Brian's buddies were calling to their friend and his girl. Sat over on the far side of the copse, the young couple were propped alert and upright on the diseased trunk of a mighty white oak, its bark corrupted by a black fungus that had spread all over.

Trey thought he recognized the kid. Brian—that was the little freshman dude who told him about fish after his girlfriend had kicked up a fuss, right? It wasn't even an hour ago since he'd been speaking with the kid, but he could have mistaken the pair of them for someone else now. It was only when they stepped up close to get Brian's side of the story that he realized why.

Brian, no basketball league player to begin with, looked shorter. Or rather, his girlfriend looked taller. He and Hailey were sat up stiff on that trunk like they expected a dissing from their friends, or had a steel rod stuck up their asses. The ribbing and the joshing died as a bunch of Forest Green guys, his freshman buddies in the first row, found that Brian and Hailey were not as they remembered them.

They weren't so much sitting there as propped against the thin white and black-flecked branches that sprouted high out of the trunk. And Brian looked different. In fact, Brian was wearing what looked like a girl's chemise, with dainty little ballet pumps on his feet to cope with the lakeside soil.

It might have been comical had it not been so bizarre. Brian refused to look at his buddies face on. In fact, he and Hailey only had eyes for each other. As they sat facing outward, they regarded each other askance, so awkwardly that their viewpoint would have been at ninety-degree angles with their torsos if they were walking down the street. Hailey wearing Brian's fraternity jacket, while he was in her young lady's casual clothes.

It was only as the guys assembled around the trunk—cautiously, slowly—that they checked Brian's expression. Or lack of it. His eyes rolled way back in his head, till all that could be seen were the whites. His tongue distended slightly from his mouth, coated in a thick red like cranberry sauce.

It took one of Brian's best buddies to conjure up the balls needed to reach out to Hailey's shoulder. She responded quickly to his touch. Her lolling head inclined downward at first, as if she, or Brian, or whichever of the couple the body belonged to, was about to crash to the ground. But her head had a center of gravity of its own. First it fell toward her boyfriend, and the thick blood that ran from her small mouth down to her neck gushed a little more.

Then it tilted the other way and came unbalanced. Dropping from Brian's shoulders, it revealed the clean cut that tried to marry her hacked windpipe and spinal column with the bloody vacant space on her boyfriend's shoulders. As Hailey's head fell into the winter leaves, it was clear they were never going to be a perfect match.

The assembled college kids backed off, speechless, some grabbing a deep breath to keep from retching. As they did, the support their cautious fingertips lent the two bodies was withdrawn, and Hailey's small, slender shape concertinaed to the ground from its propped upright position. Her boyfriend's severed head, which had been replaced uneasily on her shoulders, became detached and bounced off of the tree trunk.

What ensued can only be described as pandemonium. At least forty or fifty kids had wandered their way into that forest. All of them wanted to find their way out. Quickly.

Trey tried to keep his mind on phoning the cops on Gretchen's cell phone. But, just like the others, he ran as fast as he could, as fast as staying close to Shawna, and the colliding, tumbling bodies in their way, allowed him to. Whichever sick puppy had enjoyed playing with Brian and Hailey, after ending their lives, was still in that forest.

In a few short minutes, the exodus from the woods at Forest Green took on epic proportions, as a couple score or more frightened kids came sprinting out of the trees and up the grassy banks. At least now, apart from their murdered friends, everyone was present and accounted for. So they thought.

Deep in the thick of the woods, Josh Logan was still trying to find his way out. He'd been one of the first to enter, in the mad dash of the "wetback hunt," but the fun had gone out of it by now. He'd heard that crazy screaming coming from who knew where, and then a whole load more noise as others came running to check out what was going down. Now he heard nothing.

He guessed that the others had found out who was kicking up the big noise, and that now the party was dying down. At least, that seemed to be the most palatable explanation he could consider, in his paranoid state. It had been a mistake to finish up that big blunt when he was wandering in the woods. At the time, it just seemed like part of the fun. But now he was alone, with just the fading gleam of his torchlight for companionship. It helped him pick his way through the woods, stopped him falling hands down over quite so many roots. But every time he shone it at the trees, their gnarled outlines seemed somehow malevolent, their twisted branches rising to the sky like deformed limbs.

He was just stoned, that was all. Stoned and lost. He could hear a thousand little voices in the trees that might have been the squeaking and chirping of nocturnal animals, whistling through the branches as the night air got colder. His mind couldn't place it. His imagination, working overtime, served only to confuse. He could no longer keep track of his own steps, not knowing how many times he had already walked this route before.

"Flashes, I get flashes of Jason..." The old Geto Boys lyric from Mind of a Lunatic flashed through his mind. He knew it referred to the lunatic killer who was supposed to have made Crystal Lake his hood, what Trey referred to as a folk story or something. But he also got flashes through his mind of scenes of violence.

Some big, lumbering dude, slashing at a little chick's throat with a blood-stained machete, while he held the throat of some small dude in the other hand and squeezed the life out of him at the same time.

Fuck. He didn't know why he should be prey to those kinds of visions at this time, but it was like his state of mind had made him receptive to somebody else's violent feelings. When he got back to campus and straightened his head out, he was going to stop playing gangsta and horror rap, maybe mellow out with some contemporary R&B for a while. Shit, if he was really gonna clean his head up, maybe he'd lay off the blunts for a short period too.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 1