Jason's leatherface impression

In the temporary offices of the State Attorney, Diane Miranda found cold comfort for herself and her charge. With no sleeping accommodation, and no _ heating, the night was falling uncomfortably. Gretchen had been given a cursory medical check-up and an antitoxic antidote by the medical center, but was dismissed quickly. In such emergency conditions, where gunshot and knife wounds were more common than pregnancy labor or whiplash, anything that suggested drug abuse received short shrift.

"Hello? Is that Sheriff Casey's office? Is that...2 Yes. Yes, this is she." Diane was taken back to hear Casey himself on the phone. It had been weeks since they had direct contact, and she assumed that maybe the old man had passed authority for the emergency situation over to his deputies. But there was no such luck.

"Yes, it's good to hear you too, sheriff," she lied. His voice sounded tired, dissipated. In the background was a continual hum of movement as men shouted and took orders, and lawmen who were perpetually on duty worked through the night. "No, it's a personal call, really—except that," she looked at Gretchen's drained, traumatized face, reminding herself that she had no need to make excuses. "I've taken in a former Forest Green girl named Gretchen Andrews. Oh, you've heard of her. Of course. To put it plainly, sheriff, we've had to vacate our temporary offices for security reasons that I may need to report to you at a later date. The State Attorney's people have allowed us access to their offices, but it's just..."

She looked at Gretchen's faraway stare. Noted her fragility, how she had internalized every terrible experience she had endured. It touched her that the girl was still appreciative enough to smile back. A nervous but kindly, almost loving smile. "We have nowhere to sleep out here. And we're a little scared. All we have is a top-story view of the highway and all the craziness that's going on outside."

To her surprise, Casey was inherently sympathetic. "Know what you mean, ma'am. Long time since I felt any peace myself. Long time since I was able to sleep too. But I'm not going to leave two vulnerable women alone in times like these." It sounded as if all the piss and wind was taken out of Casey by the constantly grinding circumstances. Any bygones between them were, it seemed to be merely bygones. He sounded to her like a tired old man who knew that perhaps he might die soon, and had resolved not to leave too much acrimony behind him. In any case, she couldn't help but be slightly touched by his insistence that he pick both of them up himself, and accompany them to a spare lockdown trailer in the deputies’ high security quarters.

"No, no, that's fine,” he told her. "I'm happy to get out of here a little while. Just give me twenty minutes to get over. Your safety is my responsibility, Miss Miranda. We may be stuck way out here, but youre still one of my constituents."

George Casey put down the phone. He looked out from the frenetic office loaned to him by the Sheriff of Cunningham County. He had a heavy sense of failure following him around from the Forest Green college incidents. His draconian tactics, he confessed to himself, had failed to save as much as one life. He wasn't going to refuse aid to one of those young students now.

But, in those isolated offices on the edge of the highway, twenty minutes turned into more than a half-hour and counting. The women's discomfort grew as the night grew colder. Headlamps threw creeping rays up and down the walls. And still the madness, the screams and yells and gunshots off in the distance, did not abate.

"Gddamn cop." Diane's sympathy with Casey was short-lived. Gretchen seemed fully conscious now. Her hypnotic trance and postdrug nausea were something that belonged to the previous twentyfour hours. The process of staying awake for so long had created a vicious circle, promoting a fatigued wakefulness.

"Not long, baby,” Diane tried to reassure her. Gretchen gave her that endurably patient, almost unbearably angelic smile.

"Maybe we should just sit up till morning to make sure we're okay. We can start the day again tomorrow. Find ourselves somewhere safe to rest." The girl seemed so vulnerable, yet so long-suffering and full of goodwill.

Diane's urge to protect her was basically maternal. And yet, she admitted to herself, finding a safe refuge was as much a personal priority for her as it was for Gretchen Andrews. She no longer recognized the life she used to live before Friday the thirteenth of January. Before the madness. Before the violence. But there had been the consolation of finding a strong, intelligent man who could help her make sense of the chaos all around them. She had really believed that Ed North shared many of her principles, and respected the strength of an independent woman like Diane Miranda.

But then, she'd also started to believe that he cared for her. What a fcking pity that he turned out to be an ashole, just like all the rest.

The whooping buzzer sounded like a nuclear meltdown warning. It awoke them from the cold purgatory of their most private, most melancholy thoughts. When it sounded again, Diane rushed to check out the image on the CCTV camera. Its dull colors were almost black and white in the darkness, but she could pick out the solid image of a beer-gutted sheriff in his corny fedora. She instructed "enter" into the two-way microphone and hit the button that released the electronic lock.

"Hey!" She gave a little shout to Gretchen to bolster her spirits. "Better late than never, huh?" It had been more than two hours since she put the call in to Casey, but, now that he was here, relief dispelled her irritation. After all, who knew what might have befallen him on the way? Nothing could be relied upon these days, so a lawman showing up in the dead of night was something to be thankful for.

"Oh my. Check out how he swaggers.” They watched him enter the offices on the CCTV screen. Formerly a little slow but steady, Casey now seemed to lumber from one foot to the other in a violent swaggering motion where his legs and shoulders moved as one.

Diane's voice was low and conspiratorial, in case the old boy should hear her. "I really don't think all this pressure has been good for him. The last I heard, they were talking about taking him out of the state, down to Florida to get away from all this craziness."

"He's coming down the hallway.” Gretchen spoke in that faraway singsong voice from deep inside her head. The place that protected her from evil men and human monsters. "He's here.” Diane could see that for herself. But the girl announced it as if the walk down the passage was the coming of some great and powerful figure. Not just a late-night goodwill call by that crusty old bastard Casey.

"Oh, George! Are you okay?" The way he stumbled through the door as she let him into the office elicited Diane's concern. So much so that she called him by his Christian name, for the first time in living memory. His eyes were downcast and he held his fleshy gray face aside, as if he could not meet her gaze straight on.

Gretchen became suddenly animated. She couldn't take her eyes off the sheriff. Instead of standing on her feet, she retracted her legs and knelt upright on the stiff-backed wooden chair she'd been trying to rest in, both extending her body and retreating at the same time.

Apart from his hat, the sheriff seemed to be in civilian clothing. He wore a Shapeless black jerkin, which seemed kind of cheapskate and austere for off-duty hours. But then, no one had any time to indulge themselves in luxuries anymore. He had his face turned so that Diane only saw him in profile. He seemed pained. His face was loose and pouchy. It would have been a hangdog expression, if it wasn't so expressionless. And he remained almost rudely silent.

Diane thought that maybe she ought to drive them out to the security compound, if Casey would risk leaving his car there. Even in the minimal lamplight, she could tell he looked ill and exhausted, like he was on the verge or a stroke—if he hadn't suffered one already, that was.

Then she saw the gash. In profile, it ran from the underside of his right ear in a deep red line all the way along the underneath of his jaw. At first, she thought it might be a razor cut, but it was of truly Van Gogh proportions. It could never have been self-inflicted unless a man was trying to cut his own face clean off.

As he turned toward her with those dead eyes, Diane's immediate impulse was to reach out to the wounded man. But something made her hand freeze in mid-air. Gretchen kept repeating, "He's here... He's here," as if she had some kind of nervous compulsive disorder.

And then the sagging flesh of his face fell away. For the first time in these interminable days of horror, Diane Miranda heard herself scream. As he turned to look at her, face-on, it seemed that only one side of George Casey's features had been fastened to his skull. As even that peeled away, from the sheriff's deeply furrowed brow down to the jowl, she saw the colorful mass of membranes, veins and fatty tissue, several layers below the colorless skin. But what lay beneath was another thing entirely. The skinned face of the late Sheriff Casey had merely been a mask.

Beneath it was something much worse. That wrecked, dehumanized visage regarded her with curiosity. Wearing another human being's skin was a trick taught to him by Ed Gein when they were in hell together. The mockery of the human form that was Jason Voorhees had gained entry.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 16