Chapter Three: Final Cut
The Macher house, Turner Lane, Woodsboro. Friday night.
* * *
It's about forty steps from the tree at the edge of the Macher property to the front door. At the time all I knew was that Stu Macher was standing in the doorway with a beer in each hand yelling my name, and Billy had told him I'd come.
On step three I thought about Tatum in the garage door. On step five, the cameraman—Kenny, I think?—in the van. On step seven, the bullet that would pierce my shoulder if everything went like in the original: how it looked in the movie and how it would feel from the other side. It wouldn't be the first time I'd been shot, and it was still going to hurt like a bitch, assuming of course, I haven't pissed them enough to get a headshot or a shot hitting my vital spots.
On step nine I opened the panel and tried again, because some part of me was hoping for some miracle, that the system might throw me a bone, but this wasn't the case.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Tickets: 1× Gold Choice · 1× Silver Ability · 1× Bronze Trait · 2× Bronze Skill
> [PULL](locked)
> Story in progress.
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"Yeah," I said under my breath. "Yeah, I know. Fuck you too."
So, no superpowers and no magical way to just get this over with. Whatever the multiverse had in its pockets for me, I wasn't getting it until the credits rolled, and the credits only rolled for people still alive to watch them. What I had was a Little League bat, my dad's Beretta in the back of my waistband, a tape recorder in my shirt pocket, twenty-two stitches on my right arm, a curse that sped my heart up every time I looked at Stu Macher, and the plot of a movie I'd seen a hundred times, guess I'm going to have to make it be enough.
I climbed the porch steps. Just short of the top I leaned the bat against the railing behind a big potted fern where Stu couldn't see it from the door, since walking into Stu's party holding a baseball bat was going to get me questions I didn't want to answer.
"Randy," Stu said, and threw an arm around my neck, beer sloshing, and hauled me inside. His other hand slapped my back about four inches above the gun. He didn't notice. I did. "My man. The hero. Karate Kid. Billy's gonna be so happy."
"Where is he, by the way?"
"On his way." Stu grinned. "He had to take care of something first."
I bet he did. Busy stringing up our Fonzie-looking principal, most likely, unless Billy was off killing somebody else entirely.
* * *
The Macher house was the kind of place you only get in movies and in towns like Woodsboro: a big old farmhouse at the end of a long drive, two stories plus an attic, a barn out back, a garage off the side with an automatic door, and more rooms than any family needed. Stu's parents were in Sacramento for the weekend. Stu's parents were always somewhere for the weekend, and honestly, if I'd grown up rattling around this place alone I'd probably have come out fucked up too—not serial killer fucked up, but still.
Maybe thirty kids were inside. Beck on the stereo, beer cans on every surface, people on the stairs and in the kitchen, a couple making out in the dining room like the world wasn't ending, and on the big TV in the living room, The Night He Came Home.
The title card was up when I came in, white on black: HADDONFIELD, ILLINOIS. HALLOWEEN NIGHT, 1958.
1958? That didn't make sense, I keep trying to remember any other movie that took place in that same city with that timestamp, but nothing came to mind. I stood in the doorway watching this huge fucker with a kitchen knife, walking down a street I couldn't recognize, yet felt so… familiar, again, it was like that other movie at the video store, where this strange dissonance between my memories and Randy's conflicted, again, with no explanation as to why.
"You okay?" somebody asked.
Sidney, next to me with a cup of soda and her arms crossed. She'd changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, and she looked tired and not thrilled to see me, or maybe that was just worry? I couldn't tell for sure although I could see her gaze turn to my arm.
"You're grounded," she said.
"So are you," I said. "Technically speaking all of us are. There's a curfew after all."
"My dad's missing and the sheriff thinks he's a murderer. I'm not grounded, I'm orphaned." She explained it flat and then winced. "Sorry. That was—"
"It's okay." Orphaned I knew a little something about, although for obvious reasons, I didn't say so.
"Tatum made me come. She said I'd go crazy sitting in her house staring at the wall." She looked at me sideways. "Why are you here? The last time you went to someone's house, you got hurt."
Because in about forty minutes your best friend is going out to the garage for beer, I thought, and I'm going with her.
"Stu invited me," I answered. "And I figured, you know. Strength in numbers, besides it'd feel weird if I didn't show up."
"Uh-huh." She said, crossing her arms, but decided against saying whatever she planned to, opting to sigh instead. "Dewey dropped us off. Tatum made him. He did this whole speech in the driveway about the curfew and how he's coming back for her at midnight, and then he drove off like he was mad at us." She almost smiled. "Just Dewey being Dewey."
I'd seen the cruiser go. From the trees at the edge of the property I'd watched it come back down the drive with its light bar dark and head down Turner Lane toward town, and about two hundred yards down, where the road bent into the trees out of sight of the house, I'd watched its taillights go out—not around a corner, but on the shoulder, where somebody had pulled over and killed the lights. Look for the car, I'd told him, hoping he'd understand that it'd be close by, given the answer I got back. Attaboy, Dewey.
* * *
The news van was the other thing.
It sat nose-out on the grass where the drive met the road, engine off now, windows dark. In the movie Gale doesn't crash the party. She does something smarter and a lot less legal: she sneaks a camera into the living room and sits out in the van with her cameraman, watching the whole party on a monitor with a thirty-second delay, waiting for the killer to walk into frame.
I found it on my second lap of the living room. On the bookshelf, between a row of Mr. Macher's golf trophies and a fake ficus, a little black lens looked out through the plastic leaves. You'd never spot it if you weren't looking, and nobody at this party was looking at anything but each other.
I looked straight at it for a second. Somewhere in that dark van Gale Weathers was looking back, and I could practically hear her doing the math: the kid who said it wasn't the father, sneaking into a party after curfew. She'd had me once today, live. She wanted twice. I thought about waving and didn't. So: anything that happened in this room tonight was going on tape, thirty seconds late and in the wrong room for most of what mattered, but on tape. I filed that next to the recorder in my shirt pocket.
About ten minutes later, from the front window, I watched the van's side door slide open and a figure in a pale coat climb out with a flashlight and head down the drive toward the road alone. Gale Weathers, going for a walk. In the movie she goes looking for her story and finds Dewey instead, and the two of them walk down Turner Lane together and find Neil Prescott's car pulled off in the brush and don't know what it means. This time, maybe, Dewey would. This time he was already out there looking.
Which left Kevin alone in the van. Kenny. It was Kenny, Jesus Christ, I'd watched this movie ninety times—Kenny, alone in the van, watching a monitor with a thirty-second delay.
* * *
I gave the speech, though I didn't plan to. Somebody restarted The Night He Came Home because nobody had actually watched it the first time, a guy from the swim team asked what the big deal was about this movie anyway, and before I knew it I was standing in front of the TV holding a beer I wasn't drinking with thirty drunk kids looking at me.
This was the scene, the one everybody quotes. In the movie Randy does it for laughs. He's a little drunk and a lot in love with the sound of his own voice, laying out the rules of surviving a horror movie like a stand-up bit while everybody laughs and the killer's already in the house behind him.
I didn't make it funny, though the kid wanted to; I could feel him in there with the whole routine queued up, the timing and the pauses and the beat where the room laughed, because this was his scene. He'd waited his whole life for a room full of people to shut up and listen to him talk about movies, and here it was, and he'd have been killed.
Sorry, kid, I thought. Not tonight.
"Okay," I piped in. "There are rules. In a horror movie, there are rules for how you survive. Everybody knows them yet nobody follows them." I held up a finger. "Don't have sex. I'm serious. It's not a morality thing, it's a logistics thing. You're distracted, you're not dressed, you're not near a door."
Somebody laughed, and I didn't.
"Don't drink. Don't do drugs. Same reason—you're slow, you don't see him coming." Two fingers. "And never, ever, say you'll be right back. Because you won't. You go down to the basement alone, you go out to the car alone, you go to the garage for beer alone, and nobody ever sees you again."
"Dude," the swim team guy scoffed, grinning. "It's a movie."
"Three people are dead in this town," I retorted, bluntly. "Casey. Steve. And tonight, I'd bet anything, somebody else. And whoever's doing it has seen every single one of these movies." I looked around the room—at Stu leaning in the kitchen doorway with a beer, smiling at me, and for half a second at the fake ficus on the bookshelf. "So tonight nobody goes anywhere alone. Nobody. That's rule one. That's the only rule. You want to go pee, you take a buddy."
It was quiet for a second. Then somebody threw a pillow at me, somebody booed, the swim team guy joked, "Can I take Tatum?", Tatum said "Gross," and everybody laughed and it was over. But I saw a couple of kids look at each other, and a girl in the corner put her beer down, and Stu, in the kitchen doorway, quit smiling for about a second and a half.
* * *
It happened at ten to ten, right when I'd been waiting for it.
"We're out of beer," Stu announced, holding up an empty. "Tatum, babe. Light of my life. Garage fridge?"
"Get it yourself."
"I'm hosting."
"You're drunk."
"That too." He blew her a kiss. "Pretty please?"
She rolled her eyes and got up. "Fine."
I was already on my feet. "I'll come."
Tatum looked at me. "I can carry beer, Randy."
"Rule one," I said. "Nobody goes anywhere alone."
I figured she'd tell me to screw off. Then she looked at my bandaged arm and my face, and something in her expression changed. She'd been there last night. She'd seen Sidney on the back of that ambulance, and my arm, not to mention that from what I recall, Sid had gotten a call when she was at Tatum's house as well alongside Dewey.
"Fine," she agreed. "But you're carrying the twelve-pack."
Stu said lightly, "Aw, Randy. That's sweet. You're a good friend." He didn't look at me when he said it. He looked at the kitchen clock.
* * *
The garage was cold and dark and smelled of motor oil and cut grass. An old Frigidaire covered in magnets hummed against the back wall next to a big chest freezer, a riding mower, and a pegboard of garden tools. The big automatic door was down, its motor bolted to the ceiling, with a little pet door cut into the bottom of it. I'd watched Tatum die in that pet door, stuck halfway through with the big door coming down on her.
Tatum hit the light switch, and nothing happened.
"Great," she said. "Stu, you cheap—" She stepped into the dark toward the fridge, feeling her way along the wall.
"Tatum," I barked. "Wait."
"It's a garage, Randy, not a crypt."
She got the fridge open, and its little light came on pale and yellow and lit her from below. She bent for the beer, and behind her, in the gap between the chest freezer and the wall, something that had been a shadow stood up.
"Tatum."
She turned and saw it: mask white in the fridge light, black robe, knife.
In the movie she isn't scared at first. She thinks it's Stu or somebody screwing around and talks to it like a prank, and then she figures it out and fights, and she's good at it. She throws bottles and nearly gets away. This time she didn't think it was a joke, because fifteen minutes earlier I'd stood in front of the TV and told everybody it wasn't. She screamed, threw a whole six-pack of Bud at its head, and ran for me.
I grabbed her arm and put her behind me, between me and the door to the house.
"Go," I ordered. "Inside. Get everybody. Go."
"Randy—"
"Go!"
She went. The kitchen door banged open behind me, the music got louder, her voice went shrieking somebody's in the garage, there's somebody in the—and the door swung shut, and it was just me and Ghostface in the yellow light from the open fridge.
He stood there a second with his head tilted. He'd come for her and gotten me, and I could see him deciding what to do about it.
It was Billy. Well, it had to be, given that Stu was currently hosting the party, and we haven't gotten to the sequels like in Scream 6-7—I had to hold myself from showing my brainrot when I thought of it— with three Ghostfaces. Nice to see you again, Billy. Guess a couple of knocks on the noggin can't fix stupid. It was right there in my mouth. I wanted to say it so bad my teeth hurt, and the kid wanted to even worse. But the second it came out, Billy would know that I knew, and a Billy who knew that wouldn't need to win this fight. He'd just need to get back in the house and tell Stu, and then they might go scorched earth and stab everything that moved.
So I played dumb Randy. "Who the fuck are you?" I said, and let my voice crack on it, which wasn't hard.
His head tilted a little more, as if he was deciding whether I meant it. Then he lunged.
The second heartbeat went off under my ribs like a car alarm. Battle Maniac didn't care that I didn't have a weapon or my stitches. It wanted this for a long time. And some part of me was happy right along with it.
I went backward, not forward, and that was all Theo. Battle Maniac wanted me to go straight at him, and Theo knew a skinny kid going straight at a knife ends up wearing it. The Beretta was under a flannel in the back of my waistband, which with a blade coming at your face might as well be in Sacramento; reach behind you for a gun while a man swings a knife and you get the knife in your armpit. The Army teaches that too. I backed toward the pegboard, he came after me, and my hand found the first long handle on the wall without looking.
A garden spade, the flat kind for edging. Wooden handle, steel blade with a sharpened edge.
He swung. I brought the spade up across my body in the similar manner to a quarterstaff, the way I once laid out an asshole at Basic with my rifle butt. The knife skidded off the handle. I shoved the blade forward, edge first, into his forearm.
I felt it bite through the robe and the jacket under it and into the meat of his arm. He screamed, the first real sound he'd made in two nights, and the knife clattered on the concrete. For one second we were face to face, the mask six inches from mine, and I could hear him breathing hard behind it and smell drugstore shampoo and sweat and blood.
I dropped the spade and drew, and the Beretta came out of my waistband and up into both hands like no time had passed since the range at Benning, the safety coming off under my thumb on the way up, six feet, center mass. With the fridge light behind him he was a black shape with a white face, and I had the front sight dead in the middle of him.
He froze, and every part of me wanted to squeeze, and that was the curse, plain as day; Battle Maniac had me by the collar. He's hurt. He dropped the knife. He's right there. End it. The Army part of me agreed with it, which was the scary part: two killers, one bleeding in front of me with no weapon, and every tactical instinct I owned said now.
I didn't, and this time it wasn't the kid—I checked, and the kid part of me was so scared he'd gone flat and quiet. I could see it: a man in a mask dead on the floor of Stu Macher's garage, and under the mask Billy Loomis, the heartbroken boyfriend who got hurt rushing for his girlfriend, and standing over him Randy Meeks, the weird kid who'd been acting weird for the last few days with his daddy's stolen gun, with no confession and no proof. Meanwhile Stu would be in the living room with thirty drunk witnesses who'd swear he never left the couch. Stu would be crying on Gale's camera by midnight, I'd be in a cell by one, and Sidney would believe every word out of Stu's mouth. I needed both of them, and I needed them to say it—for Mr. Prescott's name, and mine, and even Cotton's, that Sabretooth-looking motherfucker.
Billy saw the gun. The mask tilted a fraction, like a dog hearing a word it knows. Then he did the smartest thing he'd done in two days, and ran.
He went out the little side door by the mower into the dark yard, and I had his back in my sights all the way to the door. An unarmed man running away, shot from behind—any lawyer in California would've loved that, and I couldn't even claim Castle Doctrine, it wasn't my house. I heard him hit the grass and keep going toward the trees. I stood in the doorway with the Beretta up and my whole body shaking, and I didn't go after him.
It was the hardest thing I'd done since I woke up, because the curse pulled so hard it felt as if my feet were going to walk out that door without me. I had to put the safety on and put the gun away and grab the doorframe with both hands and hold on, like a guy on a ship in a storm, until the second heartbeat slowed down. No, I told it. There's a house full of teenagers in there and one of the killers is still in it with them. We're not chasing, not yet, not without the tape. It slowed, eventually, and I hated myself a little for how long it took.
I picked his knife up off the concrete by the blade, with my shirt pulled over my fingers, and set it on top of the chest freezer as evidence, for somebody to look at who probably wouldn't. The chime came while I was still standing there looking at it.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Feat Achieved!Save a girl the story wanted dead
> +1× Silver Trait Gacha Ticket
> (Story in progress. Ticket held.)
▌
Held, which was great; put it on my tab.
* * *
The house was coming apart when I got back inside.
Tatum was in the middle of the living room with people all around her, screaming at them to call the cops, call the cops, there was a guy in the garage with a knife. Half the party believed her and the other half thought it was a bit. Stu stood in the middle of it with his hands up going Babe, babe, it's probably Kyle, he's been messing with people all night—
Then somebody's pager went off, and somebody else's. A girl named Heather with a cell phone the size of a brick answered it, listened, went white, and announced, "They found Principal Himbry. At the school. On the football field. He's—"
That did it, same as in the movie. Thirty half-scared, half-drunk kids all got the same idea at once, which was go look. Car doors slammed outside, headlights swept the front windows, and in three minutes the party was down to almost nobody. Teenagers, man. Tell them there's a killer in the garage and they stay put; tell them there's a body at the school and they drive toward it.
Tatum grabbed me as I came in from the kitchen. "Randy. Randy, oh my God, are you okay? Did he—where did he—"
"He ran," I interrupted. "Out the side door. Into the woods. I got him with a shovel."
"You what?"
"A spade. Technically." I held up my hands, which were still shaking. "It was on the wall."
Sidney stood by the stairs with her hand over her mouth. Stu stood behind her looking at me, and for the first time since I'd woken up in Randy's bed, Stu Macher wasn't smiling at all. He knew something had gone wrong. Tatum was supposed to be dead in the garage, and here she was standing in his living room, alive and screaming. He didn't know how bad Billy was hurt, but he knew the script was broken.
"Where's Billy?" Sidney questioned.
"He's coming," Stu answered, in a voice that was eerily normal for a guy who'd just heard there was a serial killer in his garage. Was I the only person in this house with any common sense? "He called. He's on his way."
He showed up eight minutes later, coming in the front door out of breath, jacket zipped to the chin, his left arm held tight against his side with a fresh bandage of thick white gauze wrapped around the forearm, already spotting through.
"Jesus," he breathed. "Jesus, I saw all the cars. What happened?"
"There was somebody in the garage, and then everyone ran away because apparently Principal Himbry's dead," Sidney said. "He went after Tatum. Randy fought him off."
"Again?" Billy looked at me. "Man. You're like a bodyguard."
"Oh my God, Billy," Sidney gasped. "What happened to your arm?"
He didn't hesitate for a second. "Barbed wire. Stu's back fence. I came through the field from the road because the drive was full of cars, and I caught it going over." A little rueful smile. "Tonight's not my night for coordination, I guess."
"Brutal," I said. "You missed it, man. Some psycho in the garage. Mask, robe, the whole getup. I think I got him with a shovel."
I watched him not look at his arm.
"You see who it was?" he said, all too casual for something this important.
"Are you kidding? I was trying not to pee myself." I laughed and let it come out shaky, which was easy, because it was. "Could be anybody under two-fifty in that getup. Could've been Kyle."
"Kyle," Billy echoed, and smiled. "Yeah. Could've been."
We looked at each other. Behind him, Stu poured himself another drink with a hand that wasn't quite steady.
That was the whole game now. Billy didn't know if I knew—maybe I was just the dumb kid who got lucky with a shovel, maybe not—and he couldn't ask without telling me. What he did know was what was in the back of my waistband, and he'd come back into this house anyway with his arm wrapped up and was smiling at me in the living room, because he couldn't say one word about what I was carrying without saying what he'd been doing in the garage. And I couldn't say anything either, because who the fuck was going to believe the horror geek over the heartbroken boyfriend with the barbed-wire cut? He was lucky I wanted him dumped by Sid and exposed before I blew his brains out, and I'd have to watch him every second anyway, because sooner or later he'd make a try for the gun.
It was the most perfectly balanced standoff of my life, and I'd been in a couple.
"Sid," Billy called, turning away from me. "Can we talk? Upstairs? Please. I just—I really need to talk to you."
* * *
In the movie they go upstairs and talk, and then they don't just talk, which is stupid, because I fucking said it's not a good id— Randy did. Randy said it. Jesus Christ, Randy, can you not nerd-rage right now? Where was I. Right: then Ghostface comes in and stabs Billy, and Sidney runs. Except it isn't a real stabbing. It's Stu in the costume with fake blood, and Billy gets up later to shoot Randy.
I couldn't stop them going upstairs. I tried. I said Sid, maybe we should all just stay down here, and she gave me a look that said very clearly you are not my dad and went up with Billy's arm around her.
I had something else to do anyway. Neil Prescott was in this house, taped and gagged in a closet, waiting for the last scene, when Billy and Stu would drag him out and put a gun in his hand and tell the story of how he'd done it all. I'd pointed Dewey at the road, and Dewey would find the Bronco, but the Bronco wasn't what mattered. The man was.
"Tatum," I said. "Come with me. Nobody goes anywhere alone."
"Where are we going?"
"Looking for something."
She looked at Stu, who was sitting on the arm of the couch with the remote, watching The Night He Came Home with the sound all the way down. Then she looked at me. "Okay."
We did the downstairs first: coats in the coat closet, food in the pantry, a washer and dryer in the laundry room with a litter box for a cat I never saw. The basement door was locked. The back hall off the kitchen had three doors, two of them a bathroom and a linen closet, and the third with a padlock hanging through a hasp on the outside.
A closet with a padlock on the outside.
"Randy," Tatum whispered. "Why does Stu have a padlock on a closet?"
I had no key and no bolt cutters. What I had was a juvenile record I'm not proud of and a very specific education I'd picked up at fifteen from a kid named Marcus in a group home in Rancho Cordova, who could get into anything held shut with screws. The padlock was solid. The hasp it hung on was held to the doorframe by four cheap Phillips screws.
"Get me a butter knife," I said.
"What?"
"A butter knife. From the kitchen. The kind with the rounded tip. Go. Don't let Stu see you."
She came back with two, because she's Tatum. I jammed the rounded tip of the first one into the head of the top screw and turned, and it bit, and the screw came out a quarter turn at a time. Then the next. It took maybe two minutes and felt like two hours, and every creak in that house was Stu coming down the hall.
The last screw came out and the hasp swung free, padlock and all, hanging off the door by nothing.
Tatum was staring at me. "Where the hell did you learn that?"
Group home almost came out, which would have been a great conversation to start in Stu's back hall. "Library book," I blurted out. "I thought it'd make a cool party trick."
"Who are you trying to impress with a butter knife, Randy?"
"You, apparently," I replied. That one was Randy's stupid feelings, not me, and she gave me a look like I'd grown a second head and she didn't have time for either of them.
I opened the door, and he was sitting on the closet floor against the back wall, hands taped behind him, ankles taped together, a strip of duct tape over his mouth: a middle-aged man in a rumpled business shirt with Sidney's eyes, blinking up at the hall light like something dragged out of a cave. He'd been in there since yesterday afternoon, and the closet smelled like it.
Tatum made a sound. "Mr. Prescott?"
His eyes went wide over the tape and he started making urgent noises behind it. I knelt and pulled the tape off his mouth as gently as I could, which wasn't very.
"Sidney," he said in a cracked whisper. "Where's Sidney? They said—they said they were going to—"
"She's upstairs," I said. "She's okay. For now. Mr. Prescott, can you walk?"
"I don't know. I don't— Who are you?"
"Randy Meeks. I'm a friend of Sid's." I was sawing at the tape around his wrists with the second butter knife. It took forever, and he winced every time I slipped. "We have to get you out of here. Right now. Before they come down."
"Before who comes down? Randy, what's going on? Who's upstairs?"
I looked at Tatum, at her face, at her boyfriend's padlocked closet and Sidney's dad on the floor of it. There was no way around it anymore.
"Stu," I said. "And Billy. It's them, Tatum. It's been them the whole time."
* * *
I'll say this for Tatum Riley: she didn't argue. She stood in the back hall of her boyfriend's house with her hand over her mouth looking at Neil Prescott on the closet floor, and I watched her put it together: Stu's jokes about Casey, Stu sending her to the garage for beer, the padlock. She didn't say no or you're crazy or Stu would never. She went pale all the way down to her collarbones and said, "Okay. What do we do."
That's a person you want next to you in a bad room. I'd served with guys who handled it worse.
"You take him," I ordered. "Out the back, across the yard, down to the road. Dewey and Gale Weathers should be down there somewhere. Tell them everything. And that the only people in the house are Sid, myself, Billy and Stu."
"What about you?"
"Sidney's upstairs with Billy."
"Randy—"
"Tatum. Go. Now. Before they figure it out."
Neil Prescott could stand, barely, with Tatum under one shoulder. They went out the back door into the dark together, a tall girl half carrying a stumbling man across the grass, and I watched until they reached the tree line. Then I shut the door, set the hasp back over the frame so it looked right from a distance, and hung the padlock through it. It wouldn't fool anybody who touched it. It only had to fool somebody who glanced.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Feat Achieved!Break the killers' frame
> +1× Bronze Skill Gacha Ticket
> (Story in progress. Ticket held.)
▌
Keep 'em coming, I thought. I'll cash out if I live—and upstairs, Sidney screamed.
* * *
I'd known it was coming, and I still wasn't ready.
I reached the bottom of the stairs as she came down them running, barefoot, half dressed, white-faced. Behind her, at the top of the stairs, something heavy thumped onto the floor.
"He killed him," she screamed. "He killed Billy, he's up there, he—"
I looked up. In the bedroom doorway at the top of the stairs, a figure in black stood looking down at us, mask and knife, and on the bedroom floor behind him I could just make out Billy's legs and a dark stain spreading over the carpet, corn syrup and food coloring, which I knew, and which looked exactly like the real thing.
"Out," I said to Sidney. "Out the front. Now."
We went out the front door into the cold, Sidney sobbing and me holding her arm, and the first thing I saw was Gale Weathers's van at the bottom of the drive with its side door open and its dome light on.
Kenny was in the driver's seat, slumped sideways over the wheel, and the windshield in front of him was dark and wet. From twenty feet away I could tell that one wasn't corn syrup.
In the movie, Kenny sits in that van watching the party on Gale's hidden camera with its thirty-second delay. He sees Ghostface sneaking up behind Randy on the monitor and goes to warn him, and the second he opens the door, Ghostface cuts his throat and goes after Sid. I hadn't been on that couch tonight. There'd been nobody on the monitor for Kenny to run out and warn, and Kenny had died anyway. Standing on the Machers' lawn looking at the van, I understood something about this world I've never managed to un-understand since: it doesn't need the reasons. It just needs the bodies, and it'll take them whatever way it can get them.
* * *
Dewey came up the drive at a stumbling run a minute later, alone, gun drawn, flashlight in the other hand, yelling Sidney's name. I saw him see the van, and Kenny, and stop.
"Dewey," I shouted. "Did Tatum—"
"She's with Weathers," he shouted back. "Down at the road. With Neil. Randy, Neil's alive, he said—he said Stu—" He was running toward us across the lawn. "Get behind me. Both of you. Get behind—"
The figure came out of the dark beside the porch.
I saw it an instant before Dewey did and opened my mouth to yell his name, and the knife went into his back high under the shoulder blade, and Dewey went down on his face in the grass with a sound like air going out of a tire. His gun skittered across the lawn. The figure in black stood over him a second, looking at us. Then it turned and walked back into the house.
Sidney got to the gun before I did. She picked it up off the grass and held it in both hands, shaking so hard the barrel jumped.
"Is he dead?" she sobbed. "Is Dewey dead? Randy, is he—"
I was already on my knees beside him. The knife was still in his back. He was breathing and conscious, saying ow, ow, ow into the grass. I put my good hand flat on his back beside the wound and didn't touch the knife. You never pull the knife. You leave it for the surgeon, because it's the only thing holding the bleeding in.
"He's alive," I said. "He's alive. Don't move, Dewey. Don't move."
"Stu," Dewey said into the grass. "Tatum said. Stu. And Billy—"
"I know."
Sidney had heard him. I watched it land on her face a word at a time. Stu. And Billy.
"No," she said. "Billy's upstairs. Billy's dead, I saw—"
The front door of the house opened.
* * *
It was Stu, out of costume, in his jeans and flannel, blood down one side of his face, staggering and holding his head. "Sid," he gasped. "Sid, oh God, he's in the house, he got me, he got Billy—" He saw me kneeling by Dewey, and his whole face changed, and he pointed. "Him! Sid, it's him, it's Randy, he's been there every time, he was at your house, he was in the garage, it's him—"
From where Sidney stood, it made sense. I'd been at her house, in the bathroom, in the garage. I'd known things all day that nobody should've known. The one small problem with that theory was that I couldn't have attacked her, because she'd watched me get cut for her, for Christ's sake. She looked at me, and at Stu, with Dewey's gun in her shaking hands, and didn't know.
In the movie, this is where Randy and Stu stand outside a locked door screaming at each other, he did it, no, he did it, and Sidney won't open it for either of them. Then Billy comes down the stairs alive, and she gives him the gun.
The worst part was knowing exactly what came next.
"Sid," I soothed. I stood up slowly with my hands open and away from my body. "Listen to me. Don't give that gun to anybody. Not me. Not Stu. No one. Get down to the road, find Dewey's car, lock the doors, and wait for Gale."
"Don't listen to him," Stu screamed.
Behind Stu, Billy Loomis came out of the dark hall into the doorway, alive, his shirt soaked red with corn syrup and his bandaged arm held to his chest, and said weakly, "Sid? Sid, baby, are you okay?"
She turned toward him like a flower toward the sun.
"Billy," she choked, and ran to him. He caught her and held her, and over her shoulder he looked at me with an expression I'll never forget and said very gently, "Give me the gun, Sid. It's okay. I've got you. Give me the gun."
"Sidney, are you fucking kidding me?"
She gave him the gun.
* * *
He didn't say the line from the movie. I'd wondered if he would. He just looked at me down the length of Dewey's service pistol from the porch of Stu Macher's house, with his girlfriend in his arms, and smiled.
"You should've stayed home, Randy," he sneered.
My hand was already behind my back on the grip. But Sidney was in front of him (he'd made sure of that, her head against his chest and his arm around her), and from where I stood there wasn't one square inch of Billy Loomis I could put a round into without Sidney Prescott in front of it or right next to it. He'd seen the gun in the garage, and he'd planned for it. Of course he had. He'd seen all the same movies I had.
I'd known this was coming for three days and thought about it every time I closed my eyes, the gun coming up, the table breaking under me; I'd had plenty of time to decide what I'd do. What I did was turn sideways to reduce how much he could hit me while wearing some crappy homemade DIY armor under my clothes.
Well, it obviously wasn't perfect; While I was too focused on protecting my center of mass, Billy was somehow very lucky with his shot: catching my shoulder high, just inside the joint. I went backward off the porch steps and landed on my back in the grass next to the big potted fern at the foot of the railing.
It didn't hurt at first. My buddies in the army used to say that and nobody believes it. It was a very hard hit in a very small place, and then I was lying on my back in the Machers' front yard looking up at the stars, and then it hurt more than I'd known anything could—more than the knife, more than the round through the outside of my arm in Afghanistan that a medic packed and wrapped while I kept shooting. That had been Theo's arm, with Theo's pain tolerance. Randy's body had never been hit by anything harder than a dodgeball, and it let me know. My whole right arm went hot, then cold, and then it just wasn't there.
Somewhere above me Sidney was screaming. I heard Billy's voice, very calm, and Stu's high, cracked, giddy laugh, and then the two words from the movie: Surprise, Sidney.
I lay in the grass and breathed. Four came out ragged. I couldn't hold for four.
I turned my head. The bat was right there behind the fern where I'd leaned it three hours ago, but that wasn't what I was looking at. Under me, digging into my spine like a fist, still in my waistband, was my dad's Beretta. Billy hadn't come down the steps to take it. He'd been too busy holding on to his girlfriend.
Oh, I thought. Oh, you beautiful piece of shit.
The porch boards were level with my head, and above me the front door stood open, spilling light and voices. With my left hand, which was slick and wouldn't work right, I dug the recorder out of my shirt pocket, thumbed the switch to VOR, pressed RECORD, and reached up to set it on the edge of the top step in the fern's shadow, pointed at the door. The little red light came on the second Stu started talking.
* * *
I heard all of it from the grass.
I heard them drag Sidney inside. Then they did the thing I'd been betting my life on since I sat on Randy's bed with a tape recorder in my hand: they talked. Killers in movies always talk. It's the one rule nobody writes down, because it's the one that saves the most lives.
Stu went first, high and fast, like a kid telling a ghost story at a sleepover. Casey: That was us, that was so us. Steve. Himbry on the goalposts, which Stu thought was the funniest thing he'd ever done. Under him Billy's calm voice corrected the details like a teacher.
Then Billy told Sidney why her mother died like he was reading her the weather: his dad, her mom, his own mother packing the car and never coming back. We killed your mother, Sid. He used those exact words. Stu was apparently confused, not even aware that Billy actually had a motive.
I lay in the grass with a bullet in me thinking, Say it again. Slower. For the tape.
Then the part I'd been waiting for.
"Stu," Billy said. "Get the special surprise."
Stu's footsteps went down the back hall toward the closet. Silence. Then Stu's voice from the back of the house, panicked: "Billy?"
"What."
"Billy, he's gone."
"What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean the lock's, like, hanging off the fucking door, man, somebody took the screws out, and he's not in there, and the door's open, and—" Stu's voice was climbing. "Billy, where's her dad? Where's her fucking dad? We need her dad! That's the whole thing! That's the ending!"
Inside, Sidney made a sound. It was the first time all night I'd heard her sound like anything but terror. It sounded a little like hope.
Billy didn't answer for a while, and when he did, his voice was perfectly calm.
"Okay," he said. "New ending."
"What new ending? There's no new—"
"Randy." I could hear him smile. "Randy Meeks. The movie geek. He was at her house. He was in the bathroom. He was in the garage. He knew things, Stu. Everybody saw it. He's been acting like a psycho for two days. He brought his daddy's gun to your party, man. He pulled it on me in the garage. Everybody's gonna love that. He killed Casey and Steve and Himbry and Kenny, and he went after Sid, and we stopped him. We shot him with the deputy's gun. Tragic."
"What about the dad? The dad's out there, Billy, he's gonna talk—"
"The dad's been tied up in a closet for two days. He didn't see anything. He'll say two boys in masks. There'll be two dead boys, and one of them's Randy." A pause. "We just need the second body."
I heard Sidney scream no, and I heard, or at least I think I did, the grunts of someone getting stabbed.
In the movie, this is where Billy and Stu stab each other a little, for realism, so they can say they were attacked too. It's the scene everybody quotes. Movies makes psychos more creative. They did it. I heard Stu laughing and yelling ow, ow, fuck, Billy, too deep, and Billy saying hold still, while I got my left hand under my back and worked the Beretta out of my waistband an inch at a time and laid it along my thigh in the grass where the fern's shadow fell, then thumbed the safety off and felt it click.
Then slow, weaving footsteps came down the porch steps. Stu's.
"Gotta finish the geek," he said to nobody, giggling. "Gotta make sure. Gotta make it look good. And get his gun. Billy says you got a gun, Randy. Naughty."
He came down the steps and across the grass toward me, out of the porch light into the dark of the lawn, knife in one hand and the mask held in the other like a hat, robe on, his own blood running down his side. Grinning. He saw the bat behind the fern and kicked it clanging off across the lawn into the dark.
"Nice try, slugger."
I lay still with my eyes almost closed. I'd played dead once before, on a field exercise at Fort Irwin, lying in the dirt for forty minutes while an OPFOR squad walked right past me. It's easy. You just have to stop caring about anything for a while.
"Hey, Randy," Stu giggled, standing over me. "Hey, buddy. This isn't personal. You know that, right? You're the rules guy. You know how this goes."
Somewhere in the back of me the kid heard buddy. Two nights ago on Sidney's living room floor that word would've done something. Now it didn't. Whatever had flinched in the broken glass had gone cold and quiet and stayed that way.
He crouched over me with the knife, and his other hand went patting down my side, looking for the gun.
"Yeah," I said. "I know how this goes."
I shot him twice in the chest, left-handed, from about eighteen inches.
Nobody tells you how loud it is outdoors at night with no ear protection. The whole world went white and ringing. Stu sat down in the grass like somebody had pulled a chair out from under him and looked down at his chest and then at me with the most honest expression I'd ever seen on his face: pure, total confusion.
"That's not," he said. "That's not how it goes."
"Haven't you heard of the Director's Cut?" I asked.
He tipped over sideways into the grass and didn't say anything else.
I'd never done it that close, close enough to smell the beer on him. I'd wondered at the fountain what it would feel like, it felt like nothing before Battle Maniac lit itself up in my chest like a fucking Christmas tree and there wasn't room for anything else. In the back of me the kid didn't say a word, and he didn't flinch either. He was just there, very small and very quiet, looking at Stu Macher in the grass with me, and I think we were both waiting to feel something. I'm still waiting.
"Stu?" Billy's voice, from inside. "Stu, what the fuck was that?"
I got up, though I don't know how, with my right arm dead weight and my legs belonging to somebody else. I climbed the porch steps one at a time with the gun in my wrong hand, stepped over the recorder, and left it where it was, still listening.
Everything I'd learned in four years said stay down, stay out of the doorway, let him come to you, and under that the curse was going go, go, he's right there, go, and for once the curse and the part of me that wanted to save Sidney Prescott wanted the same thing. So I went through the front door.
Billy stood in the living room with Dewey's gun. Sidney wasn't with him; I learned later she'd torn loose the second he turned toward the shots and gone up the stairs. He swung the gun toward me and fired, and the shot went past my ribs close enough that I felt the heat of it through my shirt and something tore in my side like a paper cut from God. Then Gale Weathers came in through the back door behind him, out of breath, hair everywhere, a gun of her own in both hands, and yelled "Drop it!"
He turned toward her, and I shot him twice, left-handed, in the back and the side, from across the living room. He went sideways through the kitchen doorway and down onto the linoleum. Gale's gun never went off. She'd forgotten the safety, exactly like in the movie, and I hadn't—and then my legs finally figured out I'd been shot and quit, and I sat down hard against the back of the couch with the gun in my lap.
* * *
Sidney came down the stairs slowly, holding the umbrella from the hall stand in both hands like a bat. Gale was on one knee in the kitchen doorway with her gun on Billy, safety off now, breathing like she'd run a mile. Billy lay on his back on the kitchen floor with his eyes open, not moving.
I dragged myself up the back of the couch until I could see over it.
"Randy," Sidney said. There was blood across her whole face, and her eyes were enormous. "You're alive. Oh my God. I heard the—I thought you were—"
"Careful," I croaked. "Sid. Gale. Careful. This is the part where the killer comes back to life."
She looked at me, then down at Billy, and Billy's eyes blinked and he lunged up off the floor at her with his mouth open to scream.
I shot him in the head.
It was very loud in the kitchen, and then very quiet.
"Not in my movie," I said. Then it occurred to me that in a world this strange he might somehow come back anyway, so I put the rest of the magazine into his head until the slide locked back and there was nothing left to come back with. Sid flinched at every one of those. Sue me.
She looked at me over what was left of Billy Loomis without screaming or saying a word, and set the umbrella down on the floor very carefully, like it might go off. On one knee in the kitchen doorway, Gale Weathers looked at me too, and I watched her realize her story had just changed again.
Then I put the Beretta on the carpet, slid it away from me, and laid my good hand flat on the floor where everybody could see it, because that's what you do when the cops are coming, and I could already hear sirens on Turner Lane.
* * *
They found Neil Prescott at the bottom of the drive with Tatum Riley, both of them hiding in the ditch beside Dewey's cruiser, which somebody had given a flat tire and a slashed radio cord while Dewey was off in the trees looking for a Bronco. Tatum had wrapped her sweater around him. When the first squad car came up Turner Lane with its lights going, she ran into the road in front of it waving both arms and nearly got herself run over, and Neil sat in the ditch with his face in his hands and cried.
Dewey went to the hospital with the knife still in him, talking the whole way about how he was fine, and didn't die.
Kenny did. They put a sheet over the van's windshield while I watched from the stretcher, and I thought about how I'd never really met Kenny. He'd said maybe four words in my hearing, all of them to Gale, all about the light, and I was going to think about him for a long time.
Sheriff Burke came with the second wave of cars. He walked up the lawn with his gun out and stopped at Stu in the grass and looked down at him a while. Then he looked at me on the stretcher, and at the deputy holding my dad's Beretta in a paper evidence bag, and his face went through something complicated and came out the other side very tired.
"Sheriff," I greeted. "Top step. Behind the fern. There's a tape recorder."
He turned. Gale Weathers was already crouched beside the fern with her split lip and her hand halfway out.
"Ms. Weathers," Burke said, "if you touch that, I will arrest you."
She took her hand back without looking sorry; she looked like somebody watching the best story of her career go into a paper bag.
Burke picked it up with a pen through the wrist strap, pressed STOP with the end of the pen, and read the little counter.
"What's on it?"
"Them," I said. "Both of them. Saying it."
He gave me the look from the station, the one that wasn't nice kid, except there was more of it now.
"Son," he said finally, "you and I are going to have a very long conversation."
"Yes, sir."
"With your parents in the room."
"Fu— Sure. Yes, sir."
Gale did her report at dawn in the Machers' yard, the sun coming up gray behind her, split lip and all, with a new cameraman from the Santa Rosa affiliate. I caught some of it while they loaded me into the ambulance. Two local teenagers. A year-long plot. A tape recording, sources say, of a confession. The miraculous survival of Neil Prescott, rescued by a classmate who... She'd had my name since yesterday morning, when I'd spelled it for her.
This paramedic was a big bald guy named Terrence, who whistled when he cut my shirt open. "Kid, you've got a hole in your shoulder, a gutter across your ribs, and a stab wound on your arm somebody already stitched. How the hell are you still talking?"
"Adrenaline, sir," I quipped. "It'll wear off any minute."
"Christ."
Sidney climbed into the ambulance before they shut the doors, and nobody stopped her. She sat on the bench beside the stretcher in the ruined sweatshirt with Gale's jacket over her shoulders and blood dried on her face, and looked at me a long while before she said anything.
"Randy," she said finally, low enough that Terrence couldn't hear. "How did you know? Where my dad was. The closet. How did you know?"
None of the true answers were anything she'd believe, and every one of them would make her look at me the way people look at a guy on a street corner.
"You wouldn't get it, Sid," I said. "You're too much of a casual when it comes to horror movies."
She studied me for a while. "Okay," she said at last. She didn't believe me but was gonna let me get away with it. She took my good hand and held it all the way to the hospital.
* * *
The chime came somewhere on the 101, with the siren going and Terrence pushing something into my IV.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> STORY COMPLETE:Woodsboro
> Feat Achieved!Survive a slasher movie
> +1× Gold Random Gacha Ticket
> Tickets unlocked.
> 1× Gold Choice · 1× Gold Random · 1× Silver Ability · 1× Silver Trait · 1× Bronze Trait · 3× Bronze Skill
> [PULL]
▌
Eight tickets for two nights of bleeding, and now that there was nothing left to fight, the thing finally let me play.
I almost closed it and went to sleep. Then I thought about the VA counselor and you like the spin, thought fuck it, I earned this, and pulled every one of them flat on my back in an ambulance with Sidney's hand in mine and my blood pressure doing something Terrence didn't like. Cheap ones first. You always do the cheap ones first.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Crying(Trash Skill)
> You can cry at will, and it's very convincing.
▌
Wonderful. I was lying in an ambulance with a hole in my shoulder and the multiverse had given me the ability to cry, which I'd been doing for free all night.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Stylist(Common Skill)
> Celebrity-level hairstyling. You could get hired by the rich and famous.
▌
A small warm weight settled into the back of my head: layers, texture, why you never let a guy with a round face get a buzz cut. I looked at Sidney's hair, matted with blood and dirt and somebody's beer, knew exactly what I'd do with it, and hated that I knew.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Novice Communication(Common Skill)
> You understand what people mean, and you can get your own point across. Rarer than it sounds.
▌
That one I didn't mind. Theo had spent years being bad at saying what he meant, and Randy had spent seventeen saying everything except what he meant, so between us we'd earned a certificate.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Throat(Trash Trait)
> You no longer have a gag reflex, and your throat is always perfectly moist.
▌
I looked for an off switch so fast the panel flickered. There wasn't one. Somewhere in the multiverse, I was pretty sure, something was laughing its ass off.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Blind Eye(Common Trait)
> You disappear in a crowd, as long as you have no reason to stand out.
▌
I thought about Gale Weathers on the lawn saying my name into a camera, and the kids at school, whenever I got back to school, holding up their hands for high fives. As long as you have no reason to stand out. I'd have to work on that part if it was ever going to be useful.
Then the Silver Ability. The reel spun slower this time, fire and swords and wings and something like a cartoon ghost flicking past, and I held my breath the way you do on the last spin of a slot machine, and it stopped.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Truth Assertion(Common Ability)
> People believe the truth of your words. While it's active, you can't speak with the intent to deceive. A glowing white choker appears around your neck when it's in use.
> Slotted: Ability Slot 1 of 1
▌
I read it three times. For three days the single biggest problem in my life had been that nobody believed a word Randy Meeks said—no one—and the multiverse, in its infinite fucking wisdom, had handed me the ability to make it so, one day after it would have mattered.
Sidney was still holding my hand, looking out the little back window at the road, her face very tired and very young. I could turn it on right now, I thought, and tell her everything. I'm not Randy. I'm from 2026. I knew Billy did it before you got out of bed yesterday. I knew your dad was in that closet because I watched you find him in a movie a hundred times. And she'd believe every word of it from a guy with a glowing white collar around his neck in the back of an ambulance.
I didn't turn it on. Some things you shouldn't make people believe, not when they've just seen their boyfriend get killed, currently stuck in a almost catatonic state.
The Gold Choice was next, and I got to pick. My one slot was already taken, and I wanted something I could hold; infantrymen always want a thing in their hands.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Gold Choice Ticket · Category:Items
▌
The reel was gold, slower than the others, the cards brighter. Something with a radiation symbol went by and my stomach dropped, but the reel slid past it, thank Christ, past a helmet and a book, and stopped.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Soul Solid(Uncommon Item) · One Piece
> A cane sword belonging to Brook. Extremely sharp and durable; it hasn't dulled in years of use. Also extremely dapper.
▌
I reached into the place in my head where the Gacha kept things, and there it was: a slim purple cane with U-shaped umbrella head and, inside it, when I took off its sheath, a long thin blade I could feel was sharp enough that I didn't even want to test it. Brook's sword. The skeleton gentleman with the afro, who plays the violin and laughs yohohoho and asks every woman he meets if he can see her panties.
"I'm going to be the most dapper motherfucker in Woodsboro," I told the ceiling of the ambulance.
"What?" Sidney said.
"Nothing. I'm high. Ignore me."
"You're not high yet or at least shouldn't be," Terrence cut in. "Give it a minute."
The last one was the Gold Random.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Dark Spear(Uncommon Ability)
> Conjure and launch spears of dark energy. Extra damage against holy and divine beings.
> No free slot. Stored. (Ability Slot 1: Truth Assertion)
▌
The panel stayed open after that, which it had never done before, and the words changed while I watched.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Story complete:Woodsboro.
> Next story loading...
▌
The power to make spears out of darkness, and no other slot to put it in. I could be believed or I could be armed, never both at once, and switching took five minutes I probably wouldn't have. I pictured it in the next clusterfuck, some monster coming at me in the dark while I held up a finger and said hang on, hang on, I just have to swap my loadout. I laughed, and it hurt so much I nearly passed out.
* * *
I don't remember getting to the hospital. The last thing I remember was the ambulance's ceiling and Sidney's hand. After that came a long gray of nothing with voices in it: somebody counting backwards, a light I couldn't look away from.
When I came to, the clock on the wall across my bed said six-fifteen. Light came in around the blinds, it was already tomorrow.
My family had, apparently, been there all night. The hospital had called the house a little after one, while I was apparently still in the ER with a nurse cutting my shirt off. They'd come straight from bed, my dad in his slippers again, sitting in the surgical waiting room on the second floor while somebody took Billy's bullet out of my shoulder. They were then moved to the chairs in my room, waiting for me to wake up.
Mom was in the chair right next to the bed, still in the sweater she'd had on at dinner, with her purse in her lap like she might have to leave in a hurry. Dad stood behind her at the window in slippers and had his good corduroys, with one hand on her shoulder. Martha had been asleep across two chairs and pushed together under the TV, with her coat as a blanket, sitting up so fast when Mom called my name that the coat slid onto the floor. She had pajamas on under it and yesterday's eyeliner smeared halfway to her ears.
I'd been braced for the yelling, or maybe even a slap since I went out the window, and it never came. Mom held my good hand, the same Sid held, repeating my name again and again as she cried. Dad didn't say anything. He just tightened his hand on her shoulder until his knuckles went white. Martha couldn't stand still herself, she came to the foot of the bed, going back to the chairs to get her coat before ultimately coming here without it, pulling the cuffs of her pajama over her hands and shoving them back up. I later learned that she had been awake since one, having taken quite too many hot chocolates from the machine close to our room.
"Is he going to die?" Martha asked the nurse who'd come in to check my drip, very fast, before anybody could stop her.
"No," the nurse gently answered.
"Okay." She nodded to herself with a sniffle. "Because I'm not inheriting that stupid poster collection." Her voice went up and cracked, deciding to keep talking but louder, as if the alternative was worse. "I'm not taking the pumpkin one, it's ugly—"
Then she climbed up on the end of the bed in her socks, which the nurse tried to gently tell her not to do, although Martha's answer was to put her face down on my shins and hide her face there.
It was so cute that I couldn't help but laugh. Sure it did hurt, but it was for the best.
* * *
At six that evening the TV in the corner was on with the sound low, because Dad had wanted the news and forgot to turn it off. Gale Weathers stood on the Macher lawn in a red blazer with the yellow tape behind her and said my name into a microphone. Then Sidney's, Billy's, Stu's. I watched the sheriff's cars behind her and thought about Billy again, on the kitchen floor with his eyes open before I killed him. I also thought about Stu, sitting down in the grass like somebody yanked the chair right when he was about to sit, about Kenny under the sheet.
I'd survived Scream. Canon Randy had too, but in canon Randy never shot a gun, never fought Ghostface like I did. Never saved Tatum either for that matter. And if I was unlucky, I'd have just one year, maybe two, before I got roped into the next 'story' of Scream.
Next story loading, the panel had said.
Lying there with Gale's voice going under everything, I finally put it together, all of it at once, the way a picture comes out of one of those magic-eye posters after you've stared at it long enough.
The Night He Came Home, with a title card that said 1958. Camp Blood, "based on the shocking true story," a mother killing counselors and a boy who drowned in the lake and whose body was never recovered, and no Jason anywhere on the box. Never Sleep Again and Never Sleep Again 2 on the shelf at Bradley Video, a killer with a syringe instead of a glove with claws. And after them nothing. No Dream Warriors. No Dream Master, no Dream Child, none of the ones that came after, not on the shelf and not anywhere in Randy's memory, while on the TV over the counter a sixteen-year-old girl in Springwood, Ohio lay in a hospital bed saying she hadn't cut her own wrists.
This had never been one movie. Not every film I knew was real here; Night of the Living Dead played the same in both sets of memories, a movie and nothing else. But the ones that counted, the ones with a town and a name and a date, had happened in this world or were going to. The ones on the shelf were the ones somebody had been able to explain away afterward, with a crazy mother or an experimental drug or a man in a mask. The gaps were the ones that hadn't happened yet. The shelf at Bradley Video wasn't a horror section. It was a map, and most of it was blank.
And sooner or later, somebody was going to make one about this week, too, with an actor in my vest.
I closed my eyes with my mother's warm hand around mine and figured I'd find out what the panel meant soon enough, because I always did, because I had the shittiest fucking luck of anybody alive.
* * *
They kept me in Woodsboro General for nine days.
The bullet in my shoulder had missed the joint and the big artery by what the surgeon called "an insulting margin." The one across my ribs had only taken some skin. The forearm from the first night had popped half its stitches on Stu's lawn and had to be redone. The surgeon kept looking from my chart to me like one of us was lying. He'd taken bullets out of plenty of teenagers, he told the nurse when he thought I was asleep, and they cried, or threw up, or screamed for their mothers. I'd asked him whether it had gone through clean, how many stitches, and how soon I could lift my arm over my head, and then I'd asked for pudding. Four years in the infantry teaches you which wounds are bad, and that one wasn't. Some of that was on my face, and it was the wrong face to have it on.
Sheriff Burke came on day three with a lawyer the county sent. My parents had hired another one, and Dad stood at the window with his back to all of us the whole time. The district attorney had listened to the tape twice, Burke said. Twenty-three minutes of Billy Loomis and Stu Macher explaining in their own voices how they'd killed Maureen Prescott, Casey Becker, Steve Orth, Arthur Himbry, and Kenny, and how they planned to kill me and hang it on me. Nobody was going to charge the boy who made that tape with anything. He said it like he was reading me the weather. Then he said, not like the weather at all, "Where'd you learn to shoot like that, son?"
"Duck Hunt," I said.
He didn't laugh this time.
Dad didn't say a word about the gun until everybody else had gone. Then he sat carefully on the edge of the bed on my good side, so the mattress tipped toward him, and looked at the IV pole for a while as if the first sentence might be written on it.
"I went home the morning after to get your mother a toothbrush," he said. "And I stood in our closet and looked at that shelf for, I don't know. A long time. The box was right there where I keep it, behind the tax returns. Closed. Like nothing had happened." He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his corduroys. "Martha's birthday. That was the combination. I picked it because I thought nobody in the world would ever guess it, and it turns out the one person who guessed it sleeps down the hall from me."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry, Dad."
"I don't want you to be sorry about that part. That's not what I'm getting at." He was quiet a second. "I'm changing it. I'm going to have to pick something you don't know, and I sat in that waiting room half the night trying to think what that is, and I couldn't think of one thing. Not one. You know everything in that house." He almost smiled. "That's a strange thing for a man to find out at three in the morning in a plastic chair."
"You should change it," I said. "Pick something only you'd know. Not a birthday. Not the anniversary, Mom would guess the anniversary."
"Your mother wants it out of the house. When the sheriff gives it back, she wants me to sell it."
"I wouldn't be able to defend myself if I didn't have it."
"I'm going to tell her that, and then I'm going to keep it against her wishes." He looked at his hands for a while, big hands with a pen callus and a scar on one knuckle from a lawnmower in 1979, folded on his knee like they belonged to somebody else. Then he said, very low, like it was the worst thing he'd ever had to admit, "I'm glad you took it. God help me, Randy. I'm glad. Even if you had to—you know." He couldn't say kill. "Even so. I sat out there all night thinking about it sitting in that box where I left it, and you on that lawn with nothing in your hands. I'm not supposed to think that. I thought about it many times."
The kid in the back of me had no idea what to do with that, and neither did I, so the two of us lay there and let my dad hold my hand. I didn't tell him about the cane sword I could pull out of thin air or the white collar I could put around my own neck. He had enough to deal with.
Mostly I lay there watching the ceiling tiles and thinking about Kenny.
The Gacha didn't talk to me; it never did. But the panel came and went on its own now, whenever it felt like it, the way a cat comes and goes. Story complete. Next story loading. Once at three in the morning I opened it on purpose and looked over what I had: a sword cane, a spear I couldn't use, a way to make people believe me a day too late, the power to cry on command, which I'd been doing without any help every night at three in the morning, a certificate in hair, and a skill that said I knew how to get my point across to strangers.
Get my point across to strangers.
On day four I asked Martha to bring me a notebook. She brought a spiral one with a unicorn on the cover because she thought it was funny, and I thanked her, because I needed something to be funny.
Then I opened it on the tray table and started to write.
I didn't know I was going to until my hand just went. It was Randy's handwriting, a cramped left-leaning scrawl like a spider had fallen in ink, but the words came out clean—maybe the Communication pull, maybe four years of standing in formation while sergeants explained things to privates who didn't want to hear them, me first in line. Either way, I could explain a thing so a stranger got it the first time, and that was worth more than it looked.
I wrote the rules—not the movie rules but the real ones, everything I'd learned in three days in Woodsboro and everything I'd known for twenty-six years before that: how you check a house, why you never go upstairs, what a knife does and where to let it go, how to tell when somebody at the fountain is smiling at you the wrong way.
Then, because I couldn't stop, I kept going. I thought about the shelf at Bradley Video and the gap after Never Sleep Again 2; the girl in the hospital in Springwood, Ohio; the Camp Blood tape and the drowned boy whose body was never found; the title card on The Night He Came Home that said 1958. Every one of those was a story that had happened or was going to, and in every one of them somebody didn't know the rules. Some kid who'd go to sleep, or say a name, or open a box, or take a summer job at the wrong lake.
I couldn't be everywhere; Woodsboro had taught me that much. I'd been twenty feet from the bathroom and it happened anyway. I'd warned Himbry to his face. I'd never even met Kenny. But I didn't have to be everywhere. I just had to be somewhere people could find.
I'd had a YouTube channel once, two hundred and eighty thousand people listening to a guy from Sacramento explain how to survive things that weren't real. It was 1996 now and there was no YouTube, but there was the internet, or the start of it: dial-up, blinking text, and the free little homepages you could build on GeoCities if you were willing to learn some HTML.
I asked Martha to bring me a library book on HTML. She brought two and a bag of Skittles and asked if I'd hit my head. I had to explain to her what "programming language" before ultimately deciding that maybe just getting her to ask the librarian there for it would work better.
* * *
I built it on the family computer the week I got home, while my mom pretended not to hover in the doorway of the den.
It was a beige Packard Bell with a fifteen-inch monitor, a 28.8 modem that screamed like a dying fax machine every time it connected, and Netscape Navigator, until I found out the site looked better in Internet Explorer. It took four nights, because Randy's hands didn't know how to type fast, and Theo's head didn't know 1996 HTML, and between the two of us we figured it out. A week earlier I'd have called between the two of us a figure of speech. I wasn't so sure anymore.
I called it Randy's Survival Zone. At the top went a campfire, a little animated GIF I swiped off somebody else's page, and a row of blocky yellow letters, and under them in blue the only tagline I could think of that wasn't a joke:
Survive Today... Live Tomorrow.
There was an Under Construction sign in the sidebar, because there was always an Under Construction sign in the sidebar. There was a guestbook, and a hit counter that said 000001, and the one was me.
On the front page, under HOW TO SURVIVE, I typed up the first lesson from the unicorn notebook:
✦ ✦ ✦ RANDY'S SURVIVAL ZONE ✦ ✦ ✦~ Survive Today... Live Tomorrow ~LESSON 1: Nobody goes anywhere alone.
Not to the garage. Not to the car. Not to the bathroom. You want to pee, you take a buddy. You think this is a joke. Three people in my town thought it was a joke.
Then the rest, what I'd learned in Woodsboro, written as plain as I could make it. How to check a house. What to do if the phone rings and the voice knows your name. How to tell whether the power going out is an accident.
And under a second heading, COMING SOON, the list. I thought about how it would look to a stranger: a horror geek from a small town in California, a week out of the hospital after a real killing spree, posting survival tips for things that sounded like movie plots. Some of them were movie plots, the mundane, explained-away ones. Some of them weren't movies yet, because they hadn't happened. I posted it anyway.
✦ ✦ ✦ RANDY'S SURVIVAL ZONE ✦ ✦ ✦~ Survive Today... Live Tomorrow ~COMING SOON:
☠ How to survive a road trip through rural Texas (don't stop for barbecue)
☠ How to survive a summer job at a lake with a bad reputation
☠ How to survive Halloween night
☠ How to survive a Dream Demon
☠ How to tell if your dog isn't your dog
☠ What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after
☠ What to do if a puzzle box won't stay one shape (don't solve it)
☠ Why you should never say anybody's name five times into a mirror
☠ What to do if a doll you didn't buy starts talking to you
☠ How to survive a clown in a storm drain
☠ What to do when the Christmas lights start blinking by themselves
☠ How to survive a small town where the fog never lifts
☠ Do not read out loud from any book bound in skin. Ever. I don't care what it says.
☠ How to survive a film class at Windsor College
I sat back and looked at it. It read like the ravings of a traumatized kid who'd seen too many movies, and anybody who stumbled onto it would figure that's exactly what it was. Fine by me. All I needed was for somebody to remember it the one night it mattered.
I hit upload. The modem screamed, and the little blue bar crawled across the bottom of the screen, and the hit counter said 000001. While I watched it, the panel opened behind my eyes on its own—no chime, no feat, just the same two lines, Story complete. Next story loading—and hung there a second like a dog at the window when it hears a car, and closed.
I logged off and went to bed. Mom said goodnight from the hall, I said it back, and I lay in Randy's room under the pumpkin poster and managed not to think about it.
Nobody came. In the morning the counter said 000003, and two of those were me. By Wednesday it said 000011. I checked it before breakfast and after dinner and once at two in the morning, when the modem screamed so loud through the dark house that Dad called down the stairs to ask whether the den was on fire.
The guestbook filled up the way I'd figured it would, slowly and with nothing:
~*~ Randy's Survival Zone :: Guestbook ~*~xXCrowXx — the internet
FIRST!!!!!!!Visitor:cool page. sign mine!! geocities.com/Area51/Nebula/2214 it plays the macarenaJenny M. — Woodsboro, CA
omg is this randy from chem?? i still have your dead by dawn tape lol. sorry. you're kind of famous nowanon:nerd$$$ WORK FROM HOME $$$:Earn $5,000 a month from your computer!!! No experience needed!!! CLICK HERE!!!Dave — Modesto, CA
the barbecue one is funny
I deleted the money one. I left nerd, because it was fair.
The rest of that week, while I waited for something to happen on a website nobody read, I went through the tapes.
Randy had two shelves of them over his desk, a hundred and forty-one tapes, bought used out of the bin at Bradley Video for a dollar apiece or taped off HBO with the commercials cut out by hand. I took every horror tape down and laid them out on the carpet in rows, with the unicorn notebook open on my knee, and went through them one at a time the way you go through a map of ground you're about to walk. I'd hold a box and ask Theo what the movie was. Then I'd ask Randy. Where the two of them agreed, it was just a movie. Where they disagreed, something had happened.
It took three nights. The notebook ended up with three columns.
JUST A MOVIE. Short list. Night of the Living Dead, the same in both heads, word for word. A few others like it. Comedies, mostly.
EXPLAINED AWAY.The Night He Came Home: a lunatic escapes and kills babysitters in Haddonfield, Illinois, in 1958, where in my memory it had been 1978 and his sister had died in '63. Camp Blood: a grieving mother at a summer camp, her drowned son never found. Never Sleep Again and Never Sleep Again 2: a janitor with a syringe instead of a glove. Dead by Dawn and Dead by Dawn II: the cops' version of a cabin in Tennessee, where the guy who walked out was the killer and there was no book. Every one of them had a body count and a reasonable explanation, and every reasonable explanation had a hole in it exactly the shape of the thing it left out.
NOT YET. That column ran off the bottom of the page and onto the next one. Everything Theo had ever rented that Randy had never heard of, which was most of them.
Then I sat on the carpet with the tapes around me and looked at the dates, and that was the part that scared me.
The dates were wrong. Haddonfield had happened twenty years early. Elm Street had happened in 1984, right on time, according to the back of the Never Sleep Again box. But the girl in Springwood should've been in that hospital in 1987, and she was in it right now, in 1996, nine years late. Camp Crystal Lake was on schedule. Some had come early, some had come late, some hadn't come at all yet, and there was no rule to it that I could see. I couldn't use release dates. I couldn't count down to anything. The only way I'd know when the next one started would be the same way I'd known about Springwood: the news, a name, a town on a TV over a counter.
Or somebody telling me.
I wrote WATCH THE NEWS at the bottom of the page and underlined it twice. Under that I wrote WATCH THE GUESTBOOK. Then I put the tapes back on the shelf in the order Randy kept them, which was alphabetical, because Randy was that kind of person and so, it turned out, was I.
On Friday morning the counter said 000019. Somebody had signed the guestbook in the night, no email address, just a name and a town.
~*~ Randy's Survival Zone :: Guestbook ~*~K. — Springwood, OH
how do you know about the dreams
I sat looking at it until the screensaver came on and the little pipes started growing across it. Then I went downstairs and ate all of Dad's Friday donuts, jelly ones included, and didn't taste a single one, because of course it was Springwood, of course it was the dreams, and of course the one place on earth I couldn't bring a gun or a sword cane or most of the rest of my shit was going to be some dream realm, or whatever the hell it was called.Last edited: Saturday at 12:56 AM Like Quote ReplyReport Reactions:ChangeOfPace6, Blake, Shadow Pen and 1,201 oth