Saturday the 14th

The two surviving counsellors ran in opposite directions, screaming into the woods.

Jacob Mara’s shoulders sagged. Each year, he got a bit more rotted. And each year, these camp counsellors got faster. Or did they stay the same, and he was getting slower? Now, there was a scary thought: would one day come when he couldn’t catch any of them? He adjusted his hockey mask, which had stayed with him through thick and thin, through life and death. And then he crashed through the undergrowth after his quarry.

The topless blonde in a thong split left, whereas the jock in boxer shorts went right.

Every year, always the same. These kids always got naked and had premarital sex in precarious situations. They drank and smoked pot, listened to their music, and partied. Even whilst their friends were dying in ever more gruesome ways. Jacob had no idea why. All he knew was that they had to die. Jacob didn’t quite understand why they had to die; the universe demanded it. And who was he – a tiny cog, a two-bit player in the grand scheme of things – to question the plan? Jacob spun a mental coin and called the toss. He chose right and went after the boy.

The branches whipped at him, and the brush crunched underfoot. Beams of weak light punctured through the canopy, offering disorienting illuminations of the thicket. Nearby, the girl’s screams faded into the sounds of the forest. Up ahead, branches cracking and frantic footsteps punctuated the boy’s whimpers. The teen glanced over his shoulder and locked eyes with Jacob. The boy’s eyes widened, and he didn’t look where he was going. He stumbled barefoot over a gnarled tree root and tumbled into the foliage.

Exhausted, Jacob trudged after the scrambling kid. He hacked through the greenery with his machete, amputating tree limbs left and right. All the while, he said nothing, as was his signature.

The kid crawled away on his back, eyes the sizes of saucers. ‘N-No! Please! No, I— I’ll do anything! A-Anything! Please don’t do this man, don’t—’

He thought of explaining to the lad how tiring it was to chase after them all and hunt them down, one by one, in a single night. Jacob thought about lecturing him on how difficult they made his job. In the end, he decided against it. It was too much effort, and he felt much too worn out. And it went against his whole schtick, anyway. Always leave them guessing; have them dying with a question on their lips. Besides, his tongue had rotted away after spending a year chained underwater at the bottom of a lake. He wouldn’t have been able to communicate much besides exasperated grunts and growls. Up went the machete, down came the machete, and off went the head.

The jock’s final scream echoed into the trees, fading into nothingness. His decapitated body twitched, the blood flow weakening with every second. The head thumped and rolled away into the bushes like a bowling ball misthrown into the lane gutter.

One more down, a whole bunch still left to go. It had taken Jacob longer than before to slash through the counsellors’ numbers. There once was a time when he could have decimated them all within two hours. That had been before he’d begun to decay. What time was it? He raised his eyes to the heavens he knew didn’t exist and squinted through his mask, through the trees. He gasped – the first noise he’d made in god knew how long.

The sky overhead shifted through various shades of blood. It swirled from the vibrant red of an arterial puncture to the light pink of diluted crimson in lake water. Somewhere, birds chirped and called.

Jacob slumped. Dawn had arrived. It was now Saturday the 14th. Jacob had failed to kill all the camp counsellors for the first time in his many lives. So that was that. Serial killing was a young man’s game. Ought he to retire? Find a nice grave in the ground and stop forever? He dropped to a log and put his misshapen head in his mildewed hands.

All around him, the sounds of life sprung into action. The bushes twitched, and the undergrowth rustled. Branches shook and danced. Squirrels and birds and all manner of tiny creatures scurried and fluttered about.

He suppressed a sob. They were taunting him. Here sat the once great Jacob Mara, the infamous killer of these hallowed campgrounds. Only he’d fallen from disgrace. Not even the forest animals feared him anymore. If he couldn’t slaughter a camp’s worth of teenagers in a single night, what was his purpose? Gods, he was so tired. The thrill of the hunt still made his undead heart pump, but he could not keep up anymore. He had to stop and draw this nonsense to a close before he embarrassed himself.

A branch cracked to his left. Birds took to the skies. Frantic footfalls disturbed the earth.

Jacob twitched. He acted on instinct before rational thought had time to enter the equation. He stuck his machete out and lunged with a snakelike strike.

The bethonged girl flew through the air in two pieces, bisected by the belly. Her top half – still topless – landed upright in a thorn bush, with the entrails dangling into the barbs. A look of fear and puzzlement remained etched onto her face; she’d died before she knew what had hit her. Her lower half kept on running before it understood that something was wrong. Her legs collided with a tree trunk, flopped to the floor, twitched, and went still.

Jacob blinked. Well, sort of. Only one eye still had an eyelid; the other stared out at the world forever, bug-eyed. He looked from the girl’s top half to his machete, her bottom half, and back to his machete. He hadn’t even risen from his seat on the log.

Somewhere, an owl hooted before it went to rest for the day.

He didn’t have to keep up the chase like he used to. He could achieve his means through sneakier measures. All he had to do was lie in wait, an ambush predator. Hell, others had done this before. Who was to say that he, Jacob, had to remain the pursuer for all his career? Why couldn’t he change as his flesh rotted and bits fell off? Sure, it would be a more patient game, but he would never know until he tried it.

Overhead, the sunlight filtered through the blood-stained firmament.

And so what if he didn’t do it all on Friday the 13th? That day held power, yes, but why restrict yourself? All his lives, he’d only ever struck on Friday the 13th. But, now that he thought about it, they felt safe every other day of the year. What was stopping him from continuing into Saturday the 14th? And so on, and so on? Wasn’t this approach a better way of doing it? Slow down the pace and extend the kill time. Jacob got to his feet, joints clicking and popping.

Flies had begun to buzz around the girl’s halved corpse.

It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day.