by Mark Tufo
- - -
Its brain was no longer human, but it was not completely devoid of thought. Nor was it incapable of learning. It knew enough not toAttacknow that there were three able-bodied people, especially with two of them armed. The thing’s mind couldn’t quite rationalize that deeply, but it recognized danger enough to instruct itself toStay.
Waitwas another word it conjured. That command was understood, though would not be obeyed indefinitely. It wouldStayandWait in the woods, but whatever the risk, the creature could not wait forever.
Its hunger was too great.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sven led the boys through the dining hall, going mostly by feel because the stove’s pilot light was the only illumination. They snaked among the scarred and stained picnic tables. Sven shook his head.What a dump.
Gregory and Pedro were whispering like a pair of gossipy schoolgirls. “Shh. Booger will hear us.”
“He’d probably smoke some with us,” Pedro said through childish giggles.
“He’s a grown-up, dumbass,” Sven said. “Grown-ups are the enemy. Why do you think we’re stuck in this clown school without booze and chicks?”
“Let’s light up and get out of here,” Gregory said, all quick like he really was nervous now.
Goddamn wimps.
They slipped into the kitchen, though with the kids behind him, it was more like they thudded and thumped into the kitchen. No wonder they got busted and ended up here. Sven hadn’t been so stupid; he’d just gotten screwed by his social worker who was allThis is going to be good for you and besides, it’s either this or prison. Gee, thanks for the favor.
They managed to make it to the stove without knocking over any pans or breaking any glasses. Sven turned on a burner. The flames flickered and warmed their faces. Sven tucked the joint in his mouth and leaned in close to light it. He took a big hit, pulled a little too hard, and started coughing. He turned from Gregory and Pedro and choked the coughs back down.
“Means it’s good shit,” he said.
Gregory took the next hit, a baby one, but what did Sven expect?
Pedro did a little tantrum. “Freaking frijoles, Batman, don’t Borat that joint.”
Sven took another hit. “Bogart. It’s ‘Don’t Bogart that joint.’”
Sven toyed with Pedro for a moment, holding the joint out and pulling it back when the kid reached for it, like teasing a dog with a treat. Finally, Sven let him have it and, to his credit, the little kid took a respectable hit and held it in for a long time. “Shit, man,” he said, exhaling. “Druggies need to get wit’ the times.”
Gregory took it next. “Primo, dude. I’m going to have to make friends with Wallace.”
Sven grabbed the joint. That lightheaded feeling was starting to come on, like rising in an invisible elevator. “Well, if you can find his ass. Figured he’d be here dealing with his munchies.”
The boys looked around as if all the other campers might appear out of thin air.
“Yeah,” Gregory said. “Where the hell is everybody? Usually the kids are sneaking out and wandering all over camp after bedtime.”
- - -
It knew enough toStayandWatch, but its mind was too far gone to process the simple command,Quiet. It saw three of them inside, standing around the flickering flames. It watched them through a dirty window, and it wanted so badly to break through that window and go after them. It was so hungry. So starving.
It watched them and it chuckled, a jittering, cackling, snuffling sort of sound, and even in its diseased brain, it had the faintest realization that it had gone crazy.
- - -
Booger had gone back to sleep but something woke him. He’d heard murmurs. This time he was sure. Now it sounded like laughing. That was okay. He was prepared.
He pushed down the blankets and took up the cleaver that was resting on his chest.
Raccoon or kid, they were about to learn one of life’s lessons: Don’t nobody mess with Booger’s biscuits.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Robert was losing it, not that Max was surprised. The kid didn’t have the stones for this kind of serious business. He might have been good in class, diligently taking notes, and was probably that pushover who allowed members of his project groups to pile all the work onto his shoulders because he desperately needed those high marks and that professor praise, as well as peer approval. He probably assembled some obnoxiously polished presentation for his capstone, a fancy Staples-published paper with accompanying slideshow presentation. Such gloss might look good in a classroom, but it meant nothing in the real world.
Especially when you were holed up in a stinking farmhouse with a rabid goat patrolling outside. The goat had abandoned the front door, leaving a good-sized hole there, but it was still outside milling around. Even when they couldn’t see it, they heard its high-pitched bleat. Robert was afraid the thing was calling out to other goats, summoning them to the house. Max had not dignified that concern with a response.
Robert came down the stairs. He’d gone upstairs in the vain hope of finding a working phone.
Max pointed at the shattered gun cabinet. “You want salvation—there it is.” He loved how Robert looked like he wasn’t sure if Max meant self-defense or suicide.
At this point, considering how useless Robert was turning out to be, Max wasn’t entirely sure how he’d meant the line, either.
“Nothing up there,” Robert said. He’d removed his tie and undone several buttons on his shirt. Sloppy. Max had loosened his tie, but there was no reason to look slovenly. You never knew when Delphus Fraley would show up, and dressing like one of the locals wouldn’t denote the proper power shift.
“I haven’t heard the goat,” Max said. “Maybe it left. Maybe we should make a run for it.”
“A run for it? It’s ten miles to town. That’s a long run.”
“We’ll take one of the guns.”
Robert looked from Max to the guns. There was a shotgun and an ancient-looking rifle, could be a musket for all Max knew. “I’ll take the gun,” Max said. “I’ll cover you.”
“You shoot?”
Max smiled. He walked into the trashed living room where a deer head hung on the wall. Its eyes had been removed and replaced with dark glass marbles. Max pointed at it. “It’s going to be Fraley up there before I’m done. Him and his crazy goat, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They were in full buzz now and ever rapidly ascending to greater heights. The joint had gone around several times and the boys did a good job not coughing their brains out, but Sven saw the growing hunger on their faces and knew it was only a matter of time before one of them started digging around the kitchen.
It ended up being Pedro. He checked the closest cabinets, ducking his whole head in as if that would help him see any better. “I got the munchies, man.” He bumped a pan and it clattered on the floor. The metallic reverberation sounded impossibly loud.
“Watch it, Taco Breath,” Sven said. “Trying to get us busted?”
Pedro moved something around and pulled out a container. He removed one of Booger’s biscuits. Even if Sven were smoking some serious ganja from Acapulco, he wouldn’t touch those things. Might as well eat petrified dinosaur turds.
“Mmm. Biscuits.” Pedro took a big bite of one and crumbs fell all around him.
“Jeez,” Gregory said, “I wouldn’t eat that—”
The front dining hall door slammed shut. Like a secret signal, everyone scattered. Pedro crawled inside the cabinet and Sven vanished around the corner, pinching the roach until it was extinguished. Gregory dropped behind the counter.
Sven waved at the air, knowing a cloud of blue heaven might give them away. But he almost giggled anyway.
- - -
The thing that had once been Benny could no longer wait. It was too hungry, too driven toMove. ToAttack. And it moved fast and attacked with a chittering chuckle. It smelled one of them close, just inside the kitchen, and grabbed him before it
could run away.
“Benny!” the kid said. His face soured. “Man. What messed you up?”
The thing stared at the kid without blinking, like its brain had forgotten how to blink, which perhaps it had. It chuckled again, but not because it was having fun—it no longer understood “fun” in any conventional sense, or even unconventional, for that matter—but because it could do only so many things, and chuckling was one of them.
“Benny?”
Something flew at them, pushing through the darkness with the propulsive urgency of an arrow but with the weight of something much larger. It collided into the kid and the thing that had once been Benny sank his teeth into the kid’s neck and they fell back against the counter and crashed onto the floor.
It could smell the other thing, the thing that had attacked. It was something like him. A beast, perhaps, or simply a diseased mind in a child’s body.
Either way, maybe that’s why he’d been chuckling.
Maybe they were communicating.
- - -
The air smelled funny, like something was burning.
Had he left the stove on?
Booger hit the flashlight and couldn’t understand what he was seeing for a moment. Writhing bodies twirled and twisted on the floor between the island and the sink. He thought it was some bizarre mating ritual among coyotes or some other creature, but then he recognized limbs and heads.
“What you boys doing messin’ in my kitchen?” Booger raised the cleaver. The burner flames reflected across the metal. There were three boys tangling on the floor with an awful lot of blood splashed on them. They probably killed a deer or a hog or something, like thatLord of the Flies book. Stupid kids getting into stupid fights.
Only this wasn’t some dumb fight. Jesus, was that kid biting into the other kid’s neck? What in tarnation was going—
“Run!” someone shouted and pots and pans clanged all around. Another kid jumped out from a kitchen cabinet and ran past too fast for Booger to even react. His flashlight paled the kid’s horrified face like a high-watt camera flash. Two kids, maybe more, ran from the kitchen, knocking over utensils, measuring cups, and plastic trays as they fled.
Booger turned the flashlight back to the brawling boys. He’d deal with those other cowards later.
One of the kids was no longer fighting—he was right there in front of Booger with his face smeared with sticky red fluid, his eyes huge and glazed, his mouth wide.
“What on earth you been eating? Did you get in the strawberry jam?”
The kid threw himself at Booger and on instinct Booger swung the cleaver. It arced through the air and buried in the kid’s shoulder with a sickeningTHUNK. The kid cried out but did not hesitate: he went for Booger’s throat with hands curved into claws.
Booger fell back several steps but kept his feet and managed to grab the cleaver’s handle. It took two tries, but he yanked it free from the kid’s shoulder with an accompanying scraping sound and fresh spurt of blood. Then the kid bit Booger’s flabby manboob and the pain was so sudden and immense that he screamed and dropped the cleaver. It pinged on the wooden floor.
Someone else was screaming, a loud, high-pitched, horrified cry with punctuations of “Help me” and “Mommy” and “Oh, God, pleeeeez!”
A moment later, the kid really buried his desperate teeth in Booger’s ample abdomen, and the other kid’s scream ended with a chilling suddenness.Jesus Christ, what the hell were these kids doing?
Booger grabbed the kid’s head, squeezed, and pulled him from his stomach. A pad of skin and tissue ripped free along with the mouth and the pain made Booger’s vision flare to almost total whiteness, a direct glance at a hot summer sun, but he fought through the pain and grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the stove.
The kid stood a few feet away with Booger’s skin dangling from his chin. Behind him, another kid stood with the cleaver in his hand. The third kid’s legs stuck out from the other side of the island. He wasn’t moving.
In basic training, the Army had taught him hand-to-hand, knife-to-knife, even stick-to-stick combat, Sergeant Broussard riding him every step of the way. Mostly Booger had learned to roll with the punches. He could never imagine a scenario when some bloodthirsty foreigner would be trying to gouge his heart out of his chest. And now here it was happening, only the foreigners were camp kids.
If not for the pain, he might have laughed it all off. Blood gushed down his chest, saturating his shirt, sticking it to his fat rolls.
He squeezed the small cast-iron handle. His hand was slippery with sweat. The two boys panted and made awful chuffing sounds, snorting bulls readying to attack.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” Delphus stood in the doorway. “Smells like burnt pancakes.”
The two kids turned toward Delphus. Their heads cocked like animals contemplating how to proceed.
“Them boys ain’t right,” Booger said. The flashlight was a foot away on the floor, shining out toward Delphus. Booger snatched it up quickly. The boys didn’t run, although their heads swiveled warily from one man to another.
“Nothing ‘round here been right for a long while now,” Delphus said. “Which of you messed with my dog?”
Booger played the beam over the boys. Their eyes wobbled, unfocused, glowing bloodshot red. He moved to the side to get a better angle—on the floor, the third kid was like a hog on the slaughterhouse floor, a gaping wound splitting open his face and neck like somebody was sectioning him into tenderloin and bacon.
The kid with the cleaver chuckled and raised the blade at Delphus.
“Now, just hold on,” he said. “You been smoking wacky tobaccy. You ain’t in your right mind.”
The kid grinned, stepped closer. His bare foot slapped on the floor. The other stepped forward and to the side. Like they were working together. Like a pack of hyenas. Hunting.
Delphus pointed at the kid on the floor and tried to calm the kids down. “That feller there. I’m sure he had it coming. No judge in the land would hold it against you.”
Booger started backing up toward the rear exit. “They don’t hear you. They gone crazy.”
The kid who had attacked him turned toward Booger again. Blood poured from his ruined shoulder. Booger raised the skillet.
“What you going to do with that?” Delphus asked. “Fry ‘em some bacon and eggs?”
“Where’s your shotgun? I thought all you crotchety hillbillies carried shotguns.”
“We got the law here. Let the sheriff do the shootin’.”
The kid with the cleaver was a few feet from Delphus and now the other one bent down and picked up a rolling pin. Booger stepped back. Bloody gruel slipped from the kid’s mouth and plopped on the floor. His eyes glittered in the weak light.
Boot camp had also taught Booger about retreating, although Sergeant Broussard always called it “reorganizing to assess changes in circumstance.” “We better, uh, get—”
Booger stepped back and his foot went right into a soup pot. The rounded metal snagged his foot and when he tried to twist it free, he managed to wedge it even worse and something strained in his ankle.
He thunked backwards, slipped, and fell. The kid was on him immediately, the rolling pin held high over Booger’s face.
“Holy hoo-hah, Delphus, do some—”
The rolling pin came down toward his face. Booger’s last thought wasMy gold tooth, my gold tooth, won’t be chewing no steak for a while.
And later, though that word lost all meaning for him:Biscuits, gotta save the biscuits.
Then he had no more rational thoughts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mark was dead, but Jenny was handling it pretty well considering the situation. She covered him with a blanket and wiped her eyes. The sheriff stood next to her with Eva Dean on his other side.
“So, you think it was one of the boys?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said. “I thought something was following me in the woods . . . it must have got Mar
k.”
The sheriff went to the open door. “You ladies stay here and I’ll handle this.”
“You going to leave us here without a weapon?” Eva Dean asked.
The sheriff pointed at the bow and arrow on the bed and rubbed his face, indicating the close shave Jenny had given him. “That ought to stop anything that moves. Besides, it’s not like you’re holding off an army.”
“So, Ranger Rick,” Eva Dean said, nodding down at Mark, “what do you think did that? Alvin and the Chipmunks?”
“You’ll be safe in here. Lock the door behind me.”
“What about Daddy?”
“Is he still a registered Republican?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?”
“No sweat, then. I got him covered.” He grinned and stepped out. He shut the door behind him.
Eva Dean put an arm around Jenny. She tried to be tough but after a moment, Jenny dropped her head on Eva Dean’s shoulder.
Eva Dean was both frightened and depressed. This camp had been her vision, a way to cover the tax bills while using the Fraley land to help others. They’d considered a private game preserve but Daddy was firm that he didn’t want any big-city bankers prowling his land on weekends, especially ones with weapons. They could have sold off timber rights but that was just a stopgap, and Daddy didn’t want to be looking at scrub lands instead of forest.
Now, it didn’t look like they would have to worry about it. Even assuming they survived whatever animal was out there prowling for blood, they would lose the land after they got sued for wrongful death and a million other things.
But all that was a minor worry. Right now she had to protect her kids.
She hugged Jenny. “Did you do bed checks tonight?”
Jenny shook her head. Her tears had dried and she now seemed more shocked than frightened. “No, Mark and I were…”