“Jade, wait!” Hardy calls through his speaker, but Jade can’t.
She falls ahead, the machete tearing away from the tree with a distinct horror-movie sound, and it’s all downhill from there.
The slope to Indian Lake lets her be faster than she is, faster than her own thoughts: What’s she going to do, swan dive off the pier, swim to Camp Blood? Ask Letha for asylum on the Umiak? Hope Hardy gives up, which is exactly what cops do when perps holding deadly weapons run?
More important, why is she even running? It’s Hardy, isn’t it?
Shit. Shit shit shit.
She wants this to be Scream so was trying to pair him up with Mr. Holmes, but the feeling she can’t shake is his voice coming out of the darkness outside the library the other night.
His shape walking in from Melanie’s bench, sparks trailing from his hand, Clate Rodgers a red smear on the surface of the lake. And he does have that backstory with his daughter dying probably fifty yards from where they are right now, and with someone Jade’s dad used to drink with, and he does have a brush with Stacey Graves, he did grow up with his aunt telling him that rhyme, he did find Deacon Samuels, he did set a fire that killed his own uncle or whatever, and with that airboat, he can skid up onto shore wherever he wants, be gone in an instant. Or, if you’re out on the water, he can be right there beside you before you know it, hardly even dragging a wake, his big fan turned off a hundred yards back, so he just coasts in, the only sound the soft whop-whop-whop of his blades spinning down.
On the other hand, he did save Jade when she was bleeding out, and he did get her the custodian gig after freshman year, and he does run her dad in whenever he can—could the enemy of Jade’s enemy even be a slasher?
Jade doesn’t know, but what she does know is she can’t stop running. The slope’s got her now. All she can do is… is sling the machete as far out into the water as she can, dispose of that evidence, not give him a reason to take her in. Never mind that there’s nowhere to go after she does, nothing to do, no way to hide.
Halfway up the pier she catches on that Letha’s leaning over the rail, is watching this hopeless little effort.
Jade changes her grip on the machete so slightly, but it makes all the difference.
“Letha!” Jade yells up to her, and Letha cocks those bug-eyed shades up on her forehead, which is all the invitation Jade needs. She stops hard, her combat boots finding traction for once, and turns all that momentum into one desperate throw.
The machete goes twirling up into the night, Mars Baker turning around to track it, Hardy’s tires screeching, all of Jade’s hopes and prayers in that spinning blade, now.
It climbs, it climbs, and, just when it should be lodging in Letha’s chest, instead her hand stabs out as only a final girl’s can, and catches that machete by the handle as perfect as anything, so perfect that Jade hardly even feels it when Hardy tackles her.
SLASHER 101
So for a slightly late Christmas present, sir, please accept this gift of a last ingredient of the slasher, whose season will be upon us again soon in only 10 short months, by which time you’ll be having to get your slasher information from some other horror fan, since this girl will be graduated and GONE.
And you would never guess it in a 100 years unless maybe you were Clear Rivers from the Final Destinations, but this ingredient is tied to the incident in the cafeteria just before winter break. But in my defense though Manx wouldn’t believe it, I really was projectile puking from sudden onset sickness. This wasn’t my attempt to spit pea soup like Regan in The Exorcist. And also it wasn’t a prank, sir.
I think if anyone else had been sick then the cafeteria monitor would have made tracks to get that student to the nurse’s office instead of sending her to the principal’s office based on only past History of trying to make high school a fun or just less terrible experience. But that was last year as they say. Well, as everybody says except Billy Loomis, or in 1958, Pamela Voorhees.
You’ll also have to start getting excellent jokes from somewhere else, sir, sorry about that.
But, since we’re already talking puking, that’s what final girls are all better than me at not doing in the Third Reel Bodydump. There aren’t autopsies to prove this but I think final girls must have an extra valve in their esophagus that keeps them from upchuck city, sir. How else to explain them not losing their lunch when, about 2/3rd’s or even 3/4th’s through the slasher movie they’re in, suddenly they stumble upon the dead and necrogymnastic bodies of their friends and families? Think Laurie Strode in Halloween for example, finding so many of her friends surprisingly dead and suspiciously posed in that bedroom across the street, which would become the basic model to repeat not just for the Golden Age, but all the way to now, sir, which I won’t walk you all the way through since you always mark all of them out as extra like that swimming pool of bodies in House on Sorority Row, which I’m not even mentioning. This Third Reel Bodydump though is a most important part of the final girl’s development. Or instead, being faced with all this definite PROOF of what terror she’s up against is carving away of the rules of her once sane world. It pushes her over the edge, and when she climbs back up again, she’s different and more dangerous.