Camp McClane

by Grant Fieldgrove

  Janice snatched a marshmallow from the bag then pushed it down on to her stick. She passed the bag to her right, where the black kid was sitting.

  Of all places for him to sit, Janice thought.

  When all the marshmallows were attached to all the sticks, and all the sticks were poking in and out of the fire that was the time Teddy chose to have his talk with the group. The scary talk.

  Oooohhhhhh.

  “Now,” Teddy said, lowing his voice to a near whisper for maximum effect.

  “What?” Calli said. “Speak up.”

  “Did you say something, Teddy?” Holly said.

  So much for maximum effect.

  “I said, Now…”

  “Now what, buddy?” Shane said, biting down on to a too-hot marshmallow, burning the roof of his mouth. He played it off well. Chicks don’t like sissies. Right?

  “Well, I’ll tell you now what, if you’ll let me talk.”

  “Sorry Teddy,” Holly said, a big, dumb puppy-dog-grin on her face.

  “Now!” Teddy continued, this time a little louder. “I know the only reason we’re really here is to just smoke some weed and fuck each other. I get that.”

  Holly had forgotten about the weed! Hooray! Her smile grew wider…and dumber.

  Fuck each other, Calli thought? I suppose if everyone fucked everyone, it would solve a lot of problems. And drugs!

  Calli felt a lot better about the situation she was in.

  “I mean,” Teddy said, “who gives a shit about camping, right? Am I right?”

  Nods from around the campfire. If it’s possible for a nod to be dumb, such as a certain question might be dumb, this was it. A collection of dumb nods.

  Teddy went on. “I know the male to female ratio right now is a little out of whack, so there might have to be some switching off, or two’s at a time, maybe a train, who knows, we’ll play it by ear and see how the mood moves us, but judging by the lack of bras and the vagina-taco short shorts I see gathered around me, it doesn’t seem like it will be a problem.

  “I mean, a few more counselors will be here tomorrow and after that we can probably just assembly line it. Whatever gets the job done the most effectively. Quantity, not quality… or something like that. I don’t know.”

  Something dawned on Teddy. Shit. “Also, ya know, there will be kids here to get in the way of, ya know, our goal.”

  “Aw fuck!” Shane said, in that angry black man tone that you can instantly recall.

  Teddy put his hand on Shane’s knee to console him from this heartbreaking news. “I know, buddy. I know. But it will be okay. The kids don’t arrive for two days. Two days. That gives us like…however many hours to get as much smokin’ and bangin’ in as possible before those fucking kids are here to get in the way an’ shit and be like ‘take me hiking, take me fishing, wipe my butt ‘cause I’m an annoying stupid kid that can’t do anything, wahhh.”

  Everyone laughed at this, for some unknown reason. Teddy’s impression of the kids was quite lame, but easy jokes for easy folks… cough cough Adam Sandler movies cough cough.

  Shane noticed Teddy’s hand still on his knee. Seems to have been there a little longer than appropriate, but hey, they’re in the woods and there was some saying about what happens in the woods is like…bear shit…or something… Actually, Shane had no idea if there was a saying about the woods. Shane shook his head to clear that disastrous attempt at a thought away from his mind.

  It worked.

  Didn’t take much.

  When you could catch a football with one hand, no one gave a shit about your I.Q. thingie.

  Carl Langer stood between the trees, hidden in the shadows, watching the group of teenagers talk about sex. He thought back to the time when he was in high school and Cindy St. John had lured him into the parent’s bedroom of some random classmate’s house during a party that he was shocked to find himself invited to in the first place.

  Carl had thought Cindy was drunk and would have had sex with anyone, and that anyone just happened to have been Carl. His previous attempts with women had proved disastrous, but he had a good feeling about this one.

  Well, a good feeling and a bad feeling, if that were possible. He was excited, finally, after seventeen years of living, to at least get to first base with a girl, but he felt bad because, well, the girl was obviously intoxicated.

  He remembered Cindy opening the bedroom door and leading Carl by the hand towards the bed. No lights were on, which Carl thought was a good thing. His tiny little pale body, his freckles and his flaming red hair were hardly things to brag about.

  He remembered the feeling of Cindy pulling off his t-shirt. He even remembered the exact shirt it was; his Fonzie shirt that had the words SIT ON IT in bright red letters right next to the king-of-cool’s face.

  Sit on it. Yeah, I hope Cindy will sit on it. This made Carl laugh…then…not so much now. Now it just made him angry. Angry angry angry. And then a little angrier.

  Cindy removed his pants; Carl had felt like he was going to throw up. It was going to happen. It was really going to happen. Someone other than himself was going to touch his dick. Finally. He hoped all those mornings, afternoons, late afternoons, early evenings, evenings, nights, and late nights, locked in his room, jerking off, would make him last for hours.

  Nope.

  It sure didn’t.

  Not only did he shoot his load before any actual action took place, it turned out Cindy was not drunk at all. With his dick hanging out of his boxer shorts, the lights flicked on and he found himself encircled in a room full of his classmates. They laughed and snapped pictures on their Polaroid cameras. Carl’s little wiener, still dripping from the excitement, was the focal point of several lenses and flashes.

  He wanted to die.

  The pictures went up all over school the following week, and shockingly, no one knew who did it. No one would fink on anyone, and Carl was too ashamed to name names.

  The following weekend, the last weekend before graduation, a group of kids took a can of gas and dumped the liquid out onto the school’s football field, drawing a giant, crude picture of Carl sucking a giant dick. Printed in dead grass above the picture, was CARL LANGER SUCKS COCK IN HELL.

  Carl Langer would be dead before anyone would see it, making it even funnier for the assholes that did it.

  Sure, there are always those few, over-sensitive souls who pretend like the recently departed were their best friend, and they cry a little harder than necessary, they give a little speech at the funeral, and reap the reward of sympathy, thus making themselves feel better.

  But Carl knew it was all bullshit. The only people who would really be sad about him were his parents, and they were dead right along with him.

  The memory enraged Carl to a near furor, and he bent over, grabbed a stick from the ground, and cracked it in half.

  “What the hell was that?” Holly asked, startled.

  “Shoot, girl” Shane said, putting his hand on Holly’s knee. Teddy’s, for some reason, was still on his knee. Peculiar. “That was nutin’, girl. Prolly just a squirrel or some shit.”

  Shit, Shane is so brave. Not even afraid of a snapping twig in the middle of the wilderness. Janice saw through this. She had been unfortunate enough to sit in the row in front of several, large-sized black women when her and her family went to see the movie Scream last summer. She knew damn well black people were afraid of everything, apparently, and were quite vocal about it. She lost track of the number of times the women would yell the phrases “Bitch run!” and “Oh hell no!” but she knew it had to have been over fifty during the course of the ninety-minute-long movie.

  It wasn’t true, at least in regards to Shane at that exact moment. He wasn’t scared. He was in the woods after all, and small creatures walking around, making little sounds, were perfectly normal. He wasn’t unreasonable. In fact, Shane thought himself perfectly reasonable, just like that time a few years back when Wesley Snipes didn’t get nominated for an Academy Aw
ard for his role in The Art of War, and Shane and his mother wanted to burn down Hollywood with a string of drive-by Molotov-cocktailings…but they didn’t. See, perfectly reasonable.

  With Holly worried, Shane took this opportunity to withdraw his hand from her knee and lightly caress her braless tits…um, accidentally, of course!

  “Sure,” Teddy said. “It could have been a squirrel… Or it could have been… Him.”

  This drew everyone’s attention and just that quickly, Shane has gone from perfectly cool and horny, to terrified and horny.

  Calli sat straight up, the marshmallow on the end of the stick engulfed in flames. She didn’t notice. “Who?” she asked meekly.

  Teddy went back to his dramatic-effect whisper, this time with much more success. “Well, I don’t want to frighten you, but I have heard a rumor that this camp is…” Dundundun! “Haunted.”

  “H-Haunted?” Janice said, catching her word on the sudden dryness of her mouth. “What do you mean, haunted?”

  “Don’t worry, Fire Crotch, I’m sure it’s all bullshit…but…”

  Shane jumped up, his Air Jordan’s going from vertical to horizontal quicker than a Filipino whore who just got paid. “But what, mothafucka? I ain’t truckin' with no ghosts 'n shit. I only came along here cause you promised me white woman and weed. Ya never said nutin' bout no mothafuckin ghosts. In case you ain't noticed, I am black, son! And us black folk scare easy. We don't fuck around with no ghosts. You ever sat next to a sista at a scary movie, then you know.”

  This makes Janice laugh. Yes, yes she has sat next to sistas at a scary movie, and it made her think of an invention that could revolutionize the world. Some sort of device that lets movies come directly to your television, thousands of movies with the click of a button. No more having your seat kicked by annoying kids, never again having to hear, “Bitch run!” Yeah, her idea would change the world, for sure.

  Of course, she won’t be alive to fully realize it and some other asshole will eventually come in and do it, making him a billionaire while Janice’s charred corpse has turned to nothing but bones.

  But hey, right now, it makes her kind of happy and she’s forgotten all about being scared a few moments ago.

  Teddy waved his arm, like what he said was no big deal. “Don’t worry, man. I’m sure we’ll be fine. And to answer your question, yes, I have sat next to a sista at a movie before and yes, it was awful.”

  Shane knew what was up and nodded his head. Every single movie he’d seen in a theater up until about a year ago had been with a sista; his mom. He missed at least half the dialogue in every single movie he watched.

  Still though, he wasn’t ready to sit back down. Not quite yet. “Go on…”

  Teddy smiled. “Anyway, the story goes, that there was this boy...This boy named Carl Langer who, up until he was in about his late-teens or so, was just a normal guy...I mean, dorky as fuckall, but still pretty normal. They said he had bright red hair and no one liked him. All through high school he would get teased and beaten up by the jocks and cool kids with big dicks... like me and you, Shane.”

  Wait a minute, Calli thought. How the hell do Teddy and Shane know each other’s penis sizes? Maybe she would be back on top of Holly before long, after all.

  Janice had her attention focused back on Teddy, as did Holly. Calli shook the thought of lesbian sex from her imagination and nodded to Teddy to continue.

  Shane was still standing, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

  Teddy bit his marshmallow from the stick, chewed it slowly, building suspense, before continuing again. “They say Carl and his parents came camping out here in these woods when they stumbled upon an old witch doctor. Now, no one knows what for sure happened, but they must have pissed the witch doctor off something royally because he placed a curse on Carl and his parents, then tied them up like pigs and sacrificed them to whatever bullshit god he believed in. Slit their throats from ear to ear and watched them bleed out all over the very soil we are sitting on right now.”

  Teddy had everyone’s full attention and he savored it.

  “Then what?” Janice asked, curling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

  “Well, the way the story goes is that Carl's parents went to heaven, but, as everyone knows, redheads go to hell...”

  Janice nodded that dumb puppy-dog-nod again, not realizing an insult if he smacked her in the face.

  No wait, hey!

  Teddy leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Don’t worry, baby. If the worst happens, we can make your trip to hell totally worth it, if you know what I mean.”

  Janice did. Sex! She smiled and nodded again.

  Hey wait!

  Janice was just about to say something but Teddy interrupted her, because really, no one gave a shit what that dumb ginger had to say.

  “Like I was saying. Carl left his parents to go to hell, but something must have happened. Maybe the devil doesn't like redheads either, or maybe they're some sort of Hell Royalty, we'll never know, but for whatever reason, Satan sent Carl back to earth to do his bidding. And ever since then, he has hidden within the trees here, protecting this land for the underworld. Anyone who dares stay here will be killed... Ain't that right Shane? ... Shane?”

  Everyone looked around. Shane was nowhere in sight. From far off in the distance, they heard him yell, “Fuuuuuuck that shit!”

  They shared a few awkward glances followed by an even more awkward silence, before Calli broke it.

  “I gotta tell ya, Teddy, that sounds like the lamest story I’ve ever heard. That’s like, USA Up All Night stuff, right there. Lame City!”

  Teddy shrugged, nodded, bobbed his head. “Sure. Sure, lame. You’re probably right. I was just, ya know, throwin’ it out there.”

  Calli stood up, dusted the dirt from her ass and legs. “I mean, he was a kid camping with his parents but he died and now he’s an adult? So what, he was growing while he was dead?”

  “No,” Teddy said, rationalizing his story to the best of his ability, “he was, like, uh, a teenager.”

  “But now he’s an adult.”

  “Yeah, because this was years ago, and-”

  “So we’re supposed to be afraid of some little punk teenager.”

  “Calli!” Teddy yelled. “You aren’t listening to me. Gawd! He’s an adult now.”

  “So he grew while he was dead?”

  “I said late teens...shit...Look, I don't think much thought goes into these stories. I'm pretty sure people just make shit up as they're going along. I'm just relaying the story as it was told to me...by some drunk guy...at a party...once.”

  Now Janice got to her feet, though she didn’t exactly know why. Just seemed like the thing to do. “So, moral of the story, Teddy, is that we're supposed to be afraid of some teenager named Carl who got bullied in high school and is now sad?”

  Teddy was obviously flustered now. He didn’t think he would be explaining this horseshit story to Siskel and fucking Ebert here. “Yes, but I don’t know how sad he is. Jesus, I-”

  Janice laughed and said, “Carl doesn’t really sound like much of a murderer’s name. It kinda sounds like someone with a mustache who would jerk-off outside a hole in the fence at the public swimming pool.”

  This story was backfiring on Teddy in a major way. “Look, I didn’t name the guy! And I didn’t make this shit up. I’m just telling you the story as it was told to me. I was… I was trying to scare the clothes off of you. Ya know’im sayin’?”

  Calli shook her head. “Well, I’m not impressed.”

  Now it was Teddy’s time to stand. Where he got the nerve to do what he did next, the world may never know, but he did it anyway.

  “Gather ‘round,” he said, “and I’ll show you something really impressive that should do the trick.”

  Teddy unzipped his shorts, letting them fall to the dirt, exposing his American Flag bikini briefs and half-chub. He reached down and rubbed his stars-and-stripes, and said, I
swear to god, he said, “Who’s hungry?”

  Two tragedies occurred within mere seconds. The first was that this somehow worked; the girls, all three of them, would have pounced on him resulting in a majorly hot and awesome foursome, which, well didn’t happen, due to tragedy number two.

  Something hit Teddy square in the chest with a thump, nearly knocking the wind from him, before falling into the fire.

  It was Shane. Well, Shane’s head to be exact.

  Before a single scream could be released, a machete burst through Teddy’s asshole, popping out through his pelvis, his dick being John-Bobbitt-ed in the process.

  “Gahhhh!” Teddy yelped, because really, it was all he could do as his blood sprayed over the crowd.

  His dick hit the dirt just a few seconds before Teddy fell to his knees and went face first into the fire. Left standing behind him, was Carl Langer, dressed in his perfectly reasonable army pants which he acquired from, well, some guy in the army way back in the seventies, when killin’ was still new, and a button-up shirt, blue, which he thought complimented the pants well. Covering his face was a catcher’s mask made from something that didn’t look like plastic.

  Oh shit, it was made from a rib cage. He was wearing a catcher’s mask made from a fucking ribcage, his messy red hair shooting out in every direction from behind it.

  He pulled his machete from Teddy’s asshole and quickly swung it to his left, wedging it into the right side of Holly’s skull.

  Shit, Carl thought. That should have been a clean decapitation. Oh well. She’s dead, nonetheless, and really, isn’t that all that matters?

  Yeah. Yeah it was.

  The redheaded girl, the one he would have let live the longest, just stood there, while the tiny little brunette took off running.

  Sorry redheaded girl, he thought, as he took the machete from Holly’s head with a force that caused her body to flail backwards, and shoved it right into the redheaded girl’s belly. Sure, that would have been enough, but Carl is an above and beyond kind of guy, so he cut the blade across her abdomen, spilling her entrails onto the faces of a group of women, all white except one, who were wearing some truly terrible clothes.