The Last Final Girl

by Jones, Stephen Graham

Izzy, still shaking her head, lights the small pyre, the

  → smoke drifting up, around.

  The horses go freaking insane, kicking at the half doors of their stalls, screaming so that Izzy nearly falls down, away from it all.

  “Go!” Lindsay tells her then, and Izzy stumbles over to the stall with the “Wildfire” plaque, crawls under the door into that musty darkness.

  She stands, looks around, fingertips to the wall in honor, and says, as if just now figuring it out: “It ends where it started, right?”

  Then she’s looking over the top of the stall. At Lindsay, keeping that cable tight, not favoring her shoulder as much anymore. At the horse across from her, losing it completely, a demon on hooves.

  Then down to the thin black cable running through the latch of that horse’s half door.

  Izzy chocks herself up on her armpits on top of her door, reaches down for the cable, to feel it again.

  “This is—” she says, looking up to Lindsay with new eyes, and

  → again that cable snaps tight around Brittney’s throat.

  “This is,” Izzy says again, but sees it in Lindsay’s face: the back door, it’s creaking open. She cranks her head over as best she can, peers her POV through the smoke, and, right on time, his entrance more grim than Crystal’s at the game but still pretty grand, it’s Brooks Baker, dead so many times it doesn’t even matter any more.

  The reason it doesn’t matter is that he’s Billie Jean, now.

  He steps in, his sword held low, the horses crazy loud, smoke thick in the air.

  “Daddy, I’m over here,” Lindsay calls out in a little girl voice, and Billie Jean’s face pops up.

  He evaluates her, evaluates this, and starts his long, ponderous walk, the tip of that sword dragging the dirt, then the concrete, meaning

  → it’s time.

  Lindsay pulls back hard on her cable and all the latches pop at once, the doors swinging open as one, the horses exploding from their stalls, trampling the fire, pounding up the concrete to that back door they seem to know.

  Right into Billie Jean, yes.

  Lindsay steps up alongside Wildfire’s swinging stall door, doesn’t look in.

  “And that’s how a final girl does it,” she says.

  “This the version we’ll see in the papers?” Izzy says, and Lindsay finally does give Izzy her attention, the dust and smoke still too heavy to make out Billie Jean’s surely-shattered form anyway. “What are you saying?”

  “We only have your word about what went down two weekends ago,” Izzy says, still speaking from the darkness.

  “I told him—”

  “Jamie Curtis, you mean? The wannabe Billie Jean? You told him the story the two of you came up with together, that about the shape of it?”

  As punctuation, Izzy punches the cell phone in her hand alive.

  It’s the one she found in the mud.

  Now Lindsay’s POV can settle on Izzy’s glowing face. Her knowing face.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t recognize it,” she says, nodding down to the cable Lindsay still has looped in her hand.

  “You just think you do.”

  “No,” Izzy says punching her thumb into the phone, “I know I do.”

  An instant later, Lindsay’s right breast glows green.

  Her phone.

  “Is his name really even Jamie Curtis?” Izzy says. “Or was that y’all’s personal little joke?”

  Lindsay shakes her head about all this. Studies the smoke and dust still hanging at the other end of the stalls. Finally decides: “Some people are born lucky,” she says, gathering the cable in her hands while she speaks. “I found him when he wrote up Bag Head— Crystal’s wannabe little episode? We found we . . . shared certain predilections, you could say. He’s the real reason you got your home- coming bid, too. Mommy dearest never mentioned you.”

  “What?”

  “Your twin brother, that whole sad thing? Some family’s ski boat propeller meatgrindered through him? Yeah, guess who was skiing for their very first time that day, had a panic attack in all that sweet sweet blood, nearly drowned when he got some of your brother’s intestines or thigh meat in his mouth?”

  “Jamie?”

  “For every prank there’s an equal and much fucked-upper re- prank. I’m quoting you here. Think you got a C on that one, for language.”

  Izzy’s world is collapsing a little bit. Her POV narrowing, her breathing deep, her blood loud in her ears, her mind

  → creating that black and white lake scene. The blood behind the boat. A young Jamie falling down into it. The bloody water going into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, staining him once and for all.

  “That’s right, killer,” Lindsay says. “You created your own monster. Isn’t that the way it always goes, though?”

  Izzy climbs back into the world. Makes herself climb back.

  “It was him—it was him at the party.”

  “No,” Lindsay smiles, “last night he was with your little friend. Last night was—scroll down some, I think I forwarded it to him. He was supposed to delete it—I did—but he was sentimental, you know? Wanted souvenirs, all that.”

  Izzy scrolls down to a text from Lindsay. With an attachment.

  She hits play.

  It’s a video of that girl passed out by the toilet. Then of Billie Jean in the mirror, fitting the belt around his neck. Then sneaking around to Bogey and April on the bed, looking out the window at the party before angling the phone down onto his sword, waggling it like a giant penis.

  “Jake,” Izzy says.

  “Everybody wants a little piece of the action,” Lindsay says. “This action anyway. Which just begs the question. Do you? Maybe we took care of dear old Daddy together, right? Has there even been a double final girl?”

  “The Burning.”

  “That was boys, Izzy. Boys don’t count. Everybody expects them to kill the baddie.”

  “We did take care of him together.”

  “Well. Maybe I say it, though. Then you get a starring role in this movie. The quirky little sidekick. How about it, yeah? We can be stars together. The homecoming queen and the—the . . . what is it you want to be?”

  “Crystal’s queen, now.”

  “She’s not shit!”

  “Anyway,” Izzy says, dropping the phone, coming up with a pitchfork, which she’s apparently had all along, never mind what it was doing in a blind horse’s stall. “I may hate my dad, but I never tried to kill him.”

  “You saw him,” Lindsay says, not worried about the pitchfork. “He was trying to kill me.”

  “The first time, though? When you were the ‘only one’ to find him in his stall?”

  “Oh,” Lindsay says. “That. What could be worse than a girl’s dream horse nearly killing her daddy, right? You’ve got to get the sympathy on your side before you get all violent. Then anything you do, it’s justified.”

  “You stole him from the hospital.”

  “It’s not shoplifting if he’s family.”

  “People aren’t objects,” Izzy says, “they’re not devices. People are people.”

  “And you and I should get along so aw-fully, right?” Lindsay says, smiling, really showing her crazy now. She looks down to the pitchfork Izzy’s still holding like a bayonet, says, “Well? If we’re going to do this let’s—”

  Izzy races forward with it.

  Like Lindsay’s not ready, though.

  She loops the tines of the pitchfork with the cable, redirects it, pulling Izzy into her rising knee.

  Izzy’s head snaps back trailing blood, and, as easy as that, Lindsay loops the rest of the cable around her neck, hauls Izzy

  → over to the tall chute, all the ropes dizzying up into heaven.

  She reaches up for a smallish hook, small enough for the cable, and ties it, wrenches Izzy up by the neck, strangling her, Izzy kicking, kicking, her boot finally lucking onto the big hook, putting some of her weight there. But it can’t last.

&nb
sp; “Hey,” Lindsay says, stepping back, Izzy barely balanced, “this is all Saw, right? Here, the poetry part.”

  What she reaches back for is a machete. Which she angles over, lining it up on Izzy’s leg, finally slicing it right through the meat above her right knee.

  She steps back to appraise her work, nods.

  “Billie Jean kills again,” she says, simply. “Or maybe this is more John Doe? Anyway, when you get tired of almost dying, just take this”—tapping the machete—“and cut that”—the big hook’s thick rope. “It’ll . . . well. You saw what happened to your little friend at the game? Something like that, yeah. But don’t think of it like it’s a decapitation. Think of it like immortality. You’ll be a famous victim. Those little girls in junior high’ll all be coloring their hair to be like you. Shopping in the boy’s section, the military surplus store, Goodwill.”

  Izzy’s still kicking, still digging at the cable in her neck, her leg bleeding fast, but still,

  → her swinging POV can look past Lindsay, to Wildfire, screaming.

  And past that, down through the stalls, to Billie Jean unfolding from the rafters he pulled himself up into.

  “ . . . looks like Daddy learned a new trick,” she just manages to get out, and

  → Lindsay turns around, holds her hands to her mouth to cover her shrieking laugh.

  “Sorry,” she says to Izzy, reaching forward for the machete, but Izzy spins painfully away,

  → leaving Lindsay to glom a hay hook off the post, run with it to Wildfire.

  She unties the rope hitching him to a ring in the wall then backs off, slices down across his ass with her hook hand.

  “Get him,” she says, and Wildfire runs blind the same way the other horses did.

  This time, though, Billie Jean’s had enough.

  He steps forward to meet Wildfire, bringing the sword all the way up from hell, and, like we were all secretly wanting that first time, he mostly decapitates the horse.

  It keeps running past, its head just hanging on, its shoulder crashing into the door, shaking the whole barn.

  “Wildfire!” Lindsay calls out, in pain, and is scrabbling away now, Billie Jean approaching steadily.

  She turns, her back to the wall, Billie Jean jamming the sword into the wood right by her head.

  Lindsay falls away, swings her hay hook at Billie Jean when he comes at her next.

  He bats it away.

  She falls against another wall, almost gets skewered, and finally lucks onto the ladder, pulls herself up it.

  Billie Jean stands there a moment, watching her, then follows, leaving Izzy strangling out on her cable, her legs kicking free, her eyes wet and bloodshot, her

  → POV mostly on the ceiling.

  The fight going on up there, hay dust sifting down through the cracks.

  And then the fight goes higher.

  Either that or she’s dying.

  But—but—

  → her hand, it’s scrabbling down along her right leg.

  She rips the machete free, lets her neck take the full weight of the cord while she slices up at it with the blade.

  Finally she connects, but it’s a cable, not a rope.

  She strips the vinyl coating off, taking it down to metal, and is nearly dead now, her lips blue, her nose bleeding, eyes shot red, but then she swings wildly one more time, just manages to nick the rope right above the hook her cable’s on.

  The close-up of the rope twines out for long moments, finally snaps.

  Izzy crashes to the floor gasping, coughing, not able to breathe.

  And then a lit lantern crashes onto the floor beside her, its flames breathing out for anything it can find.

  Izzy, still dry-heaving, looks up for what’s next.

  It’s Billie Jean.

  He’s tumbling down fast, is going to hit her, she saved herself just to have him fall on, smash her into the—

  But no.

  That big hook, it catches under Billie Jean’s head, stops him all at once with a jerk, so he’s swaying back and forth, is that dummy from the pep-rally.

  Izzy stands, still holding her throat, and looks up, her POV seeing nothing. Nothing.

  “Boop,” she says painfully, pinching out the idea of Lindsay up there.

  She looks across to Billie Jean then, and of course his hand stabs out at her, has her by her throat.

  Until the sword comes down into the top of his head, cuts through his spinal cord, the point coming out the seat of his pants, then dripping dark blood down into space.

  Izzy guides his hand down, is breathing hard now, can see and hear spotlights and headlights and helicopters outside the barn, their hot light shining through in crazy, probing slats.

  Izzy looks up the shaft again, takes a step and collapses over her right knee, cutting us

  → a minute or two ahead, to her rubbing the last velcro strap in place.

  Of Billie Jean’s leg brace.

  She stands on it and it holds.

  She looks up to him and calmly rips the sparkly B from her chest, pushes it into him.

  It’s not for “Brittney” anymore. It’s for Billie Jean.

  Next she collects the machete, uses it to pull down another of the big hooks, the

  → close-up of her boot stepping up onto it just like Ripley would have.

  And then she reaches across, cuts a rope with one dramatic swipe, her hook pulling her up so that the last thing we see, it’s Billie Jean’s mask, slipping up off his head, Izzy taking it with her,

  → her POV now angling over through those eyeholes to study Lindsay, standing in the hay door at the very top of the barn.

  Her dress is torn, she’s bleeding, but every light out there, it’s hot on her, it’s drinking her in, her shadow huge across Izzy.

  But Izzy’s walking up out of it.

  Her POV approaches steadily, her bloody hands coming up to Lindsay’s shoulders, pulling her back to speak into her ear: “Virgins are the only ones who can do it right,” she says, “and guess what I am,” then pushes

  → the close-up of the machete out through Lindsay’s sculptured chest, saying it over her shoulder: “Welcome to the Golden Age, bitch,”

  → Lindsay’s rag doll of a body toppling out through the hay door, falling through the sky for hours, it seems like, finally slamming down not on a pipe or in a plow or on a hood, and not into the spinning blades of the helicopter parked there for some reason, but just onto the ground at Dante’s feet, crunching into it headfirst and permanent, her body folding into itself like a slinky, so we can go

  → close on her face, on her eye, dilating out into the real death, which is always the last one you were expecting, and, looking back up, the barn is a firestorm now, a pyre, a bonfire, those sparks trailing up into the sky—

  → “Stratford,” Dante says, half in thanks, half in farewell, and we’re

  → back with those sparks, are floating around while we tune in crackly snatches of radio news:

  “—last night at a house party four teens lost their lives in what can only be described as a massacre of Hollywood proportions, each death more grisly than the last, and coming right on the heels of the campground murders of two weekends ago—”

  “—release of the name of the officer is pending notification of the family, though—”

  “—word is just coming in about a grisly scene at a local residence, resulting in the death of not one but—”

  “—the families of those six high school students have asked that remembrances and memoriums be left in their names at—”

  “—local police are reticent to allow the possibility of a connection between that weekend and last night, but townspeople—”

  “—and what kind of homecoming is that, right? Was that a halftime show or a horror movie? I mean, I was never royalty myself, of course, but when I was—”

  “—related news, long-time custodian Carl Wakefield, former student of Danforth High School in what locals refer to as its glo
ry years, well as we all know he suffered massive—”

  “—and the principal is apparently unavailable for comment—”

  “—bodies are stacking up in Rivershead—”

  “—supposedly a book deal—”

  “—photos are already circulating—”

  “—shook this local community to its agricultural roots—”

  “—citzens have been quoted as saying that perhaps their town is cursed—”

  “—people are going to remember the name ‘Lindsay Baker’—”

  “—it all started with Michael Jackson—”

  “—something about a Halloween truck, that none of this would have happened if it hadn’t—”

  “Will the violence stop, though? Is it finally over?”

  Beat, beat. Just drifting in those sparks, then:

  “I mean, if every class tries to outdo the class before it, right? Then what the hell can we hope for next year? I ask you that,” sending us falling back down through those dancing orange sparks,

  → hissing into the wet grass of the football field, the scoreboard still on but that’s to the side.

  Where we’re looking is that announcer’s booth at the top of the stands, so dark.

  We ready ourselves for what the genre demands, for what we’ve paid for here, what we’re expecting, but still, that bloody palm slapping hard up against the glass from the inside, paired with a scream from who knows where—from Rivershead—it straightens our backs, it quickens our breath, it stabs our hands out for somebody else’s, so that, when we pan over to the scoreboard, we can smile—we made it through, we’re the final girl—that Period indicator rolling ponderously over from I to II, then making it to III somehow, then gathering momentum, cycling higher and higher, too fast, a Roman numeral blur these lights were never designed for, delivering us right to

  C ollege

  A classroom, the big kind, that same one they always use.

  Up-front on a huge screen is a paused frame of Jason at his most butchery, and in front of that is a youngish prof trying to disguise his good looks with the standard-issue tweed coat and specs. He’s staring up at Jason, now turning to his captive class, his hands behind his back, his eyes glittering with forbidden knowledge.