Archive of Our Own

After the interview, the detective says to Allyson, "Let's get you home." He's looking at her like he expects her to brighten up upon hearing it, but the word, home, only keeps her sitting there in the hard foam chair of the interview room.

"Where's my mom? And where's my grandmother going to go?" she asks again. There's a fistful of tissues wadded up in her hand, soaked through with both blood and mucus.

"We're going straight to your mom's, okay? We're all going to meet up there," the detective promises, showing her the way to the front doors of the station. A police cruiser is parked right outside, askew against the curb. He opens the door for her, motioning her forward. The flashing lights make black honeycomb shadows out of the steel partition, casting a net over the back seats.

Allyson opens her mouth and screams.

It's only once they're back home, with everyone sitting on the couch in the living room, that the officers remove their hats, and the detective says, "I'm so sorry. Ray has passed away."

That night is the first time Allyson ever sees her mother cry. Real tears. Sucking, heaving, gagging ones. The shock of it stems her own tears, and she just sits there, staring at Karen, while the police officers stand around murmuring into their radios and exchanging uneasy looks. She overhears them discussing the 'multiple casualties' when she gets up to pour herself a glass of water.

Allyson stands in front of the sink, watching as the water bubbles up to the lip and then begins flowing down her hand, over her purpled knuckles. The detective had taken time to photograph each and every one of her injuries, telling her to lift her arm so he could see the forming bruises, or holding a wound up to the light. He'd walked around her body, done the whole three-sixty, and then brought a female officer in to take pictures of the places beneath her clothes. The both of them had kept on apologizing. All Allyson remembers is just standing there, pliant as a mannequin.

Grandmother arrives late, accompanied by two officers and looking so exhausted that Allyson wishes she could chase all of the strangers out of their home and put her to bed. That Laurie will be staying with them goes without conversation or question. Even from here — in the suburbs, far from that dry, lonely wood — they can smell the smoke. Woodsy, clogging. It's still burning. A full purge. Allyson knows that because, when she looks through the living room window, she can see the orange aurora bleeding into the black sky.

By the time the officers leave — one unit stays behind to watch their home and the street, but it's cold comfort — it's nearly five in the morning. Her mother has cried herself to sleep on the couch, and Allyson envies her, because she's exhausted, too, but the thought of laying down and closing her eyes and trying to think of nothing seems like too much to ask of herself right now.

Allyson watches Laurie walk in circles, from living room to kitchen to study to bathroom, checking every single lock. On her third circuit, Allyson gets up to follow her. She pads after Laurie and finds her in the kitchen with her back turned, her hands closed around the windowsill, pushing hard on it, testing the strength of the lock. Once, twice. She watches her grandmother strain, and then go still. In the reflection on the windowpane, Allyson sees nothing of her face.

"Grandmother?" she says, her voice cracking.

Laurie isn't saying anything, so Allyson reaches out and slides her arms very carefully around her grandmother's waist before burying her face in her back, right between her shoulder blades. She feels Laurie's hands float down to rest on top of hers. They're rough hands. Allyson doesn't remember a time when they weren't. Laurie's calloused fingers wiping ice cream off her cheek. Grabbing her by the arm before she could take her bicycle sailing out into the street. Showing her how to shuffle a deck of cards. Those are her memories, right? They must be. Right now, they feel so far away.

"I'm sorry, Allyson," whispers Laurie, quietly. So quietly. Drawing into herself, shoulders coming together, spine curving forward, spiraling inwards. Her elbows hit the windowsill, and her hands slide up under her glasses, fingers sealing over her eyes, rubbing them.

To know what to say, Allyson would have to know how she feels, and she doesn't. She thinks that part of her is burning away in that basement, too.

As soon as morning has properly come about, revealing the horror of last night's events to the world at large, the phone begins ringing.

And ringing, and ringing. Within eleven minutes of non-stop calls, Laurie goes around the whole house, viciously ripping the phone cords out of the wall, and Allyson wants to say something to her, something like, Mom wouldn't like that, but she can't get her lips to move or her tongue to flex or her teeth to come apart to let her voice through. She watches Laurie circle back with all the cords, dumping them onto the dining room table. She has not stopped moving at any point. Watching her is distressing.

Allyson has been sitting at the foot of the couch for the past three or four hours, listening to her mother breathe through a very deep sleep. There's a high-pitched sort of buzzing in her ears — maybe it's because she's exhausted, or maybe it's because of the explosions of fire that had burst from her grandmother's home, right in front of them as they stood on the lawn holding one another — and she spends the hours just listening to it. It tells her nothing, and that feels comforting right now.

There's a knock at the door. She and Laurie look at one another. Allyson's stomach wrenches, and suddenly there's a knot thickening in her throat, and she's pressing her back to the couch cushions, her elbow jostling her mother, making her stir uncomfortably. Each breath she takes pitches violently in her throat and stops there. Disconcerted and afraid, her hand floats up to her sternum, trying to loosen whatever's tightening up her chest.

Laurie hisses something under her breath, and then she flings open the door, and whoever's on the other side barely gets a moment to say hello before she says, "Go away."

Allyson sucks in a little gasp, listening to the plain and dull tone of the stranger at the door. It's not someone there to hurt them. Can't be. Just a person. A regular person. She rocks forward, her stringy hair falling into her face. The motion wakes her mother up, and soon Allyson feels her hand on her back, her hoarse voice asking, "What's wrong?"

She shakes her head urgently, not understanding. The front door slams. She hears the lock engage, and then Laurie stomps back into the living room. Looking at her, Allyson tells herself to breathe again.

She's afraid to ask her mother or grandmother if they'd seen what she'd seen, staring down at Michael Myers from the top of the bunker stairs. Can't bring herself to ask if they'd read into those dark eyes, the way she had, and then gotten a sense of acknowledgement. A reply.

Reporters are camped out on the street and the sidewalk, as close as possible to the property line as they can get without breaking the law; there's nothing that the patrolling officers can really do about it. They've been there for the past forty-eight hours, or something close to that. Allyson doesn't have much of a sense of time passing. Not when they have yet to leave the house or open the windows. If it's night or day, she doesn't know. The police officers have been coming directly to them for the follow-up interviews; Allyson has been through her story about five times so far, and each time she tells it, she says less and less.

Laurie opens the door occasionally to tell the reporters to leave, and sometimes they do, but the ones who have traveled from far away — the officer in charge of their case says that news outlets from many different countries have traveled to Haddonfield to cover the shocking story of a mass murder spree on Halloween night — remain right where they are, determined to elicit some kind of statement. Laurie's more strong-willed than any of them, though, and it's a struggle they won't be winning. She's still got a pistol holstered to her hip, and she's still on the move, constantly circling the house, going up and down the stairs, rummaging through the pantry and refrigerator to try to coax her daughter and granddaughter to eat. Allyson occasionally manages to nibble on some crackers or bread, until her father or Vicky or Oscar or Dave come back into her head, and then she's not hungry any more, and she has to run upstairs to throw up what little she'd gotten down.

On the evening of the second day after — they're living in an after now, as opposed to the lives they had before, the ones they'll never get back — Karen starts to go through her husband's belongings. Allyson feels an unpleasant jolt when she realizes that they must plan a funeral for her father, just as Vicky's parents must be planning one for her. And Oscar's, and Dave's parents. And their neighbors. The officers. So many people.

Her mother asks, "Do you want to help?"

Allyson's sitting at the kitchen table, where she's been stirring her spoon through a cup of uneaten yogurt for the past fifteen minutes. "No," she says.

Karen winces. She looks pained. Later, Allyson can hear the soft sound of her weeping floating down from upstairs. When Karen returns a couple of hours later, she places something down on the table in front of her. Allyson looks. It's her dad's cell phone. All the same scratches. The clunky protective case. It's an old model, too.

"If you want to get in touch with your friends," Karen says, her eyes lowered, "you should. It'll be good for you, honey." She's using her therapist voice, trying to sound like she knows what she's talking about. Like she's in control. But she couldn't be more wrong.

"Nothing's going to be good for me right now," Allyson says. Her voice is this grey, flat reverb she's never heard before. "Who am I going to talk to? Vicky? My friends are dead, Mom." The last part comes out sounding sharp, angry, broken, and the sudden inversion of her emotions makes her feel nauseous. She wants to cry, but she can't force it out. She hasn't been able to shed a single tear since it happened. It. Him. He happened.

Karen looks stricken, but Allyson can't summon up an apology. She slumps against the table, clutching the phone in her hands, letting her forehead hit the wood with a thunk, causing a bruise on her temple to begin throbbing. She can feel the little pulses right behind her eyes as she listens to her mother walk away. She wishes she'd asked her to stay and hold her instead.

When she charges the phone, she's too afraid to look through it, scared she'll see a photo or a text or a note that'll force her to think about her dad. So she logs out of everything and logs back in on her own accounts, and the moment she does, a flood of messages come in. Teachers, coaches. Casual friends. Acquaintances. Distant family members. Co-workers from summer jobs two and three years ago. They all seem to know.

She turns off the send read notification option and keeps scrolling without replying. Her thumb stops over one name.

She turns the phone off.

The detective returns on the morning of the third day, and, at Allyson's request, goes through the results of the investigation on Laurie Strode's property. But there's only one thing Allyson really wants to know, and the detective seems to be aware of it, because it's the first thing he tells her, blanching.

"No body was found," he says, and then, his eyes searching her face, immediately adds, "That's to be expected, given the extensive damage to the property. We're still looking."

Allyson's chin floats up, then down. She has to tell herself to do it. Stay sitting there, close-lipped. Nodding, the way the detective's tired, hopeful eyes are asking her to. Allyson's always had respect for her elders. Her father had taught her so.

There's a seam running down the back of Allyson's head, or maybe a scar. When she brings her fingertips to it, she can feel the zipper teeth of the hard keloid ridges, but when she digs her nails in, they burst like abscesses, dripping a hot and slippery liquid that she first mistakes for pus before she smells the blood.

Her tense fingers dig in deeper, reaching in to find the split in her scalp. When she feels it out, she grips tight to peel it open. She can hear her hair ripping, the skin splitting, the vulgar bubbling of blood pouring out. It doesn't hurt. But there's something inside. She can feel it. Underneath the tear. She needs to pull it out. Her shaking fingertips brush against her exposed skull, and she abruptly realizes that it, whatever it is, is not under the skin. There's a fissure in the bone that soon becomes obvious. She fits a finger through the crack, wiggles it to widen it. Like a shattering windshield, she can feel little fractures collapse outwards, weblike, and soon she's able to pick great chunks of her skull out of her scalp. They're falling to the floor, one on top of the other, in a lake of blood fed by the waterfall coming from her head.

Her hands are so slippery that she can barely grasp the pieces, but there's just a few more. She reaches around in the pus and the blood and the mush of her brain to find the last little shards. Soon, they're all gone, and now, now she can finally get at it. The thing inside her head. She slides a hand through the slit in her scalp to grab it.

There's something damp and hot on her hand. It's rhythmic. She gropes around, not understanding, finding that it's so much bigger than she'd expected — too big, unnaturally big. It shouldn't be there, inside her head. She tries to find a way to pull on it. And then her fingers feel out the rubber texture. The angles. The shape of it.

Mouth. Nose. Holes for eyes.

She begins screaming, and then an arm comes fully formed out of the hole in her head to reach around her neck, choking her silent, locking the screaming and the terror and the pain inside with it.

And then she wakes up.

The curtains are still closed on the fourth day. Allyson hasn't changed her clothes for the past two, maybe three days. She can't remember. Her hair is tangled and oily and when she pulls herself up to the mirror to do something about it, the prospect of dealing with it is all at once exhausting — not worth it — and she just walks back over to the couch.

The TV's on, but she can't make herself watch it. Sure, she can sit on the couch and put her eyes on the TV and stare at it, but there's no way to process the images or colors or sounds. It's all coagulated confusion.

Somewhere, she knows, in a cold locker, her father is awaiting cremation. Sometime tonight, her mother said. Allyson had tried not to listen.

Haddonfield High is hosting a candlelight vigil for Vicky, Oscar, and Dave, along with the other victims. They've invited her. Told her that she can take as much time as she wants to go back to school, or start learning by correspondence. She hasn't returned their calls. They'd dropped off a letter, too, but her grandmother has been attentive with the mail, vetting anything and everything, tossing most of it into the recycling. Allyson's taken to ignoring her e-mail, too; by her last count, at least three dozen different news reporters have all managed to get a hold of her e-mail address, and all of them are begging to talk to her. It seems incredible to Allyson that the whole world wants to know about what happened in Haddonfield, when it seems like everyone in Haddonfield would rather forget.

Allyson waits until her mother has fallen asleep and her grandmother is preoccupied on the phone with the police chief before she quietly pads up to her room and gets dressed. She yanks a brush through her hair, trying to work out the painful knots, before she gives up and instead puts a hat on. She takes a scarf and winds it around and around her face, and then she slips one of her mother's coats out of the closet. It's maroon, with a fur trim, and nothing like anything she's worn at school before. When she pulls the hood up and examines herself in the mirror, seeing only her eyes and the dark circles beneath them, she decides that she's unrecognizable enough.

The entire population of Haddonfield must be at the vigil. There's news cameras, too; flashbulbs keep popping. There are so many candles piled at the entrance of the school that it's almost as bright as daytime next to them. They're melting all over one another, oozing down the front steps, cooling and hardening into weaker, formless shapes. There are flowers and cards and photos. Vicky and Dave, his arms around her waist. A photo from Oscar's second grade portrait day. A close-up shot of Vicky in middle school, smiling wide, braces gleaming. Dave and his father on a camping trip. Oscar on stage in last year's school play. Vicky as a chubby toddler, sitting in a wading pool. All kinds of selfies; Allyson sees herself in a lot of them.

Her classmates are standing there, weeping and holding one another but mostly silent, because nobody knows what to say, what to do, what to think. Someone releases a handful of balloons into the sky, and Allyson watches them, tails trailing like so many colorful jellyfish in the depths of the dark.

The tears won't come. She wonders, in her febrile daze, what she's lacking. Why all of the people around her can cry about it, but she can't. When Allyson tries to put a finger on how she feels, it slips, it burns, it disappears. It feels like she's swallowed a mouthful of anesthetic, and now it's warming her stomach, numbing it out, twisting through her bloodstream. Soon, the effort of standing there, breathing damply into the scarf, brings on a strong wave of revulsion, so she turns around to leave. She sees Cameron standing at the outskirts of the crowd, his hands in his pockets, his head canted downwards, chin nearly pressed to his chest, no one else around him. For a wild and irrational moment, she wants to run into his arms, screaming, but the urge passes as soon as it came. He's not the person she thought he was. And now she's not, either.

She'd always struggled to understand how Grandmother's experience had managed to inform her life so completely. Swallowed it up whole, ground it down between its teeth, spat her out in a puddle of spit and bile, ate her again, over and over and over in a cycle. Didn't understand why Laurie Strode was okay with it being like that, with being the sad, paranoid basket case, with being the person people recognize but then try to avoid. Growing up, Allyson hadn't understood much about the relationship between her mother and grandmother. She'd known that, at twelve years old, her mother had been placed in the foster system, and it had a lot to do with what had happened to her grandmother.

Get over it, she'd said to Laurie, in her ignorance, just a few days ago. Get over it. Not knowing why she couldn't. Frustrated to see her pain. Just wanting them all to be a family. A real family. But Michael Myers had always stood between all of them, set imperceptible boundaries that Laurie could not permit crossing. He'd been there, the whole time. In their family. In their bloodline. Always there, looking over Laurie's shoulder. The specter of him tormenting her mother. A vague idea to Allyson, distant and abstract but implicitly threatening. He'd been there, in their family, in their home. Always.

Shadows can't be held or touched. But they're corporeal enough to shroud any light.

Allyson gets it now. She'll always be the 'one that survived.' For the rest of her life.

She's in the bunker, sitting at the foot of the stairs, and that's how she knows she's having a dream, because everything on her grandmother's property is supposed to be gone. It's quiet. She can hear the buzzing of a loosely-fit light bulb above her head. Below her bare feet, a rat goes skittering by. She doesn't jump. There's a sensation of waiting that comes to her. Not anticipation or dread. Just waiting. It feels important that she wait down here.

Her mind feels sleepy and pleasant, and her head's swaying as she sits. She tries to will herself not to fall asleep. She must wait.

A soft hiss whispers out from deeper within the shelter, a fluid steady little whistle, and she listens to it. Soon, she detects a sharp odor. It slips in through her nose and thickly coats her tongue, making her gag. Run, she thinks. Get out. But she needs to keep waiting. There's something she needs to be here for.

The smell grows stronger, and she can hear the hissing coming from upstairs, too, and off to her side, and from the ceiling. Her head starts spinning. The air is laden with it, saturating her clothes, her lips, getting into the spaces between each of her fingers. She knows she should run, but she needs to stay.

Behind her, something thuds on the top step.

Then another, a little closer.

Another.

The stairs groan under the weight. Allyson keeps her back turned, her shirt pulled up to her nose and mouth, squeezing her eyes shut. It's here, she thinks.

Another footstep. A pause, like there's some consideration in the act. And then another. Soon, Allyson feels the tips of his shoes pressing into her lower back. The light in the kitchen above leaks down onto the basement stairs, stretching his shadow out, tall and taller and wide and wider, but she recognizes the shape.

Heavy hands on both of her shoulders. Allyson trembles violently. She rocks forward, whimpering, unable to get her sluggish, acrid mouth to move. The hands close tight around her shoulders, pull her back, making her sit upright.

There's something brushing up against the shell of her ear. She listens to him breathing into her neck, slow and measured, each one in perfect stillness, no deviations. She has a sense of the mass of him, crouched behind her on the stairs.

His hands slide around her shoulders. She expects them to seal around her throat. But nothing happens. When she opens her eyes, she sees those rough hands are holding something, right in front of her face.

A matchbook.

Allyson takes it. She pulls a match free. And then she finally takes a look over her shoulder, forces herself to see him. The only sign that he's acknowledging her is the breathing. She lingers. He doesn't move. His arms are still draped around her shoulders. He seems to be waiting for her action.

She strikes the match. They burn, the both of them, in fateful destruction, and she realizes that this is what she was waiting for.

"You need to teach me how to use a gun," she begs Laurie.

Her grandmother closes the book she's been trying to read. It helps to have something to take your mind off things, she'd said gently to both Allyson and her mother, earlier in the week. Laurie already knows all the tricks and tips and helpful points of dealing with trauma — it's a word she wants no ownership of — and Karen has been receptive, because retreating back into her psychologist mindset seems to be the only thing holding her together. Allyson hasn't been able to do anything of the sort. She's ignored all attempts her mother has made to try to get her involved in her father's funeral planning. She hasn't checked her social media accounts at all. She hasn't spoken to any friends or responded to any reporters or watched television or listened to music. She's just existed, somehow. Just existed, when seventeen other people aren't.

"Allyson," Laurie begins, stricken, and somehow she'd known her grandmother would respond this way.

"Please, Grandmother," she says. She's winding her hands together, clenching and unclenching, desperate. "I... I need to know. We don't have to tell Mom. We don't have to tell anyone."

Laurie's gone pale, her eyes shimmering behind her glasses, her hair a wispy white cloud around her jaw. "Michael Myers is dead, Allyson," she says. But it's quiet.

"You don't know that," says Allyson, her teeth clamped together, barely getting the words out. She wraps her arms around her body, rocks in place. "You heard them. They didn't find a body."

"No one could have survived that," says Laurie thinly. She's tense, her eyes looking anywhere but at Allyson's face. "It was foolproof. I had forty years to come up with that plan, Allyson. I went through it all. I know... I know he's gone."

Something twists and snaps in her. There's a surge of something like resentfulness. "But you don't!" shouts Allyson. She's never shouted at her grandmother before. Ever. "They didn't find anything! Don't you think they should have found something? Don't you think that maybe there's a chance he got out of there?"

"That's not possible," whispers Laurie. Her gaze is somewhere far away. "There would be no way to get out. I know you're in a lot of pain right now, sweetheart. And I'm... I'm so sorry. But this... He's not going to hurt us again." She closes her eyes, tips her head back against the armchair. "He's not," she repeats.

A laugh, a shocked little bark, tumbles out of Allyson's mouth. She realizes that she's become her grandmother. That they've traded roles, and now she's the irrational one, the paranoid one, rambling about Michael Myers' inevitable return. The lucid and logical part of Allyson knows that it really shouldn't be possible, that the trap had been perfectly designed. But every other part of her — instinct, feeling, self-preservation — doesn't buy it. Maybe her grandmother and mother don't remember it, but Allyson does. She has a perfect mental image of Michael Myers standing on those stairs, looking straight at her, unbothered, unaffected.

"You... you have to," pleads Allyson. "Please. Please."

Laurie looks hurt. Looks like she's lost in memories. A life spent underground, behind bars and walls, the pity of the entire town. Preparing and waiting. Allyson's grandmother had been so, so strong, and she hadn't fully understood it until it had happened to her, too. But, right now, she looks tired. She looks weak. And she looks like she's finished fighting.

"No," says Laurie, with both pain and finality. Allyson decides to forgive her for it, just as she decides that it's not going to stop her.

At midnight, almost exactly one week after the events — there's no way in Hell she's ever going to call it the Haddonfield Massacre — Allyson makes sure that both her mother and grandmother are fully asleep before she heads downstairs. A lot has been moved around in the home; Karen's put together several boxes with her father's belongings in them, intending them for a future organizing spree that will likely never come about. It's in those boxes that she begins her search, digging through certificates and tools and hardcover crime novels. Eventually, she comes up with the spare key for his car. She also finds a little bottle of brandy, which she takes with her, too. She knows he'd be angry if he knew she was taking his car and drinking his alcohol, but he can't. He can't get angry at her any more because he can't do anything any more, or ever again.

She doesn't have much driving experience, but she does have her route memorized, which makes it a lot easier, since she doesn't have to get nervous about navigating. Soon, the soft lights of the suburb give way to long, empty roads, dark forests shedding leaves. When she pulls up to what used to be Laurie Strode's home, she doesn't recognize anything at first.

There's police tape prohibiting anyone from going on the property, but Allyson just pulls it apart and walks through, because she doesn't see a single officer or firefighter around. The fire has long since stopped smoldering; what's left is just a pile of carbon and dust, awaiting cleanup by the county as soon as the Warren County Police Department deems it devoid of any further evidence.

After getting out of the car with the bottle in her pocket, she makes her way up the path that used to lead to the front door. The closer she gets, the stronger the smell becomes. She hadn't brought a mask, but she did bring gloves, and she's got rubber boots on, so she doesn't hesitate to tread into the ashes. She can make out vague shapes in the black: what used to be the foundations of the home, the fortifications her grandmother had set up. Something that probably used to be a lamp. Piles of indistinguishable debris. Kitchen utensils, gleaming through the wreckage. Allyson walks the property slowly, each footstep disturbing the grave of her family's old life.

Then she finds it. The opening to the basement. It's half-covered in rubble. She drops to her knees in front of it and clears it out, not knowing what she expects or wants to see. A sweat has broken out all over her body, soaking through to her clothes. Her hands are shaking. Despite the flashlight hanging from a cord around her neck, she feels afraid here, in the dark, in this place where so much pain had come to a head.

She can't see down the stairs into the basement. When she shines her flashlight down there, she sees that most of it has collapsed. The path beyond the staircase is fully blocked, and it doesn't look safe to descend them. She flicks her flashlight around again, feeling a swell of panic and frustration. Nothing there. Nothing. The police had already looked. She doesn't know why she's trying.

Allyson sits back — right on the ashes, because who gives a shit any more — and fishes the bottle of brandy out of her pocket. She uncaps it clumsily and takes a big swallow. She's never been much for alcohol, and she still isn't. She takes another swallow, then another, before she gets on her hands and knees and begins digging through the ashes by the handful. Trying to find something. Anything. She needs to know he's dead. For good.

It needs to die.

An hour later, she's covered in soot, coughing on it, trying to rub it out of her eyes. She hasn't found anything. Because, she thinks blankly, knowing it in her gut, he's not here.

She downs the rest of the bottle and sits there for a while, listening to the wind brush through the trees, the call of birds and insects. When she gets up, it hits her all at once, making her stagger. She doesn't even manage to turn the car on before she passes out in the driver's seat.

Supine and immobilized, Allyson is staring up at the ceiling. A bright white light shines back down at her, but she can't flinch or close her eyes; she can't move a muscle.

He's standing there next to her. She only realizes it when he moves into her field of view. His head drops to look down at her from behind the mask, as if registering that she can see him. Allyson wants to hit him, shriek, run. She can't do anything.

A hollow inhale. Exhale.

He lifts his hand to her stomach, and for the first time she realizes that she's nude, and that's enough to get her moving. She manages to turn her head a little, groaning. Her fingers twitch. Myers doesn't acknowledge that. He flattens his hand on her stomach, and she feels something weird, something moving around. It takes a minute for her to understand that it's his fingers. Inside of her.

Allyson cranes her neck, puts every ounce of strength she has into lifting it up enough to look down at herself. She sees that she's been cut from sternum to groin, and her body's just gaping open, red, pink, wet, bloody. Throbbing under the fluorescent lights. Little veins running over the organs she can see. And Myers' right hand, sunk into the middle of it all, like she's a jar and he's reaching for its contents. Another groan escapes her, whining and pathetic. She still can't move.

Myers tilts his head towards her, like he's interested in her expression, before he uses his left hand to roll the sleeve of his coveralls up. Allyson doesn't comprehend why until it happens.

He leans in over her, just for the leverage, and then he thrusts his arm in and upwards, up to the elbow inside of her. If she could scream, she would; as it is, she only lies there. She can feel his hand beneath her rib cage, between her fluttering lungs. The pattern of his breathing hasn't changed at all. He simply stands there at her side, reaching for something inside of her.

His hand finds her heart, and when he grabs onto it, she realizes that he could form a fist around it, if he wanted to. But he doesn't want to. What he does do is pull on it, hard, and rip it free from her body. Blood sprays into the air, splattering his mask and her face. The last thing she hears before waking up is the wet sound of him dropping the organ on the floor.

When Allyson wakes up, it's the crack of dawn, and the sunrise is coming in through the car windows and splintering her hangover into a dozen different types of migraine. Before she can even fully process the nightmare, she has to abruptly open the door so that she can lean out and vomit. It's barely anything, just liquids, really. She heaves and gasps for a while until the stomach pains fade, and then she checks her dad's— no, it's her phone now. She has several missed calls from both her mother and grandmother, along with a lot of unknown numbers, as well as the detective. None of them go acknowledged.

The nausea eventually fades, so Allyson starts the car up and enters coordinates for the next town over, an hour and a half away. She goes right to the bank. Somehow, the teller doesn't question why a seventeen year old girl is there asking to withdraw $3000 from her savings account. Maybe he hasn't had his coffee, she wonders. Either way, she has the cash in an envelope, and she knows where to go next.

Peter's Firearm Supply isn't open for another half an hour, so she waits in the car. By the time it opens, she's chewed most of her fingernails down to stubs.

There's only one person manning the front counter. He introduces himself as Peter (the one and only, he adds,) and asks her, "Whaddya want, lil' lady?"

It's all overwhelming; the walls are covered with guns. Different models, types. None of them familiar. "I don't know anything about guns," admits Allyson nervously. She realizes how bad she must look and smell right now, her clothes covered in black smudges, her breath reeking of puke. She self-consciously moves back from the counter a little. "What can I get for three thousand dollars?"

Peter laughs. He's not looking much at her. "That's way more'n you need. But I can set you up good."

"Okay," she says, expecting to feel relieved, but it doesn't come. She watches as Peter hums to himself, moving through the display cases to pick out a few models for her to look at.

"Take it you're not the firearms type," he says conversationally.

"No." Allyson can't take her eyes off of the handguns he's placing down on the glass counter top. She still can't believe she came out here, or that she's doing this. Her heart is thudding hard. She still feels afraid. Maybe even more than usual, somehow. It just doesn't feel like this will be enough to keep her safe. Just like her grandmother had known that there wasn't much that could keep herself safe through all those years.

"God damn, though," Peter sighs. "Lotta people been coming in this week. Ever since that shit went down in Haddonfield. Got people scared out of their fucking minds. Who can blame 'em? Everyone thinks it ain't gonna be them until it is."

Allyson's mouth goes dry. Her heart stills, then redoubles its pace. She feels a drop of sweat on her forehead that she reaches up to rub away. "Did you know anyone there...?" she asks, faintly.

"No. And thank God, right? I can't even imagine what those people are going through." Peter shakes his head, frowning.

Eventually, they settle on a model that Peter promises will be both effective and efficient. "The Glock 36. Underrated. Subtle enough that nobody'll ever even notice you're carrying. Fantastic little thing," he says. "When you've got something like this on you, you'll never have to worry about anything ever again."

She appreciates the sentiment, as wrong as he is, but she's nervous about the six-bullet capacity. Is it enough? she wants to ask, but the question sounds so childish in her head she can't make herself say it. She watches as Peter piles up a few boxes of .45 ammunition, and she hands over the cash when prompted. It runs her less than seven hundred dollars, which surprises her. Seven hundred dollars to defend a life.

Or end it.

Peter shows her how to pack the carrying case and reminds her not to keep it loaded unless she thinks she's going to need to use it. Allyson nods silently, her lips gummed together, as she takes the box. At no point does he make her sign anything or even ask her for her ID, which is a relief. She didn't bring it, and she hadn't prepared any kind of secondary plan if the first failed. She knows that he is doing something highly illegal for her, and that he knows it, too. There's just something in the way he keeps looking back at her. It can't be that he recognizes her face, because there's a publication ban on the media running any photos of the surviving victims. But he seems to have picked up on her sense of desperation. Her urgency. Somehow, she thinks, she'd known that it would be this way from the very moment she went out the door of her home last night.

His departing words are, "You need lessons. Go check the bulletin board. You buy that thing, you better learn how to use it."

On her way out, Allyson tears a couple of pamphlets for firearm ranges off the board. And then she puts them in the glove compartment, because she already knows she won't be going. When she finally answers her mother's phone calls and listens to her hysterics on the other end of the line, she offers just one explanation: I just needed to get some air.

After some contemplation, she responds to Cameron's text ('leave me alone') and he immediately follows it by calling her. She regrets answering. He bawls, telling her how sorry he is, how stupid he is. Allyson holds the phone up to her ear and listens to him, but his voice is as familiar to her as a transmission from outer space. It doesn't feel like she knows Cameron any more, and he definitely doesn't know her, now. It strikes her as absurd that he seems to be operating under the delusion that they should pick up where they left off. That they should dry one another's tears.

"No," she says.

"Allyson, please. I just wanna see you." He's stuttering, sniffling. "Look, I know that... I mean... Did you want me to come? To your dad's, your dad's..."

Freezing in place, Allyson says, tightly, "Don't talk to me any more."

There's a beat. When Cameron responds, he sounds sulky, indignant. "What do you mean?"

"Just. Don't talk to me. Ever." Her hand's started to shake. She almost drops the phone on the floor. "Never again." She squeezes it tighter against her ear, bites down on her tongue, but can't stop herself from raising her voice. "I told you to leave me alone."

He starts weeping again. "But," he says, "I need you. I have no one. And all of this has, it's g-got me so fucked up, I still can't believe Dave's g-gone, and Vicky and Oscar and..."

"You always did think only about yourself," says Allyson, and then she hangs up.

Larkspur, because they'd had it at their wedding. Allyson uses her bundle to cover her face for nearly the entire time. The purple blooms don't smell like anything. People keep trying to talk to her. For a lot of them, it's the first time they've seen Laurie Strode or Karen Nelson and her daughter since the incident a little more than a week ago. She begins to feel like some exotic, rare zoo animal on display, because there are a lot of bulging eyes observing her.  

In the middle of the service, there's a compulsion to stand up and go running at the pulpit. She wants to throw her hands around the pastor's throat. She wants to grab the flowers and throw them on the floor, watching the glass vases shatter. She wants to tear down the photos of her father, rip them into shreds, and start screaming at everyone gathered in the church: Why are we all just sitting here? Don't you all remember what just happened? 

She knows her dad would have felt the same way. Knows it just as much as she knows that there will be no burial. Dad had always wanted to be cremated, or he'd said he did. It had never been easy to understand if he was joking or being serious at any given time. But he'd had a will. Cremated, it said, and scattered in a happy place. He hadn't specified where this place was. Allyson thinks that's because it probably doesn't exist. 

The gun is holstered at her hip, concealed by her heavy black coat. When her mother asks if she'd like to take it off, she shakes her head no. Every time someone gets a little too close, she gets anxious. As the service begins drawing to a close, she gets up and leaves early, unable to withstand any more. The moment she steps outside, however, there's a microphone and a light being shoved in her face. 

She stares numbly before realizing it's a reporter. 

"Allyson Nelson?" says the man. He looks excited. He's beckoning the cameraman closer. "I'm from CSTV. Could I have a quick word with you? We're reporting on..." 

"No," she says. 

"Just a few quick questions," the reporter insists, and all at once Allyson is weighed down by it all, by how much nobody seems to care, by the way she feels like she's going to die at any given moment, by the spectacle and the reality that has become her life.  

Feeling sick, she breaks between the reporter and the cameraman, pushing both of them aside, and begins sprinting. She doesn't stop until she's home, some three miles away. Her mother and grandmother are still at the service; the house is silent. Once she's inside, she locks the door behind herself and goes up to her room, where she locks the door, as well. Then she strips off her coat and removes the gun from its holster, sinking onto the bed with it in her lap. She stares down at it. 

It's an innocuous little thing, and she doesn't understand how it could protect her. It won't shield her from the memories, or losses, or her pain. It won't undo what happened.  

Impulsively, she raises it to her temple, presses the muzzle to it. The cold kiss of it there doesn't really feel like anything, even though it should, and she becomes acutely, terrifyingly aware of just how easy it would be, right now, to pull the trigger. It would be over with before she could even feel it. 

She drops her hand. She can't do it. 

In the spare bedroom where her grandmother has been staying, Allyson goes searching for something specific. She knows its name; it's right on the label. When she finds the Xanax — it's well hidden, she'll say that — she feels an intense relief, enough to make her almost tear up. Almost. She's forgotten how to cry.

Clutching the little orange bottle in her hand, she goes back to her room and locks the door again. She opens the window and then slides a tin box out from under her bed. It's where she and Cameron used to keep their weed and cigarettes. There's a brand new joint rolled up in there, the last one, and she's glad to see it. Further beneath her bed, hidden under laundry long forgotten, is half of a bottle of vodka, which she pulls free, too. Her hands tremble as she lights the joint, and she sits by the window, staring out at the moon, as she smokes it all the way to the end.

When it's burned away to nothing but ash, she opens the bottle and has a swig. The first taste makes her sputter, and she spits it out of the window, watches it go streaking down the side of the house. She tries again, and this time she keeps it down.

Allyson knows what Xanax does for her grandmother. How it makes the hurt fade away, just for a little while, giving her a couple of hours of peace amidst calamity. That's all I need, she thinks to herself, desperately, falsely. I just want to forget for a little bit. Just a little bit.

She taps the little blue pills out onto her palm. They look like candy, and are just as easy to swallow with mouthfuls of vodka. She takes three, then waits. It takes less than an hour to start working, and a dreamy feeling begins to come over her, soft and comforting, relaxing her body, causing her to slump against the window frame. Her thoughts begin to wander, and the further they go, the more distant everything that's happened in the last two weeks begins to seem. She takes another, and then another, and it starts to feel even better, turning her both sleepy and content. It feels like she's floating. There's a dizziness to it, and her stomach's starting to hurt, but those sensations are easily forgotten on the gauzy cloud her mind is resting upon.

Soon, she can't stay sitting up any longer. Faintly, she recognizes that to be a bad thing, but it doesn't seem that way, and when she gets up and stumbles into bed, she feels warm and peaceful. A thought comes into her mind: she wouldn't mind dying right now. It's so painless. No more terror. No more anxiety. So carefree. There's nothing that hurts here, nothing that scares her. Nothing waiting for her in the dark. Nothing patiently waiting for a chance to close the book, end the story. Across the veil, she can find her father again. Her friends. It would be so easy. So easy.

Unconsciousness comes to take her soon after she has a couple more. Allyson feels she's ready. She's okay with it. With this being her time to go.

As she slips away, she hears the sound of muffled breathing.

When she first awakens, Allyson's first feeling is confusion. Everything in front of her is blurry. She blinks several times, trying to understand what's going on. Her head hurts; her stomach is killing her. She tries to sit up.

She's in a hospital room. The recollection comes back to her. She gasps for air, terrified. Had she really tried to kill herself? She can't remember much, just wanting the pain to go away. Allyson clutches at her stomach, which feels tender and sore, and realizes that she'd probably had some kind of medical intervention. And then, she thinks, inappropriately, Mom and Dad are going to kill me, before she remembers the truth of it.

Sitting there, alone in the room, she's not sure what to do. There's a button nearby indicating that she can call a nurse, and she's thinking that she should when her grandmother comes through the door, holding an armful of clothing and toiletries, which she drops on the floor with a sob the moment she sees that Allyson is awake and sitting up in bed.

"Oh, Allyson!" Laurie weeps, rushing over to her. Her eyes are red, flooded with tears. She's at the bedside in a flash, her arms wrapping around her shoulders, careful not to touch her sensitive waist. She draws Allyson in close against her chest and cradles her, crying, unintelligible nonwords leaking through the tears. Allyson stays frozen, stunned by what she has done to herself. So stunned that she forgets nearly everything else, including the great weight on her heart.

Laurie's hand strokes up into her hair, brushes it out of her face. She rests her cheek atop her head. Eventually, as it all begins to sink in, Allyson starts to thaw, and the emotion comes swelling back, curdling in her stomach. She whimpers into her grandmother's chest and lifts her weakened arms to hug her about the waist. "I'm so sorry," she whispers. It's raspy. Sounds nothing like her.

"No," says Laurie, almost vehemently. "I'm sorry." And then she's sobbing anew, so weak at the knees that she has to pull a chair up. Allyson feels like a fucking monster. The worst person alive. She'd done this to herself, but she'd done it to Laurie and her mother and everyone else in her life, too.

"I didn't..." she stammers. "I d-didn't, I didn't think about it, I was scared and I... I just... I wanted to..."

Laurie whispers, shhhh, and Allyson obeys, quieting, as her grandmother's gentle hands cup her face. "Your mother will be here soon. You don't need to explain."

I do, she wants to say, but then she looks right into Laurie's eyes and becomes aware that maybe she doesn't.

"It's okay," murmurs Laurie, pulling her in close. Allyson leans on the bed rail and rests her cheek against her shoulder. She smells so familiar and comforting. "I understand. I understand, okay? Listen to me. I know everything's so... That you... There's something that—" She stops her cascading words and starts over, her voice low but direct. Cutting through. "I tried it, too."

Blearily, Allyson looks up at her. Not understanding.

"I wanted to get away from it," says her grandmother, and her eyes are distant again. "I thought I'd do anything to. So I... tried. Three times. Your mother doesn't even know that."

Comprehension comes to her, widening her wounds.

"So," she says, hoarsely, "Why didn't you go through with it?"

"Because I'm stronger than that. Death. I'm stronger than him." Laurie has never sounded so lucid, nor so certain.

"I don't know if I am," says Allyson, brokenly.

"I know," says Laurie, and another tear falls. "I never wanted this for you. Ever. Or your mother. I spent so much time preparing her for the worst, but I kept hoping for the best. That it'd never come to that. You don't know how much I wanted to be proven wrong when people told me that he'd never be able to get to me again. It was never supposed to be Karen. Or you. It was supposed to be... just me, and him, ending it. And I'm so sorry, Allyson. I'll never be able to forgive myself."

The guilt in her grandmother's voice is so apparent that it breaks Allyson's heart. All those years her family had spent shunning her, treating her like she was made of paper, holding her at arm's length, telling her she was crazy, irrational, paranoid. The way she'd never questioned how her mother had pushed her away. The embarrassment she'd felt any time someone figured out that Laurie Strode was her grandmother. Like it was a shameful thing, a family secret, something to be locked away and forgotten. For all of the pain they had inflicted on Laurie, she had never struck back. Not once. She'd only ever tried to protect them.

The demons will return. She knows now that they never die, not really.

The wall shatters. Allyson bursts into tears.

They stay there, holding one another, and they cry together. Laurie rocks her in her arms like she's a baby again. When Karen shows up, they all lay together, cramped in the hospital bed, and wrap their arms around each other. Allyson cries for everything: her family, her friends, the end of her childhood.

Tears of pain. Of understanding. Of love.