CHAPTER 1
What the hell is going on?" thought 48-year old Tracy Jarvis as she quietly crept down the staircase into the living room.
She glanced behind her, making sure that the ruckus hadn't stirred her two kids sound asleep in their beds.
The whirring of helicopter blades had jolted her awake, and glancing out her bedroom window, she had seen red and blue flashing lights flying down the country road past her cabin on Crystal Lake.
Something big had to be going on. Nothing like this typically happened in Crystal Lake
The only other time that something like this had happened that Mrs. Jarvis could remember was five years ago when that Voorhees woman hacked up all those kids at the campgrounds.
She remembered that like it was yesterday.
It had been all over the news. The town of Crystal Lake, which had always been a quiet and safe community, was crawling with reporters for months and months afterwards.
Every time she drove into town to go to the grocery store, there were people huddled in groups of twos or threes at the checkout line, whispering excitedly about the murders, all talking about "Camp Blood" and how it was all the fault of the family who reopened that death trap in the first place.
When she had lived in the city, she had never seen anything like that.
Everyone that lived in the city mostly kept to their own.
Mrs. Jarvis almost liked it better that way.
Not that she didn't admire the way that everyone in Crystal Lake seemed to know each other, and the quaint and quirky atmosphere. It was just the fact that she felt a little left out.
When she first got here, she never got a warm welcome, and the locals seemed to be able to detect the urban aura that she had around her, because all she got were dirty looks and groups of people whispering about her.
At least in the city, it wasn't just her that was left out.
Everyone kept to their own, never singling out any one person.
Everyone minded their own business.
She wondered why she even decided to move out to the country.
Then she remembered why.
There was a shooting right down the street from the Jarvis apartment, and with that, Mrs. Jarvis took her two kids and left.
There was no way she was keeping her kids around that sort of thing.
They could grow up traumatized, start getting bad grades in school, get into drugs, and other awful things that the kids got into nowadays.
The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back was when she found out her husband was in love with someone else. With his young, sexy coworker.
They had been married for almost twenty years; they had two kids together.
How could he just throw it all away like that? Twenty years of marriage. Trish's first steps...Tommy's first words...all of it evidently meant nothing. What really bothered her was that she hadn't noticed the signs. The distant look in his eye, the weak smiling, the forced conversations...her woman's intuition had failed her. Or maybe she just wasn't listening. She felt like it was something she had done but then again, feelings sometimes go away. And you can't control how you feel towards someone. How could she blame him? They were both getting middle-aged and were going through their own personal crises, while at the same time raising two teenagers.
Falling out of love happens. People leave. People can start to feel differently about things. Yes, she was hurt, but she knew what she had to do.
The only thing she could do was leave. Besides, the marriage wasn't doing so well before he sat her down at the kitchen table and slapped the divorce papers down in front of her. They all knew it. Trish and Tommy both knew it. They all knew that they were just staying together for the sake of the kids. It was all they could do. She worried about her children enough as it was, with growing up in the city and being exposed to God knows what, but it would be even harder on them without a father, so she stayed with him as long as she could.
But eventually, things just get too hard to manage and so, you have to leave.
But why did she have to pick a hick town like Crystal Lake?
And now, all these murders?
She left the city to get away from that sort of thing, and only a few months after they moved in, the Voorhees woman went insane and killed a bunch of kids at a campground just a few miles up the dirt road from where they were nestled on the shore of the lake. And now this? God what was next?
She shot another nervous glance out the big picture window, blew a strand of wispy blond hair out of her face and then crossed the living room to the television set and turned it on.
A male newscaster was seated at his desk, staring solemnly into the camera, reading off of a teleprompter.
"…the Crystal Lake massacre is, indeed, not entirely over as authorities have recently found more mutilated bodies left behind by the masked maniac who has left a trail of corpses all over the 20 acre campground and surrounding area. A lone survivor, a young girl whose name has not yet been released, managed to put a stop to the murderer's crime spree and the man who has terrorized this small community for the last two days is now believed to be dead. The young girl was in a state of hysterical shock and is being sent to a local psychiatric clinic…"
My God, Mrs. Jarvis thought to herself.
An image of a large, two-story log cabin in the middle of an isolated clearing was superimposed onto the screen where gurneys piled high with blood-soaked corpses were being wheeled down the front steps.
Police cars and ambulances were scattered across the front yard of the house. The camera panned over to a large, red barn, where another body was being wheeled out into the back of an ambulance. A police helicopter hovered over the scene, shining a giant spotlight around the perimeter of the property, searching for more bodies.
"Jesus," she muttered to herself. More murders, and another young girl left traumatized...she couldn't imagine what that poor thing had been through.
To see all of her friends getting killed, and then to watch helplessly as her life turns into a nightmare before her eyes...she would probably have to live out the rest of her days in some institution, not able to process what had happened to her. My God. Who was it this time? Who did this to her?
Pamela Voorhees?
But the Voorhees woman was dead. Wasn't she? She had to be. Mrs. Jarvis had heard something about her head being chopped off. She grimaced thinking about it. There was no coming back from that.
No, this was someone else.
The newscaster had described a man.
Another maniac. Just like the Voorhees woman.
Jesus...there has to be something in the water here...Mrs. Jarvis thought.
She felt a chill run up her arm and she moved to the front door to make sure it was locked.
She didn't exactly know why she was insisting on the door being locked. The newscaster said that the guy was dead, after all. But something was bothering her. A pang of dread hit her in the gut, and she instinctively checked anyway.
She turned her attention back to the television, where paramedics were loading another body into the back of an ambulance.
The newscaster appeared on-screen again.
"….Sources have informed us that the man responsible for the killings is being taken to the Wessex County Medical Center where further examination is to be made…"
Wessex County was only the neighboring county.
It wasn't very far from the lake.
Mrs. Jarvis stared grimly out into the night.
She couldn't help but feel paranoid with all of the murders happening.
She felt another shiver up her spine as she tried to block the ghastly images from her mind.
Crystal Lake was going to become the murder capital of the United States pretty soon, Mrs. Jarvis thought, sitting on the sofa.
She jerked her head towards the door...was that a noise?
Was it? No, it had to be the wind or something.
Mrs. Jarvis silently scolded herself. She was just scaring herself silly. After all, it was foolish to sit at home and be afraid of a dead man.
It was foolish, right?
He was dead.
The maniac was dead.
It was a dark and wet night, still soaked from the drizzling rain and the thunderstorm that had been brewing on and off for the last two hours. Storm clouds rolled across the night sky, not managing to obscure the silvery outline of the full moon. It had been a rainy summer, even for the Northeast. The trees swayed gently in the night breeze. It was all peaceful and quiet...save for the circling police helicopters, bright searchlights, and about a dozen police cars and ambulances scattered around an isolated farmhouse and redwood barn nestled in a clearing by the lake.
The two bright headlight beams and flashing sirens cut through the darkness, illuminating a wooden sign that read "HIGGINS HAVEN" in scrawled letters. "WESSEX COUNTY MEDICAL CENTER" was emblazoned on the side of the medical transport vehicle that was driving tediously down the uneven, partially flooded dirt road.
The trees cleared and near a small stand of trees, the two-story farmhouse stood on the shore of the lake, the red and white lights shimmering on the glassy, smooth surface.
The headlights of the ambulance hit the police officer directing traffic in the face, and he waved his arms in the air, signaling for the caravan to stop.
The passenger, a tired looking male paramedic in his forties, rolled down his window; the traffic cop approached, sloshing through a mud puddle and squinting through the sprinkling rain.
"Whatd'ya need and whered'ya need it?" the male medic asked.
The cop pointed towards the open barn doors.
"We got a body over there in the barn. It's been a busy night. We got ten bodies. You got the last one," the cop said.
It was clear in the tone of his voice that he had seen more than enough carnage for the night, and was thankful to have been given the mundane task of directing traffic.
Stress was written all over his face.
"What's wrong with em'?" the medic asked.
"He's dead," the cop said grimly. "Yeah they're all dead." He looked like he had seen a ghost.
The paramedic turned to the driver of the ambulance, a young, slim black woman in her late twenties.
"Some emergency, they're all dead," he said. She made a wry face and drove through the wooden gate into the property, veering the ambulance sharply towards the front of the barn and parking.
The two medics stepped out onto the muddy ground and ran through the rain towards the back doors of the ambulance.
They both heaved the heavy doors open, and lifted a gurney out of the back compartment, and began rolling it inside the barn.
The young black medic scrunched up her nose in disgust as the smell of fresh hay and mold mingled with the stench of death.
She stopped short and stared down in disbelief at the enormous man sprawled across the barn floor, an axe protruding from his skull.
A hockey mask was pulled over his face; the blade of the axe had broken through the thin plastic and embedded itself in his forehead.
The tall, portly mustache-d police chief, his uniform obscured by the thick sheen of a rain poncho, was hovering over the body. Next to him, a forensic technician was snapping photos with his camera, and another technician was dusting for fingerprints.
"Is this the guy who's been leaving the wet stuff?" the male medic asked.
"Yep. He got seven kids and three bikers. But this time, they got him," the police chief said, staring down grimly at the axe firmly lodged in the masked man's cranium.
The female medic watched as the body of a young biker chick clad in leather was being rolled out of the barn on a gurney, her dead eyes gazing up at the ceiling, five bloody puncture wounds forming a second mouth across her throat.
The medic shivered down to her soul.
She had never seen anything like this in her entire life. My God, she thought. This was him? She stared down at the body of the masked man in a mix of horrified fascination and bewilderment.
His skin was deformed and greying; his nails black and broken, his hands covered in blood. The olive-green tattered work suit and slacks he was wearing were also caked with dried blood. He really killed them all...she thought to herself. Those poor kids...the thought of what they had experienced in their last hours was getting to her. The man didn't even look human.
She silently prayed to herself that she wouldn't have to see what was underneath that mask. She couldn't believe people actually went out and put on masks and just started killing innocent people. But it was right before her eyes.
She had already seen what he had done at the counselor training center on the opposite side of the lake. A kid in a wheelchair with a machete driven through his skull. Two kids impaled on a spear. The sick shit you see in those cheap slasher flicks. He must have been absolutely insane.
She couldn't even begin to process it. She was completely tuning out the inane dialogue between the police chief and the ambulance driver. She couldn't tear her eyes away from him.
"Alright, let's belt him," said the male medic, snapping his female companion out of her trance.
One of the crime scene investigators reached down with gloved hands and yanked the axe free from the man's skull with a sickening POP.
The female medic struggled to stifle her own grimacing. She was already being leered at by all these homicide detectives and she didn't want them chortling to themselves about her being a 'rookie'.
The investigator slid the blood-stained axe down into a clear evidence baggie and sealed it.
It took four men to heave Jason Voorhees's lifeless corpse onto the stretcher.
The female medic then placed the sheet over him hurriedly, as if she were ripping off a band-aid, and stepped away as the male medic strapped him in.
The woman took one side of the metal stretcher and started to walk with her partner out of the barn.
As they began to roll him out of the barn, Jason's grimy, blood-caked hand slipped out from underneath the sheets, and his fingertips brushed the female medic's thigh.
She leapt out of her skin, letting out a startled yelp.
Several of the men laughed.
"What's the matter with you?" the male medic asked, grinning from ear to ear.
"He's dead,"
"Christ, this place is a pile of shit," said 38-year old Axel Burns, watching a light fixture flicker and buzz out.
It was no secret that the Wessex County Medical Center morgue wasn't the best kept facility.
The hallways were narrow and dimly lit, the wallpaper was peeling; most of the bulbs in the overhead ceiling lights had blown years ago.
There had been some seedy going-on's with upper level management at the hospital, and Axel got to hear the juicy bits from one of his security guard buddies. It turned out that one of the corporate representatives was dealing coke, and a doctor had gotten drunk on the job, and long story short, nobody gave a fuck about the morgue. It was all he could do to alleviate his boredom but gossip about just what juicy happenings were going on at his place of employment.
They were always understaffed. Axel had to work nights and clean up the leftovers from the day shift. Bodies were constantly getting switched, lost, and there were constant complaints against Axel for what they said was "unprofessionalism".
He didn't know that you had to be "professional" to work in a dump like this. He was a morgue attendant, not a doctor. He wasn't even the one that helped with autopsies. He just made sure bodies came in, and out, and got where they needed to go.
He ran his thumb along the wall, and grimaced as he stared at the filth that came off onto his rubber glove.
I've worked in this shithole for way too long, Axel thought to himself.
Being a morgue attendant sounded sort of exciting when he had read about it in the classifieds about five years ago.
Sounded easy too.
He'd tried taking a job working with people, but he quickly discovered he didn't have the patience. So, why not take a job where the only people you'd really have to work with are dead as a doornail?
And it was a fairly easy job, even if he did work the night shift.
The first few weeks it had been a piece of cake.
But five long years of taking corpses into the cold room, sticking them in the freezer like a slab of meat, signing paperwork after paperwork, and doing coffee runs wasn't what Axel had imagined.
He bit into his tomato-and-mayo sandwich, licked his fingers, and reached over to turn on the tiny television set he had set up to stimulate himself for the mind-numbing lull of the night shift.
He sat down on the edge of a folded gurney, and took another bite.
He hit the channel button on the remote, and a group of women in tight black leotards doing aerobics flashed onto the screen.
Some sort of late-night raunchy workout tape.
Axel grinned.
The girl in the middle had a huge rack, and Axel felt himself getting a stiff one.
"Hi girls," he said to himself, staring lewdly at the screen.
Could you blame a guy? Nothing to do around this dump but get your rocks off, he thought.
Just as he caught a glimpse down the front of the blond chick's leotard, he heard the doors leading to the morgue bang open.
He groaned in annoyance. Great, another body. Another one of those kids that got killed up at Crystal Lake, he thought.
Axel walked out into the dimly-lit hallway.
The body was coming towards him; a huge mass on a gurney covered with a white sheet was being pushed by a tough looking medic and a young black woman.
Axel waited as they rolled the stretcher towards him and handed him a clipboard.
Axel laid his sandwich down on the body, and took the clipboard, hastily and illegibly scribbling his signature at the bottom of the page.
The male medic gave him a frown.
"This is your last?" the medic asked.
"Nah...I got one more in there," Axel said, pointing to the cold room. "She's a real cute girl,"
"Was," the medic corrected him.
Axel shrugged and glanced back at the cold room.
"Eh, she still is,"
The medic's jaw tightened. The young black woman's tightly pursed lips screwed into a disapproving grimace.
"All ya gotta do is go over there and uh…" Axel made an obscene gesture, a grin spreading across his face.
The female medic let out a cry of disgust and yanked the clipboard out of Axel's hand.
"Nice talk, real nice talk," the male medic said, mortified. "I get the top copy"
Axel held his hands up in the air defensively, ripped off the first page on the clipboard and handed it to the medic, and they both made their way back down the hallway, shaking their heads.
What? Axel thought. Does nobody have a sense of humor anymore?
He pulled back the sheets on the stretcher and he grimaced.
A blood-stained hockey mask stared back at him.
This must be the guy who killed all those kids, Axel thought. Why did people keep going up to those goddamn campgrounds? Hadn't they learned by now? That place was a death trap. Five years ago, he remembered another series of murders at the old camp. He had heard the girl who survived went missing a few months later.
Then again, he probably knew most of it was just an exaggerated legend spread by the locals and Axel certainly made his contribution. After all, he got to see the injuries working in the morgue during these last murders.
The guy really did a number on them. You had to be crazy to do something like that to a human being, he thought. Bodies literally found hanging from blood stained bed sheets like sick pieces of artwork. A guy split in half down the middle like something out of a splatter film. Another girl with a spear lodged in her eye.
And now, he had to be in the same room with the dead psychopath all night. Just great.
Axel threw the sheet back over the body and pushed it into the cold room.
Nurse Roberta Morgan hated going down to the basement.
She didn't know why exactly. Maybe it was the fact that the basement was where the morgue was, and where there's a morgue, there are dead bodies, and despite her job, she hated the thought of death.
She grimaced just at the thought of dying. She imagined the pain that those poor kids at Crystal Lake went through.
How awful it must be to be murdered. The realization right before it happens…the adrenaline pumping through your veins, the sheer shock and agony as the knife plunges into your body, as hands wrap around your throat, as you stare into the deranged eyes of your killer, nothing you can say or do to stop it from happening.
She shuddered.
It had been a hell of a night at Wessex County Medical Center.
The night shift was never this hectic.
They were the only medical facility big enough to hold all of the bodies within thirty miles of Crystal Lake. They had still been recuperating from the night before when another group of kids, mostly college-age, were murdered by apparently the same psycho.
Nurse Morgan liked the job that she had, but sometimes it took an emotional toll on her. She had seen far too many sobbing parents tonight, too many mangled bodies being wheeled around on gurneys; it was all too much for her to take in at once. She could stomach the gore, but it was the reactions of the family members that really got to her...there was something about seeing the look of sheer despair on a parent's face at the prospect of never seeing their child again that chilled her to the bone.
She just had to choose this as her profession, in this town, during a killing spree. Just my fucking luck, she thought.
It made her almost not want to be a parent. She would constantly be worried about where that child was at every second of every day, just out of sheer fear of becoming a bereaved parent...Yeah, fuck parenting. She'd just keep using condoms and taking the pill.
Besides, she was a young woman in med school. She didn't have time for kids. She didn't have much time to breathe, now that she was thinking about it. Could I really do this for the next three years, possibly more? She thought. Could she bear seeing the horrified faces of grieving mothers and fathers and watch women faint in their family members arms after learning their child was horribly murdered? But what can I do? Throw in the towel? Call it quits? She had bills to pay.
No, not now. She was already in her third semester, working to be a registered nurse, and so much money and time was invested.
But if one more thing went wrong tonight, she might just finally do it. She was at her wits end...back and forth from her station to patients rooms, constantly hearing Code Blue and Code Red being called over the intercom system. Then she would have to run upstairs to hold down a patient in cardiac arrest, or run downstairs to meet with the doctor to take crying parents to identify their child's mangled bodies...she felt like she was going to break any second.
At the end of the day, she had to remember why she had wanted to be a nurse in the first place: to help people. To BE that friendly face that a grieving parent needs to see. To BE the help in that kind of situation.
But tonight was almost too much. She stopped to catch her breath and clear her thoughts in the stairwell. God, I need a smoke break, she thought.
She probably looked like hell.
No time to worry about that now. She had to go down to inventory.
She collected herself for a moment and then climbed the rest of the stairs down to the morgue and walked down the narrow hallway.
A single light flickered unsteadily up ahead. The rest of the hallway was shrouded in shadows.
The walls creaked and the pipes in the wall groaned.
She turned the corner, coming to a stop at the reception desk.
Where the hell was everyone? They had bodies coming in one after the other, and the morgue looked like a ghost town.
She shrugged, glancing down at her clipboard. She jumped as two hands suddenly clamped down on her shoulders.
She whirled around to face the morgue attendant, Axel, staring at her with lustful eyes. Oh perfect, she thought. It's the other reason why I hate going to the basement.
"I'm free doll," Axel said.
"Yeah, at a bargain and twice the price," Nurse Morgan snapped, turning her back to him.
"Hey, whatsa matta?" Axel questioned, placing his hand on the small of her back.
Nurse Morgan let out a heavy sigh.
"I have a headache, Axel. For you, I always have a headache,"
"I can fix that" Axel said, stroking her hair. "Why don't you come in the cold room with me, I'm closing up for the night. What'dya say?"
"Axel, I'm not faking any more orgasms for you," Nurse Morgan quipped, pretending to write something down on her clipboard, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone.
"You got the curse?" Axel asked.
"If I do, you're it," Nurse Morgan said, forcing a smile, and pushed past him back down the hallway towards the staircase, forgetting what she came down there to do in the first place.
Since the day she started working at Wessex County Medical Center, Axel had been giving her dirty looks and using every dim-witted, cliché pickup line in the book.
What a pig, Nurse Morgan thought to herself. What happened to common courtesy? Chivalry really was dead. She had always thought that when you liked someone, you actually went up and talked to them like a civilized human being, not spew out sexual innuendos and blatantly look down their blouse.
She couldn't believe how outright disgusting he was.
How had someone not reported his sleazy ass? How has he not been fired already?
She hated him.
Hated him with a passion.
There was no way in hell she was going to meet him in the cold room.
Nurse Morgan stepped through the double doors into the cold room and stopped short.
The room was pitch black dark.
The light from a tiny television set illuminated a huge mass underneath a white sheet lying on a gurney.
Was that him? The guy who killed all those kids? My God, she thought.
Nurse Morgan craned her neck to see what was on the TV, and she smirked.
Of course, she thought wryly.
It was a women's work-out video, and the women might as well have been naked in their skimpy black leotards.
Nurse Morgan shook her head and glanced around the room.
Where the hell was he?
"Axel? Axel?" she called.
No answer. The only sound was the soft music coming from the workout video, and the humming from the freezers in the back.
"Axel?"
She turned back to the television, grimacing in disgust at the work-out tape. All three women were bent over in an exaggerated sexual position, moving from side to side, their assets in full view.
Unbelievable, she thought to herself. How could anyone watch this shit? It was so demeaning to women.
Who was she kidding? This was Axel she was talking about..
She reached down to turn the channel, when two hands wrapped around her waist and she let out a shrill cry.
Axel stood there, a dumb grin on his face.
"So glad you could come," he said, trying to kiss her on the hand.
Nurse Morgan angrily pulled her hand away.
"God, Axel, you are the Super Bowl of self-abuse!" she exclaimed. "I just want to watch the news,"
Nurse Morgan leaned down and turned the channel on the tiny television set, and a news broadcast flashed onto the screen.
"….and now back to the tragic story of the mass slayings at Crystal Lake…." the announcer's voice said.
Nurse Morgan sat down on the edge of the folded gurney, and stared intently at the screen.
Axel plopped down next to her glumly. He looked over at her, his big brown eyes racked with guilt. He put on his best puppy dog eyes and scooted closer.
Nurse Morgan glanced over at him, and scoffed.
"…And so begins another chapter of the story that most residents of Crystal Lake had prayed was over. A trail of mangled bodies has led authorities to conclude that…"
The announcer's voice was interrupted by a pulsing disco beat, and the ladies in the black leotards popped back onto the screen.
Nurse Morgan looked at the remote in Axel's hand, and frowned.
As she opened her mouth to speak, she felt Axel's lips brush her neck. He nuzzled her hair, and his hand began to move up her back towards the zipper of her crisp white nurse's top.
"I came to watch the news," she said firmly, pushing him away.
She leaned forward and switched the channel back to the news station.
"…authorities are still awaiting the identification of the perpetrator's body, which is currently being held at the Wessex County Medical Center morgue…"
Nurse Morgan glanced back nervously at the body on the gurney behind her.
"That's you they're talking about," Axel said, patting the huge mass behind him.
Nurse Morgan's eyes widened and she swatted at him.
"I don't believe you!"
"Then shut my mouth," Axel said coyly, wrapping his arms around her and sliding her over to him.
His lips pressed against hers, and his hand slipped inside of her nurse's uniform.
Reluctantly, she kissed him back, running her hands through his hair.
She finally succumbed, and she gently pushed him back onto the gurney.
She straddled him, her hands sliding inside his lab coat, as his hands did the same with her nurse's top.
She kissed him passionately; his hand found the zipper in the back, unzipped it and he began fumbling with the clasp of her bra.
Just as her bra was coming off in his hand, the white sheet behind them moved. Ever so slightly. A hand fell out from underneath the sheet.
A scarred, deformed hand; the nails were blackened and filthy.
It brushed Nurse Morgan's bare thigh.
She shrieked and sprang to her feet, bringing Axel up with her.
"Jesus Christmas! Holy Jesus, goddamnit! Holy Jesus jumping Christmas shit!" Axel cursed loudly, staring down at the unsightly hand dangling from underneath the white sheet.
Nurse Morgan shrunk back into the corner, her chest heaving, and her heart pounding.
Her fear quickly turned into anger, and she pointed a finger at Axel.
"You'd better get that sucker in the icebox! I must be going nuts! I mu…" she stopped her furious diatribe when she noticed Axel's eyes directed at her unzipped blouse.
She zipped it back up angrily, staring daggers at him.
"Goodnight, Axel," she said, making a beeline for the doors.
"Where ya going?" Axel protested.
"I'm going crazy!" she screamed back at him, and she disappeared down the hallway.
I'm an idiot, Nurse Morgan scolded herself.
Why did she always have to give in to him? They had fooled around a few times before, and she immediately regretted it every time.
Axel Burns was nothing but a quick fix. Someone you did it with once and never thought about it or talked about it ever again. She was single, so it wasn't like she was doing anything she shouldn't be. But it still felt so wrong. She was leading the bastard on. There was no way in hell she was getting in a relationship with him. Maybe a quick make out session to break the tension at work, but that was it.
Axel was one of those guys that sits at every seedy dive bar and leers at you over a glass of beer, making kissy faces and being an overall creep. The guy that gets kicked out before the night is over because he won't stop harassing the women, or because he won't go home when the lights are being turned on and everyone is being sent out.
This was the last time, she told herself. The absolute last time this was happening. She couldn't do it anymore. It wasn't fair to Axel, even if he was a complete sleaze-ball. She shoved open the door to hospital inventory, and leaned against the shelf, regaining her composure.
What was wrong with her? Was it the stress? The murders?
That had to be it.
That had to be it. With the sudden late night rush of bodies, the stress was getting to her. She shouldn't have gone down there in the first place, but then again, she had hoped that she could just go in and have a place to relax, and watch the news, without any of the people she worked with. And maybe, if Axel weren't such a pervert, they could have just talked and had some coffee and it could have made for a pleasant experience in the midst of this chaos. She surmised that's what she deserved for giving him that much credit.
She looked at her watch. It was almost midnight.
Her shift was almost over, and she hadn't done a bit of inventory like she was supposed to do every night.
"Damn you, Axel," she muttered under her breath.
Guys are just pigs, she thought.
She flipped through a few pages in her clipboard, scanning the inventory list and then glancing up at the rows of shelves stocked with tiny glass vials in front of her.
Jesus Axel...she wondered. What made you like that? Just because your father was a slimeball doesn't mean you have to follow in his footsteps. Have some respect for yourself...her thoughts began to trail off.
She walked down the last aisle of shelves, standing on her toes to reach the top shelf.
And just as her fingers grasped at the tiny jar above her head, the thought of Axel's sleazy hands crossed her mind again and she didn't notice another vial sitting a little too close to the edge. Her clipboard bumped it as she stumbled forward, and it fell and shattered, spilling the biohazardous fluid on the floor.
"Shit! Shit!" she swore through clenched teeth.
What else could go wrong?
It had to be the curse of Crystal Lake, she thought miserably. And the curse is Axel Burns.
Axel lifted up the sheet and stared in disgust at the masked man lying on the slab. Jesus...he thought. No wonder he wore that mask around, he thought. He dropped the sheet, rolled the masked man's corpse into the freezer and slammed the door shut, not bothering to latch it.
God, that bastard was heavy, Axel thought. Who'd have thought he'd be looking over a mass murderer? At least his job was a little bit more exciting now.
He grabbed his cup of coffee off of the counter and sat back down on the folded gurney, his eyes glued to the TV screen, where the chicks in leotards were still bouncing and gyrating to the pulse of the synth beat.
He grinned.
"Hi, girls...thanks for waiting," he said, softly chewing his bottom lip.
He gave the blond in the middle a dirty look.
She'd act right, thought Axel. She would be willing to do anything to him. She wouldn't leave him horny and run off like a crazy person.
Look at yourself, he chided himself. Sitting here, staring perversely at these total strangers; you didn't even know their names.
What else could he do but stare at them? That's all there was to do in this dump.
That's all he ever did anyway. Stare at chicks. Stare at complete strangers. Even the dead ones. He'd never had a steady relationship. Never even been married.
There was no way he was getting tied down to one broad.
Women were far too complicated to be around for that long.
He didn't know what the hell had just happened with Robbi back there. Usually she would have happily complied to fooling around before closing up.
Not this time. What the hell was her problem? What had he done wrong? She was acting like she had never seen a dead guy before. That was the problem with broads. Acting on their emotions and always blowing things out of proportion. You work as a nurse. In a hospital, he thought. And you get spooked by a body? It had to be her time of the month.
"Women," Axel scoffed under his breath.
They needed to lighten up and learn to just have some fun. What else was there to do besides screw around at this job?
He had so much down time; that was the only thing to do besides sit in front of the TV, drink coffee, and get your rocks off.
He took another sip of his coffee, and cursed under his breath as a huge drop splattered onto his white lab coat.
"Damn," he said, and reached to set his coffee on the top of the TV.
He didn't notice that the icebox behind him was empty and the door was standing wide open.
He didn't notice that a surgical hacksaw was missing from the table.
As he sat back on the folded gurney, an immensely powerful hand clamped down his forehead, yanking him backwards.
Axel had no time to scream or fight back. He didn't have time to process that he was actually being murdered.
He saw the blade of the hacksaw move past him in a blur, and he felt a searing white-hot pain stronger than anything he had ever felt before. Warm blood began to flow down the front of his lab coat, and he realized that his throat had been slashed. The blade had sliced through his carotid artery, resulting in a brilliant geyser of blood that sprayed all over the television screen in front of him.
Blood began to gurgle up in his throat, pouring from his mouth as he choked and gagged for air. White streaks of pain flashed in front of his eyes, and he felt his entire body going numb as he choked on his own blood bubbling up and cascading from his severed neck.
Just as his life was being drained out of him, two hands grabbed him on either side of his head and twisted it 180 degrees. He didn't feel a thing.
There was the sickening sound of his neck snapping and the last thing Axel saw before life became nothing but a blur was a man wearing a hockey mask standing over him, admiring his handiwork.
Nurse Morgan didn't hear the door to the inventory room slowly swing open and the slow, laborious breathing...steady at first, and then growing with intensity.
She swept up the last few pieces of broken glass into the plastic biohazard bag, shaking her head miserably. What a night, she thought sourly.
What a hell of a night.
She knew what she was doing the minute she got home. Get a hot shower, take some sleeping pills, and hit the sack.
She could still feel Axel's hands all over her. He was a total pig, why did she keep falling for him?
He was inconsiderate. He was rude. He was crude. He was everything that girls hated in a guy.
But yet, she still found herself sneaking down to the morgue every now and then to see him. And that wasn't even the worst of it. He'd get inside your mind. Now she was dropping things everywhere and being a total klutz. What a sleaze.
Her thoughts were interrupted by footsteps behind her.
"Get lost, Axel. I'm busy!" she yelled over her shoulder, not bothering to turn around.
"I've had more than enough of you for one night,"
The footsteps kept coming closer and closer.
The breathing grew louder.
A huge shadow fell over her.
Nurse Morgan felt her face growing hot with anger.
"Read my lips, leave me alone!" she shrieked and spun around.
A hockey mask was staring right back at her.
Before she could react, Jason Voorhees's powerful hand clamped around her neck and slammed her back against the wall.
She let out a blood-curdling shriek as Jason lifted her into the air, her feet dangling in mid-air, his grimy hand in a vise-like grip around her throat.
She reached out, clawing and scratching at her assailant, seeing the utter hatred in his eyes through the two holes in the blood-stained hockey mask.
It was him. The guy who killed all the kids at Crystal Lake. And he was killing her.
She barely had time to process the realization. All she could do was continue to scream hysterically at the top of her lungs and try with every ounce of her strength to pry the maniacs hands from her throat. It was all in vain.
There was suddenly a flash of silver and a scalpel was plunged into her midsection.
She let out a guttural gurgling noise, blood bubbling up in her throat, and her vision faded to red, and then to black. All she could hear next was the sound of her own flesh ripping, as the scalpel sliced down through her torso.
For a split second, she felt the most agonizing pain she had ever felt, and then everything went dark.
Her limp body collapsed in a pool of blood and entrails, and Jason let the scalpel fall from his hand.
He felt the seething rage inside of him slowly subside, but it would soon come back.
It always did.
Whenever he killed, he felt the rage dissipate, and an unbelievable sensation of satisfaction washed over him. But it was only a matter of minutes before he felt it again. Whenever he saw young people doing filthy things to each other, it brought the feeling back, each time stronger than the last. He had heard them on the gurney in front of him climbing all over each other, kissing, moaning with passion, and all he could feel was an overwhelming lust to eradicate them both, to watch their blood flow between his fingers, to feel a blade slice into their flesh, to watch all of the life drain from their worthless bodies. They were all the same.
Just like the blond girl. The one who took his mother's life.
He felt the same insatiable fury when he had killed all of them...
He didn't feel the bloody gash above his left eye where she had struck him with the axe. He hardly felt anything when it happened.
All he felt was the anger and hatred towards her. Towards them. Towards all of the careless young people who ran around and did filthy, obscene things to each other in the dark. The ones who weren't watching him...the ones who had killed the only one who loved him…drove her crazy mad with grief and then killed her right in front of him.
For twenty long years, he survived, lost in the woods, unable to find his mother, feeding off the wilderness, and then, after what seemed like forever to his unhinged mind, he watched from the shadows of the trees as his mother was killed on the shore of the lake; watched her head be sliced clean from her body and roll off into the water. He didn't understand...he couldn't understand...his deranged mind couldn't understand that his mother had been killed in self defense. All he could understand was that they hurt him and hurt his mother. They let him die.
Nobody had cared. He remembered twenty long years ago, as if it had happened yesterday, a vivid fragment of blurred and distant memories. His whole life had been a blur. Trapped in his silent world. Living on his own out in the woods of Crystal Lake. But now, he saw what the world was like, and he despised it. They hadn't been watching him. They only cared about pleasuring themselves, like his mother had always said.
He remembered his mother had brought him to the edge of a field where the counselors had been hanging out one night and told him how the youth were all engaged in drugs and making love, and how disgusting it was, and that they would all pay for their sins. And she was right. Every time he saw them out there...every time he saw young people at Camp Crystal Lake, they were all acting the same, just like his mother had said.. Getting nude and running into the woods to touch each other and pleasure each other, heedless of any worries or cares...They all had to pay.
Wherever they went, they spread obscenities and their disgusting ways. Time and time again, he would spy on the counselors back at Camp Crystal Lake, and just as his mother had said, they would all be engaging in drugs and making love like feral animals, like the disgusting abhorrent worthless pieces of flesh that his mother had told him that they were. He remembered how all the kids had ostracized him. Ostracized him until he was walking out, alone, by the lake while the other kids were playing soccer, and had fallen in, and no-one had heard him scream. The counselors hadn't heard him scream. No-one had heard his screams. The rage grew.
He had woken up, not remembering how long he had been underwater. The only thing that had helped him survive was the thought of his mother. He remembered floating with the current until after what seemed like forever, and then he found himself somewhere on the lakeshore, far away from his mother and from Camp Crystal Lake. He had survived for weeks that turned into months and years, hiding out in some abandoned cabins and surviving off canned foods and berries and any fish or small rodents he could catch.
After what seemed like eternity of rote survival in the wilderness, after nights of dreaming of his mother, he had gotten back to Camp Crystal Lake but found his mother gone, and the cabins vacated and condemned by the authorities. There he stayed, hiding out in the cabins, and running into the woods whenever a Crystal Lake deputy would come to make his rounds and make sure no-one was trespassing on the campgrounds. And it was there, that he had seen them...counselors...and Steve Christy disturbing his home, turning it back into a place where teenagers could go to make love, and ruining his safe and peaceful hideout he had for himself. He had ran into the woods, terrified of them, still feral and out of his mind but one night, he heard his mother calling for him...Kill her Mommy...Kill her...Kill her...he had heard her cry. He was watching from the shadows as the girl, Alice, had fought his crazed mother on the shore of the lake and decapitated her. The rage grew.
She hadn't forgotten about him, his animalistic mind had thought. She had been screaming his name, killing for him, and seeking vengeance. And now, the only rational position in his mind was to finish the job for her. To kill Alice and anyone who came back to his woods. To his lake.
He managed to take his mother's head before the police started crawling all over the camp, and built a crude shack in the woods with some spare supplies he had stolen, where he lay in wait, dormant, not bathing or grooming, growing even more into some kind of uncivilized animal surviving out in the woods, waiting until the time was right…
Jason would hear his mother's voice calling to him, as he would kneel down by her decomposing severed head in the back of that dilapidated shack...Kill her, Jason. Kill them all...Kill them all...do you know what they did to me? What they did to you? They weren't watching you Jason. They are very bad. They do very bad things with each other...very bad, selfish, disgusting things...you must kill them. They can't hurt you...Kill them for me, Jason.
How could Jason let his mother's killer live knowing she had only been loving him so much, and avenging him. He couldn't let her live. She had to die.
He didn't remember tracking her down. He didn't remember climbing into her apartment through an open window with his mother's severed head...but he remembered her scream as she saw the head, sitting on the top shelf of the refrigerator where he had placed it on display, as a morbid reminder of what she had done...
Her death happened in a wild blur. He had stopped her screams with one hand, and held her as she struggled in his grasp like a fish on a hook, and then, he had plunged the icepick deep into her skull and into her brain. He didn't remember plunging it in, but he could remember the satisfaction from hearing her dying screams, and that he had to kill again… and again...They all had to die. Every last one of them. The counselors...selfish, careless teenagers. Young people. They were all responsible. They would come back again and again to fulfill their selfish and abhorrent desires in his woods.
It was what his mother wanted.
And now, he had to finish what she started.
Jason was going back to Crystal Lake.
