Camp McClane

by Grant Fieldgrove

  “But hey uh, anyway...Well, so uh hey, we're going to have a party up there tonight, ya know. See, they're buying the beer right now. All these people here are part of our group. We'd love for you guys to stop by.”

  Savannah and Breanna both looked towards the surly clerk and the two hunks checking out. Jimmy didn’t notice because he was looking down…for what reason, not even he knew.

  Mort noticed, and once again, his heart crashed, burned.

  “Oh,” Savannah said. “They're going to be there?”

  “Yeah, they’ll be there?”

  Mort's shoulders dropped even lower than before, to an angle he never thought possible. If he were wearing a purse, it would have slid right off.

  But why would he be wearing a purse? Mort had confused himself and shook it off.

  Jimmy raised his head to look at Stuart and James. The bane of his existence! “Yeah, but...” He leaned in and whispered to the twins. “Do me a favor, though. Don't hit on them. They are both totally gay. Like, super gay... Five For Fighting-listening gay... and when women hit on them it makes them as uncomfortable as a Wal-Mart undershirt...so...ya know...”

  Hey, Jimmy thought, that wasn’t bad. From here on out, he was going to tell everyone that James and Stuart were gay.

  Yes… Brilliant.

  Jimmy smiled at his master plan. His similes were pretty good, too. Shirts from Wal-Mart do suck and, while he had never actually heard a song from Five For Fighting, whenever his dad talked about them it was with a murderous rage. (How do these shitfuck pussyboy sons of bitches have more money than me?!)

  “Rats,” Savannah muttered.

  “And mice,” Breanna added.

  “But hey,” Jimmy said, cheerily, putting his arm around Savannah, much to the chagrin of Mort. Again. “We'll be there.”

  Savannah and Breanna looked unimpressed. What is it with women and that look they have that can kill a man’s confidence with a single glare? Did men have a look that could do that to women?

  No, probably not.

  Out of ideas, Jimmy resorted to the old faithful. “Free beer and weed.”

  “You've got weed?”

  “Yeah, you've got weed?”

  “Girls, girls,” Jimmy said, adding his other arm to Breanna’s shoulders, “I'm like the Ghetto Florist up in this motha. Ask and ye shall receive.”

  “Is it good?”

  “Yeah. Good?”

  “Baby, baby, it's the dozen long stem red roses of the illegal herbal family.”

  Mort blew out a cheek-full of air and looked around, hoping no one else could hear this embarrassing bullshit. Holy shit, man. Luckily, everyone appeared to be out of earshot.

  Dave and Andie were on the back aisle with the condoms. Dave picked up a pouch of colored maxi pads and showed it to Andie. “Check it out. Colored maxi pads. Seems kinda pointless, don't ya think?”

  Andie said dryly, the thought of maxi-pads as a topic of conversation didn’t seem very appealing, “I guess...Why?”

  “Don't they just end up red, anyway?”

  Rimshot!

  Andie didn’t laugh. Dave sure did. But Andie didn’t. In fact, she wondered how long this joke had been sitting idle in Dave’s brain, just waiting, praying, for a moment when he encountered colored maxi-pads with an audience at his disposal.

  “Classy, Dave,” Jacquelynn said, rounding the aisle with a box of crackers.

  Unimpressed Sarah, in a tone dryer than prison meatloaf, said, “Zing.”

  With a smile that could blind the elderly, Dave laughed and said, “Oh come on. Who do you need to impress with your maxi pad. Like, hey babe, I'm wearing a sexy pad tonight.” He laughed harder. “Said no one.”

  Jessica, joining the group on the back aisle, grabbed a pack of Magnum condoms without saying a word and pranced happily towards James and Stuart at the checkout counter. She placed them in the pile of food and looked up at James.

  “A girl can never be too careful.”

  She winked and James laughed.

  Carl unlocked the door to the first cabin with his key and wiped his feet on the concrete slab outside. He opened the door and peeked inside, although he was not sure why. He was just there, the door was locked, and everyone was gone.

  Still, sometimes people came shooting out from the least likely of places trying to kill him. It’s usually just one person, and usually it’s a girl, but still, sometimes it can be pretty frightening, like that one time nearly thirty years ago when a group of kids came up to camp.

  Flashback!

  Star wipe!

  They had their tents all set up and Carl, still new on the job, was quite nervous. He knew what he had to do and he wanted to do it with precision and maximum mental torture on behalf of his victims.

  In one tent, there was a boy and a girl, well, young adult male and young adult female, and do you know what they were doing?

  Fornicating!

  Nothing gets Carl’s goat more than having to watch that nonsense.

  His plan was not fully formed yet but he acted on pure impulse. He ripped the No Trespassing sign from the ground and ran to the tent where the silhouette of the two lovers infuriated him beyond any rational thought. He plunged the stake-end of the sign right through the vinyl of the tent, impaling the riding woman.

  “I heard you like to be nailed by guys,” Carl said, then instantly regretted it. It was a stake, not a nail and…well, who cares, he didn’t have time to think up a good zinger, and besides, his only audience would be dead soon if everything went according to plan.

  Inside the tent, he couldn’t see it, but her blood sprayed wildly over her boyfriend, who screamed like the bitch he was. Carl pulled the stake free, ripped the hole in the tent big enough for him to get through, and grabbed the blood-covered man by the throat, dragging him and slamming his face into the dirt over and over, until there was nothing left of his face but a clump of hair, and some teeth stuck in the soiled, blackened dirt.

  Sure, he was effective in killing those two, no problem, but with all that noise, it gave the other two campers time to retreat.

  They ran into the forest, taking cover amongst the trees. Carl took off after one and waited for him to trip, which of course he did. What Carl couldn’t figure out was why it took the guy so long to stand back up. He tripped, and then instead of getting right back up, he crawled for a bit.

  Crawled.

  It couldn’t have hurt that much, and certainly the alternative would be much more painful, but there it was. A grown man… crawling through the forest.

  Carl reached down, grabbed the man by his hair and lifted him to his feet. He picked him up in the air, like one of those dumb cross-fitters posing for an Instagram picture with their stupid barbells, then slammed the man down on his, Carl’s, knee, snapping the man’s spine like those late-term abortions sluts get when they get knocked up and think someone is actually going to marry them, but then, ya know, don’t.

  “This work sure is…back breaking,” he had said to the man just before he… well, you know.

  With three down and one to go, Carl thought this would be the easiest job he ever had…which doesn’t exactly say much because he never had a job before, but whatever.

  Boy was he wrong. That final girl, man. She was something else. She had some fight in her.

  Carl dropped his recent kill with a loud thud on the muddy forest ground and then set off for the last girl. He stalked quietly around the campground.

  Nothing.

  His heart was thumping.

  Yeah, he had a heart, just like a human, but this one just happened to be black and twice the size of a mortal’s.

  Where was she? She couldn’t have gone far.

  He peeked his head into the ruined tent and saw nothing but the dead whore. He peeked in the other tent, again, no signs of life.

  To his right, he heard a sound, like a rock being displaced by a shoe because, well, that’s exactly what it was. He turned to look and was quickly smacked upsid
e the head with a frying pan.

  “Holy crap!” Carl yelped. “What the holy crap?!”

  True, it didn’t hurt, not exactly, but it had still scared the living bejesus out of him and he found himself feeling embarrassed, his pale white face was, he assumed, probably turning as red as his hair.

  He had felt embarrassed enough during his seventeen living years and he sure as shit didn’t want to feel it again.

  This embarrassment turned into rage as he snapped his arm out and grabbed the bitch by her long brown hair and pulled her toward him.

  Another surprise, this time in the form of a pocketknife jabbed into his thigh. He knew what had happened, he had felt the blade enter his skin, tear through his muscle, but it did not hurt. Again, just a startle.

  He wasn’t sure how long this immortality thing would last. The guy he had replaced was the replacement for someone who had died on the job, so obviously, contrary to it’s name, immortality was not, in fact, forever, so he chose to not press his luck. While it was likely he would survive this attack, and several others in the future, he could never be sure when, exactly, the good times would be over.

  “Oh, you’re gonna get it now, girlfriend!” he said, just as she managed to break free from his grip and run off.

  Carl ran after her. Later, he would learn that walking after a potential victim was much more scary and well, the fear factor was all part of the fun of the job. A perk.

  The woman tripped and Carl nearly tripped over her. Another perk of walking was much more stability, but that would come in time.

  The woman rolled to her back, looking up at Carl Langer’s white, freckled face, his splotchy red hair matted from sweat and dirt, and screamed. She begged for her life. “Please,” she had pleaded, “Don’t kill me!”

  Carl pulled the pocketknife out of his thigh and jammed the business end swiftly into the woman’s left eyeball.

  She screamed louder. Louder and louder. The loudest scream he had ever heard, or would ever hear. With his palm he hit the blade in farther, right into her brain. That shut her up.

  And that was that.

  His first mission was a success. He had protected the land, collected a few souls for his boss and could go back home and catch some Zs.

  But first, he had to report to big man in charge.

  With Savannah and Breanna shopping for what they came for, Mort and Jimmy walked outside and stood in the parking lot. Jimmy pulled out a bag of M&M's from his pocket triumphantly.

  “Dude, where'd you get those?” Mort asked.

  “Winona Discount.”

  “Dude, you didn't snag me any?”

  “You've got money.”

  “Bitch so do you.”

  “They wanted like three bucks for this shit.”

  “Three bucks, really? What a rip off.”

  “Like a cheap circumcision, my friend.”

  Mort looked at him, blank-faced and oblivious to the joke.

  “Man, I'm sick of wasting jokes on you assholes.”

  “Camp McClane is haunted!” a creaky voice behind them boomed, causing Mort and Jimmy both to jump.

  “What the fuck, old man?” Jimmy yelled at the ragged old hobo who seemed to just appear out of thin air. He had eyebrows so bushy if they got any bigger he’d have to hire a native guide, and so many wrinkles he could bundle them up and sell them to Venice as a new canal.

  “You’re all gonna die.”

  “Fuck you, dad.”

  “He’ll kill you,” the hobo said, slowly and delicately. “He’ll kill you all.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, “and I’ll kill you if you don’t fuck off. Beat your ass so badly you’ll call me daddy.” Jimmy wasn’t strong enough to fight off a sneeze, but the hobo didn’t know that.

  “And I’ll steal your bag of cans, old timer!” Mort said.

  The old hobo backed up slowly. “I have warned thee. I have warned thee.”

  “Warned thee? Dude, this is the twenty-first century, Hobo Joe, go back to the 1875 where you belong.”

  “You’ll all be dead soon.”

  Jimmy and Mort looked at each other briefly, then back to the hobo, only…the hobo was gone, just like the Stranger in those horrible old Eastwood Insurance commercials from the 90’s that aired during Jenny Jones and shit.

  “Dafuck?”

  “Fine! I’ll be dead!” Jimmy yelled to the strange man, wherever he was, “I don’t want to live in a world where waiters drive BMWs!”

  Mort side-eyed Jimmy then just shrugged his shoulders, and they probably would have continued conversing about this strange occurrence had they not been interrupted.

  The door to the store swung open and the gang all came strutting out with their groceries and, of course, Stuart and James had beer.

  Dave, the only person not carrying a single thing, said, “Let's saddle up and ride, bitches! Wooooo!”

  “What do you have against waiters?” Mort asked Jimmy quietly.

  “Fuck waiters. Hey look at me, I brought your food from ten steps away and managed to not drop it. Give me extra money!”

  Mort laughed and they all stepped back into the van.

  Once the store was emptied out, Grant, the surly clerk, picked up the phone and dialed a number he made certain to memorize the moment the opportunity presented itself. A female voice picked up after one ring.

  “Annie DeGarcia,” the no-nonsense voice said.

  “Hi Annie, this is Grant.”

  “Who?” Annie said, obviously multitasking. Grant could hear the clangs and bangs of background noises.

  “Um, Grant Fieldgrove, over at the, um, from Sawyer’s General Store…”

  “Sure,” the impatient woman said, “what can I help you with, Grant Fieldgrove from Sawyer’s General Store?”

  Grant could tell she had no idea who he was and if he wasn’t feeling sorry enough for himself, what being thirty years old and working a shit job in a shit town, this managed to make him feel worse.

  “Um, I was given a card by you, a while back, you told me to call you if anyone ever showed up to the Camp McClane um, campground.”

  The background noises suddenly stopped and Grant could tell he now had the woman’s full attention. “Yes!”

  “Well, someone is there. Several people. Teenagers.”

  “Holy shit. Great work. We’ll be out as soon as possible.”

  “Okay, yeah, great,” Grant said. “Um, there was something about the five thousand dollars…”

  “And you’ll get it. If there are people there, that money is as good as yours.”

  “Fantastic,” Grant said, his mood changing drastically. “Fantastic.”

  Carl stepped inside the cabin, sure that it was clear, and dumped his arsenal on one of the cots. It was much easier to keep his supplies here for quick access than down below in his fortress, which required climbing a ladder, which would not be ideal in a situation requiring speed.

  His favorite toy, the one had he been dying to try out, was a bear trap. Two hunters had entered his territory nearly three years ago, trying to get some bears. Now, don’t ask why someone would want to stalk and kill a bear, but here were two camo-wearing dingleberries doing just that.

  Carl was already extremely annoyed with their arrival because it happened to coincide with the very night the series finale of Breaking Bad was set to air.

  Breaking Bad had been Carl’s favorite show. In fact, it still was and he often wondered if anything would come close to topping it.

  As far as comedy went, Seinfeld reruns and The Simpsons were his main go-to’s.

  Ah, the good ol’ days, when he had a generator running an old black and white television. He stole gas for the generator from his victim’s cars and he stole the generator from the back of the general store.

  Carl was pure genius.

  As for Breaking Bad that night, it was T-minus seventeen minutes and counting until the finale aired and he had two dipshits trotting all over his land. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy
the show with them out there, and he couldn’t take the chance of being discovered and not being aware of it. He would be too engrossed in the show and god knows what could happen. The two dipshit hunters could peek in the window and snap pictures of Carl, hunched forward in his seat, breathlessly awaiting Heinsenberg’s next move, and he would never know.

  Sixteen minutes.

  Argh!

  He got up and stepped outside, sniffing the air, trying to pick up his intruder’s scent. It didn’t take long. They smelled like they had bathed in dog shit.

  With nine minutes left ‘til airtime, Carl sneaked up behind one man who was standing next to a tree taking a piss.

  A quick neck break was all that was required and he quickly moved on to the next. He was seated around a small campfire, the flames dancing in front of his face as he stared transfixed at them. He saw Carl approach.

  “Earl?”

  Carl remained silent.

  “That you?”

  Another two steps. Four minutes to go.

  “Hey, you ain’t Earl. Who are you?”

  Carl took off in a sprint, so fast it caught the hunter completely off guard. He didn’t move and Carl ran through the fire, grabbed a flaming log and hit it so hard against the man’s head it splintered.

  The man’s hair caught on fire before he even hit the ground.

  He was still alive, but unconscious. Three minutes.

  The fire would take care of him and the dirt would extinguish the fire, he was sure of it.

  As he was leaving he spotted the bear trap. Carl smiled, grabbed it, and then ran back to the hideout where he made it with one minute to spare.

  He pulled the trap open, a giant mouth with fangs, and closed it, opened it, closed it. His own ventriloquist show, still somehow more entertaining than Jeff Dunham’s. “Gonna kill me some fools tonight, wacka wacka!” He looked to Professor Puffinpants who was not impressed.

  “Okay sorry, let’s get to work.”

  Purrrr.

  From outside, Carl heard the hum and crackle of the van’s engine and the crunch of gravel beneath its tires.

  It was almost time.