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Final Girl

A Tale of Modern Horror and Long-Term Planning

By JRD SkinnerPublished 6 years ago 9 min read
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A tale of modern horror and long-term planning.

Kayla Simmons, 45, was laughing at herself as she stumbled out of the cornfield. She’d been planning and saving for this trip for a year-and-a-half, and there wasn’t much of it left: It would be hilarious, in her mind, if she’d wasted her remaining time stumbling among the tall stalks.

Well, hilarious now that she was free of the maze. Less so, she knew, if she’d somehow actually gotten lost.

Pausing to kick off a croc and dump out the mud she’d collected within, she surveyed the area. To her left was a ramshackle barn, its peeling red paint telling the tale of decades of weather having battered the gray wood. To her right was a white squat farmhouse in only slightly better condition.

The sky was black but for a few twinkling pinpricks, and the crisp air filled her nostrils with the smells of freshly churned soil, vegetation, and countryside. The chill, and the high-quality drugs that hummed through her system, raised goosebumps on the flesh of her forearms.

From somewhere in the broken-toothed shadows of the barn there came a scream.

Her legs began to pump against the shifting dirt, and it felt good to let her thigh muscles stretch and pound. It had been too long.

Kayla knew it was likely just the narcotics, but she felt as if she were flying. Reason was having difficulty keeping pace with her winged feet, and her momentum was nearly enough to convince her to pull wide the double doors.

The second scream, however, cleared her brain of some of its opiate haze.

Instead Kayla slammed to a halt, stifling her rasping breath, and leaned close to place an eye to a gap in the splintered wood.

Inside lurked a giant in denim overalls. He was at least ten feet tall and standing comfortably only because of the structure’s lofted roof. His hair, blond and short, looked to have been cut by his own hand without a mirror. Tufts of bang hung low over his brow, and clung to his head where the strands had come into contact with drying blood, but the rest of his face was lost behind a maroon skull-like mask.

A decade previous, Kayla had dated a man whose lack of children meant he’d had far too much to spend on airsoft guns and accessories. The mask, she recognized, would have fit well in his collection.

As she watched, the colossus raised high a cleaver landing it amongst the crumpled mess at his feet. His backswing was marked by another spatter of crimson across the nearby wall, and Simmons worked hard to keep quiet as she watched the monster at work.

There was no one to save here, just a jumble of raw meat and viscera.

Kayla found herself shivering, adrenaline mixing with the stimulants, and it forced a slight smile to her face.

Almost as if he’d heard the creeping rise of her lips, the skull-faced killer turned.

“Shit,” Kayla whispered involuntarily, but the hum of crickets and the croaking of distant toads were enough to blot out the sound.

The figure’s strides were enormous. He’d eaten the distance to the door in but three steps, yet the observer was unwilling to be discovered so soon. A pair of large white tanks sat beside the barn, and she ducked low behind them, letting her palms cool against the curve of the metal as the skull scanned the dirt laneway, the cornfields, and the black sky.

Finally, the entrance slammed shut. She was alone.

The drugs tickled a giggle out of Kayla as she huffed two deep lungfuls of night and launched herself towards the farmhouse.

“Haven’t done this much running around since I was ten,” she muttered through a grin. Even as she said it, however, she felt something in the aging surgery sites in her left leg rip a little. It would be painful, she knew, if it weren’t for the exotic chemistries flowing through her veins.

Rounding the house, she came upon a bay window overlooking yet another march of corn. Stooping, she peeked at its corner. The home was of a simple design, and mostly dominated by a single large room that acted as a combined kitchen, living space, and dining area.

At one end hunched a bow-spined man, his back to her as he worked a poker vigorously in the open mouth of a cast iron stove. At the other, stood a figure whose simple black dress and sharp-edged features gave Kayla’s influenced eyes as much the impression of a busy crow as of a woman.

Both figures were rail thin and jagged with age, yet somehow still obviously the mother and father of the behemoth in the barn. Ringing the walls, and unseeingly watching the projects the pair were intent upon, were two dozen heads. Their ages varied; here was a teen girl, her cloud of blond hair obscuring the brown plaque on which she’d been mounted, there was a professorial man, with a neat salt and pepper beard, whose glasses were placed too far down his nose to provide any clarity — were he alive to need them.

As Pa endlessly stoked the fire, Ma circled a dining table across whose surface she’d spread a collection of tools. Kayla watched as the woman’s bobbing head settled low to the saws, snips, and scoops. On occasion she would lift one high, as if to catch the light from the open stove. Sometimes she would shake her head and set the implement down only to dig for another, similar instrument, nearby, and sometimes she would nod, then apply the cutting tip or digging edge to the freshly hewn neck of the decapitation resting upon her work area.

Reaching into the darkness beside the stove, her husband retrieved a length of split wood for the fire’s mouth and righted himself. Muttering something to his wife, he turned for the door.

Looking about for cover, Kayla’s eyes fell on the man’s likely destination: A stump with a ragged pile of unsplit lumber stacked against it and an axe planted at the heart of its weathered rings. Running to the corn so that she might haunt the farm a little longer was tempting, but Kayla knew it was time.

She was ready.

Waiting till the homicidal farmer’s footsteps were clearly audible on the dewy grass, she summoned the wind to her limbs. In five strides she had the chopper in hand, and as Pa’s unshaven chin came around the corner she swung hard.

His forward momentum met the axe head with a meaty thud and a snap she suspected to be the killer’s neck giving way. There was no time to check, however, as, beyond the falling body, she realized the barn doors were wide spread. The giant was clearly watching the scene unfold.

Lifting high his cleaver, he gave a guttural scream that was a mix of rage and grief — then he began to run.

He’d halved the distance to the house when Kayla burst through the entrance, but the crow woman did not miss a beat in snatching up a corkscrew-tipped implement and attempting to turn it on the trespasser.

The taxidermist’s hands slashed and stabbed with pecking precision, but the axe was too much; though Kayla suffered a slice across her belly, her own weapon landed heavily on the woman’s right shoulder, crumpling her to the ground.

Another dozen steps brought the intruder to the fire, and she thrust the splitting head into the guttering embers. Seconds later the entrance slammed wide, but it was not the cleaver-wielder she had expected. It was, instead, his father. The man’s caved skull was folded well back, his spine having fully separated, and his hands flailed blindly as his muddy boots landed inside.

Almost as if summoned by the sound, the black ruin that was his wife began to rise, her now lopsided frame grinding bones internally as she gained her feet.

Behind the nightmare vision of the couple the giant’s shadow appeared at the entryway.

Kayla’s vision glowed, and she removed the axe from the bed of coals. The upper portion of the haft was now alight, and the metal head throbbed a dull red. Her weapon was not all that escaped the fire, however; in dragging it free she had also carried cinders from the pit, and these greedily found purchase in the rough wood floor and dingy throw rugs.

Rather than turn her weapon on the approaching family, Kayla set it to smashing the bay window through which she’d spied, then she was again running free in the darkness.

Scurrying back onto the main laneway, she looked down long enough to see her Youth In Asia shirt was soaking through with blood. Adrenaline and modern medicine drove any pain from the wound, but it certainly would have formed one hell of a scar were it left to heal.

She raised her arms and let out a war cry, then Kayla began to lead a terrible parade towards the barn. Though his head remained folded back, the old man came sprinting from the house, his arms reaching as if drawn to her. Behind him, her shattered shoulder clicking and grating with each step, came the crow, a single high note of fury emanating from her throat.

At the rear lumbered the cleaver-wielder, his skull mask still firmly in place.

Kayla kept her burning axe high, as if lighting their way, but, despite her exuberance and painkillers, her pursuers had closed the distance by the time the chase came alongside the barn. Placing the white tanks between herself and the murderous family, Kayla’s view was briefly obscured by her shelters’ pill-shaped forms, then the mother came skittering over top of the nearest vessel even as the men approached from each side.

Laughing and nodding, Kayla Simmons completed the plan she’d first conceived while lying in a hospital bed some 18 months previous. The axe head landed deep in the A of the block lettered PROPANE, stencilled across the white expanse, and the flaming haft provided immediate ignition.

There was no pain, no regret — there was only expanding force and nothingness. Kayla did not witness the inferno that followed.

In time three forms strode from the flames, their skeletons no longer cloaked in the guise of monstrous humanity, their clothing and synthetic flesh having been consumed by the heat.

Once they’d reached the field that marked the edge of the operation zone they halted, their internal processors shunting through the process of reset and hibernation. Soon the support team would arrive and they’d be re-dressed, perhaps again as brutes, though just as likely as nymphs, and another terminal patient would enact their well-planned, and well paid for, final request.

For now, however, they simply waited.

slasher
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About the Creator

JRD Skinner

Writer, Adventurer, Family Man, & Man of Science. Toronto-ish.

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