[Cheryl's skittering lunge, Quentin's desperate grab for the chainsaw — it all happens so fast, leaving Ash nearly no time to react. His feet are like cement blocks for as useful as they are right now, but he is able to force some feeling back into his hands, enough to compel them to try to wrest the chainsaw back from Quentin.
Try being the operative keyword, because all he really ends up accomplishing is driving the blade sharply up, right as Cheryl pops up from under his nose like a jack-in-the-box.
The blade impales Cheryl from underneath her chin. She opens her mouth and ejects a furious spray of blood onto Ash and Quentin. Her teeth shift and whirl in her mouth, and Ash comes to the distant realization that what he's seeing is actually the rivets of the blade spinning, the gears grinding noisily. It sounds a bit like a clogged garbage disposal, stuck on many layers of bone, sinew and muscle it can't easily digest.
Ash doesn't hear it — or much of anything, really. Not the roar of the chainsaw's engine or the way it sputters before it finally stalls out, not Quentin's screaming, not Cheryl's gurgled cackling. Were it not for how raw and ragged his throat feels, he wouldn't even be aware that he's screaming.
But he stops, winding down the same way the blade does. It finally ceases spinning, and Cheryl's body falls forward. Ash watches her head snap up and open, revealing the pinkish-grey hue of her brain, before she hits the ground in a sprawled heap with a wet splat. It's a sound that's haunted Ash's dreams before; hearing it aloud offers an entirely new dimension of terror separate from all the nights he's woken up screaming.]
Cheryl?
[His voice is very calm, very quiet. His large brown eyes are like marbles set within a sheet of blood. Ash stares, almost dazed, waiting for Cheryl to get up. She doesn't.]
Cheryl? [he tries again, softer, his grip on the chainsaw's handle going slack. It falls out of his hands and lands on the ground somewhere beside his and Quentin's feet, in the pool of blood forming around Cheryl's body.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Try being the operative keyword, because all he really ends up accomplishing is driving the blade sharply up, right as Cheryl pops up from under his nose like a jack-in-the-box.
The blade impales Cheryl from underneath her chin. She opens her mouth and ejects a furious spray of blood onto Ash and Quentin. Her teeth shift and whirl in her mouth, and Ash comes to the distant realization that what he's seeing is actually the rivets of the blade spinning, the gears grinding noisily. It sounds a bit like a clogged garbage disposal, stuck on many layers of bone, sinew and muscle it can't easily digest.
Ash doesn't hear it — or much of anything, really. Not the roar of the chainsaw's engine or the way it sputters before it finally stalls out, not Quentin's screaming, not Cheryl's gurgled cackling. Were it not for how raw and ragged his throat feels, he wouldn't even be aware that he's screaming.
But he stops, winding down the same way the blade does. It finally ceases spinning, and Cheryl's body falls forward. Ash watches her head snap up and open, revealing the pinkish-grey hue of her brain, before she hits the ground in a sprawled heap with a wet splat. It's a sound that's haunted Ash's dreams before; hearing it aloud offers an entirely new dimension of terror separate from all the nights he's woken up screaming.]
Cheryl?
[His voice is very calm, very quiet. His large brown eyes are like marbles set within a sheet of blood. Ash stares, almost dazed, waiting for Cheryl to get up. She doesn't.]
Cheryl? [he tries again, softer, his grip on the chainsaw's handle going slack. It falls out of his hands and lands on the ground somewhere beside his and Quentin's feet, in the pool of blood forming around Cheryl's body.]