It makes her spin around in the water for whatever’s coming for her.
Nothing.
And then—no.
“Behind you!” Jade screams as loud as she can, pointing with both hands, which makes her face nearly slip underwater.
There’s a head of long hair blowing in silhouette from the railing of the deck above Letha.
Synthetic hair, Jade wants to tell Letha, but in the moment it doesn’t matter.
Ross Pangborne’s dead, Mars Baker is dead, Deacon Samuels was dead before this night even started, and Lewellyn Singleton can’t have enough backstory to be any kind of slasher, can he?
Leaving one man up there in a Norman Bates dress, a Samara wig: Theo Mondragon. Who else could get close enough to Tiara to toss her over like that? Who else would have that upper body strength?
“Jump!” Jade screams up to Letha, and, instead, Letha looks behind her, sees this mask-face from much closer, and this does dislodge her.
It’s a fall that should crunch her ribs in on the railing of one of the three decks below, break her in half, ground her for life if she’s so lucky, but Letha’s Letha: one of her bare feet finds the solid railing she just slipped from and pushes out hard from it so Letha’s no longer going straight down but is arcing out, her body stretching out into a dive so perfect Jade almost gasps.
Three seconds later Letha slips into the water with less splash than a dagger, porpoises up maybe twenty feet out, meaning she turned back for the surface the moment she broke it, to be sure not to mar her face against the stony bottom.
Good for her, Jade says inside. Smoke em if you got em, and this final girl most definitely does.
Jade slaps the water like a beaver tail to get Letha’s attention and Letha clears her hair from her eyes, looks around, awake again. She takes a long, easy stroke Jade’s way, then another, and, right before she’s going to get there, Jade kicks away, going for around the front of the boat, for shore that doesn’t involve the pier.
“Camp Blood,” she manages to get across to Letha. “We have to—”
Letha stills, stops swimming alongside Jade.
“We have to,” Jade says, swirling her hands to stay afloat.
“No,” Letha says, and Jade can tell from the set of her lips that she’s seeing Deacon Samuels all over again. At Camp Blood.
“But—”
“I can’t,” Letha says. It’s not a plea, just a fact.
“Shit! ” Jade says, slapping the water in frustration now, but then she turns back the other way, to the ass-end of the boat, where it’s darker. Where they can hide better, if they can slip into the trees? Maybe bunk in the woods, take the long long way around to Proofrock, through the national forest? Show up sometime in early August?
“Where are we going?” Letha asks, having to swim slow to not pass Jade up.
“Land,” Jade says, struggling through the water.
They’re almost there when Jade’s hair is sticking into her eyes in a way it hasn’t been—at which point it registers that she doesn’t have hair. And it’s not hair anyway, but a thick coating on her whole face, chunky like canned dog food that’s been poured into the lake and then let spread out until it’s thin.
She looks over to Letha, and the chunks on the pale shoulders of her camisole are red in the moonlight. Jade’s next awkward stroke brings her hand into a warm cavity like a floating bowl of oatmeal, a floating bowl that’s… Lewellyn Singleton’s caved-in face? What, is this a Fulci film?
She spins away, swims under the floating body, no breath this time, hits bottom almost immediately with her fingertips.
She pulls ahead rock by rock, finally stands in the shallows, well clear of any floating dead people.
Letha’s already there, chest heaving, her eyes locked on Lewellyn Singleton’s pale form.
“Is it over now?” she asks.
“Not even close,” Jade tells her, and they trudge up into the mud and grass, then scramble for the trees hand in hand, groping through the darkness when the moon’s gone above the trees, and… was this what it was like for Stacey Graves a hundred-plus years ago, when she made it across the new lake? Was she scared like this?
Except she was younger, Jade reminds herself.
And what she was scared of, it was herself.
More important, it’s now, not then. And no, Letha, this isn’t over yet.
“We’ve got, we’ve got to—” Jade tells her, pulling her away from the yacht, away from the yacht, that’s all she knows right now.