She sighed.

  What I need is a drink, she thought. Lots of drinks.

  A faint buzz of laughter and voices was audible from the porch. Everyone out there seemed to be having a good time. Thinking she would grab a beer and join them, Candice got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. She was through the archway and halfway to the refrigerator when the presence of the black-clad man she’d swooped past belatedly registered. Wheeling about, she saw a tall, lanky individual in a black trench coat. A ski mask hid most of his face, but there was no hiding the wild look in his eyes. The machete in his right hand was smeared with dark, coagulating blood.

  Rather than immediately fleeing in terror, Candice stood her ground. She simply couldn’t accept the idea of a masked, machete-wielding killer invading a cabin in the woods to wreak bloody havoc on a group of partying young people. It was too absurd. This had to be some kind of prank.

  She struck a defiant pose, smirking as she folded her arms beneath her breasts. “Nice costume, but it’s not Halloween yet. Is that a rubber machete? I bet it is. Good job with the fake blood.”

  The masked man tilted his head, squinting at her. He seemed almost comically confused.

  Candice laughed and took a tentative step toward him, unfolding her arms and holding out a hand. “Can I touch your little prop?”

  The man gasped and backed away in apparent surprise.

  Candice shook her head, her brow furrowing. “What is your deal, man? Who are you, anyway? Oh, wait.” Her expression hardened. “You’re that Kevin guy, aren’t you? You fucking asshole. What were you thinking with that silent treatment bullshit? Do you have any idea how upset Ramona is?” She sniffed, her mouth curling in an expression of withering disdain. “And you did it for, what, some stupid Halloween trick? Idiot.”

  The man who was probably “Kevin”, if that was even his real name, retreated another step, even though she had moved no closer. He seemed rattled. She noticed the hand clutching the machete was shaking visibly. The furrow in her brow deepened. This was really odd behavior for a supposedly hot stud like Ramona’s online boyfriend. She was getting a vibe from him she’d encountered many times from guys with low self-esteem. They always got very nervous around her. They often stuttered and sometimes were unable to speak at all. His eyes kept jittering crazily in their sockets. There was an audible click in his throat as he swallowed with some difficulty. She had the distinct feeling the face hidden beneath the ski mask was flushed red with embarrassment.

  “Take off the mask.”

  The masked man shook his head.

  Candice moved a step closer. “Take it off.”

  Another shake of the head was his only reply.

  “You are fucking pathetic,” Candice said, making a sound of disgust. “Look at you. You’re skinny as a rail. Not exactly the buff hunk in your pictures, are you? I bet you photoshopped those. Or maybe the guy in the pictures wasn’t you at all.” Her tone was growing steadily more heated as she talked. She felt like she was on the verge of losing control and flying into a real rage, but she didn’t care. No one got to treat her best friend the way this asshole had and get away with it. “Take the goddamned mask off, you fucking loser.”

  The masked man’s timid demeanor abruptly changed. He stopped shaking and his hand tightened around the handle of the machete. Some instinct told Candice he was about to come at her an instant before it happened. As she spun away from him and dashed toward the back door, a grim awareness gripped her. She hadn’t been wrong about this man’s identity. She still felt that as strongly as she had just seconds ago. But now she knew she’d been wrong in thinking he wasn’t actually dangerous. And he wasn’t decked out like he was as part of some stupid prank. That machete in his hand was real, as was the still-wet blood smeared along the edge of its blade.

  Candice had her hand on the doorknob when she felt the first slice of the blade as it cleaved through her bikini top string and opened a deep gash between her shoulder blades. The first sting of agony hit her as she cried out and fell against the door. Her hand was still on the doorknob. She tried to turn it as blood flowed down her back in a thick stream, but her grip on the knob was too weak. The masked man grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her away from the door. She cried out again as he twirled her about and flung her across the room. Candice lost her footing and took a tumble on the floor, landing hard on her ass. Blood from the gash on her back pattered on the cheap linoleum. She scooted rapidly backward as the masked man came at her again, then attempted to get to her feet when she reached the archway leading to the living room. But the hand she braced on the floor with the intent of propelling herself upward slid in a smear of her own blood.

  The masked man loomed over her, raising the machete for a killing blow. Candice rolled out of the way just in time to avoid having her head split down the middle. Instead, the blade chopped deep into the linoleum. Managing to get to her hands and knees, Candice decided to make another try for the back door. The cut strings of the bikini top slipped down from her shoulders as it fell away from her, leaving her breasts bare. This time the masked man caught up to her before she reached the door. He seized her by the hair again and hauled her to her feet. Turning her around, he drove the machete blade into her abdomen as hard as he could. She felt the hard steel push through her flesh and whimpered, knowing the fight was over.

  I don’t want to die, she thought. It isn’t fair. Oh, please God, don’t let this happen.

  It happened anyway.

  The killer held on to her throat and drove the blade in deeper, staring intently into her eyes as various vital organs were perforated. When she was dead, he dragged her over to the pantry, shoved her inside, and closed the door. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the door again, stared briefly at the beautiful corpse, and then took a bag of flour down from a shelf. He again closed the door and ripped open the bag of flour, dumping its contents over the various blood spatters on the floor. The cursory attempt to cover up what had happened wouldn’t hold up to close examination, but the killer was sure it wouldn’t matter in the end.

  He dumped the empty bag in the trash and went into the living room.

  Adrienne Bartram sat in a rocking chair by the window in the second floor room she was sharing with Jake Feldman for the duration of their stay at the cabin. As she listened to the faint sound of voices drifting up from the porch, she swiped at her phone’s screen and reviewed the new pictures she’d taken of Jake, who was still tied to the bed behind her.

  “How long do you plan to make me wait?”

  Adrienne swiped at her phone again. She enjoyed taking pictures of her boyfriend in various bondage poses. There were hundreds of them on her phone by now. Ignoring his question, she closed the photo app and leaned forward in the chair, straining again to hear whether Ramona had joined the rest of them on the porch. After listening intently for a couple more minutes, she decided she still wasn’t out there. And the last time Adrienne left her room to peek into the living room, she hadn’t been there, either. Only Candice was down there, stretched out on the sofa and apparently oblivious to Adrienne’s presence at the second floor railing. She looked lost in thought and, judging from her expression, possibly troubled about something. About what, Adrienne didn’t care.

  Right now all Adrienne gave a shit about was the less than subtle way Ramona had tried to get intimate with her boyfriend. Right in front of her, no less. Obviously some form of payback was necessary. For the rest of the trip, Adrienne planned to flaunt the firm grip she had on Jake’s affections,, rubbing it in Ramona’s face whenever possible. But the girl’s disappearing act was putting a crimp in those plans.

  Sighing, she got up from the rocking chair and approached the bed, circling it as she raised her phone and snapped a few more pictures.

  “Those are gonna come back to haunt me someday, aren’t they?”

  Adrienne laughed. “Probably.”

  At last, satisfied that she’d taken enough pictures of her tied-up boyfriend for one night, she put the phone on the nightstand and climbed up on the bed. After straddling Jake and guiding his erect cock into her pussy, she shifted around a little, getting comfortable.

  A look of intense pleasure twisted Jake’s face. “Mmm. That’s nice.”

  Adrienne leaned forward a little, lightly clasping his throat with both hands. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long. Do you want me to do the choking thing again? I know it’s your favorite.”

  He grinned. “Yes, please.”

  Adrienne increased the pressure of her grip on his throat as she continued to slowly ride his cock, which was already very stiff. She knew, though, that it was about to get even bigger. It always did when she choked him. According to Jake, the temporary air deprivation intensified his pleasure to an insane degree. She usually did this crazy thing for him at least a couple times a week. It made her nervous, though. Jake always liked her to really bear down while she was doing it. Sometimes she worried she might wind up accidentally choking him to death, but he never failed to complain afterward if he thought she was doing a wimpy, half-assed job of it.

  And more than ever before, she wanted him thoroughly satisfied with her sexual attentions. So now she further tightened her grip, bearing down harder than ever. In a few moments, his eyes widened in panic. He turned his head to the left and started spluttering, desperately trying to communicate something. Adrienne frowned. Jake usually lasted much longer than this before they went into the begging for mercy routine.

  Then she heard a booted foot clomp on the floor behind her. Before she could turn her head to investigate, someone slapped a gloved hand over her mouth. She squealed and tried to twist away from the unseen assailant, her hands finally coming away from Jake’s throat in the process. A reedy sound issued from his throat as his depleted lungs worked hard to pull in air. At least for the moment, he sounded incapable of raising the alarm. Realizing this meant help wouldn’t arrive soon enough to save her, Adrienne intensified her efforts to thrash free of the man’s grip. Though she still hadn’t seen him, she sensed clearly that, whoever this was, he wasn’t one of her other friends pulling some kind of sick prank. He was an unknown intruder, a malicious predator with only one goal in mind.

  To kill.

  On the verge of losing his grip on her, the intruder climbed up on the bed, pinned her down atop the still spluttering Jake, and pressed the tip of a sharpened screwdriver against her temple. She squirmed and squealed behind the glove as he began to push it into her head. Blood dripped from the newly created hole and pattered on her boyfriend’s chest. Adrienne experienced a few more moments of increasing desperation as the slender length of cold metal continued to push through her temple. And then it entered her brain and the killer took his hand away from Adrienne’s mouth as her body began to convulse.

  When she stopped moving, the killer retracted the screwdriver, shifted position slightly on the bed, and plunged it into Jake Feldman’s throat, silencing him just as he was on the cusp of having recovered sufficiently to start screaming for help.

  The killer jerked the screwdriver from Jake’s throat.

  Then he plunged it in again. And again and again, several more times, needlessly perforating the flesh of a man who’d already expired.

  The killer left the screwdriver embedded in Jake’s throat as he walked on down the hall to the next occupied room.

  Still wearing her Halloween mask, Amy Miner stared up at the ceiling from the bed in her room. It was a vaulted ceiling, with a thick central beam dividing opposing rows of wood planks. A small ceiling fan hung from the center beam above the bed. As she watched the fan slowly rotate, her thoughts again returned to the question she had spent so much of the last few years contemplating. In many ways, her contemplation of it defined her life. This fact would likely have saddened a normal person, but Amy felt nothing. That was the crux of the problem, actually. She felt empty inside, devoid of any strong emotion. It was why she’d shied away from intimate relationships since breaking up with her sophomore year boyfriend. There was no point. She had nothing to offer anyone. No compassion. No empathy. Nothing like true love.

  The closest she ever came to feeling normal was when she was around her best friends from high school. She felt a degree of affection for them, particularly for Ramona and Candice, but she didn’t actually love them. Over their years of friendship, she had learned how to convincingly fake such feelings, which was an easier thing to do than faking amorous feelings for boys. Or girls, for that matter. Her entire life, she’d felt no genuine sexual attraction to anyone, regardless of gender. She never stopped being aware of how strange this made her. In truth, no one was stranger than her. No one came close, not even the most pathetic misfits from back in high school. They were normal compared to her. And no one knew it. No one had any inkling.

  As a result, Amy always felt alone, even when surrounded by people. If she’d ever opened up about this to anyone, she might also have gone on to reveal that she spent hours every day imagining how she might kill herself. This wasn’t an idle exercise. From slightly after the onset of puberty, she had known she would do it one day. Method aside, the only real question was when it would happen. As she lay there and stared at the ceiling, she realized she was edging ever closer to believing she should do it sometime over the next few days. At least that way she could die surrounded by the only people who mattered at all to her. They would be upset, of course, but Amy wasn’t much concerned about that. She wouldn’t be around to bear witness to their pain, after all.

  When the door creaked open, she lifted her head off the pillow and watched as the man in the ski mask entered her room. She felt no fear. She didn’t tremble and her heart didn’t start pounding. The man’s black trench coat was streaked with blood spatters. Some of the blood was dry and flaking away. Some of it looked wet. He opened his trench coat and took a hunting knife with a long, thick blade from an inner pocket.

  Amy propped herself up on her elbows. “Are you here to kill me?”

  The man in the mask nodded.

  “How will you do it?”

  The masked man shrugged. Then he made a jabbing motion with the knife.

  Amy nodded. “Okay. That works. Your knife looks very sharp. You should cut my throat.” She tilted her head back, exposing her neck as she drew an index finger across it. “Like that. I’ll bleed out fast.”

  The masked man was at the side of her bed now.

  He hesitated.

  Amy sensed he was frowning behind the mask. “I was thinking about killing myself before you entered the room. No, seriously. I always think about killing myself. It’s my thing. My only thing. But it’d probably be easier if I had someone else do it, so I guess I’m glad you’re here. Will you kill my friends, too?”

  He cleared his throat and, in a low, growly voice, said, “Yes.”

  Amy grunted. “Probably for the best. They won’t have to be sad that I’m gone.” She tilted her head back, exposing her neck again. “Do it. Do it now.”

  Sighing, the killer leaned over her.

  He did as she asked.

  Later, while driving back to his lair, the killer would think about Amy Miner and sob uncontrollably for several minutes, nearly making himself drive off the road.

  When Elliot came out of Amy Miner’s room, he edged carefully to the second floor railing and scanned the living room below. Seeing that it remained unoccupied, he proceeded quickly to the staircase and hurried down the stairs. A peek through a window verified that most of the others were still out on the porch. The only one missing was Ramona. He assumed she was still down at the boat dock.

  Treading as lightly as he could, he moved to the front door and paused there, listening to the voices of those on the porch to gauge level of intoxication. They had seemed significantly impaired before he’d entered the house, but they were worse now. Their voices sounded thick and strange. They struggled to enunciate, not just words, but individual syllables. This rapid progression of impairment puzzled Elliot, but then his nostrils flared, detecting a sharp odor he recognized as weed. At some point between his dash from the cover of the tree line and now, the kids had decided to get high. Evidently, the stuff they were smoking was extremely potent.

  Elliot reached inside his trench coat, tugged the handle of his machete free from the Velcro strap that held it there, and gripped the doorknob with his free hand. A spike of adrenaline set his heart to racing. There were three of them out there. Under ordinary circumstances, that would be too many to handle at one time. His original intent had been to retreat to a hiding place and wait for a chance to pick them off one at a time, but now he thought that might not be necessary. Logic dictated that people too fucked up to enunciate mere syllables were likely incapable of defending themselves.

  Just do it, he thought. The sooner you get back, the better. You know that, so do this fucking thing.

  Psyching himself up for what he was about to do, Elliot inhaled and exhaled sharply several times.

  Then he opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

  Three faces turned his way as the porch planks creaked beneath his tread. Two young men and a girl. At first their slack features registered only confusion. Then their mouths stretched wide in amusement. They pointed and laughed. A guy who looked like a typical jock had a lit joint pinched between thumb and forefinger. He toked from it even as he laughed. The other guy, the one who reminded Elliot of a diminutive and more gregarious version of himself, tried to say something, but, predictably, the words came out garbled. Elliot raised the machete and swung it around, cleaving the little one’s face at a diagonal angle.