by D. Melhoff
A barrel of nails? Where did they come up with this shit?
The stories outdid themselves on every page. A boy in “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” slits the throat of his little brother, and when his mother finds out, she stabs him during a fit of rage (forgetting, of course, about her other child in the bathtub, consequently killing him too). “Vom Fundevogel” has the cook thrown into the boiling water she’d been preparing for the main character; the slumbering Talia—aka Sleeping Beauty—is raped and impregnated by none other than her future husband, the king.
Scott’s stomach churned with every story, and on more than one occasion, he had to set the book aside and take a break. When Brynn returned an hour later, he couldn’t be more relieved. Together, they agreed to pause their research and join the others downstairs.
The rest of the morning moved deceivingly slow. Thankfully, the only screams that rang through the halls were the ones of kids scoring soccer goals in the ballroom. The next loudest noises came from the campers’ stomachs. But much to everyone’s surprise, their prayers—and gurgles—were answered when Charlotte assembled them on the roof at two o’clock and declared with a look of triumph that lunch was served. Indeed, the air smelled of something hot and creamy. A metal trash can had been filled two-thirds of the way with white chowder and heated by a trio of torches. “Denisha and I found a pallet of soup hiding under the stage from last year,” Charlotte announced. “Had to crawl through cobwebs as thick as goalie nets to reach it, but this should be enough to keep us full for a while.”
So they wheeled the bathroom bucket away and dished up, devouring at least two helpings each. No one was picky. It was the first sustenance they’d had in almost forty-eight hours, and the garbage-can chowder hit the spot as well as any gourmet meal from Michelin Guide’s triple-star restaurants.
Now, with food in their stomachs, Scott and Brynn excused themselves and returned to scouring the camp records. Although nothing they learned that afternoon brought them any closer to understanding Bruce’s motive—or how he planned to strike next—they were at least comfortable enough that they could exchange the odd smile. At one point, Scott tried a joke in an attempt to lighten the mood (“A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says, ‘Make me one with everything’”), but just as Brynn started to snicker, they wandered past the stairwell and caught a whiff of rotting flesh rising out of the dungeon. Their smiles had vanished, and neither of them spoke for the next hour.
For the children, the rest of the day consisted of a familiar routine: half-hearted coloring, followed by a half-hearted soccer match and half-hearted musical chairs (with Denisha subbing for a CD player). They saw no signs of Bruce or his victims. Not that evening, not during the night, and not the next morning. By the time the sun came up on Tuesday, a small part of the tension had abated, and it was clear that something else had replaced it—something that hadn’t been around since their journey through hell began.
A trace of hope.
21
Roddy Simmons felt no such hope on the floor of the dank chamber where he was tied up, facedown, in a pool of someone else’s blood.
His frantic thrashing had slowed to a subdued squirm hours ago. Now, he was lying on his stomach with his head cocked to the side in the direction of the room’s only door. The chamber was darker than the coldest recesses of deep space—and quieter, too. He had gone one hundred percent deaf in his right ear and nearly ninety percent in the left when four gunshots had fired less than a foot away from his face.
“H-Help,” he sputtered for the hundredth—maybe thousandth—time, hearing nothing but a distant trace of his own voice. “Can anyone hear me? Help. Helllllp.”
He squirmed forward, inching for the door, when his cheek brushed against something wet and slippery.
The rain slicker, he thought, stopping cold. The slicker and the rubber gloves.
A new wave of despair washed over him as he recalled the events of the last twenty-four hours.
He had been running from the mess hall—from Ella’s screeching corpse—as the cries of petrified children teemed around him. After careening into Charlotte, the two of them had begun rounding up campers only to be separated in the commotion minutes later. Then, someone had crept up behind him and thrown a burlap bag over his head before jamming a gun in the small of his back and forcing him, blind, to this miserable lockup away from the buzz of the square. He had been chucked inside—his nose hitting the floor and crumpling like a can of Pepsi—and bound by his wrists before the assaulter took off and slammed the door shut, locking it from the outside.
The rest was a blur of semiconscious images.
At some point, Roddy worked the bag off his head and became mortified by his surroundings. It was a room, no more than forty square feet, bathed in the crimson hues of a red-wax candle approaching the end of its shaft. In the bloody light, he had seen horrors he could not unsee. A hacksaw on top of a cluttered worktable. A pair of handcuffs. A collection of rusty tools, including a hammer, a wrench, and an aluminum sword he thought he recognized from the fort. (The hammer was the weapon he had been carrying for self-defense, and a lot of good it had done—he hadn’t gotten a single decent swing in.) What was above the table, however, chilled him most. There were pictures of the fourteen counselors pinned to a corkboard. Those of Erin, Dominique, Meegan, Bethany, Kimberly, and Chase had red slashes across their faces, and in the center—connected to each headshot with a piece of red yarn—was a photo of Scott.
Scott? Why the fuck is Scott in the middle?
Then he saw his own picture in the bottom right corner: a shot of himself holding his snowboard in Whistler last February. He had gaped at the picture, and his picture had grinned back, an oblivious past-self staring down the lens of a wormhole, unaware as the shutter snapped that he was smiling at his future body on the floor of a torture chamber. Filled with rage, he had lashed out and knocked the table over with his legs, spilling the tools and the candle and extinguishing the room’s only light.
Not long after—Fifteen minutes? Twenty?—three more counselors had been thrown into the room, their heads covered with burlap bags and their limbs also bound. In between pleas for mercy, they identified themselves as Cynthia, Nikki, and Mai.
The memories that followed were even hazier.
Roddy remembered flickers of a video recording—a portable DVD player—blinking to life and showing clips of pole dancers doing erotic twirls across its seven-inch screen. But they weren’t just any dancers. They were Cynthia and Nikki. No music played with the racy routine, but the footage had been spliced together with clips from a 1940s cartoon of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and every minute or so, the movie would crackle to life and spit out some line from the wolf or Grandmother or Little Red herself.
Roddy recalled turning to see their captor at the back of the room and feeling his organs melt inside of him.
The killer had been standing in a black, full-length rain slicker with the hood pulled all the way down. The slicker’s glossy material reflected the light from the DVD player, and the tip of a Smith & Wesson had been poking out of the right sleeve, clutched in a rubber glove.
The figure had hovered closer, raising the gun, and the last thing Roddy heard was the crackling voice of the wolf saying, “…better to eat you with, my dear.” Four gunshots tore into Cynthia and Nikki’s foreheads, killing them instantaneously. Roddy fainted the second their brain matter struck his cheeks. When he came to again, he had realized that all of the girls—including Mai—were gone, along with his sense of hearing. He imagined their pictures on the corkboard, red slashes severing their faces.
Something tickled Roddy’s wrist and jolted him back to the present. He felt a beetle scurry up his arm and around his neck, poking its antennae into his deaf ear canal. He thrashed his head left and right, smacking the discarded slicker, and the bug tumbled off.
The slicker, he thought. What was the psycho doing in a raincoat and rubber gloves?
&n
bsp; The only answer that came to mind was a dark one.
The fucker didn’t want to get dirty. Didn’t want evidence. Shooting us is one thing, but moving us—maybe cutting us up with that hacksaw—is a whole other story.
Strange thing was, Roddy didn’t know if Bruce fit the killer’s profile anymore. At first glance, the Reaper in Rubber had the same frame as the burly groundskeeper, but on second thought, the slicker was bulky and lacked a distinct shape. Didn’t seem as tall as Bruce, either. Maybe our main suspect took off two days ago and is halfway to Lansing by now. But if it wasn’t Bruce, it was surely a demon, Roddy thought. No human being could harbor that much evil inside of them to commit such atrocities.
He remembered Chase and Kimberly hanging out of the zip-line tower, and he felt Cynthia and Nikki’s crusted brain matter on his cheeks. What did they do to deserve this? WHAT DID I DO?
Roddy Simmons knew he wasn’t a model citizen—far from it. For years, he had been a no-good street kid with a no-good stealing problem. His ultimate low point had been three winters ago when the police had followed him back to his buddy’s apartment after a failed break-and-enter and raided the building at 2:00 a.m. He’d managed to slip out of the bathroom window wearing nothing but jeans and a Rolex during the coldest night that January, but within a minute of charging down the fire escape, his bare feet had been on the brink of total numbness. Just when he’d contemplated turning himself in, he had spotted a church across the street and made a break for it. Its doors had been locked (even hard-core Christians know that providence is no substitute for a good deadbolt), but he had discovered a window to the basement around back and smashed it with the face of his eight-thousand-dollar watch, slipping into a Sunday school room and passing out on the carpet an hour later.
The pastor’s wife had found him the next morning. But much to Roddy’s surprise, when the frail English woman discovered his half-naked ass in Noah’s Reading Corner, she didn’t go straight to the authorities. Instead, she convinced her husband that they should be honored by the challenge God had given them and, rather than turning him in, should let him stay in exchange for regular attendance at Bible studies and daily shoveling of the walk. Roddy agreed, thinking it was good to lie low for a while, and thanked the family profusely.
After a month of living in St. Margaret’s Cathedral, however, Roddy had developed a bad case of convent fever. Deciding it was time to leave, he sneaked into the sacristy and stole a wad of envelopes containing five hundred dollars in offerings before pelting to the nearest exit. Then, divine intervention: the pastor’s wife had rounded the corner and caught him red-handed. Upon realizing what he was doing, she told him that if he returned the money and sat down with her for an hour, she wouldn’t phone the police. He accepted the offer, and the old woman proceeded to tell him about a famous French man who had stolen from the church many years ago, and, when arrested, was spared from jail by the very bishop whom he’d robbed. “Believe it or not,” the woman said, “the bishop offered the man a pair of silver candlesticks in good faith.” Jean or Valjean or some queer name like that. Turned out the story was a stalling tactic. The pastor’s wife had already called 9-1-1, and ten minutes later, two cops burst into the nave with their guns up, hollering at Roddy to put his hands in the air. The pastor and his wife testified at the trial, and Roddy was sentenced to eight months in juvie. Those eight months straightened him out pretty good—much better than Christian kindness had, although perhaps this was an alternate form of the same thing—and after that, he hadn’t stolen again, not once.
Is that what this is about? Roddy reeled on the floor of the chamber. That bullshit three years ago? No. It can’t be, but…but then what the fuck is going on?
Something changed in the darkness. At first, it was a premonition—an invisible shockwave pulsating across the floor—and then a sliver of light appeared, and a silhouette slipped through the doorway.
He’s back. The Grim Reaper is back.
The light vanished, and Roddy’s heart bashed against his rib cage. Pressure pounded his eardrums, but no frequencies traveled the membrane.
Out of nowhere, he felt the slightest puff of air on his face. Then another puff, which carried a stale, spit-like odor straight to his cortex.
Breath, he thought. The Reaper is right in front of me. Breathing on me.
He reared back, but the breathing followed. The puffs kept coming in random, scattered bursts. The killer was talking to him. Telling him something.
The fucker doesn’t know I’m deaf.
Roddy straightened his back. He had been bracing himself for a bullet, but this made more sense, didn’t it? There was a sick method to the bastard’s madness. Like the video of “Little Red Riding Hood” shown to Cynthia and Nikki, he was hearing—or supposed to be hearing—a message before facing the Reaper’s scythe.
Except he couldn’t. He was deaf, and he would never hear a word of it.
Good. He smiled. Let this asshole’s fairy-tale delusion be the end of him.
And without hesitating, Roddy reared back and whipped his head forward, smashing the killer’s face with his forehead.
He didn’t hear the crack of the person’s nose, but he felt it, and then he launched himself off the floor with the ferocity of a wild animal, biting and kicking and head-butting as the killer thrashed beneath him. Unfortunately, without the use of his arms Roddy was a seahorse picking a fight with a giant squid. A hand gripped his neck, and he felt the barrel of the Smith & Wesson dig into his chest.
Even though it was pitch-black, Roddy closed his eyes. The pain didn’t come. The figure jerked him around with the gun, pushing him to the door, and slipped a familiar burlap bag over his head.
The door to the chamber flung open—Roddy felt a breeze on his bare arms—and with a final jolt of adrenaline, he flung himself forward.
Run!
If he hadn’t been shot yet, he thought, he might be safe. Maybe the killer wants me alive. And if somebody’s around, they might be able to hear me or see me and run for help—
Roddy made it two awkward hops out the door when he rammed into a large object and pitched forward, buckling at the stomach. Suddenly he was falling—tumbling into a tight, musty void—and struck the ground headfirst. He tried squirming, but he was stuck, crumpled upside down with his legs flailing above his head and his arms crammed against his torso. Whatever crate or coffin he had fallen into tipped over, and his center of gravity pivoted as the structure slammed to the ground, rattling every bone in his body.
“Help!” Roddy screamed deafly. “Help!”
A modicum of sunlight streamed through the burlap sack, and he saw a faint circle shining above him like the opening of a well. The opening shrank as something began crossing over it, and as the last rays of sunlight were eclipsed, he found himself wondering in a dizzy haze how long the French man with the funny name had held on to the bishop’s candlesticks, and whether or not God forgave him.
Roddy Simmons never heard the story the Reaper told him. But he felt the pain, first in one place, then in two, then all over his body. And as the pain overwhelmed him, his twilight thoughts recalled the recent sensation of lying in a pool of blood. Except this time, it wasn’t someone else’s.
This time, the blood was his.
22
Despite being exhausted, Scott’s mind refused to let him rest.
His nightmare was back Tuesday night, spliced together with images of gruesome fairy tales. The train’s steel-studded form became an impenetrable wall of thorns; crows circled; bodies dangled from the concrete overpass and swayed in the breeze. When he looked up—past little Desiree—he saw the Pursuer crawling out of the shadows at the end of the street, stalking him with its canine grin. A wolf! Stay back! But the beast had him cornered. Its coat glinted in the sun as it bounded across the gravel, and its yellow eyes pinned him to the spot like tractor beams.
Run!
Somehow, even in sleep, Scott managed to wheel around and dive through
the gap of his only hiding place—the decommissioned train station—just as the wolf let out its vociferous yowl and pounced into the air, blotting out the sky with its enormous physique.
Everything went black.
Scott jolted awake, sweating like a bottle of Coke at a Fourth of July barbecue. The ballroom was scorching hot, and the smell of his BO blended with everyone else’s.
Around him, the campers squirmed in the muggy heat. Denisha had curled up against the wall, trying to absorb the coolness of its stones, while Lance and Brynn were nowhere to be seen. Must be upstairs, he thought. Lance was likely on lookout duty, while Brynn would have returned to the playroom to continue hunting for clues that could lead to her sister.
No one else was awake.
Wrong, he corrected himself, squinting at the front of the room.
Charlotte was sitting on the lip of the stage, barely moving, with her elbows dug into her knees and a Kleenex pressed to her face. Even from a distance, Scott could see her puffy eyelids and stark complexion. He got up and wove through the children like a soldier navigating a field of landmines.
“Trouble sleeping?” Charlotte whispered, blowing into her Kleenex and dabbing her eyes as Scott arrived at the stage.
“Well,” he said, “accommodations aren’t quite what the website made them out to be.”
“False advertising, so sue me. Get in line behind everyone else.”
Scott hoisted himself onto the stage and sat beside the camp’s fearless leader, who, at present, didn’t look so fearless. He gazed out at the children and watched their troubled movements: flipping from their stomachs onto their backs, from their backs to their stomachs, and wriggling in the uncomfortable heat. He wiped his face with the bottom of his V-neck—the fabric was soaked.