Had there been a slasher in Proofrock twenty years ago. She’s standing up from her pink-frilled boat, and Jade’s blood, she’s pretty sure, actually drops a degree or two— all the degrees.
Jocelyn Cates is screaming because her husband beside her, whatever his name is, has black spreading over his chest. From his face, his mouth. Where his mouth used to be.
His lower jaw has been ripped off. All the flashlights within shining distance hold on him long enough that everyone can be sure. Long enough to track his slow slump forward.
Like that it’s panic at the disco.
The bass-boat bassinet fires up its outboard in response, breaking whatever promise this mom-and-dad-to-be had to make to Hardy. It stands up in the water and tries to spin around but there’s no room. Instead of executing a neat flipturn, the propeller wraps in the float beside it, the Henderson High float the teachers always do—the same “classroom” as every year—and all the teachers in the bolted-down chairs of their “desks” grab on to those desks, their hidden beers and glasses of wine exploding up before their faces, and, and— Among them, Jade sees the last person she ever thought she’d get to see again. All other sound falls away.
Mr. Holmes.
He’s there in a wheelchair, his right leg in a trash-bagged cast in front of him, a cigarette in his hand, hidden down by his spokes. And the float he’s on is being chewed into by an illegal propeller that’s screaming higher and madder, faster and faster.
“Sir! ” Jade shrieks, and doesn’t even think, just runs to him, climbing up and across Lonnie’s living room, falling almost immediately back into the water, conking her chin on the hard side of some boat, its mushy paper clinging to her face so she has to duck below the surface, swim under.
She comes up into absolute madness.
On-screen, the Orca is sinking, and right beside her, a much smaller Orca is too. The papier-maché shark is floating free, getting batted around, and—no. No no no.
The lower part of Jocelyn Cates’s husband’s face is snagged on a half-gone six-pack, is floating with it, right by Jade’s face.
What could even do that? An M-80 in the throat?
There’s no time, though.
Jade jerks away, trying to find Mr. Holmes. The bass-boat bassinet’s outboard is coughing down now, maybe has too much of the teachers’ float wrapped into its propeller. Jade can hear it, not see it. She looks around for anything to climb on, something to latch onto, and—the pier.
Either Cinnamon or Ginger has Galatea up on her hip.
They’re waiting for Shooting Glasses, who’s having to find his own way up, and with, Jade can see now, a line of nails angling down across his back. Theo Mondragon did get him.
Just, not enough.
Or: not yet.
Jade shakes her head no, can see this happening but do nothing about it: Theo Mondragon is gliding to the pier in—in Manx’s invisible canoe. Which he is using like a paddleboard, Letha. He even has an actual paddle.
Give him a robe, a wig, and he’s Stacey Graves.
And he must be soundless, too, or else his paddle dipping in is hidden by all the splashing around him, by Jaws still playing so loud through the speakers, by all the screaming. Shooting Glasses doesn’t hear him until it’s too late, anyway.
Theo Mondragon pulls him back hard, all at once, hard enough that the nails in Shooting Glasses’s back stab into Theo Mondragon’s chest and stomach, sending both of them spilling over the side, the invisible canoe continuing on invisibly, maybe, who knows.
Jade looks up onto the pier for where either Cinnamon or Ginger is looking, as they might have a better line on what’s going on right under them, and—and it’s Tiffany Koenig standing there now.
She’s got her phone aimed down, is recording whatever’s going on, and probably this whole disaster.
Jade waves as big as she can to Tiff, but her arm’s just one of a hundred, and when she rises up high enough again to see the base of the pier, the foundering librarian float is in her way now.
“No!” Jade says, clawing at the soggy paper, her hand painfully connecting with the aluminum boat hidden underneath.
When she pulls it back to coddle it for a moment, stop the stinging, she makes herself try to remember if Theo Mondragon had his machete or not when he pulled Shooting Glasses down.
No, he didn’t! He had both hands on that tall paddle, didn’t he?
“Please please please,” she says, and a heavy hand plants on her shoulder, its owner just trying to pull past, get away from whatever this is. It dunks Jade before she can breathe, and she comes up sputtering.