Hell Lake durability

If Sanchez had been able to concentrate on something other than self-pity, he might have seen the visions of violence currently playing out in Jason's mind. Might have seen him under attack by a whole coterie of wild kids. Slashed with knives and hacked with axes. Flailing out as he was attacked by male and female alike, with that crazy, long-legged bitch who'd been there the night they erupted from Crystal Lake crawling up his back, pulling at his mask and slicing at his twisted ear with a machete.

Then he would have seen the kids who already lay upon the ground. The grunger dude with the long black hair, whose nose ring had been ripped out by Jason along with the rest of his nose. The pretty girl whose small, oval face had been crushed like a peach in the palm of Jason's hand. He would have seen Trey Leblanc return to the scene of the attack, after what he considered a tactical defeat and what Shawna Black considered cowardice. Would have heard him scream, "Get the fck out of the way! I'm gonna blow him to fcking hell!" as Leblanc tried to take him down with a semi-automatic hunting rifle.

But Jason kept coming forward. Stung, bleeding, wounded in an eyesocket where the eyeball had ceased to exist. He could bleed and he could suffer, but he had died too many times in his strange halfexistence to be halted by mundane weapons. Jason walked on where others died.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 18

They were in the last ditch. With so many of their friends and comrades slaughtered, no real hope could be said to remain. As the relentless, deathless Jason advanced upon them, there could only be said to be one chance of ultimate survival. But neither Shawna nor Trey was prepared to abandon their vulnerable friend. Even if she, and the invading personality that lurked within her mind, were all that this monstrous force of nature was now interested in.

"Fck him, Trey, let's do it! Let's take him down! We're only going to get one chance—even if he kills us, we can save Gretchen." Shawna was hysterical. But the more convinced she was of her imminent extinction, the greater her bravery.

Maybe two dozen people had tried to take out Jason within the last hour, whether they were gangsters or from their own neo-vagrant community. Now a great many littered the hillside, discarded like grotesquely broken toys. Of those who had survived, only Shawna, Trey and Gretchen had not already run for their lives. Now, they could not afford to turn their backs on Jason as they groped their way backwards up the hillside. As they twisted their ankles in unseen holes, or became snagged on entangling vines or weeds.

"It's crazy, Shawna. Our only chance is to get out of here. Just run and keep running!" Trey no longer saw any hope at all. For too long, since they had busted out of jail, it had seemed to him that they were living in a nightmare way beyond their control, in which all their efforts were irrelevant. They could be heroic, or they could be cowardly. None of it made any difference.

"Please don't hurt him... Please don't hurt my boy. He doesn't mean any harm. All he wants to do is cleanse the world of the things that feel dirty. All those things that the nasty children want to upset him with." That stereophonic/schizophrenic voice echoed from Gretchen's mouth, as the killer who desired to reduce her friends to offal ascended toward them, maybe twenty feet below at most. All was insanity.

"What's happened to you?" Shawna spat the accusation at Trey. "Isn't there anything left worth living for? Anything worth dying for?" Her words were self-righteous and her eyes were wild.

He had no time to answer. The brutal hands of the childlike mass murderer reached upward for them. In any moment death might be upon them. Whether or not their lives were worth living would become an irrelevance.

Then Shawna screamed. She rose to her haunches and gave out a cry that was not defeated, not the despair of some wretched little girl who felt terrified because she had no big, strong man to take a stand for her. All her rage and her disgust at everything they had been through came roaring out of her in one almighty scream, splitting the night.

With a last look at Trey and Gretchen, she opened the twelve-inch blade of the hunting knife that was one of their final remaining possessions. Then, holding its glint up to the gleam of the starlight, she turned and jumped down the incline of the hill. Towards the murderous beast in the black welding mask whose grip was approaching their ankles. Toward his sloped, rounded but powerful shoulders that ungracefully caught her in their grasp.

Toward the dark eyehole of the mask, where the end of the blade was just about able to penetrate, slicing into the empty socket from out of which the man-thing still perversely stared.

And she fell downward. Down to the lower ridge, from which Jason had emerged. Tumbling down, locked together, onto the rock ledge and over it. Down below, into the unkempt foliage that ascended its way up the side of the hill.

And then they were gone. After a few moments of frenetic violence, it was as if neither of them had ever lived. Yet the verdant outgrowths and distended roots that lined the hillside stretched down a steady gradient. It was no sheer drop. Both of them must still have been there somewhere.

Trey scuttled down the hillside, kicking up earth, leaving Gretchen stuck at the point where they had ascended. His heart beat so fast he could feel each violent palpitation shake his body up to the top of his cranium. All the pain of all the loss and all of the battles for survival, all the false hope and the despair, were eclipsed by this one act. In one sudden, mad moment, Shawna had taken herself and Jason out, just like she insisted they should. In the blink of an eye, they were both taken out of existence.

In Trey's state of despair, he might have rejoiced. If the boogeyman was gone, then he and Gretchen could cut and run. But if Shawna disappeared from the planet then she epitomized loss. She was the woman who exemplified endurance and hope to him, even when their relationship had reached his lowest ebb. She was the very apex of his relations with the human race, her very presence intimating that there might always be a reason to live. Might always be a reason to hope. If she could just disappear into the ether of a desolate hillside, then life had been proven meaningless.

After so much conflict, it was eerie to take in all the silence around them. As Trey looked over the ridge into the green nothingness, all that could be heard on the wind was the distant shriek of a night bird. Until a sudden surge of movement hurtled out of the underbrush below the ridge. First a hand reached out to him. Not an extension of friendship, but a vile, subhuman thing couched in a cheap woolen glove. Then the panting specimen whose body it belonged to came climbing out of the shrub. It extended its hand again, but this time it proffered a gift. An item that made Trey sick to the very depths of his soul.

When he would not accept the object, Jason hurled it up onto the ridge. It was a scalp. Or rather, a "scalping," in the manner of the old white bounty hunters whose barbarities were adopted in revenge by belligerent Native American tribes.

Ringed by an angry red top layer of human flesh, the crimped and layered brown hair dripped blood like a wig worn by someone on the guillotine. Of the few little items that were still attached to the human hair, Trey recognized one of them as the Egyptian Ankh cross he'd bought from an East Village street market. A symbol of life after death. This was the scalp of Shawna, torn fibrous and bloody from a body still living at the time of the mutilation. The body that was almost certainly dead by now.

    Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 19