by D. Melhoff
12
Scott bolted up in a cold sweat, cranking his eyes open and shut, open and shut.
His underwear and the sleeping bag were soaking wet. He took a whiff—Thank God, not piss—and collapsed on his back.
“You should really warn girls about that,” a voice said, startling him.
He looked over the edge of the bunk bed and saw Nikki standing by the desk. Her arms were bent behind her back as she hooked her bra together and laid the purple straps on their parallel tan lines. Scott hadn’t remembered that she’d stayed the night, and when he pressed his memory and recalled their previous exchange (including his embarrassing outburst), he was surprised that she had hung around this long.
“Huh?”
“Night terrors, or whatever the hell that was. I thought you were having a seizure.” Nikki snagged her uniform off the floor and slid one hand inside, then the other. Her feet slipped into her navy-blue Crocs as she breathed into her palm and smelled the air that came wafting back—Not bad, she shrugged. “You, uh, you don’t want to talk about anything, do you? Nightmare-related or not?”
“Not really.”
“All right, man,” she said with a hint of relief. “Don’t sleep too long. It’s almost eight.” Then she was out the door in a flash, her footsteps fading away as fast as her Fantasy perfume fragrance by Britney Spears.
Oh, don’t worry. I won’t be sleeping anymore.
The door clicked shut, and Scott climbed off the bed and stripped out of his boxers. He pulled on new underwear and gathered up the same outfit he would be wearing every day for the next three months: gray shorts (with belt—begrudgingly), brown runners, and the red V-neck with the word “SQUIRE” on the back.
As he yanked on the shirt, his eyes strayed to the bunk again. He hoped the sleeping bag would be dry before Chase got back. Back from…where was it again? Probably Kimberly’s, he dismissed. Then a shadow of a doubt crossed his mind. So wait, does that mean Brynn slept somewhere else last night? No. No, because wasn’t Cynthia Kimberly’s roommate before they swapped with Erin—or was that Denisha? He massaged his temples. “Screw it,” he muttered. “It’s too early for this crap.” He snatched his hat off the desk and slammed it on.
Suddenly the image of Desiree, the little girl in the pink dress, flashed across his mind—
He grunted and forced the memory away.
His hand shot for his jacket, but when he reached in the pockets, he let out another low growl. The Marlboros were gone. Charlotte claimed them in her room raid, he remembered, and his whole chest welled up like a steam generator with a broken release valve. Get me out of here. He pulled on his runners and shuffled out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
____
The morning was cool and crisp. Dew sparkled over the grass between the huts in Camp Mandolin, and the static hum of crickets cast a lazy spell over the clearing. When Scott stepped outside, the forest’s scents triggered his allergies, inflaming his nostrils and cranking the imaginary taps that controlled his tear ducts like faucets.
Through the haze, he could see Nikki on the gravel road that led to the bathrooms. Then he spotted another figure trudging up the path toward him. Thin waist, blonde hair. Oh God. When he wiped his eyes and checked again, his hunch was confirmed. You gotta be kidding me. Fuck, I could really use those darts right now.
As Brynn and Nikki came within an inch of each other, neither of them said a word. Brynn had her sights set straight ahead, her trajectory locked like a Shrike missile, and only after the girls crossed paths did she do a double take, looking back to catch a glimpse of Nikki strutting away from the boys’ camp with a suggestive sway in her hips. Scott saw a cloud of suspicion darken Brynn’s face, which multiplied tenfold when she made eye contact with him on his front stoop.
“Hey,” Brynn hollered.
He contemplated ducking into the hut, but it was too late.
“Oh, hey.” You wanted to make her jealous, he told himself, then countered: Just figured it would take a while. I didn’t think she’d be around to witness the bloody walk of shame.
“What gives? We’ve been waiting for you and Fehlman up at the road for ten minutes. First breakfast plating’s in five.”
“I was just coming,” Scott lied. He had no idea what first breakfast plating even meant. “Check Kimberly’s place if you wanna find Chase.”
“They’re not there.”
“Then I dunno. Check with her roommate.”
“I am her roommate.”
“Oh.”
“Our groups were supposed to be showered by seven thirty and meet at twenty to eight. It’s in the schedule.” Brynn reached in her pocket and pulled out the blue pamphlet that every counselor had received the day before, shoving it against Scott’s chest. “I know reading involves thinking, and that’s probably a challenge for you, but give it a shot sometime.”
Scott took the brochure and jammed it in his back pocket. “I’m more of a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy. Chase is too.”
“Huh. Well, I guess what they say is true then.” She turned and started the way she came. “Shit rolls in the same direction. Careful, pal.”
“Pal? Ouch. Stick to ‘piece of shit’ if you’re choosing between terms of endearment, please.”
Scott watched her hustle away, chewing on the wall of his cheek. She’s high-strung. Mustn’t have gotten a lot of sleep either. Still, he couldn’t help but think about how cute she was when she was riled up. She wasn’t anything like Nikki—that was clear. She was a challenge, and nothing motivated a relentless, twenty-one-year-old Lothario like Scott Mamer more than a good challenge. Push and pull, he told himself. It’s all about push and pull. Time to get back on her good side.
“Hey,” he called, jogging after her. “Wait up.”
Brynn shot him an icy glare. “What?”
“Lead the way.” He jammed his thumb and forefinger in the crooks of his eyes, extirpating the last flecks of sleep.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Huh?”
“Your kids?”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. One sec.”
Scott jogged across the road and bounded up the steps of hut number three. “Rise ’n’ shine, stooges,” he announced, banging on the door. “Breakfast’s ready!”
“Forget it,” Brynn called from the road. “I’m not getting in trouble ’cause you didn’t wake your kids up an hour ago. We’re going without you.”
“Hold on, hold on.”
Scott hammered on the hut harder. BANG! BANG!
Before his fist came down a third time, the door creaked open and Marshall—dressed in Detroit Red Wings pajamas—peered though the crack. Behind him, his roommates were cowering under their sleeping bags like a trio of third-grade vampires shielding themselves from the sun.
“Excuse me,” Marshall said, “we’re trying to sleep in here—”
Scott forced himself inside and tore back the curtains, flooding the room with sunlight. The boys shrieked. He grabbed each of their covers and ripped them away like a magician flourishing three cloaks at once, then he scooped Brady and Spencer out of bed and set them on the ground, swiping their yellow shirts from the floor and ramming them over their heads in one fluid motion. Tyrell had gone to bed wearing his outfit from yesterday, so Scott pushed him outside first before yanking the others out by their barely existent biceps and slamming the door shut.
“Everybody good?” he asked.
The boys looked the definition of “dazed and confused” on the front stoop. Yawning, blinking. Rooster tails shooting in every direction.
“Great.” Scott clapped his hands at Brynn. “Lead the way.”
“What about Chase’s group?”
“I dunno.” He shrugged. “They probably went early.”
Brynn checked her watch and sighed. “I guess we’ll see. All right, come on.”
____
Thirteen children were already waiting at the junction of Camp Rose and C
amp Mandolin—showered, dressed, and ready for a day of adventure. Scott and Brynn approached like a pair of drum majors leading a parade of zombies (aka Spencer, Marshall, Brady, and Tyrell).
“All right,” Brynn announced, “double time, everybody. Let’s go.”
Lance, who was dousing his group with bug spray, tucked the aerosol can under his armpit and clapped chop-chop. His kids stood at attention and started toward Storybook Square like well-trained military troops. As they marched by, Lance shot Scott a look—which Scott assumed meant something along the lines of Get your act together, loser—and took off without a word.
All twenty of them wound through the clearing as the mouthwatering smells of bacon, breakfast sausages, and pancakes intensified. Storybook Square drew closer, and a minute later, they were in it. As they passed the buildings with the colorful murals, Scott found himself trying to pinpoint landmarks for later. The Seven Dwarfs fountain is ahead of us, past the rats in the Cinderella painting or whatever, which means…Wait, which animal points the way to the archery range? The wolf or the bear? Dammit, I thought I had it.
“You look like a tourist,” Brynn said.
“What? I’m not allowed to gawk?”
She didn’t reply. She was significantly less talkative—and vivacious—than the day before, even around the kids.
“Something wrong?” Scott asked.
Brynn shot him a look. He expected a curt “No”—Maybe I went too far with Nikki—but instead, she let out a sigh and mumbled, “Where the heck did they go? She always comes back at the end of the night. Always.”
“Oh.” The realization dawned. “Chase and Kimberly?”
“You don’t think they got lost or something?”
“How many times has Chase been here?”
“Twice as a counselor, twice as a kid. Same as me.”
“Then I think he knows his way around.”
Out of nowhere, a memory tapped Scott on the shoulder. He looked at the zip-line tower up ahead. “Chase mentioned the zip line yesterday.” He nodded, more sure of it. “I think they were meeting here.”
“Here? Why?”
“Probably to play patty-cake and share their favorite Bible verses. Why do you think?”
“For God’s sake,” Brynn muttered, scrutinizing the tower. “If I find out I stayed awake the whole night worrying about this…”
Scott shielded his eyes and studied the zip-line’s spire thirty feet above them. They were approaching the tower from the back. Its only entrance—a door camouflaged under a panel of cedar lattice—blended into a mural of cartoon animals frolicking through painted grass.
“Am I the only one who cares about giving the kids a good time?” Brynn mumbled. “Swear to God, I’ll rat them out if they don’t pull their weight. Swear. To. God.”
Scott caught her eying the camouflaged door. As they swerved closer, now within arm’s reach of the tower, Brynn stepped out of formation and grabbed the doorknob. She jiggled it, but it didn’t turn.
“Hey,” Scott said. “What happened to hurrying?”
“Don’t you even start.”
“C’mon,” one of the six-year-olds whined. “We’re huuuungry.”
“Yeah,” a boy from Lance’s group echoed.
“Me, too,” a third said. “And those animals are giving me the creeps.”
Scott looked at a cartoon fox on the side of the tower. Creepy is right, he thought. The fox’s eyes were bright red, and as he surveyed the rest of the mural, he noticed the other animals’ eyes were red too.
“Geez,” he whispered to Brynn. “Who painted this thing? Deranged Dr. Seuss?” He hoped for a smirk but got nothing. Instead, Brynn stared at the animals on the wall and frowned. “Relax.” He tried again. “Chase and Kimberly are probably—”
“That’s weird. Were they always like this?”
Brynn’s hand came up and touched one of the squirrels in the mural. As the group continued around the base of the tower, curving with it, her fingernail followed the stucco and connected the beady eyes. A deer, a fox, an owl: red, red, more red. Other colors passed under her finger too—the blue sky, the emerald grass, the bronze tree trunks—but every few steps, a red pupil cut through the palette and caught the tip of her nail, scraping off in small, coppery flecks.
Then there was more red than usual, glistening like wet paint.
Brynn stopped and took her hand away from the wall, massaging a crimson stain between her thumb and forefinger. She looked up…
And Scott saw a single droplet fall from the sky, splatting directly in the center of Brynn’s forehead—plop.
A sickening beat. Then Brynn began to scream.
In slow, horrified motion, Scott’s eyes trailed up with everyone else’s, and one by one, their screams went off like fallout sirens.
13
“Why would anybody do that?” Stephanie whispered among the sniffles and sobs in the fort’s ballroom.
“I d-don’t know,” Brynn whispered back. “I don’t know.”
The screams—the ones that had torn through their throats and brought Charlotte and Ella to the scene outside the zip-line tower—had been replaced with a ghostlike silence in the room with the stained-glass windows and urethane floor panels. A sniff here, a cough there. Pale phantoms with sickly faces and sicker questions.
“Did somebody bad hurt them?”
“Did—did they kill themselves?”
“Is somebody gonna kill me?”
Scott pretended not to listen, but the voices were impossible to block out. Each question, no matter how quiet, was amplified in the rafters and returned with an eerie clarity that didn’t quite match the movement of the children’s lips.
He glanced at the stage where Ella—who had once seemed so friendly and vivacious—was plopped like a three-hundred-pound sack of potatoes, and then over at Norma, who was wandering the rows of campers and doling out teaspoons of Benadryl in a last-ditch effort to induce drowsiness and lower the room’s anxiety levels.
Dizziness descended like smog over Scott’s head.
He pictured the horrific scene for the hundredth time. The red droplet plopping onto Brynn’s forehead, then looking up to see Chase and Kimberly dangling above the square from the tower’s zip-line cable. Yellow bungee cords had been jammed into their scalps and wrapped around their necks before being threaded through the pulley system and tethered to the building’s anchor pole. Through the clouds of flies surrounding their heads, Scott had expected to see two sets of eyes staring back at him—snapped open, gaping in permanent terror. Except this time there were no eyes at all. This time, the sockets had been hollow: nothing but empty holes dripping blood down the corpses’ cheeks and into their cavernous mouths, filling their throats and drooling out of the sides of their lips in thick, slavering streams.
Fuck, I need some air.
Scott reached for the window in front of him and tugged on the crank. The frame cracked open, and a wimpy breeze blew into the ballroom, dispelling some of his dizziness. Not much, but some.
He looked outside and decided the view was shit: nothing but spruce trees and ironweed bushes. At least it beats the view of the ballroom, he thought, and he continued staring through the mesh screen and relishing the petty draft.
In the nearest tree, a robin doted over three Tiffany-blue eggs and a pair of recently hatched chicks. Suddenly, one of the eggs twitched, and a fracture appeared on its surface. A beak broke through the crack, and the mama bird hopped over and helped pick apart the shell as her newborn squirmed free: a pink, featherless creature that moved in harsh twitches and tremors. It squealed with its alien-like siblings—pointing its bill in the air, crying out blindly for food—and without so much as a chirp, the mother snatched a piece of eggshell and flew off, leaving the babies alone while she went to scour the forest for breakfast.
Scott watched, mesmerized, as the baby birds screeched in the nest. They looked like miniature Peking ducks in the window of a Chinese butcher shop, fully plu
cked, with jet-black eyes as deep as the Pacific Ocean and as small as teardrops. They were so ugly, so unearthly. So unholy.
He didn’t like staring into the birds’ eyes, so he turned to face the ballroom again. But as he looked around at the children—their mouths tipped back in muted screams, their dilated pupils sparkling with tears—he couldn’t help but see baby robins in every direction.
“Why w-was they killed?”
“Does dying hurt?”
“The cops are gonna catch the bad guy, right?”
“Are they gonna get the ec-lectric chair?”
“When can I talk to Mommy?”
“I want my mom—”
“Where’s my mommy?”
The words were loud, but the crying was louder. Shrill sobs crashed against the room’s walls like waves in a cove, fierce and thundering, until the next volley of questions swept in and drowned out the first.
Why hasn’t anyone said anything yet? Tell us what’s going on!
The doors of the ballroom rattled open, and Charlotte billowed into the hall, her wool cloak rippling behind her. Without a single word, she approached Norma—who had just tipped a teaspoon of medicine down an eight-year-old’s throat—and took her by the arm, guiding the old woman gently but firmly onto the stage toward Ella. From there, the three supervisors launched into quick, animated whispers.
Throughout the room, the counselors eyed the platform with dreadful anticipation. Whatever the women were discussing, it didn’t seem positive. As Scott weighed the interaction, he didn’t know what he wanted more: to hear what they were saying, or to hide behind his veil of ignorance.
“We have to know,” he muttered to himself. Enough sitting here. If they’ve got something to say, they can say it to everyone.
He inhaled one more breath of fresh air from the window and then started toward the stage. As he wound through the crowd, he could feel dozens of eyes latching onto him, tracking him through the auditorium. “Hey,” he called as he neared the platform. “Hello?”