by Lily Sparks
“They got me a bed,” Rose said, watching them. “It’s a four-poster. It has a canopy and everything. I got to pick it out.”
“That’s so cool.”
“And he’s getting my mom a car, but he said she doesn’t have to work anymore, so it’s mostly just to pick me up from school and for shopping and stuff.”
“It’s like a fairy tale or something.”
“And you’ll be sleeping over like, all the time. Right?” She turned to me then, and I stuck out my pinkie.
“Whenever you want,” I promised, and we linked our fingers together to make it official.
But after she moved across town to the nice neighborhood and joined her stepdad’s church, things changed.
Everyone who went to Rose’s church hung out together, and when they got to high school their youth group became its own little world. They went on group outings instead of dates, they drank root beer instead of Rainier, and they gave each other promise rings junior year. By ninth grade it was very clear there was no place for me in their world of two-story houses, church lock-ins, and wilderness retreats. Rose joined their lunch table while I ate PB&Js in the library and read creepypasta off my phone.
I still followed all Rose’s social media accounts. Her life was like a high school soap opera I couldn’t stop watching. Every moment seemed to take place during golden hour at the center of a circle of beaming friends. That’s what made it so weird when Rose reached out to me again, junior year. When she needed to keep a secret from her “real” friends. When she started seeing a guy whose name she wouldn’t tell me.
She just called him “Mr. Moody.”
* * *
The bus jounces me back to the present as we trade the freeway for a narrow dirt access road that sends vibrations up my cramped legs. The trees close in tight around us. I’d love to pull down my window and breathe the forest air, but my hands are still cuffed.
“We’re getting close!” Dave announces cheerily.
I glance up front and my eyes immediately lock with Nobody’s. She’s sitting straight up in her seat and staring at me through the frayed eyeholes of her mask. How long has she been awake?
How long has she been staring at me?
She rises slowly from her seat, the way a snake rises out of a coil. Squaring her broad shoulders, Nobody lurches down the long narrow aisle toward me. Her orange jumpsuit is dark with rusty arcs of blood. One of her long hands, clenched into a fist, is gloved with arterial spray.
Even if I call out for Dave, he won’t make it to me before she does. I’m cornered and pinned in place. I clench my jaw and desperately hold her stare as she lands beside me, looming over me, her eyes just visible through her mask.
Then her arms shoot out over my head and she unlatches my window. It falls open, cool forest air rolling in with a smell like Christmas trees and sunshine.
“Thanks?” I mutter.
Nobody nods, crosses the aisle and lowers the parallel window, then crosses again to the window in front of me. Soon a cross-breeze is sending my hair flying around my face.
“Almost there!” Dave announces. “Here’s the sign for the entrance to camp!”
I twist in my seat and crane my neck as we pass beneath two tall wood posts bracing a weathered wood sign that reads:
WELCOME TO CAMP NARAMAUKE.
Where’s the chain link? The barbed wire? The prison guards?
The walls, for crying out loud? All I see between the trees are blackberry bushes and butterflies.
I scan for a guardhouse or gun tower as we pass under the gate, but instead, as the trees clear, I’m greeted by the most beautiful field I’ve ever seen, which dissolves into sand ringing a lake of shimmering blue water with a weathered dock.
Through the windows on the other side of the bus I clock a low log cabin with a stone chimney, its front steps almost buried in banks of lavender, its roof thick with velvety moss. Next to the cabin is a covered patio, and beyond that I glimpse what must be a fire pit, ringed by sun-bleached logs.
Straight ahead four little cabins peer through the trees, red with faded white trim, their sides spotted with fallen shingles.
We’re going to live in an abandoned sleep-away camp?
Dave parks, then strolls to my seat and unfastens me from my cuffs completely. Confused, I stand and put my hands up for him to cuff again, but he just goes back down to the driver’s seat and throws open the bus doors.
“Come on, you two, time to meet the others,” Dave says, and jogs down the bus steps.
Nobody and I look at each other in surprise and then, warily, follow him outside. The cool wind rushes to meet us with the smell of pine and lavender, sunlight bathing us from the top of a limitless blue sky. I stagger down the gravel path, lovestruck by the world.
As we pass by the log cabin, a curvy woman pops out of a side door with a giant tray of crayons in her arms. She’s mid-thirties, like Dave.
“The new recruits!” She smiles and two symmetrical dimples appear in her plump cheeks, which bolster a pair of red cat-eye glasses. “I’m Kate, and you must be Signal and—”
“Nobody,” Dave interrupts. “She prefers Nobody.”
Kate nods quickly. “Okay, Nobody it is! Everybody’s down at Arts and Crafts.”
Kate doesn’t have a holster or taser or nightstick, or any of the usual fun accessories correctional officers carry. Just a silver whistle around her neck, like a gym teacher’s, and a small key fob dangling from her wrist. In her sweatshirt, jeans, and worn-in hiking boots, she could pass for a real camp counselor. She and Dave speak companionably. I can’t make out what they say, but they walk with their backs to us. Like they’re not afraid of us at all.
“Okay. After dinner, then.” Dave breaks off their conversation and announces, “Kate will take it from here. See you guys in a few!” as he jogs back up the path.
“You guys had a long drive, huh?” Kate peers at Nobody’s blood-stained jumpsuit.
“Yeah,” I answer after a long cold silence from Nobody. The lake fills the horizon completely, a golden haze coming off the water and silhouetting a graceful sycamore in the middle of the field below. Under its branches is a picnic table.
Around the table four kids sit, lazily coloring with markers on yellowed construction paper. Their voices float up to us, laughing and teasing, three guys and one girl. As we get closer the voices drop away, and all four faces turn to stare.
I would never have guessed they were Class As, not in a million years. They look totally normal, except their clothes are weirdly out of style and a bit too bright, like the kids in a foreign language textbook, the ones who are endlessly talking about who will bring cassettes to the party.
The shortest of the guys, a scrawny black kid with huge aviator glasses, wears a bright green T-shirt with a giant yellow smiley face on it. Next to him are two twins, one in red and one in baby blue, who’re almost as tall as Nobody. Both have dark crew cuts and big, toothy smiles that flash at the same time as we approach.
“Oooh, more ladies!” one of the twins says approvingly, and the only girl at the table rolls her large dark eyes. She has short curly black hair framing a heart-shaped face. Her T-shirt, neon pink, reads in lavender glitter letters: Secretly a Mermaid.
“Where’s Javier? And Erik?” Kate frowns.
“Kitchen. Tree.” The boy with glasses answers, staring straight down and continuing to color.
Kate smiles. “Oh, that’s right! I told Javier to get dinner started.”
She let a Class A into a kitchen? With all the knives and things? Alone?
And then she forgot?
“How you doing up there, Erik?” Kate calls skyward, to a guy in the tree. His face is hidden by floppy, dark-blond hair, but his rolled-up shirt sleeves reveal alarmingly defined muscles. His shoulders bow slightly forward, tensed in a posture that makes me expect a sulky reply, but instead he calls down, “I’m exploring nature.”
His voice is deep and confident, and dripping with
sarcasm.
“All right! Well. I should head to the kitchen, then. Signal, Nobody, this is the rest of Camp Naramauke: Erik’s up there—” she points to the tree. “This is Dennis in the smiley face shirt, Kurt and Troy are our twins, and last but not least we have Jada. Grab a crayon and jump right in!” She throws us a cheery wave and sallies right back up the hill.
I haven’t even been able to go to the bathroom without a guard watching me for the last twelve months. Now here we are, in the middle of a field ringed by forest, under the open sky, seven verified Class As … coloring?
I follow Nobody to the table, and we both awkwardly take sheets of the yellowed construction paper and sit at the empty spots left at the picnic table benches, directly across from each other. Her hands are still stained with dried blood, but no one remarks on it. There’s just the gentle squeak of markers.
I look back at the lake. Kate’s out of sight. The water is so close. I could run to the edge, kick off my shoes, dive in, and be halfway to the far shore before she comes back. We all could. I glance around the table: so why don’t they?
Just because I can’t see a fence doesn’t mean there isn’t something keeping us here. Maybe there’s an electric current in the water. Or drone surveillance, or snipers on the far shore.
I don’t want to find out the hard way.
“So like … are there cameras all around the camp or something?” I whisper to the table.
The scrawny black guy with the giant glasses continues to stare straight down as he talks: “No cameras. No electricity, either, except in the main cabin.” His voice is a complete monotone. “No internet, no Wi-Fi, no cell phones …”
“We find other ways to stay busy.” One twin grins suggestively, revealing a small overlap between his two front teeth.
“Troy, you are so gross,” Jada groans. “But hey, new girls: how many, huh?”
“Getting straight to it I see,” Dennis says, still not looking up from his paper.
“Dennis’s number, obviously, is zero.” Jada looks from me to Nobody again. “Come on, ladies. We all know each other’s numbers already. How many?”
“How many what?” I stall.
“She’s asking how many people you’ve killed,” the deep voice from the tree says. Only it’s not in the tree anymore, it’s right behind me. He’s crept down so silently I didn’t hear him over the wind rustling the leaves.
There’s a throb in my chest as my heart rate surges. I can feel him hovering so I don’t turn around. I pick up a yellow crayon and start drawing a line of stars across my paper, using all my focus to keep my hand from shaking. Of course. Of course that’s the first question here. They’re killers. Underneath the bright shirts and construction paper, that’s all we have in common. We’re convicted murderers.
Nobody uncaps a green scented marker and holds the tip in front of where her nose must be, sniffing like it’s perfume. Then she says in a rusty voice, “Six.”
One of the twins laughs, impressed. “Whoa, for serious? Second only to Erik!” His thick black eyebrows jump up as he continues chummily, “Me and Kurt got three between us—”
The prolonged scream of an air horn tears across the field. Everyone at the table freezes. Then the twins leap up and start running. The guy from the tree—Erik, I guess—climbs up, onto, and over the table, his long sneaker landing right on my paper as he launches himself off and runs up the hill. My stars are torn in half.
“What’s that sound?” I ask Dennis, who is lining up his paper carefully, matching the corners exactly before folding it in fourths.
“It’s the air horn. It means we’re going to have a drill.” The same monotone, though his expression seems annoyed. “We’ve got to drop whatever we’re doing and run to the east lawn.” He heads toward the hill the other boys have just disappeared over, and Nobody rises to her feet and walks after him without a backward glance.
Jada, however, waits a few feet from the table, her forearm shielding her face from the sun and me. Is this some overture of friendship? Jada has been the only girl here for a while, and of the two girls that have just arrived I am, for the first time in my life, the normal one. As I approach she reaches a small hand out to me, and smiles.
But when we connect her grip is vicelike, her little pink-polished nails biting into my arm. She twists my skin, hard, and her smile deepens as I wince.
“Just so you know, Erik likes me.” Her eyes narrow, her voice strong and clear. “And if you make a play for him, or if you tell him we had this talk? I’ll cut you.” She releases me, still smiling, then jogs up the hill ahead of me, revealing a glittery turquoise seashell on the back of her shirt.
Like, what?
I stumble up the incline, flabbergasted. Jada is beautiful. Prettier than most of the popular girls at my high school. How could she possibly be threatened by me? Maybe this Erik is a player.
In addition to being a killer.
I run, full speed, face flushing, eyes tearing. At Bellwood, the few times they allowed me to exercise, I was only allowed to shuffle in ankle chains. Now I sprint wildly through the high green grass, birds shooting low over my head across the blue sky, calling out like they’re cheering me on.
Way, way across the field, there’s a guy running against the dark wall of pines that surround the little cabins, parallel from me. The moment I notice him he smiles and speeds up. Okay. You want to race? Let’s race!
Down at the end of the field, on the lawn across from the main cabin, Dave stands with the rest of the campers beside an orange cone, a square blue tarp behind him and an air horn in his hand. He waves his arms over his head as the others clap and cheer, watching to see who will get to the cone first.
My atrophied legs are almost at their breaking point, but I tilt forward and gain speed, lungs burning, keeping just ahead of the guy from across the field, until he makes a final surge before I get to the cone and we knock into each other, hard.
Up close he’s way taller than I thought, and apparently made of iron. When I slam into his chest I actually bounce back.
“Whoa, easy!” he laughs, grabbing my arms to keep me from falling, and my forehead almost knocks into his chin. “You okay?”
I’m too winded to answer, he’s knocked the breath out of me, and then our eyes lock—his huge and dark and melancholy. Though maybe that’s just the tattoo at the edge of his left eye, a tiny blue tear poised to slide down the long, narrow line of his cheek.
“Earth to Signal! Get in line and listen up!” Dave claps his hands, and I break off our stare and take my place in between Dennis and Nobody.
“All right, guys, now that Javier and Signal have finally joined us, it’s drill time!” Dave announces to the group as I struggle to control my panting. “What better way to welcome the new recruits than a drill, am I right?”
There is scattered applause, not from me. I’m bent over at the waist as a cramp stitches up my side. If we’re going to do sprints or push-ups for this drill I might as well give up now. The blue tarp I noticed from the field is draped over a pile of something, a tall pile, almost as high as Dave’s waist. With my luck, it’s probably medicine balls.
“This is a timed drill. You have three hours, from now until dinner. It’s real simple, though I wouldn’t call it easy.” Dave leans down, grabs a corner of the plastic sheet, and with a flourish pulls it back. “All you have to do is hide a body.”
Eight limp bodies lie stacked on top of each other, their limbs tangled together, gazing up at the sky with unblinking eyes.
Chapter Three
The Bleeder
I’m going to faint. Right here, right now.
All the others lunge forward. There’s a loud rattle as Dave throws down what sounds like a drawer of cutlery. A box of knives, cleavers, and small saws spill out in the grass in front of us.
“Hey.” The guy with the tear, Javier, has hung back while the others bicker over the knives. “They’re not real.” He whispers.
“What?
” I force myself to look at the pile of bodies, where one of the twins is working a busty woman loose from the arms of the other cadavers, and see the fingers of her hands are molded together. They’re … plastic? But they aren’t just mannequins—there’s no seams in their flesh, their hair catches the wind, and their bland faces are uncanny and individual.
“They get them different places—special effects houses, old medical mannequins, and some are uh …” His tone gets embarrassed. “Like, sex dolls we think.”
“Oh.”
“Freaked me out too, the first time,” he says, and then he lopes ahead of me and plucks a short male mannequin off the pile.
He saw. He saw me freak out. Did anyone else see?
Nobody hoists up the last mannequin. The tarp is empty, but Dave turns to me.
“Don’t worry, I saved one for you!” he moves aside the corner of the tarp to reveal a young female figure with long brown hair, lying face down in the grass.
“How thoughtful,” I mutter. She’s surprisingly heavy when I pick her up, and taller than me. I awkwardly cradle her in my arms. There’s two knives left so I grab one, struggling to carry it all.
“Don’t forget this!” Dave tucks a trash bag under my elbow, and I mutter a thank you.
I get about ten steps away from the tarp before I sink to my knees under the weight of my “victim,” a knot forming in my stomach that rises slowly toward my throat.
Around me buttons are popping off shirts as the others set to work, the flailing limbs of the mannequins rising over the grass as clothes are ripped clear of torsos so saws can ravage plastic flesh. One of the twins has a stockinged foot on his shoulder and is bending the leg sharply backward at the knee. Jada cuts four fingers off her mannequin with one knife stroke, her expression eerily remote. I see Erik’s head bowed over the grass and quickly look away.
“Now remember,” Dave lectures, circling us, “this is not about dismemberment skills, it’s about concealment. This is an evidence drill. If I find any evidence, even so much as a button, that’s a fail.”