Final Destination 3, page 7
part #1 of Final Destination Series
Ashley and Ashlyn exchanged disgusted looks.
"Let's ditch this loser," said Ashley.
"Hell yeah," said Ashlyn.
They hopped out of the car and started for the exit.
Frank stood up. "Hey!" he called. "Where you babes going? Wait a minute."
He scrambled after them, keeping them framed in the view screen of his DV cam as he ran out the exit.
Lewis looked over Ian and Erin's heads at Kevin, sneering. "Dude, what the hell's the matter with you?" Lewis said. "You need to control that bitch."
"Fuck off, Lewis," said Kevin. "Even if she was my girlfriend, which by the way she isn't, I'm not some fucking caveman like you."
Lewis failed to fuck off. He raised his voice to a girly squeak, mimicking Wendy.
"We're going to crash. We're going to crash." He grunted and returned to his normal voice. "She's probably trying to get some attention. Just like a bitch."
The two hooded girls slipped out of their car and away without a word, heads close together and exchanging whispers. Wendy looked down, embarrassed, but Kevin turned and started toward Lewis.
"Hey, enough already," Kevin said, face flushed and angry. "Leave her alone."
"What do you care?" Lewis asked. "I thought you said she wasn't your bitch."
"She isn't anybody's bitch," Kevin said. "And I said leave her alone."
Lewis's voice rose up into high-pitched baby talk again. "Leave her alone. Leave her alone." Lewis smirked. "You're starting to sound just like a bitch yourself, man."
"Fuck you," shouted Kevin.
Lewis stood up in the car. "Fuck me? Fuck you."
He pushed Kevin. Kevin grabbed for him, and Lewis blocked the grab with a sweeping left, accidentally backhanding Erin, who was cowering in the car behind him.
"Ow! You dick," she cried, hand up to a bright red mark on her paper white cheek.
"Fucker," Ian stood up and threw a weak punch at Lewis, who returned it with a wide haymaker. Ian ducked and grabbed Lewis's arm. Kevin took advantage and leapt on Lewis, throwing punches. Bludworth and Colquitt turned at the noise of the fight.
"What the hell?" said Bludworth.
Colquitt advanced, hefting his flashlight.
"Hey!" he called. "Break it up. Break it up,"
The two security guards waded into the fight, trying to push the combatants out of the car. One of the passengers in the front half of the cars started chanting a line from an old Ramones song.
"Hey! Ho! Let's go!" they cried. "Hey! Ho! Let's go!"
The rest of the riders picked it up.
"Hey! Ho! Let's go! Hey! Ho! Let's go!"
In car number one, Jason was turning and craning his neck, trying to see what was happening. All he could see were the tops of Kevin and Lewis's heads, and fists flying.
"Let me out," he cried. "Lewis, you asshole, get off him. I'll fuck you up."
Colquitt and Bludworth dragged and pushed Kevin, Ian and Lewis out of the cars, and shoved them to the ground. Kevin and Lewis kept slugging each other. Erin followed Ian, weeping. Wendy looked on with her hands over her mouth. Everybody who could was turning around and watching.
"Let me off," Jason was shouting. "Wendy. Kevin. Hang on, I'm coming."
Colquitt looked up from trying to hold Kevin and Lewis apart. He shook his head at the attendant. "No way," he said. "Don't let anybody else out. We don't need any more trouble." He scanned the cars and waved at the attendant. "Get the rest of them out of here. Start the ride."
"All right." The attendant nodded and then returned to the console.
"Hey! Ho! Let's go!" chanted the remaining riders.
"No! You can't!" screamed Wendy.
She started toward the attendant. Colquitt broke away from the scuffle and hustled after her. The attendant pushed the 7-12 button and all the restraints on the empty seats closed at once.
"Let me off," bellowed Jason.
"Stop! Stop!" screamed Wendy. "The tracks are broken. The cars are going to crash."
She grabbed the attendant's arm. He shoved her back, and Colquitt caught her and pulled her away.
Wendy fought and squirmed fiercely against him.
"Don't," she begged. "Don't please. Please!"
The attendant ignored her and pushed the button.
Wendy looked toward the front of the train as it jolted into motion. "JASON!" she shrieked, but she couldn't find his face.
The train disappeared into the tunnel. She sagged in Colquitt's arms.
Colquitt shook her, angry. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he asked. "You don't touch the equipment. You don't assault the staff. We could have you arrested."
Kevin stood up as Bludworth muscled Lewis up and pushed him, Erin and Ian toward the door. Kevin started toward Colquitt.
"Hey, ease up," he said. "Give her a break. She freaked out. Let her settle down. She'll be alright."
"Yeah," said Colquitt. "She'll settle down at home. And so will you." Colquitt grabbed Kevin's arm and turned him toward the exit. "You guys are eighty-sixed with all the rest."
He kicked open the emergency exit and pushed them through. They went down a short flight of steps to another door and went through that. They came out outside, right next to the superstructure of the roller coaster. One of the loops was right overhead. The half full train rocketed above them. Squeals of joy and excitement reached their ears.
"See," said Colquitt, sneering. "Everything's fine. It was just your imagination."
"Yeah, Wendy," said Kevin. "It's all right, see?"
Colquitt started to lead Wendy and Kevin away from the coaster. Suddenly the metal pillars of the superstructure groaned and shuddered, as if subject to unusual stress. The three of them turned simultaneously and looked up, trying to find the train in the clutter of beams, posts and track. As they watched, it rose up over a hill. The front car was shooting up a huge plume of sparks.
Wendy's mouth dropped open in horror as she realized that her vision was really coming true.
"What the hell?" Colquitt said.
Kevin gasped with a stunned disbelief. "No way," he whispered.
Colquitt's hands fell away from Wendy and Kevin's arms. Through the pipes, the three of them watched as the damaged car raced for the second loop. There was a scream of rending metal, and the crunch of horrifying mechanical impacts. Red and orange lights flickered. They flared off the slack contours of their stunned faces.
Wendy shrieked.
"JASON!"
5
Wendy
Wendy sat, sleepless and numb, on the foot of her bed. It was 5:15am. She had not slept. In fact, she'd barely slept more than an hour at a stretch since the accident.
The accident. That word, accident, uttered so many times by officials, her parents, and the media that it no longer seemed to have any real meaning for Wendy. The details of that horrible night were alternately painfully vivid, then dull and distant, like something viewed underwater. Certain images stuck like shrapnel in her mind. One of Carrie's slutty shoes, wet with blood, lay on the ground next to an empty paper cup. The look of raw superstitious fear on Colquitt's face as he backed away from Wendy, wiping the hand that had touched her on his pant leg as if she were contagious. On the other hand, things that seemed important, like what happened to Kevin or how she got home from the park, were all a jittery blur of overlapping confusion.
That was fourteen days ago. Three hundred and twenty four endless hours that felt like centuries, during which Wendy moved like a silent sleepwalker through her house, while her mom and sister tiptoed around her and treated her like she was made of glass. Her sister cried constantly, flinging herself into a sobbing heap on the nearest piece of furniture at the least provocation, and acting almost as if she were more affected than Wendy by what had happened.
Her mother, Sophie, was well-meaning, but mostly ineffectual, prone to hysteria and fearful of everything she didn't understand. Unable, as always, to find a way to communicate with her distant and shell-shocked daughter, she had seized on food as the solution and went on a mad cooking spree. She followed Wendy around with carob brownies, whole wheat cheese sticks, fresh mango and a million other healthy treats, begging her to just have a little something to keep her strength up. The thought of eating anything repulsed Wendy, but she forced herself, if only to make her mother feel better.
Her father, on the other hand, was far more understanding. He and Wendy had always been close, often sneaking off together to dodge her mother's endless restrictions, and swearing each other to secrecy after watching a forbidden movie or eating unacceptable junk food. He was a quiet, thoughtful man who liked fixing things, and taught Wendy how to play cribbage. Julie was their mother's baby, but Wendy had always been her daddy's girl.
There was more to the father-daughter relationship than that, because Grant Christensen was also a Marine. He had been shipped off to the Gulf War when Wendy was a toddler, and baby Julie was still in the hospital from the first of her complex, open-heart surgeries. He'd taken a bullet in the right knee and received a medical discharge from the service less than six months later, but several of his closest friends had never made it home from Desert Storm.
When Wendy got back to the house that awful night, her mother had assaulted her with sobbing hysterics and hot, smothering embraces, clutching at Wendy and wailing. Her father had simply looked into her eyes and let her know without words that he understood.
Several days later, when Wendy was standing in the living room and starting, unseeing, at some flashy car commercial on the television, her father came in and sat down on the couch. He just sat there for a long, silent minute, watching the screen as the car commercial changed to a cereal commercial, and then spoke.
"It gets easier," he said. "I know it's hard to believe that now, when you're all locked down and frozen, but eventually time passes and it will be safe to feel again. For now, all you can do is live through each minute."
Wendy really hoped that he was right, but living through each minute was like living through an ice age. She couldn't sleep, but she really didn't feel awake either. Nothing seemed real. She felt like a big, dead puppet, just going through the motions. Everything she did seemed utterly pointless now that Jason was dead. The funerals were like a dream, distant and half remembered. Wendy had stood there as they lowered Jason into the ground, watching them shovel dirt over the coffin, and remembering the strong, beautiful body that she would never have a chance to know.
She'd felt like some kind of impostor, like an automaton that moved only in simple, programmed, repetitive ways: nodding her head, accepting condolences from members of Jason's family that she had never met. Yes, I'm the girlfriend, she said, over and over until she wanted to scream. Jason's mother had collapsed into howling tears, and had to be supported by Kevin, but Wendy felt nothing. All of her emotions were frozen under six feet of ice. As the days dragged on, she lived in constant fear of that ice melting. Her vast, monstrous anguish and loss, once unleashed, would eat her alive.
So she stayed frozen. She took care of things, did chores, organized her desk, sought comfort in order. Her bedroom, her beloved little sanctuary where everything was exactly the way she liked it, now seemed like a meaningless prison full of things that no longer mattered. She found herself remembering how hard she had fought for the spare, modern, white on white look she'd wanted for her room. Julie had chosen an over-the-top, glittery, Middle Eastern brothel style for her room. To Wendy, it always looked like the aftermath of a catfight between drunken belly dancers, and she longed for simplicity and clean, precise lines in her own private space. Her mother had argued that white would be too hard to keep clean, but Wendy had insisted, and every surface of her little sanctuary was as immaculate and pristine as the day she had painted over the happy lions and giraffes of her childhood. Sitting there now, in the cool, pre-drawn hush, all her efforts seemed so irrelevant. The chaos that she sought to tame within the walls of her orderly, white sanctuary had finally won. All the obsessive compulsive magic in the world had been unable to stop it.
She had gone through the room the night before, like a sudden hurricane, struggling to eradicate anything that reminded her of Jason, any painful sparks that might melt her protective ice. There were so many things, so many memories. She had packed away the obvious stuff, the photos, a sweatshirt of his that he had let her borrow one night when she was cold, birthday cards, a stuffed bear he gave her when she had the flu, and a postcard of Wednesday Addams from the old television series, cut into the shape of a heart.
It seemed like everywhere she turned there was something else waiting to ambush her with hot, painful memories. If only she could eliminate everything that reminded her of Jason, she could keep the tears from coming. She knew that if she started crying, she would never be able to stop. In her desperate and obsessive need to control her feelings by controlling her environment, she packed away every single thing she could find, but it was impossible to eliminate everything. Jason had been so much a part of her life. Everywhere her gaze fell, there was something that led her mind back to him. A light blue dress that he had always teased her about because he said it made her look like someone's mom. A framed photo of her dead grandmother that he always turned to the wall when he came over, because he said he thought the old gal didn't approve of him, and he didn't like her watching them. Wendy kept seeing herself push him away that afternoon on the lunch quad, telling him there would be plenty of time for kisses later. She had been wrong. There was no more "later" for Jason. For Wendy, on the other hand, later was just an endless dry stretch of empty frozen nothing.
In the chilly, pre-dawn darkness, she wished over and over that she had just kept her mouth shut, just stayed on that ride and died with Jason. Then it would all be over.
Wishing was useless. All she could do was get up, take a shower, brush her teeth and hair, and pick out clean clothes. Keep moving, keep busy and never let the ice melt.
Today was graduation day. She had not been back to school since the accident, and although Julie had offered to pick Wendy's diploma up for her, Wendy knew there were things she needed to take care of herself. She could not just stay locked in her room forever. Life went on, and she had to face the world eventually.
Wendy got up and started getting ready.
6
Kevin
Kevin found that he didn't need to be asleep to have nightmares. All he had to do was close his eyes. The flood of horror and carnage came back again and again, as vivid and awful as that night, the night of the accident.
When the coaster crashed, Kevin had cast off the clutching arms of the security guards and ran to the scene of the smoking wreck, out of some misguided idea that he could help, could save someone, anyone. That had been the worst mistake of his life.
The things he saw had been burned into his mind forever. He saw a girl's long, brown hair coiled around a jagged chunk of metal, a wet red flap of scalp on one end and a cute pink scrunchie on the other. He saw a meaty slab of ribs that looked just like ribs in a butcher shop, only they were all dirty on one side, and sitting incongruously beside a giant fiberglass ice cream cone that had split down the middle and fallen over. It had been hard to tell the difference between metal and bone. Everything was slick with blood and hydraulic fluid, and the fragments of broken coaster cars seemed moist, organic and violated. By comparison, the mechanical structures of the shattered human bodies seemed artificial and contrived.
When he finally found what was left of Carrie, Kevin only recognized her by the glint of crystal that dangled from her navel piercing. When he spotted it, it was half-buried in a messy stew of red, purple and black. There was a long, jagged, white bone sticking out that might have been a leg or maybe an arm, but he couldn't see anything that looked even remotely like a head. That's when the ill-advised, deep fried Snickers came back with a vengeance. The horrific stench of hot metal and burned plastic were mixed with the odors of death and blood, and the rich shitty stink of entrails. The stink wormed its way deep into Kevin's nostrils as he vomited again and again, kneeling in the bloody dust with tears streaming down his cheeks. When he was able to stand, someone tried to lead him away, someone in a uniform, but he would not go. He had to find Jay.
He searched through the wreckage in endless, frantic circles, but he never found anything that he could be sure was Jason. Just pieces, grisly, unrecognizable pieces, and ragged scraps of those stupid McKinley T-shirts, jaunty and ironic letters proclaiming "I Survived Devil's Flight!" It was all like some awful kind of joke. He kept telling himself that maybe Jay was okay somehow; maybe he was alive and taken away by an ambulance or something. Then the thought of Jay made him think of Wendy. He had promised Jason that he'd take care of Wendy, and then he'd left her alone. He ran back to where they'd been standing, but she was gone. The last thing he remembered was half sitting, half falling down on his ass on the tarmac with his arms wrapped around his shaking body. He must have been crying, because his cheeks felt wet, but he couldn't hear anything. It was as if his head was stuffed with cotton. The next thing he remembered was being home, sitting on the couch with his dad and mom and three brothers, all stiff and static, placed like ceramic figures in a drug store nativity scene.
"Back up, son," his father had said. "Be glad you got off."
No one else said anything, and eventually Kevin got up and went into his room. He could tell that his family was more embarrassed by his anguish and grief than anything else. They wanted him to feel better, not so much because they loved him, but because then the whole uncomfortable business of dealing with his untidy emotions would be over with.
Kevin's family had always revolved around his father. His father was a stout, blue collar, bull of a man who had brought himself up by his bootstraps and now owned his own custom shelving business. He despised displays of emotion or other signs of weakness, so the entire family habitually with Kent Fischer was like living under a shaky military truce. So long as no one broke the rules, you could almost pretend everything was okay.
