Blood Lite

When the Chainsaw Guy came to kill us, I got my chance.

The newspapers distorted the story. Yes, an escaped mental patient wearing camouflage fatigues hunted the children at Camp Soaring Osprey. Yes, the scalp of a diner waitress who'd spurned him hung from his belt. Yes, the chug-chug-chug sound of a chainsaw cranking up growled across the lake. Yes, children fled for their lives, and their camp counselors managed to stop him. But no, we weren't naked and making love in the moonlight on Rowboat Island. We'd just gotten there.

Mostly, I was pissed. Together, we had paddled across the lake after lights out. Beneath the moonlit sycamore leaves, I'd finally told Misty how I felt about her, and we'd started our negotiations—mostly with our hands. I'd just managed to unclasp her bra when that crazy asshat came stumbling out of the underbrush.

You'd think it would ruin the mood, but there's some­thing existentially inspirational about the possibility of death. It's as though your genetic code knows it's now or never. I wish I could say I bravely stood up to fend him off, but frankly, my DNA still wanted to get as far as it could.

Misty, fortunately, had more sense. With her lovely left breast surging from beneath her shirt, she rose from the grass and took a swing at him with her canoe paddle. The screwball parried with the chainsaw, and sawdust salted the air.

A

I spun dramatically, swinging my paddle in a motion that was more Bambino than Jedi. The water-treated spruce thocked against his skull and he tumbled backward onto his ass. The Husqvarna fell against his chest, nearly cutting him. Misty squished his balls with her paddle, and we ran to the trails.

You saw the rest of the story re-created on American Justice. We got the kids together, hid in one of the cabins, and tried to wait out the night until the police came. They squirmed and sobbed, but we managed to keep them all contained—except for Gordon. We begged him to use a bucket, but he insisted on making a run for the latrine. We heard his scream echoing against the tiled walls followed by the slurp and smack of his fat-streaked giblets.

Enough was enough. We had to stop the maniac before he came looking for us.

Misty and I hatched a plan. She'd run out into the quad, lure him into the electrical shed, and I'd finish him off by shoving him into the old non-OSHA-compliant circuit breaker.

We left Reuben, the crazy tough redneck kid, in charge and stepped outside. There, huddled beside the door, I held her hands. "Are you sure he'll follow you?"

She gri

In the movies, the psycho killer is a little smarter than to chase the panty-clad teenager into a trap, but ours was a dumb-ass. Misty had just passed the flagpole when he came staggering out from behind the dining hall, chain-saw snarling above his head.

She played her part well, prancing across the quad and stumbling to give him time to catch up. She shrieked a few times to seal the deal, begging for her life and clutch­ing her breasts. She even made a token effort to close the electrical shed door before he zipped through it. She cow­ered and shielded her eyes as he raised the chainsaw, and she had to be scared. A little, anyway, despite the grin I saw just as I crashed through the split door.

If you've never pushed a guy into a zillion volts of elec­tricity, let me recommend it to you. He stumbles back, stu

When the cops arrived the next morning, they were impressed. The medical examiner bagged up Chainsaw Guy's charred skeleton while they all laughed with us and reenacted the scene. We should have gotten a medal or the key to the city, but the camp administrators chose to focus on the one kid we lost instead of the thirty we saved. We preferred to think of the camp as ninety-seven percent full instead of three percent empty, but they didn't see it that way.

At least we had each other. When the Morning After occurs postmurder instead of postcoitus, you skip several levels of dating. Unfortunately, some of those are the fun ones. We jumped straight to the "something missing" stage.

We'd established some weird Pavlovian co

When I took this job in the fall, managing regional sales representatives for a global e-business outsourc­ing firm, I discovered that it wasn't just the sex that was anticlimactic. It was everything. It was driving to work all belted in safely. It was drinking coffee from one of those cups with the extra-stable bases. It was sitting at an ergonomically calculated perfect height, distance, and angle from my computer.

It was working for levelheaded, evenhanded, mild-ma

Vrrrrrummmmmm! I'd imagine the chainsaw clawing for wood or flesh in the nighttime air and smell the burnt two-stroke engine oil that portended my coming death.

"We surely appreciate all your hard work, Chet," Ger­ald from Marketing would say, putting a hand on my shoulder that I wished was a hook. "You're an invaluable part of the team."

My veins ached for that rush of adrenaline you can only get on a sweaty summer night when swinging a canoe paddle at a psychopathic assailant.

Why did I have to electrocute the only person who'd ever made me feel alive? Maybe the Chainsaw Guy and I could have come to some kind of agreement: We'd fight a little every night and then go our separate ways. He'd show up whenever Misty and I were on a date, remind us of our Darwinian duty to procreate, and then discreetly leave once Misty and I got our pulses racing.

The Chainsaw Guy couldn't be the only serial killer willing to ply his trade on us, could he?

Despite what the media tells you, there really aren't that many serial killers around. The best ones burn out quickly, and all the others are incompetent. Misty and I waited in every lover's lane within sixty miles for some disgruntled woman hater or sexual sadist to find us, but no dice. We wrote to some of the old Manson family mem­bers, but they just wanted to lecture us about saving the Earth. Hell, we even considered writing a controversial and blasphemous book challenging fundamentalist Islam, but, well, neither of us knew enough about it to provoke a good fatwa.

I tried hiring an actor to pretend to murder us, but it just wasn't the same. First of all, you know it's just an act in the back of your mind. Second of all, it's almost impos­sible to find a person who can convincingly portray a psy­chopath. The drama program at George Mason had some close candidates, but certainly no Christopher Walkens or De

I even offered a mental patient some dough to come kill me in the middle of the night, but he got lost on the way and the police found him frozen to death by the Jefferson Memorial. To his credit, he was clutching a scythe in his hand, but I still probably would have taken him.

The truth is that a good psycho is hard to find. Pissing off a biker is too iffy, poking a bum in the eye will just get you panhandled to death, and even calling old high school enemies just shows you how much crazy people mellow with age.