by Dann Gershon
Big Al called the meeting to order by simply standing up and clearing his throat. The others immediately stopped what they were doing and waited for him to continue.
“I would like to begin by congratulating you all on a job well done,” Big Al began, creating a positive atmosphere for the staff meeting. “Everything is running according to schedule and I’m pleased with the results.”
He was a seasoned leader and knew the value of a good pat on the back.
“I picked up the mail at the P.O. box today,” Bucky said, dropping an envelope on the table.
“That’s it?” Big Al asked, shaking his head in amazement.
“That’s it,” Bucky confirmed. “Pretty pathetic, but it’s more or less to be expected. These kids are all spoiled brats, misfits, and malcontents. Let’s face it, that’s why they’re here. Their par-ents were happy to unload them for the summer and take off.”
Big Al opened the envelope and removed a check for one hundred dollars made out to a kid named Manny. There was no note to accompany the check. The rule was no outside com-munication and Big Al was a stickler when it came to the rules. “Have any of the campers attempted to communicate with their parents?” he asked.
Bucky shook his head.
The situation was sad but true. The complete lack of com-munication required in the brochure was no doubt a selling point in the decision to send kids to Creepy Time.
“That’s good,” Big Al said. “It makes our job a lot easier.”
“I don’t know why we wasted the time and money to create that phony brochure,” Curly said, giggling. “This group would have sent their kids to San Quentin for eight weeks and paid extra for solitary confinement.”
Everyone laughed loudly except for the nurse.
“What is it?” Big Al asked.
“Curly messed up my name tag,” she complained. “I think he did it on purpose. Everyone in camp thinks my name is Nurse Knockwurst.”
“Knockwurst. Norkhurst. What’s the difference?” Curly re-plied. “Neither one of them is your real name anyhow.”
She gave Curly the evil eye. The cook threw his hands in the air and looked around the room for support.
“What is a knockwurst, anyway?” she asked. “It’s a big bloated weenie,” Curly replied, smiling. “Hey, if the name tag fits.”
“I’ll wipe that smirk off your face, you pasty-faced little troll.” She lunged across the table and grabbed Curly by the throat. Big Al and Bucky watched her strangle the cook until he turned blue. She pulled Curly up close and looked him in the eye. “I’m going to tie you to a tree and feed you to the scorpions.”
“Good idea,” Bucky said. “I second the motion.”
“All in favor of tying Curly to a tree, say aye,” Big Al said, enjoying the look of terror on the cook’s face.
Everyone in the room held up their hands and shouted “Aye” at the top of their lungs.
“The ayes have it,” Big Al announced, smiling at Curly. “Who has some rope?”
The room was silent and filled with anticipation as the sweat began to pour down the nervous cook’s face. Curly dropped to his knees and begged for mercy. The room erupted in laughter once more, with Nurse Knockwurst laughing the loudest.
“We’re just having a bit of fun with you, sport.” Big Al leaned across the table and stared at the cook. “For now.”
He lingered in Curly’s face long enough to make certain that the cook got his message loud and clear, motioned for Nurse Knockwurst to release him, then pressed on with other busi-ness. “Is there anything else that I should know about?”
Curly wiped the sweat from his brow with a gravy-stained sleeve and sighed in relief.
“The Fleet kid may be a problem,” Bucky reported. “I can’t find a werewolf costume that fits and he refuses to take his salt tablets.”
“Won’t take his salt tablets, eh?” Big Al replied, his eyes nar-rowing to small slits.
“He’s a real pain in the butt,” Curly said, confirming the fact. “I put some in his lunch yesterday and the little wimp accused me of trying to poison him. Claims that his uncle is the head of the Food and Drug Administration. One phone call from him and they’ll shut down my kitchen.”
“Where is the boy now?” Big Al asked.
“In the infirmary recovering from heatstroke,” Bucky replied.
“Leave him to me,” Nurse Knockwurst said.
Big Al smiled at her and nodded.
“I’m afraid that the Fleet kid isn’t our only problem,” Bucky reported.
“What is our other problem?” Big Al asked gruffly.
“We have a couple of runaways.”
5
Cha p te r
1
T
Day Three — 1:55 P.M. he Whammy sisters wandered aimlessly down the road, drag-ging their suitcases behind them. The dirt path was full of potholes and rocks. Both girls wished they had worn sneak-ers instead of designer boots with three-inch spiked heels. The black shoes looked very stylish with the witch outfits but were completely impractical under the circumstances. It gave a whole new meaning to the term fashion victim.
Willow signaled for her sister to stop and snatched the Of-ficial Trail Guide from her hands. She dusted off her Louis Vuit-ton suitcase and plopped herself down on top of it, intently studying the “simple” set of directions that showed the layout of the camp and the way to the main road. After three days of Creepy Time, the sisters had had enough of life in the wilder-ness. The last straw was when Curly had demanded that they turn in their witch outfits, put on the mummy costumes that they were supposed to wear in the first place, and get with the program. The sisters had other ideas. They decided to escape and spend the rest of the summer partying with their friends and trashing their parents’ house instead. It wouldn’t begin to even the score with their folks for sending them to this slum of a summer camp, but it was a good start.
“This map reads like an algebra assignment,” Willow com-plained, turning the map upside down to see if she was miss-ing something.
“You mean we’re, like, totally lost?” Wanda asked. “Duh . . . what do you think?”�
�her twin replied, pointing at the endless sea of sand and sagebrush that surrounded the girls in all directions.
“We should have stayed with the rest of the witches,” her twin replied.
“Hola, we’re, like, the only witches in the whole stupid camp,” Willow reminded her. “Can you believe that idiotic bus driver wanted us to wear those dirty rags? Yeah, like I’m going to cover my face in used gauze and hide my new nose job.”
“Too bad we don’t have our cell phones with us. Then we could have called for the bellboy and a taxi,” Wanda insisted. “It’s, like, so degrading to carry your own luggage.”
“I hate to break this to you, sis,” Willow said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm, “but this isn’t exactly the Four Seasons.”
“It was supposed to be,” Wanda sobbed. “The pictures in the brochure were beautiful. This place is a total pit. We should sue.”
Wanda sat down on a rock and pouted. It was one thing to get lost in the mall, but it was quite another to get lost in the desert. The worst that could happen in the mall was that they missed the chance to max out their father’s credit cards. This was scary.
“I’m hungry and thirsty and I need to take a soak in a hot peppermint bubble bath,” Willow whined. “This place sucks. I can’t wait to get home.”
“Me too,” her sister agreed, wishing they had never set eyes on that stupid brochure. “This isn’t a camp. It’s a reform school. Sure, Mom and Dad pack up and spend the summer on the Riviera. We get eight weeks on the set of Fear Factor. It’s totally unfair.”
“This place stinks,” Willow announced, holding her nose. “For sure,” Wanda agreed.
“No, I mean it, like, really stinks.”
The odor was pungent, like the stink of rotting flesh. Wil-
low covered her mouth with her hand, fighting back the urge to retch, and then she realized the source of the stench. She stared, unable to take her eyes off the gruesome scene.
“What is it?” Wanda inquired, noticing her sister had turned an ashen shade. “You look like you’re going to hurl.”
Willow pointed at the putrefied corpse that lay about ten feet to the left of the rock that her sister was perched upon. Maggots and scorpions were feeding on the carcass. Wanda jumped up and ran over to her sister. They held each other tightly and whimpered.
“Gro-oss,” Wanda said, taking a one-syllable word and turn-ing it into two.
“You think a coyote did this?” Willow asked.
“That is a coyote,” Wanda answered softly.
“If that’s a coyote . . . ,” Willow muttered, letting the ques-tion linger.
“Then what killed the coyote?” Wanda replied, finishing the thought.
The answer was just over the ridge, hidden behind a rock. It moved swiftly and quietly, circling behind them, cutting off any chance to escape.
Wanda squeezed Willow tightly to her body. “If you scream in the desert,” she asked her sister, “do you think anyone will hear you?”
No one did.
Cha p te r
1
E
Day Four — 4:34 P.M. instein woke up feeling groggy and light-headed. His body ached and his skin itched like crazy. He made a clumsy at-tempt to scratch the back of his neck but found it difficult to do so. Both of his hands were bandaged. Slowly, he began to piece things together. Einstein remembered the wasps and shuddered. As the cobwebs in his head cleared, the room came into focus. It was stark and minimal and smelled like ammo-nia. White antiseptic walls, cots with white cotton sheets, and white tile floors. It could only be one place. Einstein was in the infirmary.
“Look who’s back in the land of the living,” a voice gen-tly cooed. “We were very concerned about you, young man. You’ve been out cold for over a day.”
Einstein turned to the sound of her voice and saw the camp nurse standing next to his bed, smiling like a mental patient. She was just as large and homely as Einstein remembered her to be, and the plain white uniform did little to improve her situation. Her greasy brown hair was wrapped into an over-sized bun, which rose out of the top of her nurse’s cap like a skyscraper. “Nurse Knockwurst?”
“I told you my name is Norkhurst!” she growled with the bedside manner of Medusa.
The name tag was still pinned to her uniform, but Einstein was too weak to argue. “What happened to me?” he asked.
“You are suffering from dehydration in addition to experi-encing an allergic reaction to the wasp bites. It’s nothing se-rious. Take two of these and call me in the morning.” Nurse Knockwurst snorted at her own joke as she tossed a couple of salt tablets at Einstein. Salt tablets seemed to be the prescribed cure for any and all types of sickness. Be it a headache, a belly-ache, a wasp bite, a sprained ankle, food poisoning, malaria, or the common cold, the salt tab was the standard camp panacea for all that ailed you. Einstein flatly refused the offer, explain-ing that it was a well-known medical fact that salt clogged your arteries.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a Twinkie?” Einstein in-quired hopefully.
“You need to lay off the Twinkies, tubby,” she replied, pat-ting him playfully on the tummy. “Take the salt tablets.”
“No, thanks,” Einstein said, again rejecting the offer.
“You’re being very naughty,” the nurse scolded. “How do you expect to get better if you won’t take your medicine?”
Einstein tuned her out as she continued to push the salt tab treatment, distracted by two of his fellow campers who were sitting up in their cots, quietly engrossed in a game of check-ers. They were bandaged from head to toe. The only spots that Nurse Knockwurst had missed were small slits around their eyes and noses. “It’s your move, Manny,” one camper reminded the other.
1 “What happened to those guys?” Einstein whispered. “Poison ivy.”
“What did they do, roll in the stuff?”
“You can’t be too careful,” the nurse told Einstein. Einstein took a closer look at Manny’s frightened eyes and
thought he recognized him as the poor soul on the bus that Billy Armstrong had pelted in the head with his Twinkie. The mummy costume that he’d�
�arrived in the first day was noth-ing compared to the job that Nurse Knockwurst had done on him. His original costume was made of thin layers of soft white gauze that loosely covered his T-shirt and shorts. Thick layers of painter’s tape had replaced the thin layers of gauze and were held tightly in place with several strands of electrician’s tape. The black-and-blue color scheme looked like a giant bruise. “It seems a bit extreme if you ask me,” Einstein said.
“Who asked, you insolent little twerp?” Nurse Knockwurst growled. For the next thirty minutes, she attempted to force- feed Einstein the salt tablets. Finally, having had enough of the cat-and-mouse game, Einstein bit her. The nurse stormed into her office in the back of the infirmary, screaming something about death and dismemberment before she slammed the door shut behind her. Einstein was not sorry to see her go. He retrieved pencil and paper from his pack and quickly jotted a note to describe the abysmal conditions in the infirmary.
“How they hangin’, Houdini?” Greeley asked, materializing out of thin air.
Einstein pulled the covers over his head and hoped the ghost would disappear. He considered the possibility that Greeley was only a figment of his imagination and that he may be suffering from sunstroke or a brain tumor. It was not the first time that he’d been accused of being crazy, but it was the first time that he considered the possibility. He waited a few moments and then took a peek to see if the coast was clear. Greeley was still standing next to the bed, grinning at him. “Go haunt someone else, Greeley!” Einstein snapped.