Lincoln Loud woke from a nightmare he couldn't remember just as the first fiery light of dawn touched the eastern sky. His head throbbed and his eyes ached. He rolled onto his side and tried to drift off, but images from his dream came back to him: Luna's face melting like candlewax, Lola's hair burning, his mother and father lying on the ground, blood gushing from their mouths and noses. He squeezed his eyes closed so tightly that he saw bursts and whorls of color.

They were on a plane, he remembered, and something was wrong. There was fire and smoke in the aisles, and the sound of screaming and sobbing surrounded him. He remembered his heart slamming against his ribcage. He remembered trying to find his sisters in a dense cloud of smoke, but he couldn't: He fumbled and stumbled around, until he walked through a door and fell. The last thing he saw before he woke was the ground rushing up to meet him.

I'm up, he told his hateful brain. He swung his feet out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute. His mouth was dry and the side of his face was crusted with drool.

Scratching the back of his neck, he got up and went to the bathroom. He laid his hand on the knob but stopped: From inside, the shower hissed.

When you have ten sisters, there is a clearly defined morning schedule. Lori, who was always up the earliest, was first, and she stepped into the shower at 6:00am during the school year, and 7:00am during the summer. Lincoln didn't know what time it was exactly, but he knew it was much, much earlier than seven.

He knocked. "Hello?"

"Yeah?" It was Leni. Hm. She usually slept late.

"I have to use the bathroom."

"Okay. Come in."

Holding a hand up to block his view of the shower curtain, Lincoln went into the bathroom and lifted the toilet lid.

"You're up early," she said.

He peed. "Yeah. I couldn't sleep. What are you doing up?"

"I have a date tonight," she chirped.

"A date?" Lincoln searched his brain, but couldn't remember anyone mentioning Leni having a date.

"Yeah, with the cutest guy," Leni said. "I met him at the mall the other day."

That's nice. "Why are you taking a shower now then?"

"Well, duh, everyone knows that the earlier you shower, the cleaner you'll be."

Lincoln opened his mouth to reply that that's not how it worked (at least to his understanding), but stopped. Leni was...well, Leni. She wasn't exactly the brightest blub in the shed. Then again, when you got right down to it, neither was he.

"Well...good luck."

"Thanks, Lincy!"

The hall was still empty. No one else was awake. Lincoln went quietly back to his room, shut the door, and stretched out on top of the bed. He figured he'd hop in the shower when Leni was done. He started to feel drowsy, though, and dropped off, coming awake sometime later to the sound of slamming doors. The sun had fully risen, and he could hear taking and footsteps in the hall. He slipped out of bed, and stopped when he saw movement outside the window. A black car was parked in the yard. Two men in military uniforms talked to a police officer. That was strange. Why was the military here?

Unless the plane was military.

Lincoln's heart skipped a beat. He wondered if it was carrying anything dangerous. In a movie he saw once, a military plane crashed and released some kind of virus that turned people into zombies.

That was just a movie, though, right?

Lincoln turned his head to hear their conversation better, but caught only snippets.

"...not here..."

"...found ASAP."

The cop finally nodded, and the men turned, one of them looking up and locking eyes with Lincoln. Lincoln's heart sputtered. The man was tall and broad with deep set eyes, iron gray hair, and skin like cracked leather. He looked mean. Real mean.

Lincoln slunk away from the window and waited a long time for them to leave.

-2-

General William Howell sat in the back of the government sedan, a file forgotten in his lap. He gazed out the window as the driver navigated away from the crash site. He drummed his fingers unthinkingly on his knee. It was a habit left over from his youth. The Military could drill a lot of things into (and out of) you, but some things could withstand anything.

Next to him, Frederick Teal, Commander of The Shop, a secret government research apparatus, stared straight ahead, his arms crossed over his broad chest and his deep-set eyes boring into the passenger seat head rest. Teal was probably the only person in the world who scared Howell. Howell didn't know if there was an Illuminati or a shadow government or anything like that, but he knew there were organizations and individuals who existed outside the law. Teal was one of them. He had been in charge of The Shop since 2001, and while Howell couldn't testify to anything, he'd heard a lot of talk about what went on there. Human experiments, mainly, things having to do with psychic research, parapsychology, and extraterrestrials. Teal answered only to the President, and each one, from Bush to Obama to Trump, gave him free reign.

Not only did Teal wield endless power, but he was also quick to anger. Howell had known many men like Teal. They were short-tempered, extremely focused, and didn't mind breaking a few eggs along the way. He believed the clinical name was "sociopath."

Chewing his lower lip, Teal said, "It's been over eight hours since the crash. Voorhees could be anywhere. If I had to guess, I'd say he's in the woods." He turned to Howell. "I'm calling in a group of my boys. You call in some of yours. I want the roads in and out of this town closely watched, and I want men in the woods."

Howell nodded. He picked up the file and opened it. Inside was a top secret memo relating to Jason Voorhees, the Crystal Lake Slasher. When he first read it, he was sure it was a hoax. Unkillable? Undead? Virtually unstoppable? Voorhees wasn't a man, he was a fucking Predator. But Teal said it was all true, and Howell knew Teal wasn't a man who played games.

The Shop had been in possession of Jason Voorhees for five years. Seal Team 6 (the same elite group that took down Bin Laden) cornered him in a remote section of the forest surrounding Crystal Lake and took him, losing three men in the process. He was subdued with a massive amount of drugs (enough to kill fifty elephants, the file said) and cryogenically frozen for "future research." He got lost in the mix until last fall, when war with China and North Korea seemed inevitable. Someone somewhere (Mad Dog? Bannon? Trump himself?) decided they wanted super soldiers. Teal heard, and had just the subject...

Only somehow Voorhees woke up en route to Montana, and took out ten guards and a flight crew of twelve. There should have 23 bodies on that plane. So far they found 22. There was a chance that Voorhees was still back there, blasted to bone and ash, but having read the file front to back twice, he knew it was unlikely. The son of a bitch got away and now he was wandering around a populated area, a danger to every man, woman, and child in a hundred miles radius. At Crystal Lake, he was a danger only to those who ventured onto his hunting grounds. But out here, away from home, God only knew what he was capable of.

"I'd close the whole damn town if I could get away with it," Teal said. "But with the media how it is, the whole world would know everything in half an hour."

"Yeah," Howell said. "We'd be fucked."

"If we don't have him in twenty-four hours, I'll bring in more men. And the militia. And the state police if I have to."

"Should we bring in anyone...else?"

"Seal Team 5, Seal Team 9, and Seal Team 12. Hell, bring in Seal Team 7 too. We need this over as soon as possible. And preferably without a lot of dead bodies piling up."

"Anything else?"

Teal sighed. "No. Just men. Lots and lots of men. I know he's in these woods. He came from woods, that's where he'll go."

Howell made a few calls. Within an hour, nearly a hundred elite soldiers were en route to Michigan.