The second realization is that she’s been in this particular car before.
“Um, need some help?” Shooting Glasses asks. He’s the timid silhouette standing up behind the blinding glare.
“This where y’all keep the explosives?” Jade asks back, shielding her eyes as best she can. “Or, no. The candlesticks, the lead pipes, the daggers?”
“Who you looking to kill this time?” Shooting Glasses asks.
This time. Because “last time” was herself.
“Everybody?” she says, clambering down and out as best she can, without quite puncturing an ankle, or falling into a needle bath.
“Think they’d notice if you did?” Shooting Glasses asks, reaching in to dial the lights down to just the orange ones.
“Dead & Buried, 1981,” Jade says by way of an answer.
“Whole town of dead people who don’t know they’re dead. It happens.”
Shooting Glasses makes a show of aiming his finger down to the door panel and punching the unlock button.
Jade steps around to the passenger side, says, “There’s this other movie called Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things.
If there’d been a sequel, it might should have been ‘Children Shouldn’t Get into Cars They Know Are Stolen.’ ”
Shooting Glasses folds in behind the wheel, says, “Another of your slashers?”
“I wish,” Jade says, settling in. “The director did go on to make Black Christmas, though, so maybe there’s some genealogy there, if you squint right.”
“Everything eighties with you, isn’t it?”
“Those are both dirty seventies,” Jade tells him, tracking the dim headlights prowling along the staging area’s fence line.
“But the eighties were great, that’s why. They—”
Shooting Glasses interrupts by starting the already-started car, which results in metal screeching, parts grinding, and— more important—the brake lights of that car trolling by.
“That was pleasant,” Jade says to Shooting Glasses without looking at him. Just waiting for that car to move along, move along.
“It’s so quiet I can’t ever tell if it’s going or not,” Shooting Glasses says about the car.
“But the eighties,” Jade continues, since someone finally asked, “they’re when the slasher was at its purest. Which is to say its dirtiest, its cheapest. Low production values, throwaway dialogue, nobody actors, recycled premises—all about making that quick buck. But that’s what makes it the Golden Age, when Jason was born, Freddy was born, Chucky was—well, when Chucky was bought, anyway. But every Friday there would be either a new slasher or two, or there’d be the same ones from a few months ago, with new titles. It must have been amazing. And I was born too late for it.”
“That’s what Cody’s always saying,” Shooting Glasses says, nodding to the taillights finally weaving away into Proofrock.
“Cody?” Jade has to ask, then, “Oh, yeah. The anyflavor Indian?”
“He says he was born too late too. That if he’d been born a hundred years ago, things would be different for him.”
“Good for him,” Jade says. “Don’t think it’d work for me, though.”
Shooting Glasses cuts his eyes over to her about this.
“Some boys from town would play a trick on me,” she says like the most obvious thing, “they’d throw me out on the water, and I’d run away into legend.”
“Don’t take this wrong,” Shooting Glasses says, “but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone like you.”
“Y’all almost done building Camelot over there?” Jade asks back, throwing her chin across the water.
Shooting Glasses backs the car up, repoints it so they’re looking through the lake side of the staging area’s chain link fence. Past it, there’s the lights of Terra Nova.
“Foundation problems now,” he says.
“It’s rocky over there,” Jade tells him. “That’s why the cemetery is on this side, yeah? Only thing over there are old mine shafts. My history teacher says it’s all pockmarked with caves, too. And”—Jade closes her eyes to get it just right—“he says that, before the lake, when Drown Town wasn’t drowned, that at night you could see the sparks from the pickaxes over there. Everybody trying to strike it rich.”
“Did they?”
“What do you think?”