by D. Melhoff
The supervisors didn’t acknowledge him. He planted his hands on the stage and hoisted himself up, first to his butt, then to his feet.
“Cooler, yes…” Norma whispered. “…but three days at most until—”
“We only need five.” Charlotte glowered. “I know we’ll catch hell for it, but they’re already moved.”
“All six?”
“Just now,” Charlotte said.
“Oh Lord.” Ella moaned, shaking her heavy head. “Oh Lord, Lord, Lord.”
“Hello,” Scott called, louder than before. “Excuse me—”
“If we find enough cardboard, we could seal it off. Or better yet, another door might fit the hinges.”
“Hey!” Scott hollered, forcing himself into the supervisors’ inner circle. “What the hell is going on up here? Can’t you hear them losing their minds out there, or don’t you care?”
“Keep your voice down,” Charlotte said.
“Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say to everyone,” Scott replied. “Or at least the counselors. These kids are crying for their moms and dads, for Christ’s sake. Let’s at least start a lineup for the phone or something.”
“There is no phone.” Charlotte’s voice remained hushed. “The line’s been cut.”
The words sent a rush of blood to Scott’s head. He wavered, dizzy again.
“You think we’ve been playing tic-tac-toe up here?” Charlotte said. “As soon as we have something to share, we will. Until then, tell your group whatever it takes to calm them down.”
“How? Half of us can’t even stay calm.”
“Figure something out.”
“Fuck, where do we start?” he barked. “Can we leave the hall? Are the police on their way?” Then, off Ella’s blanched reaction: “You got ahold of 9-1-1, right? Right? There are four dead bodies lying around this shithole; what are you doing to get us out of here?”
“It’s worse than that, hon,” Ella said.
“Worse? What do you—what?”
“Meegan and Bethany were found an hour ago,” Charlotte said. Her hand went to cover her mouth as though it didn’t want the words escaping.
“When I left them in the sick bay, they were fine.” Norma jumped in, getting her back up. “Out cold, but fine. I checked in every half hour, on the nose, I swear it on St. Peter.”
“You couldn’t have stopped him anyway,” Ella assured her.
“Him?” Scott asked. “Him who?”
“Who do you think?” Norma said. “The only son of a bitch who isn’t here. Bruce!”
Bruce? Scott pictured the groundskeeper in his grungy makeshift tunic. His smug face, his wispy brown hair. A warthog, a quiet giant, maybe—but a murderer?
“He hasn’t been seen since last night,” Charlotte said. “If anyone has another theory, please, for heaven’s sake speak now.”
None of them responded. Not immediately. Then Ella hugged the rolls of fat padding her body and said, “Well, I don’t suppose anyone else here is strong enough to…to do what he did to those poor girls. Hanging people is one thing, but…” She tipped her head forward and rested it on her chins, tears spilling down her cheeks like rain on studded leather.
Scott rounded on Charlotte. “What the hell was this guy’s background? Do you hire any psychopath who sends in a resume?”
“I’m not dignifying that with a response.”
“Don’t fucking dignify it to me. Dignify it to those kids out there crying for their families. Or better yet, get us out of here!”
Silence. Total, pin-drop silence.
A sniffle echoed in the rafters. Charlotte opened her mouth and then closed it, staring at something over Scott’s shoulder. He pivoted and saw everyone in the ballroom watching the stage with utter horror etched onto their faces.
“We’re not leaving?” a small voice piped up from the back of the room.
“And the police aren’t coming?” a girl with pigtails whimpered.
Charlotte raised her hands as a dissenting murmur rippled through the crowd. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m so sorry. But please, no tears if we can hold them.” The questions died off, but the chain of coughs and sniffles intensified. “We’ve lost a lot of friends in the last twenty-four hours,” she continued. “No one knows why, but we think the…the bad man who’s responsible is still out there. We’ve got to be very careful, okay? And we’ve got to stay strong.” Charlotte’s voice was firm, but her tone had started to crack. She was gripping the gold chain around her neck and stringing it back and forth—an anxious habit that reminded Scott of his own mother.
Deborah Mamer had owned exactly one piece of jewelry her entire life: a plain sterling necklace. She kept hidden in the collars of her blouses, tucked safely away, until stressful situations arose, at which point she’d grab it faster than her husband had grabbed the keys to their Mustang and left for Nevada when Scott was six years old. He remembered hating that wavering grip. It came whenever the heating bill arrived in January or their jalopy wouldn’t start or a young man approached them late at night on their walks home from the Laundromat or the bus terminal or the liquor store down on Ashbury Street. Came close to getting her killed too, he recalled. Some dirtbag had broken into their house almost five years ago and robbed Deborah at knifepoint, taking her purse, her wallet, and—even though she slept with it tucked into her peignoir—that godforsaken necklace, which the intruder must have seen clutched in her jittery death grip and demand that she hand it over or else. That had been the summer of tenth grade. By mid-October—when Scott’s foray into the lucrative world of high school weed dealing was taking off—he used his first $200 profit to reclaim the necklace from a sleazy pawnbroker in Hamtramck. He’d had mixed feelings about it (clearly the item must have been a gift from his father, otherwise he would have known where Deborah had got it from), and maybe he should have let it go. Ultimately, he decided that wasn’t his call. He never asked for the story behind it, and his mother didn’t question how he afforded to get it back. That was the essence of their relationship: they loved each other, plain and simple, and what they didn’t know could never hurt them.
“Unfortunately,”—Charlotte’s voice brought Scott back to the ballroom—“our phone is down. But I promise we’re doing everything we can to get you home as soon as possible.”
How? Scott clenched his teeth. Tell us how to get out of here.
“The bus is scheduled to come every Friday to rotate campers,” Charlotte continued. “That’s only five days away—”
“Five days?” Lance shouted from the side of the room. “Hell if that’s happening. We’re getting out now!”
“Our shortwave radio is missing, and our only vehicles are a water truck and a riding mower,” Charlotte said. “If the phone’s cut and our transmitter’s stolen, there’s a slim chance the vehicles are still operational.”
“We can go on foot,” Lance replied.
“The nearest town isn’t for a hundred miles. Hiking the woods for three days is just as dangerous as staying put, if not more.”
“Dangerous? There’s a psycho running loose!”
“While we’re in a fort. Even if it isn’t exactly armed to the parapets, it’s worlds safer than prowling around the forest at night.”
“That’s it?” Lance tugged on the roots of his hair. “That’s this camp’s emergency plan? At least send one of us for help on freaking horseback! We need to get out of here.”
“We need to stay safe,” Charlotte emphasized. “We can get through this. Bruce has fled, and we suspect he’s the one behind it, but there’s a strong possibility he’s hiding in the woods waiting for us to run—on horseback or otherwise. As long as we stick together and stay inside, he can’t get us.” Her voice was loud, but Scott didn’t think those last words sounded as sure as the others. “He may be alone, or there might be others. If you see strangers, do not approach them. Do not try to fight. You run. You run until your legs give out, understand? Remember: safety is our highest prior
ity.”
There were no arguments there.
Scott looked around the room. The flurry of sobs had settled into a thick, baleful fog. His eyes strayed to the back of the hall and found Brynn and Stephy clinging to each other, their expressions a puffy blend of sadness and shock.
“Now,” Charlotte said, tucking her chain into her shirt and accessing some hidden reserve of confidence, “Norma, Ella, and I have agreed on a few ground rules. First, everyone stays inside the fort at all times. I repeat: at all times. Secondly, this ballroom is your new bedroom. Everybody sleeps together, and lights out is sundown—no exceptions. Last but not least, most important, is that supervision is constant. That means you find a friend and stay with them, got it? No one should be alone, including counselors.”
As Charlotte spoke, Scott’s focus remained on Brynn and Stephy. Then a quick movement caught the corner of his eye. It had come from the window he had previously opened, and before he could register what it was, his wiring snapped, and he pictured Bruce’s face pressed into the crack. The groundskeeper grinned, his beard and lips glistening with blood. Scott’s stomach leapt into his throat, but when he blinked, the apparition vanished, and he saw that the movement in the window was merely the mama bird returning to her newborn chicks. Instantly, the baby robins flashed across his mind—helpless, screeching. Trapped. Trapped in a twig fort, waiting to throw themselves over the edge and soar away to freedom or plummet to their spine-snapping, skull-crushing deaths.
Scott’s hand came up and massaged the back of his neck.
“Other questions can wait until dinner,” Charlotte said. “Right now, we need to seal the fort. Counselors on this half of the room follow me, quickly.”
Charlotte hopped off the stage and started for the exit. The other counselors stirred from their numb positions on the floor, and Scott followed, avoiding eye contact with children as he passed by.
Then something else caught his attention.
He frowned, squinting at the open window again, and veered toward it. With each step his internal temperature dropped five degrees, and when he got to the ledge, his heart morphed into a solid chunk of ice.
The baby robins were dead.
The bird he had seen fluttering into the nest hadn’t been their mother after all. It was a small crow. The black predator clung to the edge of the twiggy bowl, its feathers glinting with a greasy sheen as it pecked at the broken eggshells and mutilated carcasses of the dead hatchlings.
Scott banged on the mesh screen. “Get out, get!” he hissed.
The crow took off, leaving behind a mess of bones and mud and chick guts.
Scott leaned against the sill and waited for the world to stop spinning. Another flicker glinted in the window—Goddammit—and he lifted his fist, ready to chase off the next vile crow…
Except this time it wasn’t a predator.
His stomach dropped at the sight of the mama robin perched on the rim of the nest. She had returned with a bellyful of fresh grubs for her hatchlings, chirping the arrival of breakfast.
Scott watched the bird tilt her head—confused—and inspect the soup of blood and muscles below her. One of the baby’s beaks hung open, but no squeal was coming out of it. The mama robin leaned over anyway and regurgitated the mealworms directly into her dead offspring’s mouth.
Scott turned and stumbled out of the ballroom, straight for the closest garbage can. Seconds later, he regurgitated too.
14
Four sets of hands pressed against the oak slabs of the fort’s door and pushed. At first, the hinges held strong—reinforced with the adamantium-strength cobwebs of some indefatigable spider—and then a groan echoed in the entryway and the heavy panels stuttered back.
“That’s it,” Charlotte urged. “Faster.”
The left half of the massive door brushed over the concrete and thudded into place, rattling the twenty-pound knocker. The right side was next. As they dragged it across the cinder blocks, a lone bar of sunlight streaming into the atrium contracted to a yellow pinstripe, then a twinkle of gold. Whoomp—the roves met, and the sunlight vanished.
Charlotte jerked a latch across the boards, and Lance cranked the gears of a rusted winch, lowering the portcullis.
A moment later, Scott heard the iron hit the floor—clank. As the chains jingled in the rafters, he closed his eyes and thought only of baby robins in a bloody nest.
____
Having had no time to gather their belongings before securing the fort, the counselors scoured the building for food, supplies, and any weaponry they could get their hands on. Unlike a real fort, however, Crownheart’s castle was predominantly decorative. Most of the closets were bare, and many of the halls’ doors had nothing but empty storage spaces or stone walls on the other side.
Apart from the ballroom, key areas included the nurse’s bay, Charlotte’s office, and an old playroom that looked like it might have been used for puppet shows and reading circles once upon a time. Scott collected the beanbag chairs from the playroom’s cabinets and put them with the linens that Norma had brought to the ballroom’s stage. Meanwhile, Ella’s crusade for food produced little more than two boxes of granola bars and a sleeve of stale saltines.
Weapons-wise, they found a toolbox, a pack of hypodermic needles, a pencil case containing neon-green safety scissors, and two aluminum swords from the suits of armor in the vestibule. Lance joked about putting on the armor and challenging “that sick son of a bitch” to a jousting match, but no one had found it the least bit funny. For all they knew, that son of a bitch had a 16-gauge shotgun and a Remington pump-action tucked under his sinewy forearms. Norma took the hypodermic needles, and then each counselor selected an item for self-defense. Scott had last pick. His options were a pair of needle-nose pliers or the safety scissors, and without much thought, he chose the pliers and snapped the latch of the toolbox shut. At least you can stab yourself with pliers, he reasoned. Plastic scissors aren’t even sharp enough to slit your own wrists.
____
Weaponry was one thing, but what the fort lacked most—the first thing old Maslow would have pointed out on his well-known pyramid—was water. Running water. Back when they had barred the doors, the topic had barely been raised; now it was Critical Issue Number One.
“What about a bucket system?” Norma suggested. Six of the remaining counselors and the three supervisors had convened in Charlotte’s office to discuss the matter. “For waste.”
Nikki and Cynthia cringed.
“Better’n what we had in ’Nam.”
“We’ll need to feed and water sixty mouths at some point,” Ella said, “and it’s darn near impossible to lug those meals all the way up here. Plus, ain’t no place to cook ’em. Might be easier to take everyone down to the hall, feed ’em and let ’em use the toilets, then bring ’em all back.”
The idea of taking everyone out of the fort was even more divisive than Norma’s shit-pail suggestion.
Scott slumped onto the floor and listened to a handful of proposals sail back and forth. Drawing straws to see which counselors would go to collect food, setting up buckets to gather potential rainfall, starting a fire on the roof to signal for help. In the end, their new slogan of “Safety in staying put” lost out to “Safety in numbers,” and Ella’s idea to leave the fort was voted in by present company, 5-4. Charlotte only agreed on the basis that they would go directly to the mess hall and return as soon as possible.
“If he’s still here,” Charlotte said, “and he might not be, but assume he is, he’ll be waiting for us to surface. No straying near the woods or any place we can’t keep an eye on the kids.”
“What time should we go?” Nikki asked.
“I refuse to leave when it’s dark,” Charlotte said, “but let’s wait as long as possible in case these meals get fewer and farther between. Once a day might be all we can risk, and closer to bedtime the better. We’ll aim for dusk. It’s a chance to grab knives from the mess hall and anything else we can find to defen
d ourselves with. If the kids can’t hold their bladders until then, they’ll have to use a bucket. Questions?”
Lance raised his hand. “What if the bastard comes at us?”
Scott thought Charlotte had been holding up incredibly well until then, but the suggestion of another attack spread a look of hate across her countenance like rotten icing smeared over a dried-out cake.
“Defend the kids,” she said. “At all costs.”
No one pressed the issue.
“All right.” Charlotte worked up some saliva. “It’s four o’clock. Go to your groups—Lord knows they need you right now—and we’ll leave at eight. If any of them are thirsty, try to distract them. Take them up to the roof, if that helps. A sip of fresh air is all we can offer for now.”
Scott stretched his arms as the others shuffled out of the room. When most of them were gone, he sidled around the desk and stopped at the office’s large windowpane.
There it is, he thought, touching the glass. Laid out like a toy set.
The view from the office offered an unobstructed glimpse of the entire clearing. The huts, the zip-line tower, the mess hall. It was all so still—so innocuous—in broad daylight.
“He’s out there, isn’t he?” Charlotte approached the window and stood next to Scott. They stared at the camp, shoulder to shoulder, and said nothing for a full minute.
“Who’s keeping the first watch?” Scott asked.
“I will.” Charlotte’s tight-lipped expression curved into a grimace. She lowered her voice and made a quiet vow: “I’m staying right here. Right here, waiting for that asshole to show his miserable face. No one fucks with my kids.”
15
A rubber band shot through the air and caught Marshall’s ear. “Yow!” He flinched. “Cut it out.”
Behind him, Tyrell returned a smug look. “Cut what out, snot-head? I didn’t do nothin’.”
“Yeah you did, you—”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
“Did not.”
“Shut up.”