Friday the 13th 3

“What the hell are you two doin’ up there?” he demanded angrily. “You hear me talkin’ to you?”

He stormed over to the ladder and grabbed it, about to start climbing up, when suddenly Loco’s body was thrown down from the hayloft. It came flying down at Ali, landing right on top of him and sending him crashing to the ground. His eyes went wide as he saw all the blood and he shoved Loco’s corpse away, scrambling out from under it.

“FOX!” he screamed, and then he turned quickly as someone dropped down from the hayloft, landing back in a dark corner of the barn.

Ali looked around quickly and his gaze fell on a rusted machete among the array of gardening tools. He grabbed it and started for the back of the barn, his eyes glittering with homicidal fury.

“When I find you, you bastard, you’re a dead man!” he said.

He rushed back to the stalls, brandishing the machete, and then he spun quickly as he heard someone jump down behind him from the pile of hay bales in the corner. In the dim light inside the barn, he saw a huge figure coming at him, holding something in his hand. Ali swung the machete at the shadowy figure’s head with all his might.

Moving with amazing speed, his attacker ducked beneath the blow and Ali staggered, momentarily caught off balance, and then stars burst before his eyes as an iron plumber’s wrench came down upon his skull and he fell crashing to the floor. The wrench descended on him three more times like a sledgehammer driving in a railroad spike, but Ali never felt it.

Chapter Five

He saw them through the window of the barn, the girl dressed in a scanty blue bikini and wrapped in a towel, the boy in shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt. Their wet hair was plastered down and they walked close to one another, hand in hand. They were coming up from the boat dock by the lake, heading directly toward the barn. Their voices floated up to him.

“What’re you doing?” Debbie said as Andy started to pull her toward the barn.

“We haven’t been in the barn yet,” Andy said, with a sly grin. “Let’s take a look.”

“Not now,” said Debbie, pulling away from him and walking back toward the house. “I’m cold.” The water in the lake was freezing and it had brought on a sudden attack of cramps and mild nausea.

“How about it, Debbie?” Andy said, wiggling his eyebrows and leering. “A little roll in the hay?”

“Go play with yourself,” she said, grinning at him. “I’m going in the house.”

“Hey, wait up!” he yelled, laughing and running after her.

Jason Vorhees slowly unclenched his fists as the couple headed back up toward the house. The bloodstained plumber’s wrench dropped from his hand and fell onto the floor of the barn, next to the prostrate form of Ali. He looked down at the biker’s blood-spattered body and, for a moment, the raging fever within him ebbed. His breathing slowed and became more regular. A curious sort of calm came over him, as it always did after a kill. But it only lasted for a little while, and each time the period of calm was briefer than the last.

He had fled from the deserted Camp Crystal Lake known to the locals as “Camp Blood” after the sheriff, with assistance from local hunters and the state police, had organized a search for him. It was the largest dragnet in the history of the state. They had started at Paul Holt’s counselor training center, the scene of the recent murders, and from there they had gone on to the abandoned camp, where they had found the ruined, patched-together cabin he’d been living in. From hiding, he had watched them carrying out the bodies of the counselors he had slain and brought them to the shrine he had erected to his mother, the centerpiece of which had been her rotting, decapitated head. It was all that remained of her after the girl named Alice, the soul survivor of her vengeance, had killed her at the camp, beheading her with a machete.

Thinking he had drowned and blaming his death on inattentive counselors, Pamela Vorhees had been driven mad with grief and she had embarked upon a murderous vendetta to avenge her son. She butchered two young counselors while they were making love, savagely hacked them to pieces with a hunting knife so that their bodies were barely recognizable. Then she had poisoned the camp water supply. Each time someone tried to open up the camp again, she stopped them until Steve

Christy, the son of the original owner, returned with a setup crew of counselors, determined to reopen the camp and prove once and for all that “Camp Blood” wasn’t cursed, as people in the town of Crystal Lake believed. Enraged, she killed them all, except for Alice, who, in terrified desperation, struck out at her with a machete and ended her pathetic life. Only what Pamela Vorhees had never realized was that her son, Jason, had survived.

Jason had drowned in Crystal Lake on that fateful Friday the 13th, but some feral spark within him had refused to die. He had come to on the shore, with no memory of how he had dragged himself up out of the slime at the bottom of the lake. The last thing he remembered was crying out in terror as the waters of the lake closed over him, the awful feeling of the water rushing down his throat, flooding his lungs as he tried uselessly to breathe . . . and then nothing.

When he found himself in a clump of bushes on the shore he rolled over on his side and retched for what seemed like hours, vomiting up filthy, stagnant water, worms, and writhing maggots. After a time, he regained enough strength to crawl a short distance from the lake and collapse beneath a stand of pine trees, where he slept while his body continued the strange process of regeneration that had kept it alive despite all the rules of nature.

He did not know how much time had passed since he had drowned, how long he had remained on the bottom of the lake, but even had he known, chances were he would not have understood. The ordeal of his “death” had dealt an irreparable blow to his tortured mind, which had never really functioned properly to start with. Despite the supernatural ability of his body to shut down and repair itself, his mind was never fully able to recover from the effects of brain death. He lived, but he did not really reason. He was a human shark, motivated by nothing more complicated than a relentless urge to kill.

He had avenged his mother’s death, then returned to the abandoned camp on the shore of Crystal Lake to carry on her grisly work. And when Paul Holt had come to open his camp counselor training center on the lakeshore near the abandoned summer camp, Jason had killed them all, save for Ginny Field, who had survived miraculously after he left her for dead. When they came with dogs and rifles to hunt him, he fled deep into the woods, then plunged into a stream and followed its course, causing the dogs to lose the scent while he doubled back to the lake and worked his way around the searchers. Instinctively, he outmaneuvered them and did the last thing they expected him to do. He returned to Crystal Lake.

They expected him to flee deeper and deeper into the woods, heading for high ground. They would never think to look for him on the north side of the lake, closer to the town, where there was the thickest concentration of summer homes and vacation cabins. By keeping to rocky ground and then wading through the stream which fed the lake, he left no tracks for them to follow. When it grew dark, they gave up their search.

And then he started to hunt.

Rick parked the battered Volkswagen just off the road overlooking a quiet cove, about twenty-five yards from the water. He switched off the radio seconds before the announcer came on with a special bulletin updating the progress of the manhunt for “The Camp Blood Killer.” There was no television in the cabin and none of them had been listening to the radio since they arrived. So far, they hadn’t heard a thing about it.

He turned the engine off, left the headlights on, then got out of the car and walked with Chris down to the water’s edge. They sat down on a log and looked out over the water, which gleamed with the reflection of the moonlight and the beams from the car’s headlamps. When Chris rubbed her shoulders because she felt chilly, Rick took off his denim jacket and draped it around her.

“Is that better?” he said, moving close to her.

She smiled at him in a distracted manner. He picked up a few pebbles and tossed them one by one into the water. He glanced at Chris after a few moments. She seemed a thousand miles away. He suddently wanted very much to take her in his arms and kiss her, but as he put his arm around her, he felt her body tense. He sighed and took his arm away. He knew something was bothering her, but he couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. Was it something he had done or failed to do? Something had really changed between them since last summer. Maybe there was someone else back home, he thought. But surely, if that were the case, she would have told him.

“You know, I don’t think I could live anywhere else,” he said, looking out at the lake and just talking to make conversation, hoping he could get her to open up. “The nights are always so peaceful and quiet.”