Chapter 16 Jen #3
And then she was running again, even though she’d fucked up her ankle when she’d fallen.
Her gait was awkward, favoring her right leg, her left palm pressed to her gored shoulder.
There was so much blood, soaking her ruined T-shirt, trickling to her shorts and scalding her leg in hot dribbles.
She cried out as she ran, every step making her wound spit up more blood, tasting tears and snot and the waxy residue of her dissolving eye makeup.
The Slasher continued his relentless trudge.
He was toying with her, Jen realized. She was weak, dizzy from fear and blood loss.
He could easily overtake her. The sadistic fuck was enjoying this.
He’d had his chase, and now he was waiting for her to give up.
Accept that she was beaten. That was probably the real thrill he was savoring.
It wasn’t death, but power that got him off.
Fuck that. She wasn’t going to surrender and give him the satisfaction. He could go fuck himself—
She stumbled on her bad ankle and fell to the ground.
No, no, no. Three words cut through the tangle of gibbering thoughts in her head.
Get up, bitch. She twisted into a sitting position, sobbing as pain and terror surged through her body.
She scooched back as if she could outrun the Slasher on her ass.
Her chest heaved, each desperate movement sending a sharp stab in her chest like she was being gored all over again.
Jen’s life flashed before her. There wasn’t much to see. Her only regret was that she’d come back to this fucking place. She should’ve blown off Patrick’s invite and counted down the days to her trust fund.
She thought of all her conquests. The girls who thought they could melt her heart. How they never understood it was kinder for Jen not to give anyone hope. She knew how her would-be girlfriends felt now. Throats exposed and grasping for the slightest shred of optimism.
She found that shred, in desperation. There had to be some way she could appeal to the killer and not die tonight.
She squinted up at the advancing figure and tried to map it to the body she’d seen on the cabin floor. “Russ?”
The Slasher silently inclined his head, and Jen caught her breath.
They’d been right. It was Ranger Russ, playing out his horror movie fantasies, or avenging some forgotten slight from high school.
And of course he wasn’t going to speak. The Slasher never did, except for that one line growled over the phone.
You’re all going to die tonight. That was what made him scary.
“Russ,” she repeated, hoping to appeal to his humanity. If he had any. “Russ, you don’t have to do this.”
He kept coming. How many steps would it take for him to reach her? Jen inched backward and forced herself to her feet. Her vision filled with stars from the pain, or maybe it was the night sky. The young trees offered little by way of canopy. They were as small and broken as she was.
Jen frantically looked around. They were in an open space, littered with jagged saplings. Nowhere to hide. She had to change tack. If Russ was cosplaying as the Slasher, maybe she could appeal to his goal of reenacting the movies.
“You can’t kill me, Russ,” she rasped. “I’m a queer woman of color. It would be cliché.”
Hell if she’d become the thing she hated most in media: the tragic queer.
But she had the sinking feeling it was tragic only if someone cared if you died.
Who was going to be sad, really? Her parents, sure, but they’d probably spend more time finding ways to blame each other for her death than actually grieving.
Tiffany, yes, but she’d get over it. Jen’s death certainly wouldn’t change her life.
Besides Tiff, Patrick and Carrie were the only friends who would cry at Jen’s funeral—because they were so sickeningly wholesome, not because they deeply cared about her.
“There’s a hot straight white couple wandering around,” she added. “You should go for them first.”
And then Jen had the terrible thought that maybe he had. Maybe he’d dispatched Tiffany and Jason already, and the others, and she’d finally gotten her old wish of being the Final Girl. In a lot of slasher films, the Final Girl never knew her friends were dead until she was alone with the killer.
Jen should’ve been careful what she wished for.
She squirmed backward another few paces, and something shifted at her waist.
The knife tucked in her belt.
Heart racing, she made a grab for it. It wasn’t much against that axe, but she could at least stick it someplace that hurt. That should give her enough of a head start to keep running. She just needed him to come closer.
The Slasher paused. He had all the time in the world.
Jen gritted her teeth. She wouldn’t be beat so easily. She had a knife—and her words, which could cut to the bone more swiftly than any blade.
“I did not come back to Cedar Lake so some loser with mommy issues could chase me around the fucking woods. Go to therapy like everyone else,” she spat.
The Slasher calmly cocked his head toward her like a scientist observing a new species of insect. But the gloved knuckles tightened around the axe’s handle, the leather squeaking almost imperceptibly. Good. She was getting to him.
It was time to double down on the insults. “Is your dick so tiny you have to carry an axe to compensate? Put that down and kill me like a real man.”
The axe swayed. Jen put all her strength into ducking out of the way, shrieking as she struck at his arm with the knife.
The back of the Slasher’s axe knocked her wrist, sending the knife flying into the dirt, out of reach. The fucker had faked her out, anticipating her strike. Jen screamed in terror and frustration as her last shred of hope crumbled to dust.
The poets weren’t going to write about her after all.
She wouldn’t get her romantic death. Not the drug overdose in a Paris garret or stabbed by a jealous lover in another woman’s bed.
Instead, she was going to be butchered senselessly by a rando dressed as the Slasher.
In fucking Cedar Lake. So uninspired. So derivative.
She’d be memorialized in fucking true crime podcasts instead of the tears of her lovers.
She was so cold, and the blood soaking her T-shirt was scalding hot. “At least make it spectacular, you fucker,” she wheezed.
She imagined Carrie and Tiffany sobbing over her open casket and took comfort in knowing she’d be a beautiful corpse.
The axe swung. Jen jerked backward and lost her footing, blood spurting out of her mouth as her spine arched. She choked on the coppery mouthful, waiting for the impact of the forest floor and the fall of the axe.
But they never came, even though her arms and legs dangled uselessly from her body like she was a marionette. She was suspended in air, a bloody and broken ballerina held aloft by—by what?
She glanced down at herself. A long shape protruded from below her ribs. Not a blade, but a tree, its broken tip dark and glossy. That was her dance partner.
Fucking trees.
The Slasher stood over her, watching impassively from within the depths of his hood, the axe perched on his shoulder.
Jen tried to say something witty and cutting, but the words came out as bloody bubbles that drooled out of the side of her mouth.
The stars above began to fade, and so did Jen.
Her head lolled back, unable to hold itself up anymore.
The Slasher nodded once with satisfaction, then turned and silently trudged away, leaving Jen to face the rapidly darkening sky alone.