Slasher Summer(51)
She kept running, trying to outpace her regrets. Weaving between saplings, hopping over bowed trees thick with moss and fungi. She couldn’t stop. Stopping meant death.
Her boot, however, did not get the memo. It caught on an exposed tree root, wrenching her ankle inside the leather as she lurched forward, unable to slow her momentum. She cried out, falling to the forest floor. A blossom of pain exploded above her right breast. Motherfucker—
It took her a few precious seconds to realize what had happened. The good news was that she hadn’t been felled by the Slasher’s axe. The bad news was that the jagged edge of a broken sapling had stabbed below her collarbone. If the Slasher didn’t kill her, the fucking woods would. She was pinned like a butterfly under glass, laid out for the Slasher’s scrutiny.
“Not…today…Satan,” Jen growled, pushing herself up with her left arm and wrenching upward. Her vision briefly went black from the agony, or maybe the clouds had passed in front of the moon.
Tears sprung to her eyes as a scream scorched her throat. Screaming was good, actually. She didn’t know why she’d been ashamed of it before. It meant she didn’t have to hear the gravelly squelch of serrated wood shredding her flesh like deli meat. The hot gush of blood wetly dripping onto dead leaves and moist earth.
It wasn’t enough. All that pain and she wasn’t free yet. Just another inch, she told herself. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. She could do it. She tried not to think about the ragged splinters engraving her muscle tissue, and the dirt and moss and bugs and T-shirt fibers left behind in the wound. She thought of all the movies in which characters get stabbed or shot and yet keep fighting. Adrenaline was supposed to make you superhuman. Where was her hit?
Ah—there it was. There was the adrenaline, coursing through her veins like hot espresso. She dragged herself off that final inch of the sapling, screaming herself raw the whole way.
And then she was running again, even though she’d fucked up her ankle when she’d fallen. Her gait was awkward, favoring her right leg, her left palm pressed to her gored shoulder. There was so much blood, soaking her ruined T-shirt, trickling to her shorts and scalding her leg in hot dribbles. She cried out as she ran, every step making her wound spit up more blood, tasting tears and snot and the waxy residue of her dissolving eye makeup.
The Slasher continued his relentless trudge. He was toying with her, Jen realized. She was weak, dizzy from fear and blood loss. He could easily overtake her. The sadistic fuck was enjoying this. He’d had his chase, and now he was waiting for her to give up. Accept that she was beaten. That was probably the real thrill he was savoring. It wasn’t death, but power that got him off.
Fuck that. She wasn’t going to surrender and give him the satisfaction. He could go fuck himself—
She stumbled on her bad ankle and fell to the ground. No, no, no. Three words cut through the tangle of gibbering thoughts in her head. Get up, bitch. She twisted into a sitting position, sobbing as pain and terror surged through her body. She scooched back as if she could outrun the Slasher on her ass. Her chest heaved, each desperate movement sending a sharp stab in her chest like she was being gored all over again.
Jen’s life flashed before her. There wasn’t much to see. Her only regret was that she’d come back to this fucking place. She should’ve blown off Patrick’s invite and counted down the days to her trust fund.
She thought of all her conquests. The girls who thought they could melt her heart. How they never understood it was kinder for Jen not to give anyone hope. She knew how her would-be girlfriends felt now. Throats exposed and grasping for the slightest shred of optimism.
She found that shred, in desperation. There had to be some way she could appeal to the killer and not die tonight.
She squinted up at the advancing figure and tried to map it to the body she’d seen on the cabin floor. “Russ?”
The Slasher silently inclined his head, and Jen caught her breath. They’d been right. It was Ranger Russ, playing out his horror movie fantasies, or avenging some forgotten slight from high school. And of course he wasn’t going to speak. The Slasher never did, except for that one line growled over the phone. You’re all going to die tonight. That was what made him scary.
“Russ,” she repeated, hoping to appeal to his humanity. If he had any. “Russ, you don’t have to do this.”
He kept coming. How many steps would it take for him to reach her? Jen inched backward and forced herself to her feet. Her vision filled with stars from the pain, or maybe it was the night sky. The young trees offered little by way of canopy. They were as small and broken as she was.
Jen frantically looked around. They were in an open space, littered with jagged saplings. Nowhere to hide. She had to change tack. If Russ was cosplaying as the Slasher, maybe she could appeal to his goal of reenacting the movies.
“You can’t kill me, Russ,” she rasped. “I’m a queer woman of color. It would be cliché.”
Hell if she’d become the thing she hated most in media: the tragic queer. But she had the sinking feeling it was tragic only if someone cared if you died. Who was going to be sad, really? Her parents, sure, but they’d probably spend more time finding ways to blame each other for her death than actually grieving. Tiffany, yes, but she’d get over it. Jen’s death certainly wouldn’t change her life. Besides Tiff, Patrick and Carrie were the only friends who would cry at Jen’s funeral—because they were so sickeningly wholesome, not because they deeply cared about her.