about.
It’s still there.
“What’s that?” Banner asks.
Jennifer presents it for inspection, says, “Mine, I left it here.”
She pockets it before he can press her, and then she’s trying to swipe into the phone.
“Here,” Banner says, trading her the flashlight for the phone, but of course he doesn’t know Abby’s PIN, either.
There is a stack of texts on the lockscreen that pops back up after each failure, though. All from “Daddy Dearest.”
“Shit,” Banner says, about them. “I’m going to have to tell him, aren’t I?”
“You’re going to have to tell a lot of them,” Jennifer says. “What next, Deputy?”
“We’re not done here,” Banner says, and Jennifer doesn’t get it, but follows when he sweeps out, back into the gym.
Abby Grandlin isn’t convulsing anymore, which probably isn’t exactly wonderful, medically speaking.
“You don’t know about fingerprints,” Banner says to Jennifer.
“I know about fingerpr—” Jennifer starts to say, but he’s already pressing Abby’s limp thumb to the phone’s screen.
When he stands again, the phone’s open.
He swipes into messages, but—
“She was only talking with Wynona,” he says.
“Was she Milton’s little sister?” Jennifer asks, not even sure she could actually pick Milton Fleming from a line-up anymore. He was just another face in second grade, and at graduation.
Banner passes the phone back over, as if Jennifer needs it.
“Rex Allen will be back soon,” he says.
“Hardy’s here,” Jennifer offers.
“He’s not sheriff.”
“Rex Allen barely is.”
Banner steps away.
“Hey!” Jennifer says, holding the phone out to him.
“Being in a bathroom…” he says, meaning it’s pee time.
“Need me?” Jennifer says down to Doc Wilson.
He doesn’t answer, is doing something intimate and necessary to Abby’s face, or breathing passage.
Jennifer steps away, gives them their privacy. Not because she trusts him with an unconscious human with breasts, but because she can tell he’s in triage mode, not grope-and-caress mode.
Still, she hangs close, just to be sure.
Right when Abby’s phone dims, she wakes it back up, is still in.
Looking around, which is a dead giveaway she’s about to try something, she taps into the settings, turns the lockscreen off. It means confirming with Abby’s limp thumb again, but Doc Wilson’s otherwise occupied.
Jennifer scrolls through Abby’s contacts.
Cinnamon Baker.
“Oh yeah,” Jennifer says, and, lightly, because she’s not sure she should be doing this, she touches that name.
It takes a few seconds for the line to ring—the signal’s still thready—but then, on the fourth ring, a voice says, “Abs?”
“Cinnamon Baker?” Jennifer asks.
“Who is this?” she asks back.
“I’m at the high school, where are you?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s somebody—you know why.”
“Jade Daniels? Why do you have Abby’s phone? Is she all—?”
“Where are you?”
“Do I need protection? I’m at the—Pleasant Valley. I thought you were here too. Is Abby with you?”
Jennifer switches ears, steps away from Doc Wilson.
“Your friends Mark and Kristen?” she says.
“Don’t—I can’t—”
“You have to, Cinnamon.”
“Cinn. It’s just Cinn.”
“Is it true what your sister said?”
“Ginger? You talked to her? But she doesn’t—”
“She did,” Jennifer says, pacing.
“What did she tell you?”
“That you and her found some—some…”
“Oh, that,” Cinn says. “We told the sheriff. He didn’t clean it up? That was three, no, four years—I was in junior high.”
“What was it?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because everything does, Cinnamon.”
“Cinn. It was just—” She coughs, like about to dry-heave. “It was some leftover from the Independence Day thing.”
“The Independence Day Massacre.”
“Or maybe it was just fish guts, I don’t know. It’s not like we touched it.”
“So you left it there?”
“Why would we—yes!” And then, quieter, to some nurse off-phone: “No, no, it’s… I’ll eat it right after this?”
“Jocelyn Cates’s son is dead too,” Jennifer says. “I’m sorry. And—and the… the Fleming girl. Milton’s little sister.”
“Wynona?” Cinn shrieks.
“And some boy,” Jennifer adds, quieter.
It’s not her responsibility to drop all this on this girl, she knows. But, too, if she finds out about it all at the third-reel bodydump, then it might slow her run down, let her catch a blade in the back. This is for her own good. Let her cry and shrivel now, so she won’t later.
“What was his… what does he look like?” Cinn asks.
“Sandy hair,” Jennifer says, seeing him again, pinned on the elk. “Robert Pattinson eyes, like a vampire?”
“Jensen…” Cinn fills in, sobbing now. “Why is this happening?”
Good, good, Jennifer tells herself. That’s exactly what the final girl needs to be thinking.
Except, of course, Cinn doesn’t need to dial back to some prank she and her evil sister and their evil friends played on some unfortunate in eighth grade—their parents were busy being massacred then. And anyway, Dark Mill South wasn’t in town to be wronged back then, or ever, meaning…
“It’s not about revenge this time,” Jennifer says.
“What do you mean, revenge? I volunteer, I donate, I never—”
“No, no, of course you do, and don’t, and would never,” Jennifer says, switching ears again, like the one on the right side’s full. “This is… do you watch the news?”
“Dark Mill South,” Cinn whispers.
“His beef is with everybody still drawing breath,” Jennifer explains. “And—and for some reason he’s targeted you and your friends.”
“Me?”
“I’m sorry. But—”
“Then I can stop all this if I just… I mean, if I let him—?”
“No,” Jennifer says. “That’s not what final girls do.”
“Final what?”
“Your sister knows,” Jennifer says. “At least, she knows all the movies.”
“She doesn’t have to be at cheer practice four hours after school every day. But—can I just leave? Will that work?”
“The storm, no. And that won’t stop him.”
“What will?”
“You have to kill them with what they like to kill with,” Jennifer says, squatted down now to think, because she hasn’t had to think like this in… in four years. “Something sharp, or pointy. And then when they’re down, you run over them a lot of times, or keep stabbing. Like, cut their Achilles tendons, gouge their eyes out, break their fingers, stab them in the—”
“Fire,” Cinn says.
“No, no, not fire,” Jennifer says. “Just—use whatever’s there, when the time comes.”
“So he’s coming here?” Cinn asks back, such that Jennifer can kind of see her on her hospital bed at Pleasant Valley, drawing her knees up to herself and watching the door, the window.
“If that’s where you stay.”
“But my sister’s up here,” Cinn whispers. “She won’t—I can’t let him—”
“Where’s the party?” Jennifer asks. “That’s where he’ll show up!”
“The party?”
“Where are all the kids getting together?”
“Well, I mean, it’s usually…” Cinn trails off.
“My house,” Jennifer fills in.
“We didn’t think you were coming back,” Cinn says. “And I never—”
“Doesn’t matter. The party’s got to be somewhere else, then. His kind can’t stay away from—”
At which point the call drops. Not even the sound of air rushing in or some great emptiness. Just: nothing.
Jennifer studies the bars, and that little dot’s not holding on very well.
She tries to dial, can’t make a connection.
“Anything?” Banner asks her from the baseline of the court.
But what if she’s lying? Jennifer asks herself.
What if Cinn and Ginger did find some tumorous mass pulsing under the pier? Almost definitely, it’s some bullshit concoction Ginger made up in her fevered brain, through a cloud of narcotics and wishful thinking.
But, if not?
What if Dark Mill South just happens to be in town right when whatever Cinn and Ginger fed for all these years is finally grown up, and coming to town to shred a few teenage bodies? What if he’s not killing anybody at all, but just trying to find a place to hunker down for the winter?
Worse—no no no, Jennifer tells herself, but she knows this is the drain her thinking’s swirling toward: what if that bloody leftover handful of the Independence Day Massacre metastasized into… Stacey Graves?
She and the lake are connected in some way.
Maybe she escaped Ezekiel’s big hands and bobbed up to the last place she knew when she was a real girl—Proofrock—but couldn’t climb any higher than the underside of the pier?
“Then it’s not over,” Jennifer says. “It was just on pause.”
Because slashers never really die. They just go to sleep for a few years.
But they’re always counting the days until round two.
No, this time the party won’t be on the water, under an inflatable movie screen.
Still, you can’t lock high schoolers up too long without them all getting together to cut loose, as Dewey says.
That’s not yet, though.
There’s still time for Jennifer to… she doesn’t want to, but at the same time she knows it’s the only way… there’s still time for her to prove Ginger’s story wrong, by sneaking around to Terra Nova, seeing if some bedroom or basement over there is a hatchery, or an incubator, or a den.
Except?
This time she’s not going to have to go the long way around, is she?
“Hey, I tried backing the snowmobile out of the display case,” Banner’s saying, “but—you didn’t take that kill switch, did you?”
The little plastic key the engine won’t start without.
“What?” Jennifer asks, trying to squint her whole face.
“The kill switch,” Banner says.
“That plastic key?” Jennifer asks, so innocent, even trying to wap her Bambi-lashes up and down, never mind that that’s more Letha’s domain.
“We’re stuck here without it,” Banner says.
“I thought it was just—” Jennifer says, patting all her pockets, then a-ha’ing it. “I… I used the ladies’ before I came here. Maybe it fell out of my pocket?”
“Which one?” Banner asks.
“Down the art hall.”
Banner sighs, then points to Doc Wilson and Abby Grandlin, says, “Stay here, for if they need anything?”
“Am I deputized now?”
“Has hell frozen over?” Banner asks back, on his way out.
“Seen outside?” Jennifer comes back with, to the swinging door.
She counts to twenty, which should be enough time for him to have passed the dead-boy elk, and then she’s running for that same junction, but—very John Bender—sliding around the corner and trying to accelerate for the front of the school.
Last time she sneaked across to Terra Nova, she had to walk the dam, the chalky bluff behind Camp Blood.
Now, though, now she can go straight across.