Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Trish Jarvis-Brodski slapped a mosquito, thought back on her decades of accolades for directing true crime sagas, then wondered how she was stuck directing this glorified slasher about Jason Voorhes' post-prison escape rampage. The Town That Dreaded Sundown had been a true-crime gorefest to, of course, but it was famous for being first (or pretty close, anyway) rather than for being good, and she didn’t even have first.
At least the studio had given her complete creative control over this movie. She’d be showing up to work drunk if she had to bow to all the whims of the toupee-swapping, corset-wearing Botox-swollen producer who answered to the name of Trent Sutton. To his credit, Trent had produced very few flops over a long Hollywood career, but he’d produced even fewer hits. He had only been assigned to this picture for the publicity that came from his being a survivor of Jason Voorhes’ last Crystal Lake rampage.
Trent had wanted to open with a recreation of Jason Voorhes’ original capture. A local officer had been radioed about the call for help from their cabin while out on patrol. He had arrived ten minutes ahead of his superior (who was leaving from the station), parking just far enough that no one would hear him coming. He’d taken the killer terrorizing Trent’s family cabin by surprise and riddled Jason Voorhes with bullets just before the hockey mask wearing psychopath could finish off a wounded young man named Lawrence. EMTs had saved Lawrence--and, unfortunately and improbably, the bullet-riddled Jason. Search parties had found a young woman named Whitney Miller (brother of Clay, one of the four survivors in the cabin) held prisoner in Jason’s tunnels, reuniting her and her brother.
Whitney Miller was now the owner of a modestly successful art gallery. Her brother Clay and Lawrence had both gone into law enforcement (ironically, Clay had been the one to quit and go into private security during the Black Lives Matter era). Trent’s former girlfriend Jenna was married to Clay, had four kids with him, and had recently retired from a hospital administrator job. Trent made movies that did okay but were quickly forgotten. Trent's one-night stand Bree was the longtime manager of one of the wildest hotels in Las Vegas, even if she'd personally finished sowing her wild oats years ago and rarely did anything crazier than act as a ringer for her third and current husband’s pickleball team. The cop who’d shot Jason had just retired from being a senator after the publicity of the rescue launched a distinguished political career.
Trish conceded that all of that might have made an interesting enough opening scene. Unfortunately, it took just two minutes of conversation with Trent to make it clear that his main interests in beginning the movie at that point were self-serving. First, he wanted to include a fictional sequence where he defied danger by running to help Lawrence and fought Jason hand to hand for two minutes before the deputy’s arrival. Second was the amount of screentime he wanted to devote to a graphic sex scene between himself, and Bree just before Jason's arrival. He’d already been making a list of suitably attractive actresses he wanted to see play Bree in this recreation of his past conquest.
Trish felt like literally rinsing her mouth due to all the bad taste involved. Not helping matters was that Bree had given birth to fraternal triplets (two boys and a girl) nine months after that night. They had been born in a rehab facility the young woman had checked herself into several months earlier. She'd had a drinking problem even before nearly surviving Jason and had been longing for enough beer to give each triplet fetal alcohol syndrome three times over during the nightmare-filled months after narrowly escaping bludgeoning, impalement, or some other horrible fate at Jason’s hands. In-patient treatment had saved her children from any health problems, and the family had gravitated toward church groups in the years that followed.
Bree had amicably parted ways with that circle a few years later to go back to school and then go on to her job in Vegas, but all three of her kids had remained devout and ended up married to ministers in one of the few mainstream American church groups to take equal stands against both Republican and Democrat misbehavior throughout the entirety of the 2020s. The triplets were all parents themselves now, used the trust fund Trent’s father had given them for humanitarian efforts, and had repeatedly refused to publicly condemn the bloodier and sexier Hollywood movies of the era except under extreme circumstances but politely declined to watch such films themselves.
Nothing Trish would read had suggested they were narrow-minded, jackasses, or otherwise deserving of hearing about their father turning the moment of their conception into the next best thing to a porn movie just so he could get off on clips of the actress playing their mother. Besides, she'd needed to rub in Trent's second fiddle status fast. So, the first scene in their movie was instead the parole hearing of the man who’d inadvertently kicked off Jason's final killing spree.
They were filming in near chronological order. The first scene, done over a month ago, stuck as closely to real-life as magnets stuck to metal. It began with a close-up of the actor playing Tim Timmons. The fat, bearded, bespectacled former supermarket janitor frankly and tearfully recounting the bender that had led to him drunkenly killing two other motorists the day after his husband of 16 years died of salmonella from bad food at their anniversary dinner and his suicide attempts afterward. Next spoke his niece Jordan, a worker at a chicken farm whose actress combined gentle vulnerability and the so-called "white trash" look well enough for Trish to note the woman’s name for future projects.
Several different camera angles followed Jordan’s alternately morose and wistful recounting of how her uncle and his husband had raised her after her parents' deaths in a freeway pile-up. She pleaded how Tim’s electrician training could bring more income to the family at a time she and her three children were facing homelessness.
The victims' families spoke next to say that they had forgiven Tim. The prison chaplain and librarian spoke about what a model prisoner he was. The final witness in favor of Tim's parole was a guard describing how Tim had been the one to tip prison staff off about the culprit behind several recent shankings: Prisoner 13131313: Jason Voorhes. Said prisoner’s homemade knife had been confiscated, along with the picture of his mother he had it hidden inside. The guard also voiced concern that if Tim was still in prison when Jason got out of solitary, then Tim would be a dead man.
The surviving witnesses agreed that it had really been about two more minutes of relatively mundane dialogue before Jason showed up, but Trish felt that kind of entrance cue should be taken advantage of. Trish would have really liked to include some scenes with the long-serving prison mob boss whose goons had taken hostages to let Jason out of his cell and silence the alarms right when the parole board that had rejected his final chance at freedom was meeting with the man Jason hated. It would have messed with the flow of the story just a little too much though, not to mention required a bigger budget for those extra actors and scenes than she had been given. Instead, she settled for having a news broadcast after the escape briefly mention what had happened.
Jason hadn’t shaved once since his arrest. Pictures of him in and out of prison when all this had happened nine years ago showed such a thick, shaggy white beard and head of hair that his facial features remained as obscured as they would have been under that legendary hockey mask. He had killed everyone in the room besides the librarian, one of the parole board members, and Jordan Timmons. Jordan and the others had only survived because Tim threw himself between them and Jason as they ran and put up a longer, fiercer fight than anything in his record would have implied he could.
Before dying of his ten stab wounds, the prison chaplain told first responders that he'd overheard Jason speak for the first time in a decade to punctuate every blow of the beating that had reduce Tim Timmons to pulp. He’d gloated how, if he’d cared so much about saving Jordan, then Jason would be sure to track her down and kill her slowly. Jordan no longer had to worry about being homeless as she and her children were placed under federal protection and relocated to another coast.
Based on all surviving memories and records, no one had ever mistaken Agents Wallace Hahn and Elizabeth Marcus for lovers regardless of Marcus’s pregnancy and the close, familiar banter between the two. Adding a line where Jordan made that mistaken assumption was a way to mockingly poke fun at the old inappropriately close comrades trope, though. The pair were responsible for briefing Jordan and sent her on her way to the new safehouse. Two days later, Jason Voorhes had shown up at their office and killed eight agents in eighty seconds.
Driver had shot his right ear off before barricading herself and two other agents in an office, but Hahn had been stabbed outside and Marcus and the others had assumed they were doomed when Jason leaked kerosene under the door and they could see through the window that Jason was waiting with a machine gun he'd taken from their armory, while standing over Hahn. Then, suddenly, Jason and Hahn exchanged some words and Jason shot Hahn but left the others alive. Later, they would realize that, perhaps because of Marcus's pregnancy or Hahn’s close friendship with her and the others in that office, Hahn had agreed to tell Jason where Jordan was if he let them live.
It took Jason five days to make the trip to Dark Hearth, New Hampshire after taking a long-haul truck driver hostage for his rig. Perhaps because of the man’s amiable nature, Jason had left him tied up but alive upon arrival. Unfortunately, while Jordan Timmons was the one he was after, that mercy would no carry over into his next encounter with an innocent local. Nor, at that very moment, was that mercy showing itself in the hospital where Jason had been taken to have a tumor removed and was smothering a patient in the neighboring bed who had seen him stealing a syringe for an escape plot.