“I’m going to tell you about the Tribe.”
“Not Spencer’s imaginary friends again,” Capone moaned. “Are these the same guys making birdcalls at you today?”
“Weren’t they in the cafeteria too?” Thomas asked.
“Laugh it up all you want,” I said. “But everybody who hasn’t heeded my warning are all dead now, and I’m not, so I’d think twice before making fun of me about them.”
“Fine,” Capone said. “We’re listening.”
“There was this middle school,” I started. “It was just like every other boring school. Nothing special. Until…”
A charred dollop of marshmallow melted off the tip of my stick, dripping against the cinders.
Mason flinched at the hiss. “Until—what?”
“There was this one Cro-Magnon kid. Riley was his name. Riley Callahan. Real jerkwad. Used to pick on sixth graders by shoving them in their lockers.”
“My kinda guy,” Capone said.
“One day, he wandered into the bathroom alone between classes…only he never walked out.”
“Really?” Charles asked.
“They found his backpack in one of the stalls. All ripped open. Textbooks torn to shreds. But no sign of Riley. Nobody laid eyes on him ever again.”
The campfire illuminated every face in an orange glow. They all looked like pumpkins, anxious expressions carved across their faces.
Thomas leaned in. “What happened to him?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Boring,” Capone mumbled.
“A week later, it happened again. During football practice, this one jock forgot his helmet in the locker room. He went back inside by himself to get it….”
“And…?” Thomas asked.
“Ten minutes go by. Nothing. No sign of him. Twenty minutes later, the coach goes looking for him. All he found was his bloodied football jersey, his number and everything, ripped to pieces.”
“Yeah, right.” Capone was growing restless. The fire reflected off the metal in his mouth, gooey strings of melted marshmallow caught in the brackets.
“What’s the matter, Capone?” I asked. “You afraid?”
“Hardly.”
“You should be,” I said. “I know your type. Acting tough in front of everybody, while deep down inside, there’s a little dribble of pee in your pants.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m trying to help you, Capone. This is for your own good. Because by the time the third kid disappeared, a pattern slowly started to emerge. These weren’t just any students going the way of the dodo—but bullies. Just like you.”
“Bullies?” Capone asked. “Like me?”
“All the kids who ever picked on somebody else at school were vanishing. Almost like they were swallowed up by the walls of the school. Only their backpacks were left behind. Not even that, sometimes. Nothing but bits and pieces. Like they’d been eaten alive.”
“Good riddance,” Charles said under his breath.
“Then everybody started noticing this rank aroma of roadkill in the halls. The custodian realized the decrepit stench was coming from inside a locker. Several lockers. Not just anybody’s, but the lockers of those bullies who’d disappeared.”
I held out my hand, reaching for the invisible locker in front of me.
“So he dialed the combo on one locker and opened it up and…”
I paused for a moment, concentrating on dialing the air.
“…And?” Thomas asked. “And?”
I silently opened the imaginary locker door and gasped, eyes widening at the horrifying sight that only I could see spread out before me.
“Bones,” I whispered. “A bunch of bones still wearing Riley Callahan’s clothes fell out at the custodian’s feet. That Cro-Mag’s skeleton comes spilling out across the hallway floor, shattering into all its various segments like a game of pick-up sticks. Ribs scattered everywhere. His skull goes rolling over the linoleum. His locker had totally become his coffin. He’d been stuffed into his locker for weeks, left to rot.”
“How…?” Charles started. “Who did it?”
I leaned back.
“Turns out there was a tribe of crazy kids, just like you and me—living in the school. They were hiding in the ceiling. During the day, they’d keep out of sight. But at night, after everybody else had left, they’d creep out and roam through the hallways. And now…well, now they were getting their revenge against all the students who had ever picked on them before they ran away, one bully at a time.”
“He’s lying,” Capone said, shaking his head. “You really expect us to believe there were kids living inside a school and nobody knew about them? Impossible.”
“Fine,” I said. “Don’t believe me. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“How come you know so much about them?”
I leaned in closer to the fire. My shadow against the surrounding pines was stretched to colossal proportions.
“Because they asked me if I wanted to join.”
Capone hesitated, caught off guard. The rest remained silent, unsure of what to say.
“I would,” Charles piped up first.
“Me, too,” Mason said.
“You might think twice if I told you how they induct you….”
“How?” Capone asked.
I slowly pulled the sleeve of my T-shirt up to my neck, exposing my shoulder.
Stunned silence.
Mason’s eyes widened, and he shrank inside his hoodie.
Everybody—even Capone—stared in disbelief at the pink scar coiling up from the bulb of my shoulder.
The Tribe’s very own insignia, singed into my skin.
“No way,” Charles said.
“Once you’re in, you’re a member for life—and there’s no going back.”
Mason held out his hand, touching the scar tissue with his index finger. His shoulders tensed at the feel of it.
“By the time I realized I was in over my head, it was too late. I had to run away just to survive.”
“No way,” Charles said again.
“I’ve been homeschooled for the last six months just so I could keep my head attached to my shoulders.”
“So where are your imaginary friends now?” Capone asked.
“Wish I knew,” I sighed. “They’re out here, somewhere. Waiting for me.”
A tree branch snapped behind us—CRACK!
We all turned our heads.
Nothing.
Everybody’s attention slowly turned back toward the fire.
Nobody said anything.
“They’re angry that I skipped out on them, and now they want to make me pay,” I said, peering over my shoulder. “They’re coming for me.”
“Yeeeeeeargh!”
A bare-chested boy, streaked in ash, burst through the circle of campers. In his hand, he held a stick used for roasting marshmallows—like a spear.
“Yeeeeeeargh!”
Two more leapt up behind him and shrieked, their eyes ringed with soot.
Charles squealed and fell over backward.
Capone leaped from his seat, his eyes blasted with panic.
Laughter erupted from the clan of pint-sized cannibals.
It was the Piranhas. The eight of them reveled in their victory, high-fiving each other as they howled loudly.
“Didyouseethelookontheirfacesohmygodthatwasawesomehahawegotyou!”
“I’m gonna throttle you.” Capone rushed for the nearest Piranha, but the kid sprinted back into the shadows. “You better run!”
The remaining Piranhas dispersed in a flurry of limbs and gnashing teeth, sidestepping Capone with every lunge he made. Their cackling continued, drifting off as they ran—Capone close behind.
“Get back here,” he yelled, his voic
e fading.
The rest of us remained by the fire, shaken up. We all looked at each other, unsure of what to do.
Thomas started laughing first, which got Charles to join in.
Before long, we were all laughing at how scared we’d been.
Even me.
It felt like we were all friends.
Almost.
It felt good to be telling a story again.
Not just any story.
Their story.
I wish it was just a ghost story. Parts had been embellished for dramatic effect, sure, but not the Tribe. That part was all true.
At least I thought it was.
I peered over my shoulder one last time. Nothing but cicadas grinding away. Nothing but trees.
Nothing but nightmares.
DAY ONE: 2300 HOURS
tan the Man had been acting funny ever since curfew. I watched him wobble headfirst into the bathroom door after corralling the Middle Kids into the cabin.
“Everything okay, Mr. Man?” I asked him while we all brushed our teeth, watching him doze off on his own two feet in front of the sink.
“Never felt better,” he slurred his words, a dollop of toothpaste foam dribbling out from the corner of his mouth, like a rabid camp counselor.
By the time we were all in bed, Stan the Man could hardly hold his head up.
“Lights out, everybody.”
With a flick of the switch, we were all plunged into darkness.
“Sleep tight, Spencer,” one of my cabinmates whispered. “Wake us if any of your make-believe play pals decide to pay a visit.”
That roused a round of snickers.
I curled up into the warm nylon of my sleeping bag. Squinting up at the shadow of Sully’s missing flyer, I said, “Wake me up when summer’s over.”
•••
Before long, a chorus of discordant snores hacked away at the silence. None louder than Stan the Man, his nasal cavity buzz-sawing away by the front door.
So much for a good night’s sleep.
A new sound rose up from the darkness. It wasn’t coming from across the cabin.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was coming from above me.
“…Charles?” I whispered.
The sound stopped.
Silence.
“You okay?”
I stared up at the pitch-black above my face.
“I hate this place.” Charles’s voice slunk out from the darkness. “I hate everybody here.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Every summer, it’s the same thing.” I could hear the strain in his voice. “Capone picks a fight on the first day, I fight back, we all get in trouble, my mom gets a call from George, she signs off on some new prescription, and I spend the rest of the summer drooling into my breakfast.”
There it was again—that sound.
Was Charles crying?
“I don’t want to lose myself,” he sniffled. “I don’t want to spend another summer staring at the walls.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, only half-believing the words coming out of my own mouth. “This summer’s gonna be a blip. It’ll all be over in a month and you’ll be back home.”
“Home?” He actually laughed. “What’s that?”
“We all gotta call someplace home, right?”
“That’s a good one,” he said. “My mom ships me off to a private academy for the school year. Then she sends me here for the summer. I’m at my parents’ house for a few weeks out of the whole year. School holidays and that’s it. That’s no home.”
“Would you two lovebirds shut up, please?” said another camper—Mason, I think. “Some of us are trying to sleep here.”
“Shut. Up.” Another camper grumbled. “All of you!”
I couldn’t fall asleep.
Not completely.
The best I could manage was to pinch my eyes shut and drift off to that space between unsweetened dreams and restlessness, half-conscious and half-dead to the world all at once.
I’m not sure how much time had passed, but somewhere in the midst of my tossing and turning, I had a dream.
I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was drowning, wrapped in a suffocating blackness.
My eyes bolted open. They adjusted to the dark, focusing on Sully’s photocopied flyer staring down at me.
She looked different.
As a matter of fact, she looked a lot like…
“…Sporkboy?”
The picture blinked. “Time to tuck you in.”
Sporkboy zipped my sleeping bag over my head.
I was swallowed up by black.
“Get me out, get me out, get me out!” I did my best to claw my way out, but my nails were useless against the nylon lining.
There was a sudden tug.
Thud.
I landed on the floor and was dragged across the cabin.
Thud.
I hit my head on something. Probably the front door.
Thud.
I was outside, I think. I could feel the soft earth skidding under my back.
Where was he taking me?
Rock.
Ouch.
Root.
Ouch.
Pothole.
Ouch.
And then—I was levitating.
At least, it felt like I was. No more solid ground below me.
Somehow I was suspended in the air.
•••
It was impossible to tell what was happening.
Where’s the zipper in this thing?
I started rocking my body through the air, back and forth. The harder I rocked, the more momentum I gained.
Just one more heave-ho and—
CRACK!
That sounded like a branch breaking above my head.
I landed hard on my shoulder. Initial impact was on the bulb of my humerus bone, with the rest of me flopping over flat onto the ground.
That was going to leave a mark.
A slight shimmer of light reached through a slit in the zipper. I poked my finger through and opened my sleeping bag enough to wriggle out.
I had been dragged out to a pine tree farther off into the woods.
Four sleeping bags had been hung from separate branches. Each one writhed in the air like a cocoon about to burst.
I reached up and tore into the nearest sleeping bag.
Stan the Man slithered to the ground.
“What’s going on?” he moaned, half-catatonic. Without his glasses, he looked like a defenseless woodland creature. “What happened?”
He drifted off to sleep again.
“Stan? Mr. Man? You’ve got to snap out of it….” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook as hard as I could. “Wake up!”
I leaned into his face until his eyes latched on to mine, then watched them float up into the safety of his skull, leaving only the whites behind. His head lolled over his right shoulder.
“Come on, now—wake up!”
Then it hit me: Lunch-man-Sporkboy. Black-market meds. Stan had been drugged with our meds.
George had been dozing off at the bonfire. Stan could barely stand on his own two feet by lights-out.
What if Sporkboy had dosed the counselors with enough valium to put them out of commission for the rest of the night?
I suddenly had a pretty good idea who was cocooned within the other sleeping bags.
If the Tribe had kidnapped the counselors, then what were they planning for the rest of us?
“We’ve got to get everybody out of here,” I said, shaking Stan awake. “Now. You need to cut the other counselors down, okay? Before they come back. Can you do that?”
“What…are you…going to do?”
“Call for help.”
As soon as I let him go, he sank to the ground, where he recommenced his buzz-saw snoring.
This is hopeless, I thought. I need to warn the others before it’s too late.
I glanced up at the sleeping bags dangling from their branches, like a livid Christmas tree covered with wriggling decorations.
I’d return for the comatosed counselors.
But first—back to the cabins.
•••
Ducking into the parking lot, I had a flash of inspiration:
What if I hot-wired a bus and plowed through camp? Campers could hop on board this yellow bad boy, and I’d press the pedal to the metal and—
A garden trowel stuck out from the bus’s front tire.
Scratch that plan. Not that I knew how to drive anyhow.
The only remaining lifelines to the outside world were in George’s office.
One telephone. One computer.
One shot.
The path leading to the main cabin was too exposed. Most likely booby-trapped. That meant I was creeping alongside the surrounding tree line, using the cover of pines to make my way to the rear of the cabin and slip through the back.
The window to George’s office was open. I peered inside.
Empty.
My eyes locked on to the upright microphone sitting on George’s desk.
Now or never, Spence….
I hoisted myself up and stumbled through the window, then picked myself up and rushed across the room.
Just as I was about to reach the desk, something tripped me.
I hit the hardwood floor. Hard.
Wincing, I rolled over and the lights flashed on.
Too much light. I shielded my eyes.
“Peekaboo,” someone said.
I lowered my hands.
My eyes adjusted to the brightness.
Compass, Yardstick, and Sporkboy hovered above me.
“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” Compass asked, waving his four and three quarters fingers. He had fastened a computer’s circuit board to his chest and a rainbow of cables and voltage sources ran down the length of his arms and legs.
To prove his point, Compass punched me—right in the eye.
I rolled over onto my stomach and moaned, cupping the pulp of my brewing shiner. I clamored up to my hands and knees and attempted to crawl, only for a hand to grab my shoulder and flip me onto my back again.
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