Oh, you thought we were going to continue to use the same horror tropes again? Well, this new anthology is changing the horror game one short story at a time and all your favorite authors are sharing some of their most terrifying tales for this new book.
Blood Debts author Terry J. Benton-Walker got some of the biggest book names together for The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power and you won't believe who is involved. Adiba Jaigirdar, Alexis Henderson, Chloe Gong, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, H. E. Edgmon, Kalynn Bayron, Karen Strong, Kendare Blake, Lamar Giles, Mark Oshiro, Naseem Jamnia, Tiffany D. Jackson, and Terry J. Benton-Walker, all submitted a stories for the big release and Cosmopolitan has your first look with a special peak at one of the stories. That is...if you think you can handle it. Here's some more info from our friends over at Tor Books:
13 SCARY STORIES. 13 AUTHORS OF COLOR. 13 TIMES WE SURVIVED... THE FIRST KILL.
The White Guy Dies First includes thirteen scary stories by all-star contributors and this time, the white guy dies first.
Killer clowns, a hungry hedge maze, and rich kids who got bored. Friendly cannibals, impossible slashers, and the dead who don’t stay dead....
A museum curator who despises “diasporic inaccuracies.” A sweet girl and her diary of happy thoughts. An old house that just wants friends forever....
These stories are filled with ancient terrors and modern villains, but go ahead, go into the basement, step onto the old plantation, and open the magician’s mystery box because this time, the white guy dies first.
Edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker, including stories from bestselling, award-winning, and up-and-coming contributors: Adiba Jaigirdar, Alexis Henderson, Chloe Gong, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, H. E. Edgmon, Kalynn Bayron, Karen Strong, Kendare Blake, Lamar Giles, Mark Oshiro, Naseem Jamnia, Tiffany D. Jackson, and Terry J. Benton-Walker.
A collection you’ll be dying to talk about… if you survive it.
You can actually check out Chloe Gong's short story, Docile Girls, below to get a sneak peek of what horrors you can expect in this anthology. Don't forget to pre-order the book before its big release on July 16, 2024.
An Excerpt From The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power
Edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker
Docile Girls
by Chloe Gong
It was the night before the end-of-year dance, and Adelaide Hu sat less than an inch away from a gory cluster of intestines.
Beef intestines, of course. In a plastic bag. And though the bag rested by her feet, it was rather see-through, which made a gruesome picture under the blue-white glow of the school parking lot lights. Adelaide kept nudging it farther and farther under the carseat, but its putrid stench remained. Her older sister, Tara, had a fussy dog who was fed better nutritional value than Tara’s actual children. The whole car smelled like blood.
“Five more minutes,” Adelaide said anyway.
They had been parked for a while, idling in the lot. Each time there was movement, Adelaide peered through Tara’s tinted windows, watching the rest of the dance committee pull in. She had delayed enough now to make herself late for their intended start. Not that anyone cared, even if she was the head of the committee and tonight’s decoration efforts were entirely a result of her work.
“I don’t understand why you won’t just quit the committee.” Tara reached over to turn on the interior light. Adelaide immediately turned it off to avoid anyone seeing her inside the car, lurking likea loser.
“It’s almost over,” Adelaide replied. “I just have to get through tomorrow.”
“Is that a healthy approach?”
Adelaide shrugged. “These piss faces attack the same way each time. It’s fine.”
The thing was, they hadn’t been piss faces just last week. Last week, they had been Adelaide’s best friends.
Then Jake Stewart had dumped her out of nowhere during one of their after-school coffee shop hangouts, saying that they were “graduating next year” so it was time for him to “get serious” about what he “really wants out of life.” The conversation was over before Adelaide even finished her coffee. Despite the rush of tears in her eyes, she stayed calm, asking what she’d done wrong. I can fix this, she thought. This wasn’t the end.
But Jake replied, “Come on, Ad. Don’t be like that.” He was already standing, putting on his jacket. “This was fun, wasn’t it? But you knew we were never going to last after high school. I’m looking for something different.”
The rest of her friends had stopped speaking to her in a matter of hours because it turned out they were actually Jake’s friends, and when Jake was done with someone, they were done too. Fuck. Pissfaces.
Adelaide picked at a nail. Blood welled up at her cuticle for a quick second before she wiped it away. The smell of bagged intestines was getting unbearable now.
“Stop tensing,” Tara commanded, squeezing her shoulder. “You’re ruining your posture.”
Adelaide tried to relax her shoulders. It wasn’t working. This was going to be miserable. The six of them would make sure of that in a cohesive effort, and she was obviously outnumbered.
God. She couldn’t believe how the group had found it within themselves to switch up that fast, as if she were only an extension of Jake to be removed and discarded at will. Adelaide had made such an effort to make sure each of them liked her. She and Madison had just gone dress shopping together, giggling each time the sales assistant brought an armful of fabric. She and Kayla had been texting for hours the day before the breakup, deep in discussion about the latest romance novel they were reading. And the boys . . . Robby, Liam, and Chris had helped her campaign for head of the dance committee, had sacrificed multiple afternoons to put up posters in the hallways. Yet, after Jake broke up with Adelaide, Robby moved seats in English with his nose pinched to feign smelling something bad while Chris had thought it particularly funny to text that night: lol do u send.
Adelaide finally sighed, opening the car door. “You’ll pick me up at ten?”
“Sure.” Tara tapped the wheel. “It’s not too late to bail.”
Of course it was. Adelaide had been friends with these people for a long time, had observed exactly how they worked. In their eyes, every person at school either stood with them or against them. The moment Jake had shoved her out, they’d decided it wasn’t good enough to let her fade into obscurity; they needed to keep reminding her that she had been rejected and it was repulsive to continue existing.
“You wouldn’t get it.”
Tara was nine years older. She’d gone to a different high school before they moved here in the suburbs, had had an entirely Asian- American friend group. Meanwhile, there were three Asians in the entirety of Adelaide’s otherwise very white, very small high school— including her. She couldn’t just do whatever, especially when she still had a whole year left to go. They would continue to attack, and she would continue to take it. If she antagonized them in return, she would be accused of being the unreasonable one, which meant the whole school really would turn on her.
“Mèimei— ”
“Shhh!” Adelaide looked around the parking lot. Guilt gnawed on her stomach, but it didn’t stop her from closing the door without a goodbye and hurrying off.
The dance was being held in the gymnasium, located behind the main school building. It had been built as a separate unit so that the rest of the school wouldn’t be tarnished by its sweat and unsavory smells, which was also convenient for their decorating committee. Adelaide had been worried she would need to coordinate with the school to gain access after hours— especially since they had recently installed a security system controlled from the front office to ramp up safety procedures— but Mrs. Smith had waved her off, saying the cleaners could leave the gymnasium entrance open even after locking up the rest of the school. It wasn’t a safety concern, as long as the double doors that connected the back of the gym to the main school building stayed locked. They only needed to make sure to lock the gym’s front door once they were finished.
Adelaide trudged a path beside the main building, stomping her shoes into the grass as she headed toward the gym. The whole complex— with its hulking, tall shape and dark- painted exterior— was out of range from the parking lot lights. The twilight evening shadowed the building, some cryptid lurking in wait for its next prey, armed with a fancy alarm system that turned its innards into a giant crypt.
“It can’t be that bad,” she whispered under her breath. “It can’t possibly be that bad.”
The moment she pushed through the entrance, the others inside turned so fast that their heads practically moved in unison.
“Hey, A- Lay.”
Robby’s greeting came from the corner. He sat with one hand pulling a length of string off the wall and the other running through his blond hair. Though she stared at him evenly, his words pricked like nettles, the epithet warming her cheeks. She wanted to take back her past two years. Forget leaning over to talk to Jake in their bio lab that first week of freshman year, forget going on that movie date, forget saying yes to being his girlfriend and feeling like she was someone to be respected when she merged into the table that everyone at school wanted to sit at. People like her were never granted that kind of power.
Not like Robby. Not like Jake.
As if summoned by her thoughts, Jake emerged from one of the back rooms, carrying a box. Madison and Kayla both trailed after him, neither holding anything in their arms, yet they somehow looked even busier. With Robby and Liam cleaning the motivational posters from the walls, and Chris off in the corner typing furiously on his phone, that made the entire dance committee . . . and Jake’s friend group. They all had the time to kill. Empty evenings structured around a lack of responsibilities, activities taken on if they enjoyed them and tossed aside when they got bored. It didn’t matter how badly they screwed up. Life would continue, the years would go on, and when they each inherited their houses or whatever the fuck else so- called all- American families passed on, the portraits on the wall would still be smiling with white teeth and white faces.
“So where should we start?”
Adelaide shook herself out of her thoughts, turning around at the quiet voice. She barely held back her eye roll. Elaine stood behind her, pulling her cardigan sleeves over her palms. Elaine Zou wasn’t on the committee, but she was a shoo- in for valedictorian and did every extracurricular under the sun to add to her college applications, so she had volunteered her time tonight. Adelaide didn’t particularly like her, but that was mostly because people always confused the two of them for each other. It made no sense. Elaine barely uttered a peep in class unless it was to answer a question, and Adelaide used to be at the social center; Elaine wore the same dowdy shirt and jeans every day, while Adelaide changed her wardrobe every season; Elaine never even showed up to the cafeteria during lunch because her math textbook was her best friend. She was a perfectly nice girl, yet Adelaide couldn’t help bristling because Elaine was exactly the person everyone at this school expected her to be, and it felt impossible to get away from the stereotype when Elaine was doing it all.
Adelaide tried to stifle her annoyance. She surveyed the gym, looking for a starting point to answer Elaine’s question. “We could move the tables out of the way— ”
The main door slammed back suddenly, bringing Devon Aldrich in like a jump scare. This time Adelaide actually rolled her eyes. As committee head, she had known Devon would be showing up: he had been assigned as help to save the teachers from having to watch detention on a Friday night. Devon was a notorious troublemaker, which— if you asked Adelaide— was embarrassingly cliché, alongside the multiple tattoos, the leather jacket, and the smoking habit that had stopped being cool about twenty years ago.
Devon nodded in Adelaide’s direction. Adelaide nodded back. He was a nuisance, but they had been in the same tiny art class since sophomore year, so at least Adelaide was used to it when he let the doors close behind him with a thunderous noise.
Jake, meanwhile, threw his box down in annoyance. “Are you trying to break the gym?”
“Hell yeah,” Devon answered immediately. “Don’t be sad. You can flex your shrimp muscles in the hallways too.”
Jake frowned. “Weirdo.”
Adelaide cleared her throat. “I said, let’s maybe start with— ”
“There are balloons that still need inflating in the back. Everyone make yourselves useful,” Jake cut in.
Before Adelaide even had the time to be offended that Jake was taking over, Robby kicked an inflated balloon in her direction, adding, “You’re good at blowing, aren’t you, Adelaide?”
Adelaide took a deep breath in. A deep breath out.
Since the breakup, she had tried the route of complete apathy, and she had tried the route of displaying great despair. Nothing got Jake’s friends off her back for long. It wasn’t about how she responded so much as it was about them egging one another on for a job well done. Robby was the type of person to make anonymous burner accounts so he could comment mean things to niche internet microcelebrities. Adelaide knew this because he’d shown her his accounts once with pride.
“Real mature.” Devon gave the balloon a hearty responding kick, sending it flying back to Robby. “Any more stupid sh— ”
Music blasted to life from the speaker that Kayla connected to her phone, drowning out the rest of Devon’s taunt. She looked up innocently, twirling a finger around a lock of hair. Unperturbed, Devon made a scoff and headed for the back rooms.
Adelaide wavered. A few seconds later, she sidestepped Elaine— who had started to pick through the balloons already on the floor— and pushed through the left- side door into the back rooms too, catching Devon before he turned the corner.
“Devon, hold on.”
The back rooms were off a single corridor that wrapped around one end of the main building, with entry doors on the right and left sides of the gymnasium. This back hallway housed a bunch of storage rooms on one side, while the other contained only the locked double doors that led to the south wing of the school. Most of the storage rooms back here had their doors propped open, their insides overspilling with basketballs and hoops and nets and other gym things.
Devon paused to wait for her. He peered through the entryway of the nearest room absently, moving aside a scrimmage vest and picking up an electric air pump.
“This will be helpful for the balloons,” he said, more to himself. Even here, she could barely hear him over Kayla’s bass- heavy pop music.
Adelaide hurried up to him. “Did Mrs. Smith give you the keys?”
Devon frowned. “What keys?”
“The keys to lock up.” Adelaide walked a few more steps to turn the corner, where there were two other open storage rooms on her right, then the double doors into the school at the end.
“Um.” Now Devon strode ahead of her, swinging the air pump in his hands. “Why would she give me the keys?”
“Because she said she would?” Adelaide returned. “I didn’t have time to stop by her office, and she was out today. But she said she was seeing you in yesterday’s detention so you could pass them on.”
“Wait, but . . . why?”
This was such a waste of time. There was so much decorating to do, and instead she was talking in circles with someone who wasn’t even on the committee. The gym didn’t require much fiddly work because it was only a rectangular block, but it was large, which meant it was going to take forever to get everything set up.
“Because we need to lock up, Devon. Come on.”
Devon took a moment to think. Adelaide couldn’t comprehend how someone could forget whether they had been given a set of keys or not. Eventually, Devon shrugged. “I dunno what to say, dude. Maybe Mrs. Smith gave them to Jake instead. I saw him talking to her outside detention for a while yesterday.”
Adelaide barely bit back a snarl. Of course. She wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Smith had suddenly decided that Jake should be the committee head instead, that he was more suited for it.
“All right,” Adelaide muttered. She turned on her heel, leaving Devon to his rummaging.
In the gymnasium, Kayla’s music still blasted loudly enough to tremble the walls, drowning out what appeared to be an argument between her and Chris. The light outside was rapidly fading with the sunset, and the small windows high on the walls of the gym were glowing with faded orange. Jake was nowhere to be found. She hadn’t seen him in the back, so maybe he’d stepped out . . .
Adelaide tugged the main door to check. It didn’t move.
The music cut off abruptly.
“— I fucking told you, they’re already in my downloaded library.”
A prickle of unease crept down Adelaide’s neck. Kayla was always prone to dramatics, fancying herself a Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girlboss blend, but this didn’t seem like her usual type of prank. Adelaide gave the door another tug. It didn’t budge. Maybe a cleaner had hit the panic button from the main office by accident. The security system would automatically trigger a lockdown in emergencies.
“What’s going on?” Jake emerged from the back rooms with a large box of tinsel in his arms. The right- side door banged shut after him. “I heard yelling.”
“We have no cell service,” Kayla snapped.
“What do you mean?”
Kayla hurled her phone at him.
With a surprising quickness, Jake barely caught it with one hand, shooting her a nasty look. “Jesus, Kayla.” He peered at her screen. “Just go outside and— ”
“Door won’t open.”
Adelaide’s voice echoed in the gym. Crawled into the little corners, shuddered when Madison looked up from detangling cords and offered her full attention.
“Did you lock it?” she asked.
“No. I didn’t lock it.” Obviously, Adelaide held back. “Maybe something is jammed up against it, but it feels more like the magnetic security system got activated somehow.”
Jake heaved a sigh. He set his box down, then started rolling his sleeves up as he came toward her. “Here, let me— ”
“OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, OH— ”
At once, everyone in the main gymnasium looked toward the back rooms, startled by the screaming. Adelaide recognized Liam’s voice in an instant, but there was something unnerving about his shouts looping over and over, high- pitched and nonsensical.
Someone in the corridor would surely get to him first, but Adelaide lunged toward the left- side door, rushing past Jake before he could grab her. She pushed through. The corridor had turned pitch- dark. The overhead lights had all gone out, and something smelled . . . metallic. Just like Tara’s car.
“Liam? Where are you— ?”
Adelaide collided with someone. Her eyes were still struggling to adjust, but she felt cold leather press against her hands.
“Sorry, sorry,” Devon said, trying to steady her. “I think the light switch is right here . . .”
The overhead bulb flared on again. It lit the space just as Elaine and Madison appeared from the opposite end of the corridor, having run in through the gymnasium’s right- side door. Liam’s screaming was coming from one of the rooms— the same one Devon had been rummaging in before to retrieve the air pump, though now its door was half- closed.
“Jesus, Liam.” Adelaide pushed the door open. “What is— ?”
For several moments, she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
A chainsaw was still winding down in the corner, its sharp teeth dripping red and painting the floor around it. Liam had tripped over his own feet near the door, tangled on the floor with a volleyball net around his legs. He glanced up with terror when Adelaide came through the entryway.
Robby, however, was on the other side of the room, surrounded by miscellaneous gym equipment.
Well . . .
Two parts of Robby, sliced completely in half lengthwise— his skull split down the middle, the generous incision line extending straight to his groin. His separated legs were closer together than his separated torso. There were lumps of organs spilling out from the casing of his chest, pink and formless against the flashes of white rib bone displayed in the fluorescent light.
But the smell was worse than the sight. The room was drenched with an animalistic stink; distantly, Adelaide thought of that school trip they’d taken to a farm during sophomore year, when the cow gave birth wrong and out came a screeching mangled animal covered in gore.
Adelaide didn’t register the rest of the committee standing behind her in the corridor until she felt the splash of vomit against her leg. She jolted, a fresh rush of horror sinking into her stomach, prickling her arms, roiling against her throat.
“Everyone, take a step back,” she said. “Now.”
They were too shocked to argue. Too horrified to be annoyed that Adelaide was the one giving the instructions, and when Adelaide reached down to haul Liam to his feet, he actually seemed grateful that someone was getting him out of there, even her.
“He— he— he— ”
“Liam, what happened?”
“I don’t know! I found him like this!”
Adelaide slammed the door to the storage room shut. Blocking out the smell and the incomprehensible sight.
“Go! Go!” she commanded. “Back that way!”
No one protested. It wasn’t until they had all rushed back into the main gymnasium that her former friends started to screech at the same time. Elaine, meanwhile, fumbled for her phone, sniffling. Devon was also trying to call someone, but they had both missed the conversation about cell service being down, and there was clearly nothing going out.
“What was that— ?”
“It’s gotta be a prank, oh God, maybe it wasn’t— ”
“You saw the blood.”
Silence. They had seen more than just blood.
“So did someone attack him?” Elaine asked quietly.
A hush fell over the group. Chris retrieved his phone from his pocket, his face as white as a sheet of paper. He slicked his hair out of his eyes, sweat plastered to his forehead, and said, “Nothing is sending. Signal is always bad here, but we should still be getting Wi- Fi.”
Adelaide reached for her own phone. When she navigated to the Wi- Fi screen, it wasn’t only that the school network wouldn’t connect— there were no networks showing up at all, which never happened unless there was an area-wide power outage. Adelaide put her phone away quietly, digesting the situation they had found themselves in.
The main doors were locked. Their phones weren’t working. And one of their classmates had been severed in half.
“Jesus, okay,” Adelaide whispered to herself. Sooner or later, someone was going to look for them. Tara was picking her up at ten. Jake’s parents were anal about his eleven o’clock curfew because he would always stay out late to prove that he could. If he was out too long, they would call the police in an instant, and then someone would find them. Precious, prized Jake— whom the world would fall over to save even when he was getting into trouble on purpose. They couldn’t stay locked in this gym forever.
“I think we just need to stay out here,” Devon said levelly. His eyes were latched in the direction of the back rooms. “Whoever did this might still be hiding nearby.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Elaine’s voice was hoarse when she spoke up. She hugged her arms around her middle. Kayla and Madison were arguing with each other now about whether they could use Bluetooth to send a message out, making a racket that echoed off the walls and almost drowned Elaine out. “Those rooms are tiny. Where would someone be hiding?”
Kayla and Madison fell quiet. Madison’s hands were shaking as she pressed them to her mouth, as if to keep another wave of nausea back.
“What about the double doors into the school?” Madison asked.
“It’s locked,” Adelaide offered.
“But don’t we have”— Madison heaved a breath— “the keys? We were supposed to lock the main doors when we left. It’s all on the same key loop.”
A pause.
“They’re gone.” Elaine’s voice had turned so quiet that Adelaide almost couldn’t hear her again. “Mrs. Smith gave them to me. I didn’t say anything because I was going to check my car first, but I know I brought them into the gym. Someone stole them.”
And in the time they had been inside the gym, those double doors had stayed locked.
Adelaide glanced around. Chris gulped, the visible gleam of sweat on his forehead growing. He had offered Liam his arm for support before, but now he had taken a step away. Kayla and Madison both shifted on their feet. Created a layer of space.
“I don’t understand how someone got in then,” Devon muttered. He was the only one still intently thinking, trying to figure out how they had a murderous intruder. Everyone else had started looking at the other people in the room.
“The more likely explanation,” Elaine said unsteadily, “is that one of you killed Robby when you were in the back.”
A sudden chill settled over them. Elaine was Miss Valedictorian, after all, and the committee latched on to her logic fast, taking it as truth.
“Devon was in the back when it happened,” Madison exclaimed.
“Yeah, making confetti sheet by sheet on that stupid tiny machine,” Devon fired back. “If we really want to talk about who was in the back, I saw Jake and Madison walk by right before Liam started screaming.”
“For five seconds to get that stupid strobe light,” Jake snapped, pointing to the fixture he had plugged into the corner. “Definitely not enough time to get a chainsaw and kill my best friend!”
Silence. Madison gagged again.
“How could we have not heard a chainsaw?” Kayla said, almost to herself.
“Your shitty music was too loud,” Devon answered.
Madison stomped her foot. In the next second, her lip was wobbling, and then she was heaving loud sobs with no tears in sight. “You”— she pointed a finger at Devon— “are not helping. And”—she exaggerated a hiccup that trembled her shoulders— “as the only one in the vicinity, I think you did it!”
“Oh, fantastic.” Devon threw up his arms. “We’re going around baselessly accusing each other of murder now.”
“What’s the alternative?” Madison cried. She waved at herself. “That I could do something like this? Me?Meanwhile, you’ve threatened to kill Robby before. We’ve all heard you.”
Adelaide knew that their situation had been tense to begin with, but Madison’s fake crying was so grating that it was giving her a headache. The tears were fun when they were at the mall trying to skip the line for the dressing room; now they felt out of place.
“Madison,” she said. “Come on, enough.”
“Enough?” Madison screeched. “We’re going to let a possible killer go loose?”
“If we’re talking possible killers,” Devon returned, “Liam was the one who went back with Robby. How did he not hear a chainsaw running?”
They all turned to look at Liam. He blanched, his mouth opening and closing. “Because I split off to find the extension cords! For fuck’s sake, how are you going to say I’m the killer with Incel James Dean Dupe standing right there?”
“Look, look,” Adelaide interrupted before the argument could devolve further. “Let’s just stay put. Whoever did this to Robby can’t target us all at the same time.”
It was already fully dark outside. The windows showed an ink-black night.
“We should try the windows,” Elaine said, pointing up when she traced Adelaide’s line of sight. Everyone ignored her this time. It was an idiotic suggestion, especially because the gym walls soared high enough that there was no way to get up to the windows, but Elaine continued: “I think we could break the glass.”
“I think we can bring the main door down,” Jake said, pivoting without any acknowledgment he had heard Elaine, who was tapping on her phone now, likely trying to send a text despite everyone else’s attempts.
“You can’t,” Adelaide said immediately. “The security system’s activated. The locks are magnetized. Honestly, the double doors into the school would be a better— ”
“No one asked you, Adelaide.”
Jake was shaken, his lips pale. Perhaps he treated her with such derision only because the situation was tense, only because he wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe he had always been like this.
“Jesus Christ, I’m trying to help before you break your knuckles trying to defy basic physics.”
“It’s not helping, as usual, so— ”
The gym slammed into complete darkness.
A short scream echoed through the space. Elaine, maybe. Or Kayla. Adelaide’s first instinct was to flinch back, bewildered at the sudden loss of one of her senses. While everyone else panicked and shouted and shoved, Adelaide stayed unmoving, letting her eyes adjust. Their silhouettes took shape. Jake and Chris were shoving each other. It was clear where they stood because their voices were so loud, tossing accusations back and forth. Adelaide blinked. Once. Twice.
There were nine of them tonight, weren’t there? With Robby gone, they were down to eight, and she should have counted seven figures in front of her.
A strange thump echoed by her feet.
“What the hell was that?” someone demanded. Liam. His voice was closest, still rough from his screaming. “What did I just kick? Something wet landed on me.”
Adelaide felt something on her leg too.
“Chill,” Jake demanded. “Get your phone flashlights out.”
One by one, their flashlights turned on, cutting beams into the gymnasium. When Adelaide turned hers on, she didn’t point it at her classmates’ shocked faces as they were doing to one another.
She fumbled to point the light down to where she felt something splashing on her leg . . .
Adelaide dropped her phone, right into a puddle of blood.
She screamed. The sound was hoarse, that feeling in nightmares when senseless terror loomed at full force without the dreamer comprehending what the matter was. A feeling devoid of all logic except dread. Though she hadn’t yet digested what she was seeing, it was wrong, so horrifically wrong—
Her classmates scrambled to attention. Their arguments cut off; their phone lights pointed down until the sight at their feet was as clear as day.
Madison could have fallen, tripped over her kitten heel, and taken a tumble. Those were her legs. That was definitely the fabric of her sundress. And her arms held close to her body. She even had her phone still clutched in her hands.
Then, just a bit higher, there was the stump of Madison’s neck. That protrusion of slick white bone: the end of a spine severed perfectly at one of the vertebrae, surrounded by throbbing pink flesh exposed to the air, blood still spurting onto Adelaide’s leg with a nasty squelch at each weakening pump.
“I’m going to be sick,” Kayla wheezed.
Adelaide lunged forward, closing her hand around Kayla’s wrist to shine her light to the left. After Liam’s kick, Madison’s head had rolled away, facedown with her blond hair tangling at the back like a cheap wig on a mannequin.
Adelaide’s stomach threatened to upheave too, but she swallowed hard. The blood had started to spread, though something was sitting at the edge of the puddle, disrupting the smooth unfurling.
Slowly, Adelaide crept closer, careful not to step in more blood.
“Ad,” Jake said sharply. “The hell are you doing?”
“Wire,” she reported, pointing at a silver coil of it on the floor. “Razor wire.”
“It’s Devon,” Liam declared at once. “Devon is doing it. Madison accused him and he killed her.”
All the flashlights swiveled to Devon.
“Excuse me?” he demanded, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes from the bright lights. “I don’t even know what razor wire is.”
“Then why do you have blood on your sleeve?”
Devon looked at the sleeves of his jacket. He recoiled, startled to find a splatter of red along the worn leather, then pointed at Liam and retorted, “The fuck? You do too!”
The lights swiveled again. Sure enough, Liam had a splatter along his front, soaking into the cotton of his white T- shirt. The moment they looked around, though, they realized they were all blood- splattered in some manner. A murder had happened before their very noses.
“I want to see everyone’s hands,” Adelaide said. Whoever did this would surely have gotten blood on their palms while handling the wire.
No one listened to her.
“I’ve had enough.” Jake marched off toward the back rooms. “You can all stay away from me until we get out of here.”
“What the hell?” Devon demanded. “You know you look really suspicious right now going off on your own!”
Jake ignored him. The beam of his flashlight waved erratically with his swinging arms, disappearing with him through the left- side door that led into the dark back corridor.
“Jake! Stop!” Kayla shouted, rushing after him and sniffling. “Separating from the group is dangerous!”
“Hey, hey!” Liam hurried to follow. It prompted Chris to move too, and then their little group of assholes was barging through the door, arguing among themselves about who was getting too close and who needed to keep distance.
Adelaide’s chest felt tight. Only Elaine and Devon remained with her.
Four in there. Three out here. Something felt off. Menacing.
“I’m going to go too,” Adelaide announced.
“What if they’re dangerous?” Elaine hissed immediately. All the same, Elaine followed close on her heels as soon as Adelaide started to move, and Adelaide barely prevented herself from rolling her eyes despite the terrible feeling squeezing her stomach. She didn’t want to have to babysit Elaine while their lives were under threat.
As if on cue, the moment Adelaide pushed into the corridor for the back rooms, there was a scream.
“Oh my God! There’s another severed head!”
Her heart flew to her throat.
“Kayla! That’s a fucking hockey mask!”
A dense plastic sound thudded against the wall. Someone’s phone light flashed in an arc, illuminating enough for Adelaide to guess that the mask had been picked up and thrown.
God, it’s so damned dark in here, why are we walking around here entering the individual rooms instead of being out there where we could safely camp out in a corner— ?
Adelaide felt the hairs at the back of her neck prick up.
Then:
A blur of motion in the corridor. Adelaide couldn’t see very well, but she felt the rush of air against her side. Fear hurtled down her spine, froze her in place. Her awareness of the world turned so staticky that she couldn’t tell whether it had been someone rushing from behind or from ahead. Until Kayla screamed in feral, raw pain.
“Kayla?” Adelaide bellowed.
No one’s phone light was shining straight anymore. They turned entirely unpredictable, spinning left and right in an attempt to spot who was running around.
“Someone stabbed me!”
Complete havoc broke out. Footsteps thundering. The others were hurtling into the rooms and slamming the doors shut, intent on locking themselves away. Adelaide didn’t know what she could do. She merely stood there, petrified for what felt like an eternity, listening to the arguing voices and the clatters and—
“Adelaide!”
She blinked. What was that? Had it come from one of the rooms?
“Adelaide! Help me!”
It sounded like Elaine.
Adelaide finally rushed forward, following the call into a closed room. The moment she slammed through the door, she almost smacked her head against a volleyball net. Adelaide recovered fast, struggling to place the sound of nearby whirring before realizing Devon must have left the confetti machine on. Beside it, there was a phone facedown, its flashlight shining up. Crying echoed through the room, then grunting, and when Adelaide closed her hand around the phone and pointed, she found Elaine struggling to hold Liam off her, wet tear tracks reflecting off her cheeks.
Holy shit. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit—
Elaine had a basketball jersey clamped over Liam’s face, barely keeping him an inch away while he loomed over her, his hands pressed to her shoulders in attack.
“Adelaide, pleasepleaseplease,” Elaine screeched. “Please, help, help! He’s the killer! He tried to stab me!”
Liam made a muffled noise into the jersey. Elaine’s head tipped to the side. Sure enough, a knife lay with the batons, dripping with red.
Adelaide didn’t waste time. She grabbed the nearest heavy object— the confetti machine, still plugged in— and brought the dense square of metal over Liam’s head to knock him out.
Only she hadn’t realized the source of the confetti machine’s whirring was the blades on its underside. The very moment she made contact, it sliced efficiently, whip- quick metal gouging into skin and sending a viscous splatter of blood and tender bits of flesh in every direction.
Liam bled out in seconds.
Bits of his scalp flew wide, stringy viscera wads decorating the room like freshly cooked macaroni. They landed alongside the shiny confetti that had been left from Devon’s task, some macabre addition to the existing color scheme. By the time Adelaide realized what the machine was doing and tossed it to the floor with a screech, the blades had already done enough damage.
He swayed. When he slumped off Elaine, the jersey stayed around his face, covering whatever expression had frozen in place with death. Even after he stopped moving, his head continued bleeding, the initial frantic spray slowing to rivulets.
Adelaide felt a sticky sensation in her eyes. A delicate wipe along her cheeks didn’t seem to help; she blinked once, and her whole vision blurred red.
“I killed him,” she muttered. She couldn’t tell if she needed to cry or hurl. If the sweat at her neck was hot or cold.
“I- it was s- self- defense.” Elaine panted shakily. She rose to her feet, coughing as she caught her breath. Her phone had landed on the floor again. It lit a section of the room in electric silver, the angles wrong and the shadows distorted. “He would have attacked you too.”
“Why was he trying to kill you?” Adelaide screeched. “Why did he kill Robby? And Madison?”
Elaine’s bottom lip wobbled. “I don’t know.” She picked up her phone and tapped the screen to check if it was okay. Out of nowhere, the corridor lights came back on, pouring into the room through the half- open door. “He just . . . he attacked me out of nowhere with that knife.”
Why?
The door creaked wider on its hinges. Devon peered in, his face pale.
“Sirens,” he croaked.
Robby’s body had disappeared.
Jake was pacing the gymnasium, his posture tense. From the corner, Adelaide kept her eyes pinned to his every movement, because if she didn’t, then she was inclined to stare at Madison’s detached head instead, and that didn’t sit well with her stomach. Kayla, meanwhile, was in the other corner, bleeding profusely from her side. She hadn’t seen who had stabbed her in that corridor, but she hadn’t questioned it when Adelaide announced they’d caught Liam red- handed. Then again, Kayla didn’t have the energy to do much else except sit and clutch her side to staunch the bleeding, wincing every few moments and drawing terrified looks from Chris, who held himself close to the left-side door.
The sirens were still faint outside, but they were getting louder. It sounded like the police were going to the school first, which meant it wouldn’t be long until they saw the security system had been triggered in the gym, and it wouldn’t be long until they were found.
“There was no time for Liam to have taken Robby’s body,” Jake said tightly. “I could hear him talking beside me until he disappeared into that room. He must have an accomplice.”
“You’re being ridiculous.” Adelaide tried to wipe her hand on her jeans. “There are only the six of us here. Who are you trying to accuse?”
Pointedly, Jake looked at Devon.
“I felt a rush of air when someone brushed past me in the corridor. The only other people behind me”— Jake stabbed a finger at Adelaide and Elaine— “were you two.”
“A rush of air,” Devon said drily. “Nice. Let’s go to court with that.”
“You fucker— ”
Jake took a step toward Devon. At once, the gym plunged into darkness again, triggering screams from Kayla and Chris. This time, though, Adelaide was prepared. She was already standing near the strobe light. She lunged for it, then flipped the switch.
Flash.
Jake scrunching himself down in fear, his hands held before his face.
Flash.
Devon rushing for the front entrance, pounding his fists on the doors as the sirens drew nearer.
Flash.
At the other side of the gym, Kayla was screaming loudest. It wasn’t until the strobe flashed again that Adelaide spotted the knife handle sticking straight up from the center of her skull.
It took three more flashes before Kayla stopped screaming.
On the fourth flash, she was on the floor.
Adelaide breathed in shallowly.
On the fifth, someone yanked the knife out of Kayla’s head.
On the sixth, Elaine turned around, the knife in her hand.
“What the hell?” Adelaide whispered under her breath. “What the hell— ?”
Jake had his eyes squeezed shut. Devon was facing the main door, entirely focused on trying to get out. The only other person who had spotted Elaine was Chris, and he was paralyzed by the sight of her heading toward him with the knife. Adelaide should have done something. She should have shouted, used some of that adrenaline that had rushed through her when she was trying to fight back against Liam.
Liam wasn’t the killer. It was never him . . .
Instead, for a reason she couldn’t fully comprehend, Adelaide turned the strobe light off. She squeezed her eyes shut too, like that would erase what she had seen, like that would protect her when the knife came for her next.
When the overhead lights flared back on, Adelaide’s eyes flew open too. No less than twenty seconds had passed, but she felt as though she might have been rooted in place for two decades, made into another support beam for the building, another brick for the walls outside.
Chris was dead— or at least close enough to it. His intestines trailed out of his opened torso, the engorged pink rope making a clustered pile on the gym floor. He was still twitching a little, in the same way that insects scrambled inside an electric trap when their legs had already been burned off. Each weeping cut was jagged and long, striving to pull his soft insides entirely outward.
And in the middle of the gym, Jake was holding the knife now.
“Christ.” Jake dropped the knife like it had burned him. It clattered to the floor. “Someone shoved that into my hand, I swear!”
Adelaide finally understood.
Elaine was standing near Devon, a weeping gash cut across her forehead. It soaked blood down her face and onto her T- shirt, obscuring the other stains across her front— the ones that had actually come from Kayla’s brain matter and Chris’s intestines.
When she’d killed them.
“Stay away,” Elaine sobbed at Jake.
Devon held his arm out too, trying to protect Elaine in case Jake lunged.
“It’s him,” Jake insisted, gesturing at Devon. “He’s framing me!”
“Are you deranged? You were the one holding the knife!”
“It’s not me— ”
“What if it was me?”
Jake swiveled suddenly to look at Adelaide, his brow furrowing at her interruption. “What?”
“It could have been me,” Adelaide said. Her voice carried an eerie calm that she didn’t feel. “Why would you accuse Devon when he has no reason to get you in trouble? I have plenty. After how you’ve treated me.”
A beat passed. Silence grew thick within the walls. The sirens got closer and closer outside.
And then Jake— even now— rolled his eyes. “Adelaide. Come on. Be serious.”
She had spent three years with Jake, and yet it hadn’t changed his mind about girls like her. In the very beginning, he had said that he loved her for how much she agreed with him. That should have been her first warning sign.
“I am being serious,” Adelaide said. “You felt someone run past. Now all your friends who have tormented me relentlessly are dead, and you’re being framed for it. Why wouldn’t it be me?”
“Cut it out, Ad.” There was no room for argument. “You couldn’t.”
He didn’t say, That’s not you, or You’re too kind for it. He said couldn’t. As if there were something physically limited about Adelaide, some shortened spectrum on her emotions that meant she would never push into the most visceral part of human vengeance. She wasn’t really a person in his mind— not someone with wants and desires, the good and the ugly existing in tandem. She was an exotic smiling accessory to slot at his side until the time came to find a real girl. Someone who could be taken home and would blend right into the family photos. When he needed her, she was always around. When he discarded her, she would scamper off to nurse her wounds. Why would Adelaide Hu be anything other than accommodating?
Anger bubbled in her stomach. It was red- hot, like she had swallowed a bowl of liquid metal. She could think of nothing else. She wasn’t afraid of Elaine despite the threat she posed; Adelaide wasn’t worried about anything outside the next few seconds— and how this scene was going to unravel in front of her.
“Adelaide,” Devon warned when she took a step toward Jake. “Be careful. Stay back.”
“No, it’s okay.” She clenched her fists hard. “I have this handled.”
Jake looked at her, perturbed by her tone. Perhaps, in that moment, he finally saw her for what she was capable of. She wanted to believe that she might have earned Jake’s respect for once in his life.
They lunged for the knife at the same time.
And when Adelaide’s hand wrapped around the handle first, she brought it up in an arc, cutting right across Jake’s throat.
The sirens were directly outside the gym now.
Jake fell to the floor, gagging as he tried to take in air. Just as Adelaide turned around to Devon’s startled shout, Elaine pulled another sharp blade from her sleeve and put it straight through his neck.
The motion was so quick that he wouldn’t have had any moment to fight back. Devon gasped sharply. His hands flew up to scrabble at the blade.
Then Elaine tugged the knife out. Wiped off the handle. Chucked it to the floor. Devon, before he could do anything more, teetered onto his side, rivers of red gushing and gushing onto the floor.
“Jesus, Adelaide,” Elaine huffed. “I was going to let Devon live. You had to do it right in front of him. Messed up my entire plan.”
Adelaide had the bizarre instinct to apologize. She heard Elaine as if there were water in her ears. A droning sensation hummed through her head too, her thoughts scrambling to play catch- up with her actions. Devon was dead. She should have been afraid when she was the last one remaining, but she wasn’t. If Elaine had wanted to kill her too, she would have done it by now.
“Your plan,” Adelaide echoed slowly. She pictured the scene Elaine had set: Jake, holding the knife. “It wouldn’t have worked.”
“He would have been caught red-handed. Devon was an eyewitness.”
“Please.” Adelaide had seen every responsibility Jake had shirked over the years, every bit of trouble his family had gotten him out of. Jake Stewart wasn’t an easy person to set up to take the fall for anything— hell, he hardly took the fall for matters he was actually guilty of. “That wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. His expensive lawyers could spin a sob story out of this in hours. Think of his potential. A boy with so much to lose, so much life to live.”
Elaine sighed. “Well, you’ve still made this a little difficult, given we don’t have a culprit anymore.”
The humming in Adelaide’s head had mostly faded, yet Elaine continued to sound . . . different. Her words carried a hollow echo, like her throat had fathomless empty space inside it, extending and extending. Perhaps Adelaide was just as bad as Jake. Perhaps Elaine had always been like this, only it took Adelaide until now to realize it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she snapped.
Elaine examined her nails, scratching some dried blood out. “Me?”
“Yes, you.” Adelaide gestured around them, her arms erratic. “How can you be so flippant? You’re killing people.”
“No”— Elaine cricked her neck— “I’m killing white people. Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to do this. I gave you a chance, and you racked up a body count yourself.”
“To help you. Which I only did because you were lying about Liam attacking you.”
“Was it a lie?” Elaine returned just as quickly.
The gymnasium entrance suddenly shuddered. Police, calling that they were trying to come in. While Adelaide’s attention whipped over, Elaine didn’t look bothered.
“They’re not getting in until I release the lock, don’t worry. I knew they’d get an alert as soon as I triggered the lockdown, but I figured it would take some time to check out a low- priority security glitch after school hours.” She took out her phone, glancing at the screen briefly. “Enough time to see all this through, at least.” Elaine put the phone back into her pocket. “My mom was his nanny, did you know that?”
Adelaide almost didn’t follow the topic switch. Then she caught sight of Jake in her periphery, nothing more than a pale, graying corpse now.
“He made sure to remind her at every moment that she was supposed to be waiting on him hand and foot,” Elaine continued. “Imagine being ordered around by a nine- year- old— imagine your charge pulling his eyes back and calling you slurs if he didn’t like being told it was bedtime.”
“That’s terrible,” Adelaide said quietly. She hadn’t known. Jake hadn’t mentioned it.
Elaine shrugged. “This little group formed back in middle school, so they all took their turns tormenting her at the house when they went over to hang out. Jake, Robby, Liam, Chris, Madison, Kayla . . .” She said their names like a final roll call— a checklist of the dead. “She finally quit after he started high school. Before your time, so I guess you’ve never seen them in action. She still flinches when she sees them in the pickup line though. Hard to forget that kind of behavior.”
“I . . .” Adelaide’s mouth opened and closed. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course not.” Elaine’s gaze snapped over, locking with hers. “They haven’t done it in years. Then, for some reason, they started again last week. Yelling and hooting at her across the parking lot. Nothing terrible, of course. Nothing I could report. But it terrified her all the same.”
Last week, when the breakup had happened. Last week, when Adelaide had been booted out of their group. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe Jake was just insidious enough for it to be connected.
“So this is your revenge?”
The thudding on the door had turned louder. The police were using a battering ram.
“Of course.”
“Murder was the best option?” Adelaide demanded.
“They’re all murderers, one way or another,” Elaine said easily. “Should we wait until they inherit their future companies and raze people’s homes? Should we let Jake use his inheritance and shake hands with every judge in the district first? I’m only evening out the scales early, getting them before they can get us later.”
There was no other way out from the gymnasium. Adelaide was at Elaine’s mercy entirely . . . and yet it still didn’t seem like Elaine intended to harm her.
“What are you going to do about me?” Adelaide asked. “Are you going to shut me up?”
Elaine pressed her hand to the cut on her forehead, stemming some of the blood. She shook her head. “I always admired you, you know. You fit in so well. It was as if they didn’t even see you differently. As if they were willing to look past it for you.”
“They didn’t.” Adelaide gritted her teeth. “They let me in for as long as they set the rules.”
The door tremored hard.
“Yeah. I realized that pretty early on.” Elaine pulled her sleeves up. Nothing more hid within the fabric. “That’s why I decided I didn’t want to try fit in. I wanted them to stop setting the standard. I wanted them in pieces.”
Dimly, Adelaide told herself that this was the part where she ran, where she outwitted the killer and served justice. Instead, she asked, “You had the keys the whole time, didn’t you?”
Elaine narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”
“Give them to me.”
Adelaide could have used them to escape. Elaine hesitated, but she must have read something in Adelaide’s expression. She passed over the keys, and Adelaide hurried into the corridor, sidestepping every foul puddle and unsavory splatter. She unlocked the double doors into the school. Threw them wide open.
When Adelaide came back into the main gymnasium, Elaine had her phone in her hand, her thumb hovering over the screen. Elaine looked over, and with blood still splattered across her face, she grinned at the sight of Adelaide’s return, as if there were something triumphant about the matter.
Adelaide nodded once.
Elaine crumpled her face and started crying. Adelaide ran to her side as if she were barely functional, grabbing Elaine’s arm and crumpling to the floor with her in loud sobs that weren’t really producing any tears. The police would find what they expected to see: docile girls, who didn’t have enough humanity to do terrible things, who only lived to please, caught in the middle of such a terrible incident.
The doors flung open.
When the police charged in, Elaine sobbed harder and pointed to the back. “He went that way! We saw him! The killer went that way!”
The officers gaped at the scene. They likely hadn’t expected to find complete carnage, but they were quick to react, shouting into their radios at once and running for the back rooms, for the open doors that could have taken an intruder away from the scene.
One officer crouched in front of them, his eyes scanning the damage. “Are you girls hurt?”
Adelaide took a shaky breath.
“No,” she whispered. “My friend and I hid together.”
Copyright © 2024 by Chloe Gong.
The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power, edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker, will be released on July 16, 2024. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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