Friday the 13th 3

by Simon Hawke

  And she saw Jason’s face staring out at her malevolently from one of the windows.

  She screamed and grabbed the paddle out of the bottom of the boat as she saw him come running out of the house, his horribly scarred face a mass of raw, dark red and purple tissue. She paddled madly as he ran down to the shore and suddenly the canoe struck something with a jarring impact and she lost the paddle. She had run into a large tree branch submerged beneath the water and the boat was stuck. Panic-striken, she tried to shove the canoe off, but she couldn’t do it and she quickly glanced back toward the shore . . .

  There was no sign of Jason.

  Terrified, she looked all around her wildly. Where? Where was he?

  Something erupted out of the water just behind her and she turned in time to see a horrifying apparition rising from the bottom of the lake, a woman covered with mud and slime, a dead woman, her body rotted and crawling with worms and maggots, and impossibly, she was alive and moving, reaching out for her . . .

  Chris screamed as the slimy arms wrapped themselves around her and she felt herself being dragged out of the boat, into the water, and down into the dark ooze . . .

  Epilogue

  Police Chief Fitzsimmons came walking back toward the house from the barn. His face was ashen. In all his years on the police force, he thought he had never seen anything as gruesome as the scene back at Paul Holt’s counselor training center when they found all those bodies scattered everywhere, but this was even worse. He blamed himself. It took them far too long to figure out that the killer had doubled back on them, eluding the search party by following the stream down to the lake and heading back toward the summer cabins. And like a wild animal at bay, the insane murderer had gone totally beserk, slaughtering everything in sight. If only they had tumbled onto it earlier and moved faster, thought Fizsimmons, they might have prevented this.

  The driveway and the yard in front of the house was crowded with police cars. Officer Normand stood on the porch, looking shaken. He glanced up at Fitzsimmons as he came up the steps, Fitzsimmons shook his head.

  “Looks like she’s the only one left alive,” he said.

  Normand took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What was that about a lady in the lake?” he said, still trying to make some sense out of the poor girl’s incoherent statement.

  “She must had flipped out,” Fitzsimmons said. “She’s been through hell. All her friends . . .” He stopped as Chris was brought out from the house. “Here, I’ll take her,” he said, gently putting his arms on the girl’s shoulder and slowly walking her down the porch steps.

  She was in a daze, completely disoriented, staring all around her as if she didn’t know where she was . . . and she probably didn’t, thought Fitzsimmons as he slowly walked her toward his police car. This was going to be a job for the boys in the white coats. He wondered if she would ever be the same again.

  Poor kid, he thought. Seeing all her friends butchered like that, then fighting for her very life, using an ax to kill the savage murderer in self-defense. After a shock like that, it was no wonder that her mind had snapped and she started to have halluncinations. She was trembling as he led her to the car, and when he tried to put her in the backseat, she started screaming wildly and trying to break free.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Fitzsimmons said as he forced her gently into the backseat and closed the door, quickly getting into the front seat and motioning Normand to drive off. “You’re going to be fine,” he kept telling her, over and over again, trying to calm her down, but it was pointless. She kept screaming at the top of her lungs and trying to tear away the metal grate separating the backseat from the front, bloodying her fingers as she clawed desperately at the wire mesh.

  The police car drove slowly across the damaged wooden bridge. The van had been hauled out and towed away, and the splintered planks and cracked support beams groaned as the squad car passed carefully over the gaping holes where the van’s rear tires had gone through.

  The girl suddenly stopped screaming and trying to tear away the wire grate. She lunged back, turning to gaze wild-eyed through the rear window at the open doors of the barn.

  The body of Jason Voorhees was visible through the open doors, lying on the ground just inside the barn with an ax embedded in its head.

  “That’s right, kid,” Fitzsimmons said gently. “He’s dead. You don’t have to be afraid. He won’t bother you anymore. He won’t bother anyone every again. It’s over now. It’s over.”

  But she just kept staring out through the rear window as they drove away. She simply kept on staring and shaking her head.