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" SOMEBODY HAS TO SAVE THIS FRANCHISE! "
alexa, play TRANSGENDER by crystal castles
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"Auntie!" I weakly cried out, praying to God that she could hear me.
Footsteps that I prayed were hers could be heard picking up their pace, coming in my general direction. I mean, she could still pass right by me without noticing I was there, but this is Sidney Prescott we're talking about here. A final girl for twenty-six years now. She never leaves a single stone un-turned. She triple checks every single corner before she turns. If she didn't find me, or couldn't see me, then she would go down in history as the stupidest final girl ever, right alongside Lori Campbell.
"Oh my gosh, Tatum!" Sid came into my sight, squatting down next to me with clear concern etched into her facial features. "What did they do to you?"
I shook my head and winced as she moved to apply pressure on my back, "Brie-Brielle, is she...do you know if she's okay? Don't worry about me, I need you to find out if she's okay."
"If Brie's okay? What-why? Tates, we need to get you out of-" She clearly was more concerned for my well-being than Brielle's, and that needed to change.
She didn't understand. I couldn't lose her. Brielle is my best friend out of the entire world, and if I lost her after everybody else? Well, I don't think I could handle it. I loved her. If I lost her, I would lose myself too. And that would be no good for anybody.
"No!" I did my best to be demanding. "I need to stay-I need to see this through. For Wes...for Dad."
That guilt trip should work.
"Oh-okay, okay, I'll find Brielle for you. That Amber girl, she shot Gale-"
"Is Gale still alive?" I asked, still lacking that necessary worry I should have for my birth mother at this moment in time.
"Yes, but-"
"Okay. Go find Brie, I'll stay put."
"Mark said you would need this," She held out an epinephrine injection thing from her jacket pocket, and I couldn't help but faintly laugh. "Said he talked to you and your dad about it once, uh-can you do this yourself?"
I took the injector-thing from her hand, "I can take care of it. Just go." And with that, she did indeed resume her adventure throughout the house.
I didn't even have the strength to resume the adventure throughout my mind, which was shocking to me. But, I mean, I wasn't necessarily upset about it-usually my thoughts reeked more havoc on me than anything else ever could. Maybe it was a good thing. Did I just...confess my love for Brielle? No. Don't think about that. Not the time. It was, however, time to figure out when I should inject myself with adrenaline. From only one past experience, I knew it usually took five or six minutes to fully kick in. I didn't know when I would need to help out again, or when I would need to fight for my life again, but I most definitely needed to figure that out-and fast.
What if the killers bring everybody in here? That's what happened in 1996, and these two seem pretty obsessed with sticking to the original. Not a single killer could be entirely original, could they? That would be more interesting instead of going back to the original source material and trying to copy them but do their own thing at the same time. Especially when it has been done four times by different people in the past twenty six years. Like, grow up. Mature a little. Write a script for a Stab movie instead of making it based on real events.
I heard a lot of screaming and shouting and clashing, and ultimately pieced together that Richie had revealed himself. I could hear Brielle being one of those shouting voices, and oddly enough, that relieved me. All of a sudden, I heard fast footsteps, and out of nothing but fear, I injected the adrenaline into my thigh. It would set in for long enough to act helpless, and then end these bitches. Amber came in throwing Sidney into the counter, and Richie came in dragging Sam and Brielle. Brielle got tossed right next to where I had been lying, and I pulled myself into a standing position.
"Somebody has to save the franchise!" Richie exclaimed, and I turned to see Amber's gun right at my head. I was frozen. "No one has made a great Stab movie since the first one-not really."
Sam got thrown down as well. Amber hopped up and down with excitement. I wanted to kill her right at this moment. How sick does somebody have to be to be excited and happy about seeing their friends injured-their friends dying? Was she ever really my friend? Or was this her plan along?
"Hey baby," Richie looked over at Amber, and I felt like throwing up. "You wanna go get the uh, very ex-Mrs. Riley?" He was staring dead at me.
I couldn't make a single move, or even remark, about how he referred to Gale. A part of me hoped her wound had knocked her unconscious. Not that she was dead. Well. Maybe a little bit that she was dead, but-no. No.
"Yeah I do," and she walked out of the house, probably to go and grab the 'very ex-Mrs. Riley'. My breathing became labored, and I pressed myself against the cabinet area, trying not to go full-Julie James yet. I needed to wait a little bit longer, but I could feel the adrenaline beginning to set in. Sidney went to run away, and as Richie went over and stopped her, I pulled Brielle off of the ground and discovered a stab wound on her hip. That sent chills down my damaged spine, and I didn't pay any attention to whatever it was that Richie was bitching and moaning to Sidney about.
"What the hell happened up there?" I asked, referring to when Brielle, Laina, and Amber were fighting upstairs.
"Amber went bug-fucking-nuts on Laina all of a sudden," she explained, "We ran upstairs 'cause we figured the doors would be blocked. The windows were a safer option...or so we thought."
Something didn't feel right, but I would revisit that thought later on.
"Gale!" Sidney's voice was shaking as Gale was dragged in and tossed onto a chair by Amber.
Thank you, Amber. No. No. Bad. Stop it Tatum. That's your mother. You hate Amber. Amber is a murderer. Amber killed your boyfriend and your father and your best-worst friend. Oh my gosh, Amber killed my boyfriend and my father and my best-worst friend.
"Sit the fuck down!" Amber shouted when Gale tried to move, and I was sincerely shocked that Amber didn't just resort to violence, like she had with me and everybody else she had fucking murdered.
"Back up!" Richie advised Sidney, which made my blood boil. "Back up..."
He and Amber swapped where they were standing; I could feel the adrenaline come in just a tiny bit more. Amber did a little Psycho reference with how she treated her gun, and now stood in between both Sidney and I.
"You did all of this just to make me the hero of your fucked up movie?" Sam asked, and it took everything within me to not laugh-it was beyond obvious that Samantha Carpenter would not be a hero in this movie. She was set to be, as I'm sure Richie was about to explain, the villain of 'Stab 9'.
"Sweetie," I did my very best to hold back laughter when Richie spoke to Sam. "You're not the hero...you're the villain." He explained this in such a simple way that it almost bluntly made sense. None the less, this was an extremely disgusting plan. "The daughter of Billy Loomis who sees fucked up visions of her dead dad." That was news to me. "Sidney Prescott killed your father. You did all this just to get her back to Woodsboro."
"You know what the biggest problem with the Stab movies is?" Amber asked as she traced the blade down my jawline, and I shook my head as a reply. "There's no Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. No bad guy to keep comin' back. But the illegitimate daughter of the original mastermind?! Now that's a fuckin' villain."
It suddenly wasn't so hard to pretend to be weak in my knees after Amber's last sentence.
"How did you know?" Sam asked, looking as horrified as everybody felt.
"Oh, about your father?" Amber turned her head to face Sam for but a second before turning back to face me, giving me a comedic look that almost made me laugh. "I mean it's a small town and your mom's a drunk! I met Richie on the Stab sub-Reddit," she went back to her casual monologue, "I have been obsessed ever since my parents bought this house-not to mention who I was best friends with. We realized pretty quickly we had similar ideas."
"It wasn't that hard for me to find you in Modesto." The way specifically Richie bragged about this made me sick to my stomach. "It wasn't that hard for me to fuck you either. But I guess being a sexually woman in this world is supposed to be empowering these days-"
"You sound sexist." Brielle could not have said a more Brielle thing to say in that moment-it threw everybody off, killers and victims alike.
"Excuse me?" Richie seemed genuinely offended again.
"Don't make me repeat myself." The blonde seemed to be high, but I knew personally that she was completely sober. Or at least she was when I last saw her, pre-killers being revealed.
"But it wouldn't work with just you, Sam." Amber brought us back onto the heated topic at hand. "See, we had to bring the legacy characters back to make it matter. Can't have a bonified Halloween without Jamie Lee!" She shouted right in my face, and as I winced and backed up the little bit that I could, her voice was brought back down. "Dewey had to die to make it real-"
I didn't let her finish her monologue, no, she lost that privilege. I spit right in her face and punched her boob. If she wasn't down from the boob punch, I would have a newfound respect for the asshole. Not too much respect, though, because of her thought process of how it wouldn't be a good Stab movie if Dewey Riley didn't die. There were plenty of others to kill in order to 'make it real'. He didn't have to die-fuck, nobody had to die! If they were such hard-core Stab fans, they could've written a script and sent it to directors. No, they didn't want a new, better Stab movie-they were psychopaths trying to cover up as fans. As expected, Amber punched me only once, but hard enough to make me hit my back against the counter. And predictably, with my injuries, that had me down for the count.
"Don't you get it, Tatum?" She asked. "Anybody can die in a requel!"
And she stabbed Sidney Prescott in the stomach.
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i'm almost done with this book and i don't wanna be cuz ... cuz that's scary