Final Destination 3, page 23
part #1 of Final Destination Series
When Erin first met Ian, that desire to move, to leave, to put this dull suburban prison far behind him was a large part of what seduced her, because that was her dream too.
She had been raised on the wrong side of town, the daughter of a single mother, an alcoholic artist who always made it painfully clear to Erin that having a daughter out of wedlock had destroyed her life. She railed that having Erin had trapped her in this mindless, soul-killing suburb, working shitty, low-paying jobs just to make ends meet. If only Erin had never been born, her mother could have gone to New York City and made it big as an edgy, feminist comic artist. In truth, Erin suspected her mother was glad to have Erin as a scapegoat. That way she never had to really try and take the risk of failing. It wasn't her lack of talent holding her back, it was the baby, that broken condom, that one little mistake that fucked up everything.
Erin had always been a little chubby, smart as a whip, but socially inept, and consequently never fit in school. She had no real friends at all, so she lost herself in books, living a complex fantasy life full of dragons and magic. When puberty hit, her fantasies became darker, full of sensual vampires and corsets and bondage. She suffered the pain of schoolyard teasing and humiliation of being dumpy and uncool in the world of the skinny and the perfect. When it all became too much for her, she would take a razor to her arms and legs, slicing into her pale, delicate skin and relishing the sharper, more physical pain as it washed away the hurt inside her heart.
She was a freshman at McKinley when she met Ian, and the attraction between them was immediate and incendiary. He was the only other person in the school who had ever even heard of Lovecraft, Vampire: The Masquerade and Fields of the Nephilim, and he turned her on to the whole world of the Gothic subculture. He was viciously smart and brutally cynical, and he shared her contempt for the mindless blond drones all around them. She fell in love with his bony, milk white body, his thin, expressive hands and his intelligent, unforgiving gaze. He was not afraid to try the things that Erin had always dreamed of: ropes, and hairbrushes and knife play. He was a willing and endlessly creative partner in the elaborate, vampire role-playing scenarios she invented. Giving herself over to him completely was addictively delicious, better than she ever could have known. And he wanted to take her away from this deadbeat burg. He was everything Erin ever wanted in a lover, and more. She was sure that she had found her soulmate. At first…
Four years later, all the weaknesses, all the insecurities, everything he kept hidden beneath the witty, cynical facade was becoming clearer and clearer. She enjoyed being dominated by him in bed, but he insisted on bringing that level of control into their daily life, always critical of her choices and always insisting that things be done his way or not at all. At first she felt as if she deserved this kind of treatment. After all, he was so much more knowledgeable than her. Clearly he knew best and that was that. As she started to expand her own knowledge through various online Gothic communities, she started to see that he did not know everything about everything. She began to sense that this need to control her at all times sprang from a deep-seated insecurity. He wanted desperately to leave McKinley, but he was terrified that if Erin was exposed to a world of choices, of other Goths, she would have no reason to stay with him.
She really did love him, and she tried her best to reassure him of her love and devotion, but he made it so impossible sometimes. Then, when that freaky accident happened at Red River, Erin had realized that she did not want to live the rest of her life as Ian's little Gothic slave girl. Her brush with death made her see that she needed to live her own life, be her own woman. She began to make secret plans to move away to San Francisco alone in September, squirreling away money from her job at Home Land Hardware and chatting online with SF area Goths about the local scene. She had already had more than one online affair, including an ongoing romance with another girl, a tattoo artist named Viola November. As soon as this summer was over, she planned to take off, and spend a few weeks with Viola until she found a place. Then she would start a brand new life, far, far away from anything or anyone named McKinley.
As she stood there by the massive gate, she wondered when it would be best to break it to Ian. She could not afford to quit her job, and since she and Ian worked together at Home Land, she knew he would make her life hell if she tried to break it off before she was ready to leave town. Best to just tough it out until September.
The guard, a lecherous old troll, grinned suggestively at Erin and buzzed her through the gate. She walked slowly down the winding drive, towards the carriage house, scuffing her pointed boots in the dusty gravel. Riverview House loomed up behind the little structure, and Erin realized that she was going to miss that old grand dame with all her faded glory and guarded secrets, far more than she was going to miss Ian. They were technically not allowed inside Riverview House, because the main wing had been restored into a historical museum before Ian was born. Its east and west wings had been sealed off until the funds for their restoration became available, but it had been ridiculously easy to sneak in.
The east wing in particular had captured Erin's imagination, especially lovely Triphosia's rooms, in which she was rumored to have gone slowly, inevitably mad. The decayed splendor and haunted melancholy of those vast empty rooms had been the ideal Gothic backdrop for their romantic role-playing. Erin had lost her virginity inside Riverview House and she had felt the house's presence and precipitation in the ritual as strongly as Ian's or even her own. It was as if that intense and painful moment existed not as a unique event, but only as part of a larger continuum, a single bright bead on a glittering necklace of thousands of such moments, stretching back through the generations that had lived and loved, and died inside that house.
As she approached the carriage house, she wondered if she would be able to convince Ian to make another midnight visit to the east wing of Riverview House. Erin would not tell him, but what she really wanted was a chance to say goodbye to the house.
Ian had moved his things out of his parent's cottage and into the carriage house the year he and Erin met. Back then the carriage house was barely more than a tumbledown storage shed. Ian had transformed the place into his own little Gothic sanctuary. The lower floor was still nothing but decaying horse stalls and ancient rusting equipment, but the second story contained a pair of modest rooms that had once housed the grooms, along with their shared bath and tiny kitchen. The other half of the upstairs was a large open hayloft. Ian had transformed the two small rooms into his bedroom and office, and the hayloft became a cozy living space plastered with posters of The Crow and Sisters of Mercy, and art by Tim Bradstreet and Alan M. Clark. Erin had done more than half the decorating, transforming the space with scraps of lace and velvet, painted doll heads and rusted hunks of unfathomable clockwork. She knew that she would miss this place too.
Knocking on the thick, wooden double doors, she heard the angry, German, jackhammer beat of Rammstein's "Feuer Frei" filtering down through the cracks. She sighed. If Ian was listening to Rammstein, that meant he was going to be in one of his moods. It wasn't until the quiet break in the middle of the song that he finally heard her fist against the door and came down to let her in.
"What's the matter, Zip?" she asked, touching the sharp angle of his jaw and then pushing back the hair from his frowning forehead. She could see nearly an inch of pale brown root beneath the coal black dye. He looked tired and drawn.
"Hey, Pip," he said, stepping aside to let her in. "I don't know, I just… I can't find my glasses and…"
She took his hand and led him back up the steps, into the black and red chaos of his little sanctuary, through the hayloft and back to his office. Sure enough, his glasses were on the desk, beneath a tented paperback. She picked them up and put them gently on his face. How could she leave him? Honestly she didn't know what he was going to do without her.
"You're still in your civvies," she said, gesturing to his torn black jeans and Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt. She, on the other hand, had already changed into her obligatory uniform of shame, the hated tan work pants and cheap green polo shirt with the Home Land Hardware logo on the left breast. Her jaunty apron and her badge, a laminated atrocity with a sullen, washed out photo, her name, department (Garden) and the perky question "How may I help you?" were buried in her backpack until the last possible minute.
"What if we just blow it off?" Ian said suddenly, looking off at nothing. "Let's just stay here together. I just can't face the world today. I don't want to look at anyone but you."
Erin took his face in her hands. "I know, Zip," she said softly. "But we need the money."
I need the money, she thought, and then felt a swift wave of guilt.
"You're right, I know," he said. "It's just, well, things have been so weird since… well… since the accident." He looked up into her eyes. "Don't you feel it? Something that just isn't right."
"Jeez," Erin said, sneering. "You sound as loony as that Wendy chick."
Ian shrugged and turned away. "I'll get dressed," he said.
21
Home Land Warehouse
Wendy and Kevin crept uncertainly through the dimly-lit rows of gardening implements and construction supplies at the Home Land home improvement warehouse. Home Land was one of those giant, nationwide franchise joints that show up in small towns and put all the local hardware stores out of business.
The store's logo was a sort of humanoid creature with a house for a head, windows for eyes and a door for a mouth. It was holding a hammer and a measuring tape. Clearly it was meant to look friendly and helpful, but to Kevin it just looked creepy and sinister. The store had been closing up for the night when they got there, but Wendy had convinced the manager on duty that they needed to talk to Ian and Erin right away. He has waved them back to the lawn and garden section and forgotten about them the moment they were out of his sight.
The huge, ceiling-high steel shelves were crammed with plywood, sheet rock and every tool known to man, all looming over them like deadly traps as they wandered through the enormous, warehouse-style store, looking for signs of the two Goth kids. Rakes and chainsaws, axes and garden weasels, and screwdrivers and hammers all glinted menacingly from the shadows. Wendy was anxious beside Kevin, glancing nervously around, and Kevin realized that they were surrounded by a thousand possible violent deaths. If there was a place where one could expect a horrific, accidental death, this was it.
As they turned a corner, they heard a strange, loud, compressed air sound from nearby. FWWWT! FWWWT! FWWWT! Then something squeaked up above, and with a flutter, a pigeon dropped to the floor in front of them. It twitched for a moment, then lay still, dead. Wendy and Kevin froze in their tracks, but nothing more happened.
"What the fuck was that?" Kevin whispered.
"I don't know," Wendy said.
They jumped as a tinny walkie-talkie crackled somewhere nearby. Kevin recognized Erin's voice beneath the static.
"Hey, Zip," she said. "Cut those plywood orders yet?"
Ian's real world voice answered her electronic one, very close by.
"No, not yet, Pip," he replied. "Trayne's been all edgy and impossible since his girlfriend have him the boot and he says he wants me to get rid of these pigeons first. Stupid rats with wings keep setting off the motion sensors."
Wendy and Kevin looked around the next shelf and saw Ian, his skinny body with its safety orange employee apron, green polo shirt and tan pants looking like it belonged to someone else, strangely incongruous beneath his narrow, white face, dyed black hair and heavy steel piercings. He was striking an action movie pose, looking up at the ceiling with a huge hydraulic nailgun held in both hands like some futuristic ray gun. He aimed and fired again.
FWWWT! FWWWT! FWWWT!
Another pigeon dropped, its wing bent at a strange and unnatural angle.
"They're coming out of the walls," Ian cried in mock terror. He fired again, convulsively squeezing off ten shots in a row. "Game over, man. Game over."
Nails clanged off the girders high above and tinkled down through the shelving. Kevin shook his head.
"Stay frosty, Hudson," Kevin said.
Wendy looked at Kevin as if he had lost his mind –clearly not a big Aliens fan.
Ian jumped at the sound of Kevin's voice and spun around, drawing down on Kevin and Wendy like a commando on street patrol in Fallujah. Wendy and Kevin threw their hands up.
"Jesus Christ, Ian," Kevin said. "Don't shoot."
"You scared the shit out of me," Ian said. He relaxed his pose, lowering the nailgun. "What the hell are you two doing here? We're closed." He looked down at their clothes with a nasty sneer. "And what on earth are you wearing? Why are you dressed up like College football players?"
"We've got something to tell you," Wendy said. "It's about the crash. And what's happened since."
Ian made a disdainful face. "Oh please," he said. "Spare me more of your superstitious, anti-rational claptrap."
"You can decide that for yourself after we tell you," Kevin said. "Where's Erin? She should hear this too."
Ian sighed and pulled his walkie-talkie from the pocket of his apron. "Hey, Pip," he said into the mic. "Where are you?"
"The land of nuts and screws," Erin's voice said, jittery with static.
"That pretty much describes this whole town," Ian said.
Erin's laughter bubbled from the little speaker. "Aisle six," she said.
"I'm coming to you, with outland interlopers no less," Ian said. "They are here to tell us of their quaint native superstitions."
"Who?" Erin asked.
"You'll see," Ian said.
He pocketed the walkie-talkie, then stepped up into a Raymond Gofer Easi Order Picker forklift. Ignoring the safety harness that hung from the seat, he fired up the electric vehicle. He looked at Wendy and Kevin.
"Want a lift?" Ian asked.
Wendy and Kevin, both intensely sensitive to the possibilities of potential mechanical mayhem, shook their heads adamantly.
"No thanks," Wendy said. "That's okay. We'd rather walk."
"Well," Ian said as he put the forklift in gear and started down the aisle, "I hope you can keep up with my mighty four miles an hour."
They followed him through the cavernous space, waiting as the forklift made slow ponderous turns, until they at last found Erin, also wearing an orange apron and the bland, weirdly normal Home Land uniform, pushing an industrial size shopping cart piled high with random items. She put a box of three-eighths inch screws back onto a shelf of screws of various sizes.
"Look, Pip," said Ian, as he swung into the aisle. "Visitors."
Erin looked up. She raised a questioning eyebrow. "Well, well," she said. "If it isn't the popular kids, come to mock us in our wage slave shame. What do they want?"
"We want to tell you something about the crash," Wendy answered. "Something important."
Erin sighed and rolled her thickly lined eyes. "I'm sick to death of the stupid crash," she said. "If I never hear anything more about it it'll be too soon."
"It might be too late if you don't hear about it," Kevin told her, feeling testy and trying not to let it show.
"All right, all right," Erin said. "But walk while we talk. We can't get out of here until I restock all the stupid shit our pinhead customers can't manage to return to the shelves themselves. I don't want to spend another minute more in my itchy polyester norm costume than I absolutely have to."
"Al right," Wendy said.
Kevin could see her steeling herself for this difficult task as they began following Erin while she pushed the shopping cart down the aisle at a snail's pace. Ian moved slowly alongside them in the forklift.
"Well, the first thing you should know," Wendy continued, "is that Lewis… Lewis is dead."
"You mean Frank Cheek," said Ian. "It was all over the news this morning. Revolting. I thought you two were there?"
Wendy nodded. "We were," she said, "but that was yesterday afternoon. Lewis died this morning. He was lifting weights and he slipped and fell on one of the machines. His head…"
She stopped, shuddering with the memory and unable to finish.
"His head was crushed," said Kevin, completing her sentence for her. "We were there too. Close enough to get a fucking brain shower. Hence the change of clothes."
Erin and Ian stared at them, mouths agape and silent.
"Lewis is really dead?" Ian finally asked. "You're not just fucking with us?"
"He's really dead," Wendy said. "It'll be on the news tomorrow for sure."
Erin frowned, shaking her head so her dreadlocks quivered around her pale face.
"Holy shit," she said. "You guys are like the fucking twin angels of death. People keep on dying all around you."
Wendy tuned white at this accusation. It was way too close to the fears she had expressed before, but Kevin shook his head, vehement.
"We don't think it has anything to do with us," he said. "At least not in that way. We were actually going to see Lewis to warn him that we thought he was in danger."
"Danger from what?" asked Ian. "You knew that he was going to slip? Don't tell me McKinley's own low rent Cassandra had another one of her mystical visions."
"Well no. I mean yes, kind of. Not a vision… Just…" Kevin sighed. "I guess we better start from the beginning."
"Kevin's theory," Wendy said, "is that everybody who got off the ride before it crashed was supposed to die that night. That somehow us getting off threw some sort of celestial accounting out of whack, and now something –Death, the universe, fate, whatever- is trying to balance the books by killing us all off one by one."
