Jade should be happy, too, she knows. This is proof, this is what she’s always wanted. She fumbles her phone up to take a snapshot for Hardy, but by the time she gets her phone up from her coveralls’ complicated pocket, Terra Nova’s still again, exactly like this Prowler had been a figment of her overactive, blood-soaked wishful thinking.
If she’d been making him up, though, then, first, he’d have had motorcycle boots on, most likely—those ratchet-buckles are so cool, so metal—and, second, there’d be a reason for the gas mask past just its essential scariness. In My Bloody Valentine, the gas mask is because this is a mining operation, and in the actual Prowler, the sheriff with the covered face is supposed to be a soldier who had probably had to deal with mustard gas on the battlefield or something.
Jade takes the best scent reading she can, identifies no foreign smells—no mustard gas, no horseradish—and finds herself both wanting this slasher to step out again, prove he was real, and also wanting him to have been all in her head.
She’s caught between those for, by her best guess… two hours? Has any slasher ever moved this slow? Granted, movies probably compress events that would take a lot longer, but two hours is long enough for her to spin all kinds of excuses for whoever that was down there to have been wearing a gas mask, carrying that nailgun, and wearing that black hoodie in July. Which isn’t the way to be ready, to be vigilant.
Then, finally: Clack!
Adrenaline floods all through her again, sharpening her senses. By the time it’s washing out of her system, she’s back to trying to make it all make sense. If this slasher were trying to nail someone running across the room, there’d be a barrage of clacks! This guy’s more deliberate, though, isn’t he? That game where two people hide on opposite sides of the same wall, each waiting for the other to burst out?
Evidently he’s the more patient one.
Except… except this is too early, isn’t it? This is supposed to be tomorrow night. Jade wants to stand, wave her arms for everybody to slow down, that they’re blowing their wad ahead of time, aren’t going to have any left when it counts.
She doesn’t know how far a nail from a nailgun can tumble through the air, though.
She looks up to the flurry of motion to her distant right—the yacht.
It’s Tiara Mondragon. She’s in her black bikini, her sunhat and shades on, a book tucked under her arm.
Completely unaware.
She sashays down to the—to whatever the tower part of a yacht is called, kind of two-thirds of the way back. She disappears into it. Moments later she emerges on a higher, closer-to-the-sun deck, drink in hand.
Call Hardy! Call 911! Jade tries to brainwave across, straining so hard her head nearly Scanners.
But, call him to say what, exactly? That someone over here’s wearing a gas mask all suspiciously? That their gait is all slashery? That—gasp—there’s a super-dangerous nailgun over here?
All the same, Jade gets her own phone ready, except… she did really need to plug in last night. All the charge she got from Hardy is gone, shit. Jade shakes her phone like she can get the battery juice to an important place long enough for just one call, but that works about as well as it usually does.
It’s all up to Tiara to save them now. Tiara who’s just settling down onto the towel she must have spread while Jade was having a panic attack about her battery. On the deck Tiara was just on, though, one of the Founders—Lewellyn Singleton —is walking and reading a newspaper, his robe cinched loose.
At the back of the yacht the two girls, Cinnamon and Ginger, mirror images of each other, are tossing bits of something over the railing into the water and giggling, and that short one whose head’s barely taller than the railing must be Galatea Pangborne.
None of them know. Yet.
Including Letha.
“Where are you?” Jade whispers to her. More important, where is this slasher prowling around? Is he, even? Do slashers take naps too?
“Fuck it,” Jade says, and stands.
Nothing happens. No nails whizz in, bury themselves in her gut.
“Well, let’s get this party started,” she announces, and walks downhill with long deliberate strides, all her pockets zipped, her lips set in a firm line. By the time she’s twenty yards from the closest house, past the last of the trees the Founders aren’t going to let anyone cut down, her lips feel more squiggly, more Charlie Brown. And she can feel his cartoon parentheses around her eyes, too.
Thing is, she’s close enough now she can’t see every exit, every entrance, and she’s only eighty percent certain—okay, seventy—that this is the same house she saw the slasher walking away from. Meaning it could be one he’s back inside.