Camp Cannibal

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupted.

  Charles moaned.

  “Is it one, two, and then pull on three? Or is it one, two, three, and then pull?”

  Yardstick thought it through. “One, two, three and pull.”

  “Just wanted to be sure.”

  Charles bore his pitiful eyes right through me.

  “Okay,” Yardstick started again. “One…two…three. Pull!”

  It took all our strength just to wrench its metallic mouth open. The spring coiled within the trap squeaked as we pried its jaws back.

  “Now!” I demanded. “Lift your leg out now before—”

  Charles managed to yank his foot out of the way before my fingers slipped. The trap snapped back shut with a loud metallic—CLANG!

  Charles gripped his shin and rolled over the ground. He was bleeding pretty badly. I pulled off my shirt and created the best tourniquet I could, cinching it off.

  “We’ve got to get him help,” I said.

  “We’ve got to help ourselves!” Yardstick half-shouted. “There’s an entire tribe of chemically imbalanced kids coming this way.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Yardstick looked to Charles. “Leave him. That’ll buy us some time.”

  “Don’t leave me,” Charles whined. “Please, please don’t leave me!”

  I looked at Yardstick. “You can’t be serious.”

  “He’s dead weight,” Yardstick said. “That means we’d be dead, too!”

  “We can’t leave him here.”

  Yardstick looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

  A low rumble echoed from farther off in the woods. The sound of sputtering turbines hacking to life clamored through the trees.

  “Is that a lawnmower?” I asked.

  Panic blanched Yardstick’s face. “Move. Now.” Yardstick grabbed Charles by his left arm while I took the right, carrying him through the woods.

  Charles felt like a sack of potatoes. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me….”

  “Don’t thank me yet.” I noticed Charles was still bleeding. Red dollops dappled our path like a trail of crimson bread crumbs.

  The snarl of a small engine grew louder.

  What is that? I asked myself.

  Yardstick glanced over his shoulder. “They’re gaining on us,” he yelled. “Watch out for pitfalls.”

  “Watch out for pit—?”

  The ground gave way underneath my feet.

  I was plummeting into the hollow earth.

  Found that pitfall.

  Yardstick immediately dug his heels into the ground and clamped both hands around Charles’s arm. When the slack in Charles’s shoulders tightened, my body stopped its free fall. I was suddenly hovering in the air, still clasping Charles’s hand.

  That hungry hole was about ten feet deep. Its open mouth had been covered with a latticework of branches and leaves to conceal its perilous plunge. The pit’s floor was lined with flesh-piercing spikes fashioned from broomsticks.

  Looking up, I saw Yardstick on his stomach, holding on to Charles. Charles had no choice but to serve as my lifeline.

  “Owwwww!” Charles’s shoulder popped. “I think I just dislocated my arm.”

  I clawed my way up. “Just don’t let go….”

  “You’re the one holding on to me!”

  “Climb up quick,” Yardstick strained. The veins in his neck looked as if they were about to snap. “I’m losing…my grip.”

  I had to plant my heel into the nape of Charles’s neck to gain the leverage to climb the rest of the way out. “Sorry,” I said as I scrambled onto solid ground.

  Yardstick pulled Charles back onto his feet. We both noticed Charles’s arm dangled at an awkward angle, loosely flapping about.

  “That doesn’t look right,” I said.

  Before Charles could resist, Yardstick took the limp limb into his hands.

  POP!

  Yardstick pushed Charles’s arm upward, returning his humerus to its proper socket. Charles shrieked again and collapsed.

  Yardstick followed alongside him.

  Then me.

  The three of us lay quiet for a moment, not saying a word. I could hear that familiar wheeze in my throat.

  Now is really not the time for an asthma attack….

  “Here,” Yardstick reached into his back pocket. “I’ve got something for you.”

  My Little Friend.

  I grabbed it and immediately freshened my airways. “Anyone else wanna puff?” I asked.

  I passed my inhaler to Yardstick, who took a quick spritz. “Thanks.”

  Charles, too. He retched. “This stuff tastes like a rusted penny roll.”

  “Remind me again. What are we supposed to be keeping our eyes out for?”

  “Land mines,” Yardstick listed off. “Trip wires, snares, pitfalls, mantraps…”

  “Weed whackers!” Klepto vaulted out from behind a tree, brandishing his own string trimmer as if the machine had never been intended to snip wildflowers.

  But fingers. Or ears. Or noses.

  Anything he felt like pruning.

  “Thomas—please,” I tried reasoning with him. “This has got to stop.”

  “The name’s Klepto.” He gave the pull cord on his whipper-snipper a good yank. Its engine coughed out a puff of exhaust, but didn’t catch. “Now’s the part where you guys run and I chase you.”

  “GO!” Yardstick leapt back up onto his feet and pulled Charles up with him. I grabbed Charles’s free arm and hoofed it.

  I could hear Klepto tug on the cord just over my shoulder—only this time, the engine caught, hacking and spitting to life.

  Yardstick and I did our best three-legged race with five feet.

  “Faster!” Yardstick shouted.

  Klepto howled like a wolf behind us. There was no reasoning with him now. All we could do was run.

  Faster. Faster. Faster.

  “Keep close to the trees,” Yardstick barked.

  We couldn’t outrace him. Not on foot. Not with Charles.

  “This way,” Yardstick shouted.

  “Which way?”

  “Left!”

  Too late. I stepped to the right. Charles’s arms stretched as I went one way and Yardstick went the other.

  I felt a trip wire catch my shin, triggering a large rock tied to an overhanging branch.

  There wasn’t enough time to react. All I could do was watch this pendulum descend from the tree in a crushing arc.

  I was whipped to my right, limp as a rag doll. Yardstick had yanked Charles, who had, in turn, pulled me out of the way.

  Another second and that chunk of granite would have collided with my nose.

  Klepto wasn’t as lucky.

  He had been on our heels. Too close to duck. The rock swung directly into his face, bowling him over onto the ground. The weed whacker sputtered out from his hands.

  “Maybe we should help—” I started, but Yardstick pressed his palm over my mouth and pushed me against a tree.

  He held a finger up to his lips. The sound of feet stampeding through the undergrowth grew louder.

  Several bodies blurred between the trees. Each brandished a spear.

  “Where’d they go?” somebody whispered.

  “They were here just a second ago….”

  “This way.”

  Yardstick kept his palm over my mouth until we could hear the pack wander farther off.

  “Wha…?” Klepto moaned at our feet. “Mffm…”

  Yardstick motioned in the opposite direction from the pack, and the three of us sprinted through the woods.

  “We’re dead,” Charles whimpered. “Dead.”

  “There’re too many,” Yardstick said. “They’ll wear us down before lo
ng.”

  Turning to him, I asked, “Any suggestions for plan B?”

  “B? Man—we’re up to plan Z by now.”

  I scanned the woods, searching for something, anything that might save us.

  A lightbulb went off over Yardstick’s head. “I know a place.”

  “Where?”

  “Just keep running,” he said, picking up the pace. “We’re close.”

  “Close? Close to what?”

  An explosion of black feathers burst right in front of me.

  Caw! Caw! Caw!

  Crows—I do believe the appropriate collective noun is a “murder”—scattered into the air. Too many to count. They had been feasting on something, and I stepped directly into their breakfast. Or what was left of it.

  The raccoon’s decapitated head had been staked to the ground with a tree branch. A cloud of flies swarmed around its face. The crows had pecked out its eyes, leaving behind a pair of hollow sockets wrapped in black fur. Its mouth hung open and its shriveled tongue slung over its lower teeth.

  I stepped back. Lord of the Flies popped into my head. Something similar had been done with a pig—The head remained there, dim-eyed, grinning faintly, blood blackening between the teeth. Guess I wasn’t the only one who’d read it recently.

  “We’re here,” Yardstick said.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Home.”

  DAY SEVEN: 1300 HOURS

  he opening was five feet wide and looked like a mouth in mid-yawn.

  “…Hello?”

  The only response was my voice echoing back.

  “Be careful,” Yardstick said.

  Stirring. Someone was moving, coming closer. I brandished My Little Friend like a canister of pepper spray.

  “I heard something,” I said. “Is somebody in there?”

  “Don’t,” Yardstick tried to pull me back. “There are—”

  Too late. A colony of screeching wings flooded past my face.

  Bats. So many bats. It felt like I’d been swept up in a hurricane of wings. Once they flapped by, I made sure there weren’t any crawling up my shorts.

  “A little warning would’ve been nice!”

  “I tried, didn’t I? But you had to go off all half-cocked—”

  “Are they gone?” Charles asked, his eyes still pinched tight.

  “Looks that way.”

  Peeking into the cavern, something caught my eye.

  Scrawled along the wall of the rocky entrance was the Tribe’s stick figure.

  So this was where Peashooter had been hiding all this time….

  Tribal HQ.

  •••

  The air inside was cooler. Shadows clung to the limestone walls. It was impossible to tell how deep the cavern went. A dripping sound echoed through the hollow chasm—plink, plink, plink—like a dozen faucets leaking all around us.

  Yardstick retrieved a box of strike-anywhere matches and went about lighting candles wedged into a few of the cave’s corners.

  Let there be light….

  Before long, a dim glow illuminated a library for the dead.

  Piles upon piles of abandoned books surrounded us. Some were fifty-editions tall, looking like literary stalagmites. Mountains of moldy novels, mildewed dictionaries, and yellowed pillars of paperbacks as far as I could see. The cave’s damp air had seeped into the paper, making the pages ripple.

  The Tribe really had become bookworms.

  This had been their home.

  I picked up a copy of Walden. Inside the front cover, someone had written:

  Jason Bowden

  Flipping through, I stopped on an underlined passage: The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

  You got that one right, Mr. Thoreau.

  I found lawn chairs, musty-smelling blankets, pillows without pillowcases, a wheelbarrow filled with batteries, milk crates full of empty bottles, tattered sleeping bags, fishing poles, a pile of radios, a clothesline made of fishing line.

  “Where did you get all of this stuff?”

  “Some we stole from campsites,” Yardstick explained. “The books are all Peashooter’s personal collection. The rest we just found. You’d be amazed at what people leave behind out here in the woods.”

  I picked up a rake from a pile of gardening tools. Its tines were replaced with rusty nails. “Like this?”

  “Everybody’s got to have a hobby,” Yardstick said. “Turns out one of Sporkboy’s is making weapons.”

  “Check out the cave drawings!” Charles marveled, his neck bent back.

  “Those aren’t drawings,” I said, astonished. “That’s my yearbook….”

  The walls of the cave had been wallpapered with torn pages from Greenfield Middle’s most recent yearbook. So many familiar faces—Martin Mendleson, Riley Callahan, and Sarah Haversand, along with everyone else from school—smiled down at us. Only now, the eyes were crossed out.

  When I came across my own photo, I wasn’t surprised to find the red rings of a large bull’s-eye spray-painted around my head. My grinning mug was dead center.

  “These guys really have it out for you,” Charles said, amazed.

  “I seem to have that effect on a lot of people.”

  Scrounging around, I found a stack of first-aid kits and tended to Charles’s leg as best I could. “Sorry to get you into this mess.”

  “You kidding? This summer’s been the best. Much better than last year.”

  “Do you think we can get word to your family about tomorrow? Warn them and the rest about Parents’ Day?”

  “My parents aren’t coming.” He shrugged. “They never come to Parents’ Day.”

  “And I guess there aren’t any cell phones around here, either?” I asked Yardstick.

  “None that work,” he called out.

  I spotted a map of the county plastered to a cave wall. Leaning in for a closer look, I noticed a dot marking my dad’s house. Another map detailed an expanse of wooded territory with a circle marking Camp New Leaf.

  A pamphlet for the camp hung next to the map. The start date of our session had been circled several times.

  Peashooter had counted down the days with a series of slashes on the wall. For every fourth mark, there was a cross through and they’d start another set.

  I counted thirty-six sets of marks. A hundred and eighty slashes.

  Six months.

  Now, that’s what I call patience….

  A copy of Sully’s missing flyer was taped to the wall. I pulled it down and folded it, slipping it into my pocket. Peashooter had taken mine, so I’d take his.

  An ivy of graffiti stretched along the walls. I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude, was written over the length of the cave’s ceiling.

  “Let me guess,” I asked. “Thoreau?”

  Yardstick nodded.

  I noticed a batch of photos clustered together along the far corner of the cave. A handful of candles had been stacked around the snapshots, their wicks burnt to the bottom, the wax having long-since hardened across the cavern floor. A shrine.

  I crouched down for a better look.

  “Don’t—” Yardstick started.

  They were family photos of Yardstick and his mother. Yardstick wore a tuxedo too small for his frame, his gangly arms reaching out from the sleeves.

  There was a photo of a much younger Sporkboy roughhousing with a man who must’ve been his dad. The two were mugging mid-wrestle.

  Looking at those photos, I couldn’t help but miss my mom and dad. I remembered when I used to wrestle with my father.

  I saw Sully as a little girl at Christmas, sitting with her mom. She couldn’t have been any older than ten.

  I pulled a photo off the wall. An awkward-looking boy stood beside a woman who must have bee
n his mother and glared directly at the camera. The woman’s arm was wrapped around his shoulder. The boy had a cowlick sticking straight up at the back of his head. He had the exact same piercing stare as Peashooter, same icy gray eyes. He was just a kid in the picture, but I was positive it was him.

  Flipping it over, I read an inscription someone had handwritten along the back—Jason, 11 yrs old, and me.

  Yardstick leaned over and removed the picture of himself and his mother.

  “Miss her?” I asked.

  Staring at the photo, he murmured back, “Every day.” He slipped the picture into his pocket and cleared his throat as he walked away.

  Charles broke the silence. “Uh—guys? What’re we gonna do now?”

  “All the campers’ families are going to walk right into ­Peashooter’s hands tomorrow if we don’t figure out how to stop him.”

  “There’s no way,” Yardstick said. “There’s only three of us. You can’t expect him to go out there and fight.” He pointed to Charles.

  “Yeah,” Charles chimed in. “You can’t expect me to go out there!”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just you and me.”

  “Two against twenty? That’s a good way to get ourselves killed.”

  “What’s your plan? Hunker down until everything blows over?”

  “I can’t go back there.” Yardstick shook his head. “Sorry—I just can’t.”

  “Then I’ll go myself.”

  “Then you’re crazier than I thought.”

  “My mom and dad are coming,” I explained. “I can’t let them waltz into a trap.”

  “What do you care about what happens to your parents? They sold you out, didn’t they?” Yardstick sounded sincere. “You’ve got a chance to go your own way—and you’re gonna muck that up by trying to save the same mom and dad who sent you up the river? The same mom and dad who couldn’t care less where you lived, or what medication fried your brain, or whether you lived or died out here in these woods? That mom and dad?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Those are the ones.”

  I kept flipping the photograph of little Peashooter Jr. over in my hands, reading and re-reading the inscription along the back. I stared Sweet Pea down, standing sullenly just next to his mom, almost as if I expected him to say something.

  What’re you looking at?

  Then inspiration hit.