The students of Pinecrest High School were obsessed with Johnny the Reaper. Though some 500 miles southeast of Cypress Knolls (Johnny’s familiar stomping ground), the student body regarded him as a local icon. Some even thought he should be made the official school mascot--a request the teachers were amazed that they continuously had to deny. While the story of the seemingly unstoppable killer had spread across the whole state, a particular germ had infected the Pinecrest High students with Johnny Fever. This germ was Sigourney Badejo, Sig to her friends. Though she had her father’s last name, word got around quickly during her freshman year that she was in fact the daughter of Jamie Castle, the sole surviving victim of Johnny the Reaper’s first rampage.

      Sig had been in eighth grade when Marilyn Hansen’s book, The Final Girl, had hit shelves. It detailed Marilyn’s own encounter with the masked legend, and had kick-started a fresh infatuation with the Johnny mythos. While Sig was not named in the book, her mother was mentioned in a brief chapter about the other “final girls,” and readers had done their homework from there. Throughout her high school career, Sig caught classmates pointing at her and whispering. Some were courageous (or tactless) enough to come up and start interrogating Sig regarding her mother, and one boy had the audacity to ask Sig to sign a copy of Marilyn’s book.

      As if Sig’s dreams of a normal high school experience hadn’t already been crushed, her junior year saw the release of a television exposé covering the Johnny legend, which was now all over YouTube, ready to be conjured up by any student with a smartphone.

      By now, most every student on campus was intimately acquainted with Johnny’s history. He had first appeared in Cypress Knolls during a rainstorm in the late summer of 1989, wearing his bizarre pagan mask chiseled from stone and wielding his signature sickle/sword. A group of teens vacationing in a hunting cabin had fallen victim to his inexorable fury. Only eighteen-year-old Jamie Castle had survived by running the bastard down with a car. As no one could identify him, he had been entered into the Cypress Knolls morgue as a John Doe. This, along with the reaper’s blade, had inspired some clever reporter to concoct the name Johnny the Reaper. It stuck.

      The story didn’t end there, however. The mutilated body, which everyone had agreed was unequivocally dead, disappeared from the morgue, and since then Johnny sightings were a common occurrence in Cypress Knolls and the surrounding area. He was the resident Sasquatch. Unsolved murders were frequently credited to him, regardless of their M.O.

      Since Johnny’s first appearance, there had been several well-documented cases of mass murder involving a man sporting the familiar mask and blade. In the television documentary, the late Sam Campbell, who had been Cypress Knolls’ sheriff during Johnny’s first killing spree, expressed his take on the whole affair in an archival news interview: “I think there are some very sick people out there who’ve decided that Johnny is the mask behind which they can live out their fantasies.”

      Still, there were those who thought that it was the same man--if he was a man--returning time and again to spill the blood of the hapless and unwitting. This belief was fueled by the fact that, regardless of the number of times the killer had allegedly been put down, no body was ever recovered.

      While most of the survivors of Johnny’s previous massacres had declined to appear in the documentary, Marilyn had been happy for the chance to share her story yet again. “It was the single most horrible experience of my life,” she recounted to the off screen interviewer, “but I feel I’ve come out the other side stronger for it. The expression ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ has never applied more literally.” This was also the platform where Marilyn announced the impending release of her sequel book, The Final Women, which delved into the horrors faced by all of Johnny’s other survivors, including Sig’s mother. Now, at the end of Sig’s senior year, the new book was out, and word had it that Marilyn was actually going to hold a reunion back in Cypress Knolls for all the “final women;” complete, of course, with a book signing.

      All this did nothing to help the already strained relationship Sig had with her mother. Sig knew that Jamie had no particular aversion to her; she just had an aversion to people in general. Jamie’s attempt at a family life, Sig mused, seemed like a failed experiment by someone trying to reclaim some sense of normalcy. Sig was the product of that failed experiment. Neither parent had ever told her anything of the sort but Sig accepted it as truth.

      As Sig stood in the cafeteria line, she caught for what must have been the millionth time a pair of students pointing at her from a distant table. One had a cellphone in hand, undoubtedly playing that goddamned TV special. Sig’s BFF, Heather, caught sight of them, too. “Hey,” called Heather, “are you wagging that finger this way because you want me to come break it off?” The students withdrew their hands and looked away. “That’s right, assholes,” Heather muttered.

      Sig smiled. Heather was as fearless and uncensored as others only wished they could be. Whereas Sig tried her best to graciously ignore all the unwanted attention, Heather had no reservations about describing to gawkers the various injuries she’d inflict on them if they didn’t avert their gaze. She was like a loyal bodyguard protecting a mob boss. Sig had never asked for this service, but appreciated it nonetheless.

      Sig and Heather were an amusing contrast. Sig was petite, with shoulder-length chestnut hair she had inherited from her mother, and a lightly bronzed skin tone she’d inherited from her father. Over the years, she’d amassed a rather conservative wardrobe of light, unpronounced colors--browns, beiges, khakis and oatmeals--in an unconscious attempt to better blend into the crowd that frequently singled her out. Heather, on the other hand, was an Amazon. She towered over Sig, and her head was crowned with an explosion of jet black hair that fell to her mid back in shimmering curls. Her clothes were loud and colorful, her shirts always a size too small. A black leather biker’s jacket was her signature article.

      The two exited the cafeteria together and headed for the outdoor lunch tables. Heather popped a cigarette in her mouth. “Last day of this shit,” she mumbled as she lit up. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to be out of here.” They sat side-by-side at an empty table. “You know, Sig, you should think about changing your name when you go to college so people will leave you alone. How about your middle name and the name of your first pet?”

      “That’s how you make your porn name,” Sig remarked.

      “What’s wrong with that?” asked Heather.

      Sig thought for a moment. “That would make me Eleanor Mr. Fish.”

      “I like it.”

      A small woman whose face was a mass of wrinkles stormed over to the table. “Heather Miller!” she crowed. “Hand that over right now.” Heather dutifully relinquished the cigarette. “You’re not out of high school yet, young lady.”

      “Yes, Mrs. Barker,” Heather replied in a bored, sing-songy voice. As this was the last day of school, the woman could really do nothing else but storm off indignantly with the confiscated cigarette. Heather watched her go, then slipped another into her mouth and ignited it. “Y’old bitch.” These were the moments that made Sig love Heather.

      “Hiii, Siiiig,” rang out an irritating voice. Sig and Heather rolled their eyes in perfect unison. Shawnee Bell, the resident princess of the graduating class, strutted over to the lunch table. Shawnee was like a walking magazine cover. Her hair was perfect. Her makeup was perfect. Her clothes were perfect. Her figure and her skin and her boobs were all perfect. It therefore stood to reason, to Shawnee anyway, that she was perfect, and needn’t bother with troublesome things like tact or common sense. She wasn’t mean-spirited. She just had a medieval sense of entitlement that caused the peasantry to either stare at her in awe or else fight the urge to storm her castle and cut off her head. Heather would have happily wielded the sword.

      Sig forced a smile. “Hello, Shawnee.”

      “So,” Shawnee squeaked with a commercial-worthy toss of her hair, “last day of school--I have to ask: what’s it like growing up with Mommy Dearest? Was there a lot of, you know,” and she waved her arms as she rasped, “‘No more metal hangers!’?” Shawnee tittered at her own wit, and Sig chose not to tell her she had misquoted the line.

      “Wow, Shawnee,” she said instead. “Four years of high school and you’re absolutely the first person to ask me about it.”

      “Omigod, really?” asked Shawnee, oblivious to the sarcasm in Sig’s voice. “‘Cause I’d think everybody would want to know.”

      Heather interjected, tapping a spot on her cheek as if to imply Shawnee had something on hers. “Hey, Shawnee. You’ve got something right around here.”

      “Yeah right, Heather,” Shawnee sneered. “I’m not falling for that again.”

      “Hey, ladies. What’s going on?” Corey White, Sig’s boyfriend, strolled up to the bench, backpack slung over one shoulder. He was by all accounts a pretty boy, and Shawnee never neglected to crank the Flirt-o-Tron up to five thousand whenever she was around him.

      “Hiii, Coreeey,” she sang at him. “Are you looking forward to grad night?”

      “Yeah, I guess,” Corey replied as he glanced over Shawnee’s shoulder at the other girls. Heather pointed to the spot on her cheek, and Corey, taking a cue, tapped the same spot on his. “Uh, hey,” he informed Shawnee, “you know there’s something right around...”

      “Oh, shit!” cried a mortified Shawnee, who tore off to find the girl’s room.

      “I’m gonna miss her,” said Corey as he rounded the table and stood behind Sig, looking down at her from above. “Hey, you.”

      “Hey, you,” Sig echoed, looking straight up. Corey bent down and gave her an upside-down kiss--what they called the Spider-Man smooch. He set down his backpack and joined the girls on the bench, picking at Sig’s food.

      “So, Sig’s dad’s out of town,” Heather informed Corey. “I say, tonight, Twilight marathon, and we take shots every time Edward does the rapey smile.”

      “I can’t,” answered Sig glumly. “I’m supposed to go to my mom’s house after school.” The others leaned back from Sig, sporting cartoonish expressions of bewilderment. “Way to be subtle, guys.”

      “I didn’t think you two got along all that well,” Heather said.

      Sig shrugged, feeling the need to defend her mother. “We get along. She’s just, you know, not all that great with people. The only person she really has to talk to outside of work is her cat.”

      Jamie sat in the veterinarian waiting room with Tabby in her lap, surrounded by fellow pet owners and their animals. She’d been waiting for over an hour, stroking Tabby’s copper fur, feeling the swells and contractions of the cat’s side with each labored breath. Soft rock music filtered through a speaker in the room, lulling Jamie’s anxious thoughts. Her head drooped. She became faintly aware of the opening chords of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” It surrounded her, drowning out the whines of sick dogs and the squawks of ailing birds, until there was just the music.

      Just the music.

      No, there was something else, too, barely audible beneath the melody. Was it the distant roll of thunder? The storm clouds had hung over the cabin all day, and as night descended they’d finally broken. Jamie didn’t care. What she wanted wasn’t outside. It was sitting right in front of her in a large armchair across the rustic wooden room; he was tall, muscly without being bulky, with messy, platinum blonde hair. Jamie’s hips swayed as a standup radio cassette player sang to them from a nearby table:

      Every breath you take
      And every move you make
      Every bond you break
      Every step you take
      I’ll be watching you...

      Jamie half walked, half danced across the room to the teen heartthrob sitting in the chair, watching her sway with hungry eyes. She unbuttoned her blouse, and the boy ogled the bulges of her white bra. The blouse slid off Jamie’s shoulders onto the floor.

      Every single day
      And every word you say
      Every game you play
      Every night you stay
      I’ll be watching you...

      The young stud hooked the belt loops of Jamie’s jeans with his fingers and gently guided her onto his lap. She straddled him, heart fluttering with nervous excitement.

      Oh, can’t you see
      You belong to me...

      The boy’s body jerked as he let out a violent cough, and Jamie felt a warm spatter against her chest. A strand of crimson drooled from the boy’s lips. The point of a curved blade protruded from his sternum like a bloody, curled finger.

      Jamie recoiled and fell to her back on the floor. A tall figure stood behind the now lifeless boy in the chair; darkly clad, face hidden behind a bizarre, sculpted mask. It ripped a long, strange blade with a curved point out of the young man’s back, causing the body to spasm.

      Jamie raced to her feet as the intruder came round the chair toward her. His blade whistled through the air. Jamie felt a searing pain run up her right arm.

      She screamed and sprawled to her knees. All around her, dogs barked, cats shrieked, and birds cawed. Someone asked, “Are you alright?”

      Jamie was on all fours in the waiting room, Tabby on the floor just beside her. She tried to shake off the nightmare, but the music had followed her back out into the waking world:

      Every move you make
      Every vow you break...

      “Turn it off,” Jamie shouted. “Somebody turn that fucking song off!”

      The music stopped abruptly. Jamie looked up at the receptionist staring nonplussed back at her, a hand on the dial for the speaker volume. Glancing around, Jamie saw that all eyes were on her. “Thank you,” she mumbled almost inaudibly.

      Tabby lay on an examination table, barely able to move. Jamie stood against the wall and watched as a middle-aged woman in a lab coat concluded her examination and removed a pair of latex gloves. The woman turned to Jamie. “I’m afraid there aren’t really any options at this point. We can schedule an appointment for another day. However, if you have the time, I’d personally recommend doing the procedure now.”

      The words hung in the air for a moment. “That’s it?” Jamie finally asked. “One quick exam and ‘let’s put her in the ground?’ What about treatments? What about surgery?”

      The veterinarian responded calmly. “Tabby is suffering from a number of ailments. She has arthritis, renal failure, and there are signs of intestinal cancer.”

      “I’ve had this cat for seventeen years,” declared Jamie, as if it might somehow change the diagnosis.

      “That’s a long time for a cat,” the doctor replied. Her voice was not without sympathy, but it also left little room for argument. “I know this can be difficult, Ms. Castle, but Tabby isn’t living right now. She’s just waiting to die.”

      Jamie took a final look at her poor, crippled companion, then turned her face away. “Fine. Kill it.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 3: Visions