I didn’t know Mackenzie Weaver, but I knew her story. Everyone in my area knew about the unassuming blonde from a couple towns over who had stolen her history teacher’s antique cutlass and used her classmates as a pincushion. She killed seventeen people that day before the cops showed up and shot her. Maybe she had her reasons, or maybe she was just crazy. Everyone in my area has heard the rumors about what her classmates did to her, what her teachers did to her – none of the stories fit together, so no one really knows what to believe anymore. Some people went so far as to say she’d been abused by a teacher, or that she'd gotten pregnant by some unusual means, or just that she was on drugs. Any excuse to believe that a cheerful kid with straight B grades could never commit murder of her own volition.​​

       Mackenzie’s hometown isn’t exactly close to mine, but where I’m from, nothing is close to anything. Technically, I didn’t even grow up a town. Centennial, Wyoming is what they call a census-designated place: an area with enough people to register in the government, but not enough register in anyone’s mind. What we refer to as a town consists of a cracked main road leading to plains in one direction and mountains in the other, dotted with a few houses and the occasional tree. The only place to hang out is a family-run bar and grill halfway down the road, and the only other place of interest is an elementary school that never saw more than a few students per year. That may be why they decided to set it up in a doublewide trailer.

       Legally speaking, Centennial covers sixteen square miles of Wyoming hillside, but no one has ever bothered taking advantage of the open real estate. My family was one of the smart ones who claimed a piece of land back when you could buy an acre for twenty-five bucks and a bushel of tobacco. None of my ancestors ever left the ranch, except a few errant siblings who disappeared into the big wide world. As a kid I had a few crazy ideas about escaping the mountains and making it as some horse wrangler for Hollywood productions, or maybe one of the girls who flip the numbers around on Deal or No Deal. But as I got older, the world outside Wyoming lost its appeal, and I was satisfied with a simple life on the ranch, tending to the horses and riding one of them down to the bar and grill on the Friday nights when my dad had the car, to meet up with all the hillbillies, yahoos, and beatniks I was proud to call my friends. It wasn’t exactly the life twenty-one-year-olds around America dreamed of, but it was good enough for me.

Except that when I hit twenty-one, and they finally let me drink in the grill instead of out in a plain somewhere, my parents decided I should get out of Wyoming for a change of pace. I wouldn't be opposed, except that their idea of an out of state trip was a charitable mission to St. Paul with a group of kids from our church, the oldest being twenty-six and the youngest eleven. This would be not only my first time outside Wyoming, but also the longest I’d been away from my best friend Laurelei since she was born.

We set out after church one Sunday, fourteen people under thirty and four over, all crammed into two full-size rental vans. Since our church was two towns over, I didn’t get one last look at the ranch, or the sparsely populated street that made up Centennial.

       Through what I can only assume was some divine act of providence, our pastor’s wife decided to sit in the middle of the van, where she could play twenty questions and sing gospel songs with the boys. She gave me the front seat, surrendering the job of copilot, navigator, and snack distributor. Her husband was a cheery guy who hadn’t got the memo about not wearing cowboy hats even after thirty years in the Midwest. I saw him in the pulpit every Sunday, but I hadn’t had much contact since he dunked me in a water fountain at three days old.

       On our way out of the area, there was a buzz of excitement going around the van. Most of these kids, I assumed, were looking forward to this and hadn’t been pressured into it by parents who were, and I quote, “worried you’ll turn into a crazy recluse and not bother burying us when we die.” They all looked like they were gonna cream their jeans at the thought of helping poor people in the big city, and by the time we passed that lone white house with the mysterious red stain out front, they had erupted into a chorus of Our God Is an Awesome God.

       The church kids didn’t sing for the entire thirteen-hour drive, but even in the much-coveted front seat I felt like I was at a miniature Casting Crowns concert. During one particularly low point halfway through South Dakota, they decided it was time to switch gears and launched into a barrage of VeggieTales songs they somehow had memorized.

       The rest of the drive was about as boring as the landscape, and I was kind of let down by the way South Dakota and Nebraska looked exactly like Wyoming. We’d been specifically instructed not to bring our phones, so there wasn’t much to do in the car besides watch out the window. We rolled into St. Paul past midnight, long after the other van thanks to one of the kids in our group whose bladder was about as big as his chances of ever getting a date if he kept wearing those pastel-colored polo shirts.

       We set up camp in the basement of the Unitarian Universalist church that had agreed to host us, girls in the cafeteria and guys in a dark storage room watched over by a hideous life-sized Crucifix that someone had hidden away for good reason. The thing looked like it had been mouth-carved by beavers, and I couldn’t believe Jesus looked down on it in appreciation.

       There were only eight of us sleeping in the cafeteria, including the two pastors’ wives (I'm not really referring to them as "the wives of the pastors" – more like "pastor's wife" was their job and title) and the space felt cavernous and empty. We were set up in sleeping bags on the tile floor, which would have probably been uncomfortable if most of us weren’t used to camping in our backyards or passing out drunk in a field somewhere.

       The first morning of our mission, we were served sausage and eggs by some of the local congregation who had volunteered to help the volunteers in their volunteering. Waking up was a bit of a process – not only were the sleeping conditions not great, but the four chaperones had reserved sole use of the church’s coffee maker. Church adults are weirdly averse to the idea of people under twenty-five drinking coffee.

       After breakfast, we were all taken out back by one of the pastor’s wives and inspected one by one to determine if our shorts were too short. It was obnoxiously hot outside – hotter than I thought it could be in Minnesota – and we would be working in the sun most of the day, but she assured us that the boys would be totally unable to work if they were distracted by a couple inches of thigh. I passed the inspection with flying colors; when you ride as many horses as I do, you quickly learn it’s cargo shorts or nothing.

       The boys in question stood around awkwardly, wondering why exactly they were part of this. Maybe the pastor’s wife wanted to show them what harlots the women of today had become.

       We spent half the day ladling soup at the soup kitchen and the other half digging up a patch of dirt behind the old folks’ home on the promise that we would come back and plant a garden for them to enjoy as they inched closer to the end. For the real tough work, the boys were allowed to take their shirts off. I averted my eyes and pretended they were muscley he-men instead of skinny dweebs from my church.

       We were split into two groups for the workday, but as we traded shifts and Group A went to wash the dirt off their hands before serving food to poor people, I noticed someone in their ranks who didn’t look familiar – someone I guess I didn’t notice sleeping in the cafeteria last night.

       She didn’t look like a church kid, and she definitely didn’t look like a Midwestern girl. I'm pretty tall, and I consider myself built for farm work, but this girl was short and very skinny. My hair is the color of straw and never does what I want it to, while hers was brown and done up in an impressively complicated braid. She was strikingly pretty, I thought – I’m not about to call myself ugly, but she definitely didn’t have my adult acne, random smattering of freckles, or the empty spot where I’d knocked out a tooth falling off my horse.

       I knew I’d never met the girl before, which was weird since I’d known all our little missionaries since either my or their birth. It didn’t seem likely that she’d come from another church, seeing how all the other parishes had their shit together better than we ever would.

       I managed to talk to the girl at dinner, after my group was done setting up the table and her group was done setting out the dishes. She was sitting alone, though I knew all the repressed church boys were dying to shoot their shot. Being the only one around who wasn't mad I couldn't date her or be her, I got to her first.

       She looked scared of me, and only spoke when spoken to, but I managed to get some info out of her, like her name and what she was doing here. Her name was Kimberly, and she was from a few towns past Centennial. I knew the name, but it didn’t occur to me that my new friend was from the same town as Mackenzie Weaver. I told her my name – it’s Mallory, by the way – and finally coaxed her into talking to me.

       She was twenty-two, and she’d recently come back to live with her parents after a long time away. When I asked where she’d been, she told me she was just traveling around: an evasive copout if I’ve ever heard one.

       The second day of our trip, we alternated working on the garden and being allowed inside the nursing home, where the staff and our chaperones convinced everyone but me to sing a few of their Jesus-oriented folk tunes for the old folks. The residents either looked annoyed, or didn’t seem to notice us.

       When we got back to the church we played some games I remembered from my days in youth ministry. At least now, they didn’t try to turn the icebreakers into life lessons.

       After a dinner that made me remember all the rumors I’d heard about the lavish spreads the Catholics could dish up, one of the Unitarians led us out front and built a fire in a big firepit. Some of the church kids sat around the blaze while the rest of us tossed around a football someone had been smart enough to pack. The sun was almost down, but as I learned that night, it was never really dark in the city.

When I noticed Kimberly sitting with the others, I tagged out of the game and fell down next to her. I didn’t know what it was about the sad-looking girl that drew me in, but I guessed it was something about how she never seemed interested in the life lessons and catechism.

       One of the pastorwives was leading the group in a discussion about helping people: specifically people our age who obviously needed it. A couple kids gave examples, forgoing anonymity and namedropping people we all knew. I tried to remember if this was the devious pastorwife or the face value one. Either way, these kids should’ve known better than to spread their high school drama in the vicinity of an adult. Well, a real adult.

       During a lull in the conversation, our chaperone asked me by name if I knew anyone who needed spiritual guidance or to be shown the Love of Christ. Well sure I did – all the godless hillbillies I hung out with down at the bar and grill. The lack of a police department or any respectable civilization had left them (and me) to grow up like the Midwestern equivalent of those kids in West Side Story – we would've had a kick-ass gang, if there was any crime worth doing around town. But I wasn’t about to rat out my bros, so I said the first name that popped into my head when I thought of teenagers who needed a little Jesus in their lives: Mackenzie Weaver.

       Kimberly didn’t actually move when I said the name out loud, but we were sitting close enough together that I could feel her body tense up. Her big doe eyes stayed rooted in the fire, knees drawn up to her chest and arms wrapped around her legs. Was she scared? I thought. Did she think that dead girl was gonna pop out from behind the church and slay us all with her cutlass?

       The other kids were making uneasy noises or glancing away. The devious pastorwife noticed this and clocked their reactions. “Who’s that?” she asked. She sounded curious, but I knew there was more than a little suspicion in there. Adults hated being out of the loop.

       No one volunteered to explain the story, so I jumped in. I had been half-joking, thinking I'd get a sober laugh then we'd move on, but the pastorwife had latched on. “She was this girl who went crazy,” I said. I was never good at sugarcoating. “She killed a bunch of her classmates with a sword.”

       “Oh my gosh,” the pastorwife said. “That’s terrible.”

       “Yep,” I replied.

       I wasn’t about to bring up what happened next, but one of the younger guys apparently couldn’t read a room. “Then she came back to life,” he said.

       Our poor chaperone was looking more uncomfortable by the minute. “What do you mean?”

       “After the cops shot her,” the one guy continued. “People say she came back to life to finish what she started. Killing her classmates.”

       Something glinted in the corner of my eye, and I turned to see tears sparkling in Kimberly’s eye. If anyone else had noticed, they didn’t seem to care.

       “Well,” the pastorwife said, her voice matter-of-fact. “Luckily we know that’s not possible in God’s plan.”

       “How.”

       For a second, I wasn’t sure where the word had come from. Then I saw Kimberly wiping her eyes.

       “How what?”

       “How do we know it’s not in God’s plan?” Kimberly asked. For the first time in St. Paul, none of the boys were looking at her – I guess they were embarrassed to see the tears drying on her face.

       “Because only Jesus could come back from death,” the pastor’s wife explained. “Unless Jesus Himself decides to bring someone back, like He did with Lazarus. We have to guard ourselves against evil while we’re on Earth, cause we won’t get a second chance.”

       “Why,” Kimberly said, her face totally emotionless except for the tears that didn’t fall. “Cause then you’ll be in Hell?”

       “Or Heaven,” our chaperone reminded her.

       “But what if you don’t get into Heaven,” Kimberly murmured, “And Hell doesn’t want you?”

       The conversation went on – the devious pastorwife cut her losses and steered in a more lighthearted direction – but I wasn’t listening. I had made the connection. Kimberly was from the same town as Mackenzie Weaver. She would have graduated the year that everything went down. Even if she hadn’t actually seen Mackenzie's rampage firsthand, she would’ve known people – her friends – whose lives were ended that day, by a classmate and a super old-fashioned weapon. Kimberly had been part of a tragedy that kids across Wyoming knew as a fun urban legend to tell at a campfire – and I had brought it up, even used the killer’s name, cause I thought the church kids would get a kick out of making the chaperone squirm in her seat. At a campfire.

       Kimberly didn't talk for the rest of the campfire, and neither did I. Eventually it was time for bed. The gendered groups took turns in the bathroom, brushing their teeth and peeing one last time and whatever else. The girls were going to go first, till one of the church boys told the pastor that they didn’t want to wait hours for their turn. We all thought that was just hilarious.

        I didn’t get a chance to talk to Kimberly that night, but that was fine, I really didn’t know what I would’ve said to her. I had some trouble getting to sleep after the lights were turned out and the church girls’ chatter had turned to steady breathing; I laid there in the dark, staring up at a ceiling I couldn’t see, trying to imagine what it would be like to see my friends murdered. If Mackenzie had survived the day and ended up in jail, that might be some sort of comfort – Kimberly could work up the nerve to see her, to yell at her and beat the shit out of her if the guards let her. Well, that’s what I would have done. Kimberly didn’t look like she could take a five-year-old in a fight. But it was a moot point anyway: Mackenzie was dead, and no amount of conspiracy theories could bring her back. Kimberly was left with the trauma of witnessing murder, and stuck with the pain of stupid people like me bringing it up.

       I guess I should admit, I usually sleep on my side. But that night, in the near-pitch blackness, although I kept telling myself there was no such thing as human resurrection…well let’s just say it felt better to sleep on my back, where no one could sneak up on me, alive or dead. I remembered that feeling from when I was a kid: sleeping with my back to the wall, subconsciously believing it would be better to see a ghost coming than not. I know now that all kids did that, and it sometimes made me wonder – is there something they know and we don’t? Are kids more in tune with the supernatural, or have some kind of paranormal radar that we eventually grow out of?

       Kimberly and I spent most of our free time together for the remainder of the trip. We were still in separate groups, but we sat together at dinner and moved our sleeping bags next to each other so we could whisper late at night. Over those four days I managed to piece together everything that had happened. According to her, she had taken the killings better than most of her classmates, going back and finishing out her senior year when the school reopened. It wasn’t till a year later, when people online started talking about Mackenzie coming back from the dead, that she felt the PTSD coming in full and checked herself into a hospital. She really did spend a few years traveling, but that was after she had spent a long time between the white walls of a mental health facility. She claimed she had no relationship with Mackenzie Weaver, other than knowing her as part of the same grade. But some of those seventeen victims had been her close friends – one, she had hoped was going to ask her to the prom – and she had only managed to last a year with no breakdowns by almost pretending they never existed.

       All this time, I assumed Kimberly was just feeling the effects of what happened four years earlier – I didn’t even think that she was one of the tinfoil hat people. But that changed on the drive home, when I surrendered the coveted front seat to sit in the back with Kimberly, thankful for something to occupy those thirteen hours other than staring out the window and missing Laurelei.

       “Wait,” I said. “You don’t actually think she…came back, right?"

       Kimberly turned to look at me. Our faces were only a couple inches apart. Her doe eyes always looked like they were on the verge of tears, but I knew they weren’t: over four years, she had become emotionally stronger than most people I knew. “I don’t believe anything,” she murmured.

       That reminded me of something else I’d forgotten to ask her: what exactly was she doing on a mission trip with a church from a different town? Was it some kind of therapy thing? I almost filed away the question to ask later, but then it hit me. “You were running away,” I said, and I could hear the surprise in my own voice. “That’s why you came. You think she’s…what, trying to get you?”

       Kimberly swallowed and looked away. When she spoke, her voice was almost too soft to hear over the singing in the middle rows of the van. “A few of my classmates have turned up dead,” she murmured. “Since it happened. All around the country. Some of them were ruled suicides, but some of them were murder.”

       A lump rose in my throat. Could that possibly be true? Was there any way I could justify that as a coincidence? “It can’t be her,” I said, but I knew I was bullshitting. She probably knew more about the case than anyone else, and I knew practically nothing. “That’s impossible.”

       “Why,” she replied, “Cause the pastor’s wife said so? Mallory, there are things going on here that we don’t get. Things that no one gets.”

       So there it was, out in the open. She was talking about the supernatural. More specifically, whatever black magic had resurrected Mackenzie Weaver from the grave. Did that mean my new friend was some kind of nutcase? Or did it mean she knew more than everyone else?

       “I know you don’t believe me,” she said. “But do you know why people started talking about her coming back to life? Three years ago?”

       I shook my head. I guess I forgot to ask where all the rumors had started.

       “Someone dug up her grave,” Kimberly said. For a second, I didn’t get it – I couldn’t understand what she was saying, or how those words made any sense in context. But then the parts of my brain that refuse to acknowledge things I can’t explain switched off and I realized what she was implying.

“Was her body – ”

       “They never told us.” She cut me off. “The cemetery warden found it and the cops told him to fill it back up. They never told anyone what was inside the coffin.”

       Or, I thought, more importantly, what wasn’t inside.

       Kimberly didn’t say goodbye when we got back to the church past midnight and our parents came to pick us up. This struck me as kind of rude, but where I come from we don’t really get offended by the little things, so I shrugged it off. My mother grilled me in the car about all the transformative experiences I must have had, coming closer to Jesus and my peers and helping people less fortunate than me; I told her what she wanted to hear then fell silent, staring out the window and watching the streetlights go past. I wondered if I would hear from Kimberly again, or if I could somehow track her down. Nothing against the boys of course, but it was nice having a girl friend for once – that, and, I still wanted to know more about her situation. If there was any chance that Mackenzie Weaver had really come back from the dead…

       I knew there wasn’t. Dead was dead, unless you counted the Afterlife, which didn’t seem to fit into the story. Mackenzie was dead as a doorknob. Dead as disco. Dead as…well, as dead as the classmates she’d murdered, and the ones who died later, killed by some copycat. Still, when we got back to the ranch and parked in the driveway, I could almost feel that ghostly, evil presence nearby: I could almost see Mackenzie stalking towards us, her rotting, undead body slowly revealing itself in the headlights, her cutlass dripping with the blood of Kimberly’s friends as she set her sights on me.

       Over the next few days, I got back into the swing of things, hanging out with Laurelei, drinking at the bar and grill, giving the local kids riding lessons when my mom didn’t feel like it. I did feel different after my trip, but not in the religious way my mother was expecting. If anything, I felt just a little bit afraid being out after dark, just a little bit paranoid when I heard people using phrases like Well I’ll be damned and I’ll see you in Hell. Maybe Hell was real after all – and maybe it wasn’t so inescapable.

       I poked around the Internet for any evidence of Mackenzie’s new lease on life, but all I could find was a few online forums for people who claimed they’d had supernatural experiences. It would’ve been nice to find out if some of Kimberly’s classmates had really been killed after the fact, but I didn’t have access to a list of their names. Actually, there was nothing online about the original killings either. I asked the boys down at the bar and grill if they knew anything about Mackenzie, and as I could’ve predicted they started sharing some of the gorier stories they’d heard. I would’ve joined in a month earlier, but now, every time I heard that name I thought of Kimberly’s sad face and the way she looked like she’d seen everything there was to see.

       The next time I saw Kimberly was the day everything changed. I got up early, fed the horses, and spent some time with Laurelei. My mom’s Sunday appointment was a nine-year-old girl named Jenny, a Montessori kid from Laramie who had decided at some point that I would be her teacher. My mom let me keep her hourly rate whenever I stepped in for her, so I didn’t mind. Plus Jenny was pretty cool, for a nine year old.

       Her mother dropped her off after noon and I took her into the stable a few hundred yards behind our house. Even though we were surrounded by mountains, our property and the land around it was almost completely flat – Centennial was nestled below us and a mile off, but from our house you could see far into the distance.

       Jenny and I grabbed our gear and I saddled up Tutti Frutti, our smallest full-sized horse and the one we used for our younger students. We had eight in all this year, some of them ours and some owned by locals who could afford to rent a stable but not build one themselves. Half our income came from renters, half from the lessons; my mom used to talk about converting our setup into one of those therapy ranches for troubled kids, until one opened up a few miles away. The kids whose parents forced them to go there sometimes showed up at the bar and grill, and, honestly, they deserved it.

       I helped Jenny onto Tutti Frutti, then mounted Laurelei bareback. Like always, Jenny asked when she would be allowed to ride without a saddle, and like always, I told her when she was allowed to go on the big kid rides at the county fair. My mom always told me not to ride bareback around the kids for that very reason, but I wasn’t about to saddle Laurelei. I might as well have put a dog collar on Kimberly.

       I guided Jenny through the usual exercises we’d been running for almost a year. I didn’t have to show her anything – she just followed my lead around the enclosure, making Tutti Frutti trot when Laurelei trotted and gallop in circles when Laurelei did. I forced her into a conversation about life, the kind that kids her age avoided at all costs: asking if she was excited for school, how were her siblings, was there any word on her parents buying her a horse, etc.

       When it became painfully clear that Jenny’s parents were pissing away their money, I let her follow me out of the enclosure and we rode away from the ranch. We had strayed a couple times before, but only ever when I knew my mother wasn’t home. She would have a fit if she knew I was leading Jenny out towards the mountains, and I couldn’t imagine what Jenny’s parents would say. But we were the only humans around for miles, so I figured why not.

       Jenny and I rode out past the end of the plain, and I showed her a couple tricks for guiding her mount through the steeper, rockier terrain: she could think more logically than Tutti Frutti, I told her, but it wasn’t her decision where exactly the horse stepped.

       We spent hours just exploring the foothills around my property, Jenny finally opening up about all the many pressing issues a nine year old has to face. I knew my way around, so there was no concern about getting lost, and not much of a timeframe either – my job was part teacher, part babysitter, thanks to busy parental schedule that kept the kid at our ranch till well after her lesson was over.

       As the sun drifted down past the mountains, we made our way back. I had told Jenny more than once that riding after dark was a hazard; I never obeyed this rule myself, since Laurelei knew every inch of our plain as well as I did, but I didn’t want to be any more of a bad influence than I already was. Plus, her mother would be here soon.

       Dusk had come when we reached the small complex of my home: a two-story ranch house, twelve-stall stable, an unused barn, and an old outhouse that we tried to avoid. We didn’t have a garage, so I knew my parents were still out when I saw the empty driveway that stretched half a mile to Centennial’s main road.

       But as we got closer, the sounds of horses’ hooves joining the buzz of nature all around us, my eyes seemed to pick up a black shape on our property, just outside the glow of the front porch light. I squinted into the growing darkness, hoping I wouldn’t have to protect Jenny from whatever this was. She hadn’t noticed, so I didn’t say anything – we just kept riding, slowly, as the silhouette became a human being, then became Kimberly.

       I was surprised to see her there, but if I’m being honest, I was relieved: there was someone else I almost let myself expect, someone I wouldn’t have thought of before but I now secretly feared.

       “Kimberly?” My voice roused Jenny from her daydreaming and she looked confused. I halted Laurelei and Jenny did the same.

       “Hi.” My mission friend was standing alone in the middle of the ranch, arms hugging herself. She looked cold.

       “How’d you find me?” I asked. It sounded pretty callous after I said it.

       “I asked around,” she murmured. “Can we talk?”

       I glanced at Jenny, then back at Kimberly. Jenny looked confused, and Kimberly looked lost in a totally different sense of the word. Finally I slid off Laurelei and took Tutti Frutti by the reins. “Go head inside,” I told Jenny. “Get a snack. I’ll be right in.”

       Jenny looked like she wanted to know what was going on, but she dismounted without a word and went inside. I nodded for Kimberly to follow me and led Tutti Frutti back around the house. Laurelei followed.

       “What’s up?” I said. I wasn’t sure if I should be mad that she never tried to hang out after the trip, but something told me her appearance meant something bigger was going on here.

       “It’s time,” Kimberly said. I could barely see her anymore – the sun was almost fully set – but I knew my way out to the stable. “It’s…my time. My turn.”

       “What are you talking about,” I asked, as if I didn’t know. Of course I knew what she meant. The specter of Mackenzie Weaver and those alleged murders had haunted me for a week, popping up in my head when I tried to fall asleep and in my dreams when I finally did.

       “She’s coming for me,” Kimberly said. “And I think she’s close.”

       “She’s dead,” I reminded her. We had reached the stable, and I flipped on the lights so I could guide the horses back into their stalls. “She can’t hurt you. Isn’t that what going to the hospital was all about? Weren’t you trying to convince yourself she didn’t come back to life?”

       “No,” she said, as I took the saddle off Tutti Frutti. “I was preparing myself.”

       I didn’t have to ask what she was preparing for. I could feel my stomach twisting as I realized this was it: this was the moment when I had to decide whether or not I believed her. Was I going to play into her paranoid delusions just to support her? Or was I going to help her, as a friend, to see that she was probably better off going back into therapy?

       Or…there was always that third option. I could always just believe her.

       “I know it sounds impossible,” Kimberly said, “But so does every religion.”

       “Mackenzie Weaver is a religion now?” I replied.

       “No,” she said. “But if all those kids in St. Paul can believe in God and the Devil just cause their parents told them to, can’t you believe in Mackenzie Weaver cause I’m telling you to?”

       I jumped, snapping my head to look at Kimberly, as a scream cut through the darkness. But Kimberly hadn’t made a sound. For a precious second, I couldn’t imagine who had screamed – but then, maybe too late, I remembered. “Jenny!”

       Without turning off the light or checking the locks on the stalls, I dashed back into the night and across the yard, throwing open the back door and running through the house till I reached the kitchen and saw Jenny sitting on the floor, face buried in her hands.

       “What is it?” I cried, kneeling down beside her. To my own horror, I caught myself glancing around the room – not for signs of a burglar, or a wild animal, or something scary on the TV, but for a dead girl holding a cutlass.

       But there was nothing out of place besides the girl crying on the floor and her riding helmet discarded on the table.

       I put my arm around Jenny, who was sobbing into her hands. “What is it?” I said again. She shook her head back and forth, not looking at me, as if to say she didn’t know.

       Kimberly appeared in the doorway, looking down at us with wide, unfeeling eyes. “What happened?”

       “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at Jenny, who wouldn’t look at me, and something changed inside me, something twisted and grew into an emotion I had prided myself on rarely ever feeling, coming back like an old friend after fifteen years of forcing myself to be brave so no one took me for some kind of scared little girl. Fear was pumping through my heart as I sat with Jenny in the bright oasis of our house, surrounded by miles of black emptiness that for the first time in my life didn’t feel like home, but like a vast sea of horrors that could contain all the evils of the world hidden from our sight. “What,” I whispered, choking on my words, “Did you do to her.”

       Kimberly looked surprised. “What? I didn’t do anything, I was with you.”

       “Not her,” I said, and I looked up to meet her eyes. Fear was holding me back, and anger was pushing me forward. “Mackenzie Weaver.”

       My own fear was reflected in Kimberly’s eyes, but she had none of my anger. Instead there was hurt, sadness, regret. What had she done? What had any of them done? What could have convinced a girl who hadn’t even reached adulthood to commit murder, not once but seventeen times over?

       She didn’t speak. Jenny’s muffled sobs and the hum of the ancient lightbulb that lit up the kitchen were cut by another sound from far off, something I couldn’t define but somehow recognized immediately.

       I stood up, moving slowly, every muscle in my body tense and my mind ready to shut down or explode into panic at a moment’s notice. Kimberly stood unmoving in the doorway, Jenny’s shoulders hitching silently, as I walked to the kitchen window.

       All I could see was the front porch, tinted orange from the porch light, and a few feet of our yard, dirt and pebbles and a barely-defined driveway.

       The sound kept on. It was a soft, undefined scraping, with a thud every few seconds. Something was moving across the rocky dirt ground, something that didn’t come from nature.

       As I watched through the window, my brain threatening to dissociate from this scene with unused adrenaline, I became aware of another sound: footsteps, coming closer, growing louder along with the scraping. The others were silent behind me. I could feel their presence. I could almost taste the fear in the air.

       The shadows beyond the circle of light stirred and came into focus. A foot, a boot, stepping into the orange glow, followed by another. Torn-up clothing and a battered jacket. And that face. The hideous, inhuman mask of brown leather and slatted eyes, a sheaf of chainmail hanging from her jaw. And beyond the mask, light hair that hung past her shoulders but refused to grow on the part of her scalp that had been torn away by a bullet all those years ago, reduced to a festering open wound whose rotting tissue seemed anything but human as it caught the light from the front porch.

       Mackenzie Weaver held her cutlass in a gloved hand, the curved blade dragging through the dirt and scraping across every rock like a miniature plow. In the other hand, something I couldn’t identify: it looked like a bag, like she was holding it by loose plastic handles.

       In all the time Mackenzie Weaver had spent in my dreams, I was never calm when confronted by her. I wasn’t calm now either, but somehow, the unbelievable terror I felt had frozen my body and cooled my mind. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move – but I could see, and I could recognize the monster that was walking straight towards me.

       She came close, dangerously close, and still I couldn’t move. But before the undead thing could reach the porch, she came to a stop. Her eyes were hidden behind the protective slats in her mask, but I knew she was looking right at me as she dropped the undefined thing she held onto the porch, letting me get a good look at –

       The spell was gone and I careened across the kitchen, picking up Jenny without wondering if I could and screaming at Kimberly to go, go! We ran through the house as the front door opened behind us and those heavy boots scraped across the floor, no longer joined by the sound of the blade: Mackenzie’s cutlass was in the air, ready to strike.

       We burst through the back door and I slammed it shut, leaning my full weight against it. “Do you have a car?” I hissed at Kimberly.

       “No! I got a ride!” Her eyes were wide with fear, but somehow, not with panic.

       “Shit. Can you ride a horse?”

       Kimberly shook her head. I set Jenny down on her feet, knowing Kimberly wouldn’t be able to carry her. The doorknob rattled beside me and my heart rattled inside me: she – it – was there, inches away, separated only by a thin door. I could feel her pushing against it.

       “Take her,” I commanded, putting Jenny’s hand in Kimberly’s. “Go to the stable, lock the door. And turn off the light.”

       “What are you – ”

       “Go!” I cried. Kimberly turned and stumbled into the darkness, dragging a near-catatonic Jenny behind her, and without thinking, without imagining the cut of cold steel in my body, I stepped away from the door.

       I knew Mackenzie had followed me around the house by the sound of her boots on the dirt: not running, but walking, calm and slow, like she knew I could never escape.

       I wasn't planning on escaping. Maybe if I had a second to stop, to ask myself what I was doing, I would have turn and run for town – but only me and a thin stable door stood between a killer and an innocent child. Two innocent children.

       I didn’t look at what Mackenzie had left on my porch as I dashed through the front door. Even though I was running, she was still close behind me – and she wasn’t breathing, at least not that I could hear. I shut and locked the door, knowing this wouldn’t keep her for long, and ran up the stairs.

       The shotgun that hung over my parents’ bed wasn’t loaded, but I knew where they kept some shells. I grabbed a handful and stuffed the pockets of my cargo shorts, grateful in the back of my mind that I hadn’t worn my riding clothes. Pressing myself against the back wall of their room, I loaded both barrels.

       I could hear something slamming into the front door, so I crept out of the room and peeked down the stairs.

       She was there, outside the door, slamming her shoulder against it. I could see her mask through the window as she drove cracks through the wooden door.

       I ran down the stairs, coming closer to that mask with every step. A thousand memories of nightmares, running from monsters that were just a little bit faster than me, flew through my head and I turned and broke for the back door.

       I slammed my hand on the stable door, yelling assurance. Kimberly let me in and I slung the shotgun over my shoulder to free Tutti Frutti and Laurelei.

       “Jenny,” I hissed. The girl was staring, eyes blank, drawn into herself and saturated in fear. Without thinking, I slapped her, finally drawing a reaction: she looked up at me, eyes wide. “You have to ride, okay?” I said. I could feel Mackenzie breaking down the door a hundred yards away. “You have to get on Tutti Frutti and ride with me, okay? You get to ride bareback.”

       She still looked terrified, but just a little bit comprehensive. I helped her mount the tiny horse, then helped Kimberly onto Laurelei and got on after her. 

       “Hold onto me,” I said. Kimberly wrapped her arms around my stomach and I growled at Laurelei to move. Behind me, Jenny had found her voice: she clutched Tutti Frutti’s mane, telling her to follow us.

There was no time to stop and open the door. Mackenzie was coming. I urged Laurelei forward as I swung the shotgun around and aimed for the door, pulling the trigger. I hadn’t latched it behind me, so the impact of the buckshot blew the door wide open and we galloped through into the night.

       When we were fifty yards from the stable, I urged the horses to slow down. Laurelei knew the area by feel, but galloping in pitch darkness we could still risk her taking a fall.

       “Where is she?” Kimberly whispered in my ear. I felt something warm touch my shoulder and turned to see Kimberly holding a hand to her nose, blood running down over her lips. I almost asked what happened, then I realized: I had blocked the recoil with my shoulder but hadn’t actually absorbed it – my shoulder had slammed into Kimberly’s face.

       “Sorry,” I murmured. She looked like she had barely noticed.

       “Mallory…?”

       I looked at Jenny, riding beside us. She was looking back at the ranch, and as I followed her eyes across the black plain, I could just barely see –

       Another rider.

       “Shit!” I hissed, not daring to yell. Mackenzie was coming towards us, knowing better than to gallop, but well aware that we couldn’t either. I wished I had just taken the girls down our driveway and ridden for Centennial – but I knew why I hadn’t. I knew that, somewhere down the mile length of our driveway there sat an old car, and in that car was Jenny’s mother, her feet on the pedals but her head on my front porch. “C’mon Jenny,” I said, trying not to think of the moment coming so soon when someone would have to tell her she was an orphan.

       We cantered as fast as we dared, far out into the flat land between the mountains, the dead girl trailing us on a borrowed mount. The fear and adrenaline that mixed into a poisonous cocktail in my stomach wouldn’t allow me to be calm, or even collected – if Mackenzie had chased us on foot, or forced her captive to gallop after us, fear would have guided my movements. But as it was, we seemed to crawl across the plain in slow motion, the undead thing behind us never stopping, never giving up.

       It took some doing, but I managed to reload the shotgun without slowing our pace.

       “Lean down,” I murmured. Kimberly saw what was coming and bent at the waist, almost touching her forehead to my leg. I turned as far as I could and aimed for that one bit of shadow moving through the rest, pumped the shotgun, and pulled the trigger.

       I should’ve realized that Mackenzie was too far away. The buckshot spread before it came close and she continued riding towards us, the slats in her eyes staring blankly ahead.

       Kimberly sat up, blood dripping off her chin. “She’s never going to stop,” she said.

       “Yeah that’s what it looks like,” I muttered. I turned back to guide Laurelei into the darkness, then felt a weight lift from my mount.

       I froze and reared up. Kimberly had slipped off Laurelei, dropping to the ground behind her.

       “What are you doing?” I cried. “Let’s go!”

       Kimberly shook her head. I could barely see her even five feet away, but the resolution in her eyes cut through my fear. “She’s never going to stop,” she said again.

       “Yeah that’s why we have to run!” I shot back. Jenny had stopped beside us.

       “She’s never going to stop,” Kimberly said for a third time, “And neither am I. I’m never going to stop being afraid. But I can stop running.”

       “That’s bullshit!” I cried. Why was she pulling this martyr crap right now? We could get away, we could ride to Centennial, we could get to another town, find the police…and the police would…well we could find a priest, or… “Kimberly,” I said. Hot tears were coming to my eyes, furious and terrified and miserable. Mackenzie was riding closer.

       “Go,” Kimberly said. “Go!”

       So I went, but not in the direction she wanted. I turned and forced Laurelei on, back towards the house, lifting and aiming the shotgun as I approached that ghostly figure on her stolen horse. Mackenzie’s cutlass hung at her side, ready to strike in an instant. But she didn’t want me, so she didn’t strike me. I rode past her, and she realized the threat too late – by the time she raised her sword I had turned Laurelei and pressed the shotgun to her back, pulling the trigger.

       This time, I didn’t miss. Mackenzie’s body folded, her leather and chainmail mask slamming into her horse’s neck. In the faintest glow of starlight, I could see the small cluster of buckshot puncturing her jacket.

       She was dead. I had killed her. I had committed murder, but murder in offense against a murderer. How many had she killed? And how many would she kill, starting with my friend? It was justified. I was justified.

       I almost called to Kimberly, but something shifted. The stolen horse was still cantering, and I had to assume Mackenzie’s lifeless body was being jostled around – but, no, as I watched, the terror rising in my throat, Mackenzie sat upright and urged the horse forward.

       “No,” I whispered. It wasn’t possible. No matter what she was, she was still a person, and no human being could survive a gunshot to the chest. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder and fumbled for another shell in my pocket and –

       And what. Should I keep shooting her with no results? follow her all the way to Kimberly and Jenny, where it would all be over? Was I going to keep trying to do the impossible, or was I going to defend the people who needed it?

       I made a decision and kicked Laurelei in the ribs. She plunged forward, past the bloodstained cutlass, and out into the plains where I called to Kimberly. “Get on!”

       “No!” she cried.

       “Come on!”

       “Don’t you get it?” she called up at me. Laurelei trotted around her, seeming as nervous as I was terrified. “She’s never going to stop. I’m never going to beat her, and…” She looked at the ground. “I’m never going to make it up to her.”

       I stopped. “So, what, you’re just going to – ”

       Kimberly met my eyes, and she looked furious. “The longer you’re here, the longer that little girl is in danger. Are you gonna save her, or keep arguing with me?”

       I wish I could’ve thought on it more. I wish Mackenzie had given me another minute to figure out a solution. But she didn’t. Mackenzie gave nothing, she just took sanity and took lives.

       I practically lifted Jenny off her horse and set her down behind me on Laurelei. We rounded and cantered at an angle towards the house. If we kept going, I knew, we would reach the Centennial road without having to cross my driveway or the decapitated woman.

       Behind me, the sound of hooves on dirt as Tutti Frutti tapped nervously at the ground and Mackenzie kept riding forward. I knew Kimberly was standing there to face her head-on. I might have heard the wet sound of my friend’s life being swept away by a cutlass, but if I did, I tuned it out.

       By the time we reached Centennial, everything had crashed down on Jenny and she’d started bawling. I hitched up Laurelei outside the bar and grill and went inside to find one of the boys, who volunteered to give us a ride to the nearest actual town after I volunteered to break his fingers. I knew better than to use the name Mackenzie Weaver when I talked to the police, but I also knew if I didn’t go straight to the station I would be the prime suspect for at least two murders.

       When the Albany County police made their way to the ranch with flashlights and guns, they found my parents crying in a heap outside Jenny’s mother’s car. But I guess that was the better option – a decapitated corpse in a car was probably less traumatic than a severed head on their porch.

       The police found Tutti Frutti wandering around the plain, droplets of red spattered across her pale hide. They found Kimberly farther out, and they didn’t tell me what had happened to her. I didn’t want to know. I knew she was dead, and I knew who had done it.

       I may have lived with my parents, but I wasn’t a minor anymore, meaning I was under major scrutiny over the next few days. They managed to connect Kimberly’s death to three other murders that had happened last February in her hometown, as well as four the year before. They didn’t explicitly tell me this, but I knew those seven people had gone to school with Mackenzie. I also knew they knew that, and I came to understand that they were looking for any excuse to leave her out of the story.

       That was fine by me. Once Jenny had almost recovered from the incident and the news of her mother’s death, she gave her testimony to the police: not exactly admissible in court, but enough to clear my name along with the other evidence, like my friend’s testimony and the timeline in general.

       Jenny went to live with the estranged father she barely remembered. I went to Kimberly’s funeral. The pastor told the congregation what a major help she'd been in St. Paul. The devious pastorwife sat in the front row, wearing all black, dabbing at her eyes and probably wishing she’d spent more time getting to know Kimberly and less time explaining why her fucking shorts were too short.

       This was all back in the summer of 2017. Since then, I’ve pretty much got back into the swing of things – things after the mission trip, I mean, not before. Cause just like when I got back from St. Paul, I now know about Mackenzie Weaver as an evil entity that needs to be stopped like a serial killer or, if it’s even possible, put down like a rabid dog. Except there’s one key difference between the post-mission me and the me of today: the me of today is not afraid of her anymore.

       I’ve spent a long time looking into the urban legend that is Mackenzie Weaver, trying to piece together what’s true and what’s not. Once you acknowledge the supernatural, it’s hard to logic your way around a problem, so it’s been slowgoing. But one of these days, I’m going to figure out where she’s headed, which of her hundred-thirty-something remaining classmates she’s gunning for. And when I do, I’m gonna be there with more than just a shotgun.

       Mackenzie Weaver killed my friend, and she stole my horse. It’s time someone showed her what it means to lose.