The Guard: Campground Stories

by Anthony Jacobs

THE GUARD

  Campground Stories

  By Anthony Jacobs

  Published by Books for the Hungry Book Publishing

  Copyright 2015 Anthony Jacobs

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  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters,

  and settings are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to actual events,

  names, locales, organizations,

  or persons living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  THE GUARD

  Inside the truck I had been assigned it was warm and dry, but the air was getting a little bit close. The windows were so fogged up that they offered very little visibility on this rainy night, so I decided to roll down the window and let the wind defog my windshield. Unfortunately in doing this, I failed to notice the giant mud puddle I was approaching. As the mud and stagnant water flew through the open window and hit me square in the face, one thought raced through my mind: I hate this stupid unpredictable weather! The only things that reached my lips were a bunch of four letter words that would have made a sailor blush. Now I would have to report back to my captain in the morning looking like some kind of swamp creature.

  As an armed guard, it was important to keep myself clean and neat looking, because my appearance reflected to the public that I meant business. In this business it was very important to gain the respect and support of the public, because I didn’t have the authority to arrest people like the police did, even though I carried a gun in a holster on my side.

  Vehicle patrol was one of the best posts to get, because I could do almost anything I wanted within reason. If I got bored, I would drive around discovering new paths through the woods. This was what I had been doing for the last hour when I hit that mud puddle.

  By the time I hit the puddle, I was hopelessly lost in the woods. Sure, I knew I was in the same woods that I had patrolled a thousand times before, but everything looked different at night. The headlights on the truck only made the shadows longer and the forest seem deeper. The only way out, I figured, was to keep turning off on different side roads and hope that they would eventually lead me to something I recognized.

  It was on one of these side roads that I came across a huge wooden gate crossing the road. Now by huge, I mean, this was no ordinary farmer’s gate. This gate was enormous! If I had stood up on top of the truck, I still would have had a hard time reaching the top of the gate. This was the kind of thing that made my skin crawl. Realizing suddenly, how alone and lost I was, I started to shiver, even though it was nearly ninety degrees outside. I told myself to man up and stop being such a baby, but it didn’t help much.

  Through some irresistible urge to do bodily harm to myself that I had no control over, I got out of my truck and grabbed my flashlight and proceeded to walk toward the gate. They say that curiosity killed the cat, but if you are never curious, then you will never learn anything. I am naturally curious, sometimes even nosey, so I often explore the unknown, even if my senses tell me not to.

  As I made my way toward the gate by jumping over the mud puddles, I reached down and patted the butt of my .38 special police revolver. It made me feel a little more secure, but not much. The holsters they issued us were made for the sole purpose of making a guard think twice before attempting to pull his gun out. This was because it was absolutely painful to pull the dang thing out. As I neared the gate, I noticed a large chain with a lock attached to it lying on the ground. The chain had been snapped, and had fallen from the gate when someone or something had tried to go in or out of the gate. Pulling the gate open proved to be as easy as pulling a bulldozer out of a mud bog with bare hands. Finally, after tremendous effort, the big gate swung open enough that I could squeeze through. The gate looked as if someone had chopped the tops off of a bunch of pine trees and bolted the trunks together.

  When I brought my flashlight around, I noticed about ten log cabins scattered around the area. It looked as if this had been a campground at one time, or something like that. Why I hadn’t heard of this place before hand, I had no idea. All of a sudden, flashbacks of old horror movies ran through my head. Was some knife-wielding psychopath going to come out of the woodwork and turn me into something that resembled three-day-old meatloaf, or was I just getting paranoid? I half expected to hear scary music in the background, but instead it was eerily calm, like the inside of a crypt.

  I walked up to the nearest cabin, which looked as if it had been abandoned for many years and walked around it looking for anything out of the ordinary. As I rounded every corner, I expected something to jump out at me, but nothing did. The walls were made of bare wood, and the roof was sagging. When I reached the front door of the cabin, I pushed the door open, quickly peaked in, and moved to one side of the door. I waited a second and carefully stepped in. Swinging my flashlight from side to side, I noticed it was empty except for double bunk beds on both sides of the room. The smell of rat feces and rotting mattresses filled the musky air around me. It was a kind of a dead smell, like that of a room long uninhabited by any human. There was a blanket of dust all over everything, and it gave the room an eerie look. Spider webs were everywhere, and I had to continuously wave my arms around to clear the way. I’m not saying that I’m arachnophobic, but if a spider had landed on the back of my neck, I would have flailed about like a spastic marionette and run screaming out the door into the woods in a very undignified manner.

  I set my flashlight down on the nearest bunk bed, and adjusted my gun belt. No matter how fit you are, gun belts always seem to slowly creep down your hips every few minutes, and if you use keepers to affix the gun belt to your pants belt, your pants creep down with it as well. While doing this, I decided to walk down to the end of the cabin and check the graffiti that the kids who stayed here had undoubtedly written on the walls. There was the usual “Sheila wuz here” on the wall and I managed to make out a couple of dates, ranging from 1952 until 1971 (I would assume it was the 1900’s because they were abbreviated).

  The cabin was fairly long, and by the time I reached the end of it, the light from my flashlight didn’t illuminate enough of the wall for me to read the writing there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something lying on the floor near one of the bunks. In the dark cabin, I couldn’t tell what the object was, only that it was dark and vaguely the size of a child. When I bent down to examine it, the cabin went dark. The blood on my veins suddenly turned to ice, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up in a wave from my shoulders to the top of my head. All of my muscles stiffened at the same time, but I still managed to drop to my hands and knees and peer over the top to the bottom bunks. Seeing nothing, but darkness, I pulled out my gun and walked cautiously back to the front door. My flashlight was missing! When I looked down at my hands, they were covered in some kind of dark liquid, and it felt both sticky and slippery at the same time. In the moonlight, it looked black. I smelled it and realized that it had that familiar wet coppery smell, and it suddenly dawned on me that it was blood.

  My first thought was to get the hell out of there, and leave this place, flashlight or no flashlight. I went outside and looked around and re holstered my gun. If I were going to have to run, I would hate to discharge my gun by mistake. Something in the back of my mind made me turn around and
look at the floor of the cabin. What I saw scared me even more. On the floor, there was only one set of footprints coming and one going. On a dusty floor like that one, there would be another set of footprints from whoever had stolen my flashlight. When I turned back around, someone was standing right in front of me! Needless to say, I almost swallowed my tongue. This was almost too much to bear. He wore an old guard uniform that was torn and tattered and very dirty. He said, “looking for this?” And handed me my flashlight. Questioningly I took it from him to get a better look at him, he was a big man, about six feet tall and very pale looking. His nametag said “Jankowitz,” and his badge was very tarnished. Somehow I struggled a thank you, which sounded something like “uhrgtthou.”

  He said, “I know what you mean. This place gets to all of us sooner or later.”

  A crack of thunder drew my attention away for a split second and I said, “whoa!” When I turned back again, the guard was gone.

  This was enough for me. I took it as a sign to get out of there immediately. I squeezed through the gate and hit the truck at a full gallop. I desperately fumbled for my keys, and discovered that they weren’t clipped to my gun belt where I usually kept them. I looked in the driver’s window, and saw them in the ignition. I tried the door and with a sinking feeling, realized that the door was locked, where upon I screamed a string of four letter words and reached down for a rock. What I picked up was definitely not a rock. It turned out to be a human skull. When I dropped the skull. It fell on a pile of bones washed up by the rain. Despite the trouble I knew that I would be in for doing so, I broke the drivers side window with my flashlight, got in the truck and floored it. I left there bouncing off of trees and spinning mud up over the bed of the truck.

  I made it back in record time, and when I arrived back to the guardhouse I was catatonic. Everything I tried to tell them came out jumbled. I would open my mouth to tell them what I had seen, but all I heard myself say was “aayy ssssssssaurw aaaa gooossssssshhh ina woooshhhhh!” I tried several times to make myself understood, and held up my hands to show them the blood on them, but when I raised my hands up, they were clean (more or less). There was no blood on them at all. Suddenly the room faded away, and everything went black.

  The next thing I remember was the smell of alcohol and floor cleaner. I opened my eyes slowly, and looked around me and discovered that I was in a hospital. When the doctor came in, he told me that I had suffered a nervous breakdown, and had been in a coma for the last two weeks.

  After a month of tests, and constant doctor surveillance, I was allowed to leave the hospital and return home. A week later, I was sitting in a diner eating breakfast with a friend of mine from work. He told me that everyone was worried about me, and asked me what had happened out there. I told him the story, and he looked stunned when I told him about the guard I had seen. He told me that he had known a guard named Jankowitz, but that he had died years ago.

  It seemed that Jankowitz had been on vehicle patrol, had gotten lost in the woods, and had run across a Girl Scout camp hidden back there. The story was covered up and well protected; because of the bad publicity it would have brought the area. Supposedly what had happened, was that Jankowitz had walked in on a very bloody massacre. Someone had found the camp before him and had raped and murdered everyone in sight. Some girls escaped, but at least thirty of them were butchered. When Jankowitz had stumbled upon this grizzly scene, he had turned tail and run for the truck, only to find the murderer waiting for him by the truck. He was killed, but the murderer was never found, neither was the truck. After that, the camp was condemned, and no one ever returned.

  Shortly after my friend conveyed this story to me, I asked another friend of mine who was a police officer to check the files for the incident report. The report confirmed the story my friend had told me, and somehow this didn’t ease my mind. I went back to work a few days later, but I never went back to the camp. I had to pay my employer back for the broken window, and he asked me why there was blood and hair in a large dent on the passenger side bed of the truck. I suddenly realized that maybe it wasn’t a tree that I had hit on my way out of the campground area as I was tearing out of there.

  In my dreams, a lonely guard is still wandering the woods lost forever and condemned to guard the abandoned Girl Scout camp until the end of time. To my knowledge, nobody has found the campground since, and hopefully they never will.