(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] I woke up moaning in pain.
My head covered by some kind of a cloth.
Everything was dim for a few seconds
until the sack was ripped off.
The sudden light blinding me.
Then I realized just how much trouble I was in.
The room in front of me was full of men and women
all of them wearing identical masks.
The masks should of been terrifying
with flat dead eyes painted onto rough cloth.
Probably cut from the same burlap
that had been covering my head seconds earlier.
But I was still too stunned to feel much of anything.
It looked like I was in some kind of basement.
The masked figures were all facing me
except for the one doing the talking.
Pacing back and forth behind me, a knife in his hand.
He was talking about growing,
something about careful selection.
His fervor growing with each word.
None of that mattered to me.
All I could think about was how I ended up here
in the first place.
My cousin Marcy never made it home one night,
seemingly vanished into thin air
on the dark country road she walked each night.
There had been over a dozen disappearances that year.
All of them kids around our age.
The problem was between the drugs, the drinking,
and the boys, Marcy had been trouble on two legs
before she made it to 15.
So nobody was surprised when she went missing.
They all figured she had taken up
with one of her many older boyfriends,
or gone to some party that hadn't ended yet.
But I knew better.
Marcy was my best friend and she told me everything.
There were no boyfriends or parties,
at least not on the day she went missing.
Days turned into weeks and eventually
people stopped asking questions.
But I kept looking everywhere I could think of,
asking questions, reading newspapers,
keeping notes for the rest of my junior year.
I learned more from my own investigation
than I ever did in school.
Things that a teenaged girl should never know.
By the time fall of my senior year rolled around
I knew that Marcy was gone forever.
I thought maybe her disappearance was some sort of penance
for the things we had done in high school,
a payment for our sins.
Either way, it stopped mattering to me.
I'd finally accepted she was never coming back.
But that final stage of grief gave me something
I had never had before, a fierce resolve
to claim vengeance for whatever happens to her.
It was that same fall when I found my walking on the road
that Marcy had disappeared on a year earlier.
I didn't notice the station wagon pulling up in front of me
until the headlights broke me from my reverie.
There were two passengers,
out-of-towners from what I could tell.
They offered me a ride but my mother's warning
echoed in my head, so I declined, continuing on my way.
That was the last thing I could remember clearly.
Then something hit me over my head
and all I could see was darkness,
and that brought me to now,
chained to a chair in a basement
listening to the leader as he preached to his followers.
"Each of us has a purpose, we're all parts of a whole,
"and together we are a family," he practically shouted.
The leader finally stopped placing a hand on my shoulder.
"And to usher in new blood we must take old blood."
The leader passed his knife to one of the followers
sitting in front of me.
It was already too late for all of us.
But these masked murderers didn't seem to realize that yet.
The leader beckoned to the group,
"let us rise as one and support our brother."
The small crowd in front of me all stood in unison
as the man with the knife stood over me
raising it high over his head about to strike
when a field hockey ball smashed into his face
shattering his jaw.
I began to laugh.
As the leader turned to look
at the bottom of the basement stairs,
and there she was, he tattered Catholic school uniform
hanging off her pale frame with lank, dirty hair
blocking her face and crooked neck.
Shelley had arrived.
A few of the brave colt members rushed her,
thinking they could take her out on her own.
They were wrong, she was quick.
The field hockey stick moving faster than the eye could see.
She took off one of their heads with a single swing,
splattering the wall with a shower of blood.
The leader looked to me with confusion
and terror in his eyes.
My voice was cold, pure rage and fury washing over me,
mixed with a health blend of acceptance.
Marcy Emerson was my cousin,
it took me a long time to find you,
to figure it all out.
But I did.
Marcy and I we did things, ruined people's lives.
Made them hate themselves, I said.
We were just kids but that's no excuse.
The girls we bullied deserved better.
Shelley deserved better.
I looked up at the leader through my tears,
my eyes cold and hard.
I knew if I walked that road enough
you'd eventually take me.
That's where you always took the others for your sacrifices,
but I also knew Shelley was coming for me.
She's been coming for all of us these past few weeks.
Everyone who did her wrong, I said.
And after that it was all a matter of timing.
Make sure you took me, so when she came to collect
what she was owed, she'd have to kill
each and everyone of you twisted freaks to get to me.
It was happening faster now.
The sunny family cult scrambled for any exit,
trying to get to the small windows out to the yard above
but it was futile.
I was still tied to my chair
so there was never any chance for me in the first place.
Shelley mowed through the cult,
splitting another member's chest open with a wet crack.
Before I knew it they were all dead, except for the leader.
He stood in front of her, rusted knife clutched in his hand.
"We are a family," he said defiant.
Then Shelley gutted him like a fish,
his insides spilling out onto the floor with a wet splat.
The leader tumbled to the ground
leaving the basement suddenly very quiet
except for the sound of Shelley's broken throat.
She stalked towards me.
The bloodied field hockey stick dragging
on the concrete behind her.
I smiled, ready.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," I said.
Then the hockey stick came up.
The last thing I saw before a cloud of my own blood
clouded my vision for the last time.