by D. Melhoff
“Trust?” The staircase dumped them beneath the arch of the fort’s entryway. “I’d much rather trust a woman who’s been helping us than the man who chased me through the woods with an ax and kidnapped my sister—”
Scott whipped around and grabbed Brynn by the shoulders. With as much gravity as he could summon, he said, “It’s her, Brynn.”
“But Bruce—”
“It’s her.”
Brynn’s lips trembled over an array of words trying to fumble their way out, when all of a sudden her face turned stark white.
Scott pivoted to see what she was staring at.
It was the wicket door, hanging wide open.
“Go barricade the ballroom,” he said. “Don’t let anyone in, especially Charlotte.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Lance or Denisha could be out there. Maybe both.” He sprinted to the doorway and stuck his head outside, pinpointing the glowing stables. “For once, we’ve got the element of surprise on our side. We’ve gotta use it.”
“But you don’t have any—”
Scott didn’t stick around to hear the rest. He stepped across the threshold, abandoning Brynn, and raced into the night, not bothering to shut the door to stave off the demon that had been among them all along. He veered onto the grass and barreled toward the stables, a soundless blip rocketing southeast on the camp’s radar as fast as his legs could carry him.
The stables loomed closer…
And that’s when the screaming reached his ears.
“HEL—! HEL—! OH GAH, HEL—”
Lance. He’s gagged, but alive.
The flames flashed between the buildings like sunlight through the gaps of speeding train cars. Scott rounded the far corner of the corral just as Lance’s shrieks for help morphed into a long garble of agony.
“AAHHHEEYYYYAAHH!”
Scott’s eyes ballooned.
The view from the toolshed was brighter than he’d anticipated. Charlotte faced the other direction—clutching what looked like two iron rods—as she bore down over Lance, who was pushed against the fence with a gelding on either side of him. The ground shook as the horses stamped their hooves—the fire in the feeding trough cracked—and Scott noticed the tips of Charlotte’s rods pulsing with a red-neon glow.
Branding irons. She’s got fucking branding irons.
Charlotte brushed Lance’s cheek with the metal. He shrieked (a sound Scott could have never imagined coming from Lance Thompson), and the geldings clomped even harder, smelling the burned flesh.
Jesus Christ, his feet are tied to the horses. She’s going to tear him in half.
Scott looked around for a weapon—something, anything!—but it was too late. As Charlotte lowered the rods toward the geldings, he felt himself slipping the backpack off his shoulder and go running across the corral.
Charlotte tilted her head as Scott brought up the sack and swung it as hard as he could, hammering her in the ribs—smack. The bag burst like a piñata, sending colorful tubes tumbling through the air while Charlotte went sprawling face-first into the dirt.
The iron rods sailed in opposite directions, and Scott lunged for the closest one. He grabbed the handle, rolling over, and saw Charlotte hurtling toward him with the other rod held high above her head. He lifted his bar just as hers came screaming through the air.
CLANK.
The rods struck, and Scott’s went spiraling into the dirt like a toy sword. Charlotte kicked it away, and he scuttled backward on his hands and feet, vibrating with metallic tremors. She forced him against the roaring trough. The flames singed the hairs on the back of his neck, and the tip of her branding iron hovered an inch away from his Adam’s apple.
“Well.” Charlotte’s chest heaved up and down. The expression of shock on her face was already hardening into resentment. “Here’s someone I didn’t expect to see.”
Scott was heaving too. He met her gaze through the crimson lens of his own rage—a hatred fueled as much by his own ignorance as her repulsive crimes—and spit in her face.
Charlotte wiped the spit with her shoulder, fleering. “You haven’t learned anything yet, have you, Mr. Mamer? Let’s see if fire can teach you some manners.”
She pushed the rod closer, and Scott felt the hot crown come within a hair-width of his larynx…
Then, from out of the background, a shape plunged through the darkness and slammed into Charlotte, tackling her to the ground. At first, Scott thought it was one of the geldings, but then the husky figure drew itself to its knees and he realized with a wave of exhilaration that it was the camp’s groundskeeper, Bruce Bergman.
If the bags under the man’s eyes had seemed heavy before, they were five times heavier now. Sweat streaked down Bruce’s wispy hair as he wrestled the bar out of Charlotte’s grip and pinned her to the gravel. “Take the irons!” he hollered.
Scott scrambled away from the trough and grabbed the two rods. Behind him, Lance was slumped against the pasture’s fence, unharmed except for the angry red mark on his left cheek.
He’s alive. We’re both fucking alive.
Charlotte writhed beneath Bruce’s colossal frame, but he held her down (although not as easily as Scott expected).
“Bruce!” a high-pitched voice shouted. “You got her! You got her! You got her!”
What the hell…?
Scott turned and felt a rush of relief at the sight of Brynn’s sister, Stephanie, running out of the toolshed.
“Stay back!” Bruce grunted, turning his head and dropping his guard for a split second. Unfortunately, that was all Charlotte needed. She wiggled her right arm free and jabbed an uppercut square at the groundskeeper’s jaw, snapping his neck back with a crisp pop and squirming an inch out of his grasp.
“Look out!” Scott shouted. “She’s clawing for rocks—”
But Charlotte had already found one. Her hand arched over her head and smashed Bruce’s cheek with a jagged stone, sending a geyser of blood spurting out of his nostrils. The groundskeeper reared back, and Charlotte’s second hand slipped free, grabbing one of the fireworks that had fallen out of the discarded surplus bag. Before Scott could register what was happening, she dipped the firework in the crackling trough—a sudden hiss with a trail of white sparks—and aimed the cylinder at the fence.
“No!” Scott screamed, but it was too late. The firework exploded—thock!—and shot like a cursed jet across the corral, striking Lance square on his chest and erupting in a blinding BWOOM of red-and-green balefire.
The horses reared back and took off in opposite directions. The ropes snapped taut, and Scott heard the brittle crack of Lance’s pelvis breaking in two, then the deep, razor-like scrape of his skin shearing into separate strips. The rest—the internal organs splattering onto the gravel, the two halves of the body thumping over clumps of manure—vanished from Scott’s consciousness as he collapsed to his hands and knees and threw up a puddle of stomach acid.
Stephanie fainted, but Bruce had Charlotte tackled again, managing to keep her pinned this time.
Still heaving, Scott looked up and stared at the vile woman, wanting nothing more than to flip her over the lip of the trough and watch her burn. She returned his gaze with no remorse. It was a look, Scott was sickened to realize, of triumph. He watched as she rested her head against the ground and took in a deep breath, closing her eyes as if just finishing a good bedtime story.
24
Scott knocked on the door of the fort’s ballroom, and a shaky voice replied, “Who is it?” He nudged Stephanie forward and waited for the girl to speak.
“B-Brynn?”
The person on the other side of the door stepped closer. “Stephy?”
Scraping sounds clashed to life as heavy objects could be heard sliding away from the blockade: chairs clanging together, garbage cans scuffing the floor, flagpoles slamming to the ground and rolling out of the way. Scott raised an eyebrow—Really? Isn’t anyone going to ask who she’s with?—but he let it go, in light of t
he circumstances.
The un-barricaded door swung open, and Brynn appeared, disheveled, tears sparkling in her eyes.
“Brynn!”
The tears spilled as Brynn clasped her sister’s cheeks and wrapped her in a full-body hug. She looked up and made watery eye contact with Scott, mouthing, “Thank you,” and he smiled back, about to mouth, “You’re welcome,” when he caught a glimpse of someone else rushing forward from the crowded ballroom.
The sea of children parted, and Denisha appeared, hurrying for the door. When Scott saw her, his smile vanished. A smile drained from Denisha’s face, too, as she slowed from a run to a walk to a shamble. She tried peering around him in the doorway, but when she didn’t see who she was looking for, she halted with a sad, sagging slouch.
Neither of them had to say anything.
Denisha collapsed on the ballroom floor and began to weep.
____
The only details Scott felt necessary to divulge were covered in five minutes from the front of the ballroom. He told the campers that Charlotte had been responsible for the attacks, not Bruce, and that the groundskeeper was making sure she remained locked up until the bus arrived Friday afternoon. Brynn was impossible to convince at first, but Stephy finally got through to her, explaining that Bruce had been trying to help them—not hurt them—the night they had fled into the woods.
“Charlotte killed Ella before coming after us,” Stephy stressed, her meek voice resonating eerily in the hall’s rafters. Brynn attempted to shush her multiple times, but when that didn’t work, the older sister asked, “If that’s true, why didn’t Bruce call out to us in the corral? And why did he chase us through the woods with an ax?”
“You remember how dark it was, right?” Stephy asked. “Right, Brynn? And the rustling trees? Charlotte was there too. He came to help, but he couldn’t shout ’cause she would’ve heard. Plus, we wouldn’t have believed him anyway.”
That was enough to keep Brynn quiet—for now, at least—as it seemed any attacks on Bruce’s moral character were overruled by Stephy’s testimony.
When the sisters had fallen silent, Scott proposed a new plan of action. They would stay in the ballroom until he and Bruce had a chance to check the camp in the morning; afterward, they would go for a change of clothes and a bite of whatever they could scrounge up from the square’s pantries. In the meantime, they would open the stained-glass windows to air out the fort as much as possible.
“What about potty?” a pipsqueak in the front row asked, his hands clutching his crotch.
“Say so long to the mop bucket,” Scott replied, which sparked a round of applause. “If you’ve gotta go, Brynn or I can take you. Any other questions?”
The crotch-clutching kid raised his hand again. “Can I go now?”
“In a sec. Anyone else?”
The children in the ballroom stared back, distant and drowsy. If they would have been older—or less exhausted—there may have been more difficult questions to field, but to Scott’s relief, there wasn’t so much as a peep.
“Okay. If that’s everything—”
“Where’s Jake?”
The voice that spoke sounded two octaves lower than Scott’s. Everyone turned to see Bruce Bergman striding into the room—scratch marks clawed into his husky forearms, fingernails caked with dirt. A collective shudder rippled through the hall as the kids squirmed at the sight of the acquitted bogeyman.
“Guys,” Scott said, holding up his hands, “this is Bruce, remember? He’s on our side.”
But Bruce hadn’t come to make introductions. “Jake?” he called again, whirling in a circle. “Jake?”
Then came a quiet response, as soft as a muffled “Yopp” echoing out of a microscopic speck of Who-dust. Bruce waded through the crowd and picked up a little boy who weighed no more than fifty pounds, cradling the kid’s head against his shoulder. The boy—Jake—latched his arms around Bruce’s neck, and his bottle-cap glasses smooshed crookedly against the man’s shirt. Both of their eyes glistened as the two of them rocked back and forth in silence.
Jake McDowell, Scott thought.
It clicked.
That’s the boy I plucked out of the hedge maze two nights ago. The section on Bruce’s resume—Mike and Melinda’s Garden Center—flashed in front of his eyes, along with the bullet point: “Helped sister and brother-in-law with greenhouse.” Melinda McDowell was one of Bruce’s references. That’s why he didn’t leave us; he had a nephew here.
Scott looked around and noticed a lot of the girls had started hugging each other too. Even the boys were grouping together, and before long, the only person sitting alone was Denisha—head hung in her hands, tears dripping through the cracks of her fingers. Stephy made the first move. She let go of Brynn and walked over to give the devastated counselor a hug. The other kids got the message. Mikaela, Mindy, Marshall, Cassandra, Rachel, Penelope—one by one, they formed a bigger ring around Denisha, hugging those already in the circle, and soon, the whole room was participating in one giant group hug. Bruce and Jake joined the outer ring, and Scott drew closer, like a chunk of asteroid orbiting a planet. Brynn reached out, taking his arm, and pulled him in.
After three days of constant fear—when every second had been an eternity of terror—the hug was a time warp forward. The circle swelled when they breathed in and shrunk when they breathed out, and five minutes later, no one was crying anymore. They were all just breathing, together.
“All right,” Scott said, breaking away. He nudged the kid with the clutched crotch. “Enough touchy-feely, hey? Bathroom time.”
25
“In there.”
Bruce aimed his finger at a white shed on the edge of the camp’s archery range. Scott and Brynn stood beside him in the early light of Wednesday morning and eyed the padlock on the shack’s door from thirty yards away.
“You’re sure she can’t get out?” Scott asked.
“Not unless she prays ta Satan and slips out in a wisp of demon smoke. Those are ten-inch cinder-block walls.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” Brynn said.
The equipment shed stared back at them, silent as a tomb. There were no windows. No air vents, no hidden doors. The bows and quivers that Bruce had removed before tossing Charlotte inside were dumped in a pile a safe distance away—still, Scott was on edge. “Did you knock her out before you threw her in?”
“No,” Bruce said. “She didn’t struggle.”
“Did she say anything?”
The groundskeeper hesitated.
“What?”
“She was quiet until I closed the door. Then she said: ‘Come back when you want to hear the rest.’ That’s it.”
Brynn put her hands on her temples and began massaging in slow, tiny circles. Scott turned his head, evaluating the pasture in the north and then the fire pit and the drawbridge in the south. “She doesn’t think we can find them,” he said. “Roddy, Nikki, Mai, and Cynthia. We’ve got her, but she’s still got them.”
“And Norma,” Brynn added. “Do you think they’re alive?”
A breeze blew by and stirred the hair on Scott’s legs. “Maybe. She might have planned on using them as bargaining chips in case she got caught, and that’s why she wants us to talk to her again.”
Bruce stiffened. “No one goes near that shed. Especially your friend, what’s-her-face, Denisha. Don’t need anybody openin’ Pandora’s box.”
Scott nodded, although he couldn’t say he wasn’t tempted to run over and start pounding on the door that second. The last thing he wanted in the whole universe was to hear the despicable voice of Charlotte Becker again, but at the same time, he thought he might feel better if he heard something. Not a single sound had come out of that shed all night. It’s too damn quiet. Bruce secured her by himself. What if he didn’t close the lock the whole way, or what if there’s a loose roof tile, or what if—
“Scott?”
“Hmm?”
“Where should we start searching?”
>
He looked at Brynn and shrugged. “You know the camp better than me. Let’s split up to cover more ground; every minute counts.”
“You think she set out traps?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but we explored the camp pretty thoroughly when we got here, and she hasn’t had much alone time since then. Just in case, round up the remaining fireworks and light one if you find anything.”
“Take a knife from the mess hall too,” Bruce said, adding, “there’s a cart by the buffet table, so you won’t have to go in the kitchen. And be careful. We don’t know what’s out there.”
The three of them nodded and started toward the square. As the archery range shrunk behind them, Scott managed to stop himself from turning to get another look at the shack. His ears, however, were tuned to the woods around him. He heard the distant trill of larks—a sweet-sounding quartet—and the peaceful, wave-like swish of the leaves from the hedge maze, then the ribbit of a frog, then another pretty trill. Nothing else.
It disturbed him greatly.
26
The first firework went off at 8:30 a.m.
Scott was circling the campfire ring in the southwest corner of the clearing when he heard the boom and saw the sparks erupt over the square in the distance. He glanced around the area one more time—from the woodpile to the chopping block to the benches—and muttered, “Dammit. I swore one of them would be here.”
He stepped onto a stack of wood pallets and started toward the flare. The moldy slats, still wet from the storm, bent beneath his weight, and as he cut across the ring, there was a loud crack.
The wood buckled again—crack—and Scott crashed to his knees. “Fuck,” he grunted, crawling like a baby over the planks.
Crack-crack-CRACK.
It didn’t take Spider-Sense to predict what happened next. He sprung forward as the pallets fell away—seemingly in slow motion—and slammed into the rim of the newly exposed hole, digging his fingers in the soil and clawing like hell to keep his head above ground. A mushroom cloud of dust blasted into his face, and his feet bicycled in the air before finding purchase on the dirt wall and propelling him onto solid ground. He collapsed on his back, and his head settled on the sharp gravel.