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He’s there. Right in front of me. Close enough for me to reach out and touch, and he’s looking at me. Smiling at me.

It’s the shooter. The one from the campus. The one whose photos I only saw afterward in the paper.

He didn’t survive that day. Sharpshooters took him out, and he died on the scene. I remember, weeks later, sneaking downstairs and hearing my mother say she wished he’d lived, that death was the easy way out and she wanted him to rot in prison, and my dad saying that prison was never a guarantee and this was better, his punishment guaranteed.

Guaranteed how? That’s what I thought when I got older. The shooter died instantly. Probably never even knew what happened. That’s no punishment.

How many times did I wish he’d really been in prison? Fantasized about visiting him so I could wave his failure in his face. The girl who lived.

Now he’s here, right in front of me, and all I can do is dig my fingers into the tree trunk to keep from sliding down it.

He’s grinning, as if this really is him and not a monster with his face. As if he’s been brought back to fix his mistake. Kill the final girl.

Twenty-five years of suppressed rage howls inside me. I lash out with all that rage, throwing myself at him, wanting to kick and punch and scream. But he only backs up, as if he saw that coming. Then he lifts the rifle and points it at my forehead, and he smiles, and I lunge at him.

And then he pulls the trigger.

THIRTY-TWOHENRY

Henry needs to find Ellie. Also, Noemi, but he’s going to be honest here and say that Ellie is his priority, and if the bartender would mock him for that, let him. Henry isn’t going to bluster about trauma-bonding and whatever. When he found himself alone in the forest, his first panicked thought wasn’t about the monsters or Raymond. It was “Where’s Ellie?”

Once he reins in that panic, though, his second thought is that maybe he’d rather find Raymond first. Find him and …

Kill him?

Everything in Henry rebels at the thought, and he’s not going to deal with the question right now because he doesn’t have time for it. Don’t debate whether he could or couldn’t. The point is that he needs to make sure Raymond isn’t a threat, however that can be accomplished.

He’d shouted for Ellie once, and since then he’s been resisting the urge to shout again, but now he says fuck it.

“Ellie!” he bellows at the top of his lungs. “Ellie! Where are you?”

There’s a good chance the person who hears him will be Raymond, and that’s okay, isn’t it? Bring Raymond to him. Let him deal with the bastard.

Except, if he were Raymond, he’d run the other way. Do not engage with the big guy when there are two much smaller targets in the forest.

But to win, Raymond has to kill all three, so maybe it’s best to start with Henry?

Fuck it.

“Ellie! Noemi!”

Come at me, you son of a bitch. I’m right here.

And where exactly is here? In the forest, apparently. Henry appeared in a clearing, and that’s where he’s stayed, bellowing like an enraged bull.

Enraged? He’s not even sure he knows what that feels like. He’s never allowed himself more than a hint of anger. Raise his voice, and people step back. That “gentle giant” bullshit is just a thing people say to convince themselves that the big guy is no threat, but it only takes an angry word for them to flinch. So Henry doesn’t get angry. Doesn’t snap. Doesn’t raise his voice. And now, what he thinks of as rage might be just an average person’s anger.

But he is angry, and as he stands there, turning slowly and watching for movement, he does something he has never done. Fall into the anger. Let it rise. Let it burn.

The bartender—goddamn him—was right about something else. How much it hurt that Jenn and the girls had hesitated, just a little, before jumping to his defense over that false assault charge. Logically, he understood and agreed that they were right not to dismiss another woman’s claims. But this was him. A guy all three of them had grown up with, and when they hesitated, it hurt.

The bartender was also right that they’d been drifting away the last few years, and that hurt too, even as he’d made all the excuses to himself. It wasn’t just Jenn and the girls. It was old friends and new lovers. Everyone seemed to drift, losing interest in him, and now that he knew why, he was relieved and he was furious, and that made him think about Ellie, how she’d spent her life that way, and what it must have been like.

To leave no impression. A life where you can’t seem to get your footing, to form real and lasting bonds. You’d blame yourself. Feel “less than.” Feel forgettable.

Is there anything worse than that? To feel forgettable? To be forgettable.

“Ellie!”