Friday the 13th: Hell Lake
Author: Paul A. Woods
Date: 2005-08-09 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Media Tie In
Description: The second in a brand new series of Friday the 13th shockers Jason Voorhees enters the realms of Earth by climbing a stairway from Hell. But this time he's accompanied by a terrifying clutch of infamous (fictional ) serial killers, all eager to challenge his crown as the ultimate killing machine.
Publisher: Black Flame
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

PROLOGUE

Wayne finally understood that, until they strapped him into the gurney, he'd never really know death.

Oh sure, he had a good, long run of making others only too aware of their mortality. All those insignificant little people. Those good, Christian insects. He'd told them that he was an emissary of Satan, that he was here to do the will of the Prince of Darkness on Earth. Hah! It got 'em every time, made 'em cluck like Thanksgiving turkeys that knew their necks were on the block. But from this end of the corridor, on his state employee-assisted walk, he could see it had just been a game. He'd acted like he was God in human form, lording it over those he'd chosen at random. Those frightened victims of his opportunism, all of whom were told by him that they were part of Satan's grand scheme.

Yes, just for a short while he'd held the power of life and death. But now, he was forced to admit to himself, no one could truly know death, not until they were facing it up close enough to smell it.

"Ride with it, Devil Boy." The big black guard who gripped his shoulder so tight it was almost numb whispered low into his ear. "Pretty soon, you're gonna face the same maker we are all accountable to. Maybe He'll teach you the meaning of mercy, you miserable son of a bitch."

His senses drank it all in; the drab, sterile corridor that led from death row to the designated execution chamber.

The nervous aloofness of the guards who greased the wheels for his final journey, who opened doors and punched elevator buttons, then stood back indifferently. The dull lights that seemed to radiate a dirty jaundiced glow rather than throw out any real illumination.

The internal world of Florida State Penitentiary was as dead to him now as he would soon be to the rest of its inhabitants. Everything passed by him in a surreal slow motion. But ahead of him, just out of sight, he could hear those trolley wheels keep on turning, relentlessly fast. Their trundling trajectory told him that his life was no longer his own. Someone else was driving now. The Daytona Beach Devil Boy could no longer play God.

As they rolled back the doors, the bright glare of the death chamber shocked his over-stimulated senses. He blinked. Flinched. Everything had the gray gleam of polished steel or the orange translucence of bright electric light. And there were people. A whole bunch of them. Just beyond the chamber itself, behind the bullet-proof glass—within his vision but just beyond his earshot. Women and men of all ages. Of all appearances. He guessed that some of them were dignitaries associated with the penitentiary—they were sure dressed that way. But others may have been no further up the social scale than him. And he recognized some of them from the courtroom.

They were fathers, aunts, brothers and sisters. Maybe they'd done their best to dress right for the occasion, but some of the fools still looked like they'd stepped right off a garage forecourt. They were all craning their necks like they wanted to get a closer look. They weren't witnesses for the execution: they were an audience.

He wanted to take bow, to sneer at their piety and how they were so ready to play the victim role. He wanted to jeer at their self-righteousness as they bustled for the best position to watch his dying moments. He wanted to let them know he felt they were just like him.

But the sergeant-at-arms wouldn't let him. Those two dumbass guards held him tight at the shoulders. As of that moment, he might as well have been dead. He couldn't make a single movement of his own free will anymore. Pushed and pulled toward his final gasping breaths, he felt a sudden sense of outrage and self-pity.

They wheeled the gurney in with all its attendant straps and its long wires of various colors. Sgt Delmar and Officer Wilkins propelled him toward it with all of their strength and their weight. It may have looked like gentle persuasion to the fools behind the glass, but Wayne Sanchez knew better. Knew what it was like to have all his options taken away from him. Knew what it was like to be a victim. Except, in his mind, reeling with hate and misdirected resentment, he felt that he was the only victim.

"Under the penal code of the state of Florida, it is my duty to execute death warrant x666-411 upon Wayne Ricardo Sanchez." It was that fat bastard governor, all turned out nice and spick and span in his Sunday best suit. Wayne had never had direct words with him all the time that he'd been here in the pen. And now here he was, like he was playing the lead in some daytime soap opera. Sanchez tried to see if they had cameras planted among the witnesses, whether the hardassed fuck was trying to get himself a starring role on Court TV. But they wouldn't let him rise from the gurney, holding him in his semi-prone position as they slowly fastened the straps across his midriff, working their way up to his chest.

"Does the condemned, Wayne Ricardo Sanchez, have any final words he wishes to say before execution is carried out?"

Yeah. Hell, yeah! He wanted to tell them a whole bunch of things. He wanted to tell them how they were no better than he was—all holy'd up like the good Christian congregation they thought they were, but still panting for the scent of death.

He wanted to tell them how he'd always have one up on them. Wayne Sanchez knew death. You couldn't kill as many times as he had, or in the same variety of ways, without getting up close and personal with the Reaper. They could spend the rest of their lives worrying about what was surely coming down the line—but as for him, well, he was maybe a couple of minutes away from the Big One—and he wasn't gonna sweat it none.

He wanted to tell them he didn't have to worry about getting straight with God. He had nothing to apologize for. Satan was his man, and he'd been doing the devil's work on Earth for so long that he expected a whole bevy of rock whores waiting for him in a nice hot shower in hell, by way of gratitude. Like he'd told those assholes in the courtroom, when the judge passed sentence, hell held no horrors for him. It was gonna be just like Disneyland.

He wanted to tell them all of that, and more. But it just wouldn't happen. When he tried to sit up and face them, he couldn't even raise himself straight up on his elbows, so tight were the straps. He wanted to give a farewell speech that would make 'em shit in their pants, but he couldn't find the words. "Screw you!" he heard himself holler. "Screw you!" once again, but this time a shriek, to the point of screeching. Sanchez laid right down before the guards tried to make him refrain from any further abuse. In what he'd believed was going to be his moment of triumph, he stared at the light on the ceiling and tried to not to burst into tears.

The train was truly on the track. The final moments of his life dissolved into a blur of official activity that had nothing to do with him. His pulse was taken, his temperature read. Every last-minute formality that had to be adhered to in order to make sure he was healthy enough to die. Then came the first needle. He lay passive as it went into his upper right arm. He didn't like the sharpness of the short jab, but he wasn't going to show it. It wasn't going to be the first time he'd ever grouched out after having a needle stuck in his arm.

He'd expected to sink a lot lower—to be taken out of it right there and then. But he then guessed he probably had enough adrenaline pumping around in his veins to fight the sedative. He'd made a little study of what was going to happen to him on his final journey. The downer they'd injected into him was sodium pentathol—the "truth drug," it was referred to when the CIA used it to try and extract information out of people. Shit, he was more acquainted with "the truth" than anyone else in the room. He knew the whole enchilada, the secrets of life and death. Only no one was listening when he tried to tell them.

The second injection, as it shot through his left arm, had a more immediate effect. It numbed him, made all his limbs feel too heavy to move. The Pavulon took away all his feeling, all his sensation. It almost felt like it was too much of a heavy burden for his lungs to keep pumping air in and out. Like he no longer even had a body anymore. But still his mind wouldn't shut down.

He was aware of what was going on around him. Too aware. Just like that chick he'd stalked in his Honda for a couple of miles in Gainesville, he had the definite sensation of eyes upon him without being able to see who was looking. But he knew that all of them—the old bitch with the spectacles on a chain, the blue collar dude who looked like he'd just been changing an engine, the aging babe reporter from the Herald, who'd followed his case from first burst to last gasp like it was her last try for a Pulitzer—were attentive to his every breath. Looking for any sign of movement. Hungry for the moment of death.

Death came not with a bang or a scream, but with a dose of salts. Potassium chloride, his still-conscious mind told him as they pumped the last dose into him. The same shit they used to clear the roads in all those Midwestern states where snow fell every year. This was the grand finale, the stuff they would use to shut down his heart. But it was in that final moment that he made the admission to himself; he'd never really known death up until now.

And then it was all over. He'd lost their attention, all those fine, upstanding ladies and gentlemen. Excused from the witness enclosure, he was aware of them milling around, talking among themselves. The state witnesses trying to overcome the awkwardness of the moment. The victims' families trying to act dignified and treat it with gravity, when what they really wanted to do was to punch the ceiling and yell, "Fuck you, Sanchez!"

But that was the whole thing. He was aware. He knew what was going on around him without actually physically witnessing it. Yet he'd heard the sergeant-at-arms pronounce the condemned man, Sanchez, dead at 8.11am, after conferring with the medic in attendance. Surely they were making a mistake in leaving him here for dead when he was fully conscious?

It was then that the reality of death came home to him. It wasn't just that he felt like he had no body anymore. He'd felt that way ever since they administered the second injection. It was that the execution chamber, while more crystal clear to him in most details, no longer held the oppressive weight of physical substance. It was almost like it was melting all around him, that it no longer contained either his body or his mind.

His perception really began to change as he realized the trolley beneath him was no longer a physical structure. He could not feel it and it could not support his body any longer. The room grew darker as the gurney disintegrated and the floor opened, and he fell through them both. Now at last Wayne Sanchez truly knew death for what it was.

Death was freefall.

***

The soul of Wayne Sanchez was cut loose. Weightless and no longer earthbound, it was not, however, free. It was as if his body, the very core of what he recognized as his being, had remained intact, while all other material reality around it had melted. It was pulled by a central gravity against which all else was but a pale ephemeral shadow. He plummeted, through the different levels of Florida State Prison, through the foundations of the huge penitentiary building, through the soil and the earth itself. As he passed through it, all fell away as though it were illusory, just the fleeting subconscious levels of a dream that he was about to wake up from.

He fell into the earth with breathtaking speed, yet no impact struck him. As his velocity accelerated, the G-force should have pinned his pasty, daylight-starved face to his skull. But instead he just fell. Fell way below the surface of terra firma, where daylight had long since broken all over the south-eastern USA. Fell below the verdant terrestrial landscape, of flat land and lakes. Fell to a level at which another world seemed to rise up at him, out of the recesses of the Earth.

The world of eternal night, where mountainous precipices and low-lying valleys no longer met with the horizon that touched the sky. They were part of an underworld that rose up out of the very bowels of existence. It was a self-contained place, another place, where the highest peak, as rocky and as perilous as it was, did not even touch the lowest levels of the daylight world.

Passing into a deep ravine, he felt his plummeting trajectory slow down. Below him lay a huge circular ridge, against which, in the darkness, he saw what must have been at least a thousand shadowy forms huddled together for... for what? Not, surely... for survival? If the countless shadow figures he saw getting closer were like him, then they too had passed beyond that vale of shit they called "life." Staying alive was no longer an issue, but this mass of people, this huge conglomerate of dead souls, must have remained here for some purpose.

As Wayne Sanchez fell between the levels of this strange netherworld, he saw the truth writ large: hell consists of other people. Maybe it was possible to adjust to the pain of eternal torture—maybe, after a few thousand years or so, it could even become boring. But what if dead souls were forced to endure the company of people they could barely stand, or worse still, who reminded them of just how lame they were themselves? To endure them forever, with no remission?

Then Wayne Sanchez hit rock bottom.

After such a long period of floating seemingly endlessly downward, it hurt. He felt the impact of the cold, gnarled rock surface against the palms of his hands and his formerly trim ass, turned to mush by prison food and limited exercise facilities on the row. He felt stupid, after feeling so light and so weightless, to be rolling over on the ground with a total lack of balance. He brought himself to a halt with his sore fingers, coming to rest at the feet of a group of strangers.

Hostile strangers. People of all ages, and both sexes, though most seemed to be men, with a diverse range of appearances and dress styles, from the present right back to the 1800s. People whose only common characteristic was their sense of brooding violence; the feeling that, if all their hate all spilled out in one moment, they would take you unawares and cut your throat, or stab you through the heart. These were the people to whom violence was second nature. It existed as both a means and an end in itself, and had been their greatest, sometimes their only pleasure when they had walked the Earth.

Sanchez looked up at the curious, hostile faces that looked down upon him. Man, woman, callow, aging, prepossessing or downright ugly, all they had in common was that he knew they would have cut him to pieces there and then, had he given them the chance. The Devil Boy knew that he had come home.

***

In the thirteenth circle of hell resided the most debased human beings of all. The mass murderers—the little guys whose frustrations had built up until the point that they had erupted on their work colleagues—taken an automatic rifle to work and "gone postal"—or randomly erupted in a hail of bullet fire on unsuspecting innocents, whether at a college, high school, or at a fast food restaurant where whole families unsuspectingly passed the time of day together.

As Sanchez clambered clumsily to his feet, sore from connecting with the cold dead rock, he was sure he recognized some of the faces of those who crowded around him. One of them, he could almost be sure, was the guy who made the papers when he blew his fuse and gunned down a couple of dozen innocent victims at a McDonald's down near San Diego. "Way to go, man! Maximum points on the hit-ometer!" he laughed to himself.

He then saw the serial killers. Those who had destroyed their fellow human beings out of a mixture of desire and hate, or some other random motivation that only truly meant something to the killer. Pure perverted self-gratification. It had sometimes galled him a little to read newspaper reports where they referred to him as "Wayne Sanchez, Serial Sex Murderer." Next to that, he felt his preferred tabloid label of "Daytona Beach Devil Boy" possessed a reserved dignity.

It infuriated him when they listed him alongside the worst of the freaks, the gay boy cannibals and the baby rapists. He wasn't into any of that perverted shit, he just did what came naturally; although what came naturally, on occasion, was to flag a couple down off of the main interstate road for help, abandon his own stolen car, hold them at gunpoint, drive them around a while, clear out their cash dispensers, blow the dude away and brutally rape the wife or girlfriend before sending the bitch on a one-way trip to catch up with her big beloved hero.

That was what the Feds called his "modus operandi"—his basic method of operation. Sanchez liked to stay one jump ahead of the game, he always enjoyed the way he varied how he snuffed 'em out at the end. And then there was what they called his "signature." A five-sided pentagram carved into somewhere nice and soft on the woman's body, in tribute to His Infernal Majesty Lord Satan and the freedom that He had bestowed upon him, Amen.

The Devil Boy didn't just kill for sex. Oh no, he killed for fun, money, the sheer hell of it, and defiance of all those tight-assed know-nothings who always said that he was a nothing: a nobody, a drifter, a loser, boozer, substance abuser. He killed because he knew that the Rebel Angel, his Holiness the devil, had sanctified all such acts in the name of freedom. It meant nothing for a free man to take a human life. They were a dime a dozen, crawling all over the planet like insects. Though, in truth, if human life were so insignificant, he didn't really know why he got such a buzz every time he took one away. Maybe he'd get around to working that one out someday, now that he had all the time in eternity on his hands.

And some of 'em here knew who he was. Oh, they knew all right, those who hadn't been snuffed out before he hit the headlines back home. Home. There was no home. There never had been. No, there was only this, where he would have to take his chances among his own kind.

He'd heard some of those mean, obscene scowling beasts with their half-toothless mouths mutter the words "Devil Boy"—though he couldn't tell if they were showing the appropriate respect. Now that he was on his feet, he could stand up to them all. Some of 'em may have looked frightening, but they weren't so big. Wayne flexed his pecs and walked tall among 'em. Guess who's from the first generation to start overcoming their parents' nutritional deficiencies, Ese?

He recognized, or sensed, the butchers, the stranglers, and, going by some of those way-back-in-the-day clothing styles, the rippers too. Some infamous, some unknown; some apprehended and punished for their transgressions, some who got away with it all until the day they died. When they realized that hell came in other varieties than the burning hot and sweating kind.

Like a flood of suppressed memories that had burst its banks, their presence close at hand made him realize just how much information he'd stored on his fellow hunters of humans over the years. The women meant something too; the names were lost to him, but he tagged nurses who had OD'd their cantankerous old patients, mothers who had drowned their own children, then claimed the big bad boogeyman had come and taken them away. Those who had murdered members of their own families, those who had once loved them, or those who relied on them. The ultimate traitors.

The slayers and the slaughterers scowled at him out the corner of their mouths, like they didn't need the competition. Didn't want the young blood. "So, uh, where's the number one hombre who's in charge down here?" He wasn't going to let these dudes freeze him out with their attitude. It was one thing to keep looking him over—he was the new kid on the rock, after all. But don't lay on the disdain as if he didn't mean anything, like they felt he was bringing down the neighborhood.

"Who's in CHARGE?" Some stumpy little convict with a cowhide head and a short, electrified buzz cut, patented around the same time as the electric chair, filled the air with mockery. "Why you's in charge. I mean, you's the devil, aintcha, boy?"

Big fucking joke, though it brought a short gale of mirthless laughter. "No. I mean seriously." Let 'em laugh. Let 'em laugh their big retarded heads off. Whatever dark powers had decreed they should live out eternity as their earthly selves, their corporeal selves, must have realized that anyone with an inclination toward violence could still act it out in the afterlife. Some of these guys' mashed-in mugs and fucked-up faces told him that. Violence had been a constant in his life, just like theirs, and it wasn't going to go away now just because he was dead.

"Where's the head honcho? I mean, we're the boys and girls of the lower circle, right? The baddest of the bad? So don't tell me Satan don't never call in to see His children?" They were silent. Those rows upon rows of desperate, hostile, maddened faces, all made ugly, whatever the quality of their looks, by years of never-ending torment. There, in their silhouetted, overcrowded twilight world, they had no smart answers.

"I think you're barking up the wrong tree, Mr Sanchez." The one dude who felt he had an answer did not speak out from within the mob; though, truth be told, there wasn't a great deal of space where anyone could find himself free of the crowd. The very lowest murderers may have been, in their own eyes, a more rarefied breed, but the living space reserved for them in the lowest circle of hell was minimal. Those who were able to ignore each other's imposing presence or rank breath did so only after years of practiced concentration. There were only a few uncomfortable places in which to sit, nowhere to sleep, nowhere to relax.

"You can't relate all there is to know to the Sunday school teaching you seem to be rebelling against." The guy who spoke called out from a semi-reclining position. His back was supported, though ill at ease, against one of those outgrown, shapeless stalagmite structures that erupted out of the ground. The other killers—hostile to the sound of an unsolicited opinion, always hostile, it seemed—bristled at the interruption, but then lost interest when they recognized who was speaking. Disinterest was a relative luxury when set against permanent hostility.

Wayne wove his way through the mass of bodies, no one wanting to give an inch when they had staked out their own couple of feet of territory. Some, he guessed, had been shuffling in the same spot for years. Some for maybe longer. The speaker had an upper-class voice, preppyish. It was obvious that, if Sanchez wanted to speak to anyone, then he had to go to them. No one was relinquishing their own little corner of hell.

"I mean, Satan, diabolism... That's kind of a romantic notion, don't you think?" The speaker had that all-American whitebread look, though he was starting to wrinkle around the temples. Conservative, symmetrical haircut, and what could have been blue eyes—though in this permanent twilight, everything was shades of gray. The Devil Boy thought that maybe he recognized the dude from a headline somewhere, but then he was having that feeling about everyone. He guessed that if this smug faced pussy, who had "born to win" written all over him, could make it down to the lowest level of hell, then nobody was beyond being hopeless.

"I bet you spent a lot of time smoking meth, dropping acid, and listening to death metal music, Am I right?" So what if he had? Wayne was strictly old school. He'd grown up on Slayer, dug Deicide later. Then there was the new blood, like Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel, around the time that the Devil Boy went down. "I ain't listened to a whole lot of music in the last few years. But sometimes they let me have tapes that girlfriends would send me while I was in the joint, play 'em on my Walkman, sure."

"Girlfriends." The guy seemed to relish the word, in a smartass manner. "Penpal groupies, am I right? Corpse-lickers." Wayne didn't like the way this preppy type commandeered the conversation. It was as if he was desperate for someone to talk to, but couldn't climb down from his superior snottiness.

"They used to send me tapes. I know what I like. But that ain't like I got no mind of my own. My lawyer wanted to try that 'my client was ruled by the devil's music' shit, but I wouldn't let him get into it. I did what I did 'cos I wanted to. 'Cos Lord Satan showed me the nature of freedom."

"But you see, that's exactly what I'm talking about." The speaker smiled at the young man's doughy, pale demeanor, his Hispanic coloring wiped out beneath his mop of curly black hair by years without spending time out on the yard. In the ten years since they had arrested him, then just into his early twenties, the Devil Boy had ceased to resemble a boy anymore. "I know that the music's only lowbrow entertainment, though it's useful for a defense lawyer when his teenage clients have done something motiveless, something bizarre." Motiveless? And this poon was sent down here for jaywalking, right?

"I'm talking about the grandiosity of it all, the myths about an almighty satanic majesty that this kind of drivel helps perpetuate." Wayne had had enough of being spoken down to. He hadn't defied every earthly law and code just to spend eternity with someone lecturing him like a damn schoolteacher.

"Believe what you like, my friend!" Somehow, it would have sounded too damn friendly to use the vernacular Ese. "Everybody gotta choose his own beliefs. Me, I choose to believe in Lord Satan 'cos he can set me free. What are you, some kinda Baptist or somethin'?"

The dude fell silent a moment. It must have struck a nerve. Finally, he spoke. "I did have a regular church upbringing, yes. I have to say that it stood me in pretty good stead for life. But for this—" he waved one hand toward the warped stone ceiling above them, "I don't think anyone ever has any preparation at all. All I know is that I'm in a situation most of us know by the generic name of hell." Wayne's mind started to lose its focus as he followed the dude's expansive motion, taking in the endless vista of brooding, violent people. In this darkness it was like an individual continent, a great landmass all of its own. Then he remembered that it was an illusion caused by overcrowding, and that they merely occupied the lowest level of some multi-tiered sub-terrain. It didn't make him feel any better at all.

"And I know that the devil is conspicuous by his absence. But that doesn't detract from where we find ourselves. Hell is inherent in our predicament, Mr Sanchez. I don't think anyone other than a fool would dispute that."

He wasn't going to argue about it either. The continual bad-tempered murmur in the air, the gruff cursing, the occasional howl of despair, reminded him of general population in the pen when they brought some of the crazy guys in. Shit, death row was quieter. And then there was that dark pall that hung over everything. Like you were one blink away either from pitch-black midnight, or from the dawn coming up. But it never got any lighter. Everyone trapped down there in that place was like a malevolent outline, a brooding penumbra. Until you looked closer and made out their features, and saw that they were glaring back with hate.

"Every man just has to do this thing in his own way. It's all we can do to endure." The dude shut down on him. It was okay. He'd heard all he wanted to. Maybe Wayne could speak to him again in the future, maybe never. For now, the preppy just wedged himself back into the groove of that spine-curving rock, determinedly ignoring the shouts and cries behind him, staring intently ahead. If he fixed his vision just below waist level, he could forget that the dark outlines of wavering limbs that belonged to other prisoners in this desolate nightmare. He could ignore how they tottered and moaned, and fought for space, sometimes falling, punching, biting and clawing at each other.

Wayne Sanchez guessed that he'd better try to disentangle from their bodies, and find himself a space of his own. It wasn't going to be easy. The further he pushed his way into the center of the circle, the more expansive the mass of damned humanity seemed, the greater the illusion of endlessness. Here, where the echoing tunnels belched out cold bursts of fear, the big, bad Devil Boy quietly confessed to himself that he felt more scared than scary.

The cavernous floor was uneven beneath his feet. If he looked to check whether he was on an upward slope or an incline, he might be carried away by the swaying masses that surrounded him. All he could do was to fight his way through, to make use of his natural belligerence. Sometimes he lost his footing, but learned to use it as a cue to vault forward, to push his way through those who stumbled or fell in front of him.

He also learned to summon up his inner demons. He still had the spirit, and to all extent the body, of a young man. Where some fool wouldn't permit him any breathing space, then a punch below the belt or a thumb in the eye would remove that obstacle until he pushed forward into another wave of damned souls. He learned quickly. In hell, there is no mutual cooperation. You have to fight dirty or go under. And so it went on.

Wayne didn't know whether he'd been roaming the circle for hours or days by the time he first set eyes on a few feet of empty living space. Except that "empty" wasn't really the term. Over by a cluster of bulbous rock formations, like something that had been dredged up from some forsaken seabed, sat a huge, seemingly still figure. It immediately inspired something like awe—not only in Sanchez, but in every lost soul around him. No one would approach within several feet of the blue-gray rocks, for fear of intruding on the creature's privacy.

And "creature" seemed to the operative word, for something that was either a little more or a little less than human. Its bulk, tied up and contained in a shapeless jerkin and sweat-top that smelled like they hadn't been changed in a decade or more, moved only slightly, imperceptibly, his chest falling and rising slowly with every breath.

Sanchez had been made. The big freak had seen him, turning his head to stare at the intruder who dared come too close. He should have backed off, but, for the first time since he'd fallen through the thirteen circles of hell, he was captivated. What had seemed, in the dark distance, to be a distorted featureless face, was actually a mask. Wide enough to cover most of the wearer's massive head, it was stark white, though dirtied by age, with vertical grid holes cut for the eyes and mouth, like an old-fashioned hockey player's mask.

It was then that the Devil Boy became convinced he was looking on the near-mythical, indestructible force of hate that was Jason Voorhees.

***

Maybe he had lost his mind after all. Maybe hell wasn't so much a place as a state of mind. Maybe hell was madness.

Wayne Sanchez remembered the stories in the schoolyard that all the "nice kids" would bring back from summer camp. He had no time for all their "mommy and daddy says" crap, and he never stuck around much after fourth grade anyway—once his own daddy took off, and mommy farmed him out to his fucked-up ole witch of a grandma, and whatever parasite-lover she'd taken in at the time.

But he was enthralled to eavesdrop on all their stories about Jason. About Camp Blood, and all the poor little teenage cuties that got sliced and diced there. About how the bloodbath was supposedly started by Jason's mom, before she got offed and her li'l boy took over. How the murders spread out from the hicksville town where they first took place, with sightings of Jason, the deformed butcher in the mask, as far away as New York City. All the stories about how the sucker had been stabbed, shot, run through by harpoon guns, drowned, generally kicked in the ass, folded, spindled, mutilated, but had never been killed.

So it was most likely a crock. So what? People believe what they want to believe. Jason was like the retarded kid who became almost as all-powerful as Satan. The persecuted freak-boy, who showed them who he was by slashing throats and cutting off the heads of every motherfucker who came his way.

As Sanchez had grown older, the media used words like "folklore" and "modern myth" to describe the Voorhees legend. Wayne didn't care. Jason was someone he wanted to believe in. He mentally filed every last shaggy-dog story. He even watched some of the dumb movies they made about him. By the time he was waiting on the row, he would plague the guards to tell him about any crime reports from Hicksville, CA, where it looked like there might be any murders attributable to the man behind the mask.

The guards thought he was nuts too. Jason Voorhees was a yarn that simply couldn't be true, it was like trying to attribute the Night Stalker murders to Bigfoot. So fuck them, what did they know? Sanchez thought. Here he was, stuck in some nightmare world at the very end of his own existence. And who was looking right back at him, from behind the legendary mask?

The big hulk started a little as Wayne moved forward. "Hey... it's okay. I know who you are. I heard a shitload about you." He could see one eye behind the mask, the right one. It was like a big cow's eye, regarding him with curiosity. Sanchez knew the story about how the kid's head had been deformed, how Jason had been an outcast in childhood because his face had the symmetry of something painted on a balloon by a drunk. And he sympathized. Not only for the poor rejected kid, but for the revenge he'd taken on the world he hated. The Devil Boy sympathized as much with the crimes as with the perpetrator...

A nail through an eye. The socket demolished. The jelly of the split eyeball spilling onto the cheek. A double puncture with a spear gun. Some fool and his cooze speared through the guts, joining them hip to hip as they screwed. A body cut clean in two. The sucker dangling from the rafters in two halves. His sausage-like guts spilling from his exposed lower half, revealing his vital organs, his kidneys... Sanchez reeled back. His mind was often filled with violence, but these sudden flashes had come to him like a bolt out of nowhere. In this dark place, the bright color of blood illuminated his world. It shocked him out of the despondency he was sinking ever more deeply into. It made him smile.

The silent giant behind the hockey mask regarded him curiously, cocking his head as if he were one of the more highly intelligent mammals, but still not quite human. "That was you—you did that, didn't you, amigo?" Sanchez didn't fully know why, but he felt like laughing and weeping at the same time. Jason was showing him a way out of this place, even if it was just by giving him a full-color peepshow of a different kind of hell. "You're sharin' your memories with me!"

One tear trickled out of the corner of the Devil Boy's eye. Maybe he was imagining things, but he thought he might be seeing moisture in that bovine eye behind the mask too.

Staring Jason unflinchingly in the face, he screwed up his eyes and imagined an incident from his own infamous career. It was the last time he ever invaded a citizen's home, another two-in-one bonanza. He remembered the guy, some moustached spick about whom his attorney asked him if he felt any "ethnic identification," cussing and cursing at him in Spanish. The guy's sudden look of fright as he found himself eye-to-eye with the barrel of a .22. The explosion that made part of his brain hit the wall. The girl's screams, her passing into unconsciousness before Sanchez finished working on her with his jackknife. How he had to make it down the fire escape as nosy neighbors hammered on the apartment door. How he left her with a messily carved pentagram before anything sexual had time to occur...

The behemoth remained silent. But otherwise, it was as if some great beast were coming to life after a long hibernation. He stretched and rocked backwards and forwards, stimulated by the new images filling his fractured mind. It was then that Sanchez knew that Jason could see his own memories of violence, as clearly as he'd picked up those of the man in the mask.

Destiny had led Wayne Sanchez to Jason Voorhees, even if that destiny had meant the extinction of his earthly life. They were two lost souls whose only joy for living came from extreme bloodshed, the destruction of the human form. Locked in damnation together, their thoughts were starting to conjoin on the same wavelength.

Sanchez looked on his soul mate, the first and only he would ever have. At the glimpses of scar tissue and deformity behind the mask that shielded them. Emboldened, he reached out to touch the face behind it. At first, Jason flinched. But, when he realized his new friend wasn't about to snatch aside the protection that shielded him from the world, he let Wayne's probing hand slide beneath. Sanchez felt the vast expanse of his features—the distorted bone structure that left one eye much lower than the other, the patches of fungal decomposition and scar tissue. There was no doubt for him that this was the one-man murder machine he'd been hearing about since childhood. In some of his daydreams, he had even been Jason Voorhees.

As he withdrew his hand, he felt reassured, grateful to be so tolerated by the silent freak that shared his pulsating hate for humanity. "This is totally too much... You're my fuckin' hero, man!" He was almost unbearably moved. It was like a girl letting him touch her poon on the first date, like all of the good things that had never actually happened to him in his life. If only he hadn't had to die to make it happen.

CHAPTER ONE

Now that winter had devoured the fall, the cooling air above Crystal Lake formed a soothing balm. There was little chill in the evaporated water that still fed the early morning dew, even during the wintry prelude to the year to come. There was only the customary stillness of the lake. The water's surface that sometimes rippled with memories, like a distorted mirror of the recent past, every time somebody idly skimmed a stone upon it.

In this season of early nightfall, no one could see his or her face reflected out of the water, so opaque with darkness was its still sheen. Voices rang out from the lakeside, and deep into the surrounding forest. Friday the 13th of January, 2006, may have seemed a strange time to hold a sophomore party. Students at the University of Forest Green had already started their second year several months previously months previously, and, as comfortable as the cooling New Jersey nights were in this rural county, open-air festivities back in September had run on much later.

But it was the first Friday the 13th of the year, there was a tradition to honor. A macabre but half-joking tradition that very few people still living in Forest Green took seriously these days. If they had, they might have been offended that the college kids felt the date worth marking at all.

"Hey, welcome to Lake Blood, party people!" The master of ceremonies wore a short goatee beard, an open shirt, reversed baseball cap and the baggiest shorts this side of Limp Bizkit. It was his portable CD system that rocked the elm trees up to the top of their branches. It was also his idea to make tonight's party open to freshmen on their first college semester—if a party that took place under the canopy of the night sky could get any more "open" than it already was.

While the beats boomed out on the banks of the lake, pockets of college kids spread out from its perimeters. Frat boys and girls. Jocks and stoners. Conformists and misfits. Each partied happily in social segregation, with each faction keeping determinedly to themselves.

"Gonna kick it to some classic hip-hop now!" Josh Logan always earned more affectionate ribbing than he felt he deserved. But that came from his playing the dancing bear role. Insane Clown Posse were not exactly what most would call "classic" hip-hop. But then the track that Josh had chosen, "The Juggla," booming out at bird's nest-shaking volume, seemed strangely apt for tonight's festivities. "He'll cut your windpipe, eat your face," promised the clown princes of horror-rар.

Trey Leblanc smiled and grimaced a little at the same time. He could tolerate Josh, even if, with his clueless "wigga"-dom, most people thought him a fool. And so he was, conceded Trey—but an amiable, well-intentioned fool.

"Is he going to play some real music, or should we drink strychnine instead?" The soft, pallid face of James Fitzgerald curled its upper lip in disgust. "I mean, give me an old-time polka over this mock-rap refuse!" James, and his equally saturnine girlfriend, Lisa Applebaum, did their best to emphasize what they saw as their aloofness, their cultural alienation from the mainstream. Which, as far as Trey could see, was all very sincere. It was just that some cynical people refused to take their claims to sophistication seriously. As if an immersion in the romantic culture of "old Europe" and nineteenth century literature was somehow at odds with black and purple-streaked hair, heavy kohl around the eyes, platform cyberboots and chunky silver jewelry that shone with the allure of tin.

"Yeah," Trey smiled. "He was hounding me to choose some of my favorite rap tracks. I mean, like, rap? Me?" He gave his friends a little time to appreciate the absurdity. "I asked him if he had Christian Death reciting Baudelaire over an electronic backing. Threw him a little, methinks."

James and Lisa smiled in appreciation, but Trey made himself squirm inside. He knew he was trying to play to the gallery. He could be every bit as pretentious as his pale-faced goth friends at times.

"Hey, adolescents. What's down?" Trey knew he couldn't camp it up in front of Shawna. If he gave the vague air of affectation, she'd use his plasma for nail polish. And he felt all the better for it. In a strange way, she made him relax. He knew if he tried to impress, tried to be anything other than he was, she would make him feel like a tool.

"Joshua is bringing down the walls of Jericho with his sound system," Lisa pouted through her purple lipstick. "He wanted to take our vox populi on what the best horror-rap tracks are. I mean, like, puh-lease leave us alone and gather your votes from the core constituency!"

Shawna could share their joke, but it wasn't splitting her sides. She kind of liked James and Lisa—even found them kind of sweetly sexy, though it was little James's goth-androgyne looks that she kind of went for. It's true that J and L were almost clones of each other, but she really couldn't go for the girl-girl thing. Make-up always looked best on men, for whom God had intended it.

"Well, doesn't that seem kind of appropriate? I mean, given the anniversary that we're all celebrating and everything." Trust her to play fly in the ointment. That was what Trey had always liked about her, and that's what had ultimately pissed him off too.

Shawna Black had very definite ideas about "authenticity". About who was pure baloney and who was the real deal. But she could take it too far. If there was any one reason their respective temperatures had cooled way down, after the hottest, most passionate six months Trey had experienced in his near nineteen years of living, it was her insistence that she had a better grasp of his identity than he did. He didn't need her superior condescension when it came to knowing who he was and what he wanted. Just because he was one of the only Afro-American students in this white bread-and-mayo college, it didn't mean he had to play the black man role.

"Oh, that," James sneered, maybe a little over-defensively. "Campfire tales from the 1980s. Isn't it all a little bit icky? I mean, if the story's just the complete pan-full of poo I've always thought it was, then it seems lame not to wait for this rave-from-the-grave till Friday the 13th, instead of holding it last Halloween."

Lisa seconded that motion. "Samhain. That's pronounced, like, Sow-en. It was the old north European pagan name for All Hallows Eve." Shawna rolled her eyes at Gretchen, the pretty, shorthaired blonde she always had in tow since she and Trey split. There were a lot of things she could tolerate. Well, maybe not that many—but one thing she definitely could not stand was people acting as if they were several worlds removed from who they really were.

"But if the story's true—" Trey butted in. He could see where this might be heading, and didn't need Shawna's abrasiveness putting a down on everyone's evening. "If the story's true, "continued James. "Then what are we celebrating? That on Friday the 13th of July, 1979, before any of us were born, a group of people were butchered beyond recognition? That the perpetrators were never caught, but some people tried to pin the blame on a crazy lady who was found decapitated? And then in the years that follow—"

"And that's of no interest to you, right?" Shawna jumped straight back in for the kill again. Trey threw her a mildly reproachful look. "But I thought living in the grim, gloomy, bloody past was what your whole thing was about?"

"Oh, but not like that," Lisa protested. "Where is the dark romance in someone getting a screwdriver driven through one ear and out the other side? It's hardly from the fevered brow of Poe, or even some hopeless gothic type like Bram Stoker."

That earned smiles all round. It was cute to hear Lisa Applebaum, with her chubby, heavily made-up face and runic nose piercing, call anyone a "hopeless gothic type." Still she pressed her point. "It's just thuggery turned up to the max. The story that all those barbarous killings started up again the next year, and it was the woman's retarded son—I don't know the whole story, I doubt it's even true. But what is there in it to appeal to the gothic imagination? I mean, it's not like there's any element of the fantastic, or the supernatural—"

"It's folklore. It's modern myth," Trey broke in, sounding like he had devoured all the twenty-fifth anniversary analyses in the press and on public radio. "People have a need for apocryphal stories. They make sense of aspects of the world that are out of our control. Like, the murder rate goes astronomical in the 70s and 80s, so much so that people start to invent stories that it's all a handful of misfits doing the same killing. You hear about that fool Henry Lee Lucas?"

James nodded avidly. For all Lisa's protestations, he wasn't above dipping a toe into the fetid pool of American serial killer lore. "Then you know that law enforcement tried to pin murders on him that happened in states hundreds of miles apart on the same day. Lucas's own confessions were so unreliable that, when President Dubya was governor of Texas, he actually gave him a reprieve from death row. All this because one substance-abusing white trash loser wanted to be as famous as Elvis Presley."

"When the legend becomes fact, we print the legend." Her voice was so seldom heard that, for a moment, the others didn't recognize who spoke. "I mean, it's like this place—there are a whole load of folk stories attached to it. Sometimes people call it Lake Blood, or sometimes it's Hell Lake, but it all comes from the same thing. I mean, the murders at that summer camp, more than a quarter-century ago—a few facts merging into legend..."

Gretchen Andrews started strong, but tailed off in self-consciousness. She just wasn't used to all eyes and ears being on her. It was an inhibition that was already affecting her performance in classes, a creeping self-consciousness that caused her to dry up as a wave of pink embarrassment swept her face.

"Sounds like it has the ring of truth to me. Like I was sayin'." Trey was man enough to back up the girl's word when she faltered. It sounded to him like she gave her approval to his half-digested theory about modern myth and truth becoming inextricable anyhow. He wasn't about to fall into the trap of showing any hostility to Gretchen. Ever since she found herself on the first semester of the American Cultural Studies class, she'd liked to hide in Shawna's shadow. He could understand that. Shawna was a tough girl by nature and an abrasive bitch only when she really wanted to be. She would make anyone a worthy friend.

And Trey hoped he was too gracious an individual to be fazed by the sophomore bullshit that was being spoken about the pair of them. Gretchen's attachment, and Shawna's sisterly protectiveness were, he knew, being whispered about as some kind of girl-girl thing by fools who took care to stay out of his earshot. Trey felt like it was below him to even recognize it. He knew Shawna too well, and he didn't see her going down that route. But if she could make people wonder—hell, if she could tantalize him—by playing with the mystery of lesbian chic, then that's what she'd do.

If James and Lisa were like photo-variants on each other, then with Shawna and Trey it had counted for double. Only they didn't have to make such a contrived effort. Even if the two of them were no longer an item these days, then most of their peers still pegged them as a couple.

She was long and lithe and five feet ten, with a thick eruption of dark brown hair that she shaved at the sides, partly overshadowing her naturally white complexion. Trey was long and lean and six feet tall. His highly individualized hairstyle was partly crimped, shaven at the roots, and smoothed down into a kind of tufted plateau that stopped just short of being a retro-afro. Both of them had a penchant for tightly fitting black clothes, jeans and T-shirts, tunics and work boots that sometimes made Shawna look like she was a picture of Trey in negative. It was she who was the androgynous one in their on-again, off-again relationship.

***

"Okay, ravers, I got cold Buds comin' up!"

None of the attendees at the Friday the 13th party had any reason to anticipate the terrors of yesteryear. And truly, none did. Not even Shawna and Trey and their little crew, for whom the actuality—or otherwise—of those sordid events was a debating point, felt that its shadow hung over the here and now. It was about as relevant to their lives as agonizing over the outcome of the Salem Witch Trials at Halloween. It was all so far away that it couldn't touch them, so totally beside the point.

Josh brought up his ice bucket of beers, inviting everyone to dig in and grab one. Ever the well-meaning fool, he had brought his reluctant buddies a good selection from cans of Budweiser to little bottles of Schlitz, to full eight-ounce bottles of malt liquor. No one was declining his offer.

"And I got some pretty cool bud too." Josh unwrapped a big joint of Cuban cigar proportions. He held it to his nose and made an exaggerated show of appreciating its odor. Then he proffered it to Trey. "You wanna get that lit up, my man?"

He most certainly did not. Trey didn't want to make a big production of it, but ensured his refusal made Josh feel a little silly. "Nah mon. Me nah smoke de erbs an ting."

Scarcely missing a beat, Josh realized his error of protocol and offered the blunt around. James and Lisa were not so aloof from their peers that they didn't want to get stoned with them.

"Isn't that a little gauche for you, getting fucked up on weed?" Shawna asked Lisa with a chuckle, as the little goth took her second big hit and passed it to her eager boyfriend. "Noooo..." Her eyes had already narrowed and turned a glassy pink. No one was going to fault Josh Logan for his hospitality tonight. "I wanna go back to nineteenth-century Paris." Her voice was losing its shrill edge. "Back to the days of hashish dens and absinthe. Back to the future, say I," she started to giggle.

They were far from the only students whooping it up in the great outdoors that evening. Not all of the many groups spread over nearly two acres of public land had members who were using marijuana, or some illicit, botanical-like mushrooms, or even beer. But none of them felt the dead weight of adult expectations on their shoulders that night. No one felt any need to be unduly worried about the hours they had to devote to research, or essay writing, or working as a waitress or a busboy, that weekend.

The evening was drawing on. As night came down, so the fields around the lake were illuminated by small pockets of artificial light. Kids improvised with circles of battery torches, halogen lamps or even, in one case, a theatrical spotlight secured in the branches of a tree and powered by a small, backpack-sized generator. Seen from the vantage point of the woods, it was as if a festival of lights had brought the region to life that night. Everyone was split into their own peer groups, but no one group was getting in another's face. For most, their semester of solid work had provoked a need to throw off responsibility, and to spend some time doing nothing but being and feeling young. It was a beautiful vibe. While it lasted.

"This looks kind of... pagan." Lisa's dreamy voice fought for the right words. James had been rendered incapable of speech. On the edges of the forest, the frat boys and girls with the spotlight were setting up a kind of counter—save against Josh's sound system in the field. They had a boom box that was sounding out loud, to drown out the echo of his cheesy selection of shock-rap. At least, that's the way he saw it.

"Well we can't have that now, can we?" he slurred merrily, his mood as light as his footsteps were heavy. He picked up his mobile speakers and turned them toward where most of the crowd had headed. Away from the lake and into the shade of the trees, to preserve warmth as the night temperature fell and keep their electrical equipment dry. Then he jacked the sound right up to ten.

The beat and the menacing lyrics of another old-school shocker, the Geto Boys' Cereal Killer, slammed out into the night. Apart from the people who were wasted, or just plain jubilant, enough to happily sit in the middle of this sonic warfare, some of the revelers were turned off by the noise turning into a cacophony.

"Ah, Hailey, don't walk out on me like you're pissed! Not in front of my homeboys an' all!" The "homeboy" was just a frat boy, as far as Trey could see. Short mousy hair with a floppy curtain fringe, buffed up for the football field, with a "B" for Beta insignia on his zipper jacket. It felt strange for Trey to hear how black ghetto vernacular had been appropriated by mainstream white society, to the extent where it sometimes no longer meant anything. But then, who was he to feel proprietary? He was not of the ghetto, nor did he want to be.

"I am not pissed!" yelled the girl with some vehemence, trying to be heard above Josh's sound system. "I just don't want to be here when the squad cars turn up! My mom knows the sheriff of Forest Green, he's been trying to get an under-twenty-ones curfew passed onto the county legislature, just like everywhere else. All this noise after nine pm, I can't believe they're not on their way right over here now!"

Just the type to get hysterical about mommy sitting on her shoulder, thought Shawna. Frustrated that no one would offer her a lift home to her parents', the demure little blonde princess looked frenziedly around for new targets for her ire. "And that... Look at that!"

Josh's face looked as stoned as a sleeping bloodhound's. He got paranoid when she pointed at him, the half-smoked blunt hanging from his mouth on the verge of going out. "That's pot, isn't it?" she asked as accusatorily as a shocked mother in a1960s soap opera. "Oh, that's just fine, all our asses thrown in jail on account of a few stupid stoners!"

Her boyfriend tried to hold her and calm her down as she wriggled free. Along with the potheads, the rest of the group bristled at being made scapegoats for her hysteria. But only Shawna reacted. "Here—gimme that, with your lighter." She extended a silver-braceleted hand to Josh. He complied, slowly. When he'd passed the blunt around the first time, she'd declined, regarding it as a little antisocial. If she wanted to get messed up, she'd stay in her room staring at some stupid movie or MTV program. But the little bitch had thrown down the gauntlet.

"Damn good..." She lit the edges of the tobacco leaf, inhaling deep on the hydroponically grown weed packed within. Took such a deep lungful that she felt her optic nerves twitching as she released it. Its slow stream blew its way straight over to the hysterical frat girl, leaving its pungent taint upon her clothes. "Here, girlfriend," she passed the smoldering butt to Gretchen. "Free your mind before they put your body in prison."

The blonde who Shawna was baiting looked like she might turn blue with apoplexy. Her boyfriend seemed as if his ass was tightening with anticipation of her blowing her fuse.

But then a howling, whooshing, upsurge of air and water split the night.

Everyone heard it. But it was those in closest proximity to the lakeside itself, not much more than a few hundred yards away, who were the most startled, the most deafened. Some of the slimy moss was displaced far enough to rain down onto their heads.

No one spoke for a moment. Not the clearheaded, who were wondering just what the gag was. Not the stoned, whose reverie was disturbed by the hydrated explosion, making a reality adjustment to check they were experiencing the same thing as everyone else. But Josh was at least conscious enough to shift the volume control on his sound system right back down to zero.

It was then that they heard the little after-reports. The intermittent splashes that seemed to break out every out few seconds, along the entire length and breadth of Crystal Lake. They all listened, the youthful cacophony of just a few moments ago replaced by a rapt silence. As much as it had disturbed the evening, it also broke the tension that had been building between Trey's crowd and the frat boy groupings.

The uptight blonde's boyfriend and Trey Leblanc were suddenly amused to find that they were watching each other closely. As if each needed to see the other's reaction to validate his own response. Trey couldn't help but give an embarrassed laugh. It broke the ice.

"Hey, you know what I think that shit was?" the clean-cut kid asked with a smile. No, Trey had no idea. "My dad told me the tricks of the trade for today's busy fisherman. If you wanna go home with a catch, but you can't afford to spend too much time away from the office, the deal is to go night fishing and prime a river or a lake with depth charges."

"What are we talking explosives?" Trey couldn't help but be amused by this, bullshit or not. All around them, everyone else's attention was grabbed by the eruptions down at the lake. Some carried torches, their only source of light as the night sky, and the crescent moon hiding behind a passing cloud, had turned the water an impenetrable black.

Trey and his new frat boy buddy turned tail for the water. What the hell, everyone else was making for the lake, some of them at the water's edge already. "I'm telling you, my friend," the freshman told him, over-compensating for how they were nearly at loggerheads mere moments ago, "I'm betting these are trout waters. I'll lay you even bets there are some dead trout laying on top of the lake when we get down there."

The rush turned into a good-natured scramble among every guy there, and some of the girls. "Hey, where we goin'?" asked Josh as Trey grabbed his arm and bustled him along. "Why, boy," Trey answered in his best caricature Afro-American, "we're gettin' ourself what we need for a Saturday night fish fry!"

"A... a what?" Glassy-eyed and laughing, Josh was one step behind the pack.

"You wouldn't know about it," Trey told him. "It's a black thing."

***

Down by the lakeside, there wasn't a dead fish in sight. But then, not much could be seen at all, as the dark night at Crystal Lake moved towards the witching hour. All the same, lake watching was the new enthusiasm of every man-boy amongst them.

The big source of amusement was that no one really knew what was causing it, yet everyone had his or her own theory. All of them were blown out of the water, so to speak, every time another small eruption or sudden splash came from a different part of the lake.

"What is this, dude. It's like standing outside when you're letting one rip in the bathwater."

"Hah! Maybe we got manatoo migrated from down south. I bet they can fart up a storm when they're underwater."

So it went on. The sudden splash that broke the water's surface, but erupting from the underside rather than being dropped in, was followed by increasingly more scattered sounds. Gurgling. Moans. Human sounds, that urged people to check on their friends to ensure none had fallen into the lake. Or rustling, squelching noises, suggesting some people might be trying to clamber their way onto the bank. It started a popular new game—"Which dumbass has fallen in the water?"—but remained as inexplicable as the big eruption that caused it.

"Hey!" The voice called out from the south side of the lake, opposite to where Trey and his friends were hunkered down. "Hey! Someone just came scrambling out of the lake. I called out to 'em, but they wouldn't stop!"

"Over here!" The shouted reports were becoming almost as numerous as the eruptions and the noises from the water. "I got a runner!" Excitement multiplied, along with each obscure sighting. As at least a couple of hundred students gravitated around the lake, their darkened, silhouetted forms were indistinguishable from those that suddenly broke away from the crowd and ran.

As Brian Sanders, the clean-cut freshman who had buddied up with the charismatic black dude, reached the water's edge, someone barged into his shoulder as hard as if he was trying to make a football tackle. "Hey... Easy man," he stuttered, spattered with water.

"Get the fuck out of my way, kid!" The speaker growled, and was gone, making a break into the night. Brian was momentarily stunned. It wasn't just the bad humor that emanated from the runner. It was the guttural sound of his voice, not coarsened by age, but with an edge more hostile than anyone the boy had encountered in his young life.

"Over here. I got one. I guess." Winded and bewildered, the boy pointed the finger at his own personal water rat out of a sense of duty to join in. "I think he's running into the woods."

"Whooo! Let's play 'hunt the wetback'!" The affirmative cry went up from the conglomerate mass. All the kids seemed to be moving as one now, some leading the pack, others falling back or hanging around the fringes. But none were immune to the excitement, or the compulsion to behave as a pack animal. Brian was surprised to find himself being pulled along by Hailey, all anxieties about the police forgotten now that they were all engaged in a mighty game of hide-and-seek.

Gradually, one large contingent from the assembled throng broke away, leaving their peers to monitor the occasional breaking of the water's surface and the sounds of escape that often followed. Shawna was surprised to find Trey's arm suddenly around her. She looked at him with glassy eyes, too mellow not to go with the flow. "Let's all keep together," he said, as if to explain his sudden affection. "We go into that forest without searchlights, some of us aren't going to come out again tonight." Trey was acutely conscious he was now the only member of their party who had his head on straight.

"Okay." She smiled at him, more aloof and distant than ever now. "Let's go look for the mermen with their little fishtails." She removed Trey's arm from around her shoulder, clasping his hand in her right fist as she gripped Gretchen's hand in her left. "All for one and one for all. Let's explore."

With little inclination to run with the pack, they walked together as casual observers. Gretchen, cottonmouthed and silent, was happy to stick with her friend. As long as Shawna was with her, she knew she'd feel secure.

James and Lisa seemed to have stayed put. Being part of this physical mass would be highly distasteful to them, Shawna reminded herself. Or maybe, she pondered, the image drifting unannounced into her brain, they're standing by the lake together, waiting for the moon to reappear so they can watch it reflect on the surface of the water.

"They're coming to get you, Barbara!"

The figure that jumped out on them from the darkness was unmistakable. Even so, Josh's galumphing form still made the girls start. "Buffoon!" Shawna accused, but she couldn't work up any real anger. She just wished that James and Lisa were there, to identify which midnight movie he'd stolen that corny line from, and tell him how lousy his impersonation undoubtedly was.

"At your service, ma'am!" The big doofus had worked up a head of excitement. With all the bustling activity around them, and the highly potent weed he'd smoked, he was just like a little boy. He ran off, disappearing into the crowd.

By the time they arrived at the perimeter of the forest, the girls were too sleepy-eyed, and Trey was feeling too responsible for them, to proceed into the woods themselves. He stifled a little resentment at Gretchen's presence. He'd chained his motorcycle up to the trunk of a felled oak nearby, and could have rode him and Shawna straight back to campus if he didn't have a third party to take care of. They stood around with the other revelers on the edge of the woods, some of whom were already deciding this thing was a little out of whack and were drifting away.

Then the first scream filled the air.

It sent a cold shock down everyone's spine. As if their collective vertebrae had been pricked by an ice-cutting knife. There was no ambiguity about what they had just heard. It was not as loud as the first eruption from the lake, but none of them were looking to their friends to ask what it was.

The second scream galvanized them out of their silence. It was not gender specific. That cry of horror, of insufferable anguish, or physical pain, could have come from any of the guys or the girls—if they were suddenly confronted by the absolute certainty of death.

It was a very different crowd massed on the edge of the woods now. Many of the co-eds screwed up their faces in distress, while most of the frat guys just looked stunned. Gradually, the realization that the distant shapes moving through the foliage and twining branches were their own peers compelled a few decisive bodies to follow.

Trey was already making his move. As the first scream sliced through the air, he'd let Shawna's hand drop. Now he was following the only path that seemed appropriate. Someone needed their help, or was going to get their ass kicked for staging the most bloodcurdling hoax imaginable.

"Trey, wait up..." Shawna had snapped rudely out of her reverie, like everyone else who was mildly intoxicated. She didn't know whether she wanted to detain her ex-boyfriend or wanted to follow, she just needed to stall him while she considered.

He looked back at them both with irritation. "Shawna, if you're comin', then come on!" Gretchen was on the verge of tears, just wanting it all to go away, or be dealt with by the cops whose presence would have been such an intrusion mere minutes ago.

Then came another scream. It rose upward through the air from the bowels of despair. It was definitely male, trying to form words, trying to articulate a plea. Incoherent, gargling, cut off before it could make its statement. Silenced like the terrified cry of a heifer in a slaughterhouse.

Every young male not stricken by cowardice moved decisively. Trey was among the first, with Shawna close at hand. But Gretchen was paralyzed by fear and indecision. "Shawna," she managed to implore, just loud enough to be heard. Her girlfriend hovered in her tracks, unsure about leaving her behind. "It's not like we can do anything now—the screaming's stopped."

"Yeah, screams are so much less scary when they suddenly cut off, right?" Trey dismissed her, with mild disgust. He merged into the crowd of young men now surging into the forest, with Shawna just one step behind. The untidy natural layout fragmented them, made them less of a group. Some followed paths that led to dead ends, cursing as they tried to fight their way through or over bracken and bramble. Trey held back, standing amidst a deepening pile of leaves. He concentrated on the distant shapes and flickers he could just about perceive as he stared upward through the bare branches. A torchlight here. A holler there. Eventually, it was only by holding out a muscular arm and making the other guys hang back that they gauged where the voices of the guys who entered the forest earlier were coming from.

It still took a few laps of circling their way downhill, twisting ankles in ditches that looked solid but were filled with leaves, before they found where their college mates were congregating. It seemed they had only just got there themselves, coming to a halt, not with alarm or panic, but with expressions of incredulity that suggested this whole thing was turning into a hoot.

As Trey slid his way down to the small copse, it seemed everything might turn out to be cool after all. "Brian. Hey, Brian! Was that you that made us bust our as to get down here?"

Brian's buddies were calling to their friend and his girl. Sat over on the far side of the copse, the young couple were propped alert and upright on the diseased trunk of a mighty white oak, its bark corrupted by a black fungus that had spread all over.

Trey thought he recognized the kid. Brian—that was the little freshman dude who told him about fish after his girlfriend had kicked up a fuss, right? It wasn't even an hour ago since he'd been speaking with the kid, but he could have mistaken the pair of them for someone else now. It was only when they stepped up close to get Brian's side of the story that he realized why.

Brian, no basketball league player to begin with, looked shorter. Or rather, his girlfriend looked taller. He and Hailey were sat up stiff on that trunk like they expected a dissing from their friends, or had a steel rod stuck up their asses. The ribbing and the joshing died as a bunch of Forest Green guys, his freshman buddies in the first row, found that Brian and Hailey were not as they remembered them.

They weren't so much sitting there as propped against the thin white and black-flecked branches that sprouted high out of the trunk. And Brian looked different. In fact, Brian was wearing what looked like a girl's chemise, with dainty little ballet pumps on his feet to cope with the lakeside soil.

It might have been comical had it not been so bizarre. Brian refused to look at his buddies face on. In fact, he and Hailey only had eyes for each other. As they sat facing outward, they regarded each other askance, so awkwardly that their viewpoint would have been at ninety-degree angles with their torsos if they were walking down the street. Hailey wearing Brian's fraternity jacket, while he was in her young lady's casual clothes.

It was only as the guys assembled around the trunk—cautiously, slowly—that they checked Brian's expression. Or lack of it. His eyes rolled way back in his head, till all that could be seen were the whites. His tongue distended slightly from his mouth, coated in a thick red like cranberry sauce.

It took one of Brian's best buddies to conjure up the balls needed to reach out to Hailey's shoulder. She responded quickly to his touch. Her lolling head inclined downward at first, as if she, or Brian, or whichever of the couple the body belonged to, was about to crash to the ground. But her head had a center of gravity of its own. First it fell toward her boyfriend, and the thick blood that ran from her small mouth down to her neck gushed a little more.

Then it tilted the other way and came unbalanced. Dropping from Brian's shoulders, it revealed the clean cut that tried to marry her hacked windpipe and spinal column with the bloody vacant space on her boyfriend's shoulders. As Hailey's head fell into the winter leaves, it was clear they were never going to be a perfect match.

The assembled college kids backed off, speechless, some grabbing a deep breath to keep from retching. As they did, the support their cautious fingertips lent the two bodies was withdrawn, and Hailey's small, slender shape concertinaed to the ground from its propped upright position. Her boyfriend's severed head, which had been replaced uneasily on her shoulders, became detached and bounced off of the tree trunk.

What ensued can only be described as pandemonium. At least forty or fifty kids had wandered their way into that forest. All of them wanted to find their way out. Quickly.

Trey tried to keep his mind on phoning the cops on Gretchen's cell phone. But, just like the others, he ran as fast as he could, as fast as staying close to Shawna, and the colliding, tumbling bodies in their way, allowed him to. Whichever sick puppy had enjoyed playing with Brian and Hailey, after ending their lives, was still in that forest.

In a few short minutes, the exodus from the woods at Forest Green took on epic proportions, as a couple score or more frightened kids came sprinting out of the trees and up the grassy banks. At least now, apart from their murdered friends, everyone was present and accounted for. So they thought.

Deep in the thick of the woods, Josh Logan was still trying to find his way out. He'd been one of the first to enter, in the mad dash of the "wetback hunt," but the fun had gone out of it by now. He'd heard that crazy screaming coming from who knew where, and then a whole load more noise as others came running to check out what was going down. Now he heard nothing.

He guessed that the others had found out who was kicking up the big noise, and that now the party was dying down. At least, that seemed to be the most palatable explanation he could consider, in his paranoid state. It had been a mistake to finish up that big blunt when he was wandering in the woods. At the time, it just seemed like part of the fun. But now he was alone, with just the fading gleam of his torchlight for companionship. It helped him pick his way through the woods, stopped him falling hands down over quite so many roots. But every time he shone it at the trees, their gnarled outlines seemed somehow malevolent, their twisted branches rising to the sky like deformed limbs.

He was just stoned, that was all. Stoned and lost. He could hear a thousand little voices in the trees that might have been the squeaking and chirping of nocturnal animals, whistling through the branches as the night air got colder. His mind couldn't place it. His imagination, working overtime, served only to confuse. He could no longer keep track of his own steps, not knowing how many times he had already walked this route before.

"Flashes, I get flashes of Jason..." The old Geto Boys lyric from Mind of a Lunatic flashed through his mind. He knew it referred to the lunatic killer who was supposed to have made Crystal Lake his hood, what Trey referred to as a folk story or something. But he also got flashes through his mind of scenes of violence.

Some big, lumbering dude, slashing at a little chick's throat with a blood-stained machete, while he held the throat of some small dude in the other hand and squeezed the life out of him at the same time.

Fuck. He didn't know why he should be prey to those kinds of visions at this time, but it was like his state of mind had made him receptive to somebody else's violent feelings. When he got back to campus and straightened his head out, he was going to stop playing gangsta and horror rap, maybe mellow out with some contemporary R&B for a while. Shit, if he was really gonna clean his head up, maybe he'd lay off the blunts for a short period too.

Then he heard the noise. At first it made his heart pound even louder, but then the familiarity seeped its way back into his consciousness. He started feeling stupid that he'd got his head into such a fucking mess over nothing. That was a big-ass ol' motorsickle revving up, right? Sounded exactly like Trey's new Kawasaki Ninja. He remembered that the dude had shackled up his bike on the edge of the woods, and that it would take him a few minutes to unlock all the chains. Josh couldn't see his way clear, but he knew that he had to be somewhere nearer to finding a way out of here.

"Trey! Hey, Trey! I'm down here in the trees! Hey, Monsieur Leblanc, this is Josh Logan in the house!"

There was an almost immediate rustling in the trees, as if someone had found an opening on the edge of the woods and come rolling straight down through the foliage. "Hey, Ese!" That certainly wasn't Trey speaking, but whoever it was sounded like a righteous dude anyway. This was where Josh Logan would humble himself enough to act grateful and feel stupid.

Josh was surely relieved to greet the guy as he clambered up from the dead leaves and the dirty ground. "Hey, I wondered when the search party was comin' It's kinda dumb, but for a while I lost my way back there!"

"Yeah. Yeah, I know. You ain't the only one." The dude seemed in a hurry, but Josh didn't mind. He wasn't of a mind to stay all night in the forest either. Josh didn't recognize the guy, he must have been one of the older students, but oh, what a relief to have him there.

"Through this way, c'mon, follow me."

He obviously had a sense of place and direction that Josh had all but lost. Following him through to an enclosure, bounded by felled logs where man or nature had been trying to clear the forest, Josh wondered if he had passed this clearing a dozen times without finding it.

"Yeah. Over here. This way." He was sure insistent. But who was Josh to complain? He felt almost like this Hispanic-looking dude had saved his life.

"I heard my buddy start up his motorcycle out there. Did he send you in here to get me?" Josh collapsed upon a log in a stressed-out, exhausted heap. It was only now he had time to draw breath that he realized how much strain he'd been putting his body under

"Oh, you with the guy on the motorbike?"

"Sure thing, dude. Big black chrome Japanese mother."

Josh was almost loath to move again too soon, but then his Mex buddy seemed to have everything in hand. "Wait here, Ese. I'll go get your friend. We'll take you out of here."

"Cool." Josh was still panting like a tired man twice his age. The stress, the weed and the late hour had all taken their toll.

"Say, uh," the older guy said it like an afterthought. "You came into the forest to chase wetbacks, right?"

"Yeah well, that's what someone called 'em. There was something out of whack going on at the lake. Like people kept jumping out of the water or somethin'. It was weird."

"Uh huh. Well, I hate that word: 'wetbacks.' I hope that nobody ever calls me a wetback again. He said it in a kind of joking, friendly way, before disappearing back off into the trees again.

Josh hoped he hadn't taken offence. It didn't mean anything. The guy spoke and acted like as much like an American as he did. But the relief was intoxicating. He let himself lie back across the log and rest his back against the erect trunk of a white elm.

Then it happened in a breath.

One single, solitary breath.

Josh's respiratory system would never get a chance to repeat its normal in-out function. The chain whipped around his throat from behind the tree and pulled tight. Too tight to let him scream. He could only produce a futile groaning sound from deep down in his belly that would never carry on the breeze.

By the time he knew he was being garroted by the sharp chain that keeps the components turning inside a motorcycle wheel, it had bitten deep into his throat. It was a messy process, but whoever held the chain had such a tight grip that it had cut straight through his trachea. His windpipe cut in two, choking on his blood, Josh couldn't call for help. Only the tears that welled suddenly from the corner of each eye attested to his unbearable terror.

Some claim that if a blade is able to make a clean enough decapitation, and the body dies instantaneously, then the head may remain conscious for several seconds after leaving it. That's how they would know that Joshua Logan did not die quickly. By the time they found him the next morning, his head and his lower neck were still connected by solitary strips of flesh and gristle, pinned tight against the tree by the motorcycle chain.

CHAPTER TWO

In hell, there was only cold comfort.

Wayne Sanchez had spent days, maybe weeks, exploring the desolate landscape that would be his prison throughout eternity. Time no longer had any meaning. If he'd wanted to spend most of his twilight existence roaming the dead, rocky wasteland, surveying each and every one of those tortured, hostile faces trapped alongside him in perpetual misery, then he could have done.

They were always the same, and they were always different. Each one a portrait of internal violence, a monstrous ego clashing with the others who shared its mutual distrust of each and everyone else. Or perhaps it was hatred—an intense dislike verging on self-loathing. For even Sanchez, in all his self-glorification and mythologizing, realized they were trapped in the lowest circles of hell because their mortal souls had descended to the lowest level. They weren't there for violating any federal or state code. No other man had placed them there. Only themselves. Hell was only themselves.

When a killer is able to rationalize his crimes, he is able to live with himself. When he perceives his atrocities through a gauze of moral equivalency, or warped memory, or even a kind of false heroism, it seems to be about something other than the pitiful, violated human shells and the wrecked lives that he leaves behind. That is for other people to deal with.

Here, in this place, it was impossible to avoid the angry glare of self-defeat. A condemned soul could exist for an eternity without seeing his own reflection in a rock pool, so arid was the dead landscape. But he could not escape the faces of all those other losers. Their hatred and their moral cynicism, their violence and their mania. Their brutal faces looming out of the semi-darkness; hating the other lost souls who gazed upon them for the same reason that they returned their hate because they reminded them eternally of their own predicament. Reminded them of how little regard they held for the other sufferers who, in the onlooker's eyes, probably deserved their fate. Reminded them of how they themselves were no less deserving.

There was little respite. In his first short taste of eternity, the Devil Boy had adjusted soon enough to the cries of the damned—after all, in his earthly existence, wailing sounds and cries of destruction and despair had been music to his ears. Here, in the thirteenth circle, it was a permanent soundtrack, an echoing cacophony of screams, curses, wails and moans of despair. One could adjust to it in the way that a factory worker adjusts to the sounds of industry. But a factory hand can go home. And this was home now, forever.

Most of the lost and the condemned would have gone to any lengths to remove themselves. Any lengths at all. As they were preserved in the corporeal likeness of their earthly selves, they still essentially lived the life of the body. But a life deprived of food, drink, sleep, sex or any form of pleasurable consolation at all. So it was that, to all appearances, the body could die, but never from natural causes or old age.

If a condemned soul wanted to die, then it would have to be via self-destruction. It was not uncommon. Sanchez had already witnessed it several times, in the first short phase of his eternal tenure. "You shit-eating rat! You loathsome, baby-raping maggot!" It hardly mattered how accurate the screamed insults were. It was all a pretext for two desperate men, their souls brutalized beyond the point of madness, to rip and gouge and tear at each other.

The preppy who sat on the rock, the only other being with whom Sanchez conversed, said it wasn't unknown for men and women to fight to the death. He remembered that as he watched the two ugly guys, faces distorted with hate, try to destroy each other with their bare hands. He watched a listless crowd form around them to take in the only distraction they would ever find in this place. The spectacle of one man pushing his fingernails deep into another's eye, until his right eyeball hung out on its stalk. The other fighting back by jamming his coarse, hardened thumbs straight up into the soft flesh below his enemy's jaw, until the skin broke and his fingers were able to poke at the inside of his opponent's throat. Unexpectedly regaining the upper hand by forcing the strangled man's head back onto the rocks, whereupon it was bludgeoned, cracked, dashed, not once or twice, but eleven or twelve times. Until the back of his skull caved in, and the pop-eyed man forced his hand into the back of the bloody fracture, removing a gory mulch of cerebral tissue. Forcing a piece of the dying man's brain into his own mouth, screaming, "Eat shit, shit-for-brains!"

It was only by talking to the preppy that Sanchez recognized the victor in a bout like that. And it wasn't the guy who'd go through eternity wearing his eyeball on his cheek. The winner was the guy who died. Maybe they didn't think of it like that—to them, their fight to the death was just an expression of rage that they had to make somehow, anyhow. But the guy who died was the only one who was getting out of there.

It was a pretty short-term view, for where did the debased soul of those who had already descended to the lowest level go? Why, they went to hell. Straight back to hell. Returned to the lowest circle, instantly. If a soul like Sanchez, never given to book learning, needed a perfect example of the futility of his predicament, then here it was.

***

He came to confer with the guy on the rock. The other guy didn't look up. Hardly ever looked up. But he knew he was there. His expression changed slightly, an alertness born of a sense of intrusion, or maybe of danger.

"There's gotta be an end to this shit. Some way. Somehow. I don' care if means burning us all to ashes and flushing us down the can, man, there's gotta be some way out."

The preppy was unmoved and unmoving. He nodded his head slowly, with the complacency of someone with all the fight bled out of him. "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," he finally spoke, quoting Paradise Lost.

It was not the kind of smug bullshit he needed to hear right now. "Oh right. And who fuckin' reigns here, man? Who's the king? You, sittin' there on your stone throne, growin' some hemorrhoids?" Sanchez was getting close to the stage when he would need to kill, or be killed, just to let out some of the craziness that was starting to fill his head.

They had robbed him of the inspiration and guidance of his Lord Satan, "Our master in evil mayhem." Even the preachers had promised him that the devil was real. Now he was shortchanged. There was no grandiosity in evil. There was no nobility in having the balls to transgress the moral order anymore. Sanchez wanted some hope in hell. If the Lord of Darkness didn't exist, then he wanted to instate one.

The preppy, or Charles, for he'd told the Devil Boy that was his name, remained morose. They sometimes exchanged words, when Sanchez fought his way over to the rock where the preppy wasted away throughout eternity. But it always ended in despondency. It was true that the Devil Boy's company was more stimulation than he'd had in what seemed like a lifetime already. But, as with most of the lowlife in this place, he couldn't regard him as his intellectual equal. And there was always something that returned him straight back to his wretched predicament.

He'd come briefly alive when Sanchez finally placed him, from the news reports, as one of the last men to die in California's gas chamber. One of the last to vainly try to hold his breath over a bucket of cyanide, before they replaced it with the so-much-more humane method of lethal injection. But the new face in hell had no idea as to the nature of his crime. It was altogether too refined, too subtle, to appeal to a random butcher and rapist like Sanchez.

Charles Westenhaus was a downfallen rich boy. One of society's elite who had overreached himself to grab what, in his opinion, was rightfully his. A near graduate of Harvard. A nearly-was in terms of his family's business relations, who nearly set up an empire of his own but squandered the collateral on fine living. A scion of the polo club. A coke-sniffing lothario on the ski slopes of Aspen. A matricide case who might have beaten the rap if his mother had been some lower middle-class riffraff.

He might have got away with it, had he not betrayed his brilliant scheme to slowly overdose his diabetic mother with insulin by faking ever-larger prescriptions. He had taken up a previously unheeded calling when, denied his family's funds to pay legal costs, he fired the public defender as his attorney and represented himself. "Young man," the judge had told him on the day of sentencing, "with your fine grasp of criminal law, under any other circumstances it would have been a privilege to have had you in my courtroom. But we have other business to attend to..."

It didn't take much to remind him of all he had lost. In the days after he was sentenced to death, the judge's remarks had awakened a whole new fantasy world for him. He saw himself as a potential top-ranking attorney, pitched somewhere between the highest-paid alimony lawyers and the cast of LA Law. His new image of himself inspired him to study appellate law in his cell until way into the night. To fire off request after request to the Court of Appeal. All to no avail. His new vocation had come much too late to change the course of his life.

It was more depressing than ever, to be reminded of his wasted potential as he sat on a rock in the lowest circle of hell. "Don't torment yourself, Devil Boy," Westenhaus sullenly mocked. "We're all up to our necks in the same shit."

But the hot-tempered young psycho could not accept his fate, however rational it would have been to do so. "You talk like a loser, Charles." For once, Westenhaus's gaze lifted from the darkness of the middle-distance, his meditation broken. This angel dust-smoking berserker, this beast of the barrios, was calling him a loser? What exactly did Sanchez have in mind that was going to elevate him above the cesspit he was ensconced in?

"Ever since I was a little kid, I used to daydream about what it must be like to rule over hell. To really be Satan. Think about it. All of the people locked down here, when you add 'em all up, there are more people that the straight world fears down here than there are in the entire world today. Pure fear. Someone could really make use of that."

Well, he had a point. As a purely hypothetical exercise, Charles could see that the ability to inflict fear on a wide scale was highly useful. Immense fear could translate into immense power. But so what? It remained hypothetical to the point of impossibility. It didn't change their situation one iota.

"So who will be this great usurper of darkness who takes control? You, Devil Boy?" The mockery may have been too easy, but it was all he had. If he had to live out eternity with this Mexican marauder's crackpot fantasies, then Sanchez would have to endure his cynicism.

"No." The preppy was surprised to hear the Devil Boy climb down off his pedestal. "No. I got the ideas," he rapped his knuckles against his forehead with an unsparing ferocity, "but I ain't got the power. There is someone though. One dude who could take charge of this whole freakshow."

"Oh?" If this amounted to anything other than an addled fantasy, then Charles wanted to hear it. If not, he could go and find his own rock to dwell upon for the next few thousand years.

"You know about Jason?"

"Jason? Jason who...?"

"Jason Voorhees. The Crystal Lake Killer. They used to say he was the killer that couldn't be killed."

"Are you..." Charles couldn't stop the mocking grin spreading up from the corners of his mouth, "Are you talking about the malodorous retard in the mask? That thing couldn't take charge of its own senses, let alone any great mass of people!"

Well yeah, that was who Wayne was talking about. Except that he didn't see him that way. He knew the full story of Jason. All the legends and all the facts, down to the last drop of blood to be spilled. All of the murderous career that had eluded law enforcement, and defied the vengeful adolescent brats who had sought to drown, burn, shoot and stab his hero. Jason Voorhees could never be beat. Jason always came back at you. Westenhaus didn't know shit.

"I have to say, Devil Boy, you really had me going for a moment." It was so easy to mock, so facile. All the same, Charles would drain the last drop of humiliation out of Sanchez that he could. Eternity was too long a time not to grab any last vestige of amusement. "I thought we really were going to hear something approaching a master plan. I guess it's a little too much to expect, from someone who spent their time on earth smoking PCP and pretending to be the spawn of Beelzebub, hmm?"

"You had better watch your fucking mouth, man."

In his time on earth, Wayne Sanchez had been treated like a celebrity on death row. True, in county jail, before his sentencing, the gangs had given him shit and tried to punk him out, but that was because he stood as a man alone. Just him and his Lord Satan. He wasn't some whining sissy who fought with every legal trick and every clever word that he knew, to try to prove he didn't kill his old momma! Westenhaus wasn't used to guys like him and Voorhees, to hellspawn, the real deal. One more sideways sneer out of this guy, and Wayne would show him he didn't have the cojones to back it up...

Then the shadow fell over them both. It appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and, to any spider watching from a vantage point on its rock in hell, it would have seemed that both of these men were equally terrified, equally dumbstruck. But the masked behemoth, the malodorous retard that stood over them, only had eyes for Charles Westenhaus.

Charles fell from his rock, the first time Sanchez had seen him dislodged since he arrived. It seemed as if he'd virtually forgotten how to use his legs. As Jason reached down one powerful arm, stinking foully of the rotten fabric that had long since meshed with his skin, he could only cower and look at the giant threat that lumbered over him. Defenseless, with no sarcastic words to hide behind.

Jason placed one huge, rotting, gloved hand under Westenhaus's jaw, and wrenched him up into the air. Almost eye to eye with the one watchful orb that could be seen through the vertical opening of the mask, the Ivy League poisoner could only cringe and fight to conserve breath Holding him effortlessly aloft by his throat, it seemed as if Jason was going to make Charles Westenhaus die all over again.

Sanchez had been gripped by a terrible fear at first. He knew the potential of the Voorhees dude as a force of irrational violence. The two of them may have become like blood brothers, but he didn't see that anyone was beyond Jason's random wrathfulness.

But now he was more impressed than ever. Westenhaus, the smug fuck, was choking on his own terror as much as he was having the life strangled out of him. In the time—maybe hours, maybe days—since Sanchez had left Jason to his own space and come back to speak with the preppy, he knew the masked killer had not followed him back. He had appeared at random, at will, out of nowhere, because his thoughts and the Devil Boy's were on the same wavelength. Because he knew someone was badmouthing his fearsome name to his blood brother, Wayne Sanchez.

That, Wayne decided, was real power. He wasn't sure how Jason had finally arrived in hell. Given the big guy's reputed ability to fight back against every injury ever inflicted, he felt sure they'd have to burn him alive, and then set fire to his body's ashes, to lay him down this low. But he also felt, with a renewed conviction, that nobody was going to be able to keep him there.

CHAPTER THREE

"So what I got here is a triple murder committed out in the open. Just under a couple hundred potential witnesses. And not a single damn one of 'em that can tell me anything worth squat."

Sheriff Casey's words were meant to accuse. Trey was indifferent to them. Fresh out of the holding cells, he knew that if the sheriff truly felt he was obstructing the investigation he could charge him. But he didn't have any more evidence that anyone was refusing to cooperate than he did that Trey had committed the murders. Not that it had prevented him holding the boy in custody for three nights, until his legal aid attorney, Ms Miranda, had absolutely insisted on his release.

"So I'm free to go?"

The meatloaf-faced deputy, Lloyd Spinks, shot a knowing idiot grin over to his boss, Casey. Shawna watched the bubbling confrontation intently. She had brought over her little Honda van to drive Trey back to the campus, and had to bite her tongue every time she smelled an abuse of process.

"Why son, you were always free to go." The faux-geniality was underlined by unspoken menace. Although, after three days of enduring Casey's ignorant attempts at conducting a murder investigation, it was a minor improvement to be called "son," rather than "boy." "When we said we were inviting you to help with this inquiry, that's exactly what we meant. It just seemed you had a little more to tell us than your girlfriends here."

He gestured over to Shawna and Gretchen without paying them much of a glance. Trey knew he would be accused of oversensitivity if he complained, but he felt the suggestion of a mixed-race relationship also got up Casey's nose. There was the plural, "girlfriends"—as if the black kid can't content himself with just one white girl. It was all unspoken, all unsaid. Maybe, he'd told himself at several junctures, he was becoming paranoid. But no white kid had been held in the cells when he was theoretically "free to go." No one else had been questioned more than once about his gang affiliations, of which Trey held none.

"So you thought you'd better encourage my cooperation by locking me down without representation, is that right?"

Casey's wrinkled eyes showed the demeanor of a man set in his ways. A man who had successfully run for the position of sheriff of a small town several times, and didn't want to relinquish it before his retirement in a couple of years. A trusted and efficient local authority figure, who would run for election for the final time on the platform of a curfew for wild, smartass kids like Leblanc here.

Casey looked serious. "I told you several times during our informal interviews: if you feel your civil rights have been abused in any way, I can provide you and your attorney with the correct forms to describe the procedure for making a complaint. Otherwise, Mr Leblanc, you'll forgive me but I have a particularly heinous multiple crime to investigate."

"So heinous you spent three days sweating the young black man who reported the crime. By the time you guys get off your butts and do something, this creep will have more kills to his name than Bundy."

Shawna had to let it come steaming out at some point. But Gretchen could feel the sheriff's ire building up, as her eyes determinedly swept the floor. For Casey, it was the last straw.

"Get your asses out of my office now! Before I decide to bust you for insulting an officer of the law." He rose from his desk, to emphasize his displeasure. "If I hear of any of you doing anything to impede this investigation, if you cause a public nuisance by holding rave parties on public land, if any of my men catch you drinking liquor underage, or, God help you, in the possession of narcotics, you can kiss that college education goodbye 'cos you'll be spending the next year in county! Have I made myself understood?"

They filed out in sullen silence. The Leblanc kid and that feisty bitch Shawna Black (and wouldn't you know it, her given name was "Brown"—now what kind of issues did she have that she had to change the "color" of her surname?) gave off hate in waves. But they kept their mouths closed for once. That little Andrews girl stayed pretty quiet and respectful. It was a shame about her. She seemed a nice kid, but Casey didn't rate her chances in life if she kept hanging out with trash like her two friends there.

But Leblanc wasn't finished yet. He hung himself over the deputy's desk like they weren't going to get rid of him till he had some further satisfaction. "I need to reclaim my property."

Casey shot a bemused look at Spinks. "Have you returned this 'gentleman' all his possessions, Lloyd?"

"Certainly have, George. Wallet, leather belt, steel comb..." The deputy reeled it off in sing-song fashion.

"I don't mean that." The young man was quietly insistent. "I mean my motorcycle. Is there a pound where I can collect it from? What kind of ID am I gonna need?"

It wasn't the funniest line any of them had ever heard, but somehow, it cracked Casey and his deputy up. For the first time that day, a little genuine mirth diffused the tension. "Why, Mr Leblanc," Casey explained with a sudden overstated patience, "I'm afraid that won't be possible. You see, your vehicle is now marked to be Exhibit A once this case eventually comes to trial."

"And Exhibit B. And Exhibit C. And every damn case suffix up to Z-999, once they label up all the different parts," Spinks laughed. It suddenly got through to Trey that, not only would he not be seeing his beloved new Ninja any time soon, but that he remained connected to the case by the use of one of its components as the murder weapon that killed Josh Logan—his friend; the wigga that he tolerated while others cringed in embarrassment; the harmless stoner that Casey had accused Trey of hating after he referred to Josh as "that poor fool."

"Contrary to what you may think," the sheriff used the opportunity to underline a point, "we don't lock people up here for nothing. This is Forest Green in the twenty-first century, not Dixie in the 1950s. If Mr Leblanc here was unable to explain how or why his motorcycle was dissembled to obtain a murder weapon, then we had a duty to hold him in custody until the facts became clear."

"The facts being that he didn't do it. Which you now understand, but you didn't know it before?" It was that long streak-of-piss black bitch again. Where did she get off on riding his dick?

"The facts being, Miss Brown," he stated pointedly, "that we were not able to obtain any forensic readings from the murder weapon until it was sent to the crime lab in the north of the state for analysis. Mr Leblanc owes his current freedom to the fact that the report was a little, uh, inconclusive, to say the least. Some prints were recovered from the other cycle components, but they're being sent for further analysis. The only match they could make is with an offender who's now deceased. But as far as I'm concerned, every student from the University of College Green who attended that illegal rave party remains a potential suspect. Every one."

***

George Casey was relieved to see them all go. Even the Leblanc kid. He'd known from some point late in the first day of questioning that it was unlikely they had their man. But, with three sets of grieving families going after him, how would it have looked if he'd released the only potential suspect with a definite material link to the crimes? There was still something he didn't like or trust about him, but he could apply that same reservation to most of the college kids interviewed in the days since the massacre. Either smartass or sullen, too drunk or stoned to tell him anything, or insistent that he listen to a whole bunch of crap he didn't want to hear.

There was that Garcia kid, who swore he'd seen a big, menacing figure in a jumpsuit wearing a hockey mask entering the forest. Now why exactly did he think the sheriff's office would wanted to listen to that one again? Just because a multiple homicide had occurred in the vicinity of Crystal Lake? Garcia was ridiculous enough to kick up a stink when Casey had initially told Spinks not to make a full report. But the boy was insistent, and his parents' were big enough noises in the State of NY's Latin American community, to have the whole thing transcribed word by heard-it-all-before word.

He thought he'd heard the last of those stupid boogeyman tales. It was true that Forest Green had an unusually high murder rate for a small town, if you added up all the sporadic outbreaks since the beginning of the 1980s. But then, if you worked out an average over all the years that the crime rate dipped straight back down again, you probably came up with something that, statistically, was about the same as a medium-sized suburban or industrial town.

But it was the recurrence of the old fairy tales that bothered him. Casey had just taken over as sheriff when the last spate of freakish homicide incidents occurred, and he was deputized himself during one of the previous, perhaps one of the worst, blips in the crime rate. And the refrain was always the same: the man in the mask, a big silent guy with a penchant for bladed weapons or industrial tools. By the time he joined the sheriff's office, there was even a name attached by the public to the eternally recurring suspect: Jason. Sometimes with a surname attached, but most often, with a phony familiarity, just Jason.

It seems the media had got a hold of the mystery surrounding the first of the massacres at some point in the past two and a half decades, and built up several layers of bullshit around it. Feature writers, moviemakers, even, he'd heard tell, comic book publishers, had built up a kind of Halloween tale around the idea of the killer at Crystal Lake, a big lummox who jumped up like the devil whenever a rash of unsolved murders occurred.

If he was honest about it, George Casey had no idea why there should be a sudden outbreak of unsolved murders within the same, small geographical area every few years. But it was probably no more than occurred in many other modern American communities. Ever since the end of the 1950s, society had started to go to hell, and it was everybody's responsibility to make sure the pendulum swung back the other way again. Toward a strong, Christian society where every individual took responsibility for their own actions. But it was not helpful to blame things on the boogeyman.

As far as the sheriff could see, some of these freak occurrences had ended as soon as they began, when some of the rotten kids involved had taken each other out. Who was to say who was the perpetrator and who was the victim under those circumstances, when there was no one left who could give a coherent account? Even the first massacre, back in the summer of 1979, had been attributed to an unlikely suspect, a formerly respectable middle-aged woman named Pam Voorhees, who'd got whacked herself.

The girl who killed her had been locked up in the nuthouse, so who was to say Mrs Voorhees hadn't been a completely innocent victim? What with the drugs these kids were probably taking, it was downright offensive to him that the news and entertainment media should take the girl at her word—particularly when she claimed to be haunted by Mrs Voorhees's son. That was the start of the real bullshit. Jason had been the Voorhees kid's name, and from that they extrapolated a totally unbelievable story that he'd been the perp behind every subsequent series of murders committed around Crystal Lake and Forest Green ever since, on a rampage to avenge his mom, or some such crap.

But the real clincher, for him, showed how media speculation had no part in law enforcement's work: Jason Voorhees had died in 1957, at the age of eleven. Drowned while at summer camp on Crystal Lake. And this was the basis for the phantom that had supposedly stalked Forest Green ever since, some skinny little drowned (and by all accounts retarded) kid growing up as the big masked bozo that every fruitcake claimed to have seen, but no cop had been able to apprehend.

It made him sick that some stupid people demanded he take these claims seriously. But it was also disconcerting that, whenever something like this took place, there were always inexplicable loose ends. Forensic tests on the discarded, bloodied bike chain had apparently ruled Leblanc out of suspicion. The fingerprints were assuredly not his. In fact, it was hard to see how they could be anybody's. They had a curiously deformed quality that the crime lab could only compare to a corpse gradually losing its identifying characteristics.

Casey had read about audacious offenders who had played tricks with their identifying characteristics, like partially obliterating their fingerprints with acid. But this wasn't one of those, so the lab had said. They compared it to a "floater"—a body that had been in a river long enough to decompose, its deterioration aided by the different chemical processes that would beset it in saltwater rather than on dry land.

Imagine if they heard that, he told himself. To all the freaks and occult nutbags, it would be "proof" that the killer was the Voorhees kid, resurrected from his watery grave after nearly half a century. It didn't bear thinking about.

The phones were constantly blurting across the small network of one main office and two annexes. Since the sheriff had spent the last three days preoccupied by a fruitless interrogation, the other deputies had been sent out to try to coordinate with a flying visit by a two-man team from the FBI's offices in Quantico. Casey's secretary, Brenda, and Lloyd were fielding the various calls over endless Styrofoam cups of coffee. Their brief was to approach Casey directly only if a call demanded something beyond the administrative or PR level.

When Lloyd Spinks fielded a call from the Delaware State Police Department, he passed it to his superior with a sense of regret. Never did a sheriff's deputy have a greater sense that he was not the organ grinder, but only his monkey. Casey took the call. His craggy, gray-browed face, normally so slow to show expression, became almost animated when he reacted to the news down the line.

"Sure, this is he. Who am I speaking to?"

After a pause. "Uh huh. Oh really? And what apparent connection does there appear to be?"

A further long pause. His formerly matter-of-fact responses became more serious, more measured in their tone. "I see. That would appear to be pretty conclusive, yeah. I see. Yeah well, thanks for keeping me informed. Yeah, that's fine. I can be reached on this number, or my deputy will give you my cellular. Bye-bye now."

He answered Deputy Spinks's inquisitive look. "Well Lloyd, look's like there's a series of 'em now." He was almost gleefully inappropriate in his response, as if this was the best news he'd had all week. "Thing is, this latest one's got the same markings cut into him as the Logan boy. That's not something we've gone public on, nobody's gonna know that.

"Thing is, this one's two county lines away. It's outside our jurisdiction. Looks like this sucker is making tracks." It was, indeed, the best news he'd heard that day.

***

On an adjoining dual-lane road off of the Ocean Highway, all local traffic was diverted around the taped police cordon. Lying face down on his belly, the partially covered body of a muscular young man had now been there so long as to risk the onset of decomposition. There would be further forensic and pathological examination once they took him back to the lab. For now, it would suffice to know his distraught family said he had been driving a red, white and blue-sprayed Ford pickup truck that appeared to have been taken by the perp. An all-points alert had been sent out to state police with jurisdiction for the Delaware section of Highway 130.

Of course, there was no way of knowing whether this freak was staying within state lines. As soon as he crossed, this became a federal case and the FBI assumed overall responsibility. While none of the Delaware police were as cock-a-hoop as Sheriff Casey, not having an imminent re-election campaign to consider, their responses were divided between resentment at the feds' likely takeover and relief.

For this character was a freaky one. You only had to look at the deceased, one James W Randall, to see what a fight he'd put up. According to preliminary forensic examination, it appeared that the blood drops running up and down the asphalt were an indication the victim had at first been wounded by the perpetrator inside the vehicle, then given chase.

Their sudden about-turn, and the fact that the droplets grew heavier and more frequent, as if from multiple wounds, suggested the perp had suddenly given more than he was taking. Jim Randall, a tall, toned amateur bodybuilder, had suddenly taken flight from the attacker he'd at first been angry enough to believe he could beat. Going by the size and frequency of the second set of droplets, investigating detectives believed he couldn't have taken another four, maximum five, steps back to the driver's seat, before succumbing to loss of blood and possible internal organ injuries.

Then the killer's real work had begun. Besides severing the victim's carotid artery and most likely causing the bleeding that led to death, he'd got to work on a large, biker-style tattoo that covered Randall's back. It stretched from his lower shoulder to the small section of flesh at the bottom of his spine. Jesus in cruciform, inflicted with stigmata and the Roman soldier's lance in his side. His suffering was gaudy and colorful, though there was nothing mocking or sadistic about its tone. The tattoo looked like it had been taken from the walls of one of the most devout Latin Catholic churches. It was a fitting pledge of devotion from a former three-time offender who had reformed since finding Christ.

But the killer, like some sacrilegious graffitist, had defaced his body artwork. Cut around the outline of Christ's suffering, in knife wounds that had no chance to congeal or form scabs before the victim died, were a series of gruesomely carved triangular points. It was clumsily done, as if the killer had no draughtsman's hand for such a large, fleshy canvas—or, most probably, that the victim was still alive as the killer tried to make his mark.

Not everyone was sure, but one of the feds who claimed to have an awareness of "occult crime" said that the five triangular points were connected as a pentagram, the ritual worship sign of the devil. The same symbol that was carved, less messily, into the fleshy butt of the Logan boy, down in Forest Green.

CHAPTER FOUR

At the dorms of Forest Green University, Shawna had tried to provide some emotional support for Gretchen, once they were back at their co-ed quarters. It was hard. "Like, I'm expected to be this tough bitch who nothing can touch, Fact is, I'm as shellshocked as any chick, guy or otherwise here. But I know that the only thing I can do is go on with life. It's not like this creep is suspected of being here on campus, right?"

Gretchen knew that she was right. "It's not as if I got to see it—it's just—that girl, Hailey Aaronson, and the Sanders boy. And poor Josh. Poor, poor, Josh."

It was an unspoken assumption that she'd always found Joshua Logan a pain in the ass. Neither of them wanted to bring it up now, but Josh was the beneficiary of that retrospective syndrome that makes one person remember only the positive aspects of another, dead person.

The dark pall still hovered over them that Tuesday lunchtime as they entered the cafeteria. It infected everyone, a miasma of shock and anxiety that seemed to permeate the entire college now. As Gretchen had said to Shawna, "It's as if we never knew death, except as an abstract concept. It's like you can never know death until you're face to face with it. Most of us didn't see Josh or those two poor freshmen. But we'll never be able to get them out of our minds now."

They instinctively joined James and Lisa over at their table. Lisa absently played with a mound of chocolate pudding that she got no closer to eating. It was dark and sticky, but still several shades lighter than the goth couple's choice of clothing. It's like they're always in perpetual mourning, thought Gretchen to herself. Always on guard for some devastating tragedy that has finally arrived.

"Hey people," Shawna threw them a casual greeting that tried to make light. "What's happening? Let's speak of cabbages and kings, okay, anything but dead bodies and murder. Are we unanimous on that point?"

She faced no disagreement. "There's no dark poetry in what's going on," opined Lisa, a little unconvincingly to the eavesdroppers who had her and her boyfriend marked as morbid creeps. "It's just modern America at its stupidest and most brutal."

"Or some Satanist-goth at their worst. I hope you creeps got alibis, 'cos from what I hear the killer wrote, 'I love Satan' on your buddy's butt."

Though the feds had insisted that facts about the killer's distinctive "signature" be kept secret, rumors were already rife on the Net. The jock with the loudmouth would never know how close he came to the truth. His intrusive comment came from another table of diners, all male, in T-shirts and sportswear. Hollered around the corner, from a table just about out of sight, it was hard to ascertain who actually made the accusation.

"We're not Satanists," grimaced James into his uneaten Death By Chocolate. "Gimme a break." Shawna was about to rise to her friends' defense, snarling some throwaway comment that was more abuse than retort. But then another, lighter male voice was heard.

"As if goths were anything to do with it. It's like those fools who call the Manson Family 'hippies." No hippy ever had the balls to act in the way that a real man of action would. I don't see people who fantasize about being vampires as any more effective than anyone who fantasizes about 'world peace.'"

It was the kind of defense that was meant to wound, rather than lend words of support. Both Shawna and Gretchen recognized the superior, drawling tones of Paul Christos. Spoken to one of his bookish little coterie of hangers-on, his words were enunciated and declaimed in the manner of a public performance. Christos wanted to be heard, and he wanted the world to know how essentially and courageously different he was to the mainstream of students at Forest Green.

Christos had earned himself a gentle reprimand in their American Cultural Studies class for his obsession with those Americans who had placed themselves outside the "herd," as he put it, or outside mainstream morality. Charlie Manson, various Far Right militia groups, the leaders of the American Nazi Party. Serial killers. Sadists. He'd earned the less subtle promise of Shawna's boot in his face if he continued—not so much because she'd taken offense, but because he was boring her. He acceded, but took it as a victory for himself, the man who "dared to say the unsayable," or some such crap.

But today, he wasn't going to be bound by the rules of some liberal tutor. Today he wanted to be heard. "So who's the 'man of action,' Christos?" The question was thrown to him from the jocks' table. "Is it the guy who murdered Logan and that little freshman couple? You think like he's some kind of hero?"

Christos saw it was time to, if not back down, then sweep the conversation down another avenue. Somewhere they might not follow him. And he could pull it off, too. Unlike James and Lisa, the Goth kids, Christos was jocular and outgoing. Gretchen had remarked to Shawna that, as much he wanted to provoke with his views and be regarded as some kind of "intellectual bad-ass," he craved popularity alongside it.

"Hey, I don't support people who break the law." His thin, boyish face was crowned by a flattened Caesar cut of bristly black hair. "Whether it's by unlawful killing, holding illegal raves, taking prohibited drugs, I think we need more prisons to take care of all of them." Christos believed he was controlling the conversation, by turning the onus back on them and sneering at their lifestyle, their simple jock tastes, their frat parties, their beer and weed. The lifestyle he went to great pains to show he was aloof from, when nobody had invited him to the party in the first place.

"But out of maybe a thousand worthless criminals, there may be one who develops his own philosophy. A philosophy that rips apart society's hypocrisy and moralism. A dangerous philosophy."

"How do you mean, 'dangerous'? Like it says it's okay to cut people's fucking heads off and play creepy games with their bodies. That kind of 'dangerous'?" The burly speaker in the iron-gray numbered sports shirt was clearly not impressed by Christos. The feeling was mutual. The dark-eyed sophomore found it hard to resist going where his mouth was taking him.

"I mean that it's 'dangerous' to our kind of egalitarian, all-human-beings-worthy-of-God's-love society. It's dangerous to accept that some people are simply not worth the status that's given them. It's dangerous when someone sees it's time to start culling the human animal."

Not many of the jocks seemed to be paying much attention to Christos. He was getting into his usual boring crap about the übermensch, or superman, and how there was nothing wrong with murder as long as the killer himself didn't believe there was anything wrong. Most of them had heard it before. Those who hadn't were still unimpressed. Like, this little dweeb was ever going to threaten or frighten anyone anyway?

But their buddy, the beefy guy who looked like he hadn't shaved or washed for the last several days, was taking this very much to heart. He leapt from his Formica table and bumped aggressively into Christos. "I'm the one who found Josh Logan.' His knuckles cracked into Christos's upper lip. There wasn't the space to throw anything more than a jab, but it drew a little blood as the lip met the bite of his upper teeth.

The big guy was Ricky Garcia, who had gone to such lengths to convince the police he had seen a big dude with a football player's physique and a mask making his way out of the forest. At first, he'd thought someone was ragging him. But when he entered from the same gap in the foliage, and taken what must have been the masked man's route to that open copse, he'd found the boy's mortal remains. It would stay with him for the rest of his life.

"There, see, that's a fucking 'dangerous philosophy! It says that geeks can't go around pretending to be tough just 'cos they kiss-ass to mass murderers!" Christos cast his eyes downwards, catching the blood that ran in thick rivulets from his gum on a white napkin. The waitresses eyed the telephone cautiously, ready to call campus security if the situation escalated. But it didn't look as if the smaller boy was going to retaliate against anyone.

"You didn't fuckin' see him! I did! I did!" Ricky had found Josh tied around the tree with his head near severed and his baggy pants pulled slightly down. He had seen the butcher's store gristle of his throat exposed. Had seen the blood that ran from his lower back all the way down the leg of his pants, from whatever obscene mutilation had been inflicted. It was only after the wounds were cleaned and the blood washed away that the pathologist's lab had found the cut marks in the shape of a pentagram.

As a civilian, this information was kept secret from Ricky, who was left to imagine the worst. And so he did, imagining far worse than what once might have seemed like the worst-case scenario. But all the time he was making his witness statement, the cops insisted his sighting of the masked suspect was brought on by drugs or booze. Or a malicious attempt to play up to the "local legend" of Jason.

None of Christos's little hangers-on were going to come to his rescue. He tried to maintain a look of disdain as he dabbed at his mouth, but seemed as though he might burst into tears. "You wanna show me how 'dangerous' you can be, you bottom-feeding little punk!"

It was only as Trey entered that anyone had the inclination to break this thing up, the jocks too casually amused by it, the nerds too scared. He pulled Garcia back by one hefty shoulder. "Hey man, this is no time to declare war on the geeks. We got some real assholes running around right now. Save your hate for them."

Ricky let go of Christos's bloodied shirt collar. The little nihilist philosopher backed away, trying hard to maintain his derisive sneer with one cracked tooth. "Yeah, that's okay, Christos, don't mention it, man." Trey mocked his lack of gratitude.

"Maybe to be a 'geek' in this day and age is to be what a 'superman' was in the time of Nietzsche," came the retort. Trey had to suppress a snigger. Even with his mouth running with blood, and his dignity affronted, Christos still maintained his arrogance, his strange verbal belligerence.

"Take no notice of that creep," Garcia advised as the smaller student skulked away. Now it was his turn to play calm and coolheaded. "I think maybe the superman is humiliated to be rescued by the black man," quipped Trey. Almost immediately, he realized he'd broken his rule of never referring to his race unless someone else brought it up first. "Besides which, you did do quite a number on him."

"Ah, that," Garcia tried to shrug it off, embarrassed to lose it over an obvious wimp like Christos. "You know how the last few days have been. Not only do I get to discover that poor bastard, but for a while there I'm thinking I'm the main suspect. But you, uh," he suddenly remembered who he was talking to, "you know about all that, huh?"

"They locked me up long enough to get acquainted with the situation, yeah," Trey understated. "How long did it take for forensics to clear you?"

"Well they scanned my prints and checked 'em on with the lab while I was being interviewed. I guess we're talking maybe an hour-and-a-half, two hours."

Trey swallowed hard, anxious not to show any emotion. "That's extraordinary. I guess my team of experts utilized the more leisurely method."

***

Bedded down in his two-man dorm that night, Ricky Garcia felt like it was the first time in days his body would willingly surrender to sleep. He'd been called to the dean's office that afternoon, but the old guy had softened up a little when he recounted all the horrors he'd encountered over the last few days.

Ricky wasn't sure that the dean believed he'd struck out at Christos because his "dangerous philosophy" gave up the cheer for serial killers. It was as if the top guy at the college couldn't believe that a pupil who consistently earned good grades could be a sicko. But whatever, he'd threatened Ricky with expulsion if he showed a similar lack of control again—even if the next incident was a non-violent one.

It irked him a little, to be praised as a fair-to-middling student on one hand, and attacked as a violent thug on the other. But what the hell. He'd retained his student status despite an admission of violence on his part. How many other kids, during any other semester, were able to claim "provocation" as a cause for beating up on someone, as he had?

It was this kind of benign complacency that would allow him to slip off to sleep that night. Almost. His roomie, David, was already making like a buzzsaw in a timber mill, and his friend, Shane, had crawled into his sleeping bag on the floor with the resolution of an animal bedding for hibernation. The way he understood it, Shane had wrangled permission to sleep there from David, for a hundred and one different reasons: the college dorms were all booked, he was facing a cash crisis until he could find somewhere affordable, whatever.

But Ricky believed he was there because he was scared. It was no big deal, and there were dozens of other dudes in the kid's position, but no one could come clean about it. Fear, or extreme caution, always had to be dressed up as something else.

As the only major witness to the crimes, he pondered whether he was being driven by his emotions too. He dismissed it. Anger, yes. Depression, yes. But to be constantly afraid was to use up too much precious energy. Besides, as his snoring roommates had shown, the minimum of natural caution should be no guard against sleep.

His last conscious action, as his eyelids started to weigh heavy, was to check the glowing face of his alarm clock. 1:32am. That was okay, no need to get in a vicious insomniac circle worrying about whether he was going to get enough sleep. At last, his rational mind took the subconscious path into all kinds of random, dissociated words and images He was being carried off to sleep, consciously aware of only the rhythmic snoring of his roomies, and the thin beam of light that shone through the glass panel on top of the door.

That light. He couldn't help noticing it even with his eyes closed. It didn't blend with the yellow beams of the dormitory corridor. It was a focused red beam, and, even now, as he tried to dismiss its intrusion while his conscious mind strove to identify it, it danced upon his closed eyelids.

Danced in a way that mocked and challenged him, making him only too aware of the red shadows at the back of his eyes. Irritated, he snapped back to consciousness. Sure enough, it was like a red pencil beam, shone purposefully through their skylight. He rolled over and sorted through the pile of possessions in his bedside drawer. Wallet, ID, photo of his mom and dad and his sisters, photo of his girlfriend Janita, army-style penknife, all present and correct. Among the myriad other items that he'd picked up on his path through life, he couldn't find his novelty laser pen. Exactly the type of tool to create the images he saw before him. The less sophisticated cousin of the kind of laser instrument they were using to repair detached retinas. It was exactly what some fool was using to bait him right now.

"Hey Christos! That you?" He regretted the words almost as soon as they hissed from his mouth. His regular roomie and their guest stirred a little, rolling over and murmuring as if another call from him would bring them back to wakefulness.

But, just as he found it difficult to believe that the geek was goading him, at the same time he questioned Christos's stupidity. Did he really think he could fuck with him so blatantly and get away with it? There was only one thing to do, and if it woke his buddies, too bad.

He sprang up from his mattress and grabbed his sweatshirt in one arced movement. Purposely avoiding any further noise to wake his roomies, he took the handle of the closed door in one hand and gently opened it, stepping out of the gap and pulling it closed behind him in one more single movement.

He saw him straight away.

The unknowable face that breathed hard through that expressionless, inhuman mask. The shapeless form of someone whose physiology had not known when to stop growing.

"Christos, is that you fucking around?"

Though his eyes had been closed long enough to make him squint in the light, he knew the falsehood of his remark. Petulance could make little men grow spiteful. Courage could even make them momentarily strong. But nothing could make someone of Christos's stature grow temporarily huge.

"What the fuck you doing with that?"

It was the last coherent statement he would ever make, cut off in mid-flow. The giant gloved hand grabbed the ponytail that bound together Ricky's long hair. It snapped back his head and tightened the skin of his face, pulling his eyes back open as if in a poor man's imitation of plastic surgery.

"Fuck you. No you can't..."

He didn't have enough strength to fight off the powerful shape. Ricky, like most of his friends, had never really considered the various forms that death might take, aside from the odd sick joke about road accidents. He had never believed it might come for him like this. That it would be this humanoid. That it would be this merciless, or smell so bad.

He hollered, as much in a cry for help as in pain. Unable to shut his eyes, he felt the searing heat as his right pupil shrank in defense against the thin laser beam shining directly into it. As it came suddenly closer, and his eyelids could afford him no protection, his manic stare reversed the process. The pupils of his eyes grew until they almost obliterated the irises, like black voids of fear.

His right pupil maintained itself at more than twice its normal size. Dark and terror-stricken, Ricky's eye would have accommodated someone's thumbprint across its center just then.

But instead, it defenselessly welcomed the glowing red end of a laser pen. The hot end that quickly turned its lubricating tears into a hot vapor. The burning point that pushed quickly through the huge black pupil, then upwards through the eye, through the organic jelly of the cornea.

Ricky Garcia screamed hopelessly, helplessly, though he knew his cries would bring rescuers too late. He screamed because it would have intolerable to stay silent, as the laser pen was driven in its entirety through the cornea of his eye and upwards, to imbed in the right side of his brain.

CHAPTER FIVE

There was a total lockdown. As the police swarmed all over campus, their agitation was compounded by Sheriff Casey's disappointment that the killer was still in their midst. The very young people that the cops were supposed to be there to protect became their natural enemies.

No one had been allowed to leave the premises. According to Casey, every student of Forest Green University remained a suspect. The trouble was that everyone who remained under that same roof was a potential victim, too. "Get me the Leblanc kid," Casey had told his deputies. With the help of the janitor, they were not long in finding his dorm. When they came storming in, the male students and female co-eds were in an informal meeting in the dormitory's common room.

"Well, well. Whatta we got here?" Deputy Spink picked up some items from a table and regarded them with exaggerated suspicion. Couple of cans of Mace pepper spray. Several steel combs with their teeth filed into a sharp point. Swiss army knives. A silver star that looked like one of those weapons Bruce Lee may have used, back in the day. Spinks was excited by the prospect of being out of the office and deputizing for the sheriff on a big murder enquiry. He was exactly the kind of guy to let something like that go to his head.

"I think you'll find this is all legally held private property, officer." Well, well, so it was the long-legged bitch with attitude talking.

"Thank you, Miss Brown," he addressed Shawna Black. "I think the Forest Green sheriff's office is probably the best judge of that." The chief deputy motioned to his second to pack up everything on the table in an evidence bag. Shawna stepped up, face to face, to broadcast her defiance. But it was a smooth young black man's hand that slammed itself down on their private property.

"This is mostly protection for the women," Trey Leblanc asserted. "Unless you can give us all a twenty-four hour armed guard around the clock, it seems like our best chance of fighting back."

Spinks took Trey's arm and forcibly lifted it. He was stronger than he looked beneath the donuts-and-cheeseburgers exterior. The deputy motioned for his colleague to pick the materials up. "I don't care if this is everything your ole gran'ma bequeathed you on her deathbed. Do I need to repeat that every single one of you is a suspect in this case? There's no percentage for the sheriff's office in leavin' you armed."

Spinks met with groans all round. "That's insane, " They pressed his point further. "If you're going to take away our only legal forms of defense, then what chance do any of us have?"

"I reckon that maybe a couple of you have the greatest chance of getting out alive," spat the deputy, becoming riled. "After all, there's no sign of breaking and entering here. It means that at least one of you is responsible for the murders of Richard Garcia, Joshua Logan, Hailey Aaronson and Brian Sanders. Give me your cooperation on this and help me catch the perps, then you can comb your fuckin' hair with needles and spray each other with Mace as much as you damn like!"

Not bad, if he said so himself. It helped to minimize the irritation he felt at being wakened from bed in the early pre-dawn hours that morning. After a few days of nothing but mutilated bodies and uncooperative kids, the strain was starting to show. Still, at least he was wearing better than ole Casey, who was starting to look like an old man who didn't know his tail from his elbow, every time the killer notched another one up. So much for "the killer's left the county, he's no longer our responsibility, boys." There was one ole coot who ought to think twice about running for re-election next year.

"I need you to accompany me to the sheriff's offices, Mr Leblanc. There are a number of routine matters that have to be addressed."

"You mean I'm going back to the jailhouse without charge." Trey cut through the law-enforcement doubletalk. He said it loud and clear and bitter, so that every guy and every girl in the place was aware of the pointless harassment. "When in doubt, just round up the usual suspects."

His blue-collar parents, a car mechanic and a factory hand, had encouraged him to develop every aspect of himself, from his interest in clinical psychology to his disciplined training in Chinese martial arts. "We may be in the ghetto, son," they used to tell him back at their Westside Manhattan tenement block. "But you are not of the ghetto." It was hard to bear that in mind when you had cracker policemen like Casey and Spinks, who saw a dangerous young black man every time they set eyes upon him. To his mind, they were just rednecks in respectable uniform.

"Police harassment didn't catch the killer last time. What are you gonna do, try, try and try Trey again, hoping he'll crack and make a false statement?" It was a kick to have someone like Shawna on your side.

"Darlin', we're likely looking at more than one perp in this mess," growled Spinks, his old-fashioned country way of thinking offending her just like it was meant to. "If you're so certain your boyfriend there had nothin' to do with it, I suggest you take a ride down the station with us and explain just how."

Her knee-jerk impulse told her to go for it, but a squeezing hand was pulling her back. It was Gretchen. Irritated, Shawna almost told her to go take a flying fuck. But, in a moment, some of her fury was dispelled. Trey looked over at her, shaking his head slowly. Gretchen was so frightened, so paranoid, at the sense of being under siege.

"If I don't come voluntarily, is there an arrest warrant for me?"

Spinks could see the boy was likely to play it safe this time around. "Only if you don't comply, Ta-Rey," his country voice lending the boy's name an extra syllable. "Otherwise, if we get this thing over and done with quickly, you can come right back and console your friends here."

He looked uncertainly back at Shawna. "Diane Miranda. She takes the legal aid cases at Shemp and Darrow. Phone her for me as soon as office hours begin."

"Come on, Ta-Rey, you know we ain't gonna stop you making a phone call. That was just a misunderstanding last time, right? You said you didn't have a lawyer."

"Since when did not having a lawyer disentitle anyone to legal aid?" He shot one more look back at Shawna. "Diane Miranda. Shemp and Darrow. Call her." Then the suspect and his escort marched back off into the night.

"So... where are we all gonna sleep?" It was the question on everyone's lips, articulated by one fatigued-looking young girl. As if all their coursework that semester wasn't enough, now they had to face mass murder. Broken sleep. And the arrest of someone that several of them counted as a good friend but, if the sheriff's office were to be taken seriously, was a prime suspect in the killings.

"We sleep wherever our friends will let us," broke in Shawna. "No one ought to be alone tonight. And here," she fished another batch of gas canisters, sharpened nail files, various everyday objects primed and honed to make them into weapons, "take as many of these as will go round."

They dug their hands in obediently, the guys included. Many of them had fantasized about getting in Shawna Black's pants, but the fact was that she was too feminine and too tough. An unlikely proposition for anyone but the most self-assured young man, who would need to possess a brain to boot.

"Shawna?" The shaky voice was trembling but loud, a little off-key. She wasn't going to let her down now. "Sure, Gretchen, you can sleep in my room," she answered in anticipation. Nobody would say anything outright about it. In fact, Shawna defied anyone to say anything outright to her face. But there was still the odd snicker, snigger or snide comment behind their backs. It was hard for her to single out where any one of them originated, so she chose at random.

"Say what, pepperoni face?" It wasn't normally her thing to pick on people for their physical appearance. In fact, she regarded it as downright below her. But this kid was among a group of buddies who were either cracking wise at their expense or laughing at the jibes of others who were. She could make her point with him.

"Hey, what's your fuckin' problem? I never said nothin'! Why don't you pick on those guys over there?" She had thought about it. But they were too inscrutable, too sneaky. She couldn't identify what they'd done in the way that she could this kid.

"Because you were laughing."

"So? It's like a crime now to laugh?" His voice was becoming louder, but losing its shrill edge. With the backing of his buddies, his confidence was growing. She'd have to see to that.

"Not a crime," she conceded. "It's a misdemeanor. But it's one that earns you corporal punishment instead of jail time." Pulling a sharpened comb from one of her pockets as if it was one of Trey's kung fu weapons, she made a scrape across the topside of his hand that made him yell and put everyone else's teeth on edge.

"Fuck you!" he squealed, retracting the hand with the long, stinging scratch that drew blood. His friends took one step behind him en masse as Shawna stepped forward.

"You said what? You wanna 'fuck me,' is that it?" She drew closer, clenching her fists like she was going to make use of them.

"No, no, I don't wanna fuck you." In his humiliation and panic, he wasn't choosing his words carefully. "What I mean—I ain't looking to start trouble. I don't want trouble." It was a climb-down that he knew his buddies would tease him about for months. How he kissed ass to Shawna, the hobby dyke, when she made like she was going to deck him. Countered by his excuses that he didn't want to take on Leblanc, should he ever return from the cells.

"Well that's just fine then, little boy. No trouble, no tears." She backed off from a closeness that would have been sexually provocative, had she been that way inclined toward him. As it was, it was downright menacing.

And he felt humiliated. He wished that the Crystal Lake Killer, or Jason, or Kris Kringle, or whoever the big freak in the mask was supposed to be, would do his worst upon Shawna Black. Slice her, and gut her, and glue her eyeballs to her nipples. Anything, just to make the bitch pay for her little power trips. Just kill Shawna, my friend, and then fuck off, because then your work is done.

Long before everyone else was paired, threesomed, quadrupled and quinned off to their temporary sleeping-quarters for the two-and-a-half hours before dawn, Shawna and Gretchen had hit the sack. "I got you a mattress you can bunk down on, girlfriend," Shawna sullenly intoned. She wasn't fazed by having to share the room with the girl who all the jocks sniggered about, claiming she was her lesbian lover.

It was the whole scene: those godawful murders by that sick-puppy psycho, getting closer all the time; poor Josh, the unsuspecting, stupid sap; the cops scapegoating Trey because he was neither the white college kid, nor the gangsta-rapping, cap-in-your-ass kind; this weird fucking atrocity tonight, and then those assholes just now—though, if she were honest with herself, she'd admit that she needed those assholes. Needed something or someone to react against, and blow off some of her steam before it blew up her head. Needed to kick out against somebody or something she was able to handle.

"And I got a key here to lock the door from the inside. So in case you hear the fire alarm, it's—"

"Shawna." Gretchen's voice broke in, soft and sincere.

"Yeah, what?" She sincerely hoped this wasn't going to be what it sounded like. It was one thing batting off foolish jibes from know-nothings and another to fly in the face of stupid convention when its shackles became too constraining, but she didn't actually need Gretchen getting silly and sentimental over her. Especially not now, of all times.

"If they call off the lockdown and let some of us go—I mean, the girls really—do you want to come and stay awhile with us at my folks' farm in Connecticut? It'd be a break from this nightmare and all this stress. I mean, you don't have to..."

"No. That's good." She felt relief at being set free from her own paranoid expectations. What did she think, that Gretchen was some kind of big, predatory dyke? No girl, either hetero or gay, had ever seemed quite so vanilla. "I mean that's fine. I'd consider that. If you don't want to come stay at my mom's in Asbury Park, that is. Have you spoken with your folks?"

"Yeah." She breathed the word out in a big sigh. "But not tonight. I didn't dare wake them up and disturb them. I think it'd just drive them batshit crazy if they knew. I mean, it's bad enough people getting slaughtered out in the woods. But here...", she focused her attention on the dimmed skylight at the top of the door. "In here..."

Shawna knew exactly what she meant. She wondered if Gretchen felt the same icy chill in her bones. Whether it really was due to the harshness of the season, or whether they would all remain chilled to the bone by what was happening here forever.

She found it impossible to tell Gretchen that she hadn't spoken to her own mother. Mom was hard at work running the beautician's salon anyway, and her dad... Well, who knew where he was? Who gave a fuck? She only knew that, if her mom were to hear about these "Crystal Lake murders," or whatever lame label the press were going to hang on them, that she'd come strutting up the dean's office with her best fingernails on, and her hair all fixed right, and demand that her daughter come home with her that minute. She felt unable to tell Gretchen, because so much of Gretchen's sense of security depended on her right at that moment. But there were people in this world that had seen little Shawna Brown when she was insecure and frightened. She'd wanted her daddy back, her family back. There were people in this world who knew how Shawna Black wasn't as tough as she put out to be.

***

The day after was like any day after a major crime takes place on work or educational premises. There was a pall of trauma, of morbid excitement. Nothing seemed quite the same, not quite so mundane anymore. There was a police presence along the corridors and in the main hall. But this was to protect the forensic evidence, to stop the bloodstains and chalk drawings from getting contaminated, rather than protecting the sleeping students.

Few of them had slept anyway. As they drifted out of the communal bathrooms, wearing their disrupted slumbers like a lush wears his hangover, some were very surprised to see a wider awake, but distinctly pissed-off, Trey Leblanc enter the men's dormitory.

"Leblanc, my homie!" The misjudged greeting came from the jocks, towels wrapped around their dripping torsos. Trey let it go. He'd had more to worry about—shit, they all had more to worry about—than a few silly words. "When did you hit bricks?"

"The cops had to let me go on a technicality they overlooked."

"Oh yeah?" This kid named Payne, who Trey knew from the basketball squad before he'd quit, seemed genuinely fascinated. "How'd they fuck up?"

"It wasn't them who screwed the case." He pushed open his dorm room door, surprised to see the possessions of three other guys sprawled across mattresses on the floor. "It was me. I just didn't do anything fucking wrong."

He dumped his night bag on the top of the bunk beds. The bottom one had been unoccupied since some miserable, subhuman gut-parasite had been cruel enough to murder Josh Logan. That poor, lovable fool. Trey was relieved to see no one had taken Josh's bed space. If they had done, he might have had to make someone eat their own dental caps, besides bawling them out.

"Morning, Leblanc. Glad to see you're ingenious enough to beat the rap." As he emerged from his room, he was a little surprised to see Paul Christos looking as if he'd slept like a baby. Looking almost like he was a baby. So squeaky clean and personable, he wondered what there was about Christos that always made him seek to offend. Like he almost felt he was too cool for school, but in a kind of reverse-cool, elitist-geek way.

"And a top of the morn to you, Christos." He moved his towel from around his shoulder in a whipping motion that stopped a nano-inch short of Christos's face. "There was no fucking rap to beat, by the way. Just like I'm no fucking rapper." Trey gave it to him straight in his face. Sit on that stereotype and spin on it, baby.

Christos smiled, as courteous and polite as ever. That was the thing about him. He could be the spirit of geniality itself, but you didn't have to see far into him to know he was spitting on you, or anyone remotely like you. That he felt somehow unique, much stronger than his puny body would ever allow him to be, much smarter than even his good grades would give him credit for.

***

Out on the edges of the sports field, kids drifted to and fro to check whether their classes were still taking place today. Many were not, simply because, given the sweeping nature of a case like this, everyone had to make police statements even if they only knew the boy as a face in their classroom.

The basic deal for students was that they describe how well they knew the deceased, and where they were at the time, relative to the spot where he was found in one of the men's dorm corridors.

Paul Christos had wasted no time in volunteering for his police interview. As personable and cooperative as ever, the cops finally got a little irritated when they realized he had absolutely nothing to tell, but that he was pumping them for information.

He was particularly interested in why they declined to press charges against Trey Leblanc. "We were just eliminating Mr Leblanc from our enquiries, due to the use of an article in his possession as a murder weapon," came their answer. Oh, but then, why eliminate him twice? They were about as impressed with Christos's line of questioning as Trey had been with theirs.

He had no other method of feeding his curiosity but to make a private call. Pressing the button that brought his cellular phone to life, with a motif from Wagner's Ring Cycle, he punched in the memory button for Shemp & Darrow. Majoring in Law and Philosophy, Christos had begun an internship with the local law firm shortly after the beginning of his sophomore year.

When the receptionist answered, he asked if it was possible to speak with Diane Miranda. As luck would have it, she was available. Her first conference of the morning had not started yet, so he wouldn't be talking into the vacuum of voice mail.

"Hello Diane! How are you?" Sometimes he didn't care how smarmy he seemed. Social etiquette was a necessity, especially with a woman as charming as Diane. It was true that she was about two decades older than him, but then, as he'd never had much success with the females of the species who were his contemporaries, surely to dream about her was no crime? But oh, what dreams. What bad dreams.

"Yes this is she. Who am I talking to?" His opening shot made him sound like a public prosecutor she'd once had to meet to discuss a case out on the golf course. Or maybe one of her father's greasier colleagues. But there was something familiar about that voice.

"Diane, this is Paul. Paul Christos!" Oh, the intern kid. Yeah, she recognized him now. Equal parts pretentious and precocious, but everyone's entitled to a shot in life.

"Sure Paul. How can I help you? Say, isn't it awful what happened over there on the campus site? I heard about the victim last night. Were you there when it took place? You were? Oh my God, you poor things! Say Paul, I thought you weren't coming in until later this week, I do have a client I need to—"

"It's really a little advice, a little legal advice I need to..."

"Okay, you have sixty seconds to truncate your request as from now. Shoot!"

"It's really kind of connected to the 'Lake Blood' or the 'Crystal Lake' killings, or whatever the papers are calling them. Are you aware of this student Trey Leblanc, who they brought in as a suspect?"

She adopted a cautious, slightly icy tone. "Oh I'm aware of him, Paul. I believe I mentioned that I take the legal aid cases at Shemp's? Well, he's one of mine. Please be careful of whatever you say, I've no wish to jeopardize the client-attorney relationship or the confidentiality that surrounds it."

So that was it. The liberal lawyer has come running to the rescue. "You're involved in the Crystal Lake case?"

"Well I guess I was, by default, but since there's no criminal case against Leblanc..."

"Did you have disclosure of full evidentiary materials? I mean, forensic records, scene-of-crime photographs?"

"Oh sure. That's standard. But listen, I can't go into the details of this..."

"Of course, Diane, of course. I understand." He made a mental note to go sifting through her files at his first opportunity, when she was out of the office. Photostats of that Logan oaf, with his head hanging on by a thread, and of that cutesy little couple with their bodies switched, would make fine additions to his collection.

Adjudging Diane by his own legal experience which was basically nil, Christos had come to the conclusion that she could be a big hitter if she broke out of her one-horse town mindset. It was best to be careful then.

"This is really a hypothetical case that I'm putting to you. Supposing that the family of Joshua Logan, for example, decided that they believe there is a case against Leblanc, and intended to take out a civil suit against him when the District Attorney refused to prosecute. How would they be advised to go about it?"

She was momentarily flustered. "Oh well, I'm not sure that they should be encouraged to go about it. It's such a costly process, and there has to be some kind of case. The only piece of evidence connecting Trey Leblanc to the crime was a component taken from his motorcycle. Once you factor in the fact that there was at least one other person's prints all over what remained of his bike, including the murder weapon, and all you're left with is the wild possibility that a young man chose to dissemble his motorcycle to use one component as a murder weapon. Against a friend of his, of whom everyone says he had no quarrel with. And the 'suspect' is a young man of good character and sound mind, with no drug or alcohol problems. It really doesn't fly, does it? Well, does it? Consider a similar hypothetical for your next class, but fer chrissake don't use this case! Okay, Paul, bye-bye, gotta run."

"Goodbye, Diane." Christos felt mildly deflated at how she steamrollered the case down. Okay, everyone with half a brain knew Leblanc was not really implicated in the murders. Christos himself doubted Leblanc could ever step outside of his nice-guy persona and behave in such a truly admirable way, to rid the world of dullards like Garcia and Logan without mercy, without compassion.

But he was also disappointed in Diane. It seemed she believed he wanted to enter law to be an advocate for truth and justice. Isn't the strength of an advocate supposed to be that he can argue the case equally for someone he believes to be innocent or guilty? Isn't that the kick that he gets from playing God? Imagine, Christos told himself, what it would be like to be the legal genius who got the real Crystal Lake Killer, whoever he may be, off on an acquittal. Or the case of some other cleanser of the human species kicked out of court on a technicality. Imagine the genius of that! The whole world knowing that one of its most celebrated mass murderers had been released, all due to a piece of legal chicanery. It was Paul Christos's ambition to be an advocate alright, but he wanted to be the devil's advocate.

And if a lawyer of genius can reverse the wheel of justice for the guilty, then the same must surely apply to the innocent? It would have been an educational process to have guided the wretched, bereaved Logan family through the mire of the civil courts, and not a little amusing, to boot. The idea of hanging one of the so-called "Lake Blood" or "Hell Lake" killings on a bewildered creature like Leblanc was almost too delicious for words. Especially if, as Christos—with his personal fascination with serial murder and his current eavesdropping around the legal and judicial system—had come to believe, there were not one, but two serial killers loose. From what he'd heard, it would have been no surprise to find they had someone living out the myth of Jason Voorhees, the Crystal Lake boogeyman, in their own backyard, while someone had hit the roads who was recreating the MO of Wayne Sanchez, the Daytona Beach Devil Boy. Now there was a class act...

***

It would soon warm Paul Christos's cold heart to hear of the young woman and her boyfriend lying dead close to the Delaware-Maryland border. They were found mid-morning, though forensic reports would suggest they met their end in the early hours of Tuesday, at around the same time that Ricky Garcia faced death by optical and cerebral mutilation at Forest Green University.

Their Chevy station wagon, with its bumper sticker reading, "Drug Abuse is Life Abuse," had been discovered on a dirt-track road leading off of the main highway. Anyone could have detected it if they slowed enough to see its shape through the cluster of bare pine trees. But the horror it contained was not visible to anyone out on the main road. Nor were the many ritual mutilations and cryptic messages cut into parts of their body. Crude, bloody incisions and scarifications, committed in a frenzy of excitement. Portentous words carved almost illegibly into the softer areas of flesh, post-mortem.

Sammy Atkins and Arlene Hirsh had been a common-law husband and wife, for whom there appeared to be some light in the darkness. They bonded over recreational drugs together—crack and crystal meth, anything that would give an intense speed high and keep them going for days. They soon came to realize its destructive potential together. They joined a Twelve Steps recovery program together, and sought guidance from the Lord in overcoming their self-destructive habit. They came to recognize the power of the human will together, and the resilience of the human body, which at least in part they attributed to divine grace. For Sammy and Arlene, life together had started anew.

Then they were plunged into darkness. Riding along a sunny lane before meeting with the freeway, according to the highway patrolman's report, they must have stopped to play Good Samaritan for someone who appeared to be having trouble with his car. Somehow, presumably at gunpoint, he (and everyone involved in the case fervently believed it was a he) had made them pull into the enclosure behind the trees. Hitchhikers were ruled out, on account of whoever did this must have split the scene bright and early. But first came bondage and restraint. Crude torture. Death. And then the freak really got to work. He made his final, incoherent statement in his victims' flesh and blood, and fled.

When George Casey got the news, he was assured that Jimmy Randall's patriotically-sprayed Ford pickup had been found elsewhere in the county later the same day. Assuming this was the same guy (and God forbid they should have more than one of 'em), then he was switching vehicles and taking victims at an intensely manic rate, his current means of transport unidentified. Like it was the last stand of some freakish perp who knew death was waiting for him, so one of the feds’ headshrink advisers said.

"We may have some kinda Manson Family deal goin' down here, Lloyd," Casey told his deputy after being briefed on the border-town case. It was disappointing news, to say the very least. "They're estimating that when this animal caught these people out on the back road, they'd just turned off the highway after coming home from a prayer meeting about a hundred and fifty miles away. Around about the same time that animal down here was making oatmeal out of that poor kid's brain."

Spinks hesitated a moment, unsure what his response should be. "That don't mean they necessarily have to be connected, does it? I mean, it don't make it a cult—"

"No, it don't mean they have to be connected. But look at the facts: whoever's hitting the highways started off down here with the Logan kid. There could be more than one wacko cutting symbols into people's flesh, but let's cut ourselves some slack and go for the obvious option. He ran and is still running. The other freak stayed here, and it looks like he's a college kid. Both are plain kill-crazy. It don't look like either's gonna stop till we put the bracelets on or shoot 'em down while we're trying. And that's the raw truth."

The truth was raw, bloody meat indeed. Casey was determined to control what was leaked to the media as best he could, but he knew any newshound worth his salt would soon get a handle on what was going down. It was so hard to keep some of this shit under wraps. After all, the kind of crazy graffiti the perp was cutting into his victims' chests, their naked backs, or on the cheeks of their backside, would prove pretty hard to suppress when you had a world full of people eager for bad news about their fellow man.

There was no way that Casey could have predicted the young trainee intern at the Shemp & Darrow law offices, Paul Christos by name, would gain access that very afternoon to the scene-of-crime photos copied to their office when the Leblanc kid was taken in. That he would enlarge the shot of the Logan boy's bare ass, where that pentagram and a little piece of doggerel had been cut into his butt: "Lucifer take my dark so." Everyone—even Casey who was no expert on fruitcake psychology—figured that the carving on the boy's left cheek was supposed to end in "dark soul," before the killer ran out of either time or flesh.

It was one of the details that would fascinate Christos. He was no fan of what he saw as moronic guitar music for longhairs, but he knew black metal doggerel when he saw it. What intrigued him more than ever was that, whoever this offender was, he was taking great care to replicate the MO of one of Christos's all-time favorite people-hunters. And yet the police were suppressing the facts, so any satisfaction that this brave (if unoriginal) individual gained must have solely been through the defacing of the body, or the taunting of law enforcement. With no press or publicity relating to that aspect, he couldn't get his kicks from shoving his mania into the public's gawping face. It was clearly a compulsion of the worst, or best, kind. In one mad reflective moment, Christos could almost believe that the original offender who utilized these methods was somehow on the loose again.

"We need round-the-clock security on that campus, Lloyd." Casey knew his second-in-command was likely to whine, but he'd broach no argument. "Every dormitory, every corridor, every block of lecture theatres, every annex. Whoever killed those college kids is still in there. I don't want him to go take a shit without us being able to smell him."

Spinks sighed heavily through his nose, predictably. "Kinda difficult, George. We're already overstretched as it is. We gotta have a few men on patrol outside the college area, then we got the liaison with the FBI—"

"So pay for some private security. I don't care how you do it." Spinks saw the sheriff was deadly serious. This was one problem that looked likely to keep growing until it made Forest Green a regular homicide black spot. "Raid some money from next year's budget. Cancel the deputies' Christmas bonuses. Just do it!"

***

The evening of Thursday the 19th of January was almost a full week away from when hell erupted into Forest Green. It was also just over twenty-four hours since Hank Jankov, as an employee of the Hart's Minders security firm, had started a long shift at the University of Forest Green. Depending on who was working the day or night shift, he could be one of up to a dozen men working the college at any given time. After a too-short six-hour break to grab a little shuteye and freshen up, he was back on duty in the co-ed section of the main dormitory house.

Strict rules applied. Students were informed of his presence, and warned that, for their safety's sake, their privacy would be compromised if they were to run to and fro from the showers with nothing but a towel to cover their sopping wet modesty. That was fine by Hank. He didn't want to blot his copybook at Hart's at all, especially since getting fired by the chief correctional officer at the women's facility. "Let the cooze come to me," he reassured himself. "I don't need any little bitch saying I was spying on her like it's some big thing, like it's not one of the perks of the job."

It was just after nine pm, and almost all of the girls had gone back to their rooms. As matter of fact, it was Hank's job to escort them straight back if they should be outside their sleeping quarters, which all had doors that locked from the inside, after nine. The same kind of lights-out curfew that they would have in the can, he reflected. While most of the jobs he'd taken at Hart's, since joining a few months back, had not permitted the carrying of concealed firearms, the sheriff of this place was prepared to extend the rules a little, or turn a blind eye. Hank felt just like a real guard again.

And real guards are entitled to show a little real initiative. He knew that little blonde chick he'd let stay in the shower after lights out had smuggled her boyfriend into the dorm. He'd thought about hustling him out of the place with his arm up his back, but something made him stay his hand. Maybe it was the fact that, using his ex-wife's compact mirror, if he positioned himself right then he could stand outside the showers and catch the reflection that came from within the washroom itself. Maybe everything was back to front, but it was still more of an eyeful than what he could see the right way around.

And that little chick didn't look so much like a boy after all, with her clothes off. Oh, she was skinny alright, but she had all the bumps, she had the curves in the right places. All that spoiled his view of her was her damn boyfriend, some darkhaired guy with a whole lot of pubic hair, and a bare chest that looked shaved and oiled. It was enough to turn any self-respecting voyeur off.

He'd decided not to make the dude leave the building when he realized the two of them could put on a little show for him. Liven up his evening. After all, if this boy was the creep who was tearing up the other kids, Hank would hear every threatening word that the guy made when he turned nasty. Get in there, grab an eyeful of pussy and make a hero out of himself at the same time. Ah, they could bitch about him letting the kid in, but as, technically, it was little blondie who did that, he'd rely on her word if she didn't want to get herself in a whole lot more trouble.

He'd watched them both disrobe anyway, before they entered the shower itself. The dude didn't have any weapons on him. None, that is, unless you counted that healthy adolescent tool standing to attention at the sight of the dark pussy on that little bleach-blonde. On its own, Hank was confident he'd never have some queer thing about the naked male body. But one-on-one, when two young 'uns got down to action, that was a whole different ballgame. That was when he knew that the young guy was paying his admission fee, though neither of them knew that they'd be allowed in there for his amusement, for his entertainment.

Then, wouldn't you just know it? The whole place had to steam up. The shower steam formed such a thick layer of condensation on the mirror that Hank couldn't see shit anymore. Ah, what the hell, he consoled himself. He'd grabbed himself a little peek, there was no way he could burst in on 'em and bust the guy. What could he say? Your foreplay period is over, no real humping allowed?

"Oh, uh, oh Brad, that feels real good..."

Hah hah, atta boy Brad. Hey, it was like the TV screen had gone haywire but he still had FM radio! He could stand there and listen to 'em till the cows came home. It amused him, and, he had to be honest with himself, got him a little hot too. Something to think about when he got back to his room later.

"Ah—ah..." It was the guy this time. "Do you like danger, Patti? Do you get hot when you feel the boogeyman near?"

Go for it, Patti! Hank could hear her moaning rhythmically like she was building her way up to the big one. Of course she likes danger, asshole! Why do you think she went all the trouble of smuggling you in when there's a guard on the corridor and a psycho on the loose?

"Ah... I... ah... want to know you'll be there to protect me. I want to fuck you right in front of the boogeyman and tell him to go fuck—ah, go fuck himself."

This was where Hank's patience got sorely tried. Boyfriend there was getting so far up his girly that he didn't have anything on his mind other than popping his cork. What kind of protection was that? That dumb bitch ought to have been aware there were guys like him getting paid to do a professional job, protecting her at an hourly rate that could, frankly, do with a little improvement. No knife-wielding psycho was gonna walk through that shower door when Hank Jankov was on the job!

"Ah, ah, ah..." Listen to the horny little bitch, working her way up to it already. And he thought guys were the ones who were supposed to have the premature ejaculation problem?

"Uh, uh, uh..." And here came Brad the stallion too. Jeez, it was like a synchronized start and finish. They oughta form an Olympic relay team.

"Ah, ah, AH, AHHH!" Suddenly, this wasn't such a fun game anymore. There was no pleasure in that last scream. Maybe he was too big, and he was hurting her?

"Uh, uh, oh God! Oh God! No, no! Please God... On any other day of the week, Hank would have said that was one young guy ready to shoot for the moon. Right now his excitement sounded too much like distress. But what was Hank to do? Burst in there on 'em? They'd probably think he was some kinda pervert…

"AHHH! Ahh! Uuh...." Okay, that decided it. They must have had a girl psycho on the premises. No one else had entered the shower, there was just no opportunity.

It was too late for him to try to figure it out. If he'd allowed something bad to happen, it was his balls on the line. "Hey! What's goin' on in here?" His dark-browed face must have just about been visible through all the steam. It hit him like a sauna turned up to the max. Jeezus, maybe they had gotten scalded in there? He waved away some of the steam, gripping his .48 handgun in the other fist. That's when he saw them for the first time. "Oh, Jesus Christ. Holy Mother of God, no!" It was the most agonizingly offensive sight that would ever greet his eyes. And he had allowed it to happen. "Oh no. Oh no." Every time he broke open a little window in the vapor, it steamed up again to obscure the vision from his eyes. It was almost a blessing, but he had to see what had happened, had to try to understand what was...

Close enough to touch them, the atrocious reality was unbearable. They could still both speak, or rather, they could force themselves to make sounds. Technically, they were still alive.

But they were in the process of dying together. Impaled on a broken shower pipe on which both their twitching bodies hung. Stripped naked, pierced and hung on a hook, like dead pigs in a butcher's crowded showcase. It was the guy who was furthest up the splintered steel pipe, which seemed to enter just above his pubic triangle and exit gorily through his back, leaving scraps of vertebrae spilling into the crimson-tinted water. She was below him, but joined so close it was as if they were still making love while her bobbing head nodded out of consciousness, into death. The splintered shards of the pipe must have exited somewhere around her navel before penetrating her lover's body. Hank knew it was probably a small mercy that he couldn't see where the instrument of impalement entered.

The sight made him nauseous, he knew he was going to throw up in the shower water, his vomit mixing with their blood and small fragments of broken bone. The misdirected water cascaded all over the shower enclosure, whipping him with its hot spray. He was hot and soaking wet and miserable. He knew this was his fault for allowing it to happen, and yet how, how could...?

It was only as the steam started to clear that he got his answer. Hank saw it all too clearly in the shower mirror that had provided such amusement. It was him.

Hank didn't have time to turn his head around. Didn't have time to demand to know whether the killer was a student dressed up in the garb of something that haunted their nightmares. Didn't have time to discover how that hulking murderous psycho creep had been able to wait in the shower, without either Hank or those kids noticing...

He'd never felt such power in human hands before, as they gripped him by the throat. Hank pointed his handgun, intent on blowing the creep away. But the pressure exerted on his neck and spine caused his nervous system to malfunction, his arms spinning wildly, unable to aim.

By the time he saw the flashing glint of steel in the mirror, and realized it was heading for him, he could no longer even hold his .48. It fell to the tiled floor in a hopeless clatter of despair. Hank's perspiring belly felt a sudden cold flash as the machete ripped open his uniform shirt and slashed through the top layer of skin, then a frenzy of hot and cold sensations as it bit deeper.

He knew these were his final moments. He just wanted to know how, why...?

As the killer in the perforated white mask wrenched him high in the air by his shoulders, Hank could think of no better explanation than that the boogeyman had finally come, a dark promise of childhood realized. As his stomach lesion was brought down hard on the spurting pipe, which entered his slashed gut, he was in far too much agony to speak.

He knew the kids he had joined on the broken pipe for a grotesque threesome were dying with him. As he slid further down, and the pressurized water started to displace his stomach upwards, it was the boy's turn to go limp and be left dangling just above the floor.

With his last breath, Hank wanted to scream an accusation. But he could feel something rising from his throat. As Jason's rancid hand reached in and pulled the wet organ from Hank's mouth, he realized it had been part of his upper intestine.

CHAPTER SIX

Wayne Sanchez wanted out. He wanted out now. He'd spent too many long, miserable hours in hell, berating the perverted and the vicious. Goading the degenerate and the obscene. With such a force of raw evil behind them, they could have been the most feared and fearsome army of men the world had ever seen. And the women, such as there were, could be even worse. Instead, they came on collectively like a sorry pile of shit. And he didn't mind telling 'em so.

They scowled and growled at him, mean and ugly. He was happy for them to do so. Sanchez had long since realized that most of his compadres in the pit, his brethren in the lower circle, were losers with a violent streak. That was all. They didn't have his compulsion to make war on society, to wage an unending battle on God. (And where was He when you needed someone to blame down here? Let alone the other guy, who Sanchez had thought was his main man. What a disloyal disappointment He turned out to be.)

Wayne Ricardo Sanchez had gone to his death without letting up on his hatred and his contempt for one second. Sure, there may have been times when he felt a little queasy—after all, he'd never died before. But now he was sure he had this death thing licked. It was all a fucking scam, just like mostly everything else in the world. It all worked on the basis of believing what they were telling you: we give you happy families on the TV, McDonald's Happy Meals, we tell you you're happy—bingo, you are fucking happy! Ditto this hell situation: we throw you to the freezing cold bottom of a deep, dark pit, we tell you you're trapped, there's no way out, then ay! Caramba! You are trapped just because you think you are!

He looked up way above their cold circle of stone. Through the cavernous tunnels and potholes. Toward the higher levels that he passed on his descent. He didn't have the attention of everyone in the lower circle—there were just too many of the ugly sons of bitches to rant at all at one time. But there were enough listening to him to make for a little silence in this squalid corner of hell. To hear the murmurs of voices and shouts that came from above them, rather than down here at the very bottom of everything. No one on the other levels was really that far away, Sanchez reckoned. It was their acceptance of their situation that made this place into hell. Hell was other people.

"Any of you assholes gonna tell me there's no way you can carry your goddamn carcasses up to the higher levels?" He got no positive answers that he could hear. There was a low murmuring, the odd shout of "motherfucker," or some curse he couldn't recognize in a foreign language, and the mad screams of the crazy-ass people. But that could be heard at any time. It wasn't necessarily addressed at him, it was just the soundtrack to this place. If you steeled yourself, you could get used to it. Sanchez had come to regard it as an acquired taste; just like the wailing guitars and satanic invocations of black metal.

He looked at every misbegotten, toothless, angry, twisted or conscienceless face that surrounded him. They were just what society ordered to induce a big dose of fear. Even all those evil mothers that looked normal, and there were plenty of 'em, this place had knocked all the humanity out of them. Left them looking as if only a scowl or an expression of pure, feral hate was natural.

"We are held down by the sheer weight of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of human souls block the exits." Sanchez searched the ugly mutts' faces to find who spoke. He couldn't recognize the accent—it wasn't American, Mex, or Hispanic, it was, you know, foreign.

"So what?" spewed Sanchez. "Every time a fellow do-bad arrives down here, do we have to make room for him or what? Do we shift ourselves a few feet, a few inches, to make room for another? Like, what choice we got unless we wanna tear the miserable sonofabitch to pieces? I seen that happen a few times now, and lemme tell you it don't work, the bastard just comes right on back down!"

He felt every suspicious, psychopathic eye upon him. But no one was murmuring or putting him down. They were paying attention to what he had to say. They were at least taking him seriously. All apart from that same mutt who spoke before.

"I tell you, it's too much work for one body." He saw him now. The bastard was a big fat German. He had a load of grease on his chin, like he had just finished up a plate of schnitzel, though he probably hadn't eaten a single meal in something like a hundred years. "They executed me for selling the flesh of vagrants, the street boys, as meat in the months after The Great War." He made a slicing motion beneath his several chins, indicating a time when Germany sent killers to the guillotine. "Trust me, I know what it's like to heave human bodies around. Very hard work. And now we're supposed to listen to this newcomer, this 'Devil Boy,' when he tells us we can fight our way out through thousands upon thousands, maybe millions, of other damned souls? Hah! A fool's game."

There was unrest in the ranks of the damned. Muttering, shouting, pushing—even the odd knifing or disembowelment. This was their way of staging an impassioned debate. The crowd swayed this way and that, erupting sporadically into violence, neither side giving way to the other. Sanchez recognized that he had them, or at least some of them. He just needed some way to silence that sad sack of sauerkraut that kept dissing his plans.

"So we hurt them. Cut them. Terrify them. We do what destiny has marked us out to do, Ese. We make them make room for us, 'cos they got no other choice." The crazy, glowering eyes of those who crowded around him grew fiercer, ripe with violence. It didn't even matter to some of them if they never made it out of hell. As long as they had an outlet for the rage that was burning at their very bone marrow. Hell, this cold, miserable place, started to feel like it was about to boil over. "If they can't make room for us, then we'll make a stampede. Make 'em so chickenshit scared that they crush each other underfoot! Then we do the same with the next level, and the next. Fuck 'em, what would they do to us if we were in the same position and they wanted out?"

The blood of the mob was starting to ignite. Blood that had not flowed warmly in many years was heated by the prospect of shedding more blood, or even spilling itself upon the rocks. It made little difference. Any real chance of erupting into being again, of living like a creature with free will instead of a dangerous animal caged and broken, was enough to stir the blood. Enough to shed blood for.

"And who is to be der Fuhrer, Devil Boy? Who is the unheimlich one, who will make all the gangsters and the dope dealers poo in their panties, huh? Is it you?"

"Yeah, Fritz has got a point." Some ugly mug with a collarless shirt and a flat cap looked as if he came from the same era as the German, but from southside Chicago rather than Hanover. "I got cousins joined up with the Mob. We're Irish, but sometimes they recruits other Catholics, see. They ain't never raped and killed no broad, not like I have, but they think what I did was like, well, sissy stuff. They ain't gonna scare easy, Sanchez."

The mob was alight. They wanted death, they wanted vengeance, they wanted blood, and they didn't much care whose it was. It was no longer possible to tell who was with the Devil Boy and who was against him. All of them were turning into a tidal wave of corporeal hate. If Sanchez didn't come up with a solution soon, then all his rabblerousing words were in vain. All the blood shed would be that of his compatriots in the thirteenth circle of hell. The war in hell would be restricted to its deepest level. All who died would simply be reborn again to this afterlife of misery. None would be free.

"I got a compadre, I got a general, I got a commander to get us out of this piss-hole!" Sanchez had to holler at a lung-bursting level just to be heard. It was no longer clear if his words swayed the growing crowd one way or the other. It was too late for that. If the classic medieval image of hell is one of unmitigated chaos, then hell seemed finally to be about to enter its classical era.

But the Devil Boy would not accept defeat, not even when it seemed that he himself might be torn apart by the crowd. In all his sin and his cynicism, he had preserved a strange kind of idealism, a form of hero-worship that saw only the best in he who did the worst. He knew, instinctively, who would lead them mercilessly through those vistas of superfluous humanity that they all despised so much.

"Listen up, assholes! We got Jason Voorhees in the house! He's gonna lead us to the promised land!"

It has never been measured as to how quiet hell would have to be in order to hear a pin drop. But Sanchez realized the noise of the mob had suddenly decreased, to the extent where he discerned the odd ranting, haranguing voice again. Then came the mirthless cackles. Then the shouts and the jeers. The missiles, facsimiles of hell—prisoners' earthly weapon, or simply pieces of hewn rock. The Devil Boy stood on the threshold of being torn apart by the mob he had roused to fury. But he didn't care. Let them do their worst now. At least he'd had the cojones to stand by his beliefs, had been man enough to put them to the test.

"Der Untermensch with the hockeystick, jah?" yelled the fat German, hearing the mob's uproar as an affirmation of his own apathy. Talk of the devil, thought Sanchez to himself, and the devil will appear. Or, in His absence, someone equally impressive.

They all saw the massive shadow lumbering over them before they saw its source. Even Sanchez, who now knew that any thoughts of Jason could propel him toward the person harboring those thoughts. Especially the kind of mockery he was picking up on right now.

"Gott im Himmel!" No, man, God in Heaven will not help you, the Devil Boy thought. He's been rather scarce round these parts, hadn't you noticed?

The shadow of the fat little German joined with that of Jason to make a two-headed monster against the rock ceiling of the thirteenth circle, Effortlessly, the mighty creature the little cannibal had berated as "subhuman," just a few moments earlier, held him aloft by his shabby old lapels like a toy.

"No! Wait! Wait!" For what should the big guy wait? Should he mess around for the rest of eternity, like the more defeatist elements of the eternally damned community insisted he should?

Sanchez was almost overjoyed to see Jason pull the solid memory of his most favored weapon from his sleeve. The eighteen-inch long steel machete still glinted in the darkness of hell's lowest level. The Devil Boy had dreamed often of seeing the master of murder in action, but dismissed the likelihood. Until he'd come to hell, he wasn't even sure if his hero had really existed.

"Please! Puh-lleeeeezzzzz!" It was poetry in motion. With one slow, methodical draw of the blade across little Fritz's plump throat, Jason instantly cut away a couple of the flesh flaps that formed his multiple chins, exposing the meat, gristle, and—with another fell slice—the bone beneath. He let the German fall to the ground, but, as he did, held tight to his trachea. As Fritz lay gurgling in his death throes, Jason pulled out the windpipe almost in its entirety, holding the sticky organ aloft. Many of the crowd pushed forward to see his handiwork, ancient green bile from the pits of the German butcher's stomach discharging over their heads.

Wayne Sanchez scanned their brute faces with satisfaction. He said nothing, but they could all read the sentiment on his mind. "Beat that, fools." neither could, nor would they dare try. They had the annihilated form of the man who dared called himself "butcher" prostrated before them. Sanchez knew that, as a dead soul, the German couldn't really die. He'd be back to this place soon enough. But who the hell cared? At least, for a while, he'd keep his mouth shut.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CNN was much the same as the other rolling news stations. For once, it agreed entirely with Fox News in its reportage of unfolding events. All the channels that they were surfing did. "According to criminal and demographic experts," reeled off the slick, gray-flecked reporter on site, "there is an unexplained phenomenon that places this section of rural New Jersey at the epicenter of a new, statewide epidemic of violent crime. In some cases, the spate of murders, violent hold-ups and predatory sex crimes seems to have spread out beyond the state borders, which makes it all the harder to glean any discernible pattern."

They sat around the glow of the cathode-ray tube in the common room, as if awaiting words of wisdom from some ancient oracle. Though in truth, no one believed the corporate-sponsored commentators were going to have any answers. "It's like Dante's Inferno just erupted into Middle America," Lisa said. "Like every damn deviant and miscreant in the pit has come roaring back for revenge."

No one said much. What should they say? Her explanation was totally wack, but no one else could make a better diagnosis. "Anyone want to make a guess as to who's at the very center of the epicenter?" Trey tried to make light, but it was hard to laugh at something that faced you each way you turned. The sheriff had put cops and security guards over every inch of campus, and still it didn't stop. Whoever wanted to kill them all was relentless. And, by all accounts, invisible and unstoppable.

"So like, how are we supposed to be around each other," Shawna asked Trey, the behavioral science major. "As nobody and everybody's a suspect, should I be wary of you?" She responded quickly to his frown. He, after all, was the only one who had been taken downtown as a suspect. "Or you of me? Or would that just be symptomatic of mass hysteria?"

"No. No. This is something outside of us." They were all startled to hear Gretchen speak up. So silent, and seemingly so passive, for so long, they had assumed she was becoming psychologically withdrawn. "The moment we start suspecting each other is the moment we're all finished. Whoever's doing this would just be laughing at us."

Trey shrugged. He guessed she was right. He'd heard no more pertinent a reading of their situation. Whoever divided would surely conquer.

"We just have to stick to commonsense rules of survival. We can't go playing stupid games of dare with our lives. Not like Patti and her dumb boyfriend." Their silence gave grim consent. The murders in the co-ed dorm had been the worst yet. The most vicious. The most gruesome. The closest to home. It seemed like some force of homicidal rage, of evil, in plain old-fashioned terms, was ever present. Always close at hand.

Locked down in her own head, Gretchen seemed to be giving it much thought. She was nervous, uneasy to a degree that made them all the more uncomfortable. But she was not as passive, as timid, as her usual demeanor indicated. The horror that was in their midst was waking Gretchen Andrews up, alerting her to take control of her life.

"In rural Craven County, Sheriff George Casey is making use of a little-known and controversial state by-law." Someone had flicked the screen. The forty-something black woman talking on Fox looked like Oprah in her intermediate slimming-down period. The screen showed the sheriff pontificating earnestly and silently to camera in front of the college, its parking space crammed with ambulances and squad cars. The reporter's voiceover continued over the top of him. "It states that cases of mass homicide can be described as a civil emergency. In such conditions, Sheriff Casey has pointed out, the affected area can be subject to conditions close to those of martial law."

"Since when did that redneck become an expert in law?" murmured Trey. It seemed to him like Casey had been taking advice from somewhere, and it wasn't from the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The by-law is being applied to students at the local University of Forest Green, who have numbered no less than six among the seven recent local murder victims. It enables the local police to impose a curfew and to temporarily incarcerate anyone even suspected of criminal or misdemeanor violations such as underage drinking, unruly behavior or abuse of illicit substances."

"Way to go, lawman," sneered Shawna. "Keep us locked down and waiting for the slaughter without the compensation of getting high."

"This is no time to get high," Gretchen spoke up again, emphatic. "We need to stay real. Stay focused. We need to sleep at night with one eye on the door." Shawna regarded her friend. This had all totally rattled her cage. But then, why shouldn't it? Everyone else was totally wired with fear too.

"You're right. I know, stupid remark," Shawna offhandedly reprimanded herself. "So since we're virtual prisoners, what are we doing in our own defense?"

They ran through the ad hoc procedures they had hurriedly initiated. Shawna was organizing her fellow co-eds into a vigilante group, armed with every lawful item that could be improvised into an offensive weapon. That evening, Trey was going to start teaching everyone basic offensive and defensive martial arts moves. "But it's not any of that Wu-Tang bullshit, like Enter the Dragon overnight. This is the basic shit for anybody in a tight spot. If he shows his face to you, then go straight at him. Fight to disable quickly. To maim, if possible."

"What if he doesn't show you his face?" James spoke up with trepidation, sounding morose. "I mean, what if he wears a mask all the time?" Everyone was silent. They all knew what he meant. "If he's the guy that everyone says he is. You know. The Crystal Lake Killer."

"Masks have eyeholes," spat back Trey. "If that's all he's showing you, then go for it. If his eye offends you, pluck it out." His blood boiled a little each time he heard someone refer to "Lake Blood," "Hell Lake," or "Jason." It was bad enough having a kill-crazy psycho in their midst, without someone conjuring up zombies from hell. But then, he argued with himself, take a look at the facts. Whoever this bastard was, he had a knack for pulling off the inexplicable. When nothing could be explained rationally, then the natural herd response was to look for solutions in old folk myths.

"I hold a gun license back home!" Gretchen piped up again, unprompted. "It's a State of Connecticut license. But there's nothing to stop me packing a piece here is there?"

No one responded. No one really knew whether or how local gun licensing laws corresponded with each other. But they were not going to dismiss the idea out of hand.

"We'll take a ride down to the Arms 'N' Ammo mart in the morning, during a study session. That's if Casey's stupid stormtroopers will let us off campus."

"And if they don't confiscate it on searching you after your return," cautioned Trey.

"Or arrest us both for some suspected felony that hasn't happened yet," added Shawna. "But if we get through," she emphasized, "then we'll lock it up somewhere that we're all aware of. Just for safekeeping."

As the early evening fell, despite the presence of guards and sheriff's deputies everywhere, Trey managed to loiter long enough to pay a prohibited visit to Shawna's room. It was the first time they'd been alone in her bedroom for many a month. But still, all they did was get to talking. There was too much on their minds, too much in the air, to concentrate on anything but immediate anxieties.

"Poor babe's so stressed out, she's likely to blow away the first pizza delivery guy who shows up, Shawna observed of Gretchen. She'd never seen her so enervated, but at the same time so purposeful. It was almost as if a hyper case of coffee nerves was making her ultra-alert and aggressive. But then she remembered Gretchen couldn't drink coffee unless it was decaffeinated. It gave her minor palpitations.

"You know," reflected Trey, not a little ill at ease himself, "it would take one fucking lionhearted delivery boy to bring pizza here at the moment."

***

In death, they found sensual pleasure. The lithe beautiful lovers ran their delicate hands over the one-night stand paramours they had bought home from the club. One was male, one female. Both were dressed in the androgynous style of the goth-rocker, the 1980s outgrowth of the punk movement that stressed a more darkly glamorous aesthetic. Both were, each had assumed, bisexual, and as ready for anything as they were.

Except their gothic lovers had little way of knowing what was coming next. As the glacial blonde removed the Egyptian pendant from the chain around her neck, they were so far submerged into the realm of the senses that they never saw it coming. The first incision by the spiky, sharpened symbol was a shock that drew a moan that sounded purely sexual. As sexual as the lust of the two ageless lovers who began to lap the blood from the incision in the chest...

Lisa sighed. It was a long time since she and James had watched The Hunger together. It may have been filmed several years before either of them was conceived, but they regarded it as "our movie." This was death made mysterious and romantic. This was blood as the ultimate aphrodisiac, not a purgative to make you vomit.

It had been laughably easy to smuggle Lisa back into James's room. Just as she had, in the past, got him to slap on the face paint, mascara and lip gloss to the extent where he looked like a bizarre androgyne, if not exactly a young woman, now she was playing the gender bender. Rather than trying to make her fleshy, purse-lipped face butch, however, they had gone to the other extreme. Both of them wore enough slap and gloss to clear out a Max Factor warehouse, teasing their black hair upward with layers of lacquer that looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a hair salon.

In semi-identical crushed black velvet suits and pointed black riding boots, their appearance dared the security guards to shout, "Hey you! You can't be going in there with him!" Or "With her," whichever way the land may have seemed to lie. Their befuddlement was a blessing, and made for some real laughs once they were safe behind the door.

As David Bowie—who was one of the icy cool vampires now draining the goth lovers on screen—once sang, they would rather be scared together than alone. They understood what had drawn Patti and her hapless boyfriend, Brad, who had died in the showers, like moths to the flame of erotic endangerment. But there was no sense in it. In fact, it was plain stupid, to place themselves in the field of danger just to experience a mild sexual frisson.

No. The great strength of their passions, their aesthetic, the way they wanted to live their lives, lay in its sense of fantasy and control. Call it "goth" if you will (though James and Lisa might have despised you for it), but it equated with taming the darker, more uncontrollable elements of life and death. Turning archetypal nightmares into roleplay, brandishing sexual ambiguity as a tease—either as an exhibitionistic turn-on, or as a more courageous signal of possible bisexuality, or even asexuality.

So that was sex. In truth, both James and Lisa were more conventional than they wanted to admit. Neither of them ever had a sexual relationship with anyone other than a member of the opposite sex. Then, of course, there was death. And this was where their little peccadilloes came in. For morbidity and gloom, strictly confined to the realms of role-play, were what put the icing on their cake. What made it delicious.

On the screen, the two victims writhed as the delectable Catherine Deneuve licked the blood from their wounds. On the single bed, his pale feet hanging over the edge, his wrists tied to the posts of the removable headboard, James was getting hard. But it wasn't due to the action on screen. As morbidly perverse as it may have appeared to an onlooker, to James Fitzgerald and Lisa Applebaum, nice middle-class kids from the Queens and Bensonhurst neighborhoods of New York, it was as comforting as a favorite episode of The Simpsons.

It was Lisa who was the architect of his stiffening enthusiasm. After stripping him down to his black boxer shorts, she'd decided a change of apparel was called for. Now tied to the bed in a pair of her black nylon panties, he gave little yelps of tingling ecstasy as she fastened her removable silver nose rings to his nipples. Not pierced but elongated, they provided the little burst of pain he needed to convince himself he'd entered a dark sexual netherworld.

It was all in the imagination. But it was the imagination that really did the trick. "Lisa. Lisa. Do you know... do you know what that French guy called the orgasm?"

"I sure do." Neither of them knew how quaintly American and folksy they sounded. But it didn't matter. At that moment, they inhabited the harmless realms of the imagination. "It was the author Bataille who called it "le petit mort"—the little death." For all the airs he adopted, it had been Lisa who spent much of her lonely adolescence shut up in rooms not unlike this one, finding solace in books. But, thankfully, they had found each other.

"Right, right..." He began to pant as she put on her masquerade ball eyepieces. Huge, black and birdlike, the ornate mask rose above her dark hair like raven wings, with only small slits for her eyes. It was like something out of Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. James was lost in his fantasy, as Lisa mounted him, enjoying the feeling of control.

"If I give myself up to sex, then I find a moment of oblivion. A moment of death..." She knew he was remembering the translated meaning of Bataille's words so as not to experience "le petit mort" too early, to ejaculate before they'd barely begun. It was fine by her. His otherworldly babble gave exactly the right mood to the sense of unreality she wanted to create, as she lubricated herself with her own pinkie then drew him in.

"Sex and death." On the TV screen they were as one now, though the divinely aloof Catherine Deneuve and her vampire lover Bowie had since disposed of the corpses. "They exist in the same forbidden realm." James knew very little of what he spoke, thought Lisa. But she wasn't going to spoil things, she was enjoying this too much. She could think of little that was more life affirming.

But James's imagination was over-stimulated by the constant rocking back and forth of her solid little body, by the tingling of his gently tortured nipples, by her mask fetish that he'd learned to like, obliterating the restraints of identity as surely as the orgasm itself.

"Oh God..." As he felt his sap rising, tingling all the way up his neck to the roots of his hair, he focused on the damaged, ornate wooden cross a friend had salvaged for him from a renovated Catholic church. One of the traditional icons of blood and suffering, it no longer had a place in a modern American house of worship. But James loved it. Now, more than ever, he loved it. The agonized ecstasy on the face of the suffering Christ. The bloody nails through the stigmata on his feet and the palms of his hands. The numerous arrows that pierced different parts of his twisted torso, leading the friend who liberated the artifact to wonder if it wasn't the image of the martyred Saint Sebastian, rather than Jesus.

"Oh God! What, what..." sputtered James. Lisa had known this was working for him, but she didn't want it to happen just now.

"Close your eyes and think of oblivion," she whispered to him. But he couldn't relax anymore.

"Who put that, that, splatter movie on the VCR?"

Oh, what now? Had someone recorded over her tape of The Hunger? Lisa didn't want to slow up the action, for Christ's sake! Grinding over him, again and again, she slowly turned her head toward the source of his gripe.

He was right. She was just as pissed as he was to see, not Deneuve in the shower with a besotted Susan Sarandon, or Bowie attacking some kid on the streets once his vampire years were up and he started to age—but Jason Voorhees.

Lumpish. Misshapen. Ugly. Inarticulate. Sexless. Violent. Jason Voorhees. The mindless nonentity behind that stupid mask. Bloody-pawed and lumbering toward the screen.

"Ignore it. Keep going. Don't stop now..." Lisa turned her back to the screen. But sex and death were about to become more intertwined than she had ever known. Without a word, without a sound, their conjoining in the consciousness of these two young people had invited an intruder into their sanctum. A violent force of nature that had no need of announcing itself. Had no need or doors or portals anymore. Would no longer need to smash its hideous bulk through wooden partitions or glass windows.

Now, one stray thought was enough to summon his unwelcome presence.

"No. No. Oh God, no!" Lisa kept the weight of her rump fastened to her boyfriend. "Don't stop now, James, not now!" Locked into her sensual dream, she never saw what James saw. With her back turned to all else but this bed of sensual delights, she would never really know death until she faced it.

The splintered wooden crucifix tore through the rear of her lungs with all the power a once-human being could muster. Measuring three feet by two feet, its mighty ornate scale ripped most of her upper body apart. Its spiked head erupted diagonally through the mid-section of her breasts, tearing one loose from its fatty tissue. It pinned the screaming James to the bed, impaling him through the soft flesh at the top of his breastplate and the bottom of his throat.

By the time Lisa knew what was happening to her, it was too late to act, or to care. She breathed in sobs, but it was with the agony of respiration rather than weeping. James squirmed below her, the blood flowing from his gushing throat down the wooden shaft just an inch or two, before it found its viscous resting place in Lisa's hair.

Jason filled James's vision. A nightmare from the screen become reality. He grunted a mighty breath, the sole triumphant bellow of a mute. He brought his weight, his force, his strength down hard once more, and the lovers were truly conjoined in death. With her face involuntarily kissing his bloody breast, Lisa shivered. Her chill warned her, almost reassured her, that death was coming now. As she died, James's shaking body could control its involuntary spasms no longer, and at last he reached an orgasm that was concealed between her dead thighs. The little death flowed into the big death. Sex and death were as one.

***

When the early morning news hit Channel 8 at 5.30am, its presenter's face smiled out of the monitor. The video had long since played itself out, and regular TV had eventually shone through the snow of blank tape. It was audible in the next rooms, but by no means louder than any other TV at that time of the morning. Too many co-eds were waking early to discover whether they were still alive. To keep that one eye on the door as Gretchen had urged them to.

Besides, if Lisa's roomie hadn't complained about having to bed down in the next room while she and her goth boyfriend had a few hours of freaky fun, why should they complain about a little noise? Why worry about all their moans and groans, as Lisa spread peanut butter on his butt, or whatever else they got up to? James Fitzgerald may not have been the buffest guy, but hey, who knew now whether they would live long enough just to grab a little happiness?

On Channel 8, the anchorwoman's expression was frozen into one of seriousness and concern. "Meanwhile, police in Baltimore have issued a statement about a double murder, apparently committed on a camping site just a short distance outside the city limits last night. The bodies of an as-yet unidentified young male and female were found inside their ransacked mobile trailer..."

So much stimulation for the fearful or morbid mind, but so much left unsaid. Nothing said of the way that two unsuspecting lovers had been impaled together during the coital act. How they had been staked and left to die, their blood and their body fluids intermingling. Sex and death were again as one.

"Speculation exists that the perpetrator may be a serial killer who has struck at least twice in the New Jersey region over the last week and a half. These apparently random crimes are said to be part of the mysterious, so-called 'Friday the 13th crime-wave' that has left law enforcement baffled. Due to the method of the crimes, criminal profilers consider it likely that a particularly dangerous individual may be traveling the interstate highways on an as-yet undivulged route..." But the police were keeping it locked down as to what fed their concerns. The satanic rants and seemingly meaningless hieroglyphs, sadistically cut into the victims' flesh, had been the trademark MO of this particular freak ever since Friday the 13th of January.

"The public are urged to contact their local police department if they encounter suspicious individuals or travelers who give cause for concern. But the authorities have stressed, please do not approach any suspicious persons of your own accord. The individual they are seeking is believed to be armed, dangerous, and to show relatively little concern about being apprehended..."

By the time Lisa's traumatized roomie found her, bound to her boyfriend in a hideous conjoining of splintered wood, there would be more common aspects identified between two sets of multiple crimes. With her lifeless face drooling saliva and blood, long congealed, onto her transfixed boyfriend, Lisa Applebaum and James Fitzgerald had been crucified together. As had the hapless couple in the Maryland trailer park.

But these could not be anything other than macabre coincidences. Although the various law enforcement agencies would never be exactly certain, both multiple murders seemed to have been committed at exactly the same time. There could be no serious suggestion of any connection between the two incidents. Unless, of course, it was somehow possible that two sick minds were working as one, many miles apart.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It had to be seen to be believed. There are any number of things one has to get used to in an afterlife of psychological torment. But for sheer pathos there was nothing, to Charles Westenhaus's mind, that could beat the faith that the Devil Boy put in that pitiful, subhuman creature.

They had pushed and kicked their way through their fellow prisoners of the thirteenth circle. When that was too subtle an approach, they knifed and gouged. For all the animosity they created towards themselves, for all the hateful rage and screams of resentment, they were also attracting a following. It was quite something to see, as comical as it was futile. All the crazy people, the mental cases, those who had committed the least motivated, most senseless crimes, or who had lost their minds during the infinite, unmarked hours in this place—these were the lost souls who followed Wayne Sanchez and Jason Voorhees on their exodus across the overpopulated mass of barren ground.

Then there was Charles himself, of course. But that was strictly for amusement, at a distance from the murderous hoi polloi. Once they had beaten back the rest of the flotsam and jetsam, his curiosity wouldn't allow him to rest. These were the creatures that were going to overturn the regime of damnation? A system that, for all he knew, had been operative for time immemorial, ever since the first caveman bashed in his neighbor's skull, or Cain slew Abel with a rock—whichever was one's preference. Amusement was so damnably hard to come by, and if it took the form of lowbrows and blowhards beating the brains out of each other, then so be it.

In earthly times, it might have taken days. It might have taken eons. What was the measure of time when each step was weary, when each thought was doubly as tortuous
as that which came before? But, for the chance to see that deluded spick and his mongoloid mentor defeated and humiliated, Charles was willing to follow the throng. To shuffle along for time without measure. To step over groaning bodies and avoid the hostility of those who still lurked in the shadows. Until they reached the end of—well, what?

All that they found at the furthest reaches of the thirteenth circle was another cavernous wall—with one narrow opening that led sharply, up an uneven incline, into total darkness. It was completely inhospitable to the human form, with no torchlight showing the way, nothing to grip, and a height that necessitated any figure much above five feet tall having to scramble up on his hands and knees.

But this was the portal. This was the way to a world above their own, even if it meant only exchanging one plateau of torment for another. Sanchez knew for sure when he listened hard at the bottom of the tunnel and heard the screams and cries of rage from above. This sounded like a whole different scene—like they had some dudes up there who were trapped forever in their death agonies, or subjected to some sort of torture for their life's sins.

"Hear that, big guy?" As with anything, it was met by Jason with silence. But his cocked head, his attentiveness, his very presence after sweeping this far across the thirteenth circle, guaranteed his interest. "It's like they gotta punish them hard for what they did, but with us it's punishment enough just to be down here with each other. Are we the fuckin' underclass or what?"

They stood at the very bottom of a howling tunnel that only led to another level of eternal suffering, and after that another, and another. Behind them was a veritable legion of the damned. The unloved and the unlovely. Killers of women and firebugs. Slaughterers of entire families, betrayers of their own flesh and blood. Faces that grimaced with an almost innocent expectation, a sense of wonder that they might get out of this place—even if it was only to a higher plateau of hell. If Jason and the Devil Boy were to take the lead, they had an army of followers. If they stalled at this point, they might find hundreds of hands rending their flesh from their bones, till all that remained were some discarded organs and scraps of skin around a red raw skeleton. And once they returned to hell, there would still be enough hate in the hearts of the mob for the whole brutal process to start all over again.

"Looks like you an' me are carrying the expectations of these losers." Sanchez glanced up at his subhuman/superhuman hero."Whad'ya say, killer? We need our best man to be the first thing those fucks up there see when we get outta here. Someone to make 'em scared of losing their lives all over again."

Someone to fight their way through the displaced bodies and souls that blocked their path. Someone to lead them on their insane flight from the deepest, darkest circle in hell. With hardly a hope in hell.

Jason wouldn't move. After coming so far, he seemed paralyzed. Sanchez felt his guts tie up in a knot. The guy that was so feral that he'd lost almost all human characteristics, who made the average serial killer look like a pussywhipped schoolteacher, seemed scared.

"Hey, c'mon man! What you got to lose? There ain't no one fiercer than you in that fuckin' world or this one!" Sanchez was feeling waves of fear coming from Jason, waves that originated from the dark tunnel up ahead. Not of violence. Not of defeat. Just raw, shapeless fear.

The Devil Boy felt his own fear too. Behind them, the ugliest mob that ever there was, or ever there will be, was making its displeasure felt. "What is this bullshit? What kinda fools are they takin' us for?" The guttural words dripped with malice, the sound of a man used to manipulating other people into committing his dirty deeds for him. "No more of this shit! Fuck 'em up!" That was one of the more articulate complaints. Others roared, raged and bellowed, in unrecognizable foreign languages or the deranged argot of beings who had long since forgotten how to communicate.

Sanchez stared sharply behind him, at the foremost members of the mob. Most of them looked older than him, ruthless, experienced in every kind of low enterprise. But maybe that was because even he had an image of himself as the Devil Boy; the murderous youth for whom time had stopped, when he was arrested for multiple murder aged twenty-two, back in the early 1990s.

One of them had a completely bald head and dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like a faggot who liked to blow teenage boys and then cut them up to be collected in garbage bags. The other dude had teeth like rotten tombstones, and the rank aura of someone who might follow student nurses home in the night and try to make them heal his tormented soul—before he raped them and cut them up good. Since coming to hell from the row, he had an uncanny instinct for detecting the nature of his fellow predators. He knew him and Jason could take them, make them eat their own shit, but then you had to multiply their kind by a couple hundred...

The big guy snorted. It was a high-pitched whine that started in his belly and blew out of his distorted, bestial nose. A noise like nothing human can make. He tilted his head and looked up above at the winding passage of darkness. Sanchez didn't know what had held him back, but he could feel a fire in his own gut that he believed they shared.

Then, with a speed that belied his graceless form, Jason Voorhees hurtled upwards. Up the narrow, echoing tunnel with a grasp on the rocky surface that almost defied their hellbound gravity. Never was there such a corpulent but agile corruption of a human being. Though he had the sluggish shape of an overgrown retarded man, Jason moved with an electrified sense of purpose that no man could keep pace with.

Though many tried. Sanchez was the first, breathlessly moving up the rear, while the very dregs of humanity panted at his shoulder. He had to move, had to maintain his closeness to Jason. This was his idea, his campaign. His war. No scumbag was going to position himself in Sanchez's place. He was not the Crystal Lake Killer's first lieutenant, he was his fucking general.

The further they climbed, the more alive the tunnel became. Not simply because of the echoing voices from above becoming louder, there were human figures that inhabited this rock fissure. They were the maggots in this diseased bowel of a place.

"Aaaah!" One man's body rolled toward Sanchez, a bearded dude in a lumberjack shirt and denim. He sobbed, holding his eyes as blood ran from the sockets through his fingers. The Devil Boy recognized the handiwork of his hero, the huge dark shape that clambered way up higher in the tunnel. Sanchez climbed frantically, finding that though he was tired, once he reached a peak of exhaustion, his fatigue stayed at the same level. It struck him that he was no more exhausted than he'd been ever since the day he entered hell. Fatigue, discontent and irritation unto madness were the natural states of mind here. They could literally get no worse.

Twilight was entering the tunnel, dull gray and obscuring, but still a relief after the pitch darkness. Somewhere up above, still unseen, was an exit. Below that was Jason Voorhees, though he remained out of sight. Another scream came from above, and Sanchez found himself scrambling over a body that came rolling down the tunnel. It was a guy about his age, but dressed a little faggy, like from the bad old days when everyone had to wear topcoats. Except that his elegance had come all undone, as he clutched at the opening in his frilled shirt and the deep machete wound in his back, where it looked like his kidneys might be about to fall out.

Bodies were rolling all the way down the tunnel, Jason's bloodlust having been awakened long before it was needed. Sanchez could not give a damn. Most of those who had stayed the course so far, who were scrambling up behind him, screamed and hurled obscenities. But not at him. Not at Jason. The distant scent of freedom, however faint, was in their nostrils. Some of them had been trapped down in the thirteenth circle for what might pass for a couple years up in the outer world, others were there for longer than they or anyone else could remember. All of them felt a refreshing, revitalizing burst of pure hate.

An elegantly dressed lady from another time, who might have been a poisoner from the court of King Louis in her fine white dress and pomaded hair, made an obstacle for Sanchez to clamber over. She was deader than a doornail, her gushing neck broken by the man who everyone feared, even before he took his blade to it. It warmed the Devil Boy's heart. He grabbed her by the hair and cast her corpse behind him, raising his bloodied hands to those who followed. "We are killers! So let's fucking kill!"

And so they did. Any tormented soul, or any instruments of torment—the gallows, the gibbet, the solitary windows from which could be seen the accusing gaze of those who had died on their betrayer's account—were removed from their path, reduced to bone and matchwood splinters. But the important thing now was not their bloodlust, but their path—to where? They had no way of discerning how, or whether, they would rise from the ultimate levels of the pit. But their maniacal forms were already alight with triumph. They had already burst out of their own confines, from which few believed they would ever pass. Their march of murder was becoming a celebration.

Crossing the plateau of traitors was so much easier than on their own level of hell. Those who suffered there were locked into their own inert torment. Few moved, fewer still resisted, as the howling mass trampled them underfoot or tore them asunder. What had seemed to take earthly days to traverse down below was much more rapid on this level. None would feel the burden of their fatigue, their bruised bodies or broken bones anymore.

"Lemme up! Lemme outta here! I got things to do! I got people to kill!" It was the voice of the irredeemably degenerate, and it could have sounded from any one of them. As they found the tunnel that led upward from the twelfth level, the fact that it was stuffed to the brim with suffocating, suffering humanity was a challenge, a test of their ruthless spirit, rather than an obstacle. Men cried out and women sobbed. Any who could not take shelter from the rebelling horde were reduced to a bleeding mass of torn, hacked flesh. None were permitted to stand in their way.

By the time they burst screaming onto the next level, Jason hacked frenziedly with his machete. Sanchez was driven into a foul bloodlust. They all knew that they were not subject to the same laws of imprisonment that had held some of them bound for decades, even centuries. There was no guarantee that they would ever be truly free again, but while they knew these small freedoms they would demonstrate their power.

In the vale of the thieves and the gangsters, the dealers and the professional assassins, Jason's legions fell upon the first sharp-dressed man they saw. He wore an expensive suit, so they stripped it from him. He sported a trimmed, oiled moustache, so they ripped it clean from his face, the bloody follicles torn out by the roots. He instinctively regarded himself as a higher class of criminal, someone who used his brain, rather than simply responding to every perverted urge. So they clawed through to his skull, clogging their fingernails with his blood and body fat as he tried to plead with them. "Look. Please! You crazy-asses, I'll give you anything you want, anything!"

But there was nothing he could offer them. Earthly rewards exist only in an earthly context. So they stuck his fat, seeping head on the end of a bayonet, as a symbol of their power and their undeclared crusade. On this level, many fought back. Sometimes the madmen and the psychopaths were outwitted, or outgunned. In a hellish environment where a killer could summon his earthly weapon by force of memory, and where everybody else's weapons were inescapably trained on him or her in return, many of the professional killers gunned down the scum who invaded their space. But they were always outnumbered. Their ammunition was always exhausted, or their weapons taken from them.

Their expensive clothes were always ripped away by maniacs who tore the living flesh from their bodies. Or dragged them along the ground in opposing directions until the body split in two, one arm and one leg heading in one direction, the remaining ones in another. "Please. Please PLEASE," became the only verbal currency of exchange, worthless except for how it added to the cacophony of screams that now permanently filled the air. Nobody could reason with a twisted mind that correctly perceived it had been damned to rot away forever. That irrationally blamed every other existing soul for its predicament, apart from those that ran in its feral pack.

This was now hell as imagined in the triptychs of fifteenth century churches. Any fool or thug brave enough to resist found himself seized upon by more rabid degenerates than he had imagined existed. They fell upon him out of the darkness, from out of the shadows of the rocks, out of nowhere. He would barely have time to ask, "Look, why, why are you, why...?" before they would tear the flesh from his bones. Gouge the eyes from his head and cut the tongue from his mouth. Or impale him upon broken branches, stakes, or long blades. Through his mouth. Through his navel. Or through his ass.

It was the hell of torments painted by Hieronymous Bosch in The Last Judgment. Only here there was no need of devils to inflict grotesque punishments and tortures. Here devils were redundant. In hell, as the lunatics ran riot throughout the asylum, men and women were their own tormenters and torturers.

One level of hell after another fell. In our earthly terms, it may have taken weeks. Indeed, it may have taken years. All sense of time was an irrelevance, something that belonged to the past they were trying to reclaim. All that motivated was the desire for freedom and revenge, the lust to kill, and the will to survive. Beside that, all earthly things, particularly time, could no longer be said to exist.

Each time Jason's legions of hellions came screaming out of another tunnel, they left many wounded and dead behind, including many of their own number. Not all of the insurrectionists in hell would know freedom again. But despite the casualties, their ranks were swelled. There were a greater number of them on each level than there had been before. Volunteers were gradually being recruited from the ranks of some of the more rational, professional killers in the mid-circles of hell.

By the time they ascended to the upper levels, the cowardly everyday adulterers and business cheats had had much time to listen to the coming mortal deluge, to the chaos that came ever closer. These were not violent criminals. It went against their instincts to offer resistance to the demonic lowlife. Where possible they tried to cringe away, to attach themselves to rocks or gaps in the ground, and let the madmen pass. They suffered all the worse for it. Any of these common sinners who could not make themselves invisible, make themselves evaporate, were clawed and hacked till the rocky ground beneath them ran red.

Women, far more common here on the higher levels, were descended upon and raped by the sex criminals from the lower. "Please. Please stop. Somebody help me!" came the seemingly helpless cry from one society hostess, as she was dragged to the ground by the weight of a thousand maniacs. It seemed too great a price to pay for an average life of two-faced duplicity. As she was submerged beneath the human tide, a moment of relief allowed her to breathe again. Their foul breath, rough faces and groping hands fell away. As she blinked into the twilight, she saw it was a huge, shapeless, deformed man in a mask who was her rescuer. Who had hacked at her violators till they gave way and fled. Trembling, she hesitantly accepted his hand as he raised her to her feet again. Weeping and suffocating, she choked on a mouthful of her own blood as his machete cleaved her torso in two. His disgust at the beauty of women, of anything that stank of hated life, was as great as the disgust he felt for sexual activity.

And hell followed with him. Jason was now a great centurion, assisted by a legion of murderers from all the lower levels of hell. All those who were canny and ruthless enough to realize that they were best served in joining the murderous throng rather than trying to resist or flee from it. All the killers—rational or insane, professional assassin or marginal deviant—carried the tools of their trade. To call them an army was almost to understate the power of this vast homicidal mob. Their legions were headed by the Devil Boy and his man-mountain mentor, who had taken on the mantle of the devil himself. As they approached the final tunnel, at the very top of the upper circle, the plateau was crammed with bodies. The everyday miscreants outnumbered the murderers by at least a hundred to one. And still they fell before them.

And in the wake of Jason's army came the cautious ones. The survivors, those who had shrunk to the ground and stayed unnoticed, as the killers ecstatically covered themselves from head to foot in blood. The world-weary career criminals, those whose few errors of judgment had brought them here, who had no wish to make any further fatal errors before considering the consequences. The lone wolves, those killers whose isolated nature left them wary of joining up with anyone—especially a howling mob led by psychopaths and psychotics.

Then there were those few cunning survivors who wanted to assess the situation, to know if there was anything in it for themselves before committing. At the rear of the great line of devastation, Charles Westenhaus exchanged courteous glances with some of his fellow stragglers, those he recognized as having led criminal careers of some prestige. He had followed the Devil Boy's shambling hordes all the way from the lowest reaches of hell. But cautiously, at a distance—trailing in the wake of the madness and the pointless bloodshed he surveyed. Even Charles had to admit he had felt a sense of freedom, of exhilaration, of having come so far, of traveling each bloody mile. But now what? Had they wreaked so much bloody chaos just to remain prisoners several hundred feet above where they were previously interned?

At the head of the shock troops, he saw a wide-eyed Sanchez and his monstrous, unspeaking mentor walking alone. Ascending above the twitching, febrile masses that writhed below them, that they had crushed and trampled underfoot. Clinging to a rock ledge that led apparently nowhere, tilted upward on a sharp gradient.

"So here we are, mah man. There ain't nowhere further we can go. Nowhere more we can climb." At the very top pinnacle of the almost bottomless construction they had christened hell, they could see all the way back down to the bottom. To the pits of the thirteenth circle from which they had arisen. It was such a long way back down, almost too far for the human mind to assimilate. Maybe further than the drop from the highest, snow-capped mountain peak to those dark, mysterious places at the bottom of the ocean.

And now, above them, there was only a small dark hole that led into a void. Pure nothingness. There were no sounds of life that promised any existence outside of this place, such as they had encountered at every level on their way up. "Check it out, dude," Sanchez whispered to his friend and soul mate, solemnly. "All this way and all I can hear is the whistling of the wind. Leastways, that's what I think it is."

Jason listened intently. In his madman's mind, even more so than in the deluded dimension where Sanchez dwelled, he received only fragmented impressions. Nothing was what it was, only what it suggested to him. But here, in the least logical and most chaotic of places, it was his only asset.

Jason stretched out a mighty helping hand in friendship. It was a gesture he had never made before, to anyone. It steadied Sanchez as he felt his way up to the very top of the ledge, and looked out of the gap in the rocks. Blackness. Nothingness, Silence. At that moment, it seemed as if even the ominous whistling of the void had been nothing but his imagination. A vain hope that there was something there.

"I can't hear anything but death," Sanchez decided. "Shit, I wouldn't tell anyone but you this, but I'm scared, man. It's like I'm back where I was when they offed me. Like I'm getting ready to die all over again."

Jason heard. The howling silence suggested death to him, too. But then, to Jason, everything spoke of death. Death was all he knew. Death was all he wished for, for others and, finally, for himself. Death was what he wished to bestow on every living being. It was so inextricably bound up with every aspect of his existence that he had none of Sanchez's fear. He listened hard to the beckoning void and felt that to die again might be the same, to him, as being born again.

The small portal in the rocks promised nothing but nothingness. Its dimensions were too small for the vast bulk of Jason to enter through. All seemed hopeless. Then he pushed his powerfully destructive hands to either side of the basalt rock enclosure that surrounded the void. And pushed. Tensed. Directed every inch of leverage in his great, malformed body outward, till he shook with the tension.

"Is that what you think, man?" queried the Devil Boy. "That we can break our way right out of here?" Thinking hardly entered the equation. The only mode of communication between Sanchez and Jason was those stray, silent images that passed between the empathic consciousnesses of the two killers. All Wayne Sanchez could pick up from Jason Voorhees was a similar misgiving that he himself had felt. That to step outside the confines of hell would merely be to return him to the moment of his death.

Then the coral-like rock on either side of the small hole in the cavern wall started to crack and crumble. With each surge of strength from the mute behemoth's body another piece fell away. Until what had been a less-than-man-sized hole broke open to make a stark entrance into the black, unending void.

Without thought and without hesitation, Jason hurtled his corpulent mass out into the unknown. He fell into nothingness, no air currents or surfaces below him to counter the ruthless pull of gravity into the void. He fell into pure, silent darkness, heading further and further down into nothing. Until his dry form suddenly cracked through a dark sheen of moisture.

For a moment, he believed he might be re-entering the protection of his dear mother's womb. But then the impact of his body against the fluids created a sound. The moist crack of water being hit by a weight many times its own mass and force from above. He could see now, but it was the obscured vision of someone plunged into dark water. His lungs filled, and he recognized the claustrophobia that he had felt before. So many years before, when he, as an eleven year-old child, had drowned in Crystal Lake.

He had come back to the scene of his worldly death, his watery grave. So intimidated by the memory that he splashed and kicked, hoping to propel himself to the surface of the water before his lungs burst. He had returned to the scene of his earthly resurrection, when the distress of Pamela Voorhees had returned life to the twisted, pathetic young body that had been left to molder at the bottom of the lake for twenty-two years.

As his frantic, spastic movements took him upward from the mossy bed of the lake, further impacts made him aware that he had re-entered the physical world. Splashes of large objects against water sounded all around him, their impact felt as much as heard. After a moment's reorientation, Jason realized he had passed through the void and re-entered the physical world. But he was not alone. Other humanoid forms were hitting the water, falling below the surface and kicking and splashing their way upward when their efforts were not so halfhearted as to sink them right down to the bottom again.

They had followed him here. With not even a full moment's hesitation, the first of those desperate lost souls of the underworld had plunged in after Jason. Had followed him back into his world. He propelled himself upward against some of those who kicked and faltered. Feeling no personal loyalty to any but one of them, he used their floundering bodies as ballast to balance him as he made his way back to the surface. The others were hitting the water at rate of one every two seconds. The vicious, the crazed, and the ugly, all kicking wildly, ecstatic to break out of the confines of hell, or panicked to find that they were drowning.

As Jason's masked visage just broke the surface of the water, he saw that his old killing ground was darkened beneath the stars of a fall evening. He was back in the world. The air hummed with a thousand sounds, and the area surrounding the Jake veritably buzzed with the essence of life. Damnable, hated life. Everywhere. The sounds of youthful excitement, of happiness. Of confidence, joy and well-being. All those states of mind that he had never known, and had wanted to destroy wherever he found them.

The surface of the water exploded next to him. "We made it!" Wayne Sanchez spluttered to the surface, joyfully spitting out the water that filled his nose and mouth. "Hey, Jason." The young Hispanic stayed afloat by treading water. "We made it home, man!" He sensed the unease that tempered the decaying giant's relief. The sense that he had escaped only to re-enter the world that he hated. The world of smug, smiling faces and facile happiness. The world that was both alien and hostile to him. "We made it to your home, man," Sanchez recognized the significance of where Jason Voorhees had brought them. "And this is our world. We're gonna make those motherfuckers see. Shake up their stupid, fucking worthless lives like we never have done before."

His senses filled with the sounds of the night, of the lake and of the surrounding verdant forest, the self-styled Devil Boy was intoxicated by their potency, and of the dark possibilities of what could yet be done. Staying mostly below the dark sheen of the water's surface, he floated his body toward the edge of the lake and indicated for Jason to do likewise. He raised his left arm enough to see that the Mickey Mouse watch he'd worn at his execution, en route to what he believed would be the Disneyland of hell, was functioning in the water. In hell, it had been a redundant prop, its time frozen at the moment of his death. But now he could read the time and date and see that it was close to the end of the day, nearly midnight, on Friday the 13th of January 2006.

CHAPTER NINE

Shawna and Gretchen were not the first to find Lisa, but they were among the first alerted by the others' screams. No one had told them what to expect. There was no one who had witnessed it who could speak coherently. The first witnesses to the scene had been the co-ed girls. They had screamed. Panicked. Their hands shook and their hearts palpitated. But, in their blind terror, few had been able to tear themselves away to leave the room. It was as if the awful certainty, the nauseating truth that lay before them, was somehow preferable to the uncertainty out there.

Most of the girls' revulsion, their anger and their grief, was fixated upon Lisa. It was not as if the dead body of her boyfriend was an irrelevance. But he lay submerged beneath her, and the ruin of the religious artifact he had affixed to his wall. Parts of Lisa Applebaum were in evidence upon the bed. On the wall. Smearing the corpse of her beloved, James Fitzgerald, with a final devotion only the mortician could erase.

Shawna was among the first to quit the room, to summon up the nerve to be alone. Crashing her way into the showers to dunk her reeling head in a basin of water, she was too frenzied to check for hidden dangers. But the presence she felt was benign.

Gretchen stood holding herself gently with her folded arms. Rocking from side to side. The self-assurance recently born out of necessity, and danger, was vanishing. "Fuck this." It was the only sentiment Shawna could express. It was just forlorn of hope enough to suit the moment. "Just fuck it."

As she threw her sopping wet locks around in impotent fury, the impulse to hold Gretchen, to catch her before her fragile form fell to the ground, overtook her. The girl didn't seem quite as frail as she'd imagined. But she held onto her stronger friend, touching the tip of her nose against her shoulder.

"What do we do, Shawna?" She was relieved to hear the girl speak. The moment might have suggested intimacy to someone spying on them both. If that was Gretchen's intent, then Shawna didn't share it. But right then she would not have resisted. Sometimes it was better to turn against your natural instincts than to be alone.

She gave a mirthless laugh. "I don't think there's anything to do, dear girlfriend, I think it's all over." Was that really herself she heard saying that? That hopeless, defeated prophecy of doom? She wanted to retract the words the moment they slipped away from her. But one moment later was too late. She felt Gretchen shake in her arms, giving little sobs. What worse crime could there be than to take away someone's hope at a moment like this? It seemed to her almost as bad as murder itself.

"Hey, no. Listen. Listen to me." She pushed the girl a couple of steps away from her and shook her sopping fringe. "I don't intend to die. But if anyone comes for me," she reached back, curving her right leg in a squat and thrust motion, "then they're gonna have a real fight." She took something from inside her black leather motorcycle boot.

At first, Gretchen had thought Shawna was producing one of those sharpened combs she'd been distributing wholesale. Instead, she flipped a catch on the black steel casing and out swung a six-inch switchblade. "Every girl's best friend. But you and I are getting our asses out of here the first chance we get." It was only as she heard herself speak that Shawna realized she was weeping. "We're not staying around to be anyone's sitting target."

Gretchen almost wished she could cry too, to release some of the pressure she felt inside her. It was a hollow ache, the force of something that felt as if it was pushing her back up against the wall.

Outside in the corridor, the bustle to and fro was like some kind of disorganized hell on earth. Young co-eds wept and screamed. Male students tried to keep their cool by leaning back against doorframes and taking deep breaths. The dean, his secretary, the football coach, every last authority figure that hadn't upped and run from the college already, pursued students and law enforcement alike for an accurate reading of the situation. None were forthcoming. Few felt the need to cooperate. Cops and security guards alike bitched and screamed at each other, bawling each other out for the atrocity that each claimed the other party had allowed to happen. It was, in the military terms of the ex-Marine coordinating the private security arrangements, "a real cluster-fuck."

Trey wasn't anywhere to be seen in the corridor. Wordlessly, Shawna and Gretchen knew they were both searching for the same person. In these times of crisis, when it seemed to every kid on campus as if their world might be ending, absence could mean something permanent.

They were relieved to find him in his room, the chaos that now reigned desegregating the sorority and fraternity blocks of the dorm. He stared intently, legs apart, breathing deeply. His outstretched fingertips rested on his temples. There was an odor of regurgitated food that could not be placed, somewhere near at hand. On the TV screen, it looked as if the horror and tragedy striking Forest Green were just a foretaste of some wider social apocalypse that consumed Craven County.

"Officers at the scene say that the level used in the hold-up was entirely gratuitous. Both John Cummings, thirty-eight, and Mary Lee, nineteen, the store's employees, were marched outside and murdered execution-style after handing over all of the takings." An all-night garage and convenience store's forecourt was shown, with bloodstains where the victims had been taken away in body bags. "This is like MTV," Trey intoned expression. "Turn on any news station now and you'll get the same atrocities replayed over and over in rotation." As if to demonstrate, he hit a remote control button and switched stations.

"Officers from the overstretched sheriff's office at Forest Green have called in forensic investigators from outside the county for assistance. It is believed that the Wayland family held little cash and few valuables inside the house." The picture showed an everyday middle-class family home, with peeling white paint and a rickety picket fence. Its modest charms were submerged by the deluge of paramedics and press surrounding the house, shouting as a small contingent of police tried to maintain order. "Off-the-record sources have claimed that the killings, which claimed both Mr and Mrs Wayland, their two children and the family dog, may have been sexually motivated by the killer's targeting of Peggy Ann Wayland, twenty-nine. Others speculate that an organized crime link to the construction business of Russell Wayland, thirty-two, is a possibility. Police are baffled by the savagery of the—"

Click. "Occurred yesterday evening on campus at the University of Forest Green—" The TV was silenced. They didn't need to see a non-descript picture of the emergency services rushing in and out of campus. Everyone present was more aware of what had happened than they really wanted to be.

"You know," continued Trey, "they ought to have a system among the viewers so that you can vote for what you think is the grisliest murder of the week. Just like you can vote for whether you want the new Eminem or the latest nu-metal band. I think James and Lisa would have liked that. They would have held the top atrocity slot for a while."

Gretchen shuddered. "That's shit," Shawna muttered quietly. "They were beautiful in their own goofy way. They were poets. They weren't ghouls. They weren't monsters."

"Yeah. I know," Trey was chastened. "Excuse me for trying to laugh in the face of death. I've got to thinking that if I don't I'm gonna go crazy. I only had a handful of friends in this place and they're dying by the minute. I gotta get out. We gotta get out before it's too late."

No one said, "Amen," but no one gave up an argument. "You know what I think?" He was going to give his opinion, solicited or not. "I think that whatever crazy bastards are doing this—and there's gotta be more than one, the whole fucking region's gone apeshit. I think that they're doing it out of a hatred of life itself. They hate young people that have sex. People that play sports. People that have their own kinds of music. All they have is their hate and resentment of what life means to them. Trouble is, it's stronger than most other people's love of life."

It sounded convincing enough. "You base that on your psychological research, Trey?" Gretchen whispered.

"No. Not at all. I base it on what I feel. And what I feel is hate and death coming at me from all sides."

***

Out in the corridor, Deputy Spinks argued with the head of security from Hart's Minders. "I know what happened to those two kids in this goddamned place! I just got back from hearing the coroner make his initial report, and lemme tell you, that's something you don't ever want to endure in a whole month of Sundays!"

"Fuck you man, I saw more dead bodies in the Gulf in one day than you will if you miraculously graduate to LAPD homicide squad!" It was a gross exaggeration, but so what? Charlie Minkoff, director of operations at Hart's, had a point to make. "What I wanna know is, you withdraw all your men from here, and we get the next fuckin' kamikaze raid by some lunatic from God-knows-where for God-knows-what-reason, then who the hell is legally responsible if half of these kids are butchered?"

Minkoff's thick moustache bristled and his face turned red. In his rage, he cast a sweeping motion around the corridor, irrespective of the distress on the faces of those same students, whether co-eds or great big jocks. "And what if half of my boys end up in the same meatwagon? Are you telling me the sheriff's department will accept liability for failing to fulfill their duty of service and protection?"

"Look, look," Spinks's nervously motioning hands tried to bring him down. He hated having this conversation out in public. Like everyone hadn't lost enough faith in the sheriff's department already? "We got an unprecedented situation here. The sheriff is telling me I gotta get every man out of here to bolster the local crime taskforce. Why it should be happenin' now, shit, maybe it's in the water, maybe it's in the stars, I dunno, but it sure ain't my fault. Your company says it's there to provide security, if you guys ain't up to it then maybe you should look for a less demanding job."

Minkoff was just about ready to make first strike on this yokel, when Spinks stepped aside from the argument by picking on a group of kids walking sullenly past. "Mr Leblanc! Ms Brown!" There was a small group of students of both sexes, with Trey, Shawna and the ever-present Gretchen taking the lead. "I take it you're aware that the curfew is indefinitely imposed around the clock? If you haven't already registered your full personal details with these gentlemen from Hart's—Minders—security services!" he emphasized the name with thinly-veiled contempt, "then please report to roll call now!"

"Go fuck yourself, deputy." Trey spoke in calm, even tones. He spoke for all of them.

"I... I'm sorry. What did you say?"

"I think you heard me well enough." As crude a statement as it was, its effect was carefully measured. But Trey knew he was about to risk arrest anyway, and he knew these cowboy bureaucrats could treat any verbal dissing like it was a capital offence. "We're not out for trouble. We're looking to avoid it. None of us are going to stay here like sitting ducks anymore."

They seemed serious. Every grim-faced kid who lined up in the first rank with Trey, and Shawna, and Gretchen. All the non-conformists and all the misfits. All the punkers and metalheads and potheads. But then, behind them, lined up with a little more trepidation, came the ranks of Middle American youth. All the smart kids and the straight-A students. The football players and the science majors. They weren't necessarily the ones who were making the move. But they were sure as hell watching closely to see which way Leblanc and his friends turned.

Spinks wanted to argue reasonably. To plead that what the sheriff's office was doing was in all their best interests. To make them see sense and avoid confrontation. But his heart wasn't in it. This whole curfew business was laid on him by Casey, and the by-law that said arrest anyone who spat in the shoeshine any day but the first Tuesday in the month, well, that came from that new lawyer at Shemp & Darrow. The one who played it like a bleeding heart liberal in front of his colleagues, then came over all moral majority in his meetings with the sheriff. No, Lloyd Spinks had no appetite for this, but he still didn't like to have his authority challenged.

"Ta-rey..." Spinks tried to keep his tones civil and respectful. There was no need for any of this to get too unpleasant. "I'm asking you to think again, son. If you disobey the law that we're all living under at this moment in time, I've got no choice but to arrest you and your friends."

Trey already knew the score. But he wondered if the deputy really did. He took note of the odds against and in favor of him. The total of four deputies he'd seen in and outside the dorm, including Spinks himself. The various security guards loitering around the place, all waiting for the word from their director to jump one way or the other. Their dozen or more friends and acquaintances who were ready to walk off campus after them. The many more who would take no action themselves, until the majority voted with their feet.

"Then you better arrest me, Deputy Spinks." Shit, that was definitely not the reaction he was hoping for. As Leblanc and his little entourage moved cautiously toward the door, the boy kept his head turned toward the lawman, watching for his next move.

Spinks was already painfully aware he only had one man left in the dormitory building, and he'd already ordered him to radio the sheriff's office and report for his new assignment. Then there were the security guys, of course.

"Minkoff, are you with me on this?" Spinks spoke out the side of his mouth.

"Negative, deputy." At least the situation had restored a little etiquette. "Unless you can take the time to officially deputize me and all my men, and refer us to the exact bylaw under which we're entitled to detain these students, then I'm bound to say that we have no authority to do so."

So that was it, huh? Every man for himself and ole Lloyd Spinks left stranded in a sea of shit. Report to the sheriff and hold tight onto your balls, son, 'cos he's bound to be taking at least one of 'em.

Lloyd just stood back and watched them defy his authority. In his head, he knew that what the kids were doing probably made a whole lot more sense than sitting there, waiting to be killed next. But in his heart he detested them for making him look small, and despised George Casey more for landing him with such a laughably tall order.

All the students who showed trepidation about defying the deputy were following on from the dozen or so kids who led now. As they walked out of the dorm, they had the eyes of the rest of the college upon them. Gradually, a trickle followed from every dorm, frat and sorority house. Forest Green's prized institute of higher learning, built less than a decade ago, was seeing one of the greatest non-violent student rebellions in the state's history. As lines of students streamed out into the reception and car park area, they dissolved into an amorphous mass rather than an organized body. Gradually, small factions formed around friends who had their own motor vehicles, or lived in the same county or, if further away, the same state.

While Spinks watched, helpless, as the greater portion of the university emptied out, another figure made more furtive observations. Inside the administration building at the center of the college complex, Paul Christos gave an eyewitness account into his cellular phone, shielded from the ears of the other students. "That's right, yes. A veritable exodus from Forest Green. And guess who our Black Moses is?" he snickered. "Certainly. I can give you a fuller report when I stop by the offices later. And do you have any of the information that interests me. You do? That's excellent. Truly excellent."

***

The offices of Shemp & Darrow were on the southern side of Forest Green, just before the main exit toward the center of New Jersey. With an unassuming white stone front, they were as modest and compact as befitted small lawyers in a rural town. As they were the foremost law firm in Craven County, however, their phones rang constantly whenever any miscreant was picked up in the midst of the current crime wave.

"Poor Miss Miranda. You know, Diane, she takes Shemp's legal aid cases? Worked off her feet since every Tom, Dick and Raoul they pick up in the county has pled indigence. Quite a motley crew she has to deal with, I can tell you. I think I may have turned up in the nick of time."

Christos was charmed and intrigued by Edward North, the new advocate lawyer at Shemp & Darrow. North was smooth. He had a manner around Diane that made her feel like the most attractive woman in town—which, as Christos acknowledged, probably wasn't far short of the truth. But he also had a way of making Christos feel he was a close confidant during the couple of brief times they had spoken alone. Aware of the student's interest in the murder cases erupting all over the county—or, on a wider scale, all over the state—including at his own college, he adopted a conspiratorial air that promised more information than anyone else could proffer, provided the boy was diplomatic enough to play it close to his chest.

Christos wondered how true it all was. Would an out-of-town attorney, who had appeared just in time to lighten the law firm's inflated caseload, really risk his new position to indulge a trainee junior intern? Maybe he recognized that there was no real risk. As long as Paul Christos had something to gain from these tactics, he would guard Ed North's private counsel jealously. Or maybe North had nothing of any real value at all, and was just throwing him tidbits to maintain his interest. Either way, Christos couldn't help but admire his style. It was the type of advocate lawyer that he would like to become. Adept at manipulation. Machiavellian.

"So, uh, do you have any information on any of the recent murder cases?"

North leant back in his leather chair, his blue eyes watching young Paul with amusement. "Only where a suspect exists, Mr Christos, and only where our services have been requested. As for the unfortunate incidents at your college, since Mr Leblanc was officially exempted from suspicion, I have no more information than yourself. Probably less. In fact," he smiled over his horn-rimmed lenses, "I was trusting you to keep me abreast of current affairs at Forest Green."

Of course. Quid pro quo. Though, for the life of him, Christos found it hard to ascertain why Ed North, who claimed only a professional interest in cases where Shemp's were likely to represent the defendant, should share his interest in ritual mutilation. But when he talked him through the latest exciting news, of the highly amusing ends of that utterly jejune "goth" couple, Fitzgerald and Applestein, or whatever her name was, North seemed to find the gruesome details highly distasteful. It was as if he wanted, or needed, to monitor the situation, but didn't want to truly know of it, in the way that Paul Christos did.

And what of the current suspects, Christos wanted to know, did any of them have the particular characteristics they'd discussed?

"You mean, are they devil cult freaks, something like that?" North smiled at him. He had a way of turning the tables, of making Christos feel his own curiosity was crude and juvenile, whereas his, however unspecified its nature, was wholly professional.

"You're quite a fan, aren't you, Mr Christos?"

"A fan?" The boy bristled a little. Maybe North was setting him up for a fall on Shemp & Darrow's behalf.

"Yeah. Come on, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. A fan of these serial killers. These moral transgressors."

"I'm interested in those individuals who have a philosophy that explains their actions," he defended himself haughtily. "I'm not in thrall to every thug who ever butchered anybody."

"Like Sanchez?" North grinned knowingly. "The Devil Boy? He's your A-Number One, isn't he Paul?" Christos's response was not forthcoming. It was hard to know if North was truly sympathetic to him or not. "I bet the day they executed him, you were sending fan mail from the janitor's boiler room down into hell."

"You make me sound like a little boy sending letters to Santa. Wouldn't my so-called fan mail just be incinerated down below? Assuming the Christian concept of the Inferno really exists, of course."

North's expression grew pensive, faraway. His smile dwindled. "Oh, I'm sure hell has a much colder climate than you imagine."

***

When Christos returned to campus after dark, he found himself the only male student left in his section of the dorm house. Just him and two security guards, chewing the fat and shooting the crap with each other. When he ventured forth to find if things were the same in the co-ed section, he was held back from entering. It seemed preposterous. There were no audible signs of life, yet they were enforcing segregation. He guessed the buffoons were simply trying to justify their presence, and protecting a phantom clientele.

Outside, in the complex of buildings built on a stretch of land reputed to stretch over the site of the legendary "Camp Blood," he watched the last of the stragglers take up their possessions and walk. It was hard to tell, but he suspected he might be the last remaining student in the University of Forest Green.

In his heart, in such profound moments of loneliness, he felt a definite unease. When the butchery had been taking place, it had given him a frisson, awakened his senses, to watch the panic and the hysteria grow. To speculate over who might be next. To guess at the motivation, of the "philosophy," if there was one, of the killers. For there was more than one killer active—in the region, if not on campus—of that he was sure.

But it seemed there was no purpose to remain. Not only would classes have been abandoned, but in the event that the killer remained, he was offering himself up as the last available victim. For one moment, he felt the chill of terror, the feeling that he might end as one of them. On the wrong end of the fishhook. Christos quickly calmed down, reminding himself that the one he wished to contact was a long way from here. If all the indications were correct, the new pretender to the throne of Devil Boy was currently working his way across Arizona.

That settled it. Paul Christos was gathering up his books, his possessions, and leaving immediately. But it was of his own volition. He was assuredly not part of the cowardly flight of the lemmings.

As he pulled out of the university grounds, he surveyed the empty roads from the driver seat of his new white Volkswagen. (His choice. His father would have preferred to buy him something more brash, something more American. But, if he had to drive a modern automobile, then let it be the wagon of "das Volk," the car that Hitler had dedicated to the German people.)

The road that ran from the college to the outskirts of town was strangely silent. It seemed, Christos told himself with pride, that he was the last man of action left in a lily-livered society. The very last man of all.

As he reached the southern side of Forest Green the big questions of where and why, weighed heavy. He could pick up the Interstate and drive directly back to New York City. But the idea didn't appeal.

He had already faced his father's anger when he refused to enrol in a business studies course, or some such other sensible route toward his inheritance of the family shipping business. To avoid the old man's displeasure, he had to disappear to the obscure backwater of Forest Green to follow courses in criminal psychology and American cultural studies. They were the major components of his fascination with, and respect for, the great all-American serial killer—with the added little fillip that Forest Green had once been the site of the region's major series of unsolved murders.

But where to now? He knew what his heart told him. To follow the trail of the Beast as far as it would go. To head south along the Ocean Highway, to wherever the self-styled satanic culler of the species, the killer who had taken up the mantle from his hero Sanchez, appeared to be heading. It was a personal dream, to link up with others who regarded the lowly, pathetic human species as he did. Who saw most people as worthy of nothing more than being playthings, in the games of men strong enough to disavow any loyalty to humanity. Of being made to bow down before their superiors, those they had victimized with their ape-like stupidity and jeering, brutish behaviour. Of being made to pay, once and for all.

Still, it was a half-hearted hope. How could he expect to create any kind of camaraderie and alliance with a man whose exact whereabouts he didn't know? Who was not yet aware of Christos's own sincere misanthropy, his contempt for the everyday weaklings of the human race?

It was hopeless. All he had was a roadmap of the state. He didn't have a direct route into the darker recesses of a psychopath's soul.

And, looking down at the fuel gauge, he realized he had very little gas. Damn. All that running around between the campus and Shemp's, such short distances. Five miles there, five miles back, it soon added up to a whole lot of ten-mile journeys and an empty tank. With irritation, he realized he was close to the gas station where one usually loaded up before hitting the Atlantic Ocean Highway. But, as he pulled in, the forecourt was dark.

It was the same place that had been hit by one of those graceless, mundane, robbery-and-execution merchants. He remembered seeing it on the TV news, as the "Friday the 13th crime-wave" was erupting. The crime itself was of little interest—so what if two proletarian types kissed the ground while another dullard put bullets in their head?—but the annoyance was intolerable. Surely people like those were as replaceable as they were interchangeable? What was wrong with the folk around here? Did they think that civilized life in America was coming to an end, just on account of a few killings?

As Christos stomped around the unlit pumps in frustration, cursing at the darkened, unmanned convenience store, a long white camper van pulled up alongside him. "Say, kid," a grinning roughneck with a face full of stubble and a gap between his two front teeth called out the passenger window. "There ain't no place to refuel around here for miles. If you're running outta gas, why don't you park up your vehicle and hop a ride with us?"

Christos fell silent. Normally, it was the kind of invitation he'd run a mile from. These two, the unwashed passenger, and the vacant-looking, balding driver, were the type of lowlife he believed should be bred out of existence by eugenic selection. But there was something about them, something horribly familiar, that stalled him from backing off.

"Yeah, we got some great in-flight entertainment," drawled the other one, who seemed as if he was driving stoned. "We got some a couple ounces sensemilla in the back," he nodded back toward the camper with his head, "we got beer, we got videos."

"Shit, have we got videos!" leered his buddy. "You like girls, kid?"

"Sure he like girls, all young guys like girls, Ben!"

"Well I'm only askin', is all," his friend acted offended. "Some young guys is faggots ain't they, like they's gay."

"Ah, there ain't nothin' wrong with that if they are. 'Specially if they's a good-lookin' little chicken-ass like our friend here!"

Christos couldn't speak. He was as offended by their suggestions as he was sickened by them. His sexuality was his own business. So far, it existed only as far as his fantasies of dominating subservient woman. He would never allow himself to be dominated by a pair of inbred perverts!

But, to all extents and purposes, these people were the very incarnation of a couple of killers he'd read much about. Harold Lawrence and Benjamin Weilman were a pair of drifters who'd met on the yard in San Quentin, both serving time for burglary or "peeping tom" sex offenses. When both were eventually released, they met up on the outside to put into action a plan they'd hatched together.

"We got girls on our video like you never seen before, ain't that right, Harry?"

"You bet yer booty. Girls doing everything you want 'em to. Girls doing everything they's told to."

When they were apprehended, several years later, law enforcement confiscated a vast collection of pornographic photographs, all of them apparently homemade. Some of them featuring young female murder victims, who were last seen being enticed into a camper van along the Pacific Highway. Rumors had circulated of videotapes that had been stashed somewhere secret. Of Lawrence and Weilman living out the ultimate male fantasy of dominating, using, and then disposing of their victims. The type of fantasy scenario that could sustain Paul Christos through a long, lonely night. The public prosecutor obviously believed in their existence, yet they had never been found. It was also rumored that the duo were sexually polymorphous, and that occasionally young male victims had taken the place of women when they were not available.

"So what you say, little buddy, you takin' a ride with us or ain'tcha? These ain't the kinda times when you wanna be wanderin' around on your own."

Christos was paralyzed into inertia. He could neither follow the instinct to flee for his life, nor the curiosity that sought to persuade him his assumptions were somehow real. That these were two serial sex killers who had actually been on death row for fourteen years, before their executions not quite twelve months ago. Somehow returned, triumphant, into the day-to-day world. And their promise seemed oh-so-real, that implicit promise to show him a real, honest-to-badness snuff video. The type of "adult entertainment" he'd always dreamed of. The type he believed should replace all the Blockbuster stores in those dismal shopping malls. They were offering him forbidden fruit, and he wanted to partake of it, very badly indeed.

"Okay, Christos! Move your dumb ass away from that van!"

The command snapped him back to the dangers of the moment. The voice was familiar in its surliness. Unwavering in its insistence. And so Paul Christos melted away into the shadows.

"Get yourselves outside the van where we can see you! Now!" Trey Leblanc and a small posse of his college contemporaries were pulling up en masse by the disused petrol pumps, in a random convoy of cars, vans and minibuses. To any uninitiated onlooker, it was as if a gang of wild kids were claiming the night in this now semi-lawless little hamlet. But to Trey, they were re-imposing the law. The moral order.

"Say, what the fuck is this?" Harry Lawrence's ire was a little less than convincing. All of a sudden, the balding predator wanted to act like a citizen set upon by a gang of delinquents.

"We better play these fools at their own game, Harry," Ben Weilman whispered low, beneath the cheesy fixed grin he displayed out of the window. "They wanna play the violence card, I suggest we just throw it right back at 'em."

It was Weilman who left the van first as a half-dozen kids approached. He didn't know who the hell they were, but the leader was the tall, wiry black kid with his sprouting hair done up in a karate bandana with oriental lettering and red sun emblems. Then there were five other kids of different races, white, oriental, it even looked like they had themselves an Arab there. All looked like they spent more time pumping their muscles in their gym than working or book learning. This was going to require a little diplomacy.

"Howdy! Listen, just as so's we're not getting off on any wrong foot here, my partner an' I, we're headin' outta the county. We got a little gasoline stored in the back of the van if any of you fellers are runnin' dry."

That was when he saw them. There were a couple of little vixens hanging back, near the minibus that the black dude had just got out of. Tall, smoldering bitch in leather rock 'n' roll-style clothes, like a white chick version of the black guy. She was staring at them. She had some shorthaired blonde girl with her, hanging back, with her arms around another chick. Then recognition clicked. Shoot, here came trouble.

"What happened to the girls?" The black kid spoke like he wasn't buying the bullshit Ben tried to mark time with.

"Girls? I'm sorry, mah friend, you're gonna have to be a whole lot more specific." Keep it cocked and locked, Harry, Weilman said to himself. Just give me time to get my own self outta the way an' you can open up.

Trey heard the phony bonhomie fading from the hillbilly's voice. He had no idea how heavily armed they might be, there was no time for niceties. "The other two girls you picked up off the highway..."

"My friends Deborah and Stacey!" The bruised and battered little blonde could contain her indignation no further. She didn't look so good, and her friends just about kept her from falling clean away. All the same, Weilman knew they had made a big mistake in letting the girl get away. She made a break for it when they were parked up off a lonesome dirt track. He had wanted to gun for her, but Harry said no: the other little bitches were more than enough to take care of. Besides, what did they think she was going to do? There was virtually no law here anymore, they were all out chasing their tails over things that were already done and couldn't be undone. Leave her, Harry had said. Shooting up the place attracted more attention than it was worth. By the time she found herself a lawman who would lend an ear, they would be long gone outta there.

And here she was with a whole posse of mean-looking kids.

Amy Maven looked on the grinning countenances of the men who had beaten her. Who had made her adopt obscene poses with her friends, to immortalize on their camcorder. Har Har! Look at that little bitch, will ya? We'll still be getting' hard-ons from that when it ain't nothin' but wormbait!

The way they had spoken of them was dehumanizing. It terrified her. She knew in her bones that if she didn't make a break for it as soon as she could, then they were all three of them at their mercy. And someone who doesn't grant you the status of a human being, who only regards your distress as a source of amusement, isn't ever going to allow you that mercy.

"Where are Deborah and Stacey?" She spoke low, determined to let them see who was giving the orders now. The three of them had been among the first to leave the campus, long before the mass exodus. None of them had their own car. They just upped with their backpacks and walked. Simple as that. No trouble with security. So low-key that virtually no one batted an eyelid. They had no game plan but to hitch their way back to Portland, to stay with Amy's people. They were going to be careful out on the road too, not take any chances. But the one his creepy friend called Harry, he had seemed so docile and slow. And he pretended like he was driving on his own. The creep in the back of the van hadn't showed himself till Harry had suddenly driven off the highway.

"You know, ah ain't so sure I like the tone of your voice!" It was him. The creep called Ben. The one who had punched and humiliated her and screamed with joy as the weeping girls were made to paw and lick each other. He had climbed down out of the front of the van and was protesting her accusation. He railed at all of them, but to Amy he just seemed to be talking to her. "So a couple of little misses decide to follow where their tails take 'em, it ain't no business of ours! If you're gonna go around making accusations, you better get yourselves..."

He was about to say "some good lawyers." But all the time, he was watching his back like he had eyes in his ass. When Harry let rip through the windshield of their new van Ben made sure he hit the deck. The big ole Browning pump-action boomed, the glass shattered, and one of the kids howled, all in the same breath.

"Watch out! Watch out all of you! Move back!" Gretchen's shrill voice was commanding in its hysteria. They were already falling back, regardless, but Jamie van Hoon, the big football player with his hair tied back in a ponytail, had taken a hit in the chest and was falling, wide-eyed and groaning, into the arms of Trey and the other guys. Shawna pushed Amy and Gretchen into the cab of her Honda, with no ceremony. The blanket they had held around her naked shoulders fell away, and she was left as exposed as she had been on the highway, beaten black and blue and shivering.

"You made me fuck up our van! You fuckin' buncha pussies gonna pay for that!" Harry Lawrence had turned wide-eyed and psycho. Even his partner knew when to hit the dirt and crawl back around to the passenger's side. Another double-barrel shot rang out, both finding their way home.

"Oh! I'm... I'm hit!" Trey hardly knew the boy, except that he was one of van Hoon's jock buddies. In times of trial and conflict, strange allegiances are made. But now, Trey almost wept for him, and for van Hoon, as he and the others were forced to back off and retreat behind their vehicle. Van Hoon was hit again in his upper chest and fell back like a crushed doll. The other kid felt the gaping warm hole in his own ribcage, staring in wonder at the blood that coated his hands.

Another double report hit him square in the Adam's apple, knocking him down. Unconscious. Dead. The male students had scattered now. They scrambled into the first available open door, frenziedly firing up the gas of their cars and pickups. The smarter ones stayed below windshield level, just out of the direct line of fire. Just as Trey did, as he reached in to unlock the door to Shawna's Honda van and clambered inside. "Hit the gas and circle this thing around! Don't try to leave! Don't make him fire at us! Just back up and get on the inside of the other vehicles!"

She saw no immediate logic to Trey's orders, but they were barked with such insistency that Shawna felt their lives depended on them. As Gretchen and Amy cringed in the backseats, Shawna and Trey pushed the front seats back and crouched forward, he working the gears for her as she pushed the gas pedal with her hand and tried to keep the van from jerking to a halt. From the viewpoint of the convoy of vehicles, the Honda looked like it was being driven by a poltergeist as it swung round in a one hundred and eighty-degree circle and, instead of beating the retreat, nested itself on the inside of them. As if it were a covered wagon under attack.

The most immediate exit from the garage was directly in front of the killers' camper van. Trey knew instinctively that most of the young drivers would scatter, some tailing back toward the entrance, others darting directly forward if they felt the gunman's attention was elsewhere.

So it was, as a further shot split the air. It gave a mighty boom as it penetrated an engine radiator, spilling solid metal and steaming water. All the vehicles span in confusion, one customized jeep grinding its wheels over the lifeless, crushed forms of Jamie van Hoon and his buddy. Though they had tried to stick together, at that moment it was everybody for themselves. The dead were the dead, and the living had to save themselves.

"Stay close to him!" Trey demanded of Shawna. "Why? Are you fucking crazy?" she shouted back. In answer, he grabbed the steering wheel and rotated it a little, so that, as the station wagon that gave them cover span away, the passenger side of the Honda drew up parallel with the driver side of the camper van. The shooter was pulling back the loading mechanism on his shotgun, looking frantically around for ammunition. "He's got a pump-action. He fired off three double-barrels and one single. He's exhausted his seven shots!"

As Harry Lawrence reasoned that his reloads must be just out of reach, he motioned Ben Weilman back into the van. Then his driver's side door shot open. Nothing met his eye until he looked low. And found the black kid coming forward below eye level. He flipped the barrel of his shotgun, ready to club the kid with the butt. Then he felt a cold sensation enter his vest and burn its way up his belly. Something had just cleaved through his gut in the blink of an eye.

"Didn't expect anyone else to play dirty, huh, creep?" Among the pooled armory of cheap and makeshift weapons shared out among the former students of Forest Green was a bisento, a halberd spear with a distended blade that came to a sharp point. Strictly outlawed within the college, it was a handmade weapon that came courtesy of a fellow martial arts enthusiast, a kid named Wong Chen-Yun. As the fiercest weapon in an armory, it verged on the pathetic. But it had just beaten far superior firepower.

"You little piece of nigger shit!" Ben Weilman made a grab for his partner's gun, without fully understanding its load was spent. In response, he was lashed across the face by the bloodstained spearhead. The fluids from Lawrence's abdominal tract would produce a festering wound as they infected the long cut down Weilman's nose.

Harry Lawrence sank slowly into his seat, a long dribble of blood hanging from his chin. He looked as if he wanted to make some urgent statement, before his eyes span and slowly closed, the juices of his laid-open stomach soaking the driver's seat.

"Now you listen to me, you filthy, hillbilly white trash!" Trey felt a vengeful fury. He hungered for vengeance out of a sense of common justice. And also because, in one rapid moment, he had become a killer and did not know how to respond to that unyielding fact.

Weilman felt a sharp blow to his right eye and fell back, reeling. The kid had followed through the strike from the weapon with his fist. Swiftly coiled, his knuckles had moved from underhand to the top of the fist to provide momentum to the punch. Just the way Trey had been trained.

"You are gonna show us exactly where the girls are.

You're gonna tell us what you did to 'em and where they are. Understand me, boy?" Trey fought hard to control his temper. It was an illusion, he knew, but in the moment since taking a human life, he felt different about himself. He carried the grim burden of the avenger now, and he would never allow any adult male to talk to him as if were a dumb child again. Ever.

"Bring him out here!" "String the bastard up!" "Give him to us—we'll tear him apart!" The last homicidal threat came from the formerly delicate voice of a young woman. For the first time since facing the death chamber nearly a year ago, Weilman felt mortal fear. He wasn't ready to die again, not yet.

Trey found himself in the strange position of having to defend the lowlife. "Okay people," he spoke gently, moderately, though his pulse raced. He knew they felt as aggrieved and violated as him. That they had been as innocent as him, until a moment ago. "We're gonna give this vermin his chance. His last chance to make good. If he tells us where Deborah Angelo and Stacey Macaffey are, then we turn him over to the law." Trey paused, as if to compound his threat. "But if he wants to play smart-ass, he'll find we don't lynch niggers any. more around here," he spat the word with distaste.

"But we do what we have to do to survive. Even if that means killing his cracker ass." Weilman winced as Trey pressed the tip of the handmade spear up tight between his eyes, as if to remind him—don't trifle with me, I'm a killer now too, but a righteous one.

Every door of the cab was open, but Weilman had no means of escape. Faces, hands, arms, shoulders, all imposed upon him. Every one of the surviving kids peered and craned to try to get a closer look at him. There were far too many of them for him to even consider fighting his way through. When they all came vengefully filing out of their cars, they were like a small army.

Weilman remained still, feeling the weight of his situation. This wasn't like being under arrest. He missed the sense that, even if a cop accidentally punched you in the kidneys, or sent your face plummeting toward a wash basin sink, procedure dictated that you would be alive at the end of the day. There was no sense of that at all.

Trey was frustrated by the creep's procrastination. That dumb, dirty, unshaven face was in a kind of reverie, as if he was being given all night to consider his options. He would have to be disabused of that notion.

"Am I not making myself understood, fool?" The kid smacked him across the mouth, chipping one of his rust-colored front teeth. "You play it our way, or you're out of the fucking game!" Weilman shook a little, but it was more with rage than fear. He sucked on his broken tooth and bleeding gum to stop the blood running onto his chin. The black kid was getting all uppity, but Weilman knew he was enjoying the sense of power. Sure, everyone likes power, especially him that never had none. He swore to himself that he would get even with this bag of snot, even if he had to go back to the pit and rise up again two, three, four, a dozen times.

"There." Weilman gritted his bleeding teeth and nodded over his shoulder. Unable to brush off the boy who gripped him by his collar, or shake off the sight of his partner, slumped, broken and dead. "There. Back there."

Trey rose slowly, almost aloft, but stooped beneath the cab ceiling. He let go of Weilman but kept the tip of the spear at his nose. As he walked backward, jamming the driver's side door open, he elbow-whipped the lifeless Lawrence's face with irritation. The body fell forward and landed heavily in a lifeless lump on the concrete. The others flinched and stepped back to make room, but then redoubled their position, stepping on Harry Lawrence or delivering kicks to his insensitive form to show their contempt.

Without taking an eye off Weilman, he retrieved Lawrence's shotgun and passed it back to Shawna. "Guard this like it's your momma. If he lunges for it I'll kill him." Eyes crossed on the end of a point, Weilman followed Trey's directions to step out of the van and walk backwards toward the entry door to the rear of the camper. As he stepped out of the van, he jolted as at least half a dozen pairs of hands reached for him to ensure no means of escape.

Trey, Shawna, and several of the most physically powerful students, of both sexes, gave Ben Weilman the most attentive guard of honor he could have hoped for. As he unlocked the catch that gained access to the rear of the camper, they shuddered to enter its enclosed world of stale cigarette smoke, discarded dirty underwear and beer bottles, and a disorganized mess of recreational activities, from hardcore porn mags open at the "beaver" shots to a flickering TV monitor that awaited the insertion of a videocassette. Only Gretchen Andrews and Amy Maven waited outside, shivering within the locked doors of Shawna's van. They shared Trey and Shawna's anticipation that Deborah and Stacey may soon be found, discarded and dead, among the debris of those two lowlives.

"Well?" The black kid tried to give a macho little show of impatience, but Weilman knew fear was eating at his gut. He could smell it. He'd made a hobby of making young kids like him soil themselves with their own fear, and he loved the breathless tingle of anticipation he was getting from him.

"Flick a switch. Pull up a seat. We are ready to entertain you." His glassy, light-blue eyes made it seem like there was nobody home behind them. His gaze indicated the remote controls for the video screen. Trey felt vaguely nauseous before he even glimpsed what he anticipated they were about to see. He hit the button.

After a brief moment of flickering snow, jagged lines locked into a horizontal and vertical picture. A timecode appeared in the lefthand corner—starting from 00:00—and the muted tones of a homemade video filled the screen. The action was already taking place.

One naked girl rode another like a horse. It was Deborah and Stacey. Both were miserable. Both were weeping. From offscreen came the distorted shouts of the "director." It was unclear at first what he was actually saying, until he came into view. It was the driver, the late, resurrected Harold Lawrence. He clearly wanted the girls to get more intimate with each other. Harry stressed the point by taking a thick, brown leather belt and twisting it around the neck of Deborah, the mounted partner. As she gasped for air, the sobs of Stacey could be heard, almost echoing in a primitive stereo. As could the emotionally retarded chuckling of Benjamin Weilman, their current host, the man behind the camcorder.

Suddenly, Harry let Deborah drop to the floor. She had almost turned blue for lack of oxygen. He barked a distorted command in Stacey's ear, who, trembling, then slid her way up the fallen body of her friend, sobbing all the time. It became clear that the other sounds of weeping were not some macabre echo, as Harry lashed out with his belt as a whip. Amy—not naked like her two friends, but clad only in the underwear she was discovered running along the highway in—came into the frame. Crying, hysterical, she flinched and tried to protect her violated modesty with two tiny clenched fists. Then, suddenly, she was gone—darting out the door in a final act of desperation.

Harry followed her, keening his squinting eyes. The voice of Ben Weilman came from offscreen. "Leave that little bitch, Harry! We'll find her soon enough, don't let the others..."

From the way he approached them, the audience of their homemade video had no doubt that Harry didn't intend to let Deborah and Stacey do much of anything. Even drawing breath. No one present, male or female, considered it in any way a negative or inhumane aspect of their situation that Trey had sent Harry Lawrence straight to hell.

Shawna strode forward to switch the VCR off. They'd all seen enough, or maybe too much. Then the power cut off without her touching it. As a repercussion of the sudden impact that shook the camper, it jolted them all of out their spectator role.

"What the fuck was that?" The enquiry, coming from several voices at once, was addressed to Weilman. He looked startled, as if he didn't have any immediate answers.

Then the lamplight of the trailer shut off, and everyone realized that the small power generator the vehicle carried had been switched off. As the massed students of Forest Green surrounded Ben Weilman like they were going to act as judge, jury and executioner, they hesitated as an ugly, rotten-toothed smile lit up his face.

All crammed into the camper together like overstuffed peas in a pod, they barely had the space to react as the shadows of the figures outside were thrown against the window blind. As they approached the van, the shadows grew longer, better defined. Of their groaning, growling mob, one figure at the front seemed to tower over them, both taller and bulkier.

"You kids gonna stop playin' now?" mocked Weilman, his vile, leering confidence suddenly boosted. "We ain't got time for no college-boy shit. This is war."

CHAPTER TEN

The mocking and jeering tones from outside the camper van grew more intense. The eight kids and their odious prisoner, all crammed up together in the hillbillies' fetid living quarters, hung onto the inside walls for balance, as malign hands outside the structure rocked it this way and that.

Ben Weilman grinned with ugly satisfaction. He believed that the lowlife cavalry had arrived. Trey would have liked to pound that misbegotten face—the progeny of his momma drinking moonshine while he was in the womb—till it had no teeth to smile with. Shawna would have liked to cut his balls off for what she'd seen him do to three young women on the video screen.

"So who the hell are we dealing with?" The silhouettes outside suggested the students had them outnumbered. Whoever it was, it was likely they had shit for brains too, just like their host right there. But, as they spread out around the camper, there was one that stood still and menacing. Almost as large as a brick shithouse, but definitely less inviting. Larger than death.

"I said talk, ugly!" Trey was becoming frantic. The too-cool-for-school demeanor that formerly earned him respect had come undone. It was hard to stay cool in a world made hideous by madmen.

Weilman growled when Trey smacked him with the flat backside of his hand, producing blood bubbles from both nostrils. He hated that nigra boy, hated him good. Weilman acted wilfully obtuse as his compadres rocked the camper, the silhouette of a big creep pressing up clean against the door. He knew these kids were chickenshit, from the way they huddled up all together when they outnumbered him and his former inmates from the Big Downstairs. From the way that the athletic-looking white kid played with Harry's pump-action Browning, yet looked like he was too afraid to use it. From the way that bitch in the pointed leather ankle boots acted so tough, while she was going wide-eyed with fear.

"Why, that?" Weilman slanted his head bemusedly as the shapeless shadow wrenched the door back, when it could just have easily have turned the catch. "That's our buddy Jason!"

Nobody had the chance to accuse the hillbilly of lying as the door fell back off its hinges. Those who knew the legend of Hell Lake found the mocking shadow of a boogeyman falling over them. Suddenly the night terrors of childhood seemed real again.

The burly, shapeless figure pushed itself forward, regarding them all with disgust. His five accomplices—murder burning in their eyes, bad booze, bad drugs and bad attitude diminishing any human empathy they might feel—carried a nasty array of handguns and blades. But they let Jason, if it truly was him, make the advance.

The kids all froze at the fetid smell. At the odor of something left too long at the bottom of a lake. At human flesh and spirit become warped and distorted beyond recognition.

In a way they would never comprehend, they were all as distasteful to him. An assertive female in brashly sexy clothing. Beefy-boned kids bred on the sports field, raised on Mom's meatloaf and broccoli. A dark-faced boy, different from the others, yet his difference did not seem to weigh him down. They all stank to Jason. Their self-confidence and their health reeked to him as the stench of an open grave would to a normal human being. He surged mercilessly forward with the intent to kill, while his cronies stood behind him and laughed.

"For Christ's sake, Trey, move!" Shawna screamed at him, but Trey was frozen into a kind of inertia. His confidence was undermined by each passing hour that they tried to live like human beings, yet met with horror after horror. As this person, this mistake of nature, this thing, advanced on him, he could conceive for the first time of giving up. Of letting go of his life in a state of quiet acceptance.

Then Jason's eye, the vein-ridden orb visible from beneath the mask, fell on something even more disgusting. On a flickering TV set in the corner of the room, where the screen showed two girls in a state of undress. Firm, naked female flesh. It sent him into an immediate state of nausea. He was repulsed by that which he could never have. Which he could never be part of. And he would eviscerate the hide of anyone who pushed it into his face.

Moving in a rapid semi-circle that belied his size, the man-ogre smashed two of the young men to the ground. They tried to draw back, to duck, to hide out of the way of his presence, but he was not so concerned with them. The girls on the TV seemed no happier than he was, tears and snot running down their face, but still he despised their very existence.

His machete blade smashed into the center of the screen. The girls disappeared in a mess of broken glass and blue sparks. The electrical charge carried back down the blade till it shocked his arm. For several seconds he vibrated with a feedback that made him crackle and shake. To any one else, it would have been fatal. But he pulled himself free, leaving his blade stuck in the middle of the wrecked TV and rounding on his real, live, flesh-and-blood enemies.

It was then that Trey Leblanc swung out of his paralysis. Retrieving an object from the pouches that hung about his belt, he cast one of them, carefully, artfully, toward the man they all feared.

The sharpened tin star, one of the oldest and most ornate martial arts artifacts in his collection, hit Jason square in his mask's eyehole. It was a hell of a lucky shot. Rather than bouncing off, it remained wedged, suspended in mid-air. Drawing lubricating tears and blood from the eyeball it had pierced.

The big lummox screamed. It was an unearthly, alarming sound, oddly high-pitched, like a small child or an animal in distress. Jason tried to retrieve his machete but panic had disorientated him. Realizing their opponents had more balls than they credited them with, his back line of bad hombres moved in on them. One squint-eyed psycho drew on a small Derringer pistol. It was his first and last mistake. The boy who had been toying with the Browning shotgun let a round off. The impact in so small a space obliterated the would-be gunfighter's nose and made an exit out the back end of his skull. It blew him clean back out the camper and laid him on the ground. Permanently.

The second shot went wild, but it threw both sides into frenzy. The killers, naturally, wanted to kill. Wanted to tenderize, pulp and carve up that clean, unspoiled young flesh. But they feared getting in close in case the klutz with the rifle managed to squeeze another one off.

"Jason, show this buncha assholes what you can do, boy!" The big retard wasn't playing. He spun around in a private world of pain and humiliation, trying to extract one of the five sharp corners of the metal star from his eyeball without making it worse. He whined like a puppy dog. In his mind, their imploring did not even register. "Kill them Mommy! Kill them Mommy!" he snivelled and whined. It seemed to be the voice of himself as a child. But it was so long since he had heard himself speak that even he wasn't sure.

In panic, he tore the mask from his face, finally dislodging the star. His eyeball was sliced down the middle, the wound entering partway into the cornea. It bled liberally, but, to the kids, it was the least of his horrors. His face was so contorted and twisted it was as if his features had been pummelled and bludgeoned by a powerful industrial tool until they lacked all symmetry, all human appeal. His wounded eye dominated one side of his face, while the other was birdlike by comparison. The two did not even face each other in a parallel line.

And then there were the signs of decay. The dirty spores that grew between the twisted folds of flesh. The rotting fungoid smell. The tears and abrasions that had mended themselves as shapeless scar tissue. Everything that they had heard about him was true. Jason was both man and monster, a myth and an ever present threat.

In his mind, the man-beast heard the child's voice imploring his mommy to kill his enemies. Then, in his mind's eye, he saw the face of the person who spoke, the handsome middle-aged face of Pamela Voorhees. "Kill them, Mommy! Don't let them hurt me, Mommy!" She mimed the words in what she had believed to be the voice of her dead child. It was the same voice that drew him back from his watery grave, to live in the woods surrounding Crystal Lake as a resurrected wild boy. The voice of a maddened woman who would die fighting for her son, before his lost, drifting soul got the call that led him to spend the rest of his existence fighting for her.

"Protect yourself Jason! Save yourself, darling! Don't let them hurt my little boy anymore!" The voice of Pamela Voorhees rang out down the years. For a brief moment, her memory was so clear he almost felt her kiss upon his twisted brow. Whether a delusion or a visitation by her ghost, Jason made no such differentiation. To him both were equally real.

The wounded behemoth dived through the door frame of the camper van, taking part of it with him as his massive bulk impacted. His lowlife confederates had already backed off, but now they ran. Seeing their unstoppably violent mascot in retreat (not their "leader"—it was only the total madmen, and Sanchez, who took that seriously), their loss of confidence made them turn tail. But the obscenities still rang out in the air as they retreated into the night.

"Come and get us, pussyboys, come and fuck with us on our own territory!" "Comin' back for ya, cooze! Have that beaver nice and shaved and ready for me!"

If Trey and his compadres had been more confident of success, they could have rushed the twisted bastards then. But they were all too relieved to make their own retreat. They were two men light, having taken fatalities. And then there were Gretchen and Amy—as Shawna bounded out of the camper, it looked like she was giving suicidal chase to the monsters in retreat. But she hightailed it for her own van, looking for signs of life in the darkness. She found Gretchen, shaken but undaunted, holding a tire iron tight in her right hand, holding tight to a near-catatonic Amy. Shawna nervously scoured the night, waving her six inch switchblade as a challenge.

The guys pulled them tight back into the camper van. It had been the mobile refuge of the sick vermin with the bad teeth, but he had disappeared into the night with Jason and his co-conspirators. For now, with a need to regroup and think seriously about their next move out of Craven County, they had claimed it as their own.

Trey, no longer Mister Cool, retrieved the big freak's white hockey mask from where he had discarded it on the floor. It was discolored by dirt and bloodied around the eyehole. Staring through its vertical eye slits, the young man strapped it around the back of his head and placed the mask over his face. "Now, ain't I the scary one?"

***

So close to the outskirts of town, with his fuel gauge showing empty, it made sense to double back to the Shemp & Darrow offices. Ed North was a little amused to see young Christos back so soon, though he had a very strong inkling as to why. Sitting at his desk way into the night, with a .22 pistol in his top drawer, he surveyed the destabilization of society from down the end of a phone. With some concern for his own person, but without panic, With a certain interest, but somehow aloof.

"I take it the night holds terrors, Mr Christos?" He had admitted the boy to the offices without leaving his desk, after checking his identity on the CCTV system. Paul Christos was pretty badly shaken, though he didn’t like to show it.

"Lowlife need to be kept in hand. The sooner the weak-kneed liberals suffer some fatalities, and some man of action is strong enough to declare a police state, the better."

"Don't tell me you've had a run-in with some criminal elements? I thought you had a certain empathy for the real bad guys?"

North was teasing, of course, but Christos's sense of humor never extended to being the butt of someone else's fun. What truly bothered him was that, just for one moment, he had believed he might have some empathy with the two congenital idiots who had tried to waylay him off the highway. It was almost as if the excitement of society breaking down had infected him, made him fantasize that he was part of an infernal age where he was able, merely at will, to make acquaintance with some of America's most infamous transgressors. Not that that pair of mangy hold-up artists (and likely homos, to boot!) would possess one tenth of the genius of men of action like Lawrence and Weilman.

"I am interested in interesting criminals." North could see the boy was intensely nervous, refusing to make eye contact in the electric lamplight. "The type who could run the legal and penal system themselves, more ruthlessly, more efficiently, than the fainthearts currently in charge. I do not rejoice, Mr North, at the breakdown of law and order!"

Christos fought himself for control of his with temper.

Despite the ambiguities of his attitude, Ed North seemed perhaps the only potential ally he had at this stage in time. He didn't want to blow it with a display of petulance. It was just that he was still a little cross with himself for wanting to believe in the impossible. For thinking he was being granted some kind of nihilistic wish-fulfilment from beyond the grave. If there was one compensation, it was that those two mangy curs had had a run-in with Leblanc, and the vulgar boors he had formed a union with. In all likelihood, at least one party had made hamburger out of the other. That, at least, was some consolation.

The red lights flickered as someone else pressed their identity card and passed through the entry system at Shemp's. They heard the manic clatter of high heels, as Diane Miranda came down the corridor.

"Hey... are you in conference, Ed?" Her big mane of sandy-blonde hair, with only a hint of bottle dye, was silhouetted in the half-light. She failed to recognize Paul Christos immediately.

"No, no, that's okay. It's just our young intern here." She momentarily put on her reading glasses and gave an absent wave of recognition. "Taking shelter from the storm, I believe, is a fair way of putting it."

As was his habit, Christos felt a little slighted. But Diane didn't see it that way. "Sure. Understandable. Who wants to be alone with all this madness erupting?" She fidgeted through her handbag, but not in any stereotypically feminine fashion. Out came her cellular phone, her computerized filing system, her shorthand notebook. Her compact little Saturday night special.

"Do you have any idea what's going on out there?" Both men looked blank. Sure they both knew, or thought they did. But what was making Christos feel uncomfortable at the moment was Diana's obvious ease and comfort with Ed North. She sat on his side of the desk, the skirt of her business suit riding up a little to show the fine contours of the legs beneath the flesh-colored stockings.

"I mean, I know you're aware of this upsurge of violent crime. But what is it? Assuming it's not some toxic chemical in the air, a modern DDT or Agent Orange, how do we explain it? Mass hysteria transmitting from the general populace to the offenders? Vice versa? What?" Diane Miranda was far from incapable of reasoning. She was the last woman be deferential to the men in her company simply because they were men. The way she said it was almost a challenge. She had heard some observations from Ed on the nature of what he thought was going on. The Christos kid, too, was far from unopinionated when it came to describing what was hitting the streets.

So let's hear the reason for it all, geniuses.

"You know, I couldn't put it any more rationally or logically than the way you just did." It made Christos knot a little inside to see the way North stroked the top of her hand. The way she was so comfortable with it. The closeness that had developed between them in the space of less than three weeks. "But maybe this just doesn't have a rational explanation. You know, we regard ourselves as a religious nation, but we've lost something our forefathers had. Belief in providence. An acceptance that forces of darkness are at work in this world, countered by the forces of light that we still have faith in. This is a blip in the chart. An inexplicable one. But my guess is that, if you look back over the course of history, there are many, many inexplicable blips. I think we just have to accept that we're governed by darkness as well as by light."

"Very impressive." She had a matter-of-factness to her tone that suggested she was, in fact, less than impressed. "But I don't buy it. If our world isn't ruled by cause and effect, if even the heavens don't conform to some kind of mechanistic rules, then what are we doing practicing law? Why aren't we, I don't know, astrologers or water-diviners or something?"

Christos liked it when she knocked North off his smug little pedestal. There was an edge to Diane Miranda he found almost uncomfortably delicious. At first he'd put it down to Spanish blood, despite her fair complexion, until he realized that her surname was the legacy of a former marriage—as well as a big joke she always had to go through about a suspect being read his Miranda rights. But, since his arrival, Ed North had started to smooth down her edge in a way Christos could only admire.

"So what about you, Paul?" She was soliciting his opinion. That made him feel a little less forlorn. She called him by his first name too. Not his "Christian" name, though he was aware of the irritating irony of "Christ" being inherent in his surname. There were no other females who did that, since he had lost his mother. He was "Christos" to all of them.

"Isn't it your thing that major criminals are philosophers or super-geniuses or something?" She made it sound so banal, it made him cringe a little. Miss Miranda was, he had to remind himself, at bottom a liberal. Albeit not one of the soft-boiled kind. One of the ways in which Ed had won her over , when he showed up out of nowhere as the crime-wave broke, was in showing off dubious credentials as a voluntary counselor for a rape crisis center. Rape crisis! Just imagine the stories he must have heard. Christos had wondered if maybe he should volunteer for a position himself.

"Ummm, not really, Diane." He relished addressing her by her first name. "I'm as much a law and order fascist as anyone. Or maybe," he remembered the company he was keeping, "more than most. But I'm interested in criminals who have a coherent philosophy. Who understand the reason for what they're doing, yet still choose to behave in that way. Criminals who have an intelligence that raises them above the herd."

This was the first time the little intern had really taken the time to explain his views to Diane. She was forced to suppress a smile. Not the old Nietzsche superman thing? Welcome to modern America, dude, she wanted to tell him. We live in pretty complicated times, but none of us are beyond good and evil. That's why the law that you're studying exists.

"So this is why everyone within a hundred-mile or more radius of Craven County looks over their shoulder before entering their own backyard?" She fidgeted with her fingers. It was at times like these that she wanted to fish out a Marlboro Light. If only she hadn't quit and allowed Shemp's to adopt a no-smoking policy in the office without protest. "Because there's a whole new breed of super-criminal that we have to contend with. For whom conventional morality is irrelevant, right?"

Christos was glad it was dark, because he feared he might be blushing. Somehow he got the sense that his views were not quite so novel to Diane. "No, uh, no," he stammered. "I don't believe that at all. I think the majority of them are morons. I think law enforcement needs to lead a far greater backlash than it seems it's prepared to. I think that maybe one, one of them at most, from the reports I've studied, may be of the higher kind; I mean more intelligent, more personally charismatic."

It was almost a retreat from his personal philosophy, but in the end he couldn't back down. Diane had him and she wasn't letting go. "Oh?" She had that killer smile on her lips. He had only seen her perform briefly in court, but knew that if ever he saw that smile then she would demolish the prosecution's case. "And who might this super-villain, this criminal mastermind be? The 'Crystal Lake Killer'? Jason Voorhees?"

"Uh, no..." She was trying to belittle him now. "I don't actually believe..."

"You know, there's something to be said for those stories." North piped up suddenly. It was an unexpected defense. "Since I've been in the neighborhood, I've done a little research on the Crystal Lake murders. All the recurring outbreaks of violent crime in the area. I think there's something to the stories, there's often something to local rumor if there are unsolved homicides and an offender hasn't been apprehended. I think the Crystal Lake Killer, whoever he is, is still out there."

Diane had stepped down from the desk. She stalked up and down the room slowly, taking sideways glances back at Ed. Trying to work out if he was serious. "Yo' shittin' me?" she accused, then checked herself, realising the voice she had put on was a stereotype.

"No, no." North seemed to enjoy making her guess just how serious he was. "The evidence is there. It suggests 'the man behind the mask' exists. In my opinion, local and state police should be directing part of their investigations towards running him to ground. Bringing him down."

Now she knew he had to be joking. She relaxed her pace and gave a skeptical smile. "You are shitting me. I grew up no more than forty miles from here, Mr North, and Jason, the Crystal Lake whatever, was truly in the culture. He was someone it was fun to believe in. When genuine homicides occurred, well, that was down to local police incompetence if they didn't get the perps. But let me tell you, Jason Voorhees is just one big, ugly, urban myth."

***

On the outskirts of town, not far from where Paul Christos had fled, Gretchen played den mother in a place that stank of horror. It got under Shawna's skin, having to stay in the camper van where the hillbillies had tormented Deborah and Stacey. And Amy.

It was nothing compared to what it did to Amy Maven. To make her stay in the place in which she and her friends were abused, from whence they had disappeared, and from which she had already once made her escape, seemed like the most perverse cruelty.

She would scarcely have been able to stay put without Gretchen's constant maternal attention. And without the administration of a beta-blocker capsule—donated by one of the boys who, under the extreme circumstances, no longer felt ashamed to say he was on medication. Trey had insisted that they stay put, with the dead hillbilly's pump-action shotgun and ammo, until they got back. Until the men had scoured the area for what, in Amy's presence, remained the great unspoken. For evidence of the continued existence of Deborah Angelo and Stacey Macaffey. Or, if that was as grimly hopeless a task as it seemed, for some indication as to where their bodies had been dumped.

The men—for who could really call them "boys" now?—were aware they were taking a major risk. Shawna had bridled when the boys had taken over, when Trey had given them what, to his mind, was now the only possible course of action. But strange alliances were made in wartime. He now had the most respected of the college jocks on his side. Popularity may have counted for nothing, now that their alma mater days at Forest Green had reached such a rude conclusion, but they didn't see it that way. For Gerry Nielsen, noted quarterback and best friend of the late Jamie van Hoon, the social structures were still the same as they were at college, at high school, as they had ever been, even though they were playing for their lives. And didn't Trey just love all the macho support, the validation of what he believed to be his leadership skills?

Their only firearm was left in the willing hands of Shawna. The men carried every bladed weapon they could find, from the martial arts spear to a bowie knife pilfered from the hillbillies' mobile hovel. The creeps and misfits who had attacked them were still out there, but seemed beaten back, fragmented, on the run. But the freak who had led them all remained at large. Angry, wounded, mutilated. If he found the guys when they were on their reconnaissance mission, they had better use every blade they had this time. They had better cut him down like Caesar.

The torn entrance to the camper was barricaded. With the door taken off its hinges, direct entry was blocked by Shawna's Honda van, its driver seat door open with the seat tilted forward to allow her admission to the back of the vehicle. Around the perimeter, the other Forest Green refugees who'd joined forces had parked their cars, trucks and vans as close together as possible in a near circle. It was as if they were protected from an army of hostile Native Americans by a circle of wagons, like in some old movie.

Their two-tier entry system was an improvised way of sounding the alarm. If any lowlife or halfwit tried to put the big camper van under attack in the men's absence, then Shawna would surely hear them coming. It would leave just enough time to load up the final pieces of shot in the hillbilly's Browning, and blow the head clean fucking off of her intruder at close range.

All this tension was bringing out something strange in Gretchen. It was a kind of neurotic fortitude, a personal strength that had never showed itself until her back was pushed completely up against the wall. "I don't wanna... I don't wanna go back in that van," Amy whined like a little child. It spoke worryingly of the state of her perception, given that they were already sat right in there.

"You haven't gotta go back. We're not going back." Gretchen spoke sternly, almost scolding her. "None of us are taking any backward steps, Amy. We're going forward. We're getting out of here. Moving on with our lives, putting all this ugliness behind us forever." She spoke with fervor, as if she'd brainwashed herself into believing it. "This is all just going to be like a bad dream, baby."

There was nothing sordid in the way Gretchen spoke, whatever some of those insinuating jerks said about her. It was just her way of taking care of that poor, haunted wreck of a girl. The vibrant cheerleader whose very color had been drained from her face. Gretchen believed every word that she spoke implicitly, but her urgency, her need to believe, left Shawna uneasy.

She knew she should have shared the responsibility, but Gretchen was going gangbusters on her own. Shawna needed a little time, a little space to herself, just to think things through. A few minutes outside of this claustrophobic shithole at the very least.

With only the mildest twinge of guilt, she climbed from the damaged portal of the camper into her own van. Clambering into the back, she knew she would be scarcely missed by mother hen Gretchen and her charge for the next few minutes. They knew where she was anyway. Kicking uncomfortably back against the inner wheel arch, she contemplated the twilight. In the near distance, the streetlights and neon signs still dotted the small towns and highways. Life on earth did not seem to have ended just yet. It seemed crazy to her that the semblance of civilization, all those little details that she'd always taken for granted, were still there. Yet they'd had to fight tooth and nail for their lives not so long ago. And there didn't seem to be anyone to turn to, anyone else they could rely on anymore.

For all her unease, despite that quivering feeling in her taut belly, she would rather have been out there in the darkness, scouring the scene with Trey and every muscle-head jock he had with him. Shawna hadn't stayed behind because she was some ditsy chick who needed to be protected, but out of loyalty to her friend and the poor, traumatized kid in the camper. She looked at the dirty dim light that shone through its curtained window. No shadows could be seen moving inside. No real sign of life. Good. That was as it should be.

But if they were able to move on, if they made their way out of here in the way in which Gretchen had total faith that they would, then what? What would they do with the lives that were currently put on hold? Shawna saw it as a no-way-back situation. She couldn't visualize returning to Forest Green even if every female student was issued with an Uzi for her own protection. Even if the castrated balls of every killer were hung as decorations from every Christmas tree in Provincia County.

She took a smoke from a pack and lit it up. For a moment, she had a longing for a joint, but then realized their current weed-free regime was a blessing. It would be suicide to get baked under the present circumstances. Instead, she drew on a nonfilter cigarette and coughed a little on the smoke. It was from one of the hillbillies' packs in the camper. She hoped it belonged to the one who had died. Hoped that, in some rank corner of hell, he would be aware that his life was worth no more than a pack of smokes.

And what of Trey and her? When all this awful mess started, it seemed like the horror and the shock of it all were going to bring them back together. But now, they were under such pressure that all they seemed to do was frazzle each other, to stress each other out even more. Grain was rubbing against grain.

It was the most hellishly crazy thing, but now she was finding it hard to imagine a time when Trey, and even Gretchen, wouldn't remind her of this place and this point in time. Of all the horrors. It brought her even further down. But what, realistically, was the alternative? That they all come through this, and try to find a permanent place in each other's lives, when they were cultures apart, with their educational and career prospects uncertain? Maybe she had become too cynical. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. After all, Trey and mom would probably hit it off. (She imagined her mother as intrigued, rather than alienated, by a vaguely exotic young black guy. Shit, she'd divorce her own parent if it wasn't the case.)

But his folks—did she imagine that those fine, upstanding church people who'd fought hard for their son to get a good education would just shrug it off when he ran home from college? When he told them he'd led a mass walkout in defiance of the law, and wasn't going back? When he introduced them to the type of girlfriend—whoa, make that ex-girlfriend—whose personal style they'd probably never laid eyes on before outside of a rock video or a biker movie?

There was a hollow banging sound against the side of her van. Someone making a gentle knocking with the palm of his hand. It cut off all of her meandering thoughts, bringing her attention back to the moment. Somehow, she wasn't alarmed. She heard the dull banging again, sounding very slowly. It was the pre-arranged signal. Formulated between her and Trey when the shit started coming down back at Forest Green. There it was again. One more time and that would be four slow knocks, the signal that Trey had returned and that she should let him in.

It never came. She waited some more. Nothing. Either she'd been too deep in her thoughts and misheard, or he'd forgotten the drill. Whatever, she was glad he was back. It would bring her out of her moping and start her thoughts down a positive track again.

As she scrambled back into the driver's seat, she wasn't startled to see a face waiting patiently at the window. Had no hesitation in moving forward to greet it.

Face to face against the window. Nose to twisted nose. Eye to bisected eye. The face of the biggest, ugliest urban myth she would ever encounter.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the few moments it took her to withdraw from the sight of those loathsome, putrid features, to find her way back into the camper with her friend and their charge, they had come under siege.

"Where are they all coming from?" Shawna spat her question at Gretchen as if it was a demand. As if her friend, her gently pale skin now completely white, had any more idea than her. They slid on their toned backsides into the furthest corner of the camper, across dirty sheets and unwashed plates. Amy began to cry and whimper. Shawna had to remind herself it was not the girl's fault if she couldn't be strong. What difference did it make now anyway? All they could do was to face up to what was happening. Even if it meant the end.

But Shawna wasn't going so easily, and neither was Gretchen. As the tall brunette impatiently dragged the weeping, traumatized girl whose abused form was covered by a blanket, pulling her out of the sights of the shotgun, her benign friend produced her own firearm. With shaking hands, Gretchen loaded her newly purchased pistol and steeled herself to look down its sights for the first time, clasping it tight. It was a petite .22. An essential buy for the paranoid modern lady who wants to stay breathing at all costs.

"When did you...?"

"I told you I had a gun license," she said angrily. "I've been holding this till I knew I'd have to use it."

And that time had surely come to pass, bearing down on them all mercilessly. The sounds that closed in upon them drowned the moronic chatter of lamebrains and psychos, though their shrieks and jeers could still be heard. These were the sounds of industry. Of power tools.

"Oh shit! No!" Sparks flickered their pyrotechnic threat onto the floor around them. It took a manic shuffling of feet to ensure they weren't about to burst into flames. The heat came from the windowless far side of the camper directly behind them. That was where a burning line had started to trace its way around a large expanse of the camper's metal exoskeleton. Burning its way through, second by intolerable second.

The crunch of metal from outside the door told Shawna her Honda was being trashed. It was the last obstacle that blocked entrance to the camper van. That huge, misshapen man, that thing, was attacking it with all of his bulk. His unwelcome putrescence would soon be with them. Shawna and Gretchen tried to scuttle in opposite directions, each to train a gun upon the openings in the camper. Amy screamed, "No!" as they scrambled across the floor, mistaking their frantic haste for desertion. Gretchen looked helplessly at her as she tugged at her cheesecloth shirt, reluctant to push her away until Shawna insisted.

"Get the door, I'll take the wall! Take as many out as you can!" It wasn't going to be that many. If she wasn't mistaken, that teeth-gritting, buzzing noise was a chainsaw, a reinforcement to help the creep with the welding gun break his way through. She had one final double round of shot left that they had been able to retrieve. After that, it was down to Gretchen. And beyond that, she begged whatever power or lifeforce there may be in this universe to let the end come quickly. They were in the middle of an imploding tin can, and would soon be at the mercy of those who were ripping it joyously to shreds.

***

In the lanes and walkways crisscrossing the highway services section of Forest Green, the mood was heavy and solemn. There were now more of them than there had been before their numbers conjoined. Swollen to well over a dozen young men, just a hair short of a score. Their numbers were many but their weapons were light, improvised. A few blades here, a few lengths of piping there. One kid even optimistically carried a slingshot.

Nobody had too many bright suggestions as to how to search for Deborah and Stacey. Who really knew? Even as recently as a day ago, it was something that could have been left to the state taskforce or the sheriff's men, whether the girls were friends of theirs or not. But in removing themselves from the campus town, they had placed themselves in a strange region where the rules no longer applied. Where civilization had taken a hike.

And few of the additional searchers wanted to take orders. Not from that aloof black kid, Leblanc, or from the football captain, Nielsen. No one wanted to feel they were a follower and not a leader, when it came to making a sweeping search of the wasteland and the fields just beyond the roads. And nobody had found Deborah Angelo or Stacey Macaffey, alive or dead.

The nearest they got was when one of them saw something glinting at the top of the grass verge running diagonally down from the side of the road into the fields beyond. "That's a sorority ring," he announced, after dangling down the slope with his buddies' belts tied around his waist, to ensure he didn't slide down and dislodge whatever was there. It was the first of two small gleaming objects retrieved from the ground. "I'm betting maybe half the girls I know had something like this in their freshman year."

The other tiny object, which also seemed to have been cut from glass, was a more kitschy, personalized thing when held up to the light. Like a little cartoon character replicated in miniature. "That's a Pikachu pin," his buddy spoke up. "I reckon that's the one that belongs to Stacey. Her boyfriend bought it for her."

"So where is he?" asked Trey. He had no idea how well these kids knew the two girls. All he knew was that their search had a more bitter tinge of hopelessness about it with every passing moment. "Does anyone know she's gone missing?"

"I guess maybe not," the kid reflected aloud, "He was at Forest Green too. But he was one of the first to take off. Said he'd hook up with her when they got home." They abandoned their search. Unseen to them, at the bottom of the grass slope was a ditch swathed in shadow. From the reeds that grew out of that ditch reached Stacey Macaffey's dead hand. Ringless. Pinless. Reaching for help but finding nothing except mud and grass to clasp.

They trudged despondently back to where the camper was parked on the outside of the services enclosure. As swiftly as their heavy hearts would allow. There at least, over that next hill, they could protect other young women who were still alive. Who were as scared and as willing to fight as they were.

It was Trey who saw it first. Not distinctly, but from the outline of movement in the darkness. From the flickering flashes of light ignited by sparking metal. He saw the horde converge on the camper van, and felt both a sense of urgency and powerlessness. His eyes were wide and unblinking. For one moment he was paralyzed. "Who are these fucking bastards and where are they all coming from?"

***

As an atrocity, it was almost a work of art. Wayne Sanchez had waited too long to waste the opportunity to perfect his technique. Had spent too much of his recent energy, since skipping the pit, on hurried cut-and-run missions. They had been carried out simply because the raw materials, those hated people, were available. Sloppy. Crude. Briefly gratifying, but not fulfilling. Executed with a gruesome technique that owed everything to hatred, and the intensity of the moment. But not much to the terrible, gruesome knowledge that he had gained over the course of so many years.

Now, he had achieved something approaching perfection. He stood back and observed it with the detached ardor of the artist admiring his own finished canvas. The blood that had congealed and dried, overnight. The lesions that ran down both sides of the first hooker's body, deep incisions that showed the shallowness of her crack-whore skin. That revealed glistening inner membrane, organ and bone. That had been artfully inflicted so that the incisions were pulled further apart by the force of gravity, as Lydia—for that was her name—had squirmed, and writhed, and slowly bled to death as she hung up in that warehouse on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. As he stood, and watched, and got his rocks off to the grim spectacle, all the while making sure her bound, choked, beaten and terrorized partner in trade, Rachelle, watched in horror. Making her aware of what was to come, once he had perfected the piece of satanic artwork that was 'Naked Lydia,' strung upside down and pierced with nails through both her ankles. The anti-Christ.

Can you see this, Jason? Are you getting it?

In a field many hundreds of miles from Texas, the twisted brow of a marauding mass murderer became ever more distorted. The sharply defined images of violence against the naked female form hit his already warped consciousness. As he gazed on the camper van they were attacking, and anticipated the carnage that instinct told him he should inflict, he was spurred on by the horror. By the mutilation techniques of the Devil Boy, his own admirer. By the nudity of the female form, which shocked him more than any conventional horror ever could.

Sanchez had made clear his devotion to the devil and all His work this time—though, in the absence of the Real Thing when he'd done his time in hell, he'd decided that the devil was whoever you wanted Him to be. In his case, the devil was himself, with Jason on hand as chief torturer for His Infernal Majesty. "Servants of Death, enchanter of pain," he'd carved across the distended white belly of Lydia, as she still breathed. It was his tribute to Deicide, the black metal band, his fellow Floridians, who, he had once thought, and still hoped, believed sincerely in the Lord of Darkness—or Wayne Ricardo Sanchez, as he was now known. Over her breasts, he'd taken the time to carve the Baphomet, the image of the unholy goat's head.

Several hundred miles away, Jason saw Lydia's mutilated breasts in his mind's eye and winced at the vision. This was not how he regarded the sacred duty of murder. He had never wanted to touch the hideousness of naked female flesh. The ugliness of human sensuality. That nauseating tenderness that had always been denied to him.

Then he saw the blood-dripping five-sided shape, the satanic pentagram, carved into Rachelle's black breasts, and relented. It wasn't that her dark bosoms were any less feminine, any less beautiful—or, in his eyes, any less repugnant—than the white flesh of Lydia. It was that the mutilations were more dehumanizing. The chicken wire that hung around her throat lengthened the upper vertebrae so that she looked like one of those graceful African tribeswomen who extend their neck via ornamental hoops. But beyond that, it was hideous. The wire pinched tight at the bottom of her jaw, and, where it brought its bloody grip to a close, exposed the meat and gristle of her throat. It was the type of artistry that Jason could admire.

But then his mind recoiled. Horrified by the sad, lost beauty of the ebony flesh that not even Sanchez's murderous touch could completely despoil. Both of the dead women had sold, lived and breathed sex. It could only ever be a source of revulsion for Jason, something that he wished to destroy, rather than participate in.

Jason smashed his body into the camper. Some of the low-lives had already managed to invade, but their pre-emptive raid was as nothing against his onslaught. Gretchen Andrews was pinned against the far end by the chrome metal wall that had caved in. Held in her shaking hand was a pistol with just a couple of bullets left. Two of the invaders lay dead or dying, their facial and abdominal wounds trickling red onto the floor. But still one leering maniac advanced. With thin, scraped-back hair, thick lips and a wide nose, his features lent themselves naturally to the full clown make-up that he wore. He was a nightmare out of childhood, a drooling, lustful reminder of the darkness that longs to despoil innocence.

"Hey little girl! Wanna try some of my cotton candy?"

Shawna Black had spent the last round of shotgun ammunition, at least one barrel shooting wild into the inner shell of the camper. Now she pulled at the matted hair of Ben Weilman, digging her nails deep into the back of his check shirt.

"Ahh! You fuckin' bitch! I'll get back to you in time, honey!" It was almost like extra stimulation, as the partially nude body of Amy Maven squirmed below him. He had come back to reclaim what he now saw as rightfully his, payment in kind for the damage done to his and Harry's van. As Weilman pulled down her bra and revealed her pert little white breasts, Amy would sooner have been anywhere else on earth right then. She would sooner have been dead.

"Ahhhh!" The scream rang out as the bullet blasted a goodly proportion of the facial tissue beneath the clown's make-up. "I'll see you in hell, darlin'," he groaned through his broken mouth as he sank to the floor. "Did he really think that I wouldn't fire?" Gretchen said amidst that moment of hysteria. Did these madmen think that they were running the place?

Then Jason advanced. He regarded the chaos and carnage all around him through his mutilated eye. Like all his other wounds, his scar tissue, his partially decomposed flesh, it had healed so that it was now but one part of his overall deformity. Though part of the cornea was now cut loose from the eyeball, it still functioned as one eye that saw everything through a tear in the visual fabric. A jagged slash that ran through the center of his world.

Then he regarded the sexual assault that was taking place at his feet. "Hey, big guy!" the hillbilly leered as he started to pull down his jeans. "You wanna take turns with her after me?"

Jason's machete came down on the camper van rapist's head. Ben Weilman was frozen in shock. Frozen in a moment in time, as his skull was sliced in two. As the legendary murderer of Crystal Lake withdrew his weapon, the bloody severance of Weilman's cranium left his brain exposed and bisected. All was silence, except for the choking and clucking as his mutilated cerebrum sent him into terminal convulsions.

Nobody knew whose side Jason would take now. The perplexed deviants who had joined the attack so enthusiastically began to back off. Shawna and Gretchen began to hope, against hope, that his obvious distaste for sexual transgressions might bring everything to a halt. That the unpredictability of their enemy might yet be their salvation.

Then his puritanical rage exploded again. As Amy lay sobbing, her partial nudity stoked his anger. As the hillbilly lay in an unholy mess of cerebral tissue and blood, the sight of his hysterical victim drove the man-mountain insane.

One slash. And the machete made a clean cut of her screaming larynx. As the cold, stained blade withdrew, dark crimson gushed from the diagonally dividing cut he had made through her voice box. Amy was silenced forever. But screams welled up in the throats of the protectors who had failed to save her.

The reserve ranks of the pervert army made a scrambling retreat from the back of the camper van. Jason was everyone's nemesis. Even those who regarded themselves as allies were liable to face his wrath. His hatred and disdain for everything tainted with the pall of sexuality. His hatred for most things living.

"Gretchen, fer chrissake, move your ass!" Shawna was climbing through the smashed windshield at the front of the van, her bleeding palms paying no heed to the glass embedding itself deeply within them. But Gretchen remained transfixed. Semi-catatonic over the corpse of the young woman they had failed to save. Shawna's words were not reaching her. But still the deformed hulk advanced. She stared upon him, no longer pulling away in horror. Shawna knew her friend had gone into shock. That she was waiting like a lamb for the slaughter.

He looked almost tenderly down on the girl. Her calm served to pacify him. For her to be so willing in the face of death was like a gift, a peace offering from someone accepting of her fate. That she could stare so deeply into the twisted face of death, with those kindly, benign eyes. She took Jason back into the mists of his past. Into that which he only half-remembered. Her strong, fair features and her pale blue eyes reminded him of the only woman able to gaze on his ugliness with affection. Jason, in his turn, was becoming transfixed by Gretchen.

Then Jason's mutilated eye exploded. This time the orb was blasted out of existence in spray of blood and dark, fatty jelly. It left nothing but a red, empty socket as the gigantic killer lurched, almost knocked off of his feet.

"When I said move, girl, I meant right now!" Shawna yanked her brutally along the floor, dismayed at having to risk her own life further. She passed Gretchen's handgun, from which she had fired the last shot, back to the men of Forest Green whose clambering hands were waiting for them to climb through the front of the van.

Trey stood close to them, his Chinese spear aloft in his hand, as if it might counter the human monster if it went on the offensive. But Jason, for now, had to cope with the pain, and his partially obliterated sight.

Shawna's open hand smacked hard across Gretchen's face. It brought her back to consciousness just enough. She followed her friends as they climbed, crouched and clambered over the broken glass of the windshield.

Outside, everyone was being pulled into the vehicles that remained in a driveable state, to make good their escape. In the back of Gerry Nielsen's pick-up, they watched as the deformed behemoth came staggering, half-blind, through the burnt hole in the camper van. Gretchen responded to her friend's perplexed glare with surprising indignation. "I looked, but I didn't see evil there," she spoke as if awakening from a dream. "I only saw damage. And sadness. Deep, dark sadness."

CHAPTER TWELVE

"You can't fight a forest fire with a thimble full of piss." The lawman's craggy face became more sour with every mouthful of cold coffee he swallowed. In this late hour, there was little optimism to be found among those who couldn't go to bed for fear their entire jurisdiction might become extinct by the time they awoke.

"No. No, you can't." Ed North was determined to remain courteous to Sheriff Casey. It was a little incongruous, but the doors of Shemp & Darrow were always open to him in these dark days. Ever since the new attorney in town had started offering advice on legal precedent in times of civil disturbance. And that, Casey was forced to concede, was where they were at. This was no mere "crime wave."

"But you can fight fire with fire. The citizenry can be empowered in dark days like these. Make them aware of the extent and the limits of their powers and you have a few hundred extra sworn-in deputies, straight off the bat." The precedents he cited stretched all the way back to the wording of the American Constitution, and the citizenry's right to form an armed militia to oppose political tyranny. This, North argued, had a direct parallel in the situation they were facing today: the tyranny of bad men.

A class act, Diane had long since decided, and watching him give his spiel to Sheriff Casey only reinforced her view. In everyday "peacetime," it would have made her more than a little uneasy to have the cops regularly come into the office to confer. In fact, the situation would have been downright untenable. But she appreciated that Ed was only staying true to his word in preserving the rights of the individual citizen. In a situation of civil emergency, who could say that he or she was truly a free citizen when the quality of their life was dictated by a violent mob?

If Ed North drew from an eclectic range of sources—many credible, some totally indefensible, like the citizen's right of retaliation against people who defied the perfidious Jim Crow race laws in the Old South—to state his case, then at least it spoke to an old-school conservative like Casey. The sheriff may have taken pains to come on like a socially-inclusive New Republican, but at heart Diane had always regarded him as a folksy fascist. At least Ed was instilling in him the rights of the citizen.

Or that was the way she saw it. But then, since his arrival, Edward North had won over Diane Miranda in quicker time than anyone since—well, than anyone.

"Sounds a little like lynch-law to me, Mr North, but I guess if desperate times call for desperate measures..." Ed and Diane both raised a discreet eyebrow. Look who was suddenly a law and order liberal. "I'm just a little concerned that the sheriff's offices not be removed from their responsibilities. Once you take it down to rock bottom, the citizenry doesn't have legal responsibility for its own protection. We do."

So that was it. It was about control, not individual freedom. At least they could rely on Casey to be consistent in that respect.

"Speaking of which," Ed seemed to have been awaiting an opportune moment, "I've been meaning to ask you to take a look at this, Sheriff." He produced a neatly ordered dossier, all bound together in digestible sections within a labeled ring binder. Marked "Crystal Lake Murders," it carried the orderly but obsessive mark of the single-minded researcher.

Casey read the heading. "Shoot." He flicked through the contents in a perfunctory, almost disdainful manner. There were archived witness statements and press reports. Even artist's impressions of the masked suspect. Some of this must have been taken from the local municipal and newspaper archives. How had North found the time to do all of this when he was working the caseload of an attorney at a law firm? Was he some kind of nut?

"Yeah, it's all here alright. Of course, the only reason I'm saying that is that I've seen it all before." Diane couldn't help but feel embarrassed for Ed. Why was he devoting so much time and energy to this crap? She thought they'd finally agreed that the media-hyped figure of Jason, the "Crystal Lake Killer," was an inflated piece of local folklore, a semi-mythical archetype? At times, she had a nagging doubt that this charming, intelligent man who'd arrived out of nowhere, had swept her off her feet and into bed, might be, at heart, a flake.

It was an overly cynical thought that she suppressed. Still, it gave her pause to listen to him now.

"You may have seen some of it before, Sheriff. But I was able to put that together in my spare time since I first came to town. And much of it relates to contemporary accounts. It's amazingly consistent when it's compared with material from more than twenty years ago..."

"Yeah, yeah." Casey perused the file out of a sense of duty. But he remained singularly unimpressed. "I see you included the statement from the Garcia boy here. You take that from your disclosure on Leblanc's arrest?"

Diane blanched. Where else could it have come from? This was taking his personal interest in the case just a little far. In fact, it was tantamount to a breach of confidence.

"That was my source, yes." Ed remained unabashed. He had his eye fixed so closely on the ball that he couldn't see how he'd scored a foul. "The importance of that piece of evidence relates to how Ricky Garcia described a suspect in every way identical to that in murders committed more than twenty years ago."

Casey didn't respond at first. Just kept on looking through the file, stopping to mull over some disputed "fact" or wild correlation. "Deputy Spinks took the Garcia statement from my interview with him. Just seemed to me like a crock. I was half-minded to arrest the boy for wasting police time."

Ed North had the Sheriff where he wanted him. "Garcia's testimony corresponds to every last detail of statements given to the sheriff's office by survivors of the first waves of Crystal Lake murders. All this apparently unknown to the witness. And then, as soon as he's back in his college dorm, someone seeks him out on the premises and murders him. The very first of the Forest Green murders.'" Casey tried to remain objective, but his aging, tired face couldn't help but appear rankled.

North continued. "There's nothing to suggest this boy was an expert on modern folklore or so-called 'urban myths.' He wasn't even born at the time Jason Voorhees went on his first killing sprees."

That was it. Ed had said the magic words. From criminal researcher to Bigfoot buff in one single breath.

"Ed, I can't help feeling this whole Voorhees thing is something of a red herring." Diane felt a little uncomfortable in siding against him. But still, she didn't want to see him undermine his professional credibility on account of a professional interest turning into an obsession. "There's nothing but conjecture as to who the killer was. The only Jason Voorhees' anyone could ever connect with the case was the son of the dead woman who was posthumously accused of the first murders. And even she was never convicted, so there's no firm evidence, As for Jason, he'd been dead for years..."

"Drowned in the lake in summer of '57," the concurred Casey, glad that Miss Miranda was taking his side for once. "I was a boy at the time. Used to go to the camp every summer. 'Course, that year I had the measles."

"And his body was never retrieved from the waters of Crystal Lake," cut in Ed emphatically, as if that proved something. "If there was ever any death certificate for Jason Voorhees, then the cause of death it listed must have been purely speculative. As is his demise itself."

"Now just hold on." Casey raised a hand and the flicker of a smile. If North thought he was going to tell campfire stories while the social fabric was tearing itself asunder outside, the sheriff would put a stop to that right now. "Are you telling me we have ourselves some kind of 'wild boy' out there? That the Voorhees kid never died and he's been living feral in the woods ever since, waiting to murder any young person that comes his way?"

Put like that, even Ed could see it looked more than a little unlikely. But then, that wasn't the angle he was pushing. "I don't know. I've really no idea." He sounded disdainful, as if it had been a vulgar thing to take his own suggestions to their strange logical conclusion. "But I know you have a murder suspect never brought down by law, who may be still active in the rural center of Forest Green. I know that his personal emblem, and his method of disguise, is what appears to be a hockey mask. I know that he answers the description of an individual of an unusually large growth rate, possibly due to some freakish syndrome. And that his level of personal hygiene is, by all accounts, far from socially acceptable." Ed recalled a private personal memory of the malodorous retard, and winced.

"Okay, let's say that Voorhees has been living off the land all these years," drawled Casey morosely. "Let's say he lives in a hole in the ground and wears a mask like the goalkeeper of the New Jersey Devils. Are you saying that this Wild Man of Borneo has managed to coordinate a whole mess of killers and deviants? Like he's some kind of Charlie Manson, or leastways a gang leader like Ma Barker?"

Ed was a long time in dignifying this ridicule with a response. "I make no such claims. I merely state that the jurisdiction of Forest Green has an unapprehended mass murderer in its midst. A murderer who is in many ways physically identifiable and geographically locatable. And that he remains a menace to your community as long as he's at large."

Casey didn't have any further argument. He could bitch about the detail, but a few facts were unassailable. "In fact, if you're to mobilize the citizenry to cope with the state of emergency, sheriff, then I suggest you make this 'Voorhees,' or who or whatever he is, into your very own public enemy number one. And that your deputies, any deputized citizens, anybody with the capacity to do so, should be instructed to do their utmost to bring him down, by any means necessary. Voorhees will not give himself up voluntarily, Sheriff Casey. The sheriff's office and the good people of Forest Green should resolve to destroy him."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The small convoy moved steadily downstate in the morning light. Comprised of military jeeps and police cars with motorcycle cops in accompaniment, every so often a helicopter would pass over to radio details of the roads ahead. For the most part, they weren't talking about highway maintenance or repairs.

If, in their quasi-military methods, the authorities had made it clear that extreme measures were needed to counter extreme developments, then it also spoke nervously of who they believed was currently winning the battle. For the federal agents and advisers who were quitting the area had insisted on the armed accompaniment to Sheriff Casey. He in turn had to call in National Guard reservists, to administrate the conditions of civil emergency to be imposed on Craven County.

Forest Green was the tiny nucleus of a cancer that was spreading throughout the state, and beyond. The epidemic of murder, sexual violence and gratuitous assault had spread all along the East Coast. Now it seemed the plague of murder was spreading further, with reports of sudden escalations of violence in towns near the state lines of New York, Delaware and Maryland. The Wild West had returned again, but had made a coastal switch with a perverse, bloody vengeance.

Suddenly, it seemed America had more violent criminals than her borders could possibly encompass.

Statistically, big cities had seen their violent crime rate rise overnight by as much as one quarter. Smaller counties and rural towns were transformed into little hamlets of fear, paranoia and bloodshed. A town relatively free of violent crime might find its rate rising by as much as two hundred percent, in as quick a time as it took for one random, senseless massacre to occur. The scale of the social chaos was not yet so great as to have the federal government declare a state of national emergency, but for many of the more religiously inclined in the provincial region of Craven County, it was as if the end of days had arrived.

When it came to self-preservation, Paul Christos was little different from the mass of the humanity he so disdained. Riding silently, awkwardly, alongside members of the National Guard, he took advantage of the free ride Ed North had wrangled for him with Sheriff Casey. Incapable of conversing freely with those rougher types, he just huddled up to the hurriedly packed contents of his overnight bag and small suitcase.

The convoy was moving in the exact opposite direction to his family home in Manhattan. But Christos had made a big decision. Only time would tell if he had the conviction to stay with it, but for now he was taking his very first step. Equipped with a hidden handgun and more defensive chemical sprays than he could possibly use, he was hoping to break through the fear barrier somewhere along the way.

As law enforcement displaced itself from the epicenter of the crime epidemic, so the priorities of protecting and serving the most vulnerable were reversed. Those without the official approval to travel with the convoy were left to either fend for themselves or quit the county. Most chose the option of flight over fight, but were impeded as soon as they hit the road. All around the edges of the different county lines, impromptu checkpoints and roadblocks were set up to check the movement of local citizens. Under the slimmest pretext, one small family or group of friends might be held up for hours, denied the right of free movement. Only the murderers and psychos who had brought chaos to their region were, it seemed, able to travel freely at will.

Martial law had not been declared, but in all other senses it had arrived. As the convoy met with the first series of roadblocks at the county line, it lifted Christos's anxious heart a little to see that the authorities were doing their best to contain society's undesirable elements.

"Were you granted permission to travel state highways as a collective group on this scale?" The officious little guardsman, eyes barely visible below his buzzcut hair and military cap, was enjoying the power newly assigned to him. He shouted his question like a bald challenge.

The bedraggled kids had been halted in their array of salvaged and damaged vehicles. Formerly in pristine condition, testament to the relative wealth of many students of Forest Green, their little convoy was already battle-weary.

"C'mon man, what is all this permission shit?" Trey said it with fatigue rather than aggression. Everyone felt the same way. "Like, when someone sets my house on fire, I gotta get permission before I slide my ass down a rope? Do I have to pick up the correct form from the post office, what?"

The weekend reservist took it as a personal affront. "The purpose of these checks is to administer security procedures relating to the movement of individuals in the center of the state!" He read it like a passionate delivery of some dry-as-dust rulebook. "All civilian single-sex groups of over two males and over five females are hereby ruled potentially suspect. Civil defense law in this time of emergency decrees that all large groups, sexually mixed or otherwise, are immediately suspect except in the case that they can show official sanction for their movements!"

The migratory mass of kids was more than bummed out. They were weary with the terrible horrors the world had showed them in so brief a time. Yearning desperately to move on to a better place, to anywhere where they were not living in fear of annihilation. In fear of the freaks and the corpse-lickers laughing in their faces, as they toyed with their minds and bodies.

"Ah hey!" Gerry Nielsen was as exhausted as he was exasperated. Like the rest of the two-dozen plus kids that were now attached to their ramshackle convoy, he just
wanted out. "We were at Forest Green when the bodies started piling up around us. We're lucky to be here at all. Please," he poured every last ounce of deference into the word, believing that he and the authorities were still on the same side, "just let us get through. Nobody's ever gonna be bothered by us. I mean, not ever."

"Forest Green?" The tone of the guardsman softened a little. Like everyone in the region, he was aware of what had gone down there. The most dominant students in the group, those who orbited around Trey, all strained to hear from further down in the line. It seemed they were going to get a little official assistance at last.

"So when did you guys leave campus? If you've just arrived here on the county line, you presumably took off some time early this morning?"

"Don't we wish?" Shawna's words were bitter, but robbed of all passion. The events of the last twenty-four hours had robbed her of vigor, if not of the will to live. "We've seen our friends die. We've had to fight for our lives against creatures, things, assholes. All we need is to get out of here. I mean, we're done, we're finished, we're about as messed about as a healthy body can get."

If she had been able to summon up the energy, Shawna's words might have been impassioned. As it was, she and Gretchen, and mostly everybody who had got out alive that previous night, had sunk into a condition of numbness that was a kind of insulating armor. All except Trey, who was still buzzing on righteous indignation. Without sleep, he was regarding the ordeal as a test he had to get through, as if it were some kind of martial arts training. Much to the irritation of the others, who just felt wasted.

"She's right, everything, she says," Gerry the jock jumped back in. "We all walked out of college yesterday morning. It was the only chance any of us had. But since then we've had to tangle with a whole shitload of creeps just to survive. We've had to, we had to..." The boy couldn't find the right words to express their ordeal. It was all so far outside of any of his life experience up to that point. His language was redundant. In a world where a frat party could be "awesome," or a close defeat on the football field was "totally devastating," there were no superlative terms left to express real terror, or wanton loss of life.

"Just wait here a moment for me, would you?" It brought shouts of bad-tempered impatience from the people who waited, interminably, behind them. For the ex-students of Forest Green, it was another mere inconvenience. After all, how bad could it be to get snarled up in a government line? It was irritating, sure, but at these barriers, with their mobile offices and makeshift desks, at least there was a simulation of civil life that still went on.

They could see the part-time soldier fussing around, grabbing the attention of superiors who didn't really want to expend any time on him. They had their own busloads of civilian irritants to deal with. But then he caught the ear of someone who wore the pale shirt and peaked cap of seniority. The guy nodded assiduously and pointed to somewhere further across the thronging enclosure. The guardsman turned straight back to them, mouthing the words, "Wait right there!"

"See? The dude's straightening out," Gerry came alive with a little burst of optimism. "Once he gives us our official ticket out of here, we'll be laughing, man. When we get home, it'll be just like Thanksgiving all over again. We'll eat turkey till we barf." The mood of his buddies and his new comrades-in-arms didn't lighten. Okay, he knew Shawna Black was a cranky vegetarian, but that didn't count for Leblanc, who looked like he was seeing a tornado across the horizon. Maybe it was because he was talking about precious little home comforts that didn't seem to matter at the moment. That many of their friends would never know again.

"We got the Forest Green group over here, right?" Another of the guardsman's superiors was bustling his way over, his raised arm forcing a way through lines that didn't permit space for movement. The little guardsman's cap could be seen bobbing along behind, his face invisible among a sea of shoulders that rose slightly above him. And behind him, having difficulty keeping pace, was a white sheriff's hat with the insignia of Craven County stamped upon it in silver.

"Let's find ourselves a way out of here," Trey spoke aloud, but barely moving his lips. "Don't place wait for them to come back, just force a through the crowd and get back out to our vehicles."

They all had much the same thing in mind. But each bitching, arguing mass of people was corralled into line by at least one guardsman and military police officer. All took their duties very seriously, waving an army or state-issue handgun around for dramatic emphasis when they felt they had to.

"Yeah, yeah, that's him." They could hear a familiar voice creaking below the rumble of so many others. "If we're gonna make a break, we'd better do it now or just forget it," Shawna told Trey. She spoke sensibly. As Casey bustled his way over with a military accompaniment, it was turn tail now or never.

Trey got the feeling that every National Guardsman or State Trooper's eyes were now upon them. They all had their own groups of Craven County migrants to contend with. But they could hear the disorder that was attaching itself to these kids. And they saw that they constituted a bigger, more potentially troublesome group than any other currently trying to gain authorization to pass. If they made any unauthorized moves, each of these routinely armed men would take it very personally indeed.

"Mr Leblanc," Sheriff Casey addressed him directly, a little breathless. "I got a report from my deputy that says you led a mass absconding from the university at Forest Green, after all of you had been placed on a round-the-clock curfew."

"Are you serious?" Trey searched the old man's haunted eyes. "We were left there to die." If the sheriff wanted to make this one personal, then Trey wished he would just bring it on. He was almost provoked into telling the old prick to lock him up now, on behalf of all the kids who had quit that place of their own free will.

"We started coordinating evacuation from Forest Green by four-thirty of that same pm. No one was left to die in my town, son. No one." Trey saw the bitterness in the sheriff's eyes. He knew he was the scapegoat for every failure to deal with the horror that had engulfed them. Every shortsighted move and every halfhearted measure.

"Every student in that college was on lockdown until they could be eliminated from murder inquiries. You organized their going AWOL, that's aiding and abetting the flight of a suspect. Multiply that by a few hundred times, I reckon you've got some charges to answer. That, and the fact that you never gave me the chance to eliminate you from the Fitzgerald and Applebaum enquiries."

So that was the way it was. The sheriff was never going to catch any of the vermin that were terrorizing their county. But he could make an example of someone he perceived as a rebellious college student.

"Sheriff, do you have any, uh, specific charges to bring against these young people?" The sergeant-at-arms who accompanied him wasn't overly concerned about the kids, just with keeping the disorganized lines moving before the whole improvised system came to a halt.

"Sure." That weather-beaten face had a hard time tearing itself away from Trey Leblanc. In his cockiness, in his otherness, he personified everything about the college kids that he despised and distrusted. "They're all murder suspects. Every last damn one of 'em. They absconded from my jurisdiction when they should have remained under house arrest. None of 'em are exonerated from involvement in the events of the last few weeks."

You didn't need to look to be told that every guardsman or lawman had just drawn a firearm or unlocked a safety guard. Trey could hear it. He could feel it. Shawna held his arm, as if to stay his hand. But he had no moves, no maneuvers, prepared for this.

Every other student regarded their potential captors with bemusement. It was a strange and terrible thing, to have to run for your life away from the forces of chaos, then to find yourself numbered among the enemy by your fellow countrymen, the ones who were entrusted to restore order. When someone finally spoke, it was no belligerent masculine voice.

"Let them detain us all, if that's what they want. Let them lock us all up together." Gretchen's lilting, delicate tones sounded calmed by the very prospect. "Better prisoners under armed guard than victims in waiting."

***

"I have to say, I've heard some truly bizarre crap recently, but nothing beats this." Diane Miranda almost snarled at her colleague and newfound close confidant. "These kids were under siege. Just how on earth does anyone think they can legitimately label the victims as the offenders?"

Her ire was fully up. The makeshift office they had been granted in the mobile trailer of the sheriff's department hardly made matters any better. Diane thought at first she had best check the place for bugs before she entered into conference with Ed, then thought better of it. If the whole tragic mess had been handled this incompetently so far, then she was crediting them with far too much ingenuity.

"Potential victims." Ed stood with his back to her, clasping his fingers at the back of his skull and flexing his biceps. He gazed out the window through haphazardly hung blinds, at the gradual slew of vehicles that was released back onto the roads. "None of the kids who attained victim status are actually here. We're dealing with the ones who made it."

Maybe the conditions were too intense for anyone to stay reasonable, but, for the first time, Diane admitted to herself that she just didn't know what the score was with Edward North. Maybe his cleverness and his ability to see all the varying points of view, to gain an assessment of the overall situation, had been part of what charmed the pants off her. Maybe. But, right now, she didn't like his detachment from the very concept of justice. And she didn't like that "attained victim status." What was he thinking, that the kids who died were playing some kind of victim-hood game, buying into the blame culture?

"I guess that's one way of looking at it. At least the real victims won't be around to sue anyone for negligence. I can't say I'd feel the same way if I was their parents though." She was deeply and severely pissed at him, and North wasn't so insensitive that he didn't know why.

"You know, for all his poor-man's-John-Wayne posturing, Casey has a point about Leblanc and his cohorts. By their own admission, another five members of their party have been lost in less than twenty-four hours. There was no attempt to even notify law enforcement of the alleged murders. That makes for another five inquiries they have to be eliminated from, straight off."

"Oh, they were running for their lives!" She puffed energetically at a full strength Marlboro. There was at least one freedom inherent in living under martial law. "And I'm telling Casey and I'm telling you, Ed, that I want to see a list of suspects and possible charges before the day is out, otherwise every kid that's being held in county jail can be released without charge immediately!"

She knew she should never have let him continue with his Machiavellian games. All that stuff about returning power to the citizenry, and emergency regulations to protect individual rights, had only served to endear him to Forest Green's weenie law enforcement elite. His sycophancy toward power, even of the most petty kind, now seemed to her almost indecent. It shamed her to think she had believed he was on her wavelength. That he was the first guy to hit on her in years who wasn't only after one thing. But then, she was forced to admit, she'd needed that one thing too, almost as much as he did. He had fucked like a man possessed. Like a man just out of prison, who hadn't been with a woman for many years and never knew if he would ever have the opportunity again.

"I think there's a good case for releasing some of the girls." He was trying to mediate, to take the middle course. "Given the nature of these crimes, the ferocity of the attack, the amount of physical strength involved, none of them can have any personal case to answer."

The voice of sweet reason. She hurriedly finished her cigarette, drowning the butt in a paper coffee cup and puffing a cloud of smoke toward him. He grimaced and waved it away. "And what is this, 'some of the girls?'" Is it like some of the young chicks are more menacing than others, what?"

She really wasn't going to let him off the hook. And he knew it. "I'm thinking specifically of Shawna Brown, or Black, or whatever she calls herself. She just seems so close to Leblanc in everything he does that she's almost implicated by default. It's unfortunate, I know, but then," he shot a smile full of bared teeth, daring her to take offense, "you have to admit, she is a ballsy young vixen!"

"And you're a preppy ass." He loved to get her spirit up like that. It made him kind of hot. Though he still hated to hear that low-class insult, "preppy." "Have we had any inquiries as to students' whereabouts via the sheriff's office?" She'd let him consider that for one moment, no longer. He was the new face at Shemp's, and yet the way he'd ingratiated himself with Casey made him the chief point of contact. She wouldn't tolerate him holding back anything confidential.

"So I believe. It's difficult to know, what with Casey's cellular and bleepers going off twenty-four hours a day. But I'm pretty sure the Andrews girl's people and some others have been in touch. All the better families, as far as I can ascertain. I'm sure our friend the sheriff isn't going to stop you from making bail for them."

"We don't want bail." She spoke in the collective sense to remind him that Shemp & Darrow still had ethical standards to maintain. And she was the guardian of those standards. "We want release without charge. Unconditionally." He may have found this all an amusing game, but he was getting under her skin. Where did he get off on stigmatizing Shawna Black? Was it on account of her friendship with Trey Leblanc: the straight-A student the local authorities had decided, arbitrarily, was some kind of wild-ass? Or was it her blue-collar origins and attitude?

She blanched at how he referred to the "better families." This guy, with his phony liberal pretensions and his deference toward wealth and power, was not her kind. Just not her at all. Yet still she had succumbed to his liar's kiss. His conman's touch. She knew them for what they were now, and hated herself for loving them.

And Ed, behind that duplicitous exterior, desired her for what she represented. The smart career woman, still young, not yet out of her thirties. Someone who had attended law school in their youth, yet could still be swayed by him, the self-taught jailhouse lawyer. The heart-and-soul, blood-and-guts liberal of conviction, who could be seduced by him, the downwardly mobile snob. When he had her under his power, that was when he knew that his life could begin again. That there was a second chance. He thought of the old judge's words—how, under different circumstances, it would have been a pleasure to have him perform in his courtroom—and of the sour grapes comment of the defense attorney he sacked: "You're a pretty smart guy, Westenhaus. Just about smart enough to talk your way into the death chamber." He had always been lectured by his dear, late mother about there being no second chances in life. But now he had proved her wrong. He would prove them all wrong this time around.

***

Cunningham County Jail stood brown-stoned and monolithic, on the outskirts of the town of Fullerton. Its multi-story corridors echoed with the clatter of iron grid doors, the gaudy paint on the walls peeling a little more with each metallic slam. It was no different from any other county jail that Diane had seen, on the many occasions she had had to defend legal aid clients arrested over the county line. But its living quarters were certainly enjoying a surge of popularity.

She hadn't seen a jail as full as this since, well, never. She imagined this was the kind of influx that had filled the prison system during her childhood years, when protests against the Vietnam War were at their height. When the hippies were lined up with the muggers and the dealers. But now there was a whole panoply of American society imprisoned within its walls. The demands on its capacity were such that, for the time being, Cunningham County housed female prisoners on the same block as their male counterparts, instead of segregating them on a separate level.

As the adjoining region to Craven County, its artificial border had intercepted a whole load of people migrating their short way between the two. Fugitives of both sexes on outstanding warrants. Vagrants with nowhere to go and little to do but sit on a bench and drink liquor, or cough syrup, from a brown paper bag. Luckless losers on a dope charge. There was a whole low-level criminal cross section there—everyone but the murderers and psychos that the roadblocks were supposedly set up to intercept.

Diane's heels clattered down the hall as she was accompanied by the jail's sergeant-at-arms. She was impervious to any lewd shouts and suggestions that came her way. They were par for the course. But, down at the end of the corridor, there was a whole section of the cellblock occupied by the "Forest Green posse," as she'd come to think of them. They maintained a healthy respect from most of the hapless inadequates around block, mostly due to the imposing presence of Trey Leblanc, and the more buffed-up frame of his opposite, the football player Nielsen. That, and the fact that most of the suspected offenders on the block didn't know what this huge gang of mixed-race kids was supposed to have done. Just like the kids themselves.

"Hey." Diane felt a little awkward meeting their gaze, not wanting to encourage any false hope. They didn't look like they had any left in them. The events of the past few days had seen to that.

All the kids were courteous in their own way. They gave a feeble smile, or a half-hearted wave. Or, if they were part of that more prominent quartet of Trey, Shawna, Gerry and that formerly reticent little mouse, Gretchen, they hung on the bars and made a direct greeting.

"Okay people. I have signed instructions for the release of all female detainees." There was a mixed, but vaguely muted response. Some of the more conventional sorority girls bounced on their heels and clasped each other's hand silently. They didn't dare articulate their relief aloud.

"On the basis of?" Shawna took it upon herself to voice dissatisfaction. Diane already knew this was going to be a hollow victory.

"On the basis that you are all too gentle and feminine to have torn someone apart with your bare hands. You guys, on the other hand," she tipped her nod to Trey and Gerry, "are still considered capable of butchering your best friends, even when you were all living under the same state of siege, and all of you were locked down in your room with witnesses."

An irksome silence came down. Nobody wanted to dispute the justice of the girls' release, or to detain them further. Except perhaps one of those same young women. "I'm not goin'." Shawna was not opening a debate. This was her statement plain and final. "If this geek is capable of mass murder, then so am I." Her derision of Trey was only partly a joke. Death and chaos had thrown them back together, but had not made them any more compatible.

As the girls filed out of the cages, Gretchen threw her gaze down the corridor with shame. Some of them were quietly glad that they had a mad bitch who would make the big statement, but that didn't mean that they wanted to compete with her. Freedom, and the prospect of joining up with Craven County's newly itinerant travelers, of getting out of this hell-hole region, was too precious to throw away on a point of principle.

The sergeant-at-arms looked glaringly at the big guys who stood around the iron door of their cell. They could have rushed him if they'd had a mind to, and they all knew it. But he was just one man. There was a whole load of twitchy armed guards currently feeling under great stress, who would avenge a fallen comrade in a moment. The kids would never have got away from their cellblock.

"I'm not going either." The announcement came, surprisingly, from a tiny doll-faced brunette named Tina. "If he stays, I stay." The lucky man in question was a soft-spoken dude known as Marky. He was the kind of kid some might have regarded as a dork. But he carried a certain amount of respect among Gerry's friends and hangers-on on account of his dexterity with a football. He couldn't really kick, and his tackles were on the gentle side, but he could pick it up and run with it. And, like Trey, he'd been practicing martial arts for long enough to tear a piece out of any bully who tried to give him trouble. At nineteen, he was already approaching the level of Second Dan.

Tina was pleased with herself for following Shawna's moral stand. But to the adults, it was just another unnecessary problem. "Young lady, I really don't have time for any more of this," the sergeant's voice seethed. It was the first time he'd spoken since he and Diane arrived at the big cage. "Now if I were you, I would accept the terms of your release, which state that you will face no charges and have no further questions to answer. Otherwise, any report I make will have to stress that you have voluntarily placed yourself among the suspects in this case, which may be used in a criminal case against you. Have I made myself understood?"

Tina swallowed. Sometimes grand gestures are more than they first appear to be. "Yeah, c'mon ladies," Diane interjected. She didn't care for the sergeant's inference that standing by their friends was an admission of guilt. "There is a time and a place to fight. Surely you can see, this may be the time but this is definitely not the place."

Shawna shrugged. She'd made her statement and she wasn't backing down. "I'm staying. What she does is up to her." There was less a sense of sisterly solidarity than of rivalry. Diane searched the smaller girl's face with concern. She wasn't backing down either, though she bit her lip as she squeezed her boyfriend's hand.

"Just hang in there." Diane saw that any further imploring was useless. "I'm going to be back for you soon. I'm going to get you all out of here. There is not a single credible case to answer against any of you. Okay?"

As she accompanied the half-dozen young women who were being released, it didn't make Diane feel a whole lot better. But, however stupid it seemed to the onlooker, she realized the kids had determined to make decisions for themselves. The adult world was letting them down and they weren't going to play by its rules anymore.

And so, the end cellblock on the third story of Cunningham County Jail became quieter, more lonesome than before. Marky and Tina made a display of affection to show why they were sticking together, but it cut no ice. "I swear, dude, if you don't lay off the huggy-kissy stuff, I'm gonna..." the blond kid remembered Marky's prowess in karate, "hang myself from the fuckin' bars."

"Or puke," Shawna railed on them. Her stand, she was letting them know, was little to do with romantic loyalty toward Mister Trey Leblanc. If the guys here were considered likely suspects, then so was she. The baddest of the bad hombres on this cellblock was a senorita.

***

Night falls early when you're locked down in county. The glow of artificial light outside each cellblock never allows for a true period of restfulness. But all cell lights are turned out by the guards by 8.45pm at the latest, and so begins the state of electric twilight that persists right the way through until morning.

In the normal run of things, at that early time of the evening, shouts would still fly between cells, as would dumb jokes, abuse, and paper messages, or "kites." But now the inmates were bowed, if still restless. Each cell was crammed to more than twice its capacity, and petty offenders watched their more intimidating cellmates carefully. No one wanted to indulge in too much banter and bullshit, in case a throwaway remark got them killed. The few women scattered throughout the block were placed in cells together, but either they took it in unspoken turns to nod and doze or spend their time listening to the howls of the less stable prisoners. It was only at the very end of the cellblock, where all the students were locked down together, that anyone could be sure they were bound in enforced camaraderie.

A long, diagonal shadow carved through the light of the corridor, as the squeaking locks at the far end whined and the security door creaked open. "Hey! Hey you!" The voice called to nobody in particular, but anybody who would listen. "Yeah, you! Tell me where the college kids are in this place, and we can go walk out of here together."

It took a short while to realize this guy wasn't the average guard. He had long, dark hair greased and slicked back, contrary to regulations. He wore the blue shapeless overall shirt and work boots, but, on closer inspection, neither were county issue. "Yeah. I'm serious." He kept his voice to a low, conspiratorial level, moving down the row as if personally addressing each prisoner he saw through the metal grids. Searching each half-glimpsed face with the shadow of iron thrown across it.

The security door was left ajar, and, as the interloper walked soundlessly along on the balls of his feet, smiling into each cell, he was joined by further visitors to the block. There were three in all, once their varyingly gangling and corpulent frames passed through the portal. The cellblock started to wake up. Realization struck that these weren't guards, not in any conventional or law-abiding sense. It created excitement, bringing whoops and catcalls between those simpletons who celebrated the fact that they had gun-toting intruders in their midst their .22 rifles seemed to have come from the county armory—and those who told them to shut their mouths. Not to alert the jail authorities. To stay quiet and let whatever was about to happen transpire.

At the far end of the cellblock, where the corridor ran into a brick wall and only a scurrying rat had any chance of escape, they felt the change in atmosphere. "Who's coming down here?" Trey hissed, aggression raising his voice above its intended whisper. "I can't see." Marky, the smallest among them apart from his loyal girlfriend, twisted himself up against the frame of the metal doors. He could hear some of the excited chatter. See the flickering of shadows moving slowly down the corridor. But otherwise, the nature of the threat, if there was one, remained unseen.

Even Shawna was unnerved. "No one's gonna break in, to get to us! Are they?" Her sharp insistence cut through the layer of make-believe Tina had tried to weave around her loyalty to Marky. The girl looked like she was going to burst into tears.

Trey wasn't sure. He could only listen intently for any giveaway noises. Despite all the vicious hostility, the murderous attacks and the sheer shit-reeking evil they had encountered, he too couldn't imagine any intruder making an assault on a prison just to get at some of its inmates. Unless, he reminded himself, with unease, some of those lunatics exhibited the same gung-ho lack of regard for themselves he had seen under the leadership of that big, mangled freak. That creature he was loath to dignify with a name.

It had been almost as if they were unconcerned with their own lives because they thought they might be resurrected. Martyrs to the cause of mindless violence.

There was a shout from the end of the corridor. "Drop your weapons and identify yourselves!" It was distant, muffled by the speaker's position behind the partly-open door. But its intent was unmistakable.

The response was instantaneous. At least two of the stalkers hardly waited to turn around before opening fire. The reaction was immediate. The doors swung back closed, without indication that any of the armed response squad had been hit. But there were shouts and squeals from the other cells. Partly in excitement, and partly in apprehension, as the bullets ricocheted against the bars and grids of the cells. It was hard to tell if anyone had been hit. But Trey pushed himself as close to his cell door as he possibly could, to gauge what was happening.

"Let's get those damn asshole kids!" It may have been the first intruder who spoke, or it may have been any one of them. Their regional accents blurred into one guttural growl of malice. But as two of them ran recklessly forward, leaving their backs unguarded, the door smashed fully open with the strength of a projectile from behind. Four members of the response unit opened fire, two in crouching positions from handguns, and two more over their heads, firing identical rifles to those held by the intruders. From the vantage point of the prisoners, nobody could tell how the gang had implanted themselves into the jail. It was only apparent that the response team was shooting to kill, to avenge colleagues who had already died when the intruders purloined their weapons.

It was the more cautious of the two raiders who were hit. Turning to defend their position, they placed themselves as a buffer between the armed response unit and their brethren who were running breathlessly to the end of the cages. One man yelled as a bullet smashed his collarbone, bouncing off the cells instead of entering his flesh. His compadre took one in the mouth, choking and grunting as he fell to the floor, holding his fragmented teeth and bleeding gums. The first man sank to his knees, fighting to remain conscious despite the pain.

Tina let out a scream, as the longhaired intruder and a fat little lowlife with a goatee on his chin backed up against the walls, and rounded on them. It was in that self same moment that the first invader recognized their quarry. They hung parallel to them, with a set of keys that would have granted them access. But first they had to try to save their lives.

Squeezing the butts of their .22 rifles against their hips, firing low, they opened fire on the guards who had started to flood the corridor. One of their compadres blocked their target, trying to get back to his feet. He hit the floor as several shots passed through him—one entering the back of his shoulder, one the front of his groin—and bullets crisscrossed from either side. Two of the armed response team fell, but were passed over by their comrades' forward surge as they entered the cellblock corridor, outnumbering the intruders by four to one.

"Shit man! Those motherfuckers can't take all of us! We'll rush 'em if they unlock the door. We'll tear 'em apart if they fuck with us!" Gerry's words were as much bravado as threat. Like most of the kids, he backed away from the grid, stepping back to the very edges of their cell. They were more like rats in a trap than a pack of provoked wild beasts ready to attack.

Trey didn't want to retreat, but was cautious enough not to step up and take a bullet. In just a few moments, he hoped, the rest of this ragtag conglomerate of psychos would be dead. All their crazed bravado would count for nothing. He wondered at what could inspire such base, self-serving men to such an act of bravery, even one as vicious and stupid as this?

Then he felt its arrival. With a tense knot in his stomach, he didn't need to look to know it was there. It just appeared out of the darkness. A malevolent force of nature. For one moment, the shooting stopped. The babble of fear and excitement could be heard as the shooting party drew its breath. As the malign being appeared near the head of the corridor, before his cornered shock troops. No puff of smoke. No materializing out of nothingness. But at one moment he wasn't there, and in the next, Jason was ominously present. Imposing, wrathful, hideous. His terrible features crowned by the strange majesty of a black welding mask.

Even those who could not see through the tiny gaps in the cell doors felt his malignancy. In the students' cell, those who had previously come under his attack shuddered and breathed hard. Tina, who had never had to face him before, sobbed softly. Trey knew now that he was something more than just a creature of violence. Jason Voorhees had long since transcended his humanity. He was a death-force, something not bound by normal human limitations. If violence was in the air, then Jason could appear out of the ether. If his filthy, murdering lackeys were present, then Jason was somewhere close at hand.

And the response team fired at him. With the second line dropping to the crouching position in place of their fallen number, the first four hit him with everything they had. At least one of the shots hit home, tearing holes in his black jerkin. Jason was knocked back, but unbowed. Unbeaten. Ten feet behind him, his feral shock troops cursed and sputtered with pain. Those shots that had barely left their mark on the masked man were ripping into their flesh, tearing them apart against the wall.

Jason held his weapon high. A symbol of his intended triumph. It was no gore-encrusted blade, but something much more deadly, conjured out of recent memory. He extended the powerful semi-automatic hunting rifle from his shoulder, lining up the sight against one eye. His obliterated, vacant eye, which should have been blind. Then he fired. He opened up a rapid repeat-fire fusillade, gunning down anyone in his path. Hitting the guards' response team, and a couple of prisoners released at the end of the corridor by humane guards all too aware that they may be about to enter hell.

Jason was no longer just a living, breathing vehicle for murder, a violence-crazed thing. He was a destructive crusader, and he was declaring war on all of America.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Wouldn't you like to grab some power back from this world? I mean, real power?"

Ed North was talking candidly to a Hispanic businessman who had paid Shemp's for a legal consultation. The Mexican, expensively-dressed but slightly disheveled, in a light tan suit, gold-and-black patterned shirt and gold chain, didn't like it one bit. He didn't like the fact that his boys' defense lawyers were using an office in Cunningham County Jail as their temporary premises. He didn't like the candor, the indiscretion, that this gringo attorney was showing. He didn't like any of it. But still, there was something familiar about this legal whore. Something Santo recognized.

"I'm here for my nephews, Mister, ah..."

"North. Edward North." It wasn't like the Mex hadn't been told. But North could overlook the discourtesy. He knew he unsettled the man who was paying the legal fees of his two "nephews, because the attorney's name was so much at odds with his personal recollection. North was claiming to be someone other than the person the client remembered.

"Normally, the bail for Carlos and Pablo would be a formality. But I'm afraid they were caught up in this statewide sweep of known offenders and suspicious persons. The cops are using bylaws that few of have heard of," he gloated inwardly. "They're taking as many people off the streets as they can until the so-called 'state of emergency' is over. It's fascismo."

"So how much I gotta pay to get them hitting bricks? I only got so many funds I can access at the moment. Times is tough, you know..."

"I really have to stress again, Mr Alicante, normal bail conditions may no longer apply. We are not dealing with the world as you and I recognize it anymore."

The thin-haired Hispanic bridled slightly, wiping a layer of moisture from his mustache on this mild early December day. "I said to you my name is Romero. What's a matter with you, you don't hear right?"

North fixed his most authoritative stare on the client. "And I said to you my name is Edward North. Now, if I were a suspicious soul, I'd have to say that you seem like you don't believe me. Going by the stray glances and odd looks I keep receiving."

"Yeah well. You remind me of someone I met one time." It was as much of a tacit admission as North needed.

In his lifetime, Santo Alicante had been the most formidable Mexican Mafia boss active on both sides of the border. When he was linked with conventional organized crime, it was cocaine and heroin trafficking on a grand scale. When they finally nailed him in Mexico City, they managed to hang political assassinations on him—seeking to move the political balance of power away from his sworn enemies by means of the bomb. It was also whispered that, in that quaint old term, he was one of the most active "white slavers" in the region, or "sexual traffickers" as they were now known. Few cheap hoods raised from a Ciudad Juarez gutter were as ruthless or as powerful as Alicante.

On the floors above them, there was a rumble of feet, a massed shouting of voices. Santo also believed he heard gunshots. "Say, what the fuck is going on in this place, man?" The cacophony left him ill at ease. North remembered the story of the mass riot at Reclusorio Sur prison in Mexico City. Some of the most desperate cut-throats from the barrios had taken a whole load of guards and their fellow inmates hostage. The irony was that, in trying to negotiate their way out with other prisoners' lives, they were battling against the criminal hierarchy. The prison belonged to those inmates who had the money to pay for it. Their influence and power ran the place. It was only a final act of desperation that led them to take Santo Alicante, who was living to a standard far higher than anything his captors had known at home, with good food, booze and pussy on order when he wanted it. When they knew they weren't getting out of that place alive, their final statement was to draw a big smile across Santo's fat neck, from ear to ear.

"Bad memories, eh?"

"Yeah. Something like that. How about you? You still have bad memories of your mama's funeral?" North winced. It was a blow below the belt. But it also confirmed that Santo Alicante recognized Charles Westenhaus: his onetime fellow inmate in hell.

"I have memories. But I get over them. What is life if we can't shake something positive out of it? Eh, Santo?" The Mex gave a nonchalant half-smile. At least now they understood each other. "This really is a different world now. Finding our way out of that place was the good part. Now we have to live in a world of chaos. With all the lowlife scum and the social inadequates running riot. All those people who made our existence a misery in the other place."

Santo nodded his head. "I heard other people who made it out like it's the work of El Loco—you know, the big ugly guy in the mask?" North, or Westenhaus, as Alicante had known him, winced.

"But there's still a whole world of opportunity now that people just don't see. The violence all along the East Coast is making everybody blind. They think it's either going to drag civilization under or else the National Guard will bring it all under control overnight."

"Well, this thing's gotta burn out, you know? I seen violence, lots of it. I seen civil disturbances too. Don't matter how bad it is, everything's gotta run its course."

"But don't you see, things are not going to be the same once they restore some semblance of normality?" Westenhaus spoke with fervor, irrespective of whether or not the drab interview room might be bugged. What would they learn from it anyway? That an attorney and his client each played a prank on law enforcement by claiming to be a dead crook?

"They can't push everyone back into their box. There are more criminals who escaped from hell than there are currently living in the USA, both inside and outside of prison. There isn't going to be one big law and order clampdown and then it's over. Fear is here for good now. All of the states will be run in different ways. Local and federal government will be straining to preserve order, the Constitution will be a thing of the past. Political power will belong to the most ruthless. It's a new world. The former criminal hierarchy will be expected to play their part in staving off the chaos. The most astute will work hand-in-hand with government, rather than fighting against it."

Santo got the joke. "I see what you're saying about, uh, people like that grabbing some economic and political power. Makes a kinda sense. So who's gonna broker the deals between the bad guys and the real bad guys in government? Guys like you, right?"

Westenhaus smiled. "Well, deals are going to have to be struck on a state-by-state, county-by-county level. Whoever puts their power at the disposal of the government will be left alone to run things in their own way. The gangsters of today will be the power brokers of tomorrow"

"Okay." Alicante was quietly impressed, but didn't want to show too much enthusiasm. "So let's say, in this instance, some well-connected guy wants to help the government? Where's he gotta start? Who's he gotta hit?"

The attorney tried to cool him off. It was great to have Santo on board, but it was still early days. "That's a pretty extreme way of putting it. For the time being, I'd say that our hypothetical big guy has to watch his local turf. Discover who the people are that are terrorizing the locality, then, once a deal is brokered..."

"So who would 'our guy' have to kill first?" Alicante was losing patience. He had a reputation for directness in both speech and conduct that was well earned.

"Well, I guess," said Charles Westenhaus, becoming mildly exasperated, "it would be a good start to get rid of that hulking embarrassment who left the stable door open for us, and his diabolist associate."

"Ah. You mean El Loco. The big crazy guy. Is it true it was him and that weird spick Sanchez who led the first people outta hell, showed them how to escape?"

Charles Westenhaus's mind was caught in surreal recollection, a memory of nervously following a horde of madmen from a distance, over a vast, desolate, gray terrain. He had relegated those memories, told himself they belonged to another life. But he wanted to believe they were just a nightmare.

"Yes. I believe there may be some truth in the story. But it was a fluke, a freak chance. We can't imagine that any of us are beholden to Voorhees or the Devil Boy. I mean, can you imagine the stigma of being associated with that freak?"

***

Jason was killing everyone in his field of vision. Strewn on the ground were the bloodied bodies of guards and prisoners alike. Some inmates remained trapped in their cells, hoping that if they cowered in their corner they would not attract the hate machine's attention. Others had freed themselves with the single set of guard's keys passed down the block, after their owner had been blasted to death.

Once an enterprising prisoner was clear of their door, those who yearned for safety in numbers turned the key of the next cell, or pushed it through the metal grids in the old cell doors. Those who never cared for anything but their own hide merely ran for it. Neither made much difference to their survival prospects. Some made it out of the corridor, running with a heart-bursting intensity that told them they would never be clear, never be safe, as long as they stopped running long enough to look over their shoulder. To see if the man-thing would be on their tail forever.

Others had the essence blown out of their human form by wildly flying bullets. But when the ammunition was exhausted, Jason Stalked down the corridor and reverted to using his hands. To slashing and disemboweling with his long machete. To rending human forms apart, by pulling a disarticulated arm or leg out of its socket.

It was as the Crystal Lake Killer reverted to primitive violence that the Forest Green posse made their break. Trey and Shawna had commandeered the massacred killers' rifles, with only one or two rounds left each. Gerry Nielsen had bridled at that, but they told him to shut his mouth and run, relaying as many of the other kids as he could with him. The moment they chose was one of heartless opportunism. Voorhees had grabbed a demented vagrant who dared to emerge from his cell at the wrong time. As his mighty fist crushed the poor loser's teeth and jawbone, forcing them down his gullet so that he was choking on his own bones, Gerry and the other guys ran for it.

The first of them made it past the behemoth, his attention centered on his victim. But they still had to clamber over dead and dying bodies. Still had to push the door back against the mortal weight of the luckless few, to put several inches of wrought iron between themselves and Jason.

Once another human form was reduced to mulch, Jason began to advance. He was within several feet of tearing their youthful bodies apart. Then the pain tore into his backside. The man behind the black mask turned and roared out his wordless pain.

"Got ya, you bastard! I hope that hurts like hemorrhoids from hell!" Shawna had lined up the sights of her .22 to hit the man-monster straight in the anus. No expert marksman, the first shot hit wide beneath his crotch while the second was directly on target. As he lunged toward Shawna, another trickle of Forest Greeners ran for their lives. His bulk moved at an alarmingly fast rate for one so ungraceful.

"Step aside." Trey fired off the only round that he knew he had left in his weapon. It hit Jason dead center in the pubic region. Jason squealed and raged and Shawna ran. She was momentarily forgotten, as the pain filled his fractured consciousness. His sexual organs were of no use to him. Long ago the sensuality had been seared from his being. What was left in place of human warmth was a hatred for humanity that burned hotter than anything imaginable. Except for the agonizing sting of hot lead in his genitals.

"AAAAAUUGGRRRHHH!" The unearthly cry rang out as Shawna sprinted for freedom. As she slipped lithely below Jason's flailing hands, his maddened senses oblivious to all but pain. Trey was now the enemy writ large. The source of all confusion and all pain. The origin, in Jason's childlike mind, of all that had tormented and defeated him from day one of his existence.

Trey passed through him. Sweating and hyperventilating, his natural agility was heightened to a preternatural degree by his fear. The man-monster would soon assimilate its pain, as he had when Shawna had wounded him in the asshole. As he always had throughout his corrupted existence, from the time when the innocent child sank to the bottom of the lake and his twisted flesh began to rot. But, as Trey hit Jason in the wounded balls with the butt of his now unloaded rifle, the final pangs of that pain and confusion held him from responding effectively. Held him until Trey's now myopic focus reached the end of that bloody corridor. Until he had clambered over a small mound of dead bodies, and started to pull the crack in the iron door shut, spitting defiance in the face of the loathsome maniac.

Who was no longer pursuing him.

It shocked Trey to realize he was not the last Forest Greener on the cellblock. The whimpering he heard from the end of the corridor, the sight of a maddened, kill-crazy Jason in retreat toward the noise, made his bowels feel they had turned to ice. From his partial view behind the closing door, he saw only the massive form lurching toward some new object of his hatred. Some arbitrary target to sate his lust for revenge. The only crying female voice left in the whole cellblock.

Trey re-entered the corridor. The place where all hope was now abandoned. To his stark horror, he found that they had abandoned two of their comrades in arms.

As he staggered in pain, salivating in rage, Jason's powerful hand pulled little Tina from her hiding place in the cell. She whinnied like a veal calf about to be slaughtered. As he raised her aloft by her throat, the very motion placing a grip on her windpipe that began to choke the life out of her, Marky showed himself. Snapping at the heels of the monster who threatened to take his baby away from him, worrying him ineffectually like a small terrier dog.

Trey stood transfixed. He wanted to intervene, but without ammo he had nothing left to attack with. He was almost as frustrated as the desperate Marky, who grabbed a dead prisoner's improvised weapon from the mounds of debris on the floor.

"Why don't you put her down, you big ugly bastard?"

As Tina's eyes rolled back in her head, Marky jumped at Jason. Slashed at his arm with a shiv—a homemade blade bound with cloth to its wooden handle. Jason snorted and sighed in irritation at the creatures that were fighting back, who were hurting him, instead of accepting their own death gracefully.

"Come on, fuckface, show me what you got!" It took a lot to make Jason's moribund flesh bleed. Marky drew no blood, but he was cutting the big stiff's clothbound arm to ribbons. Jason was irritated enough to take the kid at his word.

He let Tina drop to the ground, knocking further breath from her gasping form. Marky was still lunging at Jason, slashing and thrusting at the masked man with a fervor that had convinced him he could win. With each cut from the makeshift weapon, the man-monster seemed further in retreat. Even though the shiv was quivering, ready to break from its handle at any moment.

Then Jason struck back. As the knife came at him one more time, he braved a lesion by lashing out at it. The blade flew one way and the handle another. As Trey retreated further back behind the door, he saw Jason bring all his strength to bear on the boy. Marky was unable to move, squirming in the freak's grasp like a worm on a hook. With his assailant trapped in one hand, Jason reached down to the floor and found that most basic of prison weapons—a razorblade welded into the head of a toothbrush.

Outside the cellblock corridor, the Forest Green posse was heading down the stairwell after checking it for guards. The chaos and cacophony would bring reinforcements soon, who would have to make the choice of whether to pursue the escaping prisoners or challenge the murder machine that had destroyed their colleagues.

"C'mon, dude, we gotta get out of here! Everyone else has hauled ass..."

"No. They ain't." Trey corrected Gerry sharply. In one moment, the boy became aware of his friend's absence. "Marky? Tina?" Trey's grim silence was confirmation. Gerry shouted to his buddies, his prominence among the frat-boy set making him the ideal first lieutenant. "Who got some arms? Who got some ammo?" It was a desperate melee, everyone intent on finding his way out of the jail's general population section before it was too late.

"Here man, take this!" Gerry Nielsen presumed much of Trey Leblanc. Assumed that, in that one moment, he would selflessly put himself back in the jaws of death.

Trey had made that same assumption for himself. He turned the key in the heavy iron door and edged it open before he had time to think about it. His only weapon was a cloth for burning and a canister of butane, intended for lighter fuel, retrieved from the prisoners' homemade armory.

Jason howled in his face. Trey lurched back as he brandished the body of a boy at him like it was a weapon. It was hard to tell if Marky was alive or dead. He was a piece of meat. The deformed creep had made slashing incisions into most of the boy's veins and arteries. Across his limbs and across his chest, the fabric of his clothes cut loose in a mess of bleeding flesh, and across his face, which had dissolved the boy's features into a patchwork mosaic of cuts.

Trey fought for his breath against a wave of rising tears and vomit. As the man-monster pushed the face of the dying Marky at him, at the end of the corridor Trey could glimpse the winded, helpless form of Tina, tearfully trying to fight her way to her feet. Hoping and praying for rescue.

With one last vital surge of all the strength he could muster, Trey threw himself against the door. Pushed it closed before Jason could use his bulk to pry it open. Turned the metal key in the grinding lock and ran. He left Marky and Tina to their fate. Threw himself down the stairwell in the same manic lunge for freedom as all his peers. Although none of them had stopped to ask themselves about the personal cost, everyone had assumed Trey Leblanc would always behave with the utmost courage. Even Trey himself.

***

Paul Christos knew he had cut himself adrift. On those bright, beleaguered streets on the outskirts of Atlanta, he was truly alone. He had hitched a ride with law enforcement as far south of his home state as they could take him, then taken a Greyhound further. When the service stalled due to the driver's reluctance to enter the erupting trouble spots, he had used local bus services, crammed full of the common humanity he detested.

Now he was stranded. In the space of a few days, he had followed the route he believed would be the right one. Pushed himself as far toward the end of his journey as local transport systems, with their stop-start timetables, would take him. And all for what?

Anything, he told himself as he loitered on those unfamiliar city streets, was better than returning home. To the disapproval of his stern father. To the New York City townhouse that meant little to him now. To the crime and violence as endemic to his own town as to this one, that he would have had to negotiate on his own without benefit of an armed escort.

But he had come so far in the last few days that all semblance of safety was behind him. Christos could have reassured himself he was in the same precarious position as every fool who walked the streets now, if only he hadn't drifted so far. If he hadn't sought to pursue his personal Holy Grail all the way down to Florida. To live out the fantasy of becoming something greater than himself. Part of an elite society of nihilists. Something that raised him above the petty concerns and fears of common humanity.

It was hard to admit it, but he'd only succeeded in making himself feel rootless and frightened. He had enough funds to see his way through, but a belt full of credit cards and a pocketful of spare change were no guarantee. People were being murdered for their spare change now. Credit cards were only good where the most reputable stores had not sent their staff home in a state of panic, and he wasn't forced to rely on the seediest hotels and restaurants.

His trusty VW had been left back in Craven County when he hitched a ride with the convoy. He had told Ed North he would go back and reclaim it soon, once he had followed his personal mission through to the end. North had stayed knowingly silent. He was the only other person who knew exactly what Christos was pursuing. He may have thought it a fool's errand, or he may have believed it suicidal, but he was too diplomatic to say. Now Christos could only reprimand himself for following this insane, compulsive course.

He had lingered a little after asking for directions at the gas station. He still intended to keep heading south. What other course could he take? But every hour that went by made it seem less like a schedule and more like an aimless descent. Like freefall.

As the beat-up old Chevy skidded around the pumps, dangerously close to where he stood, Paul fought the urge to remonstrate with the driver. He felt alone now, profoundly so. Even traffic was scarce on the streets. If this one driver still had the gumption to hurtle around like he was one of those damned Hispanic "low riders," then the stranger in town felt he was best advised to keep his own counsel.

"Hey, Ese." The vague greeting had to be directed at him. There was simply no one else around, "Yeah, you! Little shortpockets there. You wanna ride out of town?" He was in favor of anything that would get him where he was going. But he didn't want to be victimized. Robbed. Beaten. Worse. That paranoia was in the air everywhere now. It was just as likely to compel him to run away as it was to urge him to accept the stranger's offer.

But there was something else about this scenario. Something that drew him like the proverbial moth to the flame. An insane promise that defied all reason, but was compellingly attractive to him. "Well—I could certainly do with a ride." He must have looked like a lost orphan standing there, his overnight bag crumpled over his shoulder and his one suitcase clutched tightly in his hand. It was almost a week since he had shaved. It wasn't a regular necessity, but there must at least have been some stubble showing through.

"I'm taking the main route out of the city and onto the freeway. How far you headed, little amigo?"

As far as it goes, he heard his inner voice answer as his heart pumped excitedly. As far as it goes. "I was hoping to make it to Florida."

"FLA, huh?" The dark, tousle-headed stranger thought it over a moment. "I'm headed that way myself. Let me get some gas and some potato chips and you can hop right in." It wouldn't have been the most enticing prospect, under any other circumstances, but Christos knew now he had to go through with it, whatever the risk. He would spend a lifetime regretting his cowardice if he didn't.

When the driver held one heavy, rusting door open for him, he felt that in entering that decrepit Chevrolet he might be abandoning all hope. "Hey, don't be nervous, kid. You figure you gonna be takin' a ride with the devil, or somethin'?" The stranger laughed at his in-joke. Paul's heart beat faster. He could share the joke too, though he would never have dared laugh in the stranger's face.

Abandoning his better judgment, Christos placed his luggage in the back of the car and entered the front driver's side. "That's it, dude. Take the steel rod from your asshole and relax. Live a little dangerously."

As they swung a U-turn across a desolate city street and headed out for the interstate, Paul Christos's heart was in his mouth. Was he volunteering himself to become just another victim? One of those faceless creatures whose sole worth, he had believed, was measured in terms of how much amusement they provided for the supermen who killed them?

He thought of a quote he'd once read from a European philosopher, whose humanistic tone had repelled him: "One cannot be a part-time nihilist." As he'd understood it, this Frenchman was saying that if you counted yourself as a nihilist, believed human life had no purpose and no value, then that belief began with your own life. You were of no more intrinsic value than anyone else. Christos hated that sentiment, wanted to protest it on behalf of the nihilist superman whose ranks he believed himself to be part of. But right then, in that corroded old car, he began to fear that it might be coming true. It was possible his life could be taken by someone he believed to be a superior being, and it would be of no more consequence to the killer than the life of any faceless drone.

As the driver slowed at a stop light, checking if there were enough cops around to make it worth waiting, the boy in the passenger seat started to blurt it out. "Mr Sanchez..."

Ready to hit the gas, the Hispanic stalled the car. "What did you say?" He seemed too edgy. Christos sought to diminish any offence, and hoped that he hadn't made a terrible mistake.

"Wayne Sanchez? I am in the presence of Wayne Ricardo Sanchez—aren't I?" The driver sat silent. He breathed deeply. There was something in his widening eyes that almost verged on panic. No one had been astute enough to call his number.

Christos realized he had struck a chord of truth. Somehow, against any rational odds, reports of the Devil Boy's demise had been much exaggerated. It was overwhelming. Christos realized his dreaming had been truer than anything else he could have imagined. His excitement was bringing him to the point of tears. "I wouldn't say this to just any killer," he whined, "but you're my hero."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The all-points bulletin went out statewide. All members of law enforcement and the National Guard were warned to be on the lookout for the escapees from Cunningham County Jail. With the region in chaos, it was only fitting that shoot-to-kill orders were given. No distinctions were made between any of the escapees. Whether career criminals, suspects remanded to custody, or the college kids rounded up in the statewide clampdown, all were deemed a similar threat. All had played a role in the massacre on Cellblock Fourteen. It was something else that would convince Mr and Mrs America law and order was almost extinct. Anything was now fair game in the fight for its preservation. Anything at all.

The survivalist kids of Forest Green were—to frightened members of the public—now a threat on the same level as the random killers who blighted the region.

On the formerly quiet streets of Middle America, the infernal had become the norm. Night could descend by 6.00pm at that time of year, by which time madness would come. Random acts of mayhem continued unabated. Murder. Rape. Mob violence. Those who could put the shutters down and turn their homes into heavily defended bunkers did so. Others packed up their possessions and hit the road. They ran, but they didn't know where. Like their relatives and friends in Craven and Cunningham Counties, the compulsion to move on had become an end in itself. But as they moved over county and state lines, they found they were little more than local refugees in regions undergoing their own wave of mass violence. Some had stayed home and fell victim. Others panicked and ran, and became crime statistics in someone else's neighborhood.

It was under cover of night that Trey Leblanc and Shawna Black lived. Like wild dogs or rodents, they came out when the more dangerous animals prowled the streets. They had little choice. Subject to being shot on sight, they had to blend in with the human vermin. The Forest Greeners had quickly adjusted to life as pack animals. If they were to survive at all, many thought, then they would have to ride together. Steal together. Eat together. Live together. If necessary, they would have to kill together. They were as much at risk from the zeal of law enforcement as they were from the killers that stalked the night.

But there was dissent among their ranks. Some thought that sticking together, now they had been forced to join the street life and commandeer stolen vehicles from other thieves, was too obvious a signpost. Gerry Nielsen saw it as their only strength, but some of the guys wanted to try to cross heavily guarded state lines to make it back to their folks. Others wanted to see their girl again.

It all entailed risk. Many female former co-eds were holed up in temporary mobile accommodation, while they waited for their families to come from outside the state to collect them. Some had to stay put after their families arrived—particularly if their guardians had endured some traumatizing crime on the way there. More than one girl had lost a parent during that period, and found herself stuck there, grief-stricken, trying to nurse the surviving spouse.

It was to one such mobile park that Trey and Shawna snuck out in the black of night, to rescue a close friend. Hoping, in return, that their friend would rescue them.

"How do we know that she's at this place? Why not any other piece of salvaged waste ground?" Trey was cold and paranoid. They crouched in the dark, clinging for comfort to the state-issue handguns salvaged from dead guards.

"Because she would rather be with people she knows than go insane with fear on her own. Shit, you know how sensitive she is!" Shawna hissed, trying not to shout. "You saw her back at the jail. She opted to be a live coward with them instead of a dead fucking hero with us."

"Yeah," Trey commented. "Her loyalties were noted." He thought of the hopeless, doomed face of that little Tina kid, and immediately regretted He'd been unable to talk to anyone, even Shawna, about witnessing the last moments of herself and her boyfriend, feeling powerless and unable to intervene. The only rational choice had seemed to be to save him instead. Trey tried his best to suppress the thought. But it was too fresh. Too scalding to the memory. In his mind, Trey Leblanc was no longer the man he used to believe he was.

It had taken a couple of nights, stalking the place after dark, to note which of the trailers had been turned into a mobile sorority house. It took a couple more of Shawna running coded messages to any recognizable student who strayed outside her trailer. It took longer to pluck up the hope that law enforcement were not about to greet them with an ask-questions-later policy.

That night, they would get their response, though it was not as anticipated. "Marcie!" The word hissed out of the bushes by the security fence. "Hey! Marcie! It's me, Black. Over here!" Shawna identified herself by her adopted surname, unsure of whether the night had ears. To their mutual relief, the girl came striding toward where they hid in the darkness, after looking nervously to check she wasn't being followed.

"What the fuck is it with you guys?" Marcie Green, usually one of the more gently inoffensive of their fellow students, had a deep grievance. "Don't you know you could get us all dragged back to jail just by being here?"

"Don't you know we might be shot just for trying to contact our friend?" Trey reminded her. It calmed her indignation, but she was no more forthcoming or amiable.

"Well, she's not here anyway. She hardly stayed here at all before she got out." She spoke brusquely to deter them from hanging around any longer.

"Shit," Shawna whispered her bitter disappointment. "Shit. I bet she just took off for Connecticut without us." They had hung a lot of their hopes on Gretchen Andrews. In that moment, Marcie began to pity them. At a time like this, building a dream around being rescued by a friend was all too understandable.

"No—I mean, she's not here. I didn't say she could go home." Shawna listened to the girl intently. Her affection for Gretchen was real, as was her desire to be rid of the strange half-existence she was leading. "That woman, the attorney, Ms Miranda. She took her into protective care."

"Protective care? Why does Gretchen need more protection than anyone else?" Trey was just as skeptical as Shawna. "Ms Miranda? My legal aid attorney?"

Marcie was growing irritated. She wanted to be out of the cold. Away from the night time. Out of the company of the fugitive girl she had once held a quiet admiration for. "Her law firm has rented new office premises outside of Fullerton, I think they have living space there. I guess it's till they can get back home. Till any of us can get back home," she corrected.

"So what has that to do with Gretchen?" Shawna demanded insistently. Her bullying was the last straw for Marcie. "Hell do I know? That man Miranda is hooked up with, the other attorney, says she's in danger of being targeted by dangerous individuals. Maybe he means you two!"

***

"This isn't going to hurt, is it?" Gretchen's voice sounded fragile and neurotic. Since being taken under the wing of Diane and her boyfriend, Ed, she had lost some of the self-confidence she had been starting to build. Dependence upon other people always left a person feeling diminished, weakened, and she was no exception. Suddenly her assuredness seemed artificial, just a one-off reaction to freak circumstances.

"No, this shouldn't hurt one bit. Not if you like injections anyway," Ed North teased. He plunged the hypo home, and the chemical solution coursed into the girl's bared arm. She winced at the pinprick, but then her senses began to swim. It was no chemical high but its effects were immediate.

"Now Gretchen, this chemical is a hypnotic. It's been used in medical science to retrieve lost memories from patients with brain damage." More accurately, he might have added that sodium pentathol was best known to the intelligence services, the CIA and the NSA, as a "truth drug." Its record in obtaining suppressed facts from semi-conscious subjects was variable, but it had a high success rate when the subject was at least mildly compliant. Its use was much in vogue, when law enforcement wanted to circumvent time spent interrogating anti-socials, and easy to come by.

Gretchen's eyes grew heavy and she wanted to sleep. Only Ed's droning voice kept her from drifting away. Its insistence, its single-mindedness. "Gretchen... Gretchen, can you hear me?" She moaned in the affirmative. "I need you to tell me about the big monster. About the creature that frightened you. About what you saw in his face, what you remember about him. You can do that for me, can't you Gretchen?"

"Yes I can." Her voice was ethereal, otherworldly. North looked down at her in the black negligee Diane had lent her. It lent her slim, pale, virginal figure quite an allure. He had promised he would help Gretchen through the therapeutic stage of her post-traumatic stress. The only condition was, they had to do it while Diane wasn't around. She would object to the tried and trusted pharmaceuticals, he told Gretchen. Diane was all about aromatherapy and health-store nerve tonics. But if she subjected herself to his methods, he promised her an easy ride. She was in safe hands.

As he looked down on her reclining form, he wasn't so sure. It had been a long time, but, back when respectable Ed North was carefree Charlie Westenhaus, he'd developed quite a penchant for administering sedatives to young women. Not always with their prior knowledge and permission, it had to be said. But he'd enjoyed some wild nights of abandon, whether his partner was conscious or not. Hypnotics like Rohypnol had been a fashionable accessory among rich and idle young men, and Charles had been among the vanguard. He looked at Gretchen's pert breasts and defenseless body and wondered why it had to be so different now.

"He scares me but he's so sad. He's like child. He's so terribly, terribly ugly. But the ugliness isn't his fault. All the ugly things that ever happened in this world are manifest in Jason's flesh. When he showed me his face it was like a child revealing to me his unhappy soul."

No, he had to leave her alone, she was almost conscious. If that crazy babble she was coming out with could be called "conscious." But it was partly what he wanted to hear. Since the girl had been complaining endlessly to Diane about her nightmares of Jason, North had become obsessed with knowing what she saw. With knowing whether that misbegotten freak was still as horribly powerful as he remembered. Whether it was still in his power to inflict pain and destruction upon him.

As Edward North, he now had a completely different life. But the Westenhaus element of his psyche, the part that remembered that purgatorial existence in the other world, was still afraid. And still filled with hate.

"Jason suffers for the circumstances of his birth. He suffers for the deeds of others. When he commits atrocities, he only bares out what Mary Shelley's father said: 'Treat a person ill and he will become wicked.'"

This was becoming more than a little nauseating. "Tell me what you saw Jason do, Gretchen. Tell me about his power, his strength."

"Jason did what he's been taught to do. Jason would never have hurt a soul if it wasn't for the unkindness he's been shown. Jason kills because this world killed him first!"

Whoa, that was enough. The girl was freaking out. She wasn't even speaking in her own light, measured tones anymore. This was the much huskier voice of a woman of about fifty. He decided to try to bring her round with a dose of soluble caffeine, before this got any further out of control.

"My boy is a good boy at heart!" North started mouthing a wide range of profanities. She was hallucinating that she was the freak's mother. "He is a child. Just a little child. Who would hurt a child? Who would persecute a babe in arms for striking out against those he hated and feared?"

Shit, this had to stop. This had to stop now. He took a further step toward the girl to make her drink the caffeine solution. She rose suddenly from the couch, as if in an electrified reflex action. Her eyes opened wide and stared him in the face. Even her facial features seemed to have altered. There were wrinkles around the girl's previously unblemished eyes, and small lines around her mouth, the telltale signs of early middle age.

"People like you, Charles Westenhaus! Sneering no-goods like you have persecuted my boy all his life!" Now he really did feel nauseous. He drew back, searching to find where he had laid the hypodermic needle.

"Go to hell," he snarled. "Whoever or whatever you are, just go to hell!"

"If I go back to hell, I'm taking you with me, you evil, mother-murdering bastard!" Her face, manic and aged, howled at him. She had that one wrong, and he was about to show her just how wrong. If Jason Voorhees's crazy old bat mother was really inhabiting Gretchen Andrews's mind, then he was going to drive her out of there. She was the one who was going back to hell, even if it meant Gretchen had to depart this vale of tears too.

The girl's waving arms were manic, but not strong enough to fight him. When he got a tight hold of her right wrist, he was able to plunge the second syringe full of the truth drug straight into her arm. Almost immediately, the girl's mania left her. The intensity and natural disfigurement of age left her eyes, and she began to lose balance. To black out. North had no idea whether the two shots amounted to a potentially fatal overdose, but he would weather that storm if it came. He had played a fatally administered injection as if it was an accident before, and he would do it again. But this time, his knowledge of the law wouldn't let him down.

As he laid Gretchen's supine body on the couch, headlamps shone through the window of the office as the automatic gate of the garage raised into the air. No time for any further evasive tactics now, not even if she died. He just had to tough it out.

It was hard to look relaxed or natural as Diane entered the apartment section of their temporary offices. Just reclining in a leather chair, with a little lamplight, and an unconscious teenage girl in Diane's nightclothes on the couch.

"Say what..." After all they'd seen and heard about over the past month, the scene could still take her breath away. "What is this, North?"

"It's nothing." It wasn't actually the most persuasive argument she'd ever heard. Strike one to the defense. "Really, it's nothing. She's sleeping it off. Gretchen asked me to administer a hypnotic drug."

"She asked you?" Her incredulity was pronounced. She stepped up to the couch one limping step at a time, as if she feared her eyes would meet with further bad news. Glancing down, she saw the double needle mark on Gretchen's arm. "You'd better tell me what this is right now, Ed. Are we talking date rape here?"

"No," he winced at the very sleaziness of the idea. "God, no. I'm telling it the way it went down. Gretchen has been complaining about dreams of 'Jason', the Crystal Lake Killer..."

"I'm aware of that." Diane was couching Gretchen's head in her hands, ensuring she was breathing properly and not vomiting in her sleep. "So for this reason, you shot her up?"

"No, no, it wasn't like that!" Ed punched the air, becoming aggressive. "It was to release suppressed memories, sodium pentathol."

Diane's eyes grew wide. "Edward North, I really don't think I have any conception of you as a person." She spoke as much in sadness as in anger, her croaking voice edged with tears. "I think perhaps I never really did." She guided a somnambulant Gretchen up from the couch. "This is the situation, Ed. I am going to take Gretchen to the emergency medical center." The girl's head lolled loose against Diane's shoulder. "You'd better hope that your story checks out. I want you to open that door for us and leave us to walk out of here..." She raised her one free hand to counter his objections. "Because if you don't, I warn you, I am going to shoot you."

He backed off and raised a hand and massaged the back of his neck, feigning nonchalance. "After that, I am going to speak to the local emergency administrator about finding somewhere safe where she and I can stay. If we find somewhere, don't wait up. If we don't, I'll give you fair warning to get yourself and your things out of here."

He stood aside passively as her remote control locking device undid the door. "I've turned a blind eye to a lot of peculiar shit. But this doesn't fall under that category."

"Diane..." He implored to her one more time. She turned her head back to look at him. "If she starts talking in her sleep, take note of whatever she says. Seriously. It may be important." It was hardly the tearful mea culpa she was hoping for.

In the seat of her ten year-old Mercedes, Diane's fatigue at the end of the day was cancelled by concern for the unconscious girl strapped into the passenger seat. By the silence and the occasional stray shout or gunshot. As she drove toward what she hoped would be sanctuary for both of them, Gretchen rambled to herself in her sleep.

"People say he's the big, bad boogeyman, that he was scary enough to find his way out of hell. But he's all alone again now. His only friend has gone, and he's sad and alone out here in the real world."

***

In a low-rent backstreet of Miami, Paul Christos was being put to the test. He and his newfound friend and mentor, one Wayne Ricardo Sanchez, were renting a tiny single room in this most Hispanic region of the state.

It had taken Christos a lot to convince his host of his trustworthiness. Not a long time, but a lot of sycophancy. A lot of statements of intent to commit murder, that would have been self-incriminating if law enforcement was able to record them. A lot of lip service paid to Sanchez's "dangerous philosophy," which the Devil Boy seemed hardly to hear. And most of all, a whole lot of hero-worship.

The noise was as constant an accompaniment to life in this part of the southern USA as the heat. Even at that time of year, windows had to be opened to escape the oppressiveness of an old, renovated boarding house without air conditioning. Christos surveyed the dirty white wooden boards of the local buildings, staying wrapped in his long-sleeved white shirt. Sanchez's bare arms hung over the windowsill, his stripped torso showing off the big devil tattoo that read, "666—Regis Satanis."

"You see those people over there?" Which people? Christos wondered. The whole sweaty place was crawling with unwashed humanity. "All of them," he motioned with his hand, noting the boy's quizzical look. "Spicks. Nothing but stupid, dirty spicks." The hate inherent in the slur against his own racial group was sincere. Christos remembered how the now resurgent Devil Boy had met his nemesis in his hometown. Holed up there after his ultimate atrocity was committed in the Daytona Beach area, one of his neighbors recognized him from a wanted poster at the post office. Then so did another. And another. The recognition that they had the serial killer in their midst had spread like a particularly intense outbreak of mass hysteria.

The Hispanic community had long labored under the suspicions of their fellow Floridians. "The Devil Boy is a spick," so all the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were saying, as were many of the Blacks, and some of the Cubans. When the Latinos turned on Wayne Sanchez, his battered body had to be rescued by the same cops who promptly arrested him. They had saved him from being torn apart in the street.

Now he wanted a symbolic revenge. It would have been too difficult to track down the people who brought him low, all those years later. But he could still strike terror into the hearts of the people who once regarded him as one of their own, and for whom he felt nothing but contempt. "You see those animals over there?"

Christos did. They were an extended family of Mexicans or Central Americans ranging from the prematurely aged grandfather who sat on the balcony, fanning himself, to the little girl running around in her vest and panties, playing with an armless doll. "Wetbacks," sneered Christos.

"No, they ain't wetbacks," Sanchez corrected him sharply. "Look at how many there are. You think they all just swam over across the Rio Grande or somethin', grandpa, brats an' all?"

The boy was suitably chastened. It was something he always remembered his father saying about Mexican migrant workers. But he had a more profound teacher now.

"Don't go usin' that word, 'wetbacks' I hate it. And I hate them too." His eyes focused on the hapless family, going about their normal daily routine. Aggravated by the pressures of working-class poverty, noisily appreciative of any little joy they could snatch from life. "Satan gave me the power to inflict pain, but the people round here—they think they can overcome the power of evil with their damn crosses an' their rosary beads an' shit."

Christos was amused, and not a little surprised. He had always thought of the Devil Boy's philosophy as one of self-assertion. That his crimes were willed into being simply because he wanted to commit them, nothing to do with any deity that may or may not exist. And yet here he was, praising his mythic Lord Satan, after confiding that he'd supposedly returned from a hell that was filled not with devils but with other people.

"Are they the ones?" the boy asked, the thin crease of a smile on his lips.

"Sure. They're the ones. Can you think of anyone better we should fuck up? What else would scare hell out of this pussy-ass neighborhood?"

Christos had to steel himself to imagine his own part in their planned atrocity. To turn the luxury of daydreaming about hunting his own species into hard reality. He calmed himself by remembering that he, the son of an East Coast shipping magnate, would be about the last possible suspect in a case like this. Apart, that is, from the allegedly deceased Daytona Beach Devil Boy.

"So what you think, kid? You got the cojones to go through with it?" Sanchez searched his face for any sign of reluctance, of weakness.

"I'm ready," declared Christos. "I've been ready for years. It's what I've always felt in common with you. You're one of the only men brave enough to live out an anti-humanist philosophy. It's what I aspire to," he gushed breathlessly.

"Yeah, whatever," Sanchez answered, distractedly keening his vicious gaze up and down the street. "If you're in, you're in. There's no getting out now. All I know is I hate those motherfuckers. I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's work."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The night outside could not get any darker, or any more foreboding. As he listened to the unidentified noises that filled the air, Ed North took a big swallow on a long tumbler of Jack Daniels. It was the first time since the old days that he'd felt the need to get a little boozed. The new persona carried with it an aura of responsibility, but it was at times like these that old Charlie Westenhaus showed through.

He was resting his eyes for a moment when the red light began flashing. At first, he wondered why the intruder alarm didn't sound. But then he saw them standing furtively in the shadows outside the office door. Hesitant about making their next move. Until they attempted entry, the alarm would remain silent. It looked as if it would take them a long time to summon the courage to do so.

He hit the intercom button. "Do I have the attention of Trey Leblanc and Shawna Black?" He had thought so. They stepped out of the shadows into the lamplight, no longer making an effort to disguise themselves. North ensured he had easy access to the handgun in his top drawer, sliding it partway open.

"If you wish to enter for a private conference, then please do so without prejudice." Playing the attorney role to the hilt, he had adopted legal terms in his everyday conversation. "Provided you enter these premises with no malice aforethought, our conversation will be treated as a private matter and no outside bodies will be alerted."

Neither knew if they could trust Diane Miranda's lawyer buddy, the one who acted like a police groupie when he was around Sheriff Casey. But they too were armed, just like everyone else who had an urge to keep on living. They entered the semi-darkened main office, after the dark golden security lights that crisscrossed the passageway.

"I'd ask you what brought you here. But I guess I already know that." Did they know about the Gretchen incident? If they were aware that Diane had taken her for emergency medical treatment, then admitting them could prove to be a fatal error. Particularly if that crazy Shawna bitch went postal on him.

"Is she here?" The girl looked around at the general office area, wondering how they might double as living quarters. It seemed to answer his question, unless they were bluffing.

"Ms Andrews and Ms Miranda have gone to seek some expert advice this evening." He made no mention that it was medical, rather than legal, advice. "I assure you that your friend's quite safe at the moment. Considerably safer than if she was living the, shall we say, rather itinerant lifestyle both of you have been forced to adopt."

"I think the last 'safe' person I saw was a dead person," replied the haunted-looking Leblanc. "There wasn't any more that could happen to him." Somehow, their edginess put North at ease. Their hope had been eroded by a dark fatalism. These were assuredly not the belligerent youth gang leaders that Sheriff Casey briefed the military police and the guardsmen about it. But then, Ed North had played a hand in creating that image of Mr Leblanc, he reminded himself.

"Our world's balance of power has changed, young man. As have the laws of nature, and morality, and everything else that we thought was sacred." Trey and Shawna remained silent. This wasn't what they came to hear. But North seemed pretty juiced. The pressure was getting to everyone.

"Have you ever thought about how the dead outnumber the living? In the last two millennia, it was always assumed that everyone who had ever lived in all the ages of mankind composed a greater number than everyone who was currently occupying the planet. Of course," he digressed, "some statisticians are saying we've now passed the point where the living outnumber all the combined dead of every past historical eon. And well-meaning liberals still pretend that we haven't let our world become overpopulated."

"They ought to make a new survey of the USA," deadpanned Shawna. "The population here's getting smaller by the minute."

"Maybe," he shrugged, still trying to make his point. "But for everyone who's perished in the current social ferment, I'd bet there are several more to take their place. People who the general population thought they'd seen the last of. But that just shows the limitations of our knowledge. It's only now that we're starting to understand that life and death are just two levels of the same existence..."

Of course, North was not prepared to tell them why certain people were starting to understand this. To Shawna, it was all just one more crock of insanity that she didn't need. "So every creep and freak who's running around on the streets now is a resurrected dead person? That's fucking Dawn of the Dead."

But Trey's mind wasn't so quick to dismiss. Appalled and staggered by all he had witnessed, it seemed as sane an explanation as any in a world of insanity. "The big freak with the mask. Jason. He's like no one alive I ever saw or heard of. Nothing human."

"Certainly not human," snorted North. "Subhuman maybe. Did you know that your friend Gretchen has the ability to communicate with Voorhees's dead mother? Or at least, that's her belief." He drained his glass. His audience was silent. "Oh, believe me. I've witnessed it. It's a very disturbing spectacle." They were too skeptical to take his word, but too benighted by the darkness that descended on their world to dismiss it out of hand.

Trey thought of how Gretchen had almost gone passively to her death during the battle of the camper van. How some strange psychic sympathy with that twisted mutant had inspired pity, rather than horror. "Is that the 'expert advice' they're seeking? A psych to explain why Gretchen's walking around with that creep inside her head?"

North hesitated, pouring himself another long measure of whiskey. "It may be medically connected. But don't you see the importance of this?" Maybe they did, from their own point of view. But North was playing to his own agenda. "If she has any kind of psychological connection to Voorhees, then she ought to use it to draw him out into the open, where he can be destroyed. The power that he holds over all those deviants and miscreants, it can be dispersed. Don't you see?"

Neither Trey nor Shawna really saw where North was coming from. But then, they had no inkling of where he'd already been. As they withdrew back into the night, keeping a watchful eye to ensure their host didn't sound the alarm, Shawna spoke into Trey's ear. "We have to find Gretchen before that slimeball does." He wasn't sure whether she meant Ed North or Jason Voorhees.

***

In the temporary offices of the State Attorney, Diane Miranda found cold comfort for herself and her charge. With no sleeping accommodation, and no heating, the night was falling uncomfortably. Gretchen had been given a cursory medical check-up and an antitoxic antidote by the medical center, but was dismissed quickly. In such emergency conditions, where gunshot and knife wounds were more common than pregnancy labor or whiplash, anything that suggested drug abuse received short shrift.

"Hello? Is that Sheriff Casey's office? Is that...? Yes. Yes, this is she." Diane was taken back to hear Casey himself on the phone. It had been weeks since they had direct contact, and she assumed that maybe the old man had passed authority for the emergency situation over to his deputies. But there was no such luck.

"Yes, it's good to hear you too, sheriff," she lied. His voice sounded tired, dissipated. In the background was a continual hum of movement as men shouted and took orders, and lawmen who were perpetually on duty worked through the night. "No, it's a personal call, really—except that," she looked at Gretchen's drained, traumatized face, reminding herself that she had no need to make excuses. "I've taken in a former Forest Green girl named Gretchen Andrews. Oh, you've heard of her. Of course. To put it plainly, sheriff, we've had to vacate our temporary offices for security reasons that I may need to report to you at a later date. The State Attorney's people have allowed us access to their offices, but it's just..."

She looked at Gretchen's faraway stare. Noted her fragility, how she had internalized every terrible experience she had endured. It touched her that the girl was still appreciative enough to smile back. A nervous but kindly, almost loving smile. "We have nowhere to sleep out here. And we're a little scared. All we have is a top-story view of the highway and all the craziness that's going on outside."

To her surprise, Casey was inherently sympathetic. "Know what you mean, ma'am. Long time since I felt any peace myself. Long time since I was able to sleep too. But I'm not going to leave two vulnerable women alone in times like these." It sounded as if all the piss and wind was taken out of Casey by the constantly grinding circumstances. Any bygones between them were, it seemed to be merely bygones. He sounded to her like a tired old man who knew that perhaps he might die soon, and had resolved not to leave too much acrimony behind him. In any case, she couldn't help but be slightly touched by his insistence that he pick both of them up himself, and accompany them to a spare lockdown trailer in the deputies' high security quarters.

"No, no, that's fine," he told her. "I'm happy to get out of here a little while. Just give me twenty minutes to get over. Your safety is my responsibility, Miss Miranda. We may be stuck way out here, but you're still one of my constituents."

George Casey put down the phone. He looked out from the frenetic office loaned to him by the Sheriff of Cunningham County. He had a heavy sense of failure following him around from the Forest Green college incidents. His draconian tactics, he confessed to himself, had failed to save as much as one life. He wasn't going to refuse aid to one of those young students now.

But, in those isolated offices on the edge of the highway, twenty minutes turned into more than a half-hour and counting. The women's discomfort grew as the night grew colder. Headlamps threw creeping rays up and down the walls. And still the madness, the screams and yells and gunshots off in the distance, did not abate.

"Goddamn cop." Diane's sympathy with Casey was short-lived. Gretchen seemed fully conscious now. Her hypnotic trance and post-drug nausea were something that belonged to the previous twenty-four hours. The process of staying awake for so long had created a vicious circle, promoting a fatigued wakefulness.

"Not long, baby," Diane tried to reassure her. Gretchen gave her that endurably patient, almost unbearably angelic smile.

"Maybe we should just sit up till morning to make sure we're okay. We can start the day again tomorrow. Find ourselves somewhere safe to rest." The girl seemed so vulnerable, yet so long-suffering and full of goodwill.

Diane's urge to protect her was basically maternal. And yet, she admitted to herself, finding a safe refuge was as much a personal priority for her as it was for Gretchen Andrews. She no longer recognized the life she used to live before Friday the thirteenth of January. Before the madness. Before the violence. But there had been the consolation of finding a strong, intelligent man who could help her make sense of the chaos all around them. She had really believed that Ed North shared many of her principles, and respected the strength of an independent woman like Diane Miranda.

But then, she'd also started to believe that he cared for her. What a fucking pity that he turned out to be an asshole, just like all the rest.

The whooping buzzer sounded like a nuclear meltdown warning. It awoke them from the cold purgatory of their most private, most melancholy thoughts. When it sounded again, Diane rushed to check out the image on the CCTV camera. Its dull colors were almost black and white in the darkness, but she could pick out the solid image of a beer-gutted sheriff in his corny fedora. She instructed "enter" into the two-way microphone and hit the button that released the electronic lock.

"Hey!" She gave a little shout to Gretchen to bolster her spirits. "Better late than never, huh?" It had been more than two hours since she put the call in to Casey, but, now that he was here, relief dispelled her irritation. After all, who knew what might have befallen him on the way? Nothing could be relied upon these days, so a lawman showing up in the dead of night was something to be thankful for.

"Oh my. Check out how he swaggers." They watched him enter the offices on the CCTV screen. Formerly a little slow but steady, Casey now seemed to lumber from one foot to the other in a violent swaggering motion where his legs and shoulders moved as one.

Diane's voice was low and conspiratorial, in case the old boy should hear her. "I really don't think all this pressure has been good for him. The last I heard, they were talking about taking him out of the state, down to Florida to get away from all this craziness."

"He's coming down the hallway." Gretchen spoke in that faraway singsong voice from deep inside her head. The place that protected her from evil men and human monsters. "He's here." Diane could see that for herself. But the girl announced it as if the walk down the passage was the coming of some great and powerful figure. Not just a late-night goodwill call by that crusty old bastard Casey.

"Oh, George! Are you okay?" The way he stumbled through the door as she let him into the office elicited Diane's concern. So much so that she called him by his Christian name, for the first time in living memory. His eyes were downcast and he held his fleshy gray face aside, as if he could not meet her gaze straight on.

Gretchen became suddenly animated. She couldn't take her eyes off the sheriff. Instead of standing on her feet, she retracted her legs and knelt upright on the stiff-backed wooden chair she'd been trying to rest in, both extending her body and retreating at the same time.

Apart from his hat, the sheriff seemed to be in civilian clothing. He wore a shapeless black jerkin, which seemed kind of cheapskate and austere for off-duty hours. But then, no one had any time to indulge themselves in luxuries anymore. He had his face turned so that Diane only saw him in profile. He seemed pained. His face was loose and pouchy. It would have been a hangdog expression, if it wasn't so expressionless. And he remained almost rudely silent.

Diane thought that maybe she ought to drive them out to the security compound, if Casey would risk leaving his car there. Even in the minimal lamplight, she could tell he looked ill and exhausted, like he was on the verge or a stroke—if he hadn't suffered one already, that was.

Then she saw the gash. In profile, it ran from the underside of his right ear in a deep red line all the way along the underneath of his jaw. At first, she thought it might be a razor cut, but it was of truly Van Gogh proportions. It could never have been self-inflicted unless a man was trying to cut his own face clean off.

As he turned toward her with those dead eyes, Diane's immediate impulse was to reach out to the wounded man. But something made her hand freeze in mid-air. Gretchen kept repeating, "He's here... He's here," as if she had some kind of nervous compulsive disorder.

And then the sagging flesh of his face fell away. For the first time in these interminable days of horror, Diane Miranda heard herself scream. As he turned to look at her, face-on, it seemed that only one side of George Casey's features had been fastened to his skull. As even that peeled away, from the sheriff's deeply furrowed brow down to the jowl, she saw the colorful mass of membranes, veins and fatty tissue, several layers below the colorless skin. But what lay beneath was another thing entirely. The skinned face of the late Sheriff Casey had merely been a mask.

Beneath it was something much worse. That wrecked, dehumanized visage regarded her with curiosity. Wearing another human being's skin was a trick taught to him by Ed Gein when they were in hell together. The mockery of the human form that was Jason Voorhees had gained entry. Echoing in his mind were the distant words of his only friend, Sanchez, the Devil Boy: "I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's work."

***

That scream was as bad as anything they had heard. For a brief moment, it stopped Shawna and Trey dead in their tracks. But they'd come so far now. Shawna had brazened her way into the medical center, asking for news of Gretchen Andrews, to be told that she and her "guardian" had been accommodated by the State Attorney's department on the edge of the highway. She had run the risk of arrest, but what the hell? Everything seemed to be a risk now. Every last mortal breath that they took every day seemed suffused with danger.

They could see flickering light, maybe some movement, in the sparse office set among the derelict former workplaces of an old industrial site. It was the only feasible place where the two women could be taking shelter. And it sounded as if they had arrived several fatal moments too late.

As they ran across the vehicle park, where creeps and perverts called out to them from the husks of old cars and trucks, the omnipresence of evil was a matter of indifference. All the time, everywhere they traveled or tried to hide, there were human creatures that might have got a boner from their torture and death, if they hadn't been prepared to blow them away first. It was a permanent state of affairs that had brutalized them, made them emotionally cold to each other, at the same time as it made them dependent on each other for survival.

There was a sobbing from inside the door that had the light on. In the abject distress that they heard, there was at least a shred of hope. Someone was still alive, whatever injuries or indignities may have been inflicted upon her. Shawna and Trey held tight to their .22 rifles as the young man stretched backward, then brought his foot up to kick through the door.

As he did, the weeping grew louder. And so did the sub-humanoid grunts and gasps that had no recognizable origin. "Fuck that," Trey whispered sharply. He drew breath and looked at Shawna, both of them bracing themselves to plunge in. Horror was the accompaniment to their everyday lives now. If they had yet to truly make a friend of it, they hoped at least that it would cauterize their souls enough for them to endure what each terrible new day brought.

They trotted edgily through the glass-strewn hallway, the intruder alarm howling at them as if it were a stalled fire truck. They moved sharply but slowly, their senses hyper-attuned to what was going on around them. Horror was everywhere. Insane violence might come at them from the quiet of the office kitchenette, or the privacy of a washroom cubicle.

But they could never have been prepared for what they were about to find. For where the weeping tones of Gretchen Andrews would lead them.

"Leblanc, look! Down on the floor." In their state of paranoia, the niceties of first names were discarded. Once they had been lovers. Now they were like renegade soldiers or bandits fighting for survival in a loveless world.

Through the open door of one of several identically dreary offices, the dimmest of lights barely illuminated a prostrate Gretchen. She kneeled on the floor, shaking, twitching and crying. But she made little effort to move away from her tormentor. Both Shawna and Trey knew she was in thrall to him, preparing to face their nemesis as they ran into the office with guns pointed.

In a nanosecond they saw him. Their guns were aimed but no triggers were pulled. Jason stared quizzically in the face of Trey Leblanc, but no menacing advance was made. Behind his black welding mask, he regarded Trey with an eye that was no longer there, an obliterated orb that should have left him blinded. Jason did not attack because he wanted them see his handiwork.

In the middle of the room lay Diane Miranda. Injured, traumatized, but still alive. She lay horizontal, her partly naked body dividing the room almost perfectly in half. From their vantage point, her torn dress, one bared breast and buttock could be seen, her body quivering violently in profile. Trey's attention darted from the distressed woman to her victimizer, then back again. The last time they had come into contact, Jason had been driven into a rage of hideous violence at the sight of nudity. Now, it seemed the obscene freak had purposely disrobed this suffering woman.

Shawna took Gretchen's hand and edged toward the door. Diane tried to speak but could only clatter her jaw up and down, cracking her teeth. Her shaking was as violent as any epileptic convulsion. Trey moved toward her. Diane had never deserted him or his friends. She may have been the only person in the adult world to whom any of them could have turned.

He kept part of his attention fixed on Jason, but it was clear the freak wasn't going to attack yet. He wanted Trey to see. As the young man bestrode the center of the room, his hands fixed on his gun, he suddenly understood why.

Diane had fought valiantly, but hopelessly, for her life, and for that of Gretchen. For that, she was rewarded with a punishment that was almost indescribable. Trey looked down on her from above, and saw that her healthy, toned, feminine body had been bisected. The clucking face that met his own had suffered the torture of a machete blade dividing it vertically in two, from the hairline down, splitting the nose gristle, the lips, the lower jaw and the throat. The bloody injury was continued in the middle of her body, and followed all the way down in a symmetrical line. Seen in profile from either side, Diane Miranda was still a beautiful woman, albeit with rivulets of blood trickling down her body. When viewed from the front, she had been almost exactly cut in half.

The cut line ran down through the center of her breasts, which parted now to either side as if responding to separate fields of gravity. It ran down the center of her ribcage and through her abdomen. As her killer's hands had found more pliable expanses of flesh to cut and tear, so there was a greater abundance of her internal body to reveal. Diane had been a beautiful woman and remained so, even in these dying moments.

But Trey's mind reeled to wonder at the perfection of the still working body that was laid open to him. At the pulsing intestines and spasmodic liver, their terminal workings revealed by the hand that had prized her flesh apart from the central wound. At the lower half and trunk of her body that been split down the middle, breaking her almost entirely in two at her hindquarters. For one brief, obscene moment, he thought of an exhibition that had caused scandal at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where the British artist Damien Hirst had displayed two sides of a pig cut perfectly down the middle. Jason had not performed so delicately, but instead of rendering a dull brute into an artistic curiosity he had made an obscenity out of beauty.

Diane felt the chill of approaching death, and the cold air that invaded her internal organs, now stripped of their protection. Her teeth chattered violently as death approached. But it did not come quickly enough. Her wide, staring eyes implored to Trey to take her out of this hell of pain, in any way that he could.

Jason tilted his head, watching the boy closely for his reaction. This was his personal masterpiece. Without the power of words or rational thought, he relied solely on instinct and flashes of random intuition. He had smelled the scent of an enemy around this woman, that of the slimy mother-murderer whose presence he had been forced to endure in hell. For that alone, she had to pay a hundredfold. Jason watched Trey closely, searching for intimations of how Westenhaus might react if he saw what had been done to his lover. Jason was too estranged from human nature to know that people often shut down in the face of unthinkable horror. That Trey was showing no response simply because his mind and body could not produce anything appropriate.

Shots rang out from outside the door. Jason groaned and reeled back. The animal rage inside him welled up into a voiceless bellow. Trey backed out towards the door. "Save your bullets!" Trey was hysterical, almost weeping. "It does no good with him!" His arm outstretched, he pushed all three of them back out of the door.

"What about Ms Miranda?" Shawna's voice was sharp, outraged. She hadn't got close enough to Diane to know the extent of her injuries, but she knew she was in as much trouble as anyone she'd ever seen. And now Leblanc was running away from helping her.

"There ain't no helping Diane!" Trey howled like a Pentecostal preacher, but one who preached hopelessness, not salvation. With his shaking gun hand fixed on the immobile Jason, he threw himself backwards out of the office, pushing the two women with him. "He's cooked Diane's bacon!" He began to laugh hysterically at his lame, sick joke. Seen from the edge of tears, demented laughter was the only appropriate response.

Even as he made his retreat, he knew he'd left Diane to suffer in her death agonies. But he couldn't step back in that room, not for anything. Especially not to summon up the courage to fire a mercy shot into her head. Numb with shock, Trey Leblanc was forced to concede there were some horrors in this world that it required limitless courage to face. The type of courage that he now realized he didn't possess.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ву the time Santo Alicante reached northern Florida, it had been trouble all the way. "Anyone would think this fuckin' country's gone insane," muttered the veteran gangster and one-time hitman to himself.

He got out of the rented Buick no hire car company would ever see again, and stretched his stiffened legs. On the sunbaked street, Alicante's paunch stretched against his white silk shirt, tell-tale sweat patches leaving their salt stains.

From his point of view, criminality had always been a means to achieve what the bigger guys—the higher-up government officials in his native land, the Harvard and Yale educated in the US—had over the little guy. Besides the wealth, and the corresponding power, there was the massive boost it gave to a man's self-esteem.

But Alicante's self-esteem came from paying for real estate in used US dollars, and keeping his own harem of multi-ethnic pussy. Not from, say, raping some kid in front of her grandma, before slicing Grandma's neck open. That was a different kind of criminality: the psychos, the misfits, the woman torturers and the kiddie rapists. The "rock spiders," as they called them when he did time in a US prison.

But now the rock spiders were crawling everywhere. It wasn't only his kind, the stand-up career guys, who managed to break out when they blew the roof off hell and landed in that big lake in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the breakout had started from down on the thirteenth circle, where they cooped up most of those creeps. The smart guys, those who only drew blood when there was a reason, they were the ones who followed on. If they hadn't already been hacked to pieces, torn apart or gang-raped by the rock spiders, that is.

And America, the great land of opportunity, the apple from which every self-respecting career criminal sought to take a great big bite, had become like an extension of hell.

When he was driving down south, he had been ready to kill on a hairtrigger impulse. Not out of some compulsion of his own—Santo Alicante was a stand-up guy, he only killed when he felt it was absolutely necessary. But the streets of the USA were clogged with people who were making it increasingly necessary to kill, just to get through the day alive. They were the type of criminal he could never understand or sympathize with. No long-term gratification, no venality, no self-interest. Just pure destructiveness.

***

In the small hotel directly above the street where Alicante stood, there was an individual who bore out his feelings about the less rationally motivated breed of criminal. Worse still, this was one who, by virtue of his origins, gave Hispanics a bad name.

Wayne Sanchez had retreated into his head. While his traveling companion and criminal accomplice watched, he was communing with his mentor, his living inspiration. It was as if there was a permanent link between them now. Like two local TV stations that stood close to the border in separate states, each one could pick up whatever shows the other transmitted. Even if he and Jason never met in the flesh again, he believed there would always be that psychic connection between them. And Sanchez was amazed, totally blown away, by the extremity of the violence that he saw being committed by the man behind the mask.

Just as he hoped Jason's bloodlusting mind would feed on images of the family that he and his apprentice annihilated, he was amazed by just how far the big guy had gone with this lawyer bitch. It was the only succor and sustenance for two damaged souls who lived to expiate their own hate and rage. Who existed purely to kill.

But Jason also gave the Devil Boy reason to feel uneasy. With every crime that he had personally committed, Sanchez could move on, with the only connection to his act being the personal symbols and messages that he left at the crime scene. But with the big guy, it could get personal. His victims were not always chosen at random; it may sometimes have been on account of behavior he disapproved of, like wanton sex.

So Jason was a puritan? So what? Sanchez was no big fan of sexual promiscuity himself. As far as he was concerned, you could shove all that dating and schmoozing stuff. The only acceptable form of sexual behavior to him was rape.

Jason could inspire enemies. In Sanchez's career as a serial killer, most of the people affected by him had no idea of who he was. The crimes, and the Satanic symbolism, spoke for themselves. It wasn't until he was identified at a crime scene and his face stuck on a wanted poster that the whole thing came falling down.

But Jason was unmistakable. If he crossed your path and you were lucky enough to survive, then he would always occupy a space in your consciousness. He was the man that you feared. The man that you hated. The man that you wanted to destroy. And in every message, every memory, every thought that the man behind his mask shared with his infamous disciple, Sanchez felt an undertone of menace, of unease.

"If they could have yours and my guts hanging up in a sack, amigo, what a great Christmas present that would make."

Paul Christos was startled to hear the Devil Boy speak, if only to himself. For too long, he'd been contemplating his navel on a speed comedown. Keeping his inarticulate thoughts to himself, leaving his disappointed protégé to brood on the sickly 1970s chintz bedspreads and the herbal potpourri scent that covered up the stale odors of this cheap hotel room. Living beyond the realms of good and evil was not nearly as glamorous as he'd imagined it to be.

But Sanchez knew the realities of that life. He'd lived them for a long while, and now he was reliving them under even more chaotic circumstances. He knew there would always be hellhounds on his trail, and how tiring it was to stay one step ahead. It hardly even surprised him when the warped wooden door, held in place by just one latch, was suddenly kicked in.

"Okay, assholes, kiss the carpet!"

Christos looked to his mentor for guidance, but Sanchez hardly seemed prepared to resist. As the fat, mustachioed Hispanic with the bald head and the big Magnum handgun kicked him in the ribs, forcing him to the floor, the Devil Boy stayed still and passive. It had all gone wrong. So terribly wrong.

"Are you... are you a police officer?" Christos was badly winded, but did his best to ingratiate himself. "If there are charges, I'd like to help with the investigation. I'll turn state's evidence if I have to—"

The second kick was less merciful, intended to inflict pain rather than temporarily disable. Christos lay on the floor, his fluttering hand scared to touch his bleeding mouth. His eyes squinting from the pain of his broken teeth.

"He ain't no cop, amigo." Sanchez, too, had been on the receiving end of Alicante's boot. Still, he hovered above the floor on his knees as if he'd been waiting for this to happen for a long time. "They used to say you were the man with the big cojones way back when, ain't that right?"

Alicante was quietly impressed. He'd never had any contact with the Devil Boy, and he hated his kind. In hell, they had been segregated on two different levels. But it showed that Sanchez had paid attention during all those years on the row. He knew the jailhouse lore. Knew that every Mexican Mafia soldier on both sides of the border, in every state and city, was in awe of Santo Alicante.

"I got enough balls to piss on a couple of lowlifes like you. That's the truth." Sanchez laughed. The madman took his disdain as a kind of backhanded compliment. Christos heard himself start to quietly weep. This was not what he had in mind when he dreamed of transgressing the moral order. This was not what he'd imagined at all.

"So how long we got in here before the desk clerk calls the cops, huh, Santo? Or did you fix him before you came stomping in here?"

Without letting his roving gun arm rest for a moment, Alicante retrieved a black vinyl case from his inner breast pocket. He quickly flashed his phony DEA credentials at Sanchez. "Open more doors for you than a Visa card, boy. The staff took the rest of the day off, they don't wanna get involved. We ain't gotta worry about that." Especially, he might have added, in the current climate, when the word of criminals carried at least as much authority as that of law enforcement.

Then, his energy belying his corpulent size, the breathless crime mogul pulled Sanchez up by his ratty hair. He dragged him over to a wooden chair by a cheesy dressing table, and sat him down, delivering another vicious kick to Christos to make sure he was immobilized. The Devil Boy showed little sign of his infernal spirit as the bigger man produced a roll of black duct tape from the deep pocket of his pants, and began tearing strips off. He wrapped it around Sanchez's shoulders and the back of the chair, around his calves and the bottom of the chair legs, before bustling over to Christos and making similar movements to bind him to the headboard of the bedstead.

"See, you both bound up like a pair of turkeys now. Happy Thanksgiving!" it was more than a couple of months since the event, but what did Alicante care? He may have been in favor of the most predatory form of free enterprise, but that hardly made him a founding father.

There was no tape over their mouths, but Sanchez recognized it was only because Alicante wanted to instill false hope in them. To make them feel they could talk their way out by giving him the right information. To make his job easier.

"Wassamatter, Devil Boy? You don't feel frightened, no?" It seemed to Alicante that, unlike his sniveling compadre, Sanchez had little fear. Maybe it was because he'd killed so many times, and was on first-name terms with death already. Or maybe because, like himself, the circumstances of his own death were still pretty fresh in his mind. Alicante didn't relish it, but he knew that when the time came he'd be able to go through the process of death again. He only hoped he'd conduct himself more like a man this time, instead of begging and crying.

But it irked him that this no-good little rock spider should show no fear. Just who did he think was fucking with him? This was Santo Alicante, the most feared gang enforcer from Juarez to LA; the man who butchered and betrayed his way to the top, and made sure his own pampered children grew rich on the American kids whose streets he flooded with cocaine. Surely a little fearful respect should be forthcoming?

"Hey Sanchez, look at this!" He took a big old tin cigarette lighter from his pocket, with the emblem of a bucking horse engraved into it. "You like this, huh?" He flicked open the top and drew a long flame from it. "You like this to warm up your hands, yeah?" He quickly ran the blue end of the flame under Sanchez's exposed fingertips. The Devil Boy flinched. "Or maybe we warm up the seat of your pants?"

"You're just like me," Sanchez responded. "When you gonna admit you get a kick out of torture, Santo?" Alicante flicked out the lighter and put it slowly back in his pocket. His pride was bruised, but he'd have the last say. Over on the bed, that stupid gringo kid who had buddied up with Sanchez was sniffling.

"Okay snotface, don't be worryin'," Alicante told him. "When death comes, I promise it'll come quickly for you. Little coward." He spat contemptuously on the carpet. His words had their desired effect. The kid was more terrified than ever.

"Why, Santo?" Sanchez's question made him smile. After all the nonsensical shit this fool had pulled, he wanted to ask Santo Alicante why he was about to be killed? "Why the fuck you take all this trouble to come and chase me down? You some kinda honorary cop or something?"

Okay, this lunatic, this howling-at-the-moon madman, wanted explanations. He was going to get the last explanation he'd ever hear. "It's about power, muchaco." He stared Sanchez directly in the eyes. "So many bad-ass hombres released from hell, someone has to maintain the balance of power—and it's not going to be El Loco, that mute freak, and some crazy-ass devil-worshipper."

He said the words to put the Devil Boy in his place. But Sanchez heard something else there. Echoes of conversations he'd once had down in the other place. Conversations with that slimy Westenhaus guy, the one he briefly believed could be one of his partners in the breakout. He'd heard nothing from that guy since he got out, but he often wondered about him. Wondered if he'd survived, or whether he was still in hell. Or whether, like so many of them, he'd washed up on the banks of Crystal Lake and made a run for it.

"So you gonna kill me, huh?"

"Yeah. I'm gonna kill you." The fat slob said it with sense of satisfaction, but Sanchez had the sense that none of this was his idea. This whole phony power trip had been put in his head by the type of creep who would play the same number on everybody. The type of person who would want Wayne Sanchez eliminated and sent right back to hell, where he could never be any kind of threat.

He watched Alicante grip the Magnum tightly. He moved slowly, with a false dignity that said he was either treating the execution as a solemn event or else he wanted Sanchez to savor every last pant-shitting moment.

But the Devil Boy stayed strangely calm. Never letting his gaze fall entirely away from his executioner, he lowered himself as far as he could while he was still strapped to the chair. Some of the tape began to strain against his muscles and break away. Sanchez took deep breaths, preparing to die for a second time. He crouched down, only held from his knees by the last of the restraints that bound him. Narrowing his eyes, he bent his head forward as if to let his assassin shoot him point blank in the lower part of the cerebellum. As if in respect, Alicante moved with the same slow dignity. The Devil Boy heard the sound of the clip on his handgun.

"Let me pray, man."

"Let you whuuutt?"

"Let me say the Hail Mary before I die. I've already been banished to the underworld once in my stinking existence. I want one chance to put things straight with God. Maybe if I repent He'll let me meet with my mother for a while. This whole thing was terrible for her, man, when she came to my trial, it was the first time I'd seen her in years..."

"Yeah, yeah, okay." Alicante was bemused, but couldn't help feeling slightly touched. He, after all, had always tried to take care of his own family, despite everything he'd ever done. "So pray." He ripped away the last tape restraints from Sanchez's arm. "Get down on your knees and ask for forgiveness. But I gotta say it never did me no good. So make it quick."

Christos could hardly believe his ears. After all the lengths he'd gone to, his personal pilgrimage to find the Devil Boy, Sanchez stood betrayed as just another repressed Christian hypocrite in the final crucial moments. His rising indignation almost cancelled out his fear.

"Hail Mary, Mother of God..."

"Listen to him! Will you listen to him? The Daytona Beach Devil Boy, the great moral transgressor, running back to the baby Jesus in his hour of need!"

Sanchez paid no attention to Christos's hysteria, though it muddied his recollection of the pious platitudes he'd been raised on. He just threw anything he could remember into the mix, a few words of the catechism, of the twenty-third Psalm. By the time he got to the end of his scrambled devotions, he was practically kissing the carpet.

"Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death..."

According to Alicante's sense of decency, this was close to the moment to put a cap in Wayne Sanchez's head. He pointed slowly downward, as his fucked-up compatriot finished begging the Lord for mercy. Sanchez too moved slowly, pointing his head toward the ground, and reaching his fingers into the tiny space at the back of his black ankle-boot.

Then in one smooth motion he brought out a stiletto blade and swung it upward into Alicante's balls. The big Mex screamed, fighting to hold his gun in his shaking hands. Another push with the flat palm of the Devil Boy's hand and the pain forced him to drop it. "Hey, Ese," Sanchez snarled at him, "it's true what they say. You sure got big cojones!"

The hitman writhed in agony on the carpet, staining it with the blood from his pants. He tried to form words, but they were incoherent. No one was listening anyway.

Sanchez grasped the Magnum and pointed it at Paul Christos. "Hey you! Get your pussy-ass off that bed and help me!" He threw the boy the bloodstained stiletto he had withdrawn from Alicante's crotch, for him to cut his bonds. Then, quickly, brutally, with no consideration for his would be assassin's suffering, he hauled him to his feet and pushed his bleeding ass into the shower.

"Get the rope! Tie his feet!" The liberated Christos did as he was told. Sanchez looked frantically around for something that he could weigh down the other end of the rope with. For now the pipes that led from the top of the wall down to the toilet cistern would do, even if the fat bastard brought them down and flooded the hotel room later.

Alicante was able to form words by the time the Devil Boy and his apprentice used their combined strength to hoist him high. But nobody had time for what he wanted to say. Sanchez grabbed one of the discarded strips of tape from the bedroom and covered his hysterically blubbering mouth with it. Any consideration of Santo Alicante as a human being was now obsolete.

As they pulled the center of the rope taut to hoist the big man's feet up to the height of the shower rail, spots of blood trickled into the small bath and his expanse of flesh burst through his elegant clothes. Sanchez slashed at his silk shirt with his cutthroat hunting knife, a considerably bigger blade.

"There! You piece o' shit! You wanna lecture me about who holds the power now?"

Alicante's big belly bled copiously. Sanchez brought down the knife again, cutting in deeper. Slashing downward, to make the insides of Alicante's body obey the pull of gravity once it was released from its skin.

"You fuckin' sack of guts!" He slashed down the center of his victim's body. Just like he'd seen Jason do, in the vision he was having before he was so rudely interrupted. Christos turned the shower on to drown out the shouts and the agonized moans.

"Who's so fuckin' scared of you now?!" Alicante's belly was open and Sanchez yanked out a section of his gastro-intestinal system. As he squeezed on it, the shit that had been working its way down the gangster's body burst out of its organic tube and splattered into the bath.

Sanchez and Christos both turned away from their former captor in disgust. As the apprentice followed the master from the bathroom, they left Alicante to die slowly from shock and pain, which he surely would.

"Gather up all your shit, man, we gotta get out of this place." Christos did as he was told, his mentor's supremacy reasserted. His few personal items were already bagged up. It was a matter of retrieving utilities, weapons, ropes and roadmaps. As Christos packed everything into an overnight bag and stood up to go, he found the barrel of Alicante's powerful Magnum pistol trained on him.

"We got unfinished business first, dear disciple." Christos swallowed hard. The foolishness of not understanding how Wayne Sanchez could fight his way viciously out of a hole, of being stupid enough to mock him, made him want to kick himself. But Sanchez would probably kick harder.

"Wayne, you know, I think there's been a terrible misunderstanding..."

"There's no misunderstanding, man. Get your clothes off. Strip all the way down to your shorts."

It made no sense to him, but the sincerity of Sanchez's command was not to be questioned. The gaudy floral curtains were already drawn across the windows, and the Devil Boy could do whatever he wanted with him.

"I hope..." he stammered as he peeled away his socks, the last layer of protection on the lower half of skinny body before his boxer shorts, "...I hope we're not talking about anything faggy here."

Sanchez understood the boy's fear of male rape. But it made him crazy. "Don't you ever fuckin' say that to me." Christos understood straight away that he'd made a mistake. "Faggots is what I hate more than anything in the world... apart from all those other people I hate, maybe."

Sanchez had his own agenda. Sensing how Christos was more reluctant to take off his top layer of clothing than he was the lower, he decided to offer him some help. "Here, c'mere." The boy could only fight back weakly as the killer ripped away the buttons from his grease and dirt-soiled shirt. Keeping the Magnum cocked, his free hand patted him down. Till he found a small, hard object that seemed to be tied to his torso by a cross section of thin wires.

Sanchez pulled open the boy's shirt, sending all his buttons flying to the floor. "What the fuck is this?" The little black object was too small to be a tape recorder. Too obviously mechanical to be anything but some kind of microphone.

Christos's face moved from the deepest purple embarrassment to a deathly pale gray. "It's a tracking device." He hissed his whispered answer so low that it was barely audible. But to Sanchez, it had the impact of a twenty-one-gun salute.

"A fuckin' tracking device. To fuckin' track me..."

"No. No," Christos wheezed desperately, but was losing his voice. "It was to track both of us. Across the country. There's somebody who wants to meet up with us both, he wants to arrange a round table..."

Sanchez cut the boy off in contempt. "I've seen how much he wants to meet up with us. He couldn't be bothered to attend, so he sent his representative, right? How the fuck do ya think that piece of dying shit in that bathroom over there could track us to the exact hotel room? Huh?"

Christos had no answer. It made sense now, but at the time North had seemed so genuine. "This new attorney at the firm I worked for, Edward North..." the boy was weeping uncontrollably now. "...He helped me find you when I was looking for you, looking for the person I thought was the new Devil Boy."

"Oh yeah?" Sanchez's eyes had turned hard marble black. "And why would a lawyer wanna help find me?"

"Because he's sympathetic!" Christos blurted. "Because he can see the way things are turning now, and he knows that power belongs to the ruthless! He was talking about setting up a cartel of criminals to divide up all the power that's been up for grabs since the end of law and order."

"Oh right." Sanchez nodded slowly. "And he wants a guy like me to come into partnership with him. I mean, I'm a regular white-collar fraud type of dude, ain't that right?" Even though the boy spoke garbage, Sanchez could sense where it was coming from. It sounded as if both he and Alicante had been filled up with the same crock of delusions about "power."

"And this attorney, what's his deal? Where's he comin' from?"

Christos's eyes still ran with tears, but he could speak a little clearer. He knew Sanchez would have to listen to him. Had to realize that he would never purposely betray him.

"He's upper middle-class, well-educated. Well-bred. Not lower-middle class scum." Sanchez may have hated humanity and everyone who fell under its umbrella, but this kind of talk made him rage. There are a whole load of levels below "lower-middle class," he told himself, and I'm at the bottom rung of all of 'em.

"He turned up out of nowhere at the time of the so-called 'Friday the 13th crime explosion.' Had a load of credentials relating to practicing law in Connecticut."

There it went again, setting off Sanchez's alarm bells. "You really are a stupid piece o' shit. You know that?" Christos nodded his head with shame. If he didn't know before, he knew now.

"What are you supposed to be getting out of all this? Power?"

Sanchez stayed silent for a while. He was demanding a response. "I just wanted to live like you. To be beyond the reaches of petty human morality. To live by my own philosophy."

"Oh yeah, right, your 'dangerous philosophy'," Sanchez growled. "Well lemme tell you, kid, I never had no 'philosophy.' I just did what I did 'cos I hated people. All the rest is window dressing, put up by creeps like you."

He pushed the boy back toward the bathroom, from whence all the gurgling and moaning had now ceased. Christos now realized that he was going to pay for his duplicity. For wanting to live like a mad Roman emperor, a creature without moral conscience. In one belated flash, it came to him how the most ruthless of those emperors, the Caligulas and the Neros, had ended their days.

Sanchez pushed the boy headfirst through the bathroom door. The place stank of blood and shit. Of death. "Let's see your 'dangerous philosophy' in action, pussy." He motioned to Christos to cut the sack of expired flesh that was once Alicante down. It needed little encouragement, its weight flopping down in a visceral heap in the bath.

"If human life ain't worth nothing, then that starts with your life." At gunpoint, using simple motions, Sanchez made Christos tie his own wrists to the top of the shower rail. The boy complied without resistance. Yet he still begged.

"Please... please... let me go. I promise won't bother you ever again."

"Oh I know you won't. You're not even bothering me now, Ese."

His hungry frame was tied to the frame of the shower. His ribs stretched, as did his short stature as his arms reached upwards. Sanchez stood regarding him for a moment before he decided what to do.

Then he moved like homicidal lightning. The blade jammed into the bottom of Christos's chest before he had much time to realize it. It stung like acid fire. But it hadn't yet come home to roost. Sanchez worked his way down to the diaphragm where the bottom of the chest met with the top of the belly. Then he pushed. And he dug.

There would never be another philosophical statement from Paul Christos. For the remaining moments of his life, his words were reduced to an incoherent sputter. An agonized fight to make sounds through bubbles of blood that rose up his esophagus. "I've always wanted to do this, man. Thanks for the opportunity." Sanchez pushed his hand into the deep wound he had created. The young man's lean, half-nourished form allowed him to dig deep and explore in a way he never had done before. The boy gurgled and choked. It wasn't long before Sanchez found the wet, shapeless organ at the back of the diaphragm that he was looking for. But it seemed like an eternity to Christos as his killer pulled it, wet and wriggling, from his lower chest cavity.

As Christos died, he unknowingly forged his last link with the human race he had so despised. Like virtually every young person who died violently, but lingered long enough to be conscious of it, like fatally wounded soldiers and women who fell prey to sex murderers, he wanted to return to the sanctity of the womb. He might have clearly spoken the word "Mother," if Sanchez had not cut out his liver and forced it back down his throat.

"You hear me, Jason? You hear me, amigo? Take a long look around here, look at what I've done." Before he hastily hit the road, Wayne Sanchez transmitted a mental image of the atrocities committed in this small hotel bathroom. It was like one of the more twisted imaginings of Goya, two human beings broken down to their viscous organic parts.

For his own inspiration, Sanchez fed off of the visions of violence that he believed were emanating from his twisted, tormented friend's mind. The Christos kid had been a diversion, a nasty little waste of time. He was glad to have killed him. For Sanchez knew he had only one true ally in the world, and they were going to declare war, bloody, indiscriminate war, on the human race together.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"I'm real sorry, Ed. It is alright if I call you Ed, isn't it? But it's just truly the worst thing. So horrible." Deputy Spinks was doing his best to commiserate. After all, he had already lost his sheriff, and a good many of his brother deputies. In fact, if you counted all those who hadn't reported back for duty, he was the only law enforcement officer from Craven County left in the region.

"That's okay, Lloyd." Edward North had no such compunction about addressing the deputy with familiarity. But he spoke in the gentle tones of a man trying to recover from shock. Albeit rather mild shock. "It is horrible. There's nothing else to say about it. Just so horrible. I can only hope... only hope that she wasn't conscious for long."

They were in the midst of a big sweep from Cunningham County, Delaware. The log jams that had prevented free travel between the neighboring counties and states had broken down, rather than cleared. As the wave of violence and murder had spread way beyond its original confines, towards the South and the Midwest—even as far, so some said, as the West Coast—so the obstructions that restricted the initial mass exodus now seemed pointless. People were just as likely to be heading into mass murder as escaping from it.

And as countless innocent victims would be left behind, just as many surely lay ahead. One such was Diane Miranda, who had given her life fighting for one terrorized girl. A young woman now officially listed as a missing fugitive.

Spinks took a hurried handwritten statement from Ed as computers and filing cabinets were packed up around them. "As far as we're aware, Ed, Shawna Black and Trey Leblanc are among the primary suspects in Diane's case—maybe even that of Sheriff Casey. Several people have said Black and Leblanc were searching the area for Gretchen Andrews in the twenty-four hours before the murder. That don't make it slam-dunk, but we have every reason to believe that they took Ms Andrews with 'em—account of which, we've had to put her on our wanted list too. Do you have any reason to believe that this may have been someone else other than Black and Leblanc?"

"Do I...?" He buried himself in his thoughts for a moment. Why yes, he did. As far as Edward North was concerned, the only likely suspect was a former acquaintance known to him in the lower depths. A repulsive creature, scarcely human, unless that term had become a euphemism for mongoloid retardation and gross physical deformity.

"No, no..." Wracked by bereavement and despair, Ed seemed to wrack his brains before the hapless, well-meaning deputy. "I can't think of anyone who might have done this. Please keep me informed of any developments in tracing Andrews, Black and Leblanc."

"Sure we will, Ed. You can bank on it." Spinks compassionately grasped his hand. Meanwhile, a state trooper waved impatiently from the door. The deputy's ride was waiting. Ed North, for reasons of his own, had opted to go it alone. "And please... I particularly need to know about the welfare of the Andrews girl. As soon as you hear, anything at all."

"I know, Ed." Spinks was running out the door, racing to catch an army ordinance vehicle before it took off. "I'm aware of your concern for her, truly." And then North was left alone, in a municipal building swiftly vacating itself of people and the trappings that they worked within.

It was decent of Spinks to show such apparently sincere concern. But then, Spinks was a decent dullard. As for his concern for Gretchen Andrews, well, that related solely to the state of her mind. For the extremely neurotic Miss Andrews had gained an insight into the wretched Jason Voorhees that he could only wonder at, but could never envy. It was as if she had become the conduit between the brute's addled mind and the maternal ravings of his deranged mother. If she were to bring Voorhees into plain sight, on Ed's own terms, then Gretchen may yet prove to be the catalyst that would aid him in settling scores. After all, to manhandle a gentleman and abuse his dignity in front of the assembled miscreants of hell was one thing. To bisect his current paramour from head to foot was positively insulting.

***

They had made it to the end of the world, at last. Or that was the way it seemed.

Gretchen, Shawna and Trey huddled together on a cliff top, many hundreds of miles from where the horrors of Friday the 13th had begun. The chill wind swept in from the Atlantic Ocean in the east, and vapor began to visibly form itself around their breath. But they were not alone. In those lower foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, distantly overlooking the Atlantic Coastal Plain of Virginia, they were part of a movement of young (and not so young, sometimes merely cast aside and desperate) people who had headed down the East Coast.

There were natives of New Jersey, New York State, Delaware, Maryland, or some from Virginia itself. Some had come out to the coast from Massachusetts, or even from the closer parts of the Midwest. There were college students and high school kids. There were young trainees from religious seminaries and burger flippers. There were hip-hop, black metal and punk band members. And there were inmates from juvenile reformatories and boot camps, absconded or turned loose in the chaos that reigned. All of them congregated uneasily together because, as Shawna said, "We all want to get out of this with something other than a nervous breakdown or a toetag."

They had all come so far, but could travel no further. As the wave of homicide and violence eclipsed their neighboring states and their hometowns, so it had spread down the southern reaches of the coast, through the Carolinas, through Georgia, and, some said, even as far south as Florida. But the good citizens of North Carolina, suddenly awoken to the mayhem in their midst, had spoken. And their decree was: "No Further."

So all the young coastal refugees headed inland, and took their vehicles up to the highest escarpment that they would climb. Where they could still beg, borrow or steal food and water, and arrange for any vehicle maintenance that was required to keep them mobile, in the very real instance that they might need to flee again. Very soon, an itinerant community had formed. Nervous, uneasy, it was an eclectic social mix that would have set them at each other's throats, causing more murders than it prevented, had their circumstances been different.

But, as Trey said, "Everyone has a common culture these days. It's called survival." The three Forest Greeners were stranded together in an oasis of longhairs, dreadlocks, skinheads and conventional college kids. They all made for uneasy partners, but few complained. To quote Mr Leblanc again, "Better a union of fools than a confederacy of corpses." In their makeshift frontline, among the camper vans and the minibuses, the motorcycles and the mobile homes, each had sought to protect themselves with any conventional weapon they could lay their hands on. There were firearms aplenty, both licensed and illegal, but there were also any improvised weapons they could lay their hands on. Blades of every shape and size. Kung fu rice flails and chicken-wire garrotes. Ammonia sprays and gasoline bombs, primed by cloth fuses to explode like Molotov cocktails.

The first attack wasn't long in coming. But it was an undisciplined assault by a gaggle of creeps and perverts. "Hey baby, wanna play?" was the signal they heard one night. That kind of gloating was now commonplace. It seemed every town within spitting distance of the East Coast was full of this kind of vermin. For the previous month—which now seemed like the greater part of their lifetime to anyone under twenty-one—words like that had precipitated one of two things: brutal rape and murder, to which a much-valued friend or lover would be lost, or a fightback which would claim the life of at least one of a group of compadres.

This time it signaled a massacre. But by the good guys, rather than the hellspawn. It had amazed Trey how the central-casting psycho, the garrulous cretin with the black teeth, had choked on his own blood almost with a trill of joy in his throat. And his scummy brethren that followed were not deterred by his demise. Far from it. They advanced on the unwilling would-be victim who had cut her attacker's throat with relish, even as she called for the campsite to come alive and defend her. Shots were exchanged. Blades were thrown, along with much more frequent curses. The girl was stricken slashed, wounded. But she survived. Unlike her attackers.

"What is it with these people now?" Shawna had asked in the camp-fight's aftermath and the campfire's afterglow. The slaughtered bodies of the intruders lay under tarpaulins, covered up by members of their young vagrant community who did not want to venture out in the dark to dispose of them in the woods, or in the sea. "It's almost like death doesn't mean death to them. Like nothing means anything to them."

"No values, no fears," reflected Trey. "Maybe that's a true definition of 'nihilism." He had no way of knowing how his former classmate, Paul Christos, the self-styled nihilist, had died in great fear and pain. "To you and me, girl, that's the scariest thing: we're stuck out here on the margins of society, but we still have basic moral values. It's frightening to try to understand people who attach value to nothing. Not even their own lives."

It was the greatest degree of empathy that either could share with the other anymore. "You and me, girl." When he spoke like that, they could steal a few glances of affection from each other. Maybe touch each other's hands or hug each other's shoulders in affection. It reminded them there was still some love left, in an existence that left no time for anything but a brutal battle for survival.

"Hey, ninja!" With so many people crammed into such a small space, strangers identified each other by their fighting abilities. Possessing the martial skills to kill was the only way to gain status these days. "Your friend, the silent girl. One of my buddies saw her out walking alone near the bottom of the ravine. You better go haul her ass back."

The kid who spoke reminded Trey of Gerry Nielsen, or any other dependable, unimaginative football type. That he spoke more brusquely was due to their situation. So many of them were thrown together, but few actually knew each other. Neither Shawna nor Trey was aware of what had happened to Gerry and the other Forest Green kids. In the weeks since they had split up, they might have followed any route that would carry them away from where they were. But only the luckiest would ever get home. They didn't even know if the sports players and their girlfriends were alive anymore. They only knew they weren't up there with them, in the foothills of the mountains.

Shawna and Trey ventured out to search for Gretchen. It was a storm-battered night, and the air was flecked with rain blowing in from the Atlantic. Beyond that, they were submerged in the darkness that swathed their lives. The darkness that protected enemy and friend alike, and protected them from the harsh, unmasking daylight.

"Isn't this what they call sympathetic atmosphere?" Shawna was literally chilled to the bone. "Like, we couldn't have a mild, balmy evening to accompany Gretchen losing her mind?" She almost immediately regretted what she had said. But the essence of her complaint was true. Whenever her friend went wandering off into that damaged little world that she inhabited now, she put them not only at the mercy of whatever was out there in the night, but at the mercy of the elements.

"I think I see her down by the ridge." The outline of a slender female was visible on a jutting rock ledge that overlooked the town below, and the distant lights of the bay. They felt their way down the hillside, grabbing at underbrush and shrub as they lost their footing in the dark. All discomfort was repaid as they saw it was definitely her.

"Hey, enough days and nights in the wilderness. They're missing you back at camp, girl." Gretchen recognized her friends immediately. Since she witnessed the atrocity that destroyed Diane Miranda, she had become possessed of a calm that unnerved all those around her. It was as if she saw their fates, however bleak, as inescapable, and had become reconciled to it.

"He's out there somewhere. He's nearby." Neither Shawna nor Trey knew how to answer her. It made no logical sense. They were hundreds of miles from Crystal Lake and Craven County. Apart from some old shaggy dog story about Jason Voorhees once haunting the Hudson Bay, there were no suggestions that he had ever been seen outside of that several mile perimeter.

But that wasn't how Gretchen saw it. "He lives off the violence in our souls," she had told them. "All our hate and spite and fear. He feels it. He's a product of it. He's not a person anymore, not the way that you or I are, he's all the bad things in our nature. If we think of violence, even if it's just because we live in fear of it, then he's never far away." The way she spoke, it seemed as if her crazy insight had made her more than a little sympathetic to the bastard.

But that night, there was truly something in the air that bore out her madness. "C'mon, Gretchen, we have to get back now," Trey insisted. "At least we can scrounge something to eat and take a piss without having to look over our shoulders." The girl refused to move. The wind howled, a mournful moan on its icy breeze.

"Don't worry, son. There's no one out here who can hurt you any more." Gretchen faced the elements, not a tremble from her slender form as her uncombed hair flew this way and that in the breeze. The strangeness of her words was compounded by an echo in her voice. It was if another, older woman was repeating every word that she said.

"Okay, enough of this shit. We're going back!" Shawna reached out a bullying maternal hand. It shook her to be rebuffed by Gretchen so violently, her usually gentle hand pushing her away almost as hard as if it were a punch.

"There are people on their way to this place who call themselves your enemies, Jason. Stay away if you fear them, son. But they can do you no harm. Truly. Mommy wouldn't lie to you." Gretchen seemed to be trying to summon his presence out of the elements. To Shawna, it was plain insanity. To Trey, it was something more fearful.

Full moonlight shone on the gnarled, rocky ridge of the hillside. It may have been the atmosphere of this place playing tricks on the imagination, but Trey believed the light created faces out of the natural rock formations. Twisted, grotesque faces.

Gretchen walked toward the rocks. "Come back to mommy, Jason. She's waited such a long time." To Shawna, it was proof of her friend's clinical insanity. To Trey, it was something inexplicable. He didn't buy into the idea that Jason Voorhees was just another vicious killer like the rest—albeit mentally retarded, deformed, and possessed of a terrifying strength. That was the way Shawna saw him, through the eyes of a surviving victim who desperately desired revenge. But Gretchen, or whatever insanity was taking over her mind, was right. He was a violent primeval force.

"Mommy won't let them kill you, son. Whoever tries to hurt you is her enemy..." It was no longer Gretchen's voice. No longer her mind. The wild landscape was no longer something natural, born out of its own surroundings. It was now the interior of her mind. And the rocks were developing humanoid features.

"Leblanc, this is insanity in the first degree. Help me take her down, we don't have to injure her but we have to get back to that fucking camp..." He was silent. Frozen. He saw things happening that Shawna couldn't perceive.

"Say, what the fuck is it with you? Have you completely lost your guts?" Maybe he had. It was difficult to act without hesitation, without procrastination, anymore. He knew that they were no longer dealing with earthly forces, that it was futile to tussle with anything so far outside the realm of earthly logic.

But then Shawna saw it too. If she had ever seen the images that the moonlight made upon the rocks, it had been dismissed as illusion. But this was hyper-real, all too substantial.

"Oh son, you've come back! Your mother has waited so long to be with you again." That aging, husky voice was not Gretchen's. But it was her form they saw kneeling to kiss the gloved hand of the figure who had not been there only moments before. It was Gretchen who took the hand of Jason and led him toward them.

***

Down in Florida, the march of the hellions continued unchecked. While some streets in the north of the state resembled hell on earth, the trickledown effect into its more salubrious regions was mostly down to one man. The gangs and the crazy people were up against a war. Like all the other states caught up in the exodus from hell, its law enforcement bodies had established a draconian regime to bring chaos under control. But here, they fought back even harder. Heads were broken and confessions extracted under beating. Where small groups of people refused to submit to arrest or search, police gunfire could be random or arbitrary.

Few surviving Florida citizens saw reason to disagree with their legal and judicial guardians. When violent crime escalated to the level of urban warfare, all anyone wanted was survival.

These were the perfect conditions for Wayne Sanchez, one undernourished, vaguely frail-looking dude on his own, to make his solitary way to the Daytona Beach neighborhood. While cops blamed the mutilation of the unidentified white youth and the Hispanic man in his hotel room on gangs, the true perpetrator was able to slip unnoticed into another town.

So had begun the Devil Boy's revenge. The random all-out attacks on the population he considered responsible for his previous arrest. And this time there were few restraints. In one forty-eight hour period he hit a small hotel and rooming house on consecutive nights. The images replayed vividly in his head: naked girl with gun in mouth; black guy with knife in the nape of his neck, causing a wild spasm; one double-header with some chick forced to make love to her boyfriend at gunpoint with pillowcases on their head while Sanchez strangled him with a rope, then blew her brains out; an all-out assault on a family home, shooting dead wife, husband and old grandma as they worriedly watched the 11 O'Clock News. All bore his signature. Some were stabbed, scarred, imprinted with his chosen words of satanic wisdom. Others had diabolic signs and slogans painted in their blood on the walls.

If it hadn't been for what they saw as an outbreak of ultraviolent gang warfare, the authorities might have concentrated their efforts on finding the new Devil Boy. As it was, no one saw any sense in putting out an APB on anyone resembling the recently executed Wayne Sanchez. The freedom left him loose to commit more crimes. But the lack of recognition was bringing him down. He wanted to rock Daytona Beach, let them know Sanchez was back. But everyone's attention was divided all over the state of Florida. A mass shooting here, a gang rape there. What difference did one more berserk serial killer make in such a world?

On a palm-tree lined side road leading to the now deserted beach area, Sanchez stopped and stared at the sunny blue horizon. "Where the fuck are you, Jason, when I need you?" His innermost thoughts were like a radio broadcast to the man-creature he regarded as his partner in crime. "We could destroy this place together. We could be like conquering kings. It wouldn't matter if these motherfuckers sent us straight back to hell. We could come right back anytime we wanted to. We'd teach 'em the true meaning of fear."

If Sanchez had been able to concentrate on something other than self-pity, he might have seen the visions of violence currently playing out in Jason's mind. Might have seen him under attack by a whole coterie of wild kids. Slashed with knives and hacked with axes. Flailing out as he was attacked by male and female alike, with that crazy, long-legged bitch who'd been there the night they erupted from Crystal Lake crawling up his back, pulling at his mask and slicing at his twisted ear with a machete.

Then he would have seen the kids who already lay upon the ground. The grunger dude with the long black hair, whose nose ring had been ripped out by Jason along with the rest of his nose. The pretty girl whose small, oval face had been crushed like a peach in the palm of Jason's hand. He would have seen Trey Leblanc return to the scene of the attack, after what he considered a tactical defeat and what Shawna Black considered cowardice. Would have heard him scream, "Get the fuck out of the way! I'm gonna blow him to fucking hell!" as Leblanc tried to take him down with a semi-automatic hunting rifle.

But Jason kept coming forward. Stung, bleeding, wounded in an eyesocket where the eyeball had ceased to exist. He could bleed and he could suffer, but he had died too many times in his strange half-existence to be halted by mundane weapons. Jason walked on where others died.

***

On the backstreets of Miami, Sanchez hid his disillusionment and disappointment in a bottle of Hennessy cognac swigged from a brown paper bag. He had come to terrorize the state. He had come to do the devil's work. But with the paranoid cops giving him too much heat, he had to try to merge back into the Hispanic community. To be a nobody, with not a single headline to his name.

It almost defied belief. He, Wayne Ricardo Sanchez, had returned from hell, wreaking more mayhem on the streets of Florida than he had done even in the days preceding his arrest and conviction. And no one in the media had noticed. For all the risks he had taken, all the atrocities he had committed, everything had been swamped by a huge mud tide of murder that had spread out all the way from Crystal Lake.

It was enough to make him believe there was no justice at all in this world anymore.

"Sorry, bro, I didn't see you standing there."

It was okay. Normally, some fool colliding with him on the street was enough to make him finger his handgun and trail the guy back home. But this dude, he said sorry straight away and he sounded nervous. What the hell, let it pass.

He probably felt as down as Sanchez did. It was never easy when there was a crackdown in the ghetto. Cops would always clamp down on the minorities, even if a number of them were from that same racial group. If the neighborhood was perceived as being a Mexican area, or a black area, whatever, then it was an unwritten assumption that it was probably a Mex or a black who had pulled the crime. For once, Sanchez felt a little sympathy with his fellow man.

"Hey, you wanna hit off this bottle, Ese? Take the edge off the blues, man. It's okay." He wiped the open bottleneck with the paper bag. "I ain't got AIDS or nothin'."

His fellow Hispanic, older than him by about ten years, courteously and cautiously accepted the bottle. Sanchez watched him swallow back the mellow slow burn of the brandy. The guy had pouchy, sorrowful eyes that made his face seem fleshier than it was. His hair was very dark but combed back and thinning, and he had these crow's feet lines around the face that made him look like one of those guys who ages by the day, his life full of care and worry.

But more than that, Sanchez recognized this guy somehow. He was familiar, but it was a long way off in time. "Scuse me, don't I know you?" It wasn't Sanchez, but the other guy who asked the question. And yes, all at once, Sanchez could see that he had known him. Everything came back to him clearly, nearly twelve years on.

Jose Miguel de Figueroa. The leader of that motherfucking vigilante group that made an arrest on the Daytona Devil Boy. The group that almost tore him to pieces. Jose Miguel de Figueroa. One of the chief witnesses at the capital trial of Wayne Sanchez. Jose Miguel de Figueroa. Elder brother to one of the Devil Boy's original victims, some cooze he'd picked up off the street and left pieces of in garbage cans.

"No, not me, I don't think I ever set eyes on you. You got the wrong hombre, man."

But the guy wouldn't avert his eyes. "Yes I do... Yes I do." He kept repeating it as if he was trying to convince himself. "I thought I'd put you away. I thought they'd finally killed you."

"Whoa man, back off." Sanchez channeled his nervousness into indignation. "Lay off that weird shit, I ain't got the patience for it." But the guy wasn't going to let his stare or his grip release the familiar stranger. In the bustle, one tried to stick to the other like glue and the other tried to push him away. The Hennessy bottle smashed to the floor. The sound of breaking glass attracted the attention of every passer-by moving up and down that long street, almost empty of traffic.

"I'm tellin' you to go fuck yourself now!" Sanchez was pushing the guy into the curb, but the fool was pushing right back. The younger man tried to spring his gun from inside his vest, but there wasn't enough room between the two of them to draw. And they were attracting a crowd.

"Help! Help!" As Sanchez stuck his forefinger into de Figueroa's eye, his enemy fought back by extending two fingers into the criminal's nostrils, pushing back his nose across his face. "It's Sanchez! The Devil Boy! Help me stop him!"

"What kind of fool are you, man? You think I've just come roaring back outta hell or somethin'?" But that's exactly what the older man did believe. And there was no one so young on the street that they hadn't heard of the killer who once put the entire Hispanic community under suspicion.

"Fuck it, man!" The Magnum Sanchez had been carrying went hurtling into the gutter. He tried to grab for it, but some wiseass kicked it back with his foot, and another picked it up from the ground. He had the crowd against him.

"In the name of the Holy Virgin!" Sanchez was almost gouging the guy's right eye out with his left hand. But still the fool wouldn't let go. "This is El Diablo! The one who brought murder to our streets! Don't let him get away!"

Sanchez found hands and fists poking at him. Some other fool had enough guts to keep delivering little kicks. All of their stupid faces spoke hatred of him, both men and women. They acted like a lynch mob.

"Go back to hell where you come from, Diablo, and take all your dirty killers with you!" The red-haired woman was slightly built, thin, but her rage spoke for all of them. She was guided merely by fear and superstition, but never had such an irrational belief been so well founded. In their state of apocalyptic fervor, they were all ready to believe that the Daytona Beach Devil Boy had returned and was responsible for the bloody chaos breaking out all around them.

Sanchez was no longer able to hang onto de Figueroa. He needed his hands to try to deflect some of the blows that rained down upon him. "Dirty stinking devil!" "Don't let the filthy pig get away!" "Asesino!" He had become the scapegoat for all their fear and all their hate. And yet it was true that, if he had had the power, he would have annihilated every last goddamn one of them.

"Let go of me, asshole! I'll fuckin' kill you!" But all his aggression, all his hate, just brought more of the same in return. With such a scant, overstretched police presence, there was no one to come to his aid this time.

He was going under. The sheer weight of bodies, and the raining kicks and blows, were bringing him to his knees.

His outstretched hands could not stop him from hitting the sidewalk. Then he felt himself being dragged further into the street by his hair, his bruised scalp bleeding as clumps of it were torn from his head.

"Don't let him get away this time! Don't let him do to us what he did before!" Above him, he could hear de Figueroa. Just what was the guy's problem? Did he think he was better than Sanchez, just because he lined up among the sheep and not the wolves? In his panic and his pain, he found himself trying to cling to the philosophy of that little Christos creep. If they were going to hurt him bad, he needed to believe in himself to see it through. Needed to believe he was superior to the people who might kill out of anger instead of for sport.

Then, as the crowd opened up around him, with his face flat down on the sidewalk, he knew he was going to die again. He felt like begging for mercy, but knew that no one was of a mind to offer it to him. That's when the first kick came down upon the back of his head. "Bastard! You think they're going to save your ass again? Tell us all that they've killed you when you're still on the streets? Forget it!"

It was de Figueroa's foot that ground his face into the concrete. The dude really took it all too personally. "Die! Fucking bastard, die!" The cries were coming from all over the crowd. It could have been anyone who called for his blood. The mob were stomping his face into the sidewalk.

Fighting to stay conscious but wanting to be rid of the pain, his swollen lips murmured quietly as they all bore down upon him. He called to the devil he had found to be absent, to the saints and the savior that he had abused, to help him.

"Ahhhh!" Jose Miguel de Figueroa, brother of the murdered Juanita Christina de Figueroa, who had become a virtual saint to her family, grunted with the exertion as he brought his foot down hard. Most of the crowd stepped back as they saw the top of the Devil Boy's head glisten with blood, then start to cave in. But de Figueroa would not be deterred. As he stomped hard again, the crowd heard a crack, as a small part of Sanchez's crushed brain squished out of his skull and into the gutter.

"Jason... Jason..." As he died for second time, the Devil Boy's plea went out to somebody who was no longer listening.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They were in the last ditch. With so many of their friends and comrades slaughtered, no real hope could be said to remain. As the relentless, deathless Jason advanced upon them, there could only be said to be one chance of ultimate survival. But neither Shawna nor Trey was prepared to abandon their vulnerable friend. Even if she, and the invading personality that lurked within her mind, were all that this monstrous force of nature was now interested in.

"Fuck him, Trey, let's do it! Let's take him down! We're only going to get one chance—even if he kills us, we can save Gretchen." Shawna was hysterical. But the more convinced she was of her imminent extinction, the greater her bravery.

Maybe two dozen people had tried to take out Jason within the last hour, whether they were gangsters or from their own neo-vagrant community. Now a great many littered the hillside, discarded like grotesquely broken toys. Of those who had survived, only Shawna, Trey and Gretchen had not already run for their lives. Now, they could not afford to turn their backs on Jason as they groped their way backwards up the hillside. As they twisted their ankles in unseen holes, or became snagged on entangling vines or weeds.

"It's crazy, Shawna. Our only chance is to get out of here. Just run and keep running!" Trey no longer saw any hope at all. For too long, since they had busted out of jail, it had seemed to him that they were living in a nightmare way beyond their control, in which all their efforts were irrelevant. They could be heroic, or they could be cowardly. None of it made any difference.

"Please don't hurt him... Please don't hurt my boy. He doesn't mean any harm. All he wants to do is cleanse the world of the things that feel dirty. All those things that the nasty children want to upset him with." That stereophonic/schizophrenic voice echoed from Gretchen's mouth, as the killer who desired to reduce her friends to offal ascended toward them, maybe twenty feet below at most. All was insanity.

"What's happened to you?" Shawna spat the accusation at Trey. "Isn't there anything left worth living for? Anything worth dying for?" Her words were self-righteous and her eyes were wild.

He had no time to answer. The brutal hands of the childlike mass murderer reached upward for them. In any moment death might be upon them. Whether or not their lives were worth living would become an irrelevance.

Then Shawna screamed. She rose to her haunches and gave out a cry that was not defeated, not the despair of some wretched little girl who felt terrified because she had no big, strong man to take a stand for her. All her rage and her disgust at everything they had been through came roaring out of her in one almighty scream, splitting the night.

With a last look at Trey and Gretchen, she opened the twelve-inch blade of the hunting knife that was one of their final remaining possessions. Then, holding its glint up to the gleam of the starlight, she turned and jumped down the incline of the hill. Towards the murderous beast in the black welding mask whose grip was approaching their ankles. Toward his sloped, rounded but powerful shoulders that ungracefully caught her in their grasp.

Toward the dark eyehole of the mask, where the end of the blade was just about able to penetrate, slicing into the empty socket from out of which the man-thing still perversely stared.

And she fell downward. Down to the lower ridge, from which Jason had emerged. Tumbling down, locked together, onto the rock ledge and over it. Down below, into the unkempt foliage that ascended its way up the side of the hill.

And then they were gone. After a few moments of frenetic violence, it was as if neither of them had ever lived. Yet the verdant outgrowths and distended roots that lined the hillside stretched down a steady gradient. It was no sheer drop. Both of them must still have been there somewhere.

Trey scuttled down the hillside, kicking up earth, leaving Gretchen stuck at the point where they had ascended. His heart beat so fast he could feel each violent palpitation shake his body up to the top of his cranium. All the pain of all the loss and all of the battles for survival, all the false hope and the despair, were eclipsed by this one act. In one sudden, mad moment, Shawna had taken herself and Jason out, just like she insisted they should. In the blink of an eye, they were both taken out of existence.

In Trey's state of despair, he might have rejoiced. If the boogeyman was gone, then he and Gretchen could cut and run. But if Shawna disappeared from the planet then she epitomized loss. She was the woman who exemplified endurance and hope to him, even when their relationship had reached his lowest ebb. She was the very apex of his relations with the human race, her very presence intimating that there might always be a reason to live. Might always be a reason to hope. If she could just disappear into the ether of a desolate hillside, then life had been proven meaningless.

After so much conflict, it was eerie to take in all the silence around them. As Trey looked over the ridge into the green nothingness, all that could be heard on the wind was the distant shriek of a night bird. Until a sudden surge of movement hurtled out of the underbrush below the ridge. First a hand reached out to him. Not an extension of friendship, but a vile, subhuman thing couched in a cheap woolen glove. Then the panting specimen whose body it belonged to came climbing out of the shrub. It extended its hand again, but this time it proffered a gift. An item that made Trey sick to the very depths of his soul.

When he would not accept the object, Jason hurled it up onto the ridge. It was a scalp. Or rather, a "scalping," in the manner of the old white bounty hunters whose barbarities were adopted in revenge by belligerent Native American tribes.

Ringed by an angry red top layer of human flesh, the crimped and layered brown hair dripped blood like a wig worn by someone on the guillotine. Of the few little items that were still attached to the human hair, Trey recognized one of them as the Egyptian Ankh cross he'd bought from an East Village street market. A symbol of life after death. This was the scalp of Shawna, torn fibrous and bloody from a body still living at the time of the mutilation. The body that was almost certainly dead by now.

Trey dropped her earthly remnant and withdrew. Scurried up the hill as fast as his shaking, clambering hands and his feet would carry him. Snapped at the hallucinating Gretchen and dragged her along by her wrists. Got out as quickly, and as far away from the scene as his horrorstruck brain would allow.

As they ran for the trailer where they had been allowed to take shelter, Trey had no compunction about throwing the two sleeping young men they bunked down with out of the door. He dragged the locks of their slumbering heads till they moved, not quite of their own accord. They could stay and meet Jason, if they insisted on it. He and Gretchen were not going to cede him that advantage.

Then, tears still welling from his eyes, he turned the ignition key and gunned the gas pedal. "We're going back. We're going right back to the beginning," he told Gretchen. Though there was little that could break through her darkly fogged mind, she could recognize his fear. Sense the cowardice that had haunted him in recent days. Yet still, she understood what he meant. And how necessary it was.

***

As he hurtled down the freeway, it was so much easier to get back than it had been to get away. Straight up the Interstate, through Maryland, Delaware and, finally, NJ. Craven County was full of ghost towns, where the ghosts were all off on hiatus. There were no roadblocks, no security checks. Everybody had wanted to get out of the place, not to get back in. But now, in the pre-dawn desolation, before the sun had started to come up, it was empty even of the murderers and human monsters who caused the great exodus. They too had gone on their way, or followed those honest citizens who made their escape from the place, extending the "Friday the 13th crime-wave" to whatever distant state the exodus had headed towards.

It bothered Trey's conscience that he had stolen the main mobile trailer onsite. It had belonged neither to him nor Shawna or Gretchen, but it was relied on for shelter by many of the people on the site. It had also been a source of light and heat, the big electrical generator it carried helping to provide power to people who had become a subculture of nomads. But it was too bad. Everyone was on his or her own now. Trey's needs were more pressing. They panted at his hind with the urgency of a hellhound on his trail. In the last reckoning, nobody was going to be able to say Trey Leblanc failed. Nobody would be able to say he was a coward.

"Don't weep anymore for Miss Shawna." Gretchen spoke in the two-toned voice that was driving him almost as insane as she now clearly was. "She did what she did because she wanted to. She didn't have to attack Jason. He wouldn't have killed her if she didn't."

"Will you cut that shit out?" Was Gretchen so totally divorced from reality that she really believed she was Mother Voorhees? It felt as if she was driving Trey to the very limits of his own sanity. But perhaps, he told himself as he turned off the main road and onto the dirt track that led to Crystal Lake, he was already there.

The lake was tranquility itself. There was not a soul anywhere. The night air was cool and the waters were still. The nocturnal wildlife had not deserted this accursed place, chirruping or calling out oblivious to the stench of human wickedness.

"We're back there, aren't we?" Just for one moment, Gretchen spoke with her own voice, not in the imagined tones of some long-dead madwoman. "This is where it all began."

"Yeah, yeah, we're back there all right." He studiously ignored her, occupied solely by what he had to do. As he revved the engine of the old camper and charged its battery, so the power generator received a further boost. As he exited the trailer section he struggled to carry the generator with him, entangling himself in its long wire leads, before scraping it to the ground in relief.

Gretchen was already drifting aimlessly around the fields surrounding the lake, like the lost soul she now was. He made no effort to rein her in, letting her go her own way. She gave him a concerned parting glance, speaking silently, but he answered her with words. "Bless you, Gretchen. May God, or whatever is out there in the universe, guide you and protect you.

There was nothing more to be said. He had work to do, to make sure everything was in fully functional order. And Gretchen? By bringing her back there, Trey knew he was chancing fate. But if that was what their destinies had in store, then she could no more evade it than he could.

He continued to work, tweaking fussily at leads and power connections whose purpose he was only dimly aware of. If anything happened to Gretchen, he would hear it. Though he would probably be as powerless to protect her as he had been with Shawna.

"What did I say, Jason? Didn't mommy always promise that she would come back and find him if Jason was a good boy?" So it began. Trey didn't even look around to check whether she spoke to herself, or whether the murderous presence had manifested itself. As they had all learned the hard way, if Jason plagued your mind then his form could follow you around. Trey continued to mess with components whose purpose he was unsure of.

"This is a place of peace, Jason. Put all the hurt and all the unhappiness out of your mind. That's all in the past. The past can only hurt you if you keep bad memories. Forget all those people who hurt you."

All those people who hurt you? Trey didn't allow his disbelief at this madness to deter him from what he had to do. He worked manically to ensure the generator would keep on pumping, and that the long cables he attached were fitted to the machine's main power outlets.

"Remember all the good times we had when it was just you and mommy, back at Camp Crystal Lake during the summer, when mommy worked as a cook? Forget what came later, Jason. It can't hurt you anymore. Come back to mommy, Jason. Come back to your golden childhood. Mommy's waiting for you there."

Jason's presence was palpable, though Trey didn't dare look back. He just kept working regardless, tying the ends of the power cables to the belt straps around his black jeans. He had no time to procrastinate. No time to think. No time to doubt himself. The consequences for him were just one more horrific detail, out of many.

"Come with mommy back to the lake. We're going to wash ourselves in the waters, just like Jesus was cleansed by John the Baptist. We're going to wash away everything horrible that happened afterwards, and go right back to where we were."

There he stood. The thing. The half-human. The freak. The murderous mistake of nature. Trey's contempt for Jason was now stronger than the crazed Gretchen's sympathy for him. But the creature truly believed Gretchen to be his mother. Back when she was in the full bloom of youth. Back when she gave birth to an abnormal child that would grow into a monster.

Trey didn't know how truly Gretchen believed herself to be Mrs Voorhees, but he was grateful for what she was doing. Somewhere, beneath the shattered psyche and the multiple personality, Gretchen Andrews was playing out her own heroic role.

Jason removed his solid black mask and revealed his face to her. It was not the triumphal act it had been when he had killed. This was an act of trust, an act of devotion. To Trey, his appearance was more repulsive than ever. He was wounded, mutilated, his flesh decaying. In his enemy's eyes, Jason's deformities mirrored the loathsomeness of his soul.

Never could Trey have imagined that he would gain so much satisfaction from harming a fellow living being. Or from committing an act of self-destruction.

Gretchen and Jason had already waded into the water. She stayed in the shallows and reached out her arms to him like she was bestowing her holy blessing. But Jason went in deeper, as far as his height would allow him to. He submerged himself and then re-emerged from the water, again and again. He was bathing in the waters of memory. Of childhood. Of death and of resurrection.

Trey took the plunge. Not even a hundred yards down the bank from both of them, he became visible to Jason at last. It was too late. The power cables he wore created an instant short circuit between the water and the electrical generator. Terrified, but determined, Trey's body began to burn. In his agony, he felt the fifty thousand volts tearing through his body keep rising, due to the catalyst of the water. His impulse to tear the cables free from his body was negated by the pain. There was nothing to do but play his part now. By the time the young man had sunk downwards into the water, his skin burned and his heart stopped by electric shock, he had set the western side of Crystal Lake on fire.

An electrical shockwave of five hundred thousand volts rippled swiftly through the water. As the burning sensation hit Gretchen, she almost passed out. Semi-conscious, she was still able to scramble toward the muddy bank, her face partly submerged in the burning fluid. But Jason had waded in deeper. He was engulfed in an erupting sheet of flame on water.

Crystal Lake began to transmogrify. It was no longer a place of fluid tranquility, or even a lake in which a massive electrical charge had sent a shock through the water. It started to burn, as if it were a solid combustible object. Jason felt the heat and started to weep silent tears. His mom had betrayed him. After all these years, after all her promises. The lake's transforming waters had not taken him back to childhood, to the days before the staff at Camp Crystal Lake left the handicapped boy to drown. They had sucked him into hell.

But this was not the chill wasteland he had grown used to, before the waters of Crystal Lake aw his second resurrection. As the water burned, so it became more solid. Its rippling textures swelled into recognizably human shapes. Where only moonlight reflections had been, there were now agonized faces. Water became fire, as if in some strange medieval act of alchemy, and Crystal Lake became a traditional medieval image of hell.

It rose to the banks with screaming, burning bodies. Trey Leblanc had been granted the mercy of death, and had long since sunk into the waters. But there were no waters now. There was only a vast mass of conjoined roasting flesh, hundreds upon hundreds of damned souls who tore at each other, or at themselves, in their agony.

This was a hellfire they had never known. Amidst all the damned who were returned to the place of their former resurrection, the immolating form of Charles Westenhaus flailed and lashed at all the other burning bodies so insufferably close, but could do nothing to alleviate his own torment.

And in the center of them all, Jason Voorhees began to feel his already rotten, fungal flesh burn away. His earthly form, so seemingly indestructible, was incinerating, melting. As he was sucked under into the pools of flame, the murderous masses he had once led clawed at him in their ingratitude, with their burning hands, until the ashes of his skin were torn from his bones.

CHAPTER TWENTY

For many months that followed Friday the 13th of January, healing was a slow process of recovery for many people, on so many levels. Gretchen Andrews was doing particularly well. At the psychiatric ward of St John the Divine's Hospital, in her home state of Connecticut, the doctors and nurses had helped her through the shock and trauma of her ordeal, to the extent where they now believed she was ready to go home.

"Will you be needing me to help with your ablutions and your cosmetics today, Gretchen?"

"No thanks, sister. I'm quite taken with the idea of doing things for myself. It's a novelty, for one thing."

Sometimes it was nice to get a refusal. Sister Magda smiled on her charge. The young woman had survived such a terrible time. But then, so had so many. What had made young Miss Andrews so challenging was that, besides the trauma of witnessing the deaths of her friends, there were other psychiatric issues to contend with. The main one, by far, was the psychotic delusion that she was the mother of one of the many murderers blamed by the press for the recent crime-wave, the wave of homicide and violence that had stretched almost nationwide.

She was a poor thing, to be sure, wealthy home or not. But with a combination of anti-psychotic drugs, therapy and counseling, the dear girl was finally coming through. Of course, then there had been the plastic surgery and the skin grafts. But that, too, would heal in its time, both physically and mentally. Though some scars, it was true, took more time to heal than others.

***

In the ladies' bathroom, Gretchen took a lock of the long blonde hair she now wore as a fringe, and moved it away from her left brow. Not bad now. Maybe no beauty contest winner, but what was it Shawna used to say to her? Don't worry about glamming up when the rest of us don't have your natural advantages. Do the rest of us a favor and ugly down.

If she could only have seen her now.

Smiling to herself, she winced and looked in the mirror at her face full-on. She had never been a girl who used much makeup, but these days there were factors it would take more than a little foundation cream to fix.

It unsettled her more than she thought it would, to look at herself without any doctors or counsellors beside her. She flinched. Her face looked far worse than she had led herself to believe. Far worse.

In fact, she could only force herself to look at some of the more unpleasant aspects one by one. The deformity of the skin that had to be rebuilt around the third degree burns she received from the electric shock. The discoloration that had to be covered over with cosmetics. And then there were those hideous little patches of fungus that filled some of the pores of her skin. She had never even noticed those before.

But then, as she suddenly realized, this was not her face.

The mirror cracked as the brutal, festering hands broke through the glass to grab at her. "No! No! NO!" She shook her head from side to side, but the image of Jason would not go away. She tried to fight, but his grip was too strong. In horror, she realized she was being dragged toward the broken glass, its shards promising further damage to the face that the nurses told her was still naturally beautiful.

But, as she was dragged into the mirror by her hair, there was no pain, merely a sensation of lightness. Of being taken out of her physical surroundings. Of freefall.

Gretchen imagined herself being drawn rapidly toward the ground, and then into the very earth itself. But her descent did not end there. She found herself tumbling slowly, as if toward the gravitational pull of the earth's core. Down through vast underground vistas of rock. Mountain, cliffs and ravines. Down past escarpments and plateaus that contained hundreds and thousands of bickering, arguing, fighting people.

As she descended to the very bottom of their pit of misery, she thought of a line from her old literary studies: "I had not thought death had undone so many."

As she fell to the bottom, she could see the baying faces that waited for her. The screaming faces of the killers and the rapists who had terrorized her and her friends. The gloating face of that sleazebag Ed North. And the terrible, hideous visage of Jason Voorhees.

***

When they finally brought her round on the bathroom floor, there were all kinds of recriminations in the air. While the nurse who had administered the smelling salts felt her pulse, her consultant, Dr Anthony, berated Sister Magda for allowing her to tend to her face on her own.

"God knows, we have enough trauma patients without making matters worse! The papers tell us the crime rate has miraculously fallen, the streets are safe again, but we'll be dealing with the fallout from that little statistical 'blip' for as long as most of us are here."

Gretchen felt sorry for the shame-faced sister. It truly wasn't her fault. Neither of them could have known what she saw as she looked into the mirror.

As she was helped to her feet, they tried to shield her from her own reflection, but she wanted to see. The mirror was no longer broken, and it was hard for them to stop her regarding her own face with interest. Her own face this time, not the one she had seen before.

The medical staff backed off and let her look when they realized she was coming to terms with it. She was still a pretty young woman, after all, as they were always telling her. It was just that the burned half of her face was symmetrically distorted. The damage to her facial muscle and tissue was such that, even after all their efforts to rebuild it, one eye still remained lower than that on the untouched side. It looked, she could now tell herself with a complete lack of squeamishness, just like Jason himself.

Gretchen could still hear the wailing of those imprisoned in hell alongside Jason. She had received a vision of damnation that would never leave her now. It almost made her feel sorry for Jason Voorhees all over again. But he was an elemental force embodying pure hate, which could never really die.

I think I can understand you now, Jason, she told him within the privacy of her own mind. After all, when I look in the mirror, I can see that you're still a part of me.

Table of Contents

- Prologue
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty