Page 142 of Final Girls

I now understand why we’re here. Why Tina sought out Lisa and me. She wanted me to remember everything, to prove Joe’s innocence, to declare once and for all that he didn’t do it.

It was all for him.

For Joe.

“I wanted to come with him,” Tina says. “I wanted to run away. Together. But he told me to stay. Even after I followed him down the hall to that broken door. He said he’d come back for me. So I stayed behind. Then they told me he was dead. That he’d killed a bunch of kids. But I knew he didn’t do it.”

“I didn’t know,” I say. “I truly thought it was him.”

“So who did it? Who killed them?”

Disbelief rises like bile in my throat. I cough again, trying to dislodge it. “Someone else.”

“You?” she asks. “Was it you, Quinn?”

God knows she has every right to think that. I’d forgotten so much. And she’s seen me angry. That was her goal, after all. To poke me, get me mad, see what I’m capable of. I didn’t disappoint.

“No,” I say. “I swear, it wasn’t me.”

“Then who?”

I shake my head. I’m breathless, exhausted.

“I don’t know.”

But I do. At least, I think I do. Another memory arrives. A straggler.It’s a memory of me running through the woods, seeing something else.

Someoneelse.

“You’re remembering something,” Tina says.

I nod. I close my eyes. I think. I think until my head throbs.

And then I see it, as vibrant as the day it happened. I’m running through the woods, screaming, that branch all but punching me in the face. I see headlights. I see a man silhouetted in the brightness.

A cop. I see his uniform.

It’s covered with something dark and wet. In the dim moonlight, it almost looks as if he’s been smeared with motor oil. Yet I know that’s not the case. Even as I run toward him, I know his uniform is covered with blood.

My blood. Janelle’s blood. Everyone’s blood.

But I’m too scared to think clearly. Especially with Joe somewhere in the woods behind me. Chasing me. The taste of his lips still on mine.

So I make a beeline toward the cop, embracing him, pressing my dress to his uniform.

Blood against blood.

They’re dead, I gasp.They’re all dead. And he’s still out here.

And suddenly Joe’s there, bursting through the trees. The cop draws his gun and fires off three shots. Two in the chest, one in the head. As loud in memory as they were in real life.

I hear a fourth shot.

Louder than memory.

Definitely real life.

It blasts through the cabin, vibrating off the walls. The energy of the bullet streaks from the open door into Pine Cottage. It has a presence, a force that fills the room.

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