Only the pockets of his shorts were in reach. He pulled out the vape pen. The vape gave a sad hiss as he pointed it at the Slasher’s eyes. This seemed only to enrage the Slasher more. The gloved hand closed tighter around Freddy’s windpipe. He gasped for air and the stars in his vision began to fade. The vape pen dropped to the floor and rolled away.
This was it. Freddy knew it, and so did the Slasher. The other gloved hand, clutched as tightly around the knife as around Freddy’s throat, descended slowly. The Slasher had him exactly where he wanted him. Every nerve in Freddy’s body lit up with a primal terror more pure than any high he’d experienced.
Freddy’s hands floundered one more time, but he was growing weak from the lack of oxygen. His arms drooped by his side.
Where his right hand collided with a lump in his shorts pocket.
The corkscrew.
This was what was missing from his screenplay’s finale. Just when you thought the hero’s days were numbered, he’d pull out a last-minute reprieve. A callback to something innocuous that most viewers had forgotten about.
Freddy seized the corkscrew, wheezing triumphantly. “Breathe, motherfucker!” he rasped, thrusting the corkscrew’s business end at the Slasher’s neck.
The point bounced off the thick collar of the wool jacket. Freddy stabbed again and again, eyes staring with disbelief as the corkscrew’s dull tip met only resistance. He had the feeling that the Slasher was laughing behind his mask.
Fucking masks.
And then came the moment Freddy was dreading. That movie kill moment. The slow, deliberate push of the knife into his belly. So smooth he barely felt it. Or maybe his entire body had gone numb with shock.
He’d been right. The knifewassharp enough to part flesh like warm butter.
He stared down at the glossy slash across his midsection. Another stripe across his torso, to match the ones on his shirt. How amazing that would look on film. The lurid richness of color. The wet, suggestively phallic organs bulging from between parted lips of flesh. David Cronenberg himself couldn’t have done it better.
Cut, Freddy thought. And fade to black.
16
Jen
“Patrick?” Jen said.
A rustle whispered in her ears. It might have been a breeze, it might have been someone creeping in the brush. Jen held her breath, torn between wanting to call out and wanting to hide.
Patrick wouldn’t have skulked away to look for Mikey on his own without saying something. She loved to tease him about his many character quirks, but being an asshole wasn’t one of them.
Unless he actuallywasa psycho killer like she’d joked.
She slowly spun around, searching the shadows for Patrick’s familiar outline. Coarse tree trunks striped the night, and without much light she couldn’t tell how far away any of them were. Her field of vision had gone flat.
She stopped, slightly dizzy and regretting the spin, because now she didn’t know where she’d started from. Fuck. She tucked the flashlight under her arm and dug in her shorts for the compass.
Which, like Patrick, was gone.
She remembered with sickening clarity that he’d been the last to hold it. “Fuck!” She kicked at a dark shape, assuming it was a fallen log, not caring if anyone heard her. It disintegrated satisfactorily into splinters.
She slipped out her phone and prayed for a miracle. None were forthcoming. Her battery was at its last gasp. Not that it mattered. No phone, no data connection, so she couldn’t use GPS. Why the fuck had she joined the local NIMBYs in protesting the building of a new cell tower when she was in high school? Every other teenager in town had been all for it, but at the time she’d wanted to have places she could sneak off to without Daddy tracking her location.
There was nothing to do but keep going. Jen was fairly sure this was the direction in which she’d started—on the left side of the splintered log. She and Patrick had been walking for about a half hour. She had to be close. She’d keep going forward and hopefully she’d hear cars going down the highway soon.
Her hope was as faint as the moonlight seeping through the canopy, but it was all she had to cling to, besides the knife. It was an unfamiliar feeling. Jen’s lizard brain had always been more fight than flight. More into fucking than fearing. But now that she was in near-total darkness, holding only a knife in the wild, her brain told her that terrible things were waiting for her in the woods.
Another rustle sounded somewhere behind her.
Heart pounding, Jen dared to whisper, “Patrick? Mikey?”
Only the mocking call of a whippoorwill answered. Jen clutched the knife close to her chest like a prayer and crept forward a few more steps. Her lizard brain told her she was just a girl in the woods, surrounded by potentially dangerous men.
A shadow stirred out of the corner of her eye. “Daniel? Russ?”
