But where is the REVENGE you promised, Jade? you might be asking.
Let me tell you, and I have to go to the history books and also a 3rd page for this, sir, sorry, just give me extra points if you need to, I understand. But I’m talking about that story Quint tells below decks about his experience when the Indianapolis sank in the ocean and was swarmed by sharks which ate so many sailors and soldiers, the thing he doesn’t say about that is that his ship then was delivering an atomic bomb called Little Boy. So this is by some views already a guilty ship, a punishable offense. But what do sharks care about bombed cities or ruined centuries? They don’t, sir. But they do care about their reputation, and their reputation went bad when so many of them came in and ate the lower halves of all these floating sailors and soldiers, which started a different war, this 1 against shark kind, BY humans. So that’s what sharks can be generally mad about and need justice for, their bad reputation.
But also, why THIS shark. My idea which tracks is that since in the world of Jaws we don’t know how long sharks live or if they even die, that the great white attacking Amity Island could have been AT the Indianapolis, and because we didn’t know radiation shielding the same back then, maybe it even got some glowing green atomic rays in it, making it big AND smart. Even smart enough to cross over half the world and come to get revenge on a sailor soldier who escaped its teeth in 1945, but is now spreading word of sharks’ lifeless doll eyes, making everybody just shoot sharks on sight, when really they just want to swim and eat fish and stuff.
Which is why Jaws is a slasher, Mr. Holmes. In addition to all the outer characteristics of a slasher it has, it also has the internal and most important trait of REVENGE, and it has 1 more too, that being a FINAL GIRL, who is this time a guy, Chief Brody, who starts out meek and afraid and flinchy but gets brave and killy in the scary scary open sea by the end.
This is how slashers work, sir.
See you in the water.
HELL NIGHT
There’s something wriggling on the back of Jade’s neck, multiple wet somethings, but her arms are too trapped to get at them. Maggots, she knows. She can’t fault them, though.
They’re just the hungry kids muscling their way to the front of the cafeteria line, right? They want to be there waiting when the doors open, when the meat’s the warmest it’s going to be.
Jade chuckles and then finds she can’t expand her chest out as much as it was before. Because of the weight. Because of her weakness. Because this is it.
She’s not sure how long she was out, or even if she for sure was out. One moment there was bloody mucky darkness all around, and the next moment there was bloody mucky darkness pressing her down and down and down, the most full-body hug she’s ever gritted her teeth through. Luckily her head cocked to the side right at the last instant, probably an instinct to save her teeth from getting crunched in, or else she’d have already smothered.
As it is, the air she’s breathing is air she’s been breathing, and has to be about eighty percent gore and rot, and some part sharp stabs of elk hair—sharp to her lips and eyes, anyway.
The drowning feeling is completely real, but panicking doesn’t make any difference. She can’t move even a little. To keep from going even more batshit than she already is, she counts bodies from her and Letha’s big nightmare run through the SS
Lazarus of Jason Takes Manhattan, which wasn’t the rush Jade had always imagined it to be.
There was… first there was Ladybird Samuels in the hallway, then Ross Pangborne in the stairwell, then Mars Baker up in the window, and Tiara pedaling out through open air, and Lewellyn Singleton in the shallows. Oh, and probably Macy Todd in the room on the other side of Letha’s wall. She was really first. Except for Mismatched Gloves and Cody and Shooting Glasses. And now at the bitter end—for them anyway—Jade and Letha. Really, if Letha’s lucky, then she was crushed instantly, or got the kindness of a shattered elk rib pushing up through an eye socket, into the big off-switch of her brain.
Faster has to be better.
As for Jade, she imagines her skull’s going to turn up in years, when some kids not even born yet are building skeletons from this fun mess of bones, don’t even realize they’ve found the last victim of the Lake Witch Slayings.
At least then she’ll really be part of it, right?
Don’t laugh, she warns herself. Any space her ribs give up, she doesn’t get it back.
It won’t be long now. It can’t be.
Unless… are the state police already crawling over Terra Nova with dogs and cameras? Is the whole nation focused on Indian Lake again, now that not just one Founder’s died, but a whole clutch of them?