The Final Girl

by Kenneth Preston

  "We just need to get dressed," Mr. Caulfield said. "And we need to tell Billy that his brother..." His voice trailed off into a whimper.

  "Take as much time as you need," Darlene said.

  She and the two uniformed officers waited near their respective vehicles while Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield told their only living son that his big brother was dead. Darlene had witnessed enough misery to last a lifetime, but it did nothing to bring back the pain she'd felt in the days, weeks, and months after her own tragic loss. That pain had taken a permanent vacation, leaving her cold and empty inside.

  Chapter Ten

  Katie Beckham paced her room. She was sad that her friends were dead, but she couldn't cry. She was too afraid to cry. Because she could have been one of them. She and Diane would have been at the morgue with the rest of them if they hadn't backed out. But the man who killed her friends was still out there, wasn't he? The details coming out of these early news reports were sketchy, but they had the names of the victims, her friends. Nothing about the killer.

  Unless...

  Richard couldn't have done this, could he have? No, he was among the dead. But he was obsessed with horror movies. And he was obsessed with the game. And he was messed up in the head. She wouldn't put it past him to kill their friends before killing himself. They never should have gotten involved with him.

  And they never should have gotten involved with her.

  Jill Turner. The girl was weird. That's why they picked on her, or that's why the others picked on her. Katie and Diane pretty much took a backseat and watched their friends pick on the weird girl. And the weird girl responded to the bullying by getting even weirder. She didn't run away from them; she ran toward them. She wanted to be their friend. She followed them around school. She even walked past their houses, all of their houses. She was weird, which was why Richard brought her into their group. But she wasn't Richard's friend; she was his pet. Or his pet project. He was grooming her, not to be his friend or his girlfriend.

  He was grooming her to be his final girl.

  She would be perfect, Richard had said. She was shy, innocent, the ideal final girl for that stupid game of theirs.

  So they let Jill tag along, pretended to be her friends. And all the while, they picked on her, subtly of course. She had to feel like one of them, but they had to keep her down. They had to keep her soft, weak, insecure.

  Katie and Diane may have gone along with the bullying, but they were never quite okay with it, and they were not okay with where it was going, which is why they backed out of that last game. It was Diane who convinced her to back out, though it didn't really take much convincing. The two of them just had to support each other when the others tried to pressure them to go through with it. And there was plenty of pressure. But they stuck to their guns, and as a result, they were still alive.

  For the time being.

  She shuddered and looked at the phone she'd been holding for God knew how long. Her thumb hovered over the call button. This was not the first time her finger hovered over the button over the course of the past fifteen minutes, but this time she was determined to make the call. It shouldn't be this difficult. It was Diane, after all.

  She closed her eyes and tapped the screen. "Hey," Diane answered in a whisper after the first ring.

  "Hey. Are you okay?"

  "I'm okay," Diane said. She released a long, trembling sigh. "This is fucked up."

  "Yeah."

  "Are you okay?"

  Katie shook her head as if Diane could see her. "No...I'm scared."

  "You don't have anything to be afraid of. We weren't there. We didn't do anything."

  "That's not what I'm afraid of," Katie said. "What if it's not over?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We were supposed to be there."

  "So?"

  "What if he's coming for us next?"

  "Who?"

  "Whoever did this."

  "Whoever did this is dead," Diane said. "And he deserved it. They all did."

  Katie couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Don't say that."

  "Don't say what? Don't tell me you're not thinking the same thing. And don't tell me that you're upset about this."

  "I am upset about this." She wanted it to be true, but it felt like a lie.

  "We backed out of that sick game for a reason," Diane said. "They were tormenting that poor girl."

  "That doesn't mean I wanted them dead."

  "I never said I wanted them dead. But I'm not gonna cry about it either. Why do you think this happened?"

  "I don't know."

  "What goes around, comes around. They bullied Jill Turner, and it came back to bite them in the ass. Karma's a bitch."

  Katie hesitated a moment before saying, "We bullied her too."

  "Not like they did."

  "We went along with it."

  A pause. "Then maybe we deserve to die too."

  Katie's heart dropped into her stomach. "I can't believe you just said that."

  "Don't worry. The sick fuck who did this is dead."

  Katie breathed a sigh of relief. "You think Richard did this?"

  "Of course. Don't you?"

  "You think he killed the others and killed himself?"

  "Would that surprise you? He was always talking about killing himself. He was always looking to take that stupid game to the next level. Then he found his perfect final girl and decided to take the game all the way."

  "But Jill survived," Katie said.

  "Of course she did. That was the point. The final girl always lives at the end. Richard took that shit seriously."

  Katie considered her friend's words. They made perfect sense. "So you think we're safe?"

  "Yeah," Diane said. "Probably."

  "Probably?"

  "Almost definitely."

  "What do you mean almost definitely? You said that Richard did this. Richard's dead."

  "Yeah, but like you said, we did bully that girl, not like the others, but we still participated." A pause. "And if we deserve to die, Katie, karma will find a way."

  Chapter Eleven

  Her mother was asleep, and she was finally alone. She could think freely now, without her mother hanging over her, looking down at her, and down on her, peering into her soul. Her mother could do that, she was sure. She could peer right down into her soul and dig her claws into her and move her like a marionette moves a puppet. It wasn't telekinesis; it was terrorism. Jill was afraid of her mother. She was a bully. But she wasn't a bully like the others. The others bullied her because they were mean. Her mother bullied her because her mother was afraid of her.

  Her mother thought her a monster. Jill didn't have to be a mind-reader to know what her mother thought of her; she'd heard her mother say it plenty of times. And her mother had every reason to believe that Jill was a monster.

  Jill had killed her very own father, after all.

  She'd killed him right in front of her mother's eyes. But she wasn't evil. She wasn't a monster, as her mother believed. She'd killed her father to save her mother.

  But it wasn't the fact that Jill had killed her father that made her a monster in her mother's eyes; it was the way she'd killed her father that was monstrous.

  Jill had seen her mother's bruised and bloodied face after numerous beatings. But she had always been at school and had never actually witnessed them. Her father had made a point of beating his wife when Jill wasn't around.

  Until the day he died.

  It was seven years ago. She was ten-years-old. It was a Saturday. Jill was home, of course, because she didn't have any friends to play with. Who would want to play with the weird little girl?

  She'd heard the words before.

  Bitch.

  Slut.

  Cunt.

  She'd heard the words so many times before. She'd even repeated them a few times, right in front of her mother when her mother was scolding her. She knew how the words sounded coming from her father's mouth. She knew
that they made her mother sad. So she said those bad words right in front of her mother when her mother was being mean to her. But her mother didn't look sad when she said those bad words, not at first. She looked surprised, then angry and scared at the same time. More scared than angry, Jill thought. What was she afraid of? Jill didn't know, but her mother was scared enough to make Jill go away. Sometimes she would call Jill a wicked little girl before sending her to her room.

  A wicked little girl. She wasn't a monster yet. That would come later, after she killed her father.

  When she heard the words that day...

  Bitch.

  Slut.

  Cunt.

  ...they were different. Angrier. More aggressive. Her father was going to hurt her mother. He was going to hurt her mother when Jill was home. He never hurt her mother when Jill was home. Jill was so quiet. Maybe he forgot that Jill was home. Or maybe he just didn't care anymore. Maybe he didn't care that Jill was home to hear him hitting her mother, to see him hitting her mother. She didn't want to hear him hitting her mother, and she certainly didn't want to see him hitting her mother. But it was coming; she could sense it in her father's tone. She could hear it in those horrible words.

  But the horrible words were where it would end. There would be no beating that day or any other.

  Because Jill was having none of it.

  She walked downstairs, into the basement where the beating was about to take place, and she looked at her her father, and he stopped, his right fist frozen in midair. He couldn’t move. Her father was frozen. And her father was scared. She could see it in his eyes.

  Her mother stepped out from between the counter and her frozen father. She was looking at Jill, and Jill knew that her mother was scared too. But her mother wasn’t afraid of her father. Her mother was afraid of her wicked little girl. She could see it in her eyes. Her mother was looking at her with eyes she’d never seen before.

  She was looking at Jill like she was a monster.

  And maybe she was a monster, at least in that moment. It wasn’t the power that made her a monster in that moment; it was what she wanted to do with that power. She wanted to hurt her father.

  She wanted to kill him.

  Slowly. Painfully. One invisible fist at a time. She wanted to beat him the way she imagined him beating her mother. And for someone like her, imagining and doing were one in the same.

  She imagined it, and she made it happen.

  He bled from his nose. He bled from his mouth. His face reddened at the end of her invisible fists. The fleshed moved with each invisible strike.

  “How do you like it?” Jill said. “How do you like it?”

  She kept hammering away, one invisible punch after another. The crunching of bone as his nose flattened. The splatter of blood on the floor, on the wall, on her mother. More crunching as his jaw and cheek bones shattered, as his face caved in.

  He was face down on the linoleum, the blood pooling around him. But he was alive. And despite his pushed-in face, he could see, she knew, because he was looking up at her. He was pleading with eyes because that was all he had left to plead with. But Jill couldn’t show him mercy even if she wanted to. The damage was already done, and she didn’t have the power to fix him. All she could do was watch him die.

  It took a few minutes of crawling across the basement floor for her father to take his last labored breath. She enjoyed watching him die, but she wasn’t sure how her mother felt about it. She imagined that her mother must have been relieved, but she probably didn’t know what to make of her daughter’s newfound abilities. Jill didn’t know what to make of it herself. It almost didn’t seem real. But there he was, a bloody mess on the basement floor that would have to be cleaned at some point.

  She peeled her eyes away from the bloody mess that used to be her father and looked at her mother. Her mother’s eyes were already fixed on her, and they were wide, terror-stricken.

  “Mom?”

  “Jill?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Is that you?”

  Jill was confused by the question. “Yes, it’s me. Are you okay?”

  Her mother nodded but didn’t speak. She was trembling.

  “How did I do that?” she asked her mother.

  Her mother’s countenance shifted from terror to confusion to curiosity. “You mean you don’t know?”

  Jill thought about it for a moment and shook her head. “I just thought it, and it happened.”

  Her mother examined the bloody mess. “I have to take care of this.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No, honey.”

  “But you’re afraid of me.”

  Her mother hesitated. “I’m just...concerned. I don’t want you to get in trouble. If the police find out about this, they’ll take you away from me. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  Jill shook her head.

  “Neither do I,” her mother said. “That’s why we can’t let anybody find out.”

  “We can bury the body,” Jill said.

  “I can take care of it, honey.”

  “No, it’s my mess; I want to help clean it up.”

  Her mother smiled a nervous kind of smile. “Okay, honey.”

  She helped her mother in any way she could. Her mother dragged her father’s body from under his shoulders while Jill held his feet.

  It wouldn’t occur to her until later that she should have been able to lift her father with her mind. What did they call this ability? Telekinesis. Yes, that was it. She was only vaguely familiar with this ability. She’d read about it in one of her favorite books, the one her father used to read to her. She’d found it fascinating, and she’d wanted to believe in it―What ten-year-old wouldn’t want to believe in something as cool as the ability to move objects with her mind?―but she wasn’t sure if she did. Until that day. The ability existed. She was living proof.

  But the ability was brand new for her. She didn’t know how she called upon it when she’d killed her father, and she didn’t know how to call upon it now. She’d inadvertently called upon it when her mother was in danger. That had to be it. Jill must have found the power inside of her the same way mothers find the power to lift cars off of children. She’d heard stories like that.

  But her mother wasn’t trapped under the proverbial car anymore; she wasn’t trapped under her husband’s fists. Her husband was dead, and her mother was out of danger. Jill had no reason to call upon the power. Maybe someday, she would learn to develop the power and would be able to call upon it at will. But for now, she would just have to help her mother the old-fashioned way.

  They dumped the body into the back of her father’s old pickup truck. Her mother left her with the truck and her father’s body and ran to the garage, returning with a tarp, a pick ax, and a shovel. She covered the body with the tarp and threw the pick ax and shovel into the bed of the truck next to the body.

  A silent twenty-minute drive brought Jill and her mother to a remote wooded area where Jill watched her mother dig a hole. Her mother was dirty and sweaty when she was done digging. She took a break before wrapping the body in the tarp and dragging it into the hole. She took another break before filling the hole in and covering the grave with dry leaves.

  Her mother was exhausted when they returned to the house. But Jill was fine. Other than killing her father, she didn’t really do very much, so she had more than enough energy to help her mother clean the basement and the foyer and the back of the truck. It took a lot of bleach and a lot of elbow grease, but they got it done.

  After it was all over, her mother sat her down in the kitchen and laid down the law. Jill was never to speak of this. If anybody were to ask, Jill would tell them that her daddy went away.

  When Jill asked her mother what she should do about her power, her mother looked at her funny. Jill reminded her mother that she was telekinetic, as if her mother could forget. Her mother must have been in shock, or maybe she was in denial. Her mother told her that she was not talk about that
either. Jill argued that it must have been a gift from God, that God would want her to learn to use it. Her mother smiled and told her that it was a gift from God, but like most gifts, you only get to open it once. She opened her gift to save her mother. She must never open it again.

  Chapter Twelve

  Darlene met the Caulfields at the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's Office. She was emotionally numb when she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield to an examination room while young Billy waited outside with a uniformed officer. This examination room was just another examination room for a veteran homicide detective like Darlene, cold and sterile, of course. But now it meant something else because she was about to watch Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield identify their seventeen-year-old son.

  Seventeen.

  In the two years since losing Brittany, she had never had to step up to one of these metal slabs with a grieving family to identify a teenager. But there she was, next to the Caulfields as they stepped up to the white sheet-covered body of their seventeen-year-old son.

  She nodded at the medical examiner, who pulled back the sheet to expose the lifeless face of Richard Caulfield. Mrs. Caulfield sobbed and turned away, burying her face in her husband's chest. The task of identifying Richard fell on Mr. Caulfield: "That's him," he said, his voice trembling. "That's our son...Richard."

  Darlene escorted Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield back to their only living son in the waiting area. Billy Caulfield's eyes were downcast. He wasn't crying. She doubted that he had shed a tear for her brother. He looked cold, lifeless, as his parents wrapped their arms around him. It didn't mean that he didn't love his brother or didn't care that he was gone. Many young children simply don't process death the way older children and adults do. Some children, like Billy, push their emotions deep down inside where they can't hurt them.

  Darlene wasn't a child, but she could certainly relate.

  ―

  She met Harry back at the precinct where she pulled up the photos she'd taken at the Caulfield residence. Harry took the phone from her, swiping his finger from one photo to the next.