“Where’s the machete I gave you?” Jade asks, casting around. “Your dad didn’t really put it in his safe, did he?”
Letha looks over to her like Jade’s talking in possum, and she wants to watch her lips, see how an animal can be making human words like this.
Jade shakes Letha, says, “I know you’re not ready, but you have to be. It’s happening.”
“But… this is—”
“I know, I know,” Jade says. “I said tomorrow night, the party, but I was wrong, I don’t know, I’m sorry, okay?”
“The massacre?”
“It’s happening right now.”
“But who—”
“You don’t want to know,” Jade says, standing, pulling Letha up alongside her. “Now where’s that machete?”
Letha pans around the room, her eyes wide and dumb like a cow’s— I should have prepared her better, Jade’s chiding herself—then reaches over behind the dresser, unsheathes the machete from its excellent hiding place. She offers it to Jade but Jade steps away, hands high.
“This is all you,” she says. “I take that, I die fast. That’s Indy’s whip, Thor’s hammer, the Dude’s housecoat. One user only.”
She guides it back closer to Letha.
“I don’t know how,” Letha says, trying to figure where her fingers go, what the balance is, which is the sharp side. After snatching it from the air like a ninja chopsticking a fly in flight, yeah.
“You will,” Jade tells her, and steps forward, hates that she has to but does it anyway: pushes the side of her head to the door, to listen. What she deserves for that, she knows, and would even cheer for, is Ghostface’s knife plunging into the side of her skull, but the only other option is stepping out there without knowing it’s empty.
“Clear,” she says after maybe three breaths of silence, and snaps for Letha to come close, to be ready.
“Where are we going?” Letha asks.
“Off this boat,” Jade hisses back, and hauls the door in all at once.
Ladybird Samuels is lying there eyes open, mouth doubly-open—no chin, no jaw, maybe no throat either, like the skin just kept holding on and holding on. Her bloody handprints are on the door right by Jade’s face.
Letha screams until Jade turns around, covers Letha’s mouth with her hand, bringing her eyes right up to Letha’s, warning her to stop. After nodding to Letha and getting a nod back, she finally—slowly—removes her hand.
Letha draws in like to scream again, to tell the whole boat where they are, but instead she throws up her half a potato skin.
Jade doesn’t hold her hair or pat her back. She steps into the hall.
“Which way is out?” she asks.
When Letha’s just crying, probably replaying Ladybird Samuels in her head, Jade says it again, harsher: “Where to, Letha?”
Letha weakly points back the way they came, past the bathroom. Jade takes her by the wrist, then the hand, and leads her out, both of them stepping carefully over Ladybird Samuels.
“Who’s doing this?” Letha says, unable to look away, or be helpful at all.
“You’ll see,” Jade tells her, and they make it all the way to the stairs before the next body confronts them: Ross Pangborne.
He’s been ripped apart somehow, his torso up at the switchback, his legs playing catchup, though they never will.
“W-what could do that?” Letha says, trying to fall to her knees, give up.
“Shotgun, chainsaw,” Jade says, not letting Letha give up, just pulling her deeper into this.
“But what did he do to—to deserve this?” Letha asks, and Jade lets a grim smile touch her lips: if Letha’s already seeing these deaths like that, as the consequence of previous bullshit, then there’s hope.
Jade eases them around Ross Pangborne, trying not to step in the blood as that leaves red footprints.
“We can’t just—” Letha starts.
“We have to,” Jade completes, and then they’re to the top of the stairs, in the tower part of the yacht, she’s pretty sure, are having to step over a shattered shotgun to see— Letha falls back shaking her head no, no, and Jade doesn’t want to look, but has to: Mars Baker has been thrust headfirst through the big window, and his jaw has been pulled off too, so his mouth is locked into a forever scream.
Letha falls back shaking her head no, no, and now it’s Jade’s turn to throw up. Just into her mouth at first, but when she can’t swallow that, all the salmon and potato skins and lavender and melatonin comes up and out, splashes her boots and Letha’s bare feet, and it’s not purple, and her eyes are hot and leaky so she guesses that means she’s crying because there’s vomit burning her nasal passage, and now more’s coming up, and Letha’s hand is on her back, the same as it was for Tiffany K, once upon a puking.