allieoop: Yeah, I guess in some movies the killer’s motivations are personal.
eatersofthedead: Whether the motivations are personal or not the characters would probably survive more often if they weren’t so stupid.
allieoop: I know, there are a million things I would never do if I were in a horror movie. As Nancy says in NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, “I’m into survival.”
tyz7412: All right, then. Prove it.
ALLIE WATCHED STEVE FALL to the ground, blood spurting from the artery in his neck. His hands clutched the place where his life was draining away. There was nothing she could do, no help she could give. Putting pressure on the wound would not save him now.
I should have known, she thought. I should have known the opening bedroom door was a misdirection. That always happens. I should have known. I could have kept Steve alive. Why didn’t I shut the front door? Why did I make it easy for the killer?
She stood stock-still, the handle of the knife in her hand pressing into the palm hard enough to bruise. If that man—and all Allie remembered about him was his shirt and the impression of size, of breadth and height and strength—tried to come at her, she would make sure he regretted it.
Her eyes were blurry. For a moment, Allie thought she needed to clean her glasses, but then she realized she was crying, tears that fell thick but silent. She couldn’t release the sob in her throat, or the scream that was caught next to it. She couldn’t show any weakness, couldn’t crack up and fall apart like Madison. She had to keep it together.
She was the only one left.
Steve stopped moving, and the smell of shit and piss suddenly filled the air.
He’s dead now, Allie thought, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. He’s dead and I’m all alone.
She’d thought she’d known better; thought she could do everything right. What was the use of a mind that ran through every doomsday scenario, every possible permutation of disaster, if she couldn’t even keep her friends alive?
You forgot to account for human nature. You forgot that not everyone would be coolheaded. You didn’t think that one of you would disappear in the night, that one would be drugged, that one would just start running and screaming like a crazy person.
There was a great heavy weight somewhere in the center of her body, something that held her in place, something that made her feel like she couldn’t run or think or move at all. She waited, and waited, because she didn’t know what else to do. If the man came for her, she would hurt him. That was all she knew.
This isn’t you. This isn’t how you always said you’d react if you were in those movies you love
(the movies I’ll never watch those movies again it’s not a joke it’s not funny it’s not make-believe)
You always said you’d be the smart one, the one who survives. You wouldn’t be stupid or panicky or stand still, trembling, like you are now
(my friends are dead they’re dead)
Allie took a deep breath, choked on her tears, tried again.
I can do this. I’m not alone. I just need to find Madison.
She glanced at the front door, the door through which the giant man had materialized like Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Why can’t I remember his face? All I can picture is how huge he was, and that he was wearing a red shirt.
A memory twanged deep in her subconscious, a story she’d read many years before in which bank robbers had worn brightly colored or patterned clothing to distract the eye of witnesses, so that all they remembered about the perpetrators was that they had worn polka-dot bandannas or some such thing. That was what had just happened to her, she realized. All she’d seen was the red shirt.
And the knife. I saw the knife, too.
One thing she was pretty sure of, though—she’d never met that man before. She’d remember someone that large.
Which means that if Brad is a part of all this—and he still might be; I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary—then he’s working with someone. But you knew that already, because someone had to be outside the house tapping on the wall while Brad was inside pretending to sleep.
Allie realized that if she didn’t get moving, she would get caught in a kind of feedback loop in her head, worrying about things that didn’t matter, gnawing at mysteries that could stay unsolved. The identity of the killer was hardly the point at the moment. She could worry about identification after she found Madison and they got away to someone who could help.
But he’s somewhere outside. He’s moving silently. He could be climbing through the window in Brad and Cam’s bedroom right now. Or he could be waiting for me to rush out the door. What should I do? What should I do?
Allie had never panicked before, never thought of herself as the sort who would. But she recognized panic’s edges creeping up on her, seeping at the corners of her mind.
Pull yourself together RIGHT NOW.
Her eyes darted from the open bedroom door to the open front door to the sticky blood underneath Cam to the spreading pool around Steve.
No flies. Why are there no flies in here, zooming through the open windows, landing in the mess around Cam and now Steve? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? Wouldn’t that be normal?
There were no flies and there were no curious animals nosing through the door, and Allie felt sure that there should be. There was something so wrong about the cabin, not just the cabin itself but the area around it, and so many things she didn’t understand.
Staged, she thought for the third time that day. But I don’t understand how, or why.
She glanced at the open front door, wondering if she dared go out that way. It would be more dangerous to go through a window—what if she got stuck while climbing out, or fell awkwardly? Going straight through an open door seemed the most sensible thing. People in horror movies, especially big-breasted girls
(and you are a big-breasted girl, you’re practically a walking trope)
were always getting stuck in places that they shouldn’t have tried to go through. She thought of Tatum getting stuck in the cat door in Scream, her head crushed as Ghostface raised the garage door while she struggled to break free. Allie didn’t want to stick a limb out one of the windows only to find it lopped off by a waiting murderer.
She knew she had to go through the front door. She just had to suck it up and run fast and hope that he wasn’t lurking on the other side of the frame. She had to hope that if she ran fast enough, she’d take him by surprise and he wouldn’t be able to catch up. She had to hope that she’d find Madison, and that Madison would be alive and okay, and that the two of them could make it to the main road.
Allie slid her foot forward, trying not to make a sound. Her rubber-soled sneakers only whispered against the hardwood floor but seemed unnaturally loud in the silence. Nothing rustled outside. The wind didn’t move the trees or shift the dried leaves that were scattered over the clearing in front of the cabin.
She moved slowly toward the front door, stepping carefully around Steve, not wanting to tread in his blood. It seemed disrespectful, somehow, especially since she was leaving him behind. She was leaving Steve and Cam behind because there was nothing she could do for them, but it still felt wrong.
You’re into survival. You have to survive.
Allie looked through the open doorway, a narrow frame enclosing the world outside. There was the wooden porch, and the two steps down. There was the clearing and the artfully scattered leaves.
Artfully scattered?
She shook her head. She couldn’t think about all the things that were off about this place right now. But it wasn’t hard to imagine someone walking through the clearing with a black trash bag full of leaves, dropping them here and there for effect.
Especially since all the trees around here are evergreens.
Her eyes widened as she realized this, as one of the not-quite-right sensations fell neatly into a defined box. The leaves on the ground couldn’t have come from the trees around the cabin.
They made a mistake. They thought nobody would notice, or care.
Allie didn’t have a clue who the mysterious “they” might be, or what Brad’s connection to them was (because she wasn’t giving up on her idea that Brad was involved), but she felt secure in the notion that there was a “they.” This was an elaborate conspiracy to—what? To get rid of all of them? To terrorize Allie specifically? What was the endgame?
You sound insane. You know the whole idea sounds insane.
And yet Allie couldn’t shake the sense that she was right, and more importantly, that she wasn’t supposed to figure it out. But enough details had been off that she almost had to be suspicious. She’d be inexcusably stupid if she weren’t.
She tried to see if the man (hunter, stalker, killer) was standing just outside the door. There should be a shadow. It wasn’t so late in the day that the sun would be directly overhead.
Of course, if he’s sensible (and he does seem to be), he’ll stand on the side where his shadow is cast away from the doorway so you can’t judge anything from that.
Allie knew she was standing there thinking instead of moving, that she should have pushed herself out the door several minutes before, that she was scared to move, scared to make the wrong decision. This wasn’t a multiple-choice test, where the worst result for choosing incorrectly would be a lower grade. This was her life she was playing with here, throwing the dice and hoping they didn’t come up snake eyes.
If you stand here until it gets dark, he will come back. You’ll be all alone in here with two dead bodies, and he will come back.
Allie ran.
She burst out through the door, looking left and right as she went, and found she was alone. She slammed down the steps and through the clearing and ran along the dirt track that had led them to this place, following the faint trace of the car’s wheels in the dirt.
Allie ran regularly as part of her exercise routine, and she knew that she was running too fast, that she couldn’t maintain this pace. If she didn’t slow down soon, her body would force her to stop. She was already sucking air, the rasp of her breath telling her that she was working too hard. A stitch pinched under her right ribs, sending pain shooting through her. She tried to fix her form, to stretch the cramp, but she couldn’t, because she was running too fast to think about all the things she normally thought about, like keeping her core engaged and her shoulders over her hips and all the other stupid shit that she did when she ran for fun and not for her life.
After about a half mile of almost blind sprinting where she registered nothing except the pounding of her heart and the screaming of her lungs, Allie felt herself slow involuntarily. She couldn’t keep up the pace any longer. She looked behind her, saw that she was alone on the road. Her feet stopped moving of their own accord and she bent over her legs, pressing her hands into her thighs, trying to slow the frantic rabbit that wanted to escape out of her chest. Her right hand still gripped the knife and her fingers felt like they’d attached to the handle permanently.
She had to think. She was away from the cabin, and that was all to the good. If she was lucky, the killer had been lurking around behind the cabin, looking for an excuse to terrorize her some more, and hadn’t realized right away that she’d escaped. Once he did realize, though, he would certainly come after her. There was no way he could let her get away. That wasn’t how these things worked.
And you left your footprints in the dirt for him to follow, dumbass.
It didn’t really matter if she left a trail or not, she realized. There was only one logical path for her to follow—the road—and he would assume that was the way she’d gone. It was senseless to berate herself for leaving tracks behind.
He’ll know these woods better than you, so don’t even think about trying to hide yourself there and potentially get turned around. Just follow the road.
Her breath had returned to something resembling normal inhalations and exhalations, though her heart didn’t seem to want to stop racing. The surge of adrenaline was still pumping through her.
She started again at a jogging pace, glancing over her shoulder frequently, expecting every time to see a looming figure silhouetted on the road. But every time she looked, he wasn’t there. While she wasn’t exactly disappointed, his nonappearance made her more sharply aware of everything around her, reminded her of the way he’d tricked her in the cabin. What if he had followed and was just pacing along inside the cover of the trees, lulling her into a false sense of security?
The sun shone down on her, but it seemed only to cast light without heat. The wind wasn’t blowing, but she shivered a little as the rivulets of sweat dried on her body. The air felt strange, tasted almost metallic in her mouth. Everything was bright and still and chilly, but not the kind of chill that came from crisp fall air. It was more artificial than that, she realized. It almost felt like a climate-controlled room.
Allie stopped then, looking all around from the sky to the trees to the dirt she walked on. She felt like she was on the verge of something, of all the clues finally clicking together.
“Allie?”
A tiny, shaky voice came from Allie’s right, and a second later there was Madison, stumbling out of the trees and throwing herself at Allie.
“Allie, Allie, Cam’s dead,” she said, sobbing into Allie’s sweatshirt. “She’s dead. Someone just came and killed her while we were all standing right there.”
“Madison,” Allie said, sighing in relief. At least she didn’t have to run around looking for her friend. “Come on, we have to keep moving.”
“But Cam,” Madison said, crying harder. “She’s really dead. She’s really gone.”
Allie wondered if this was the moment to tell Madison that her boyfriend was dead, too. She decided against it. The important thing was to get Madison walking, to keep making progress away from the cabin. If Allie mentioned Steve’s fate right now, then Madison might just come unglued completely, might sit down in the middle of the road and wail endlessly. They couldn’t afford that. Just because the killer hadn’t yet reappeared didn’t mean their luck would last forever.
“We’ve got to go, Madison. We’ve got to find someone to help us.” Allie unraveled Madison’s tight hug and took her friend’s arm, leading her away from the direction of the cabin.
“But what will we say? Some crazy killer is out in the woods?” Madison said, her voice breaking as she sobbed. “It sounds nuts. We’ll sound nuts.”
“I don’t really think a stranger’s impression of us should be our priority,” Allie said. “We just need someone with a car to pick us up and take us to a police station.”
“W-what if the person with the car is the killer?” Madison said. “How will we even know?”
“Well, if it’s a huge guy wearing a red shirt, we won’t get in the car,” Allie said, tugging at Madison to keep her moving.
“What do you mean?” Madison said. “Did you see him?”
“Yes,” Allie said, not wanting to go into the details, as that would stray dangerously close to the circumstances of Steve’s death. She wasn’t trying to hide the information from Madison exactly—she just didn’t want to tell Madison at the moment. It was better to wait until they were out of danger, preferably when they were in a police station surrounded by walls and officers with guns.
Although police officers don’t have a great track record in horror movies. A lot of them die, or get hurt, or just flat out don’t believe the people reporting what happened to them.
She had to stop thinking this was a movie. It wasn’t. They just needed to act normally, act logically—find their way to a main road, hitch a ride, get to the police. Once Allie and Madison brought the police back to the cabin, it wouldn’t matter if the officers believed them or not. They’d have to see the truth. The bodies of Cam and Steve would be right in front of them.
“But no Brad,” Allie murmured.
“What?” Madison said. Tears leaked out of her eyes continuously. She wasn’t actively sobbing, and she stumbled along more or less at Allie’s pace. But she kept crying, almost as if she were unaware of it happening, and she kept one hand on Allie’s sleeve, like a little kid holding on to their parent so they wouldn’t get lost in a crowd.
“Brad,” Allie said. “What the hell happened to Brad? Did he go off in the middle of the night on his own or did someone take him? And was he involved with all this?”
“I can’t believe he’d hurt Cam, or let someone else hurt her,” Madison said. “I can’t believe that.”
“As Randy says in Scream, ‘There’s always some stupid bullshit reason to kill your girlfriend,’ ” Allie said. “Besides, I always thought Brad might hurt Cam. There was just something about the way he talked to her, the way he treated her.”
“Cam would have left him,” Madison said. Allie noted that Madison didn’t say she was wrong about Brad. That meant that Madison had sensed the same quality that Allie had, the same undercurrent of mean, even if she hadn’t identified it as such.
“Maybe,” Allie said. She knew how easy it was for women to pretend that there was nothing wrong, to believe a man when he said it would never happen again. She’d spent years watching her mother and her stepfather perform the same dreadful dance. But she wasn’t going to talk about that. She didn’t ever talk about that. “I think that Brad would definitely hurt Cam if he thought he’d get something out of it.”
“But what?” Madison said. Her voice was shaky, like she was barely holding on. “What could he possibly get out of it? If he didn’t want to be with her anymore, he could have just broken up with her. That’s what normal people do. They don’t have their girlfriends murdered.”
“Maybe it’s for his own amusement or something,” Allie said. “I don’t really know. I just know that he brought us here in the first place and that he disappeared. Jesus, doesn’t this road have an end? I still don’t hear the sound of a highway.”
Allie paused and Madison stopped a half second later. Madison seemed to get tangled up in her own feet, clutching Allie’s arm for balance before she was able to right herself.
“I can’t hear anything, either,” Madison said. “What if it’s farther away than we thought? I mean, we were all asleep in the car basically right up until we arrived at the cabin.”
“Except for Brad,” Allie said. She wished she could figure out Brad’s role in all of this. He was culpable in some way; of that she was certain.
And you want him to be the bad guy because you never liked him in the first place.
Allie looked at the dirt road stretching out before them. It went straight into the horizon, running neatly in between the thick forest on either side. There was no movement ahead on the road, nor sound or sign of any person or animal in the woods.
“How can the road be this straight and flat?” Allie asked.
Madison looked confused, then shrugged. “Who cares?”
“It’s not how dirt roads are, usually. They’re rutted and pitted and full of rocks and they weave all over the place because they’re just old cart tracks or something. They aren’t smooth and straight and groomed.”
Because the road was groomed, Allie realized. She could see the marks of a rake or some similar implement on the edges of the road. She tugged Madison over to point out the marks.
“So?” Madison said again. Her tears were still falling, though less rapidly. “I don’t get why this is important. I thought we were running away from someone who wanted to kill us. Someone from highway maintenance or whatever they’re called came here and raked the dirt. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Make sure that the roads are passable?”
“Yeah, they’re supposed to make sure the highways are passable. This isn’t a highway. It’s probably not even a marked road on a county map. It’s basically a driveway that leads to one place—that cabin back there. So why would someone come out here and smooth the dirt away? Why would the road be this flat and straight in the first place?” Allie said.
Madison shook her head, and Allie could tell that Madison didn’t get it, didn’t understand why Allie was making such a big fuss over this.
She felt a deep-seated frustration that she couldn’t explain. It was important that the road was straight and flat and that all the dirt was neatly arranged over the top of it. It was all part of the growing certainty Allie had that all of this was staged, even if she didn’t know why.
She looked up at the sky, at the light that didn’t seem quite like sunlight. She thought about the straight road and the freshly built closets in the cabin and the lack of flies and mosquitoes and other buzzing things. She tasted the air, felt the recirculated smoothness slide over her tongue, and it all clicked together.
“We’re inside,” Allie said, and dropped to her knees, scrabbling at the dirt with her fingers.
“What are you doing?” Madison said. “Allie, have you lost it?”
“We’re not outside at all,” Allie said. “We’re in a big, I don’t know, some kind of warehouse maybe or indoor park. This is all a setup.”
“A setup for what?”
“I don’t know,” Allie said, and she heard the frustration in her own voice, heard the longing for answers, for understanding. “I don’t know why Brad brought us here or why Steve and Cam are dead—”
“Steve’s dead?” Madison said, her voice rising into a howl on the last word. “Steve’s dead and you didn’t even tell me?”
“—but this has all been arranged for some reason. We’re like players in a play, but nobody told us our lines. Like The Blair Witch Project or something. The actors in that weren’t really told what would happen. They were just supposed to act natural and the filmmakers kept fucking with them, basically. But no one died. No one really died. Not like here. Not like us. So it can’t be like The Blair Witch Project.”
“Steve’s dead and you’re still talking about some goddamned horror movie? What is wrong with you? Is your heart made of stone?” Her tears fell thicker and faster now.
Allie’s heart wasn’t made of stone. Her emotions just wouldn’t engage when there was a problem to be solved. Her whole intellect, her whole self, was wrapped up in the mystery of their circumstances. She wanted to comfort Madison. She really did. But that impulse was underneath the other one, the one that made her dig into the dirt beneath them, push her fingers down until she found the thing she expected to find.
“Concrete,” she said triumphantly, brushing the last of the dust aside so Madison could see. “Look. Concrete.”
“So?” Madison said, scrubbing at her eyes. “Steve’s dead. I don’t give a shit that there’s a road under the road.”
“You don’t use concrete for roads, at least not this kind. There’s no asphalt in this,” Allie said. “This is proof that we’re inside. We’re in some kind of huge structure.”
“I don’t understand,” Madison said, her brain seeming to move away from Steve and to their current problem. “We’re, what, in a movie or something? Like you said, like Blair Witch?”
“No, I don’t think it’s a movie.”
“Then what? Is it a game? Like that old movie with Michael Douglas, where he thought he was in this big life-threatening conspiracy but really it was all fake, some weird present from his brother or whatever?”
Allie stared at Madison. “A game. A great big game.”
“I always thought that was a pretty shitty present, to terrorize your brother, but everyone was smiling at the end, so I guess it was all okay? At least that’s what I remember.”
“Mad, that’s genius! A game. We’re in some kind of game, like a survival game.”
“For real? You think something I said was genius?”
“Well, yeah,” Allie said, frowning. “Why wouldn’t I think that?”
“I don’t know,” Madison said, shrugging. “Everyone knows that you think everyone else but you is stupid.”
“I don’t think that,” Allie said automatically, but it wasn’t true. She did look down on most people, did think almost everyone else was dumber than she. “Okay, maybe I do think that. A lot. And I’m sorry.”
Madison shook her head. “I mean, don’t be sorry, because it’s true that you’re smarter than me.”
“But that doesn’t mean you’re stupid. And I’m sorry that I made you feel that way.”
“We haven’t always been the greatest friends to each other, huh?” Madison said. “Because I know me and Cam make you feel bad because you don’t want to be a party girl all the time.”
“Let’s be better, then,” Allie said, and put out her hand so Madison could hook it in a pinky promise like they were little kids.
Madison smiled a very watery smile. “Stamp it.”
They hooked their fingers and then stamped their thumbs together, then looked at the patch of dirt Allie had cleared away.
“So, a game?” Madison said. “But whose game? And does it mean that Cam and Steve are really all right, that it’s all fake, like in the movie?”
Allie thought back to the moment when the killer stepped through the door, saw again the arterial spurt pulsing out of Steve’s body.
“It’s not fake,” Allie said, her voice grim. “We don’t get a reset button if we die in here.”
“You think Brad organized all this, don’t you?”
“It’s not looking good for him,” Allie said. She faced Madison, hands on hips. “So, what do you think we should do th—”
Madison’s eyes widened and she screamed, “Allie, no!”
A second later Allie was on the ground, shoved there by Madison’s frantic movement. Then Madison was on the ground, too, a great gash in the left side of her neck, and her blood was pooling under Allie’s hands and her mouth fell open but no sound came out.
Allie rolled away from Madison and saw the man, the man who’d come out of the woods behind her to ambush them while she was worrying about the goddamned road and now Madison was dead, dead like Steve and dead like Cam and dead like Allie was going to be if she didn’t get her ass up and get moving.
The man stood above her, and she saw that he’d added a mask to the proceedings, a Lone Ranger–type half mask that would have made Allie laugh except that his stupid mask didn’t matter, just the knife that he held in his hand. She saw the gleam in his eyes, the gleam that said he was enjoying this, that he wanted to feel her fear first, that he wanted her to know that she was completely alone.
Allie took a moment, calculated her chances.
She launched herself at him from the ground, keeping herself low like a football player pushing an exercise sled across the field. She took him by surprise, felt the whoosh of air rush out of him as she shouldered him in the solar plexus. He fell backward and the knife spun out of his grip, landing a few feet away.
Before he could really register what had happened or what she’d done, Allie stomped hard on his balls. Again she heard the rush of air in his lungs, but this time it was the sharp inhale that follows intense pain. He grabbed at his crotch while Allie ran to the knife, picked it up (don’t think about Madison’s blood on it, don’t think about it, don’t don’t don’t) and sprinted into the woods.
She heard the man’s hoarse voice follow after her. “I’m going to kill you, you bitch! Do you hear me? I’m going to fucking kill you!”
Can’t kill me if you can’t catch me, Allie thought, and she ran harder than she’d ever run in her life, and she knew that if she stopped running, that life would be over, just another ignominious death in a world full of them.
I don’t want to die because of someone else’s game. I don’t want to die because Brad is the world’s biggest asshole. I’m going to find that piece of shit and he is going to pay for this.
Allie knew this was the kind of thing you told yourself when you were scared and the future was bleak, knew that Brad had never paid for a thing in his goddamned life and that he wasn’t about to start now.
But she wanted him to pay. She really, really wanted that.
Allie wasn’t looking at where she was running, knew that in some sense it didn’t matter because she was inside, not really in a forest at all.
If I just keep running, I’ll get to a wall or a door. Even if this place is huge, there will be an end to it, and when I find the end to it, I’ll probably find Brad.
Allie didn’t want to think about what would happen then, because if Brad had planned all this, then he was responsible for three murders. And someone who was willing to let that happen wouldn’t balk at killing her, too.
She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t worry about what might happen later. She had to concentrate on getting away now, getting away from the man who was crashing through the woods behind her now, the man who kept shouting that he was going to rip her from end to end.
Whoever Brad hired to play this part really seems to enjoy it, Allie thought in a distant part of her brain, the part that wasn’t gibbering with fear. She wondered if the order of deaths had been planned, or if it was just coincidental that she was the lone survivor—so far.
You always wanted to be the final girl. You always said you could survive a horror movie, that you would be smarter, faster, better than anyone. So prove it.
“Prove it,” she murmured to herself even as her arms pumped and her legs propelled her forward, even as she heard the man crashing behind her getting closer and closer and closer.
“You bitch! I’m going to kill you, you bitch!”
Get an original line, why don’t you? she thought, and she ran and ran, but part of her was stuck on two words.
Prove it. Someone said that to me before. Just recently. Who was it?
Allie crashed through the trees and found herself in a kind of open lane, a stretch of concrete flooring that nobody had bothered to hide.
On the other side of the lane, there was a wall. A huge white wall with a door cut into it, and above the door, four letters highlighted in red.
“Bitch! Bitch! I’m going to gut you when I catch you!”
Allie ran, ran, ran for the exit.
She slammed into the door, and pushed it open.