Chapter 27 Jason #2
He heard the axe smashing the cabinets beneath the sink. It was now or never. Jason launched himself out from behind the standee, yelling in agony as his injured arm shook the bag of flour open and tossed the contents into her face.
Carrie jerked in shock. He swung the cast-iron pan at her head with his other arm, but she deflected blindly with the bloody axe, shrieking like a hawk.
The blade struck the base of the pan with a clang that vibrated through Jason’s bones all the way up to his teeth.
The pan dropped, his left hand unable to take the weight anymore.
Jason ran.
“Is that what you want?” he couldn’t help calling out. He skidded on his own blood as he sprinted across the linoleum to the hallway. “For me to suffer like you did?”
“Yes,” Carrie spat. He heard her brushing the flour out of her face, her hair. “I want to take away everything you’ve ever known. I want you to feel like your life is over. That you have nowhere to go, no one to turn to.”
She’d achieved that goal. Jason desperately scanned the hallway for the knife Mikey had dropped.
He wasn’t thinking of his own survival. He was thinking of Patrick, at the bottom of the cellar stairs.
Carrie swinging the bloody axe had made him remember the blade had been unstained when she’d emerged from the cellar.
If she hadn’t struck Patrick with the axe, there was the possibility he was only stunned from the fall and still alive.
Jason had never been particularly religious, but a desperate prayer ran through the back of his head. Please, God, don’t let Patrick be dead. Patrick could survive. If Jason lived long enough to help him.
“It’s done now, Carrie,” he panted. Mikey’s headless body lay prostrate on the ground in a spreading puddle of blood. The knife was nowhere to be seen. Jason had the terrible feeling Mikey had fallen on top of it.
“You got what you wanted. You don’t have to do this.
You got your revenge on Mikey.” He staggered for the front room, his right arm dangling uselessly like it belonged to a rag doll.
He wouldn’t be able to load the flare gun or operate the fire extinguisher, but there had to be something he could use to take Carrie down.
The front room smelled like pine and burned paper.
Ash from the charred books and board games stirred as he stumbled inside, sidestepping the shards of the vase Mikey had thrown at the Slasher earlier.
Fuck, he should’ve suspected then that Mikey was working with their attacker. No one’s aim could be that bad.
There—the souvenir Cedar Lake snow globe lay on the floor by the sofa, the miniature cabin enviably peaceful in its glycerin bath. He glanced up and noticed the antler chandelier was hanging at a dangerous angle.
To his surprise, Carrie’s laugh rang out. “Do you really think this is all about you? About a dumb schoolgirl crush? The mistakes of my wayward youth?”
Jason froze, speechless, his sweaty fingers slippery around the snowglobe. Hadn’t she just explained that she’d wanted to make the Jumpscare Society pay for their part in her fall from grace? That she’d twisted the advice from her therapist to justify her thirst for vengeance?
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she continued. “When I started out, it was all about revenge. But a funny thing happened when I lured Daniel into that alley and showed him my new meat cleaver.”
She stood framed by the arched doorway to the dining room. The flour had rendered her hair into a pale wimple about her face. Saint Carrie of the Axe, about to fulfill her sacred destiny.
The corners of her mouth curved up in a radiant smile, and she almost seem to glow. “I liked it.”
Jason finally understood. Carrie, the outsider and underdog, had tasted power. God help him, he sympathized with her. Envied her, even. To seize control over your own fate and dance to nobody’s tune—this past year he’d been chasing that, too.
“The Final Girl is always transformed by violence,” she said. “When she has nothing left to lose, that’s when she finds her hidden strength. Her true self.”
Her expression was almost beatific. Maybe it wasn’t too late to appeal to the sweet, shy girl who’d had a crush on him.
But he’d be doing her a disservice. Maybe he’d never seen her at all, the way people had never seen beyond his image as a star athlete.
Maybe this was who she’d always been. A vitriol-spouting, self-righteous Fury.
An avenging angel, forged in the fires of her mother’s God-fearing moralizing and tempered by their classmates’ hostility.
He would admire her, if not for the fact that she’d cold-bloodedly murdered all their friends.
Jason dove behind the sofa with the snow globe as she advanced, heartbeat counting down the last seconds of his life.
He grunted as his injured shoulder hit the floor, the impact sending fireworks exploding behind his eyelids.
His breath came fast and shallow, adrenaline squeezing out every last drop of fight in him. He couldn’t last much longer.
Hope ignited in his chest as he came face-to-face with the fire extinguishers he and Mikey had abandoned.
He peered upward, expecting Carrie to be looming over him.
The Slasher peered back. Not Carrie in costume, but another cardboard standee.
Watching impassively in front of a side window, machete drawn.
Jason carefully rolled the snow globe toward the standee. The cardboard Slasher stirred. So did Carrie. The axe bisected the cardboard through the midsection with a rip that Jason felt in his own abs.
While she was distracted, he grabbed the fire extinguishers and started hurling them at her.
The first one flew too high, glancing off the charred support beam.
The antler chandelier rocked precariously.
The second hit her square in the chest and she stumbled backward beneath the antlers.
For one promising second the axe handle slipped in her grip, but then her long, gloved fingers wrapped securely around it again.
She regained her balance, shaking her head. “I’m not dropping the axe, Jason. It’s the only thing in this world that hasn’t let me down.”
He sprung to his feet. There was only one object left within reach. The rotary phone was heavier than he’d expected, especially in his weakened state. It would have to do. He had nothing else, except desperation.
He hurled the phone upward. Carrie’s face lit up with triumph as it sailed over her head—then crumpled in a frown as Jason’s hopeful expression never wavered. She glanced up, following his gaze.
He hadn’t been aiming for her.
The phone collided with the chandelier, the receiver’s spiral cord flying over the crooked antlers like a grappling hook. As he’d hoped, gravity did its job. The extra weight yanked the chandelier’s electrical wire out of the blackened support beam.