Chris ran over to the tool rack and seized the first weapon she saw, an ax, and as Jason slashed away at the dead biker with demented fury, Chris raised the ax high over her head and moved toward him. Jason gave a final brutal blow to the biker’s vivisected corpse and turned back toward her as she gave a wild cry and swung the ax with all her might. The blade thunked through his white plastic mask and became buried in his forehead.
Chris stepped back, shocked at what she’d done, and suddenly Jason’s arms shot out for her. With the ax still embedded in his skull, he staggered toward her, arms outstretched, fingers grasping . . .
“NOOO!” Chris screamed, staggering back, incredulous that he was still alive. “NO! NO! NO!”
Feeling the wall behind her back, she shrank against it, screaming hysterically as he staggered closer, his hands reaching out for her. And then he fell forward like a cut-down tree and landed with a thud on the ground right at her feet.
Chris stood, trembling against the wall, staring down at him with terror. She drew several shuddering breaths and prodded his head with the toe of her sneaker, then immediately jerked her foot back.
He didn’t move.
She was afraid to trust the evidence of her sense. She shuffled to one side, still pressed back against the wall, and then went around him in a wide circle, staring down at his massive body lying there with the bloody ax embedded in his head. She slowly edged around him and went outside, breathing heavily, her throat raw from screaming. In a daze, she walked down the path leading to the lake.
The wind had died down and Crystal Lake was dark and smooth as glass. The night was cold, but she didn’t even feel the chill. Knowing she was on the verge of collapsing, she followed some blind instinct that led her to seek safety out upon the lake, where no one could reach her. At the boat dock, she sank down to her knees and pushed the canoe, which she and her friends had brought, into the water. She climbed into it, huddled on the bottom, then drifted away from the shore into the darkness.
She sprawled in the bottom of the canoe, staring vacantly up at the stars. The gentle, slightly rolling motion of the canoe as it drifted lulled her into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Something heavy struck the side of the canoe and Chris jerked awake, sitting up violently and crying out, “No!” And then she realized where she was and looked around. It was morning. The canoe had drifted out to the small island in the middle of the lake and had struck a drifting log.
She sighed with relief, then reached out to push the partially submerged log away from the canoe. She hesitated, staring at the log with sudden fear. She forced herself to touch it, then jerked her hand back. She set her teeth and shoved the log away, then cried out and threw her arms up to protect herself as something swept past her head . . . but it was only a duck landing on the water. Chris squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Her nerves were ragged. She was starting at the slightest sound, the faintest shadow, the slightest movement. She counted to ten and opened her eyes, looking back toward the house.
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
