If so, great, wonderful.
But the dogs and cameras can’t be ranging out this far yet.
They’re probably still trying to talk Lemmy and Galatea out of the cabinets they’ve wedged themselves into on the yacht, that they’re never really going to crawl all the way out of again, no matter how long they live. They’re probably trying to raise Cinnamon and Ginger on their big-girl cellphones, except those twins are long-legged, are probably down the mountain already, and not stopping until they see Texas. They probably still think Letha is in the water, needs to be fished out. And what of Donna Pangborne, Lana Singleton, and, so far as the law and the media knows, Theo Mondragon?
Probably Donna and Lana were slashed open deeper down that hall, before Jade and Letha even woke—before Theo got to the room beside Letha’s, maybe caught a pellet or two from Mars Baker’s shotgun. And the kids could be piled down that same hallway, but… Jade doesn’t think so. Even the Dutch kids sacrificed to start this whole cycle, they were probably nineteen, weren’t they? How could they rent American cars if they weren’t? And, since them there’s been Deacon and Clate and the construction grunts and everybody on the yacht, none of whom were kids either.
Maybe Theo’s like Jason?
The reason Jason never takes kids, Jade’s always figured, is that he feels a dim kinship with them. Not just on a developmental level, but… his last good memories, they have to be of camp, don’t they? Of eating hot dogs in the canteen, roasting marshmallows over the bonfire, shushed laughing from the bunks after lights out?
But, too, if kids are off-limits for Theo Mondragon, the slasher, and his daughter’s the final girl, and she’ll always be a kid to him, then… how’s it supposed to work at the big movie on the water? Will he be pulling his punches, just knocking her to the side so he can open a few more necks, split a few more shoulders, leave a few more severed arms drifting down to Ezekiel’s Cold Box?
If Jade had any wishes left, if she hadn’t burned them all just to get a slasher to Indian Lake in the first place, she would want a few more hours of life, please. She’d wish to be there at the movie with the rest of Proofrock. To thrill in the carnage and narrate it all in her head, but… now that she’s dying she can say it, at least to herself: the reason she needed a slasher to come to town, it was so he could cleave through her dad at some point in the rampage. Or, failing that, Jade could do that cleaving herself, and let Hardy assume the slasher did it. That being a trick he’s already used himself, Tab Daniels being no friend to law enforcement, maybe Hardy’d let it slide, right?
But now Jade’s just going to suffocate. Unless of course her sternum crushes in first, splinters through her lungs. She clenches her fist as much as she can at the stupidity of it all, grits her teeth until she tastes blood. Maybe her own, maybe the elks’。
And now she’s crying, she’s pretty sure. It’s hard to tell, but she thinks maybe she is. Probably.
It’s because she should have done more—she could have done more. If she’d just insisted instead of been all polite and asked, Jade could have prepared Letha for all this better. What she should have done, she knows now, is kidnapped Letha, tied her to a chair over in Camp Blood, and somehow wired a TV and VCR in, force-fed this nascent final girl all the slashers she needed to have on file, to not have ended up in this cave of rotting meat. This collapsing cave of rotting meat.
Slasher movies are supposed to be these grand fairy tales where the princess is a bad-ass warrior, but Jade never showed Letha that, did she? She never showed her anything, really.
You’d have been the best of them all, Jade tells her all the same. Letha Mondragon could have swung her machete further into slasher immortality than any of the other final girls.
But, because Jade didn’t think to kidnap her, now she’s just down here with her, or with her corpse, anyway. Which is a kindness. Or, it’s only fitting that Jade eke a little more life out, so she can soak in this rancid stew she deserves, wallow in her own failure.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says as best she can, and then she thinks the unthinkable: that it would have been better for everyone if she’d just bled out in that canoe back on Friday the 13th. Or, no, the real dream, it’s that her dad rolls his high school Grand Prix the weekend before he smiles his smile to Kimmy Daniels. Then Jade never screams her way into the world in the first place, making it easier on everyone.
Sure, that means never getting sprayed with that thrillingly cold water from Hardy’s airboat, that means never finding A Bay of Blood in the bargain bin, it means never visiting the Skank Station, never sitting through detention or history class, never running away to Camp Blood over and over, coming back to find she wasn’t even missing, but it also means she doesn’t ruin so many people’s lives just by wishing a slasher to their pleasant little valley.