Frenzy

by Robert Lettrick

  “Yep, that’s right. I sprayed it and it just dropped dead. You mentioned that one of the symptoms of rabies is fear of water. Do you think it died of fright?”

  Marshall rubbed his temple as if he was smoothing out a headache. “I don’t know, Heath….”

  “Is it possible?” Uncle Bill asked.

  “Like I mentioned, hydrophobia—fear of water—is a symptom, that’s true. The virus makes it incredibly painful for the animal to swallow, and its diseased brain amplifies that fear to irrational levels. Even still, getting squirted with a water gun shouldn’t have killed it. Animals don’t just die from fear. This was likely just a freak occurrence. The porcupine was probably sicker than it seemed. You got lucky, Cricket. Rabies treatment involves a series of shots. You wouldn’t enjoy that.”

  “Ya think?” Cricket snorted.

  As Marshall and Uncle Bill folded the tarp over the porcupine’s body, Heath caught one last glimpse of those impressive chisel-like front teeth. If the porcupine had sunk them into Cricket’s leg, they would have gouged out a huge chunk of flesh. The thought of it made him shudder.

  “We need to burn it,” Marshall said as the two men considered what to do with the corpse.

  “No, the campers are everywhere,” Uncle Bill replied, dismissing the notion. Outside they could hear the water fight raging in force. “They’ll see smoke and come running. Cricket and Heath, you boys head back to your cabin and dry off. Please don’t say anything about the porcupine for now. Marshall, you and I will take it to the kitchen midden and bury it.” Heath learned through his occasional duties in the cafeteria that a midden is a dumping hole for debris, like animal bones and shells. The midden behind the dining hall was the camp’s oldest feature, dug by a prospector who first settled the camp during the gold rush in the early 1900s.

  Heath thought burying the diseased animal was a terrible idea, but he kept quiet until after the four of them had left the health center and split in opposite directions.

  “Uncle Bill is making a mistake,” Heath said as he and Cricket followed the winding path back to the Grosbeak Cabin. “What if another animal comes along and digs the porcupine up? Then eats it? It’d probably get the virus, too, right?”

  “I dunno” was all the discussion Cricket offered on the matter. He seemed in shock, like it was finally dawning on him how lucky he was to have escaped the porcupine attack without injury. Cricket was so out of sorts that he didn’t even notice the grasshopper he’d stepped on, and Heath wasn’t about to tell him and make his mood even worse.

  “Heath! Cricket! Over here!” someone called to them from the gazebo beside the craft hut. There were several campers inside, leaning against the railing or sitting on benches. Heath used his hand as a visor to shade his eyes from the sun so he could see who was there. He was ­surprised to find Will beckoning them over, and even more surprised to see Dunbar and Floaties sitting on a bench next to him. Floaties was still wearing his water wings, although the deflated left one sagged flat against his arm. He’d extracted the quill and was twirling it in his fingers like a drummer’s stick. There were others in the gazebo, too. The gathering included Sylvester (who’d come straight from the archery range and still had his equipment with him) and three older boys—Rich, Quinn, and Saul—who were counselors in training, or C.I.T.s, as most of the campers called them. Heath didn’t know any of them that well, and even though he’d talked to Will a few times now, he had a gut feeling he knew him least of all.

  “See!” Dunbar said. “I told you they’d be fine.”

  “You guys okay?” Sylvester asked to be sure. He was restringing the bow resting across his lap. “Floaties told us what happened.”

  Floaties shot Sylvester a dark look but didn’t voice objection to the nickname. Thumper may have been the alpha dog of the Oriole Cabin, but Sylvester was something even more important—popular.

  “Yeah, we’re okay,” Heath told them. “Cricket almost got bit.” He glared at Floaties. “Thanks for sticking around to help out. You’re a real hero.”

  Floaties was unapologetic. “If you and Cockroach there—”

  “His name is Cricket,” Sylvester corrected him.

  “Whatever. If you and Bug Juice were too stupid to follow me, then that’s your problem.”

  Will stood up and folded his arms across his chest. “The porcupine had rabies, didn’t it?”

  Heath and Cricket glanced over at each other, then back at Will.

  “How’d you know?” Cricket asked.

  “Floaties told us it was foaming at the mouth. Where is it now? Did anyone catch it, or did it escape into the woods?”

  “It’s dead,” Heath announced. “I killed it.”

  “No way!” Floaties blasted him. “That thing was a monster!”

  “It’s true!” Cricket snapped. “While you were running away with your tail between your legs, Heath saved me. He squirted it with a water gun, and it just died. That’s the truth.”

  Floaties stood up and loomed over Cricket. “Look, Dung Beetle, if you expect us to buy this garbage—”

  “I believe you,” Will said, and that was that. Floaties let it go. “Where’s the carcass? Did they burn it?”

  “They took it to the midden to bury it,” Heath told him.

  Will shook his head disapprovingly. “Dumb.”

  “So it was rabies?” Quinn asked.

  “Yeah.” Heath nodded. “Marshall said he couldn’t be sure, because there was no bite mark on the body, but I’m almost positive it had rabies.”

  “Of course it was rabies,” Will said. “Animals don’t just attack people like that.”

  “I saw a rabid possum once,” Saul said.

  “No you didn’t,” Will informed him. “Possums don’t get rabies.”

  “Sure they do,” Saul insisted. “It was acting crazy, ­puking up…then it just fell over dead.”

  Will snorted. “Possums are great actors. I bet it got up and scampered away the second you left. They don’t get rabies because their body temperature is too low. You fell for the oldest con in history.”

  “And you’d know all this because…?” asked Quinn.

  “My grandfather’s dog was bitten by a rabid raccoon,” Will answered. “He went insane, too, lunging and snapping at anything that came close to his cage. I got to watch my grandfather put him down with a bullet.”

  Heath thought it was odd the way he’d said, got to watch, as if it was something he’d enjoyed. He decided he was probably just reading into it.

  “At least my grandfather had the good sense to cremate Bandit’s body instead of putting it in the ground where animals could smell it rotting and dig it up.” Will turned to Heath. “You squirted it with water and it died? Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” Heath replied. “Marshall said that when animals are infected with the rabies virus they fear water.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Will said.

  “Well…water can be terrifying. You know, people even drown in kiddie pools,” said Floaties, adding his two cents, and several of the boys laughed at the absurdity of the idea. Heath sensed that Floaties understood better than anyone how a creature could fear H2O.

  “Marshall said animals can’t die of fright,” Cricket said.

  “Marshall is a goof,” Will said flatly. “The guy failed his Parks and Recreation Management course. He skipped class half the time so he could hang out with his girlfriend on her lunch break. The only reason he’s working here at Camp Harmony is for the extra credit he needs to pull his GPA out of the toilet. I wouldn’t exactly call him an authority on animal psychology.”

  Heath made a mental note. Apparently campers weren’t the only ones Will was digging up dirt on. “Marshall seems pretty smart to me.”

  “Not about this. Animals can die from fear,” Will insisted. “Happens all the time. In Chin
a, three dogs snuck into a rabbit farm. The next day the owner found six hundred dead bunnies still locked in their cages, not a single scratch on them.”

  “So it is possible,” Heath said in a somber tone.

  Two young girls came bounding out from behind a tree and aimed their squirt guns at the boys. Saul leapt from the gazebo and roared at them. The girls dropped their guns and ran off crying.

  “What’s wrong with you, dude?” Cricket asked on behalf of the group. “That was mean.”

  “What?” Saul said innocently. “I was just testing Will’s theory.”

  “I thought it was hilarious.” Quinn laughed. “Guess they’re not quite as gutless as rabbits.”

  Will cocked his head in the direction of the horse stables and held up his hand. “Shut up, you guys.”

  “I heard it, too,” Heath said, tensing.

  They listened together. It was unusually quiet except for the muted clapping and cheering of the winning cabin off in the distance: “Woodpecker! Woodpecker! Woodpecker!”

  “Our cabin won the water fight,” Saul said to Rich, and the boys high-fived.

  “Be quiet,” Will hissed. “Listen.”

  Heath glanced down and noticed there was something protruding from Cricket’s right heel above the rubber sole of his sandal. It looked like a splinter of straw impaled in the thick, calloused skin directly above his friend’s sandal. No, not a splinter of straw—it was a quill, just like the one that had punctured Floaties’s water wing. It had detached from the porcupine and embedded itself in Cricket’s foot, probably when Cricket tried to kick it away as it charged. “Cricket…” Heath said. “You’ve got—”

  The boys heard the sound again. This time it was easily identifiable as the high-pitched whinnying of horses. The whinnies were followed closely by a chorus of howls.

  The boys were still, gazing together in the direction of the animal noises, side by side and rigid like a gang of meerkats.

  “Are there dogs on the campgrounds?” Floaties asked.

  “Just Uncle Bill’s beagle, Barkly,” Dunbar said.

  Will identified the sound. “Those are wolves.”

  “Are you sure?” Sylvester asked.

  “It’s wolves,” Heath agreed.

  “They sound nuts,” Saul said nervously. “Is it mating season?”

  Will shook his head. “They mate in the spring. This is something else.”

  “How do you know so much?” Saul asked as if knowledge were a crime.

  “How do you know so little?” Will tossed back.

  “You’ve got a smart mouth for a new kid.” Saul advanced on Will, his fist in the air. “How about I teach you ­something you don’t know?”

  Floaties was enjoying himself. “You really know how to make friends, Stringer.”

  Quinn stepped in and grabbed Saul by the arm. “Easy, man.”

  “Guys, stop,” Heath pleaded. “There’s something really wrong about this. Just listen.”

  The wolves paused for air then began another round of howls. It was slightly louder this time. The howls were long and smooth, like the cry of the horned owl, which Heath knew was a very bad thing. It meant the wolves were calling pack mates to a kill.

  “They sound so close,” Sylvester noted.

  “That’s because they are,” Will said.

  Heath suddenly felt uncomfortably confined, encircled by railing. He led the boys out of the gazebo, but they stayed in a tight group. A light breeze sifted through them.

  Far off, two girls came around the path’s bend, running toward them at full sprint ahead of the howling. Their equestrian outfits were unmistakable.

  “It’s Em and Em!” Cricket said.

  The twins were yelling in unison; it was hard to understand them that way. Then, when they neared the gazebo, the girls took turns.

  “They’re coming!” Emily warned.

  “Run!” Emma yelled.

  The gray wolves broke into view.

  They were still a good ways off, but they were coming fast. So fast.

  It was a large pack for grays, seven or eight in total. Even though they were still hundreds of yards off, Heath could see that the one in the lead had old scars across its nose, like it had been raked with knives or maybe the claws of a larger animal, probably a bear. The scars separated the wolf’s face into different sections, like the stitching on a quilt.

  Heath saw the trees around the gazebo starting to jerk and sway. Something was ricocheting across the branches, obscured by leaves.

  In the distance the screams of campers pierced the oppressively hot air in all directions.

  It was chaos.

  The boys did as Emma told them. They ran.

  Like the wolves, they ran as a pack.

  The zookeeper had a bad day.

  His boss shorted his pay.

  Upset with his wages, he unlocked the cages.

  And the animals all got away.

  The zookeeper wasn’t that smart.

  The escapees tore him apart.

  And now all the beasts get to run through the streets.

  Let’s watch the festivities start!

  WHEN HEATH WAS NINE, he was confined to a hospital bed for almost two months. He watched a lot of TV, mostly shows about nature. It was his way of escaping the boredom of his bland, tiny room on the pediatrics wing at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center. Heath was raised to love nature, never imagining a time would come when he’d be forced to experience it through a television.

  He remembered a few things he’d watched about the hunting strategy of wolves. First, when attacking deer or other herd prey, the pack will usually try to isolate and pick off one or two stragglers. Second, they usually give up the chase after a mile or so, not that Heath and the ­others would be able to outrun the wolves for that long. But maybe they didn’t have to. They just had to make it inside one of the cabins. Even so, Heath feared the wolves would overtake them well before that. He thought maybe, if he fell to the rear of the group, he could be the straggler the wolves were looking for. He could give the others a chance to make it to safety.

  Before he could decide, Emily grabbed Heath by the arm and he was forced to keep his pace up or he’d get her killed, too. “Go!” she screamed, so he did.

  Heath glanced back just in time to see the scarred pack leader, Quilt Face, leap through the air at them. He cringed, expecting to feel fangs embed in his Achilles tendon—wolves liked to cripple their prey before killing it—but just then Saul accidentally ran into the wolf’s path and it landed on the boy’s back. The C.I.T. let out a shriek and fell to the ground where his head bounced hard in the dirt. Unable to look away, Heath saw a weird purple pattern, like vines, spread across the surface of Saul’s skin, covering his entire body in seconds. He’d never witnessed anything like it before. What is that? Heath wondered. Saul gasped, then fell still, lying there, unmoving, even when another wolf started tugging at his sneaker. The beast growled and shook its head back and forth in furious jerks. A third wolf, the biggest by far, muscled in and dragged Saul sideways across the ground with the first two wolves in tow, making dirt angels on the trail with the boy’s body. Saul was like a rag doll being fought over by selfish children. Heath wanted to help, but in his heart he knew Saul was already dead.

  The rest of the pack kept coming. It was like being trapped in a nightmare. The wolves were so close that Heath thought he felt flecks of spittle land on the back of his legs. They were snarling and snapping and producing low, throaty growls, just like he’d seen on TV. Again he looked back. He thought for sure he was next, but instead the wolves snagged Rich. The purple vines bloomed over every inch of the boy’s skin. Rich screamed once, then died, just like Saul. Immediately the wolves ceased their pursuit. The pack leader sprinted back and forth between the two bodies, sniffing them to make sure they were fini
shed. Heath and his friends kept moving.

  This can’t be happening, Heath insisted over and over in his mind. He tried to process his thoughts, but they came in choppy waves as his brain flipped the switch to autopilot, tuned to his survival. The ear-piercing screams around him didn’t help his concentration. He forced himself to reason. He knew that wolves didn’t raid summer camps. You never saw that on the news. Sure, sometimes you’d hear something about a hiker in the remote ­Alaskan wilderness getting killed by a wolf, but it was rare, and usually happened because the human had wandered too close to the pack’s den. What was happening now was completely unnatural behavior for wolves. It was almost as if they were deranged. And then there were the purplish viney patterns on the bodies of Saul and Rich. It had to be an infection, but what kind of infection resembled an invisible hand scrawling quickly across skin?

  Heath put it all together. The wolves were sick. Sick, like the porcupine. There was no other explanation. Marshall never mentioned the purple vines, but maybe that was one of the symptoms of rabies, too. What else could it be?

  “This way!” Will shouted. He veered off the path.

  Taking a shortcut, they sprinted through Laundry Lane, a growth of pines that supported a cat’s cradle of clotheslines. They charged through, brushing aside sopping wet bathing suits and towels, until, finally, they reached the trail again and the cabins and main lodge came into view. They were still a good deal away from the clearing, but at least the buildings were in sight.

  “Yes! We’re gonna make it!” Quinn laughed in nervous relief, then sprinted ahead of the group.

  No one saw the horse coming.

  It exploded from the woods on their left, a black blur, and hit Quinn so hard that one of his sneakers came off his feet and cartwheeled through the dirt while Quinn’s body sailed into the woods on the right.

  Em and Em screamed like victims in a horror movie.

  Sylvester yelled, “Whoa!” and collided with Dunbar hard, but somehow they both stayed on their feet.

  The world froze, except for the horse, which followed Quinn into the woods, trampling him under its hooves, chomping at him, tearing a scrap of his shirt off in its teeth. Heath thought the animal was the most muscular thing he’d ever seen, and every one of those muscles was working in unison to attack Quinn. The horse was pure power covered in skin and hair.