The Final Girl Read online

  The Final Girl

  Kenneth Preston

  Copyright © 2021 by Kenneth Preston

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Book Cover Design by ebooklaunch.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Also by Kenneth Preston

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  She pressed her right hand to the stab wound on her abdomen. The blood trickled from beneath her fingers, down her shorts, her bare right leg, and onto her sneaker, leaving a thin, dotted, crimson trail in her wake. She shuffled along the short trail, opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

  It had been a sweltering predawn morning before the girl had been stabbed, but now she was cold and growing colder by the moment. Her strength was virtually nonexistent, but she could still walk, sort of. If she could run from the horror, she would, but running wasn't in the cards for her. She just didn't have the strength. But walking would get her to where she needed to go―hopefully. She hoped she would make it to the playful voices off in the near-distance, just beyond the treeline. She attempted another scream. Nothing. Her only hope for survival was one wobbly shuffle-step after another. Her only option was to make it to them before the blood seeping from her body drained the last of her strength and forced her to the ground where she would sink into the great unknown.

  She could see the campers now, through the trees. She'd seen the twinkling of the campfire many steps ago, just after she'd heard the laughter. They were having a good time.

  She stepped to the edge of the forest and looked out into the clearing. Teenagers. Two boys, two girls, sitting around the fire, drinking beer, talking, and laughing.

  She stepped out into the clearing and walked, one shuffle-step weaker than the last. They hadn't noticed her yet, but they would notice her momentarily, and the sight of her would scare the hell out of them. She was going to give them a campfire tale to last them the rest of their lives. She was close enough that she should have heard what they were saying, but she couldn't. It was all a mish-mash of unintelligible syllables.

  One of the girls noticed her first. She started, jumped from her folding chair, yelped, "Oh, my God," and clasped a hand over her mouth. The others turned their heads and followed suit, leaping from their chairs and gaping at her.

  One of the boys ran toward her and said something. She wasn't sure, but it sounded like, "Are you all right?" Of course she wasn't all right, but she couldn't blame him for the seemingly stupid question, if that was indeed what he had asked. It was just a reaction. It's what people said when they didn't know what else to say. He ran to her, and that was the most important thing. And she allowed herself to collapse into his arms. She wanted to apologize for the blood that was soaking into his clothes.

  She almost smiled at the thought.

  The boy was holding her, lowering her to the ground.

  He was cute. She wanted to kiss him. And she was instantly ashamed of the thought. Her mother would not approve of such thoughts, not in the slightest. But her mother wasn't with her, so her mother could go straight to hell.

  Besides, he was out of her league. He was just so beautiful. She was anything but the type of girl he would kiss. And he looked like he already had a girlfriend.

  She almost smiled again. Of all the things to think about when you're teetering on the edge of the abyss.

  He was looking down at her, and she wanted to say, What are you looking at? Kiss me or call 911! But she assumed that one of his campfire friends was on the 911 call. She would have made the call herself back at her own campsite if she hadn't been busy fending off The Man with the Pushed-in Face. And somewhere between waking up in the woods and finding her four newly acquired friends lying bloody and motionless in the clearing, she had lost her phone.

  She didn't have time to stop and check on her friends, but she assumed they were all dead. There was too much blood for any of them to be left alive. The Man with the Pushed-in Face had ended it quickly for them.

  This was all her fault. She didn't kill them, but she might as well have. She'd wanted to play the game. She'd insisted on playing the game. It was just a game to the others. It had always been just a game to the others. Then she came along and turned the game into something else. She knew playing the game was dangerous for her and for all the others, but she was willing to tempt fate. Now, her friends were dead, and she was teetering pretty close herself.

  The blood was still flowing, and her life was draining. She was beginning to entertain the possibility: This moment just might be her last. She looked up into the beautiful young man's eyes and figured that, as last moments go, she could do worse. She so desperately wanted to live, to hold the beautiful young man in her eyes a moment longer, but darkness was descending upon her vision.

  She didn't know if she was going to make it. She wasn't sure she wanted to after what she'd seen.

  But she had to live. She had a mystery to solve.

  He'd killed the others, quick and easy. But not her. One stab to the stomach and he'd walked away.

  Why didn't he finish her off?

  Why did The Man with the Pushed-in Face let her live?

  Chapter Two

  It was just after 6 am when Suffolk County Police Detective Darlene Moore arrived at the Blydenburgh County Park Campground in Smithtown, New York. She pulled her two-year-old, gray Toyota Prius alongside a row of blue and white Suffolk County police cruisers and cut the engine. She kept her hand on the wheel a moment before reaching for her tumbler, taking a much-needed swig of her hastily prepared coffee and setting it back in the dashboard cup-holder.

  The coffee was necessary. She was yanked out of a deep sleep by the blaring of her phone just a little over thirty minutes earlier. She wasn't angry about being woken up at the ungodly hour on a Sunday morning. Nobody would dare call her on her work phone so early if it weren't important.

  It was important all right. So important that she had barely enough time to throw a couple of scoops into her Mr. Coffee and throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt while it brewed. She didn't bother
to brush her teeth―She kept a pack of Certs in the car for just such an occasion―or run a brush through the mangled mess on her head. Not that anybody would give a damn. She certainly didn't, not when she was faced with something like this. She had never faced anything like this in her four years as detective or her ten years on the force.

  Four bodies. Two males, two females. All teenagers. Stabbed to death.

  One survivor.

  She stepped from her car and approached the yellow crime scene tape separating the parking lot from the field.

  "Detective Moore," a young, male, uniformed officer greeted her.

  She recognized his face but couldn't remember his name. She glanced at his name-tag. "Officer Donnelly," she said, as if greeting an old friend.

  "Unbelievable," he said nervously.

  "Yeah."

  She glanced around at the uniforms, standing in small groups of twos and threes, conversing in that way that cops do when something big has gone down. Not that she had much experience watching cops gab after something big has gone down, not something this big, anyway.

  She glanced over at the four teens leaning against a cruiser as she crossed the clearing. One of them had traces of blood on the front of his shirt. The survivor, bleeding from the abdomen, had fallen into his arms before losing consciousness. She was the lucky one. She'd managed to survive and was on her way to the hospital. Her four companions had not been so fortunate.

  The names of the four deceased? She couldn't remember. But the survivor's name came back to her instantly. Actually, it had never left her. Jill Turner. Seventeen.

  Seventeen.

  She shook her head as she neared the treeline. Now was not the time.

  She reached the treeline and stepped onto the trail, the same one Jill Turner had traversed on her way to the clearing. Darlene stayed to the right, careful to avoid the traces of blood that Jill Turner had left behind on the dry leaves and flattened grass along the center of the trail.

  Reaching the end of the trail brought the crime scene into view, and it was a bloody mess. The smoky remnant of a fire lay in the middle of the open camping area. And lying next to it was the first body. He was lying on his left side, curled up in a fetal position beside a log that was more than likely where the victim had been sitting when he'd been attacked.

  She stopped in her tracks.

  "You all right?" came a familiar voice.

  She started slightly as her partner, Harry Mitchell, stepped up alongside her. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to spook you."

  She shook her head, took a deep breath, and surveyed the chaos of the crime scene work that was taking place ahead of her. She'd seen it all before. She was a detective, after all, but she'd never seen it on this scale. No crime she had ever investigated had ever required a crime scene investigation of this magnitude. The site was a maze of yellow crime scene tape. No fewer than ten crime scene technicians in white jumpsuits and goggles were combing the clearing and the forest beyond. She counted two forensic photographers.

  "Darlene?" Harry tried again.

  "Yeah," she finally said. "Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. It's just, I've never..."

  "You've never seen anything quite like this."

  "No," she conceded. She looked at him and offered him an unspoken question, something that said, What the hell do we do next? She was a ten-year veteran of the force, and she'd made detective four years earlier, but she still looked to Harry for guidance. He was a forty-seven-year-old detective straight out of a television crime drama. In fact, if he weren't a detective, he probably could have made a good living playing one on TV. He was tall, lean, and handsome with a full head of dark hair that was almost always styled just right, clipped short around the ears and combed to the side like a good television detective's hair should be. Even when a strong gust of wind disheveled his hair, he managed to look like a television detective. He wasn't just a good-looking cop. He was a cool cop, a charismatic cop. He was like Fox Mulder if Fox Mulder were real and had joined the Suffolk County Police Department instead of the FBI. He wore that detective-style tie and dark trench coat impeccably. He even wore his badge on his belt like the detectives did on television. He'd come to Suffolk County to "settle down" after a few years of gritty detective work in the big city. He'd seen it all. He'd done it all. But after seeing it all and doing it all, and after plenty of pressure from his wife to leave the city and move to Long Island, he'd joined the Suffolk County Police Department just as Darlene was getting ready to make detective, and he'd taken her under his wing and molded her. And she was thankful for that, but his tutelage hadn't prepared her for what she was seeing and what she was about to see. He'd seen this kind of thing in the city. She'd never seen anything like this anywhere.

  "Well," he said, "it only gets worse." Leave it to good old Harry to put it to her straight.

  Darlene took a deep breath. "All right, well, let's have a look around."

  They approached the body lying next to the fire pit. It was a terrifying sight from a distance, a ghastly sight up close.

  "Gary Butler," Harry informed her. "Seventeen. A senior at Sachem High School in Ronkonkoma."

  She leaned over the body, careful not to step on the blood, and peered down into the boy's face. She wished she hadn't. His eyes were open, frozen in terror. It was virtually the only part of the victim's body that wasn't covered in blood. She scanned the body―a long, gaping wound across the victim's throat, several puncture wounds on the front and back of the victim's torso.

  "A knife," Harry said. "Numerous puncture wounds on all but the guy in the ski mask. Too many to count at this point. And all but one of the four deceased had their throats cut."

  "All but the guy in the ski mask," Darlene said.

  "Right."

  "What was his name again?"

  "Richard Caulfield," Harry said.

  Darlene stood. "Where is he?"

  Harry jerked his thumb back. "You walked right past him."

  So she had. He was lying on his back a few meters behind her. She was so focused on the body lying next to the fire pit that she hadn't seen him. He was dressed in black from head to toe, including the ski mask that had been pulled up to his forehead to expose his face. White male. Teenager. His eyes were open and vacant.

  It was only upon reaching the body that she noticed the knife, buried so deep in his solar plexus that only the black of the handle was exposed.

  "Murder weapon?" she asked.

  She immediately caught herself, but not before Harry had a chance to raise his eyebrows.

  She sighed and rolled her eyes. "For the others, I meant."

  "Probably?"

  She cut her eyes at him. "Probably? Is that your professional opinion, detective?"

  "They're drenched in blood, detective," Harry retorted. "But it appears that they were all stabbed and had their throats cut. So yeah, there's a good chance that you're looking at the murder weapon."

  Darlene looked back at the body by the fire pit. "The other two are in the woods?"

  Harry gestured to the forest beyond the tents. "This way."

  He led her to the first body―a female teen, lying face down, numerous puncture wounds on her back, abdomen, and chest. Darlene leaned over and looked at her throat. It was cut.

  "Her name?" Darlene asked.

  "Jessica Lewis," Harry said. "Seventeen."

  "Another seventeen-year-old," Darlene muttered.

  "I'm sorry?"

  Darlene shook her head. "Nothing."

  Harry didn't have to lead the way to the next body. Darlene saw it when she stood upright. She approached the victim―female teen, lying on her left side, her left arm stretched up above her head, her right arm draped down along her abdomen, numerous puncture wounds on her back, abdomen, and chest, and her throat had been cut.

  "Denise Richardson," Harry said.

  "Let me guess," Darlene said, "seventeen."

  "Good guess."

  "We have to contact the families before..." He
r voice trailed off.

  "Before the media gets here."

  She closed her eyes and dropped her head.

  "Are you all right?" Harry asked.

  She gaped at him. "Am I all right? I'm standing in the middle of a blood bath, Harry. No, I'm not all right."

  There was a moment's pause before he said, "No, I mean, these kids...they're about―"

  "Don't do that." She held out a hand as if to ward him off. "Please don't do that." She took a deep breath in through her nose and released it through her mouth. Softly, she said, "I'm fine."

  He nodded solemnly. "Well, the one piece of good news, if anything resembling good news can come from this, is that we have an eyewitness."

  Right. Jill Turner. Seventeen. "If she makes it."

  "She's gonna make it." It sounded like he was trying to reassure her.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I was one of the first on the scene," Harry said. "I saw the girl, and I talked to the paramedics. It's a superficial wound, Darlene. She'll make it." She was relieved to hear it, of course. And though she had no reason to doubt Harry's assessment of the girl's condition, her inner-pessimist told her that he was just trying to reassure her. It was his nature. She half-expected him to place a comforting hand on her shoulder. She might have welcomed it.