l'Enfer C'est Les Autres
Chapter II: Sans Voix
Well before the sun sank below the crimson and golden treetops, Jayne had laced up the old jungle boots one of her former classmates who joined the Army after college sent her out of shock at finding they actually came in size 3 - small enough to fit her comfortably if she wore two pairs of socks - filled her daypack with her sketchbook and some pencils, the water bottle, and the pills she felt reluctant to leave behind unguarded, grabbed the walking stick she had attempted (and failed) to carve into something beautiful with a pocketknife during a fit of creativity back in high school, tied her knife sheath to her thigh, and slid her gun into its holster and secured it in a comfortable and effective draw position upon her hip in preparation for what she hoped would be a short hike from her campsite to the lake. Her legs were aching from working the gas, brake, and clutch for so many hours straight, but she was worried that if she did not walk around and stretch them out, she might not be able to walk at all the next morning. Plus, she really wanted to get to see the sunset over the lake. Fortunately for her, the hike over the faint remnants of an overgrown path past several ramshackle structures in various states of decay and collapse only took her about ten minutes before she reached the dock. Not knowing when last the boards had been treated against rot, she hesitantly stepped out onto the span, testing each worn, greyish plank before trusting it with her meagre weight. Thankfully, they held, although several creaked alarmingly beneath her as she cautiously limped out over the clear, greenish water. When she reached the end of the dock, using her walking stick for support, she very carefully lowered herself down into a seated position, mindful of where she placed her hands in fear of splinters. Any extra pain was something she studiously attempted to avoid, and even with peripheral neuropathy affecting her hands, they still could feel pain. Pain just felt … different … than she remembered. Tingly in addition to the sharpness, plus something muted, not quite dull, that she had never been able to describe. Actually, nothing she touched felt "right" anymore; all sensations had become strange beneath her fingertips even though the neuropathy began long enough ago that she no longer recalled precisely how things were supposed to feel.
Once she found a comfortable position, she set down her pack, pulled off her boots and her socks, and finally gazed out across the clear water toward the thick forest on the other side with a soft sigh of pleasure.
She had actually made it.
Quickly, she sketched a rough outline of her first impression of the view over the lake from the rickety old dock, pleased to find herself surrounded by such beauty and solitude and not wanting to forget it, however long she might have left, despite how the pencil wobbled in her trembling hand. Crystal Lake was exactly what Anna had described to her across the campfire when they met hiking the Appalachian Trail, and it was exactly what her aching soul had been seeking. Had ten years really passed since she and Anna had parted ways at the North Carolina border - she to return home for her junior year of high school, and Anna to complete the hike all the way back up North to where she lived? She wished she had continued hiking with Anna instead and that she had never returned home to Pontchatoula, Louisiana.
The perfect silence beside the lake was a comfort in the face of the memories that thoughts of the year following that summer dredged up in her mind, but the slight weight of the knife tied to her thigh and the warm pressure of the Kimber Ultra II .45 at her hip were far more comforting than any soothing words could have been, even out here at an abandoned camp with a rather dreadful, blood-soaked history in the middle of nowhere. If only her mother had not been terrified of all weapons and a nearly obsessive pacifist, she thought, maybe she would have been able to defend herself back then ... except that was totally ridiculous. The state of Louisiana was not going to give a sixteen year old girl a concealed carry permit even if her mother had been willing to take her to the range, enroll her in the classes, and teach her to shoot, much less willing to buy her a gun.
Plus, if she had carried a gun to the party that night, exactly ten years ago tomorrow, she would probably be known as a killer today. Or, and perhaps more likely, her gun would have been used against her in the bloody horror show that followed in the third-floor attic room of that French Quarter apartment - after all, he had used the x-acto knife he found in her purse on her when her desperate resistance coupled with whatever drugs he was on made it impossible for him to take what he wanted from her, so he had held her down upon the floor, punched her in her ribs and stomach a few times to get her to quit kicking, scratching, hitting, even biting; trying with strength born from desperation and terror to keep him off of her, then he took what he wanted with the blade, her blade, instead - and she might be a corpse now instead of just a scarred and broken mistake.
But would that really have been a worse outcome?
Thinking about that memory left her eyes red and glassy, but true to form, her shoulders did not shake, no sobs succeeded at clawing their way out of her throat, and not a single tear managed to escape past her long, golden eyelashes to slide down her pale, slightly sunken cheeks. This, like the brief outburst of tears as she drove up the road to Crystal Lake earlier, was an anomaly for the ordinarily restrained and self-possessed young woman. Viewing her from behind, it would have appeared as if nothing was happening at all.
The lower the sun hung in the sky, the more the breeze pulled at and tangled her unruly mess of curls and waves, and she finally grew sufficiently irritated at the coppery strands blowing in her eyes to stir slightly from her comfortable position to pull her hair back from her face and tuck it behind her ears. It was still relatively thick despite being baby-fine, but a decade of low-dose chemotherapy to keep her immune system suppressed had taken its toll upon her hair, thinning it and leaving it duller and more prone to breakage. She occasionally joked to herself that the condition of her hair was a reflection of her in general.
Dull and brittle.
Despite Jayne's typically close to paranoid level of awareness of her surroundings, she did not have any sense of the intent gaze of one who had already killed so many, perhaps over a hundred, scrutinising her as she sat, and by the time the last of the already-set sun's reflected rays were fading and she decided to return to her campsite, she was alone again with no evidence to suggest that she had been observed for so long and from so close. Had Jason remained watching her long enough to see how her hands trembled when she quickly stuffed her supplies back into the army green daypack atop the rattling pill bottles within or when she rolled her socks back over her child-sized feet then pulled on her boots, stiff fingers struggling to tighten and tie the laces, his estimation of the threat she could potentially pose to him would have sunk even lower. She slid her arms into the straps of her pack then picked up the walking stick with both hands, planting it firmly against the splintery grey wood upon which she sat and used it for leverage and balance as she slowly pulled herself up, first to her knees, then finally she stood upright, each movement accompanied by a virtual symphony of creaking and popping joints. By the time she was standing, a faint sheen of sweat over her pallid, almost grey-tinged face glistened in the twilight despite the chill air blowing off the lake. She leaned heavily upon the staff, gripping it so tightly with both hands her knuckles were white for several seconds before she turned around, her face a ghostly, grey-white mask of pain.
"I shouldn't have sat so still for so long," Jayne silently and morosely mused to herself as she limped down the dock to the shore, the decaying boards groaning in protest at her every light step.
The Camp Blood killer would have dismissed her entirely upon seeing all that.
It took her significantly longer to limp back to her campsite than it had taken her to reach the lake, and no hint of the sun's light remained by the time she reached the familiar, rusting bulk of Rodney, but despite her unfamiliarity with the area, she did not take out a flashlight to illuminate her path. One of the only positive points of her condition, indeed possibly the only such, was that her pupils being always dilated gave her excellent low-light vision, and she preferred not to damage that with artificial light sources if she could possibly avoid doing so. The starlight was more than sufficient for her to navigate to and around her campsite effectively, anyway, so she quickly had a small campfire burning in the pit she had dug upon her arrival.
"Now where in Cthulhu's unpronounceable name did I put that damned shovel?" she muttered out loud in frustration while she limped around the clearing, searching for it without success.
However, between the pain and the side effects of so many medications, she was accustomed to having small holes in her memory, so while she was irritated (mostly at herself) to discover it missing before she had dug herself a latrine pit, the thought that the shovel might have been taken did not even cross her mind. "It's probably in Rodney," she decided, not interested in actually searching for it amidst the semi-organised clutter filling her vehicle - everything from the life she abandoned that she had not given away to her neighbours or donated to the Goodwill - until morning. Instead, she popped the back hatch, hopelessly hoping to see it resting atop her gear where she reasonably might have left it, but there was no shovel to be seen there within Rodney's unlit confines - she had not actually set the interior lights not to turn on to protect her night vision; it was not the result of foresight or planning. The fuse simply had blown somewhere in northern Alabama and she just did not feel like hunting down an AutoZone to buy a replacement for it at any point during the long drive. With a little huff of irritation, she pulled out a lightweight folding chair from the pile of clutter in the back of the Civic then grabbed the topmost of the worn paperbacks from under her tarp and unfolded the seat, wincing at the loud, shrill squeal of aluminum on aluminum friction piercing the almost perfect silence. Once that was done, she lowered herself down carefully into its faded, waterproof canvas-webbing embrace beside the fire pit to read for a while. Although Jayne knew that she should eat something, especially before she took her bedtime medications, she just was not hungry and she found that the continued thought of food actually was vaguely nauseating, so she decided to forego supper, at least for the time being.
The only sounds as Jayne sat there with the novel resting unopened upon her lap were the faint crackling from the small fire she had built, the night breeze through the branches above catching on the dying leaves that had not yet fallen, and the quiet hitches of the breaths catching in her damaged lungs. She fully intended to read, to transport herself yet again into late nineteenth century France through one of her favourite novels since childhood, to allow herself to fall into the tragic obsessions and soaring genius of the pitiful, deformed and reviled murderer and monster called Erik who haunted the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris, thinking it especially fitting given where she currently sat and the series of tragedies that had been unfolding at Camp Crystal Lake since 13 June, 1957. However, she was distracted from opening the well-worn and personally-annotated volume by her contemplation of her surroundings and what had compelled her to make the long journey from Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana to Wessex County, New Jersey.
As she drove through it earlier that day, Jayne had noted that the town of Forest Green had been just as small, dingy, run down, and typical of recession town, U.S.A. as she had imagined from what she had read, an unremarkable and uninspiring dot upon the regional maps where a few minor highways intersected, likely unchanged since Anna described to her a decade earlier when speaking about where her older sister had gone to summer camp. Maybe Anna had even been too generous in her verbal painting of the town once called Crystal Lake, with its main street featuring more glum buildings standing vacant with boards blinding the broken windows that sullenly glared at the few passers by than storefronts that appeared to be occupied. This had given her a valid excuse to hope that the older girl's description of the woods surrounding Crystal Lake, which had sounded far more welcoming than the town despite the rumours of the absolute carnival of horror and murder that sporadically occurred in the perpetual gloom beneath the broad, thick canopy of spreading limbs of the silent, green sentinels standing watch, might actually have been reliable. Her suspicious, untrusting nature and pessimism had prepared her for disappointment, particularly when her attempts to research the area where Anna's most intriguing stories all were set had netted her very little information about the area and even less confirmation of the possibility that her tales were true. The local newspaper had proved to be a dead end, it having ceased publication only a few years after Jayne's birth, and the scanned copies of back issues available online struck her as being notably incomplete, with entire seasons being missing from several years' archives. The fact that the town had even changed its name several years earlier made the task of mining for the true story even more difficult. However, once her interest in a subject was piqued, Jayne was tenacious and imaginative in hunting down the information she sought. That any detailed information about the deaths occurring around Crystal Lake appeared to have been scrubbed from the internet just incited her to dig deeper. Anna's heartbreaking tale of poor, deformed little Jason Voorhees who drowned in that lake upon his 11th birthday while the teenage counselors meant to be supervising the campers were too drunk and horny to notice, and his grief-maddened mother's attempt to avenge his death and prevent any further such accidents due to their neglect and negligence by killing anyone at the camp who she caught distracted from their responsibility by drugs, sex, or alcohol before being beheaded herself with a machete by her last intended victim, a young woman named Alice who later vanished without a trace, only for that drowned boy to show up again some time later as a grown man who carried on his late mother's murderous mission, proved immensely difficult for Jayne to confirm.
Her research proved that there was a statistically significant number more premature deaths and disappearances around Crystal Lake than typical of an area of similar size, population, and demographics, particularly incidents involving teenagers and early-twenty-somethings, leading her to believe there probably was at least some kernel of truth hidden away within Anna's stories. She found almost no evidence she saw as reliable to convince her that these deaths and disappearances were the work of one man, but she did find an article and a paragraph from an obituary confirming that Jason and Pamela Voorhees had been real people living in the vicinity of Crystal Lake, and further that the boy had supposedly died as a child - but no body was ever found to confirm that he was dead. That they had existed did not surprise Jayne in the least; most folktales and legends have some basis in reality. However, it did nothing to convince her that a neglected little boy who drowned came back as a vengeful murder machine like Anna had insisted. Still, the story had captivated her and filled her with pity for both Pamela and Jason, who she viewed as victims despite the murders ascribed to them - almost exactly the same as how she viewed Gaston Leroux's fictional Opera Ghost. But the ill-starred Voorhees mother and child were supposed to have really lived and died and committed so many murders in the area where she now sat, unlike the far more famous Fantôme.
Although she had not actually expected to run into an unkillable backwoods serial mass killer (a concept she found fascinating all on its own) who preyed upon irresponsible teenagers by coming here, she could not deny the faint disappointment she felt that she had not seen any sign of the notorious Camp Blood Killer while she relaxed upon the very dock from which he had allegedly jumped, fallen, or been pushed, depending upon who was telling his history. Despite the strong feelings of sympathy and empathy she felt for him and his supposed plight, she felt oddly content in her knowledge that such a being would not feel similarly about her. No doubt, if he still stalked these woods, he would kill her the moment he laid eyes upon her.
Taking comfort in that dark thought, Jayne shifted upon the creaking canvas webbing in a vain attempt to get comfortable then cracked open the book and began to read Gaston Leroux's words aloud to herself, allowing them to flow over her and carry her away to another continent, another century.
"Je voulus voir le visage de la Voix et, instinctivement, par un geste dont je ne fus point la maîtresse, car je ne me possédais plus, mes doigts rapides arrachèrent le masque…"
"Oh! horreur!… horreur!… horreur!…"
—
—
While Jayne sat quietly reading to herself before the small fire in her solitary campsite, at the other end of the former Camp Crystal Lake property a very different sort of campfire built from a stack of logs four feet high burned merrily. Three brand new, top of the line tents with poisonous green rain flies appeared to have sprung up from the earth like a trio of deadly neon mushrooms, and the ground around them was already littered with almost a dozen crushed beer cans before the sun had set.
Jenelle took a sip from her can of PBR, brushed her short, fine, platinum blonde hair back from her face, then grinned at the taller, auburn haired girl sitting on the log beside her with a flash of her perfectly even, white teeth in a somewhat predatory smirk.
"Oh, c'mon! It's not that cold yet, and we've got the fire to warm us up after." Jenelle's grin widened as she continued trying to coax her friend to go down to the lake with her for a swim, and she teasingly continued, "That is, if Frank isn't hot enough for you."
Lainey rolled her cornflower blue eyes with a dramatic sigh then shook her head, the dark auburn curls reflecting the flames to frame the perfect oval of her face with a wild mane of fire. She could think of a hundred things she would prefer to be doing with the first two nights of Fall Break in the time it took her to reply to her far more daring friend.
"I don't even know why I let him talk me into coming out here with you guys! I hate camping, I hate nature, I've never even thought about going hunting much less actually gone - "
Jenelle interrupted her, " - but you couldn't let me be stuck as the only girl on this trip! And besides, you know how hot Frank's ass looks in BDUs."
As if summoned out of the darkness surrounding their campsite by the mention of his name, the aforementioned Frank suddenly reappeared to squeeze his slim yet broad-shouldered swimmer's body onto the log in between the two girls, smirking while he wrapped one dark-tanned arm around the shoulders of each and pulling them in toward his chest. Knowing that it would be welcome, one hand "inadvertently" landed on Lainey's left breast where it stayed.
"Nice of you to notice, Jen," Frank replied to the blonde with a flirtatious smile. "But I don't know how happy Mike'll be to hear how you can't stop staring at my hot ass."
While Lainey snuggled into Frank's side with a little sigh that he thought did not sound entirely like the contentment he wanted and expected to hear, Jenelle shrugged his arm off her shoulder a little more forcefully than was probably necessary then punched him in the ribs with a playful laugh. Frank grunted, jolted against Lainey's side (which was the only good part about being hit, he decided), surprised by the unexpected power behind the blow which he thought might even turn into a fist-shaped bruise by morning. However, the potent mixture of his pride born from being tall, athletic, and traditionally if somewhat blandly attractive and the natural insecurity of youth could not allow him to let anyone see that he had actually felt pain from a teasing blow from a 17-year-old girl, so Frank resisted the urge to rub his side and instead laughed with her.
"Where is Mike, anyway?" Jenelle asked, her carefully studied and oft-practiced, husky "sex-kitten" voice still warm with amused laughter.
Frank pulled a flask from his pocket and took a swig that emptied half its contents down his throat before nearly choking, his eyes bulging and his face turning deep red beneath his tan as the bottom shelf vodka he had managed to acquire via a fake ID he had forged himself burned all the way down his oesophagus to his gut, bringing tears to his eyes. It took him a moment to catch his breath; and, once he could breathe again, he took another swig, albeit a smaller one, just to prove to himself that he was tough enough, before he replied to her.
"Him and Dave went to stock the blinds for tomorrow morning. Should be back any time now."
Lainey winced visibly at Frank's grammar, but Jenelle ignored it and nodded in satisfaction at his answer.
"Good. I wasn't looking forward to lugging everything there before sunrise, but they'd better hurry back or else I'm going swimming without them."
Already peeved, Lainey slapped her arm to kill the bug she felt but did not see crawling over her skin then leapt upon the opportunity to complain.
"I don't know why we can't sleep past 5 a.m. I saw ducks on the lake this afternoon when we drove in ..."
Both Frank and Jenelle laughed at that.
Ignoring their laughter, Lainey continued, "And why'd we have to come here to hunt? There's tons of other places, like where you guys went last year - places where bunches of people didn't get murdered by some retarded freakshow dude and his psycho-bitch of a mother."
Frank scoffed.
"That's just a dumb story to frighten little kids into behaving on campouts, so they won't wander off and get lost. It doesn't even make any sense! How could a ten-year-old 'tard see his mother killed after he drowned?!" Shaking his head in wonder that a girl who consistently earned straight A's in school like Lainey could be so damned stupid about everything else, he went on, driving what he saw as the nail into the coffin of the greatly exaggerated if not outright fictional Voorhees' massacres. "And there's no way some kid too fucking stupid to ride the short bus even coulda survived all those years out in the woods alone."
The boy's explanation of why she had nothing to fear made sense to her and actually did help Lainey to relax, and it helped even more when he handed his flask over to her and told her she could finish it off.
She was in the middle of downing the last of the cheap vodka and Frank was staring at how the muscles of her throat undulated as she chugged it without choking, when all of a sudden they heard the snap of a branch cracking right behind them. Both Jenelle and Lainey screamed, the latter actually spitting out the alcohol she had not yet swallowed in her surprise. Frank jumped to his feet, wincing when the ankle he had broken so badly it had required surgery only three months earlier twisted beneath his shifting weight, and he whirled around to face whatever or whoever was there, his fists raised to the level of his throat in an untrained version of a boxer's pugilistic stance. The two girls wound up standing, too, nervously hovering slightly behind the slender swimmer to either side of him within a single heartbeat's time.
The two boys who had just sneaked up from behind the trio doubled over laughing.
"Gotcha good!" Mike chortled, his eyes bright with mirth. "Dude, you should've seen your face!"
Lainey turned and glared at the boys. "Not funny!"
Jenelle looked over at her best friend with a crooked pirate's smile and shrugged sheepishly.
"It kinda was, though."
Lainey huffed and turned her back on all of them. She did not even want to be here, but she had come along because they asked her to join them on the hunting trip - but if they wanted her to come, then why were they being so shitty? On the other hand, Jenelle had been camping with her older brothers since she was old enough to hike a whole mile without needing a break, and she was used to the way the guys acted. The blonde even felt oddly flattered that Mike, Dave, and Frank were still treating her like one of the guys … albeit like one of the guys who they also wanted to fuck. She liked that change enough that she could feel the heat creeping up her cheeks, telling her that she was blushing. The fact that Lainey, beautiful Lainey who all the guys seemed to worship, was so miserable and clearly unable to hang with them left Jenelle feeling perversely proud. She might not have a perfect figure or the face and hair of a 1940s movie goddess, but dammit, she was fun and the guys knew it.
Trying to keep the peace, something he found himself doing far more often than he would have liked while in the company of his friends, particularly when the overly dramatic auburn-haired beauty was with them, Dave told Lainey, "To answer your question: my pops always says animals tend to be out and more active around sunrise so the hunting's better, and nobody comes out here anymore so there's more game for us."
"And the sooner we get to the blind, the sooner we can get to shooting and drinking!" Mike added with a wide grin, grabbing Jenelle by the hips and pulling her firmly up against himself.
Their unseen, unheard watcher felt the familiar rage and disgust growing within him as he listened to their conversation, although there was no outward, visible evidence to indicate that mounting fury aside from the tension knotting the heavy muscles of his broad shoulders. This was exactly the sort of recklessness and irresponsibility Jason existed to punish. Mocking names like those which the red-haired girl just called him had cut him to the quick when he was a child, but his childhood was a long time ago, and such insults meant close to nothing to him now. The words of the soon-to-be dead were all but meaningless, nothing of more significance than a faint breeze blowing across a field of tall grass. Killing them would not be personal despite their insults - it simply was his duty.
Lainey leaned back against Frank, moulding herself against his body. Subtly rubbing her arse against his crotch, she murmured huskily, "Why'd you want to get up before the crack of dawn to sit out in the cold when you could stay in your warm bed with me?"
Frank's arms wrapped around her waist, his hands sliding up under her sweatshirt to caress the smooth, warm skin stretched taut over the delicate dips and ridges of her ribs beneath the thick fabric. "Both sound real good to me," he replied with a quiet chuckle. "But the blind's here - and if you didn't notice, my bed isn't."
Frank could feel Lainey stiffen in his embrace and he knew that the deep, anticipatory breath she took meant that she was winding up, about to go off on him, But, before Lainey could say anything, Jenelle pulled her shirt off over her head and threw it at the pair with a devilish smile and a silvery laugh.
"I don't care what you two do, but I'm going swimming," Jenelle proclaimed with a supercilious smirk, feeling the weight of Dave's gaze fixed upon how her smallish breasts nearly spilled out of the too-small push-up bra she had bought (on Lainey's advice - not that the auburn haired beauty needed to do anything of the sort to enhance the appearance of her lushly curving yet slender figure) to cause just that sort of reaction.
The blonde sauntered over to Mike's tent, intentionally swinging her boyish hips in imitation of Lainey's eye-catching, overtly sexual walk, and picked up a towel and a solar-powered lantern. Mike and Dave followed not far behind her, taking off their shirts despite the chill in the night air and grabbing towels of their own. Jenelle was very pleased to feel both boys' gazes fixed firmly upon her instead of on Lainey like usual as she ran off, leading them off down a barely-visible trail toward the lake like a half-naked pied piper.
"C'mon! Last one in's axe-murder bait!" she called over her shoulder before digging in and sprinting, the lantern's light bobbing madly off the trees around them as her white towel streamed behind her like a banner.
Dave and Mike sprinted right after her.
Once the other three were out of sight, Frank slid his hands up higher beneath Lainey's shirt, brushing the underside of her breasts with the tips of his fingers, and he was rewarded for his boldness with the feeling of her shivering against him. This was far preferable to the imminent bitchfest about how much she hated the woods and everything that had happened thus far on the trip that he was expecting from her, and he put his mouth to her ear.
"D'you want to go swimming with them, or would you like to christen my new tent, sugartits?"
Giggling at the sensation of his hot breath pouring over her sensitive ear and the tingling left behind when the tip of his tongue brushed over the curved shell, Lainey looked coyly over her shoulder back at the boy standing behind her and pressed her arse against him with a little wiggle, even though she thought he was a weirdo for calling her "sugartits."
"Do you really have to ask?" she purred.
The silent, masked hunter watched the obliviously giggling teenagers rushing over to the tent, clearly paying attention to nothing except each other. Within the span of a single heartbeat, he knew exactly how to deal with these two. Jason saw them disappear into the tent, heard the hiss of the zipper being pulled closed, and then waited. He knew it would not take long for them to become thoroughly distracted by what they were doing to each other's bodies, and he listened, biding his time before stepping out from the concealing darkness of the forest. It did not take long, even by his standards, for the little gasps and groans coming from within the tent to settle into that familiar rhythm that signalled to him that it was time to act.
As Jason laid the bear trap upon the ground at a calculated distance just outside of the tent and pulled open the heavy steel jaws then inserted the pin to set it before sweeping a faint covering of leaves over the stained metal to hide it, he watched the undulation of the conjoined shadows projected upon the tent wall and listened intently, not out of any voyeuristic interest but just so he could time this correctly.
"Oh, oh yeah, babe! That's just what I - " the boy's words trailed off into a long, low groan accompanied by a higher-pitched giggle from the girl.
All the pieces in place and the trap now set, Jason melted back into the camouflaging woods to spring it.
Inside the tent, without any warning, Lainey tensed and sat up straight, her fingers digging into Frank's broad shoulders at the sound of … something … outside of the tent, moving around. Surprised and confused that she would stop so abruptly in the midst of riding him harder and faster than she ever had before, he looked up at her, distracted momentarily by the sheen of sweat gleaming upon her pale, heavy breasts as she panted in the dimly lit tent before his gaze made it high enough to see her auburn curls bouncing around her shoulders and clinging to her damp cheeks and neck as her head whipped side to side.
"What - "
Lainey interrupted him with a hissed whisper.
"Shut UP! Didn't you hear that? I think something's out there!"
Frank rolled his eyes. At times like this, he wondered why he had ever gotten with a typical city bitch like her - someone who was terrified of bugs, who did not even own a sleeping bag, and who was a vegetarian at that. But holy fuck, her tits were magnificent! Yeah, that was why. At the time, he had thought that a fabulous pair of knockers would be enough to keep his interest, but now he was less certain. Maybe it was better to have something in common with a girlfriend. But those tits … he reached up and gave them a squeeze, just to remind himself why he was with Lainey.
Irritably, she knocked his hands away, and Frank gritted his teeth, barely resisting the urge to grab her chest even harder, just to be obstinate.
"I'm sure it was just a rabbit or maybe a squirrel," he muttered, his hands dropping to the curve of her hips and his hips beginning to thrust up into her again, trying not to lose his erection to her deflating ridiculousness. "You know, something little, fluffy, and cute."
Lainey really wanted to believe him, but the sensual mood had been shattered for her and no amount of reassurance, stimulation, or outright pleasure would bring her back into the moment until she knew that whatever was out there was not a threat. Even if Jason Voorhees was not real, she had read that bears were a real threat in the area.
"Couldn't you go check? What if it's Mike and Dave playing a prank? Or maybe it's like a mountain lion, or a snake … or a bear!"
Frank could feel the tension in her body pulling her taut as a guitar string, and his erection went soft inside of her. Despite the genuine fear in her wide, cornflower eyes and the trembling of her full bottom lip, he felt no sympathy for the frightened girl, only disgust.
"Fine," he sneered as he stood hunched over due to the low ceiling of the tent, not even bothering to hide his disappointment from Lainey.
Even if his friends were waiting just outside the tent in some sort of juvenile prank, Frank did not care. He was so pissed off at the interruption - of course she heard something just when things were getting good - that he did not bother to put his boxers or pants back on. Whoever or whatever it was out there deserved getting flashed; and, if Lainey liked his ass so much, then let her get a good, long look at it - she was not gonna be getting to see it for much longer. At that moment and with that aggravated thought, he decided that he was breaking up with her … well, he would just as soon as he found a suitable replacement. Putting up with her bullshit remained preferable to going without. She might have been a bitch, but she certainly was hot.
Frank unzipped the tent and poked his head out, looking around irritably.
"Hey, guys! It ain't funny!"
He looked around, but he made the mistake of trying to look straight through the bonfire, ruining his night vision and filling his sight with several blank, blinded spots of white. Lainey scooted back to the safety of the far wall of the tent, watching Frank from behind with wide eyes. A twig snapped, the sound sharp as a musket firing in the silence otherwise broken only by the heavy breathing of the two teens.
"Okay, wherever you are - that's it. Fuck you guys," Frank snarled, stepping out of the tent into the fire-warmed darkness of the autumn evening.
Stepping out right into the steel-jawed bear trap that closed around his bare ankle, the very ankle that had so recently been encased within a cast, with an audible crack followed a millisecond later by a grinding crunch. The fair skin of his sock tan at the top of his shoe was torn open and the crushed spears of white bone within were revealed, jagged and darkly wet in the flickering firelight.
It took a moment for him to register it, to feel the shredded neurons sputtering pain up his leg like candles in the rain right before the intense, blinding white agony surged up through him. An inhuman, guttural howl that Frank did not recognise as having come from himself was wrenched from his throat as he collapsed heavily into the curled, brown leaves littering the ground that crunched softly beneath him, his ankle giving out beneath him and twisting into a dripping, red ruin of ripped flesh and shattered bone as he sprawled in the forest's detritus. From the position in which he landed, he could turn his head and see into the dim depths of the tent, his shocked gaze meeting Lainey's. He could not comprehend how this could have happened - this was no juvenile prank! Who would have put a fucking bear trap right outside of his tent? Why would anyone even do such a thing?
Not fully understanding what had just happened, the girl clutched the sleeping bag up to her heaving, bare chest and scooted backwards on her arse until she was huddled snugly against the back wall of the tent, a beaten puppy whimpering her fears.
"Frank! What … what happened? What's wrong? FRANK!"
But the boy could only scream and grunt, shock quickly having stolen the ability to form words from his mouth.
A shivery whisper came from the tent wall against which Lainey shuddered, the sound of the waterproofed fabric parting around the sharp, dully-gleaming silver point of the razor-sharp blade sliding through it. Before the girl even had time to turn her head to look, she felt a strong hand in her hair, wrenching her head back, and a hard knee slam into her back over which the hand gripping her mussed curls bowed her body backward. Her begging and gibbering was cut short when the icy edge of the blade bit into her throat, allowing a second red mouth to gape open below her chin in a horrible, soundless shriek that choked out great gouts of crimson to pour over her quivering breasts in perfect rhythm with her stuttering, ever-slowing heartbeats.
Well before the girl's body realised it was dead and stopped shaking, the killer released his grip upon her hair, carelessly letting her body crumple to the reddening tent floor, then he arose with an almost feline degree of fluid grace improbable in so large and muscular a man. Jason stepped around the tent, the dried, brown corpses of summer's leaves crunching beneath his black work boots with every step, for disguising his presence in perfect silence was no longer a necessary exercise, and now he wanted his prey to know that he was coming, that Death was bearing down upon him to punish him for his sins, for polluting the sacred land with his drunken fornication. The boy stared up at the monster who had just murdered his future ex-girlfriend looming over him, the whites of his eyes showing around smoky grey irises with pinprick pupils glistening liquidly in terror at the sight of the haunting mask. His soft, young mouth moved but no fully-formed words came out once the hunter with his dripping blade finally revealed himself fully to the boy whose mangled hind limb was caught in his trap.
"H-huh … huh … huh huh … ih i-ih ih … no ... oh no oh no …"
Jason cocked his head to the left, wondering for a brief moment what the boy was trying to say to him. However, listening to the talking dead was a waste of his time, so he slammed the edge of the machete down into the juncture where Frank's neck and shoulder met, nearly bisecting the boy completely on a diagonal. There was no need to extend his life any further as the masked killer took no pleasure in watching his victims suffer. Wrenching the blade out of the corpse in which it was embedded with an arcing spray of scarlet heat that spattered his tattered clothing, he then proceeded toward the lake.
He still had three more irresponsible teenagers with whom to contend before his duties for the night were complete.