The final girl alive sits down on the dark soil and moans.  It’s her virginal moan, the one that makes her special, but now, three days later, there is no hint of an orgasmic lilt in her voice.  It’s fatigue that the earthworms in the dirt hear.  There is no one else to hear.  The others are dead and the strange white-haired couple whose land this has been since the Civil War are dead, and so are all their animals, even the sad-eyed German Shepherd.  Even the chickens’ eggs have their tops bitten off and their insides sucked dry, so not even the unborn hear how her voice has changed.  The monster, does he hear?  She looks at him, broken-legged and broken-winged in front of the barn where he killed her slutty best friend.  Poor dead Ann, always a little wild.  She promised they were on the road to Aspen.  She promised no wrong turns.

***

Thirty minutes later, the final girl wipes her own blood on her face and stands and goes to the monster.  He knows no words and begs for nothing as she comes close—his torsal wound has clotted all dark and ugly, and his broken leg has swollen, and if he is a product of nature then he must be in pain.  She did not think he was, earlier.  She thought he really had spawned from Hell, and she had been hating herself as she hid under the bed and he ate the old woman on top for not being able to remember a single Scripture after spending twelve years in the basement of a church embedding them in her heart.   The mattress had bowed down on her back like the pressure of God, or if it was her granola self talking, karma.  She thought about her sins and Sodom and Gomorrah and celestial wrath raining down on the plain, washing it of all the devils, and like a good little angel she bit her lower lip bloody and felt the pain and sucked it back in.  And then she ran over the monster with a hay baler and broke half his body and realized he was mortal after all.  Angel’s got herself a sickle now.  Everybody’s bleeding, everybody’s dead.  Everybody’s made of iron and water and bone. 

***

The final girl and the monster go to the nearest town.  She’s going to bring him to justice, that’s what she told him.  Going to make sure he never hurts anyone again.  She ran him over a second time to be certain and then chained him to the baler and drove it up to the little country road, dragging him behind her.  His face is in the gravel.  They pass the car that Ann’s boyfriend tried to escape to – its tires are still slashed out and Josh is still half in the windshield with his feet chewed off. 

The final girl did not even like Josh the drunken frat boy, but she still screams back at the monster, “Look at that!  Look at what you did, you sick freak!  Look at it!”  And she regrets not doing the same thing for Ann, down in the barn.  But the monster’s face is in the gravel and the monster sees nothing.  He learns nothing.  He is after all the monster.  The final girl feels her ribs compress and little by little she starts to cry.  They’re anguished tears, the kind of tears she expected when she was trapped in a storage room with the monster breaking in, not the kind of tears appropriate for this moment in her narrative.  Now she is free, and the terror is crippled at her feet, and the sky is laid bare and swallows, thin birds, are crossing overhead like little flourishes of hope.  Yet she cries and cries and the monster does not respond, and she looks back over and over at the car and then down the hill at the grungy farm, left to languish in the putrid smell of death.  She wishes she was dragging back the right bodies and cries some more because this brutality is what she has.  This is her prize for being good, this is what was behind door number three, this is her gold star sticker.  She keeps her foot on the pedal as her chest keeps heaving and the baler groans on like nothing is happening. 

***

The baler stops.  It put-puts to a halt as the dark comes in over the trees, and at first the final girl just sits on the uncomfortable little stool, scared to look behind her although she’s been listening to the monster drag over the asphalt for the past two hours.  Now the two of them have lost all civilization, because the farm is gone and the nearest town, that fabled myth, has not come into view.  But then she picks up the sickle she’s kept under her foot and gathers the strength to turn and look at the monster.  She imagines him standing, his jaws fallen open and dripping saliva, ready to consume her headfirst.  But he is not—he is still lying on the road, twitching occasionally. 

She hears in the black woods by the road a miniature howl and begins to think of other monsters: coyotes, wolves.  She wonders what he is, this savage thing.  She hates that he eats parts of his victims, but this trait of his also reminds her of the Big Bad Wolf and oddly enough, this consoles her.  Maybe he is just an animal, like the Beast of Bray Road and the Ozark Howler.  Maybe he is just wired to prey on other creatures.  Maybe it’s not his fault.  This idea makes it easier for her to envision killing him too.  It’s what’s always been done to rabid animals, to dogs with mange, to escaped leopards, to pit bulls that bite little babies. 

Dumb beasts, she thinks, remembering her uncle putting down a horse with a broken leg.  Dumb beasts can’t help it and we can’t help them.  She tries to breathe calmly and accept her role as executioner of this thing she has captured.  But her uncle let that horse go gently into the night, with a tranquilizer and a syringe, and all she has is a sickle.  That’s a weapon with no pity.  She decides the townspeople, when she finally reaches them, will carry out the grisly job themselves.  What would her parents say if she came home with blood on her hands?  Still, she keeps pity in her heart and nurses it like a kitten.  She’s always felt pity for the strangest things.  For dying insects.  For hitchhikers ambling down the road looking lost.  Earlier on this trip—before the wrong turn—she chastised Josh for mocking those lost souls, and Ann of course mocked her in turn.  “Such delicate sensibilities,” her mother used to say, brushing her hair. 

Feeling relieved, the final girl gets off the stool and quickly unhooks the chain from the baler, then starts to drag.  He’s lighter than she thought he’d be. 

***

The final girl hates that the monster does not talk.  All afternoon she thinks, talk, monster, talk.  It is possible that he is dead and has been all this time, and that those little tics and flutters of his ragged wings are tricks of moonlight or her own wishful thinking.  She’s not willing to close the gap between them to check.  Instead she just hates him from afar.  She would not care if he talked about eating people or how he was going to kill her or how it felt when he killed Ann.  She hates her own company much more.  Why the hell else would she say yes to Aspen with Ann and Josh if they weren’t a reprieve from the deafening white solitude of her dorm room, perched ten stories above the ground like the bell tower of Notre Dame?  But the monster has never spoken.  He is, after all, the monster.   

She says, “I could tell you my life story.”  He says nothing.  “I was born in Grand Forks.  I had good parents.  I go to college now.   I’m an English major.”  She stops because her own life makes her hair stand on end.  There is nowhere to go with that story.  “I could tell you why I survived.”  He says nothing.  He drags, that’s what he says, his scrapes against the ground are his reply.  She imagines it’s his way of saying yes.  “I survived because I am a good girl.  I am not a slut.  I am not a pig.  I am not …” she thinks of the old couple whose house the car broke down in front of, who narrowed their beady little eyes at them, this pack of teenagers in threadbare clothes, but let them in anyway.  “I am not old and stupid.  And I can run.  I always got good grades.  And my father taught me how to …”  She remembers her father clapping and laughing after she finished singing the national anthem in the living room, how he said, “Good girl!  Good girl!”  Her voice trickles off as she watches the moon and the moon watches her.  “And it doesn’t matter,” she finishes. 

The monster doesn’t reply.  She keeps dragging.  The stress on her joints burns out all those things she just said, the things that don’t matter.  The memories of blood and screaming and slamming doors and slipping keys and shotgun cocks fade with every step.  The great big amorphous past has risen up behind them on the country road and is swallowing those memories whole.  When she thinks of them now all she feels is numb release.  It is leaving a long hollowness where her sternum should be.  A void.  She realizes the chorus that she thought was the moon clucking actually belongs to cicadae in the long grass. 

“You see?  Even animals can talk,” she says, looking back at him.  Her voice is quivering.  Inside she’s begging him to say something.  Just a grunt would do.  When Ann and Josh left her in the farmhouse to go fuck in the barn she was actually happy to hear the monster land on the roof with a screech that sent the animals into hysterics—else she’d have to listen to her own little voice all night.   He drags along. 

***

It is night and the dog comes soundlessly from behind.  The final girl thinks she hears a growl but as she’s turning she gets jerked off her feet and falls.  She’s lucky the sickle in her hand doesn’t tear through her thigh.  Her wrist is still being tugged while her head is throbbing and instinctively she pulls back on the chain.  It takes her a minute to turn over onto her stomach and see that some kind of stray hunting mutt has the monster by the neck and is trying to drag him off the road. 

“Hey!” 

The dog glances up at her with urine-colored eyes but it only lasts a second.  It’s the raggedy monster it wants. 

No, she thinks.  No, he’s mine.  She’s not sure why she thinks this, but she tells herself it’s because she wants to own the coming vengeance, she wants to personally ensure the nearest town burns him alive in the name of Ann and Josh and the McFaydens, she wants to feel the heat of the pyre.  She tells herself it’s because the monster hasn’t killed this stupid dog’s friends.  With her heart in her throat, she yanks the chain back again and with the other hand lunges for the dog with the sickle.  The final girl bites her lip because already the dog is drawing blood—dark and viscous, it leaks from under the monster’s rubbery chin—and she’s afraid she’s too late. 

Then the monster lifts up one clawed, previously dormant hand and grabs the dog’s neck.  The final girl skids to a rough stop and watches as the dog, suddenly whimpering, gets its neck twisted until its head is barely hanging off its body.  The monster starts eating, loud and visceral like he’s not ashamed.  After ten minutes, the monster throws the mangled body at the stricken young woman.  It hits her sneakers but she’s seen so much carnage recently that it doesn’t even make her jump.  She just kicks the offering aside and marches up, shaking, to the monster she thought was crippled.  By the time she’s leaning over him and her hair has fallen down into grabbing range he’s lain down on his back again and closed his eyes.  Seeing this elicits a staggered shriek. 

“What, are you surrendering now?”  She gives the chain a hard yank and the monster’s head flops in response.  He doesn’t wake.  His arms and knees have tucked into his body like a baby in a womb.  She lifts the sickle.  “I’m going to kill you, you idiot!” 

The monster opens his eyes.  One dig of the sickle will end his life and she can’t believe he doesn’t know this, being a monster.  Still he throws up no defense.  His bloody lips don’t even hiss. 

“Why won’t you kill me?”  This, she says softer.  He did try to, earlier, but he never seemed to put as much effort into killing her as he put into killing Ann and Josh and the McFaydens.  He always seemed to miss.  He always seemed to give her time to run.  And this makes her drop her sickle.  Her shoulders slump and her knees go wobbly.  “Why me, huh?  Why do I get to be the last girl?  You don’t care about how good I am; you don’t care about …”  She shakes her head, because all he could have seen in her was a trembling piece of teenaged meat.  “You’re a fucking monster.” 

The monster is back to feigning death and subservience and will not communicate with her.  She starts walking away, pulling the chain taut.  “What, are you lonely?” she asks.  She says it sarcastically, but as soon as the words are out there she knows they’re true.  The monster doesn’t reply as she begins once again to drag it down the empty road.  The shock of suddenly having something in common with a creature so awful silences the girl he let live, and she wipes her eyes on her muddy sleeve.  There’s been no cars on this road all day.  But then again, it was a wrong turn. 

***

Sometime between nightfall and sunrise she stops walking and sits down, then lies down.  There’s no more dragging sounds and the silence bites her now.  The monster turns over and folds his good wing over his head.  The chain between them is not stretched taut and still he shows no interest in eating her.  The final girl is thinking that maybe he should have eaten her; but she thinks this cautiously, afraid that he will somehow hear her thoughts and come on over, jaws gaping, ready to obey. 

“You ate all my friends.  I have no one now,” she whispers at the lump she holds hostage.  But she knows she was lonely long before the monster first landed on the roof of the farmhouse like an angel of pestilence.  She was lonely long before she went to college and became Ann’s roommate (the only reason Ann dragged her along on this trip—it was out of pity).  Could people be born lonely?  She remembers being lonely even back in kindergarten when all children are supposed to be delightful little cherubs, that is why she wonders.  Well, time is nothing.  How the void inside began doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that it’s there. 

The monster just let her scream about it.  The monster let her run.  He let her pound her heels into the ground and her heart into her ribs, so angry and vicious and alive, this sweating ugly little girl in the mud with dirt under her fingernails and grease in her hair was now finally filled with real bursting pain, the stuff that burned so much cleaner than internal sorrow.  The monster let her bleed.  The monster let her swing baseball bats and rip clothes and howl like the Beast of Bray Road herself.  He let her break bones and he let her like it.  He let her swear.  She has said fuck more times in the past three days than she has in all her twenty years of life and each time it’s felt like a breaking wave.  Doing all that sick ugly nasty stuff has been like vomiting the sad lonely years with their pastel colors and blue ribbons and dutiful pats on the head for the good little girl. 

The final girl digs her filthy nails into her skin and wonders what she was really trying to run over with that hay baler when she jammed her foot against the pedal and screamed, “Die, you piece of shit!  Die!” 

“Why did you come here?” she asks the monster that is barely a monster anymore.  “Did I invite you somehow?  Did I dream you into being?” 

Only the void inside responds. 

She is afraid that the monster is her golem, and that is why he never talks.  But if that is true, he has done well.  That she can’t argue.  The skeleton that is left of her bottled life feels unbelievably clean after the three-day orgy of violence, like boiled bones.  That night she sleeps not curled up like a scared snail but open wide.  Insects crawl in her hair and nest, as if she is their queen mother.

***

All night she dreams of fists.  Every time they are her own.  She recognizes her bony knuckles, cut up from punching through the glass of a door that wouldn’t open back at the McFaydens’ farmhouse.  In her dream she is punching through wooden doors too.  She is coming down out of a crystalline sky and punching red shingles.  She punches the leathery skin of a cow.  She punches rib cages and faces and stomachs of people she thinks she might know.  She watches them crash.  She punches the mattress.  She punches the monster; his jaw crunches like it’s made of styrofoam.  She punches herself.  And there’s a voice in her dream that sounds like her own saying “Arise, arise!” 

There’s Ann, dying in front of her.  There’s the bed that she tears the stuffing from.  Late in the dream, when the colors are bleeding and the American Gothic portraits are shuddering down the wall, she is in a bathroom.  She looks down and sees that her fingernails have gone black and that she is barefoot.  She looks in the mirror and it cracks. 

***

In the morning the monster is awake.  He is watching her with his blank reptilian eyes.  She looks back at him as he sits cross-legged on the center stripe of the road.  She somewhat hopes he’ll speak but is barely disappointed when he doesn’t.  As usual, she speaks instead.  “I’m going to let you go,” she says.  “How do you feel about that?”  The monster has no reaction, of course.  “I’m going to let you go, but only if you give me what I want.”  He has no objection and she moves closer.

She takes off his tattered devil’s wings.  She puts them on.  Without them he looks like a shriveled fetus, a burned giraffe, something that was not meant to be and that life was finally, mercifully letting go.  He curls up as he watches her adjust his wings.  A couple rolls of the shoulder and they feel right.  She can feel the wind seeping in through the tears, and one of them has been bent up something awful by the hay baler, but she still gives them a go.  She flaps and imagines the monster swooping down and catching the old man and eating him, mid-flight, like an eagle with a hare—she wonders if that will be as hard as it looks.  She flaps harder and the wind catches her.  With difficulty, the final girl rises a few feet off the ground and awkwardly sways in the breeze. 

The woeful little thing below her, purposeless now, emits a strange, guttural squawk and lifts up his webbed fingers.  His neck is still tied to the chain and he’s starting to get pulled upward the higher she goes.  He doesn’t want to follow her forever.  She unravels the chain from around her hand.  She drops it and watches the creature meekly crawl away, wondering what to do with himself now that she has no need for him, until a higher wind rises and takes her over the trees.  In the distance she sees a farmhouse, and swoops.  She is used to flying solo. 

END