Right when Stacey Graves starts to surge forward, for Jade, a bellow stops them both.
It’s Theo Mondragon.
He’s standing in Hardy’s airboat, is looking at the bass boat Letha just died against. He’s looking at the water his only daughter just sank down into.
And then he’s looking at Stacey Graves.
He’s got the machete back, now, must have had it slid into his belt at the small of his back.
“You! ” he says to Stacey Graves, and she angles her head over, maybe surprised to be called out instead of retreated from.
But, does she even understand words anymore, or does she only understand death?
She seems to get it when Theo Mondragon points his machete at her, anyway.
Stacey Graves darts forward and Theo Mondragon cocks the machete back to cut her in half, but at the last moment she swerves, slides under his swing, stands up behind him.
Before he can orient, set his feet in the rocking airboat, she’s reached around, has him by the jaw the same as she had Letha.
She flings him hard to the side, not even bothering to tear his face in half, just cracking him into the side of the pier, probably fifteen feet away.
Theo Mondragon’s legs and shoulders try to keep going, and do, folding around the unmoving side of the pier, and something cracks inside him. His back, surely, because people don’t fold sideways, do they?
He sloughs off, down, and it seems for a moment that the empty green canoe is going to catch him, but it only catches his machete.
Stacey Graves, after watching that slow drip into the waiting water, maybe even appreciating it, turns, inspects the red surface of these waters, her eyes settling again on Jade.
“No,” Jade whispers to her, like that can work. But it’s not a completely voluntary thing, either. Is just a prayer, really.
It’s answered by the night splitting in two from… gunfire?
Four fast shots, grouped tight in Stacey Graves’s back, flinging her small body ahead, sending her skidding across the surface of Indian Lake, which looks so wrong.
It’s Hardy, Jade sees. He’s dying, is still trying to save her, because he’s not going to let Jade die in these waters like his daughter did.
It’s what dads do. It’s what they’re supposed to do.
After those four shots, though, Hardy slumps forward into the water, and Stacey Graves is already there on top of the water he just disappeared under. Just like when Hardy was eleven at Camp Blood, she’s tearing at the surface, trying to get to him, but again she can’t. Jade uses this distraction to push back, to hide, to live, and once under she kicks back and back, so that when she rises amid all the floating dead, she’s just one head of many. Right beside her, faceup, is Mr.
Holmes. And Misty Christy. Gliding past on a paddleboard is Lucky, the school bus driver, using a long blue paddle to pull himself ahead, ahead. He locks eyes with Jade for a second or two, pleading with her to be still, to be quiet, to let him sneak away, through all this, but then he thunks into the green canoe, over here already somehow, and loses his balance, has to step over the side, slip into the water.
On the way down his chin connects with the paddleboard and that leaves his tongue jumping on that gritty surface.
When he comes up gasping for air, chin bloody, eyes panicked, Stacey Graves is standing right there, the holes in her chest and shoulder not even bleeding, just black at the edges of those craters.
She hauls Lucky up to her level by what hair he has and, moving slowly, deliberately like an experiment, she pushes her other hand into his chest, rotates it left and right to ease the insertion. Instead of pulling Lucky’s heart back out, she holds it, it looks like, holds it in her small hand until he sags, becomes even deader weight.
When she drops Lucky’s body back into the water along with his heart, she’s already staring at Jade, treading bloody water, Jade’s friends and enemies all dead around her, and— but it can’t be, she’s not a final girl… she hasn’t been a virgin for six years now, almost seven. But she’s the only one left who can do this, isn’t she? The only one who can stand against the slasher?
Is she the final girl?
Jade shakes her head no, but Stacey Graves lived before movies, lived before John Carpenter and Wes Craven, before Jason and Ghostface, so she doesn’t even know what Jade’s saying no to.
I’m not ready, Jade wants to tell her. I don’t—I can’t—I’ve never— It doesn’t matter.
Stacey Graves lunges ahead to take Jade by the hair the same as she just took Lucky, but Jade has no hair for Stacey Graves to grab on to. Her little fingers scrabble on Jade’s stubbly scalp and Jade slips under, away from them. She drops into a quieter world. Up above it, Stacey Graves is clawing at the surface of the water, clawing and, it looks like, screeching, the same as she was about Hardy. At least until her jaw cranks out of place and she has to stand, line it back up again.