Chapters
- A young man is being hunted in a dark forest.
- He had previously planned and executed the murders of a group of teenagers.
- A storm is approaching, adding to the tension.
Shownotes Transcript
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A twig snaps underfoot and the young man freezes. The forest around him is nearly pitch black. The full moon is hidden behind a bank of storm clouds that threaten to unleash their fury at any second. The young man widens his eyes so he can take in as much light as possible. It doesn't really help. He still can't see shit. He waits. He listens. He hears nothing but the night. Careful of his footing, the young man takes a tentative step
then another, then another. One foot in front of the next is how he makes it to the end of the trail. Then he stares out at the open space before him. A massive reservoir stretches out for miles, and so do the storm clouds. At least he can see better, even though the moon hasn't appeared from behind the clouds. He looks up and shivers, knowing that if he doesn't find shelter soon, he is going to be trapped in what promises to be a nasty bitch of a storm.
He'd banked on the storm. He'd waited and hoped that it would take shape just at this exact moment. It was to be the cherry on top of a bloody, bloody sundae. But that was before it arrived. Now, it's a whole different story. Lightning sears his retinas and he winces at the sudden shock of pure light. Even with his eyes closed, he can see the outline of the bolt. Then the thunder kicks in and he winces once more.
His instinct is to clap his hands over his ears, but there's no point. The storm is coming, and there is no way he can stop it. The thunder rolls and cracks across the reservoir, bouncing up off the water's surface, turning the edge of the cliff into a massive echo chamber. The young man isn't sure where the sound starts and where it ends, or if it will ever end. Turning from the reservoir, the young man faces the edge of the forest behind him.
The woods look sinister, which is not something he would have thought of before tonight. No, he always thought of these woods as his. A place where he could express his innermost desires. A place where he could feel safe and secure.
away from the cities and the noise and the never-ending torment of thousands of people all staring at him, judging him, telling him he's worthless, that he's trash, that he doesn't deserve to live, that his mother should have aborted him, that his father was right and he'd be nothing but a monster in human skin, that he'd always end up as... wait, what is that? A shape? A shadow at the edge of the woods?
The young man isn't sure, but he isn't taking any chances. Not after tonight. Not after it ruined everything. Not after it tried to kill him, forcing him to flee the old camp and the smaller cluster of rundown cabins. Without hesitation, the young man runs. He skirts the edge of the reservoir, careful of the sheer drop to his side.
One poorly placed step and he will be in open air. Praying, he clears the clusters of rocks and boulders below as he falls, falls, falls. The young man hears something. Footsteps. Loud enough that he can hear them over his own footfalls. But that means they are way too heavy for what he believes is chasing him. He whips his head around so fast that he almost loses his balance and tumbles over.
The young man keeps his footing, sees nothing behind him, and picks up speed. He has to put as much distance between him and it as possible. If it catches him, he's done for. He knows it. He feels it. How did he get to this point, he wonders. He'd watched and waited. He'd planned and prepared. He'd executed everything and everyone perfectly. Then it arrived.
later than the others. It drove that jeep into camp, just as the young man was finishing up what he considered to be his masterpiece. Oh, how he'd worked so hard to track down each and every one of those teenagers. How he'd singled each one out, separated them from the group, and went to work. And his work was flawless. Each capture, each kill had been works of art. The first was the loser boy.
the one that had a crush on the hottest of the girls in the group. The young man had seen the same thing play out over and over again. Loser crushes on hottie, hottie rejects loser, the others laugh. Well, maybe one of the girls doesn't laugh. She might feel some sympathy for the loser, but she can't say that to the rest, or she'd be ridiculed just as much as the loser boy. Except for tonight, that girl wasn't in the group,
She was the missing piece of the plan, and at the time, the young man only shrugged. The loser had no idea he was being stalked through the dark woods. He'd stumbled off from the others, embarrassed by the public rejection he'd received. Angry and frustrated at the mocking words the others had spit at him, the loser was upset and trying to put some distance between him and the pain.
Oh, but little did the loser know that he was headed toward nothing but pain. It had taken six hours to dig the pit and line it with punji sticks. Just sharpening the sticks alone had taken three hours. So the young man had easily invested nine or ten hours into the entire experience for the loser. Yet it was over in the blink of an eye. The poor, distraught loser placed a foot onto the perfectly camouflaged pit.
It happened so fast that the loser didn't even have time to scream or cry out. One second he's struggling to find his way through the dark woods. The next second, he's face down in a pit with over a dozen sharpened sticks piercing his body. The young man had watched the loser die. It wasn't hard. The full moon was still out then, and some light filtered down through the canopy above. He'd counted the seconds as the loser died. That was all.
8 seconds. Like a bronco rider in the rodeo, the loser had 8 final seconds. When it was all over, the young man got to work removing the body and covering the pit back up. Not that he expected it to be used again. No, he had other plans in store for the rest of the group. Each would have their own special treatment. But he had gone to all that work, so he might as well set the trap right again.
30 minutes later, he'd hauled the loser's corpse up out of the pit and hidden it away in a crevice between a clump of moss-covered boulders. A person would have to shove their face inside that crevice to even catch a glimpse of the loser's body. With the first kill stowed away for later, the young man had continued on. What was that? The young man shakes off the memories of that evening and stops once more. He listens, but hears nothing. He looks.
but sees nothing. The young man runs again, as he feels the first drops of rain. He angles his flight so that he's no longer precariously close to the edge of the reservoir. He's running for his life, but he's not stupid. The woods loom before him, but he knows it will be a short trip before he reaches the meadow beyond. Then he can hunker down and watch and wait in the tall grass. In the darkness, he knows he'll be hidden
He's hunted teenagers in the middle of the day in that meadow and they never saw him. He dives into the woods and thinks of the second kill of the evening. It was a double, of course. After dealing with the loser, the next two on the list were the hottie and her bitch boy. The young man had watched the two flirt and fight and make up all day. When they slipped away from the others, he knew what they were up to. And he wasn't disappointed.
She was a hottie, and that was made more evident when she stripped down to nothing and threw her clothes at her bitch boy. She laughed and ran off through the woods, daring him to catch her. And he dared. The bitch boy laughed and chased, making a slower game of it than he could have. He may have been her bitch boy, but he was in shape. Of course he was. The hottie wouldn't let anyone as schlubby as the loser get near her perfect body.
No, she needed a fit one. Hi. Sorry, did I startle you? When you're used to hearing a certain type of commercial, something like this can, well, take you by surprise. That's kind of how it is with the Lexus RX, a vehicle that has continued to defy expectations for over 25 years. From the first luxury vehicle of its kind, to the first hybrid luxury vehicle, to the only plug-in hybrid worthy of the RX name. We understand you want more than the everyday SUV, and isn't being understood an amazing feeling?
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A teenager who was no longer a kid, the bitch boy with his tank top and lean muscle was that teenager. The two lovers played their catch me if you can game for a while as the young man stalked them through the woods. The young man had started to grow impatient, but not so impatient that he revealed himself early. No, he took his time and slipped around them.
He endured 15 more minutes of laughing and playful shrieking before the bitch boy finally caught the naked hottie. In seconds their mouths were on each other and the hottie was pulling that tank top right off the bitch boy. The young man still waited. It was all about the timing. The two teens went at it up against a tree and just before the hottie was ready to scream out in pleasure, that's when the young man struck.
A machete through the back of the bitch boy and into the front of the hottie ended their little rendezvous. The hottie gasped and blood exploded out of her mouth, coating the bitch boy's face. The bitch boy didn't notice. He was too confused by the machete sticking through him. He looked down at the blade and then up at the dying hottie he was pinned to. The young man yanked the machete free and the two teens collapsed to the ground. The hottie was dead.
and her eyes blank and staring up at the canopy. The bitch boy was still alive and the young man was very pleased. He stood over the bitch boy and cocked his head, watching as the life slowly, slowly, slowly drained from the bitch boy. Then he raised the machete in the air and brought it down quickly, taking the bitch boy's head right off. The area around the kill wasn't as convenient as the pit had been.
The young man had to drag both bodies several yards before he could stash them properly. He couldn't leave them out in the open. That would ruin the grand finale he had planned. A branch snaps, pulling the young man from his remembrances once again, dropping to the forest floor. He flattens himself against the damp earth and listens. Seconds tick by before he hears them. The footsteps. They aren't soft and careful, no. The footsteps are loud and deliberate.
They want to be heard. They want him to hear them over the rain and wind. The footsteps are meant to taunt him. He bristles with barely controlled rage. He is supposed to be the one that taunts, the one that chases. The young man pushes up from the ground and is running once more. He reaches the edge of the woods and bursts out into the meadow. The rain has gotten worse and the wind has picked up, but the young man isn't thinking of the weather. He has to find his low spot.
The place in the meadow where the ground is just a little lower than the rest, giving him the perfect view without being seen himself. Lightning flashes above, and the entire meadow becomes a vision of pure white reflecting off the green and yellow of the grasses. The young man drops fast, afraid it will see him before he's properly in place. He crawls on hands and knees in earth that is quickly becoming mud. Then he reaches his low place and slides into the depression.
After a moment, he lifts his head and pushes the grasses apart just enough for him to see the edge of the woods. He waits for a flash of lightning. When it comes, he gasps. The young man isn't sure what he saw in that brief moment. Whatever it was, it wasn't what he thought he was running from. No, no, it is much, much worse. The young man scoots to one side of the depression and begins to dig.
He is a prepared young man. Preparation is what separates him from the oblivious teens he stalks, or stalked, since his hunt is over and he is now in the unfortunate position of being hunted instead. The earth has fully become mud and the young man digs and digs until he feels the hard case he had buried. With one yank, he frees the case from the mud and quickly undoes the latches.
When he opens the case, he smiles at what's inside. Two blades of equal size, each about the length of his forearm. They are sharp and deadly, and he loves them so much. Oh, the blood they have spilled! The young man removes the blades from the case and studies them. Their edges are razor sharp, honed to a precision that can cut the thinnest strand of hair down the middle.
With a blade in each hand, the young man crouches and waits for the next flash. The lightning explodes overhead and the thunder follows almost immediately. In that glimpse, the young man sees the thing stomping its way across the meadow. Straight for him. To say he is confused is an understatement. The thing coming for him isn't what was driving the jeep. This is something different. Something wrong. It is human-shaped. Not that the young man assumes it's human.
Whatever the thing is, it's incredibly tall and wide. Almost 7 feet maybe, possibly 300 pounds or more. The thing is dressed in muddy overalls and that's it. Its skin is mottled and grey, with gashes across its forehead and chunks of flesh gone from its arms and shoulders. In one of its hands, the thing holds a machete. The young man's machete.
Oh, this doesn't make the young man happy at all. That's his weapon! He brought it! The thing should find its own weapon! But the young man tamps down his rage before it gets the better of him. Why does he care? He has his signature blades now, and he is no longer afraid. The young man crouch walks to his left, moving slowly toward the far side of the meadow. When the next flash of lightning comes, the young man doesn't risk popping up and looking for the thing.
A mistake like that will give his position away. And if he is going to take this thing down, then he needs some prize on his side. Which gets him thinking about how the jeep arrived out of nowhere earlier tonight. He'd been busy perfecting the masterpiece in the middle of the old camp. After taking out the loser, the hottie and her bitch boy, the young man began his final hunt. The innocent. Oh, and how innocent she looked.
Thick glasses that rested on a nose covered with freckles. Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail. She wasn't wearing short shorts and a tight half-shirt like the hottie. No, this girl was in a baggy t-shirt and board shorts, which had confused him at the time. The innocent should have been in a cute outfit, straight out of the Gap or whatever. A fitted, yet modest t-shirt.
Maybe some jean shorts, but not cut-offs. The ponytail was right, but those glasses… They weren't supposed to be thick. Instead, they should have accentuated her innocence while also hinting at a hidden, untapped allure. But the young man had made do. She was the last one of the group, so she was the innocent. She had to be. Those were the rules he had studied for so long. So he hunted her down and forced her to join her friends.
The way he'd forced her was by waiting with a rope up in a tree until she came running by, scared to death after just having found the bitch boy's head in her bunk. The young man dropped the rope, which had a noose on the end, and caught her perfectly. He'd practiced, of course. She'd tried to scream, but he had cut that off by leaping out of the tree while holding the other end of the rope.
The length was hooked up and over the same branch he jumped down from. So as his weight dropped, her weight was lifted up. She dangled there in front of him, kicking her feet and clawing at the rope around her neck. He tied his end of the rope off on a tree and stood and watched as the innocent's face turned red, then purple, then blue, as she slowly and painfully choked to death.
Rivulets of blood dribbled down her neck and onto her baggy tee from where her fingernails had dug deep into her own flesh. When he was certain that the innocent was dead, he cut her down and tried not to laugh when her body made a loud thump against the ground. Then he grabbed up his end of the rope and dragged her corpse through the woods and into the center of the camp where he'd already begun his work. The loser, the hottie, and the bitch boy were all disassembled.
It had taken the young man a couple of hours of hard work dismembering their corpses. Well, except for the bitch boy's head, which he'd already removed and placed in the innocent's bunk. The young man dragged the innocent's corpse into the center and let it rest. Then he went and fetched the bitch boy's head. When he returned, he noticed something funny sticking out of the innocent's shorts pocket. He crouched and plucked it from her body then studied it.
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A pipe. He'd already had a nagging feeling in his gut, but when he saw the pipe, gave it a sniff, and realized it was for smoking weed, that nagging feeling had turned into a full-on gut wrench. The innocent says no to drugs. The innocent says no to sex. The innocent is innocent. That's the whole fucking point!
The young man had stood up and thrown the pipe as far as he could into the woods. He wasn't going to let a little weed derail his plan. No, no, no. He had a statement to make, and he needed to get to work. The young man was going to wipe away the legend and history of the previous massacres that had occurred years before in the camp, and put his own stamp on the place. He got to work. After close to two hours, he had the limbs arranged so the arrangement looked like a single person.
A single person with eight arms, eight legs, four torsos and four heads. It wasn't easy getting each piece in place. He wanted that element of shock and terror to consume the discoverer. As he stood back and admired his work, two things happened simultaneously.
He heard a branch break from behind him in the woods, and the road into the camp was lit up by headlights. The young man didn't know which way to look first, but settled on the headlights since the branch could easily have been a raccoon or some night animal. He hid to the side of one cabin and watched the jeep pull into camp. When the headlights illuminated his masterpiece, the vehicle came to a sudden, brake-squealing stop. The young man waited, and he waited.
Then the driver's side door opened and a girl stepped out. Dressed in an outfit straight from the gap with cute glasses on and her hair in a ponytail. The young man realized that who he'd killed before had been the stoner, obviously, and not the innocent. This girl from the jeep had to be the innocent. Shit, shit, shit, shit! He needed her! His masterpiece wasn't done without her body in the mix.
So the young man made his way around the cabin. He moved from shadow to shadow until he was three cabins away and on the other side of the true innocent. That's when he saw what she was doing. She wasn't crying. She wasn't panicking. She wasn't looking around in fear and horror or even studying the arrangement of body parts while stricken with horror. No, she was busy pulling a pump-action shotgun from the backseat of the Jeep.
Then she reached in and grabbed a double bandolier of shotgun shells and criss-crossed those over her chest. But she wasn't done. She then reached back into the jeep and pulled out a long belt which she fastened around her waist. She reached into the jeep for a third time and revealed she had a machete of her own as well as a hunting knife. She placed them all in their respective places on her belt, turned to face the woods, and pumped several shells into the shotgun.
The sounds echoed through the night and were answered by a not-so-far-off rumble of thunder. "I knew it!" she screamed into the night. "I knew this would happen! I warned them!" She stepped away from the jeep and walked towards the woods, moving in the exact opposite direction from the young man. That's when he made his move. With a hatchet he'd picked up from the side of one of the cabins. The young man closed the distance quickly, but not quick enough.
The innocent whirled around and fired so fast that the young man felt buckshot sear the skin on his left ear as he dove to the ground. She kept firing and he rolled and rolled and rolled until he was behind a cabin and could get up onto his feet and run. "I'm coming for you, motherfucker!" The innocent screamed after him as he fled the camp. "You can't fucking hide from me! I've been prepared for this my whole fucking life!"
The young man was no longer exactly sure just how innocent the innocent was. But he wasn't going to stick around and argue semantics over the teenage girl's character, not with the way she seemed to handle that shotgun. So he ran and ran while she pursued, and pursue she did. He thought he knew the woods better than anyone, but she followed him like a bloodhound, and he couldn't seem to shake her, which has led him to right where he is now.
But instead of the innocent, he sees the huge thing in the meadow. Where the fuck did this thing come from? Why is it after him? And where is the innocent now? That last thought, he has to shove away for the moment, armed to the teeth or not. The innocent is just a teenage girl. The thing tromping through the meadow is far from that. The young man makes it to the side of the meadow and eases himself up enough so he can see the thing's position with the next lightning strike.
When the lightning strikes, he nearly screams. The thing is only a few feet from him and closing in fast. It has clocked him easily even without the moonlight. The young man leaps to his feet and holds his blades at the ready. The thing doesn't stop walking toward him. "I'll dice you to bits!" he shouts. He's practiced other versions, but that line feels the best.
The Thing doesn't seem to care about the catchphrase. It lifts the machete into the air and swipes at the young man. He dodges to the left and comes in for a quick slash with one of his blades. "Yeah!" he shouts as he hits his target. He dances back to see what damage he's done and is sorely disappointed. Part of the Thing's overalls are slashed open, and the same with the flesh underneath. But there's no blood, and the Thing doesn't even flinch.
Instead, it rears that machete back and swipes at the young man again. This time the thing grazes the young man's shoulder, sending pain shooting down his right arm. The young man shakes it off and ducks out of reach. He doesn't look at the wound, but he can feel the blood soaking his shirt and trickling down his arm. In seconds, it makes keeping a hold of his blade very difficult. The blood is at once sticky and slick.
He tucks that blade into his belt and focuses on the one in his left hand. A flash of lightning reveals the metal briefly, and the young man swears he sees someone else at the opposite edge. All it takes is that little bit of distraction. In the blink of an eye, the young man is grabbed around the throat and lifted high into the air. The thing's grip is like steel, and its flesh feels like cold, rotten seafood.
The young man stabs his blade into the thing's side over and over, but it has no effect. With his oxygen quickly running out, he yanks the blade free and aims upward, stabbing through the thing's chin, through its mouth, and out of its right eye socket. The thing tosses the young man away, and he lands in a heap up against one of the trees at the edge of the woods. He scrambles to get up as the thing clomps through the grass toward him.
He's almost on his feet when he runs out of time and he's grabbed by the throat and lifted into the air once again. He pulls the blade from his belt, but it's smacked away. But the young man sees that his other blade is still embedded in the thing's head. "What are you?" the young man gasps as he desperately tries to get a grip on the stuck blade's handle. Dark spots fills his vision when his fingers finally close around the handle and he yanks hard.
The thing shudders, but its grip does not ease one ounce. The young man stabs over and over again. He aims for the thing's remaining eye. He aims for its temple. He stops aiming and just stabs, stabs, stabs. Then he is no longer stabbing as the blade gets lodged in the gap between the thing's jawbone and skull. The young man pulls with what strength he has left, but the blade is stuck hard.
The dark spots get worse and worse, and soon the young man realizes he's going to lose this fight. A girl yells. The thing's grip loosens, and the young man falls to the ground. He can barely manage to get any air past his almost crushed windpipe. "You should have stayed down!" the girl yells. "And you shouldn't have killed my friends!" The young man hears the words and realizes that the girl thinks the thing murdered her friends.
With that new information, the young man slowly scoots backward on his ass until he's completely lost from sight in the woods. "I fucking told them that bad shit would happen! I told them that coming here would wake you up!" the girl says. "I fucking told them, but they wouldn't listen!" All the young man can see is the dark silhouette of the thing's back. He eases up onto his feet, so very careful not to make a sound, and circles to the left for a better view of the thing and the girl.
I know everything there is about this place. The girl continues while the thing just stands there. I've been training my whole fucking life for this. I've studied you and I've studied this fucking place. And you know what I found out? There's the sound of the shotgun being pumped. Then the night lights up as the blast echoes across the meadow. The thing stumbles back a step but stays upright. What I found out was... He shouts again.
The thing stumbles again. The young man keeps circling. "That you can definitely be put down!" The girl finishes. "But the real question is whether you can be stopped forever!" She fires again. The thing stumbles even more. Then it pauses and slowly straightens to its full height. "We're about to fucking find out!" The girl screams and unloads the entire shotgun on the thing. It takes the shots like a brick wall, but even brick walls can be broken.
The thing finally takes too much buckshot and teeters backward, collapsing straight like a falling tree. When its back hits the ground, the young man can feel the impact up through the soles of his feet. The girl doesn't miss a beat as she instantly reloads the shotgun, but she doesn't move in to inspect the thing. She stands in place and waits. The young man hides behind a tree and watches, transfixed by the epic fight before him. Then the thing bends up at the waist,
The girl doesn't flinch. It slowly gets to its feet and walks toward the girl, and she lets it. The young man is amazed at her courage. He was right to run from her. He isn't made of supernatural stuff. He's flesh and bone, and one shotgun blast from the girl will tear him wide open, so he stays hidden and watches. "Gun, slow you down!" the girl says as she begins to walk to the side, circling the thing.
With every step she takes, the thing adjusts its course and continues to zero in on her. Guns won't kill you, she says. But something has to. You died once, you can die again. The young man wants to shout at her about the flaws in that logic, but he stays silent. He should run. He should use the fight as a cover to escape, but then he'd miss a once-in-a-lifetime view. The girl slings her shotgun across her back and the young man almost gasps.
What is she doing? Then she pulls the machete free from her belt, as well as the hunting knife. He admires her two-bladed approach, but knows how ineffective it is. The thing gets close enough that it grasps for the girl's throat. But she ducks under its arm and stabs the hunting knife up into its armpit. She doesn't let go of the handle though. She keeps moving, slicing up around the arm, all the way through the shoulder. It's an amazing feat since she is so much smaller than the thing.
When she's all the way behind the thing, she gives her wrist a twist and jumps back. The thing's arm falls to the ground, completely severed. That stops its movement. It pauses and looks over at the shoulder where its arm used to be. Then it bends down and picks up the arm. The young man is dumbfounded as the thing tries to put the arm back on, but he fails over and over. "Good to know," the girl says.
She moves in, and she's so fast that the young man can barely track her in the darkness and rain. Lightning flashes just as her machete swipes high and hits its mark. The thing's head falls from its neck. The body follows a second later, and the thing is completely lost from sight in the tall grass. The girl sheathes her knife and machete. Then the girl takes something from her pocket and holds it over the thing's body. She waves her hand back and forth, back and forth.
Then she unslings the shotgun and lowers the muzzle down into the grass. She fires. Flames flick high into the air, causing the girl to jump back. That's when the young man catches the faintest whiff of lighter fluid. The girl stands there, staring down. She doesn't leave. She doesn't run. She watches the thing's body burn and burn until the flames finally die out. Then she turns her head and stares into the woods, directly at the young man.
"You can come out now," she says, the shotgun nestled in the crook of her arm. The young man hesitates, then decides that this is his opportunity, because he now knows who the girl is, and this time she can't win. He's a much different monster than the thing she just burnt to a crisp. More importantly, he's not her monster. "Oh, thank you, thank you," the young man croaks as he limps out from the cover of the woods. "I thought I was going to die."
"You are!" the girl says, and aims this shotgun right at the young man. He stares, stunned. Then he shakes his head and smiles. "No, no, no," he says. "You can't kill me." "Oh? And why is that, fucker?" the girl asks. "Because you're its final girl," the young man says, and points at the smoking remains of the thing. The girl laughs and moves closer to the young man. "That thing's final girl died of breast cancer last year," the girl says.
What? The young man says, then his eyes go wide. Then that means, well, fuck! Oh yeah, it's well fuck for you, alright, the girl says, getting closer and closer. The young man eyes the shotgun, then his gaze moves to the machete and knife on her belt. Nope, the girl says. You won't make a single step! The young man smiles and rushes at her.
The girl was wrong. The young man makes it two steps before he comes to a slip-sliding halt in the mud and grass as the shotgun barrel is jammed up under his nose. "I know what you're thinking," the girl says. "That since you killed all my friends..." The young man tries to interrupt and argue, but the girl jams the shotgun hard against his face and he closes his mouth. "Don't deny it. You thought I was shouting at that monster back there?" She shakes her head. "I was shouting at you when I reached this fucking meadow!"
The young man sighs and only stares at the girl. "And since you killed my friends, you think I'm your final girl?" She continues. "If I am, then you're fucking dead. Except, there's a clause with final girls, and that clause is the monster gets to keep coming back and coming back. It can't die until she does." The girl grins, and it looks devilish in the eerie darkness of the storm.
Like I said, the thing's final girl is dead, and I just permanently put the thing down. It ain't coming back this time. It's the young man's turn to smile, and his grin is infinitely more devilish. Then kill me, the young man says and spreads his arms wide. I'll only come back later and do this all again. Except you're missing the point, the girl says. I'm not your final girl.
The young man's confidence wavers. "You're not my final girl?" the young man asks. "Then who the fuck are you?" The girl laughs. "I'm the final girl's daughter, and I'm really, really sick of all this shit." She squeezes the trigger, and the young man's head becomes mist. His body collapses to the ground. The girl racks another round into her shotgun, then slings it as she pulls out the lighter fluid once more.
She douses the young man's headless corpse, then lights it up with a shotgun blast. Just in case, the girl says, and walks off as the body burns.
These ads do not represent my own political viewpoint. So if you hear a political ad play on the podcast and it's not in my own voice, then it has absolutely nothing to do with me personally as a podcaster. Thank you again for being a dedicated listener of mine, and I can't wait to have another amazing year with you guys. I'll see you in the next episode.