Once another human form was reduced to mulch, Jason began to advance. He was within several feet of tearing their youthful bodies apart. Then the pain tore into his backside. The man behind the black mask turned and roared out his wordless pain.

"Got ya, you bastard! I hope that hurts like hemorrhoids from hell!” Shawna had lined up the sights of her .22 to hit the man-monster straight in the anus. No expert marksman, the first shot hit wide beneath his crotch while the second was directly on target. As he lunged toward Shawna, another trickle of Forest Greeners ran for their lives. His bulk moved at an alarmingly fast rate for one so ungraceful.

"Step aside.” Trey fired off the only round that he knew he had left in his weapon. It hit Jason dead center in the pubic region. Jason squealed and raged and Shawna ran. She was momentarily forgotten, as the pain filled his fractured consciousness. His sexual organs were of no use to him. Long ago the sensuality had been seared from his being. What was left in place of human warmth was a hatred for humanity that burned hotter than anything imaginable. Except for the agonizing sting of hot lead in his genitals.

"AAAAAUUGGRRRHHH!" The unearthly cry rang out as Shawna sprinted for freedom. As she slipped lithely below Jason's flailing hands, his maddened senses oblivious to all but pain. Trey was now the enemy writ large. The source of all confusion and all pain. The origin, in Jason's childlike mind, of all that had tormented and defeated him from day one of his existence.

Trey passed through him. Sweating and hyperventilating, his natural agility was heightened to a preternatural degree by his fear. The man-monster would soon assimilate its pain, as he had when Shawna had wounded him in the asshole. As he always had throughout his corrupted existence, from the time when the innocent child sank to the bottom of the lake and his twisted flesh began to rot. But, as Trey hit Jason in the wounded balls with the butt of his now unloaded rifle, the final pangs of that pain and confusion held him from responding effectively. Held him until Trey's now myopic focus reached the end of that bloody corridor. Until he had clambered over a small mound of dead bodies, and started to pull the crack in the iron door shut, spitting defiance in the face of the loathsome maniac.

Who was no longer pursuing him.

It shocked Trey to realize he was not the last Forest Greener on the cellblock. The whimpering he heard from the end of the corridor, the sight of a maddened, kill-crazy Jason in retreat toward the noise, made his bowels feel they had turned to ice. From his partial view behind the closing door, he saw only the massive form lurching toward some new object of his hatred. Some arbitrary target to sate his lust for revenge. The only crying female voice left in the whole cellblock.

Trey re-entered the corridor. The place where all hope was now abandoned. To his stark horror, he found that they had abandoned two of their comrades in arms.

As he staggered in pain, salivating in rage, Jason's powerful hand pulled little Tina from her hiding place in the cell. She whinnied like a veal calf about to be slaughtered. As he raised her aloft by her throat, the very motion placing a grip on her windpipe that began to choke the life out of her, Marky showed himself. Snapping at the heels of the monster who threatened to take his baby away from him, worrying him ineffectually like a small terrier dog.

Trey stood transfixed. He wanted to intervene, but without ammo he had nothing left to attack with. He was almost as frustrated as the desperate Marky, who grabbed a dead prisoner's improvised weapon from the mounds of debris on the floor.

"Why don't you put her down, you big ugly bastard?"

As Tina's eyes rolled back in her head, Marky jumped at Jason. Slashed at his arm with a shiv—a homemade blade bound with cloth to its wooden handle. Jason snorted and sighed in irritation at the creatures that were fighting back, who were hurting him, instead of accepting their own death gracefully.

"Come on, fuckface, show me what you got!" It took a lot to make Jason's moribund flesh bleed. Marky drew no blood, but he was cutting the big stiff's clothbound arm to ribbons. Jason was irritated enough to take the kid at his word.

He let Tina drop to the ground, knocking further breath from her gasping form. Marky was still lunging at Jason, slashing and thrusting at the masked man with a fervor that had convinced him he could win. With each cut from the makeshift weapon, the manmonster seemed further in retreat. Even though the shiv was quivering, ready to break from its handle at any moment.

Then Jason struck back. As the knife came at him one more time, he braved a lesion by lashing out at it. The blade flew one way and the handle another. As Trey retreated further back behind the door, he saw Jason bring all his strength to bear on the boy. Marky was unable to move, squirming in the freak's grasp like a worm on a hook. With his assailant trapped in one hand, Jason reached down to the floor and found that most basic of prison weapons—a razorblade welded into the head of a toothbrush.

Outside the cellblock corridor, the Forest Green posse was heading down the stairwell after checking it for guards. The chaos and cacophony would bring reinforcements soon, who would have to make the choice of whether to pursue the escaping prisoners or challenge the murder machine that had destroyed their colleagues.

"C'mon, dude, we gotta get out of here! Everyone else has hauled ass..."

"No. They ain't." Trey corrected Gerry sharply. In one moment, the boy became aware of his friend's absence. "Marky? Tina?" Trey's grim silence was confirmation. Gerry shouted to his buddies, his prominence among the frat-boy set making him the ideal first lieutenant. "Who got some arms? Who got some ammo?" It was a desperate melee, everyone intent on finding his way out of the jail's general population section before it was too late.

"Here man, take this!" Gerry Nielsen presumed much of Trey Leblanc. Assumed that, in that one moment, he would selflessly put himself back in the jaws of death.

Trey had made that same assumption for himself. He turned the key in the heavy iron door and edged it open before he had time to think about it. His only weapon was a cloth for burning and a canister of butane, intended for lighter fuel, retrieved from the prisoners' homemade armory.

Jason howled in his face. Trey lurched back as he brandished the body of a boy at him like it was a weapon. It was hard to tell if Marky was alive or dead. He was a piece of meat. The deformed creep had made slashing incisions into most of the boy's veins and arteries. Across his limbs and across his chest, the fabric of his clothes cut loose in a mess of bleeding flesh, and across his face, which had dissolved the boy's features into a patchwork mosaic of cuts.

Trey fought for his breath against a wave of rising tears and vomit. As the man-monster pushed the face of the dying Marky at him, at the end of the corridor Trey could glimpse the winded, helpless form of Tina, tearfully trying to fight her way to her feet. Hoping and praying for rescue.

With one last vital surge of all the strength he could muster, Trey threw himself against the door. Pushed it closed before Jason could use his bulk to pry it open. Turned the metal key in the grinding lock and ran. He left Marky and Tina to their fate. Threw himself down the stairwell in the same manic lunge for freedom as all his peers. Although none of them had stopped to ask themselves about the personal cost, everyone had assumed Trey Leblanc would always behave with the utmost courage. Even Trey himself.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 14