Slasher Summer(48)
Fucking masks.
And then came the moment Freddy was dreading. That movie kill moment. The slow, deliberate push of the knife into his belly. So smooth he barely felt it. Or maybe his entire body had gone numb with shock.
He’d been right. The knife was sharp enough to part flesh like warm butter.
He stared down at the glossy slash across his midsection. Another stripe across his torso, to match the ones on his shirt. How amazing that would look on film. The lurid richness of color. The wet, suggestively phallic organs bulging from between parted lips of flesh. David Cronenberg himself couldn’t have done it better.
Cut, Freddy thought. And fade to black.
16
Jen
“Patrick?” Jen said.
A rustle whispered in her ears. It might have been a breeze, it might have been someone creeping in the brush. Jen held her breath, torn between wanting to call out and wanting to hide.
Patrick wouldn’t have skulked away to look for Mikey on his own without saying something. She loved to tease him about his many character quirks, but being an asshole wasn’t one of them.
Unless he actually was a psycho killer like she’d joked.
She slowly spun around, searching the shadows for Patrick’s familiar outline. Coarse tree trunks striped the night, and without much light she couldn’t tell how far away any of them were. Her field of vision had gone flat.
She stopped, slightly dizzy and regretting the spin, because now she didn’t know where she’d started from. Fuck. She tucked the flashlight under her arm and dug in her shorts for the compass.
Which, like Patrick, was gone.
She remembered with sickening clarity that he’d been the last to hold it. “Fuck!” She kicked at a dark shape, assuming it was a fallen log, not caring if anyone heard her. It disintegrated satisfactorily into splinters.
She slipped out her phone and prayed for a miracle. None were forthcoming. Her battery was at its last gasp. Not that it mattered. No phone, no data connection, so she couldn’t use GPS. Why the fuck had she joined the local NIMBYs in protesting the building of a new cell tower when she was in high school? Every other teenager in town had been all for it, but at the time she’d wanted to have places she could sneak off to without Daddy tracking her location.
There was nothing to do but keep going. Jen was fairly sure this was the direction in which she’d started—on the left side of the splintered log. She and Patrick had been walking for about a half hour. She had to be close. She’d keep going forward and hopefully she’d hear cars going down the highway soon.
Her hope was as faint as the moonlight seeping through the canopy, but it was all she had to cling to, besides the knife. It was an unfamiliar feeling. Jen’s lizard brain had always been more fight than flight. More into fucking than fearing. But now that she was in near-total darkness, holding only a knife in the wild, her brain told her that terrible things were waiting for her in the woods.
Another rustle sounded somewhere behind her.
Heart pounding, Jen dared to whisper, “Patrick? Mikey?”
Only the mocking call of a whippoorwill answered. Jen clutched the knife close to her chest like a prayer and crept forward a few more steps. Her lizard brain told her she was just a girl in the woods, surrounded by potentially dangerous men.
A shadow stirred out of the corner of her eye. “Daniel? Russ?”
The movement had been only her imagination, or the trees shifting in the light wind. Jen gulped a breath of cedar-scented air, and a giggle escaped from her tense diaphragm. “Timmy?”
The Slasher’s real name should’ve reminded her how ridiculous this all was, but her fears got the better of her. What if Freddy was right? What if Russ Meachum was another homicidal creep with mommy issues like Timmy Thompson and Jason Voorhees?
Something stirred out of the corner of Jen’s other eye. She resisted the urge to turn on her flashlight. Otherwise she might as well put up a flashing neon sign pointed straight at her. Victim Here. A young woman wandering alone in the woods was definitely a movie slasher magnet. Like brash Heather, whom Jen had played at the Rialto. The defiant bad girl had disregarded her friends’ warnings and gone off by herself to have a smoke.
Jen almost expected an audience to yell Bitch! as she crept through the woods. The thought made her bristle but also reminded her of who she was. A bitch, yes. Not a victim. She was Jennifer de la Fuente, badass goth artist. This kind of atmosphere was her element. Would Mary Shelley have been afraid of a few shadowy trees? She’d fucked Percy on her mother’s grave, as legend had it. You couldn’t get more goth than that. Jen would gladly fuck someone on her own mother’s grave, just to show Mom once and for all that she was never going to be a perfect little princess like Tiffany.
“Who’s got mommy issues now?” Jen muttered to herself.
And then she laughed out loud. Here she was, the town misfit roaming the woods at night with a butcher’s knife.
Anyone in the woods should be afraid of her.
Jen’s spine straightened. Let Russ or Daniel or any knife-waving screw-up come at her. She was ready for them. She’d always been a little pissed that she never got to play the Final Girl at the Rialto, but she realized now that she’d never been Final Girl material.
She had the potential to be the killer.
“You’d better run,” she announced, flicking on her flashlight, imagining dumb teens scattering like cockroaches. “Because here comes the real Slasher. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”