Scream 4

Chapter 14

You ignored him all day.

Why were you ignoring him?

Had something happened?

Were you okay?

What were you doing that could be more important than picking up his calls?

These were just five of the millions of questions racing through Stu's mind at one hundred miles an hour, even while he was staring at the dead body swinging left and right before him. Every two-seconds-or-so the cadavre of the young girl he had just slain climbed up higher and higher into the air until it suspended a meter above the ground, and soon after Billy appeared from behind the trunk of the tree she was hanging from, having finished fastening the body to one of its thicker branches with a rope.

If you weren't all Stu was currently thinking about, maybe he would have felt nostalgia. Their victim—the youngest member of a family of three—resembled Casey Becker in more ways than one: she was an only child, had short-cut platinum blonde hair, and wore a cute knitted blouse. Social, if blabbering two hours on the phone with her friends was a good indicator. She even had similar big, greenish-brown doe eyes. Let these similarities be the reason why they had targetted her in the first place.

Because she happened to look like his ex girlfriend he murdered.

That's why they found it fitting to tie her up the same way they had Casey, though one aspect was different. Back then, they had taken their time planning out every. Single. Detail. Having been in a relationship with her for over a year, Stu provided most of the information they needed, such as when exactly Casey went for a run, when she came back from cheerleading practice, when she stayed over at her most recent boyfriend's house, etcetera. But most importantly, Stu knew the days and hours her parents were out of the house.

That hadn't been the case with this girl. They'd only set their sights on her mere hours before shoving a blade into her stomach and gutting her.

The reason they hadn't taken their time and rushed things?

They were out for blood. Billy was so bloodthirsty that even when they butchered three people in the span of thirty minutes, it only seemed to barely satisfy him. Stu wasn't a violent person by nature but Billy brought out the darker sides of him, and he too craved to inflict pain on someone, because he was hurting inside. Stu was hurting inside because of you, his girlfriend.

It was far from uncommon that he picked your side during arguments, but how could he now? Maybe Stu was just as selfish as Billy for not wanting you to discover what really happened, but that was only because he was afraid to lose you all over again. He could pretend to be a decent person by telling himself that he regretted lying straight to your face that day in the hospital, but what would be the point in lying to himself? He was fucked in the head and he'd accepted that the moment he found his blood pumping watching Maureen Prescott and her daughter bleed out on the floor, their deaths exactly one year apart from each other.

Meanwhile, the other killer let out a grunt, and it only took seconds for Stu to be able to tell something was off. One look into the former's direction confirmed this suspicion because even in the dark where their only source of light came from two flashlights, Stu could see Billy's face was twisted in a mixture of bloodthirstiness and... Pain? Pain, or intense focus. It was hard to tell when vision was limited.

Billy had always been good in concealing his feelings, which often lead to Stu teasing him by saying he wore a permanent resting bitch face wherever he went. That wasn't necessarily true; Loomis' hidden emotions most often surfaced during their kiling trips or when you were involved, be it an argument or after a particularly rough round of sex when all parties involved were exhausted.