Page 31 of Kiss Slay Replay

Danny unlocks the door and pushes it open. “Come on.”

“No!” Cassie screams.

“Cass,” I say, dropping my voice to a whisper. “He’s not out there. He’s in here. With us.”

“We don’t know that,” she whispers back.

“Yes, we do,” Danny says.

No one screams. No one moves. The shock of him, of the mask—I tried to prepare them, but how could I?

He stands near the stove. He’s enormous; he must be nearly seven feet tall. His eyes have multiplied. I count five, six. And they…oh God. I don’t think they’re fake. They’re not. They’re not fake eyeballs. Not anymore. Now they’re fucking real. Gooey. Dripping. Adhered haphazardly with double-sided tape.

He holds his obscenely giant knife in one of his obscenely giant gloved hands. He waves with the other.

Wyatt grabs Evan by his collar and shoves him out the door. Luke picks up Cassie, throws her over his shoulder, and takes off. Barefoot, I slip in the blood on the floor, and Wyatt catches me. He pushes me over the threshold. Danny next.

Wyatt makes it out, but he doesn’t get far.

He lurches forward, his brow furrowing.

“Let’s go,” Danny says, taking me by the wrist and pulling me across the lawn toward the path.

“But—” I start.

Wyatt goes down. He’s such a big guy and he hits the ground so hard without even trying to break his fall.

There’s a knife sticking out of the back of his head, buried deep in his skull.

Evan screams his husband’s name over and over and over again as he runs to where Wyatt lies still in the grass.

“Get up, you oaf!” Ev says. “Get up! I love you. I love you. You have to get up!”

He’s so busy pleading he doesn’t see the masked figure striding toward him. Or maybe he does and just doesn’t care.

“Fuck off,” he says, as the masked man lifts the hammer from his utility belt.

“Evan! Run!” I know he won’t. He won’t leave Wyatt. He’s about to die. He’s about to get a hammer to the head. I’m about to watch another one of my best friends die.

I can’t.

What good story starts with a retreat?

The fog of fear lifts for a moment of clarity. I’m holding a kitchen knife. I picked it up for a reason. Now I’m pulling away from Danny, and I’m running as fast as I can, and I’m not breathing because the eyes are on me, so many dead eyes, and I’m not thinking—obviously I’m not thinking—until I’m close enough to wonder if knife beats hammer. Rock paper scissors.

The man swings his hammer and this caveman survival instinct puppets my body. I flinch and lean back at the last second, and the hammer just clips my shoulder, and I drop the knife, lose my balance, fall to my knees at the masked man’s feet.

He hooks his fingers around my jaw and my neck. His glove does nothing to soften his grip, and I can feel the bruises forming from the blood vessels breaking. He lifts me up with one hand like I’m nothing, like I have no weight at all. My feet are off the ground. He holds me so I’m eye level with the layer of mesh under his balaclava. I still can’t see his real eyes, his face. It’s too dark.

“I see you,” he wheezes. “I see you, I see you, I ssseeeeeeee you.”

I should be fighting back, but it’s hard to do anything other than panic when there’s a hand around your neck, and I wonder if I should just surrender to this fate because maybe it’s what I deserve. Because this all feels like my fault.

“I saw you.” My voice is weak, strangled. I saw you and I did nothing. I convinced myself that you weren’t real, that this wasn’t happening. I sat back in my denial, and I allowed this to happen. There is literally blood on my hands.

My fault.

Suddenly, his grip loosens. He wavers, and I drop.