Chapter Two

The heat of the day had vanished as the sun sank below the horizon. A chilly mist hovered across the surface of the lake, spreading slowly through the campground. It twisted cold tendrils around Deborah's arms, seeping through the fabric of her sweater to brush against her skin.

Deborah Kim shivered from her hiding place, crouching in the shade of a large tree, half-buried in some gnarled shrub. The last few minutes had been nothing but confusion and fear as she'd run as far away from the campsite as she could. She barely knew where she was now, even though she knew the layout of the camp by heart. Somehow it felt different in the dark, the shadows draping themselves around every tree and cabin. Again the slight breeze brushed the mist through her sweater and she hunched up closer, shivering even more.

Her hiding spot, which had felt so comforting for a few moments, now made her feel exposed and vulnerable. Cautiously she began to move, unhooking the little branches of the shrub from her sweater before standing. She didn't hear anyone or anything about, but that didn't really mean anything anyway. Nobody had heard Jason before, after all. Not until it was too late.

Her glasses had slid down her nose as she crouched, and she slid them back up her nose as she carefully examined her surroundings. Not too far away, only a few seconds away if she jogged a bit, was the outline of a cabin. A warm golden light shone over the bright red door at the rear of the cabin. Safety. With one last glance over her shoulder, she took the chance and darted to the door as quickly as she dared.

All of the cabin doors in the camp opened inwards, and she nearly flung it open too hard as she entered. Fortunately she was quick enough to stop it before it knocked against the cabinet behind it, but the force smashed her knuckles into the cabinet instead. Deborah bit back a yelp of pain. She couldn't be sure who was lurking nearby. The thought of someone sneaking around outside the cabin made her shoulders tense up, and she quickly shut the door behind her and pulled down the heavy wooden barricade. Then, she darted across the room, heading for the front door and barring it too for good measure.

A tiny blossom of hope sprouted in her heart as the wooden bar slid into place. It was easy to convince herself that nothing had actually happened. That she'd been dreaming, or maybe it had all been just a prank. Slowly she stepped away from the door, towards the soft glow of a desk lamp across the room. Just a was no "Jason," no hockey mask, no danger. Any second now, Rob would show up and wave the fake knife around.

Midway across the room, Deborah stopped. You should be ashamed of yourself, a little voice in her head said. It wasn't just a prank and she knew it. What she'd seen was as plain as day, and right beside her too. The hockey mask in the water, that might have been a trick of the light maybe. Something she'd wanted to see so that it all made sense. But Rob? She could still see him falling, still smell the scent of blood in the air.

Her hands flew to her head, clamping over her ears as she knelt beside one of the sofas in the room. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to block out the images, the sounds; blot out the terror that choked the hope from her heart. It was just supposed to be a summer job, to help pay for her next year of college. Nowhere had any of the registration information said anything about a murderer in the lake. Her mother and father and grandparents across the state would be so worried when she didn't come home…

No! Deborah gritted her teeth and slammed her fists into her thighs. That was quitting. She was still alive, still healthy, still sane. All alone in a cabin at the edge of the camp, sure, but that was no reason to give up. Even if it took every last ounce of strength she had, she wasn't going to let Jason kill her or the others.

With a determined stare, she stood up and shook her head, telling herself once again that she couldn't just quit. These cabins were filled with supplies, with things that she could use to defend herself if she needed to. She just needed to look. Glancing around the room, Deborah began to make a mental list of the things she might need.

A flashlight, for starters. There were dozens of flashlights around the camp, always a couple in each cabin. If Kenny were here he could point her to where exactly they were kept, but right now she was on her own. Still thinking, she walked to the desk in the corner and began hunting through the drawers for a flashlight and batteries. I need to find something to use as a weapon- The drawer sounded so loud in the silent room that she froze as she opened it, listening for any sounds that she was discovered. Nothing. She glanced in at the contents. Paper, envelopes, stamps… nothing useful. She slid it closed and checked the others.

How much paper does one camp need? She wondered to herself as she closed the third drawer in the desk. The fourth drawer, the one on the top left, yielded much better results. Inside was tucked a couple of little black walkie-talkies. All the counselors had carried one all week, but they'd all put the walkie-talkies away before the campfire tonight. Regardless of whose these were before, Deborah needed one. She took the top one out of the drawer and clipped it to her belt for safe keeping.

I should probably find a map, just in case, she thought, adding it to her list. Then she took a slow walk around the room, looking for anything that could be a weapon. It had never occurred to her how many things could possibly be used as weapons before, and the thought for a moment made her stomach turn. The fireplace pokers could do in a pinch, of course, but she wanted something a little sturdier. At the moment, however, she couldn't see anything more usable. There was, however, another little end table tucked away into a corner with two drawers on the front. It was close to the door and when Deborah checked it, sure enough there was a selection of flashlights inside. She grabbed one and tested it out, before clipping it onto her belt and taking a few spare batteries from the drawer below.

Two items checked off her list for now. The rooms were laid out like a capital T, with the large front room being the crossbar and a central hallway separating two long rooms on the sides. One of the rooms she'd already been in when she entered the cabin, and a second glance confirmed what she remembered- nothing much of note in there. On the other side, however, was the entrance to the little bathroom, and inside there was a first aid box. Almost all of the cabins had one, Kenny insisted on it.

She considered taking it with her for a minute or two, but the box was bulky and it would probably make noise as she moved. Instead, Deborah left the door open and the box in plain sight- it might save someone's life. The last place she looked was in the dresser at the back of the hall. Most of the drawers were empty, waiting for campers to put things inside, but she found a stack of maps in one of the top drawers. This she tucked into her pocket before walking back into the main room.

With no other options for protection, Deborah picked up the fireplace poker. It would do in a pinch, she supposed. Then she pulled out the map and walked over to the window, checking the cabin layout with the pictures on the map to get her bearing. One cabin directly west of her current location. One cabin to the north, one northeast, with a small campsite in the middle… she was in Evergreen. The cabins she and AJ had been assigned to were across the river in Blair's Cove, so she'd spent very little time over here during the week. This had been the guys' territory- mostly Eric and Adam and Buggzy.

Wait a second. Eric. She'd been up here just that afternoon to talk to him, and learn how to use the CB radio to call for help. In fact.. She poked her head into the room that lead to the bathroom at the end and sure enough, there on one side was the radio. The table it was on was tucked against a window and somehow she'd overlooked it in her hurry.

Gingerly she turned it on. The instructions Eric had left with her seemed so long ago, and in her worried state she could barely recall anything. There was something about the dial controlling the channels, wasn't there? And there was an emergency channel, but which one it was she couldn't remember. She fiddled with the dial for a second, wishing that there was someone else who could call instead of her. Who knows what kind of person would be listening in? It was hard enough to hold conversations with her friends, let alone strangers.

Eric had said to hold down the button and talk into the microphone. "Hello?" she said timidly, pressing the button down and leaning in. Almost certain that her first attempt was too quiet to be heard, she tried again. "Hello?" No reply, but maybe they were waiting on the other end, she couldn't remember the protocol that Eric had tried teaching her. A faint creak sounded in the other room, and anything keeping her from speaking fled in a wave of panic. "Oh God, someone help us! Jason's real, and he's killing my friends! Someone help us! We're at Camp Forest Green, at Higgins Haven! Please, help us! Bring a gun!" She let go of the button and waited for a response.

Nothing.

Her breaths were short and verging on hysterical. Desperately she switched bands and tried again and again, repeating roughly the same message each time and getting no response. Frustrated and afraid, she stepped back. The more she tried to call for help, the more likely it was that someone would hear her, but it also meant that Jason might overhear as well. She'd already made plenty of noise with all the frantic calls, he might already be on his way to the cabin!

Deborah darted for the main room and ran to the front door, but paused for a moment with her hands on the barricade. Better to leave the barricade in place, honestly, the house was safer this way. There were plenty of windows around the room, and all of them opened enough that someone her size could easily slip out. She slid open the nearest window and climbed through, turning her steps towards the cabin west of her.

It was a much smaller cabin, with one room in front and a short hallway surrounding an off-center room on the side. As soon as she entered, she barred the doors like she had for the first cabin. Overall, it was mostly empty, with a few beds and a desk, but mostly a lot of boxes. A storage building, obviously. However, one trunk by the interior wall had an abandoned baseball bat lying on top of it. Buggzy must have been through here at some point and left it behind, she figured. Still, it was nice solid wood, and could easily be useful for protection. She picked up the bat and left the poker behind.

The desk drawers proved to be completely empty, and she was just about to check the chest of drawers on the back wall when a branch snapped nearby. Deborah's heart leaped into her throat, half-choking her as she froze. The sound had come from right outside the cabin! All the brave determination she'd found earlier vanished like smoke in a windstorm. She dropped to her hands and knees, crawling back behind the desk as silently as she could with the bat tucked up under one arm. It was in the middle of the room and worryingly conspicuous, but she was small. Maybe if whoever that was got in, they wouldn't see her.

Deborah crawled over to the desk, shimmying underneath and tucking her knees up to her chest. Then, she waited. The only sounds were her own breath and heartbeat, filling her ears in the deafening silence. From outside, along the wall that her back was against, she could hear footsteps. Loud footsteps. She clamped her mouth shut, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.

The door rattled in its hinges from across the room. Whoever was outside wanted to be inside, and they were making a lot of noise about it too. Hugging the bat close, Deborah tried desperately to be as small as possible, hoping whoever it was would just give up and go away.

Burning eyes, like pits of fire stared at him from the holes of the charred hockey mask, holding him transfixed. Rough, hot hands grabbed his shoulders and violently spun him around. Before he could even catch his balance, there was pain in his head- sharp, agonizing pain, and a voice calling for help…

Tommy jerked awake, nearly falling off his chair. He'd fallen asleep at his desk again, and that pain he'd felt was his brain trying to relay that he was resting his head on the handle of his screwdriver. Gingerly he rubbed the spot, he'd slept so deeply that there was a faint indentation in the skin.

As he did so, he realized the voice calling for help hadn't only been in his dream. Several years ago he'd owned a CB radio, back when he was only a kid. After the tragedy that had shattered his life back then, the house and radio had been left abandoned. Trish couldn't stand to live in the house anymore with all the bad memories, and Tommy had been shipped off to a hospital for years to get over his trauma. Once he got out, however, he needed someplace to live, and even after he'd put Jason back to rest in the lake, he couldn't bring himself to leave.

The house had needed some work, of course, having been left empty for so many years. Thankfully his father had been willing to loan Tommy some money to get it livable again, and Tommy was more than happy to take on the job of fixing up the house. By now it was almost completely fixed up, but it had seemed a shame to not fix his old radio as well. It was almost fixed, Tommy had figured, but there were still a few things that needed adjusting, and he wanted to be sure it picked up all the channels. That was how he'd come to fall asleep with his head on a screwdriver, with the radio left on. And someone was on the other end.

"-son's real, and he's killing my friends! Someone please help us!" It was a girl's voice, and for a moment he wondered if someone was horsing around with their personal radio. However, something about the desperation in the voice made him pause and listen closer. "Does anyone hear me? It's Jason, he's here at Camp Forest Green, over at the Higgins lodge! Help us, please! Bring a gun!"

Any grogginess from Tommy's unexpected nap vanished, and he sat up straighter. The old Higgins house was close by, just a short drive by car. A cold tingle spread through his chest even as his heart started beating a double-time staccato beat. It couldn't be. Jason couldn't be back. He was sunk in the lake, chained to the bottom. Jason should be at rest. And still Tommy doubted; Jason had returned from death once before, what was to stop him from coming back again?

There was no time to think. If Jason was really out there, these people would need any help they could get, and who else was as much of an expert on Jason Voorhees than Tommy himself? The cloudy night had brought a chill to the air, and Tommy grabbed his denim jacket from where he'd casually tossed by his bed. A set of keys for his truck jingled in the pocket, and he slipped a Swiss army knife into the pocket of his jeans for good measure. A half empty, stone cold cup of coffee sat on his desk and he downed it in one long gulp. He needed the caffeine tonight.

Then, he raced out of the room and down the stairs. An old, single-shell shotgun was tucked away in the corner of one of the living room- he hadn't found a better place for it yet. He'd never used it, actually, it was something that had been kept around "in case of bears" for a long time. Tommy grabbed it, and a nearly empty box of shells from a nearby drawer, and fled outside to his pickup truck, tossing the gun on the seat behind him and roared off into the night, leaving the cabin door unlocked behind him.

The noise at the front door hadn't stopped. In fact, it had actually gotten louder. Before it seemed like someone was just rattling the doorknob and pushing against the barrier. Now, Deborah could hear the sound of something slamming into the door a few times. Once, twice, followed by a much louder thump.

Then the noise stopped.

Deborah shrank back further under the desk. That sound, or lack thereof, could mean just about anything. The worst part was not knowing anything because the lack of information caused Deborah's mind to race to fill in the blanks. The person at the door could have been anyone. It could have been one of her fellow counselors… or it could have been Jason. And the silence made her uneasy. Maybe it was Jason out there, and he'd gotten distracted by someone else? She didn't dare crawl out to check, in case that's exactly what he wanted her to do. And if it was one of the others, why did they stop?

Did she even want to know?

She clung tightly to the bat, then took a deep breath and held it. Her heart was pounding in her ears, she was shaking all over and the last thing she wanted to do was make noise by whimpering. Still, the faintest of squeaks managed to get out as she trembled in the darkness under the desk.

The thumping returned, this time at the back door. Again, the one, two, thud combination. Whoever it was seemed to give up much quicker this time. Maybe they'll move on? Deborah thought, trying to hold onto some shred of hope. Even if it wasn't Jason at the door, the person there was loud enough that he'd obviously find them. Again she waited in silence, hoping that the person had left and that she'd be brave enough to actually leave her hiding spot sometime tonight.

Then, the window nearby rattled. This was much, much worse than the doors, because the window was right next to her desk. And it was hard to tell from a most likely sensationalized legend whether or not the killer in question had a habit of climbing through windows. The glass panes rattled against each other as the window was thrown open, followed by the sound of feet thumping on the wooden floor inside. Deborah was turned the wrong way to see, and honestly she'd only seen a glimpse of what she believed was Jason anyway. She probably couldn't identify him if her life depended on it.

The sound of footsteps came closer in her direction, and whoever it was stopped just a few feet from her hiding place. Moving as slowly as she dared, she craned her neck to see if she recognized anything. She could just about see a pair of jeans around the desk, but not much else. Then, the person came over and stopped right in front of the desk.

She highly doubted anyone who'd spent time rotting in a lake wore such nice (and probably expensive) tennis shoes as the ones that had stopped just inches from her feet.

Her suspicions were confirmed when the shoes moved again, only for the person to duck down and look right at her. "Deborah Kim? What the f- are you doing under there?" The whimper she'd been trying to hold in burst out all at once in a shrill, sharp noise.

Gasping for air, she blurted out in a harsh whisper, "Buggzy? How did you know I was here?" Buggzy rolled his eyes a little and reached a hand down for her. Reluctantly she let go of the bat with one shaky hand, before letting him pull her up to a standing position.

"I didn't know you were here, I came back for my bat." He pointed to the one in her hands. Deborah looked from him to the bat and back again, before handing it over to him. "But I kinda guessed someone was hiding under the desk when I came in." Buggzy smirked. "That desk you were under was dancing all over the floor."

The nerves that Deborah had built up released in a shaky, embarrassed laugh. "Oh. I didn't realize I was making noise." The longer she laughed, the more it began sounding like it was on the verge of tears.

"Nah, it wasn't that noisy. I was making way more noise than you."

"But what if Jason-"

"I doubt he even knew you were in here, Deborah," Buggzy insisted. "'Sides, I haven't seen him at all, not since the firepit. If that even was him." He absently smacked his palm with the bat. "I mean, it'd be just our luck to get a copycat."

Deborah had been wringing her hands a bit, trying to settle her nerves somehow, but she glanced up at his face for a second. "Why are you so upset about the possibility of a copycat? I mean, a murderer is a murderer, right? He's probably going to try to kill us even if he's not some kind of immortal zombie weirdo."

Buggzy looked at her and smiled, the kind of smile that was more malicious than joyful. "Man, it'd be boring if he was human. Nah, I want to actually get to see a real, live cryptid!" He swung the bat into the palm of his hand again, the sound making Deborah flinch.

"A cryptid?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, y'know, like Bigfoot or Nessie or the Jersey Devil!" He grinned. "But just seeing one is boring. Everybody wants to just see one. I want to fight it."

Deborah paused a second to stare at him. "You want to fight the Jersey Devil." She wasn't really trying to sound skeptical but it came out in her voice. Buggzy, however just laughed it off.

"Yeah! C'mon, people send in photos to magazines all the time with photos of bigfoot or something, but who can say they got to go toe-to-toe with him?! You have to admit that would be sick- you okay, Deb?" Buggzy paused to look over at her. Deborah had taken a few steps over to a cot set up in the cabin and sat down on it with her feet on the mattress and her knees pulled to her chest. She looked a little odd, honestly, a little too pale and she looked like she was struggling to sit still.

"I- I dunno," she replied, her voice shaky. "It's all overwhelming and.." She shook her head hard. "Buggzy, Rob's dead. I didn't know him very well, really, but he's dead. And I don't know if whoever's out there is really Jason or not but- you're talking about all these probably fictional creatures and there's a real threat out there right now. And-" Her voice broke, cutting off whatever she was going to say.

In almost every situation in his life, Brandon "Buggzy" Wilson oozed confidence and a cocky, devil-may-care attitude. But something in Deborah's words hit home, and for once it wasn't all a thrill ride. Plus, she looked like she was about to cry, and that was something he wasn't too sure how to deal with. He started to reach out with his free hand, then pulled it back with a lopsided grimace. "Look, okay, I'm… I'm sorry, okay Deborah?" He sighed. "We- We're gonna get out of here, okay? I mean, did anyone even think of calling the police?"

Her head came up from her knees. "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" She sat up a little straighter and swung her feet off the bed. "It's just down at Stillwater! That's only a few minutes walk!" Buggzy waved his hand towards her with a grin.

"See? You're over there ready to give up and we've still got tons of options! C'mon, I'll walk over with you." He took a few steps back to give himself some room and swung the bat at the air in front of him. It was a strong swing, and Deborah felt a little better already. She stood up, and stepped over to the last dresser in the room.

"Let me just look through here and see if there's anything useful." Most of the drawers were empty or had a few useless items in there, but she found a stash of walkie-talkies in the middle drawer and tossed one over to Buggzy. "Just in case. And maybe the others will find some too." Buggzy caught it easily and stuffed it in the pocket of his letter jacket.

"Okay, anytime you're ready. We can watch each other's backs." He headed over to the window, waiting for Deborah to pick the fireplace poker she'd dropped back up. Then, one after the other, they climbed out the window, and began to follow the winding trail south to the cabin at Stillwater Camp.