It’s suddenly all too much, and the adrenaline drains from my limbs as quickly as it filled them. Other joggers continually pass me, the gravelly crunch of their footsteps warning of their approach. Giving up, I slow to a stroll, move to the path’s edge and walk the rest of the way home.

Back at my building, I’m relieved to see that Jonah Thomson has departed. In his place, though, is another reporter, idling on the other side of the street. On second glance, I decide she’s not a traditional reporter. She looks too edgy for mainstream media, reminding me of those unapologetic Riot Grrrls who roamed Williamsburg before the hipsters took over. A leather jacket sits over a black dress that hugs her hips. Fishnet stockings rise out of scuffed combat boots. Her raven hair is a parted curtain that provides only a partial view of eyes ringed with liner. She wears red lipstick as bright as blood. A blogger, I surmise. One with a far different readership than me.

Yet there’s something familiar about her. I’ve seen her before. Maybe. My stomach flips with the sensation of not recognizing someone even when I know I should.

She recognizes me, though. Her raccoon eyes assess me through the dark drapes of her hair. I watch her watch me. She doesn’t even blink. She merely slouches against the building across the street, making no attempt to blend in with her surroundings. A cigarette juts from her ruby lips, smoke swirling. I’m about to head inside when she calls to me.

“Quincy.” It’s a statement, not a question. “Hey, Quincy Carpenter.”

I stop, do a half-turn, frown in her direction. “No comment.”

She scowls—a storm cloud darkening the landscape of her face. “What? I don’t want a comment.”

“Then what do you want?” I face her head on, attempting to stare her down. “Aren’t you a blogger or whatever?”

“No. I just want to talk.”

“About Lisa Milner?”

“Yeah,” she says. “And other stuff.”

“Which makes you a reporter. And I have no comment.”

She mutters—“Jesus Christ”—and tosses the cigarette into the street. She reaches for a large knapsack sitting at her feet. Heavy and full, whatever’s inside presses against the frayed seams when she lifts it. Soon she’s across the street, right in front of me, dropping the knapsack so close to me that it almost lands on my right foot.

“You don’t need to be such a bitch,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Listen, all I want to do is talk.” Up close, her voice sounds husky and seductive. Cigarettes and whiskey ride her breath. “After what happened to Lisa, I thought it might be a good idea.”

I suddenly realize who she is. She looks different than I expected. A far cry from the yearbook photo that was printed everywhere one long-ago summer. Gone is the too-high hair, the ruddy cheeks, the double chin. She’s thinned out since then, shed the cherubic glow of youth. Time has made her a taut and weary version of her former self.

“Samantha Boyd,” I say.

She nods. “I prefer Sam.”

CHAPTER 6

Samantha Boyd.

The second Final Girl.

Of the three of us, she probably had it the worst.

She was two weeks out of high school when it happened. Just a girl trying to scrape together money for community college. She got a job cleaning rooms at a highway motel outside Tampa called The Nightlight Inn. Because she was new, Samantha had to work the red-eye shift, fetching towels for exhausted truckers and changing sheets that reeked of sweat and semen in rooms occupied only half the night.

Two hours into her fourth shift, a man with a potato sack over his head showed up and all hell broke loose.

He was an itinerant handyman with a boner for the parts of the Bible few like to talk about. Whores of Babylon. Smiting the sinners. Eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. His name was Calvin Whitmer. But after that summer, he would be forever known as the Sack Man.

The name fit, for he carried lots of things in sacks. The back of his pickup was full of them. Sacks of empty tin cans. Sacks of animal skins. Sacks of sand, salt, pebbles. Then there was the sack of tools he carried to The Nightlight Inn, filled with saw blades and chisels and masonry nails. Police found twenty-one tools in all, most of them crusted with blood.

Samantha personally met two of them. One was a sharpened drill bit that found its way into her back. Twice. The other was a hacksaw that caught her upper thigh, severing an artery. Her brush with the drill bit came before the Sack Man lashed her to a tree behind the motel with a loop of barbed wire. The hacksaw was after she had somehow managed to break free.

Six people died that night—four motel guests, a nighttime desk clerk named Troy and Calvin Whitmer. That last one was Sam’s doing, once she freed herself and got her hands on the same drill bit that had entered her back. She leapt atop the Sack Man and plunged it into his chest again and again and again. The cops found her like that—trailing barbed wire, straddling a dead man, stabbing away.

I know all this because it was in Time magazine, which my parents assumed I never read. That issue I did, poring over the article under the covers, pen light clenched in my sweaty palm. I had nightmares for a week.

Sam’s story, meanwhile, made the same rounds as Lisa’s and, eventually, mine. Evening news. Front pages. Magazine covers. Oh, how the reporters came running. Probably the very ones who would later camp on my parents’ front lawn. Sam granted a handful of print interviews, plus an exclusive one to that TV bitch with the Chanel-scented paper, likely for more or less the same price given to me.