CHAPTER 32
“If for some reason, underneath all that strength and confidence, you still don’t trust that you are killable enough, I’m living proof… that you’re wrong.”
—Not Bros
It’s like watching one of those Hot Lumberjack TikToks where they don’t manage to chop the wood all the way through on the first go.
Stu lets out a groan similar to those made by the frustrated, shirtless, bearded men Laurie follows across her socials and drops to his knees. The ax is still lodged in his head, blood pouring onto his plaid shirt and wiping out the white stripes when he falls facedown to the ground.
It’s a regular “Here’s Johnny” moment, but in lieu of Jack Nicholson peeking through the splintered remains of a door, Heart Eyes practically floats into the hallway to look at his handiwork.
The gray oversized dinner jacket he’s been wearing all night is stained, drenched in burgundy blood that blends in perfectly with the dark red of the wallpaper.
It glistens on the black coveralls, too, like an oil spill, the fabric visible between the V of the jacket as it stretches across his chest. He steps over Stu’s back, leans down, and wraps his gloved hand around the throat of the ax.
The sound of the blade being jostled out of Stu’s skull is loud enough to reach us, and I taste digested espresso martini.
When he finally gets the ax out and straightens, he looks between us, his head tilting down to where I’m holding Wes’s arm and can’t make myself let go.
He looks up and I see those two heart-shaped holes head-on, staring straight at me, and even though I can’t distinguish anything but black within them, I know.
I know what he must think. So when Wes turns, using his body to push me back the way we came, I yank his shirt and pull him along with me.
Because Heart Eyes isn’t going to lodge that ax into his Leading Lady.
Not yet anyway. But Wes? Wes is his rival.
Another obstacle he needs to cut through to get to me.
And that’s why I make sure my strides are a little shorter than his, let him get ahead of me, as we haul ass out of there.
I don’t look back to see if he’s following us.
Not when my shoulder smacks against the corner of the hallway and not when pain throbs heavily down my arm as I push away from the wall, spying blood that isn’t my own on my collarbone.
Wes slows down enough to bring his right arm around my back, pulling me into line with him as we head for the darkness and the debris we avoided earlier.
It’s the only option we have. Even if we were able to make it back to the janitor’s closet, there isn’t anything there to help us, and that ax will get through a wooden door a lot easier than Stu’s skull.
The beam of Wes’s flashlight illuminates a few feet ahead of us, granting just slightly better visibility than the rest of the club, but even then I still miss the first piece of glass that slices the side of my foot.
“Ah!”
The flashlight moves closer to my side and half of the corridor goes black.
“Jamie? Are y—Fuck!”
The dull thud of a body hitting a resisting force sounds next to me and the flashlight jostles, hits the side of the bucket I’ve got a death grip on, and falls, casting the left side of the corridor in light.
Instead of the bloodstained walls I was expecting, a large pile of wood and velvet and a mishmash of other materials and textures spills down the wall from ceiling to floor.
Furniture and chairs are stacked almost six feet high against the wall.
Wes reaches for the flashlight on the floor, and I use the short break to check that the glass didn’t go all the way into my foot.
When my fingers come away from smooth, wet, sticky skin, I step back and breathlessly survey the structure in front of us.
The way it’s been placed doesn’t make sense if they were trying to blockade the hallway.
They’ve stacked too many pieces of furniture on one side and left the other clear enough for people to walk through in single file.
“What the fuck?” Wes wheezes, aiming the light directly on the structure. He tries to straighten but lets out a pained breath at the effort and I figure at the very least he’s winded himself from the impact with the barricade. Worst-case scenario he’s broken a rib.
“Do you think someone tried to block Heart Eyes with this?” I ask, reaching for Wes, sliding the handle of the bucket onto my elbow and latching on to his arm to pull him close. When he winces at the movement, I think we might have the worst-case scenario.
“If they did, I don’t think it worked. Are you hurt?”
I whip my head around to the darkness behind us and try to see if there’s a figure stalking through it, but I find it empty.
That wouldn’t be his style. Heart Eyes prefers to strike when we least expect it.
The slow walk is just meant to build the fear, build the expectation of what he could do to us.
That what he could do next is always worse than the kill before.
“It’s nothing.” Just blood pouring out of my feet. “Are you okay?”
He nods, even though his eyebrows are still furrowed in pain, cheeks pallid.
“I’m fine; let’s go.”
We run from the half-made barricade and I try to avoid the parts of the floor that glimmer.
After the fifth or sixth piece of glass shreds the skin of my feet, I can almost ignore the shards altogether.
It’s when the darkness ahead of us dissolves into a warm burgundy glow that I know we’re getting to the end of this path.
Soon we’ll be in the hallway where I hid from Heart Eyes the first time.
Back to where he first made his romantic intentions clear.
Then I spy something propped up against the end of the hall and I remember what the others had said they’d found down here.
Campbell.
What was the last thing I’d said to him?
Stay in the corner and keep your back to the wall.
I never imagined that that would be the way we’d find him.
When we reach him, my feet numb, both arms throbbing, Wes’s breath audibly restricted, I can’t just run past. The way Heart Eyes has left him demands to be seen.
This is the most posed body I’ve witnessed tonight, and that’s how I know it was meant to be another gift.
I’m pretty sure if Laurie, Jennifer, and I had turned left instead of right when we left the VIP room earlier in the night we would have discovered this.
Him. Campbell’s head droops low onto his chest like he’s had too many Kamikazes.
The rest of his body is ramrod straight, pinned like a butterfly on display against the wall.
And if the sight of the two knives shoved deep into the skin under his collarbones—more under his ribs and throughout his torso—isn’t confronting enough, the bouquet of roses braced between his bloody stomach and his tied hands certainly is.
We need to set that fire.
We need to get out of here.
“Come on,” Wes urges, and slips the flashlight back into his pocket, his hand encircling my elbow and pulling me back down the hallway.
The bucket hits against my thigh as we pass each VIP room, poking our heads in and trying to catch sight of a smoke detector.
Just as I’d suspected, the building is grossly lacking in appropriate fire safety, and it’s only when we get closer to the mezzanine that we spot one at the edge of the hallway that runs behind the booths.
The one where I found Laurie and her cat-covered ass all those years ago.
The one Laurie, Jennifer, and I ran down earlier in the night after I saw Heart Eyes for the first time. It’s a full-circle moment.
It feels like the final act now. Like we could avoid the face-to-face with the Big Bad once we set off the alarms. Maybe it doesn’t have to play out like the movies.
Maybe the front of the club will burst open just when we need it, and emergency services actually will get here in time.
I won’t have to go up against Heart Eyes.
I won’t need to take on this role he’s been determined to put me in since he spotted me tonight, and finally, finally, this will be over.
“All right.” Wes digs into his pocket for the lighter and I notice the tight, pursed line of his mouth as the move pulls at his injured ribs. “Let’s do this.”
He’s holding it together, but I know he’s working on pure adrenaline at this point, so I douse the paper towels with hand sanitizer, leaving one sleeve to act as the go-between for the flame to reach the fuel in the bucket as we stride toward the detector.
He flicks the lighter on while we’re still moving, before we’ve made it out to the intersection of the hallways, but the scrape of the spark wheel is drowned out by something else.
Soft, quick steps from around the corner, near the mezzanine. They get louder and then—
“Jamie! Wes!”
I drop the bucket and swing the stake over my shoulder like a softball bat.
Wes’s knife comes up in the same instant and the flame of the lighter extinguishes as his hand reaches for the butt of a gun that isn’t holstered at his hip.
If this were a horror movie, we’d make the perfect image for the poster, but then my brain processes who is standing in front of us.
“Jennifer,” I breathe, dropping the stake back down to my side.
She’s still holding the first aid kit, her brown hair tangled in a low bun, finger-combed into a messy, effortless twist that somehow still looks good.
She looks like every Final Girl I’ve ever studied: tense, tired, but radiant with the kind of badass inner glow you can only get from being sick of the killer’s shit.
And this is another promising development.