Jade’s breathing fast and shallow now. This has to be the end. Her—her vision’s even starting to glow at the edges. No more putting it off with slasher facts. No more slowing the moment down with heartfelt apologies. What confirms she’s being pulled into another, even harsher reality is that the heavy dead body she’s pressed alongside writhes into sinuous motion, since—of course—it’s probably about to stand up, run away into the afterlife of elk, which is all grass and cold sunlight.
Except this elk, once the glow suffuses down onto it, isn’t an elk at all, but Cody, because now him and Jade are just two more Indians at the bottom of the pile of massacred Indians.
They’re circling the drain of history together, while Letha and Shooting Glasses and Mismatched Gloves are over at some other drain, with harps and angel food cake. But so be it. At least Jade’s not alone. Cody’s eyes are open now, his head’s shuddering like something hungry’s pawing at him, and Jade, with her foggy thinking, decides that she must be Alice at the end of the first Friday, Ginny at the end of the next one, Nancy in the closing scene of Nightmare, when the rules of reality go slack so the dream can seep in— And now her hand is glowing? Meaning she’s reaching for Cody’s face. Meaning she can.
There must be a reaper in whatever next stage of death this is, some dead-alive dude who sorts people into piles for processing. No, Jade says inside, not a reaper, a Reeker, like the movie.
“2005, Alex,” she thinks she creaks. Her mouth is trying to move, anyway.
Unless it’s the antropophagus from 1980, of course. In which case she’s screwed, as she doesn’t think she can run right now. She’s not even sure she can raise her head. All she’s sure of, or sort of hoping for, is that a glove of knife-fingers is about to burst up from the sand, wrap its blades around her face, draw her down into a forever Nightmare, which will be her own little back alley of heaven.
Jade starts to smile at the delicious horrible wrongness of it all, but then Cody rolls away and more light spills through, its impossible brightness blinding her so that when she looks up to who’s doing this, it’s an angel in a halo of blazing light, her hair wet with gore, face red and black with chunks, chest heaving, fingers curling open and shut like the talons they are.
Letha fucking Mondragon, reborn.
“You,” Jade says with what feels like her last breath.
“Me,” Letha says, and falls down into the pile alongside Jade, spent.
Their hands find each other in the rot and blood, their fingers intertwine like best friends, and Jade opens her mouth to the sky, breathes all this fresh crispness in.
They’re alive, and they shouldn’t be. They made it through the night somehow. This is the other side, Jade lets herself think for a hopeful moment—this is the sun rising over Woodsboro, Gale Weathers narrating the terrible events of the night.
Except: “Where is he? ” she says, trying to push up, but her coveralls are full-body blood-glued down, so she has to peel up piece by piece, limb by limb.
Letha looks around casually, as if being polite, and they survey this serene meadow, Indian Lake glittering out past it, going forever.
It’s not noon on the Fourth, it’s late afternoon on the Fourth already, shading into dusk. Jade was out for… twelve hours?
Seriously? Is that what breathing maggot air can do to you?
Shouldn’t I have to, you know, pee? she thinks, but doesn’t check. All the same, hours-old urine would be an improvement.
Letha stops scanning, as if rehearing Jade’s words. Or, only just now actually listening to them.
“My dad, you mean?” she asks, the insult there in her voice.
Jade nods once, nearly falls forward from it.
“It’s not him,” Letha says again.
“If he’s not here, that just means he couldn’t find us,” Jade says, throwing her chin across the water. “He’s already over there, getting ready for tonight. Snorkel, waterproof chainsaw, speargun, belt sander—”
“Stop! ” Letha says, high-stepping out of the muck. “Do you know how long it took to dig you out?”
Jade stands, her whole body stiff and bruised, her balance not quite catching up with her yet, blood rushing here and there in the least comfortable ways, but with a lot of stinging urgency.
Both of them are head-to-feet gore.
Jade pats her pocket for her last cigarette, tries to light it but it’s been in the lake, it’s been soaked in blood, it’s been crushed. She flicks it into the elk and it pretty much just crumbles mid-air, becomes an offering of tobacco above all these dead.