“Are you kidding me?” he said, imitating her as he slurred his words. “There wasn’t supposed to be some guy killing everybody, either!”
His compatriots all laughed at this and continued their horse-play, girls and boys alike. Cindy just stared at them, disgusted. As she started to move away, David came galloping out of the water and onto the beach next to her, looking a little sobered.
“Hey, hey – I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he half-meant it. “I know this is serious, but we all figured if we stuck together, we’ll be okay.”
Cindy hesitated, not wanting to judge these kids as she knew she wasn’t exactly handling the situation with aplomb.
“No, I get it,” she admitted. “Just, keep everybody from drowning themselves. And keep an eye on the woods. And come in before dark. And don’t do anything stupid...”
Cindy was running out of clichés. David smiled and leaned in close.
“You’re more than welcome to join us,” he said, placing his hand on her side before moving it around to her backside. “If this is Armageddon, we plan on having a bit of a blow-out tonight. That’s the beauty of it. We do whatever we want and he kills us, guess what? That’s absolution. You heard Father Billy – we’d be martyrs and go to Heaven anyway. Isn’t that God giving us a free pass?”
David’s gaze held Cindy’s for a moment as she stared back, momentarily unsure how to answer this.
But then, his grip tightened and he moved closer. His hand wandered around to her stomach, slipped into her shorts and moved all the way down to her pubic hair, which he grazed with his finger tips.
“What do you say, Cindy?” he asked quietly.
Cindy wanted to punch him, call for Father Billy to kick him out of camp, file a police report — even laugh in his face as she had done that morning. But, of course, that was “before.”
Now, she was just embarrassed. She turned bright red and grabbed his wrist, trying to pull his hand out of her shorts, but she didn’t have the strength.
“Don’t...” she said quietly.
When he shoved his fingers back in and, this time, lower, she straightened up, tears now welling in her eyes.
“You can tell me all you want that you’re not enjoying this, but your body’s telling me something completely different...”
“Don’t!” she cried, slapping weakly at his hand.
This time, David looked startled and removed his hand.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
Without another word, Cindy walked away from the lake’s edge and circled back towards the mess hall, the one place she knew she could lock herself in. It only took her a few minutes to get there, but she was in tears before she got two steps away from her would-be molester. By the time she was inside the kitchen, her body was wracked with sobs and she went to hide in the walk-in refrigerator.
“Oh, God,” she whispered to herself as the tears flowed. “Oh, God...”
Cold as it was, she knew that no one would look for her there and she could be alone in her misery.
In Cabin 2, Mark was all packed by the time Phil came back in from The Rocks.
“We ready?”
Phil shook his head “no” and flopped down on his bunk.
“I fucked it up again. Faith isn’t coming. She doesn’t believe me about Father Billy.”
“Well, that’s not your problem,” Mark shrugged. “You tried. But this is about survival. Let’s go.”
Phil laid back on his bunk, staring at the ceiling. He was scared of the woods, sure, frightened of staying behind, too, but the thing that was really burning behind his eyes was the fear that, if he did nothing, Faith would be murdered. He believed this with such fervor that he was almost shaking and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I can’t go,” Phil finally announced. “I can’t go unless we take Faith. If something happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m not leaving.”
Mark stared at Phil, incredulous.
“You’d rather die than leave without her?”
Phil thought about this for a moment, but then nodded.
“I guess so. Yeah.”
Mark looked around the cabin, coming around to a feeling of acceptance, and then dropped back down on his own bunk.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You take another shot with her tomorrow, third time’s a charm and all that, and I’ll stick around for one more night locked in here. If she doesn’t want to go then, though, you’ll come with me and we’ll get out of here together. If you promise me that, I’ll wait for Faith, too.”
“Agreed,” Phil replied.
Amy Rossmo, Shane Druitt, Paula Elliott and Bret Wimberly, all seventeen and juniors in high school, had taken up a pattern of double-dating since Bret, the oldest of the four, had gotten his driver’s license a full fourteen weeks before the next oldest, Amy, got hers. Bret and Shane had been best friends since they were eight and on the same soccer team. Paula and Amy were best friends because their boyfriends were. They all figured that, after graduating the coming year, they’d all be going to Texas A&M together and might even share an apartment after a year of living apart in the dorms. After that, they supposed a double wedding was in their future followed by a move to either Houston or even Austin just to try it out (not San Antonio, they’d agreed after a particularly un-fun road trip) and then their kids would all grow up to be friends and they’d eventually grow old and die.
It was like a pact and when one of the four seemed to be straying, it was up to the other three to rope them back in. Through a number of arguments, semi-breakups and even a round of cheating (Bret with Paula’s cousin), the plan was still very much on.
But when Father Billy had announced that the Devil was among them at Camp Easley and taking the faithful, it didn’t take long for Shane to come to the same conclusion as Mark.
“We’re out of here. Now!” he’d announced and had three quick takers.
All four were in pretty good shape; Bret and Shane were on swim team, Amy and Paula were on the drill team and all four were avid hikers. They knew that others would come around to the idea of hoofing it out of camp, but, as Bret stated, whoever “did it first” had the best shot.
So, they’d all returned to their cabins, emptied out their bags, collected food (Bret was able to grab a few pre-packaged, trail mix-type foods in the melee of the kitchen) and water to take on the trek and met back at the teaching amphitheater. Shane knew this part of the state well as his grandfather lived in Longview and suggested that if they couldn’t get a ride out on the highway, they should have enough food or water to at least make it to the closest city in either direction or, more importantly, the closest police station.
Nobody liked the idea of stopping until they were completely out of harm’s way.
They’d moved so quickly with their preparations that it was only about an hour after Father Billy’s speech that they were ready to go. Once at the atrium, they said a prayer, said their “A-men’s” and then walked into the forest, heading in a westerly direction.
They decided that rather than take the road itself, they’d shadow it from just within the woods as they wouldn’t be as exposed and couldn’t be seen from too far away. They thought that might have been what did in George and the others.
At first, they were giddy and scared, jumping at every snapping twig and hurrying along, much faster than they’d meant to, tiring themselves out so petrified were they that the Devil could be around any tree. Twenty minutes in, however, having seen absolutely nothing, they began to relax, thinking the killer was off somewhere else and they just might be home free.
They’d been gone a whole hour by the time they smelled it, a heavy, acrid stench wafting in from up ahead.
“What the hell is that?!” Paula asked, scrunching her nose.
“Smells like massive road kill,” replied Shane, shaking his head. “Like a deer...”
“... or five,” Bret chimed in. Everybody laughed.
They kept moving
through the thicket, the smell getting greater and greater as if they were walking straight towards it. Shane wondered aloud if there were “big cats” in the area that might have brought down a deer or something, but no one lent that theory much credence.
It was Amy who saw the bodies first.
“Oh, my God!!”
Everyone turned to look. When Paula had followed Amy’s gaze all the way to the objects of her panic, she screamed at the top of her lungs.
The bodies of George, Colby, Constance and the four other campers who had died on the road were just a few feet up ahead of them in a small clearing near the side of the road. They’d been stripped completely naked, their bodies already nibbled on by a variety of forest creatures. Eyes and testicles were the most obvious missing parts, but inroads had been made elsewhere as well.
George looked the worst, his head almost completely severed, barely hanging on to the rest of his body by thin strips of flesh dangling around a ragged neck wound.
The most startling thing, though, was that they weren’t lying on the ground or stacked as Becca had suggested the first four victims had been. Instead, each had been raised up in what looked like a crude parody of the crucifixion; seven bodies on seven short, crudely-made crosses, the feet of each corpse hanging only inches off the ground, the heads all bowing forward, looking straight down at the ground as if gazing all the way to Hell.
“Oh, my God...” whispered Bret, suddenly sounding much younger than seventeen. “Shane, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Shane nodded and turned around, coming face-to-face with a man clad in a black Nomex suit, bandages wrapped around his face, black weightlifting gloves on his hands and a small patch at the top of his skull completely shaved away. The man raised a large steel spike and drove it directly into Shane’s face with such force that it immediately cratered his nose and upper jaw, shattering his cheekbones at the same time. Shane was dead before his attacker let the body fall to the ground.
“You fuck!” Bret screamed.
Bret launched himself at the man, who, in a single, sweeping motion, turned and stabbed the oncoming 17 year-old in the breastbone with a second spike before driving a third into his ear, puncturing his brain.
The man then turned and faced off against Amy and Paula.
“Oh, God, no...,” Amy whispered to Paula, still having a hard time grasping the situation, as she backed up into the crucified body of Constance.
That’s when they realized the bodies were actually a sort of fence, constructed on the more tree-heavy side of the road. What’s more, it meant that she and Paula were trapped.
“Can we at least pray?” begged Paula, dropping to her knees before the killer. “Before you kill me? Just let me pray...”
The man pulled the spike out of Shane’s face and, without a word, stabbed Paula directly in the stomach. She rolled over, gasping for breath. The man then grabbed Amy by the hair, dragged her screaming over to Bret’s body, removed the spike that had been in his head and drove it through her throat, much as he had done with George.
“Gnh,” was all Amy managed to say as the spike was then torn out, decapitating her. Quickly, she died.
Paula, still alive, but bleeding all over the underbrush from her wound, was trying to crawl away as quickly as she could, tears streaming from her eyes. Finished with her three friends, the man walked over to Paula, rolled her over and yanked the spike out of her stomach.
“No...,” she whispered, gently shaking her head.
“I thought you were going to pray,” the man said.
Paula turned her gaze upwards at the man, momentarily confused, and he drove the spike downwards into her left eye with such force that it blasted through the back of her skull. The pressure drove the tip out of her head and into the ground now below it, blood and brains sluicing down the mail into the earth where it quickly muddied the dirt.
VII
Leilani had planned to wait until college to lose her virginity or, more accurately, the night of her senior prom. She had imagined it as a magical moment in a large, beautiful bed, probably not her own, but maybe in a luxury hotel somewhere, hopefully near a beach. She’d heard of seniors pooling their money and renting houses down around Galveston or even Corpus Christi on prom weekend and liked that idea quite a bit, but thought she’d like the five-hour straight shot to Galveston better than the eight or nine-plus hour drive to Port Aransas, Mustang Island or any of the other beach spots further down the Gulf, though they’d likely be more secluded.
That seemed romantic, so if the actual act was as painful and as much of a letdown as everyone said, at least she’d be somewhere beautiful. Despite having made out with a few boys at church camp here and there, even letting some of them feel her up, she never remotely considered that as a suitable location to have sex for the first time and cross that bridge into womanhood.
But, that’s what happened.
Going even more against the fantasy, she never thought it would happen in the lake, in front of about two dozen people, her hands gripping the dock and her mouth full of vomit, either.
She’d been drinking about as heavily as everyone else and a couple of guys had been intermittently kissing her. She played them against each other, kissing each back and had even noticed the hard-on’s in their wet shorts as everyone splashed around them in the lake. When one maneuvered her over to the dock, she wasn’t so drunk to not know what was coming next and she quickly reached back and grabbed his erection, as if to inform him who had the upper hand. Instead of being dissuaded, the next thing she knew, her bikini bottoms were being gruffly yanked down by the senior who, a second later, was easing his penis inside her from behind.
She’d gasped at the feeling, more from outrage than pain, but then it kind of dulled out as he humped it further into her. He made a couple of drunken grabs for her hips to steady himself and she eventually reached back and took his hand, planting it firmly on her ass to help him along. It seemed to her that most of her peers thought they were just fooling around, making a spectacle of themselves, but as the water sloshed to this side or that and revealed, indeed, they were doing the deed, gasps and incredulous laughter erupted from the group. Leilani twisted around and saw their faces, clocking hungry, jealous looks from the boys, shock and vitriolic judgment from the girls. This made her smile, albeit drunkenly, happy to have provided even more shock on a day already full of such events.
Tim (she’d finally remembered his name) “finished” after a long few minutes, the alcohol playing hell with his erection, and stepped back, red-faced and out of breath as his hard-on withered. As he quickly hiked up his trunks, Leilani turned around, exposing herself from the front now as she tried to collect herself. Rather than slink away to assess any physical or mental damage, however, she glanced at the mortified girls staring at her privates and coyly spread aside her bikini top, revealing her breasts. She then looked around at the other boys with a big smile on her face.
“That can’t be all you guys have, can it?”
Sitting in the walk-in refrigerator, Cindy found herself praying, the act she’d just been so incredulous over Father Billy suggesting as a course of action. She hadn’t prayed for real in awhile, but could remember the first time she had and the first time she had prayed and been denied. She’d been in second grade and there had been a raffle at her elementary school for two large stuffed animals, a pink horse and a pink teddy bear, though she couldn’t remember what for. She’d prayed and prayed and prayed that she’d win and when she didn’t, she asked her mother why God hadn’t made it happen. Her mother brushed her off by saying that that wasn’t the kind of thing you were supposed to pray for (the winners were twin sisters whose mother, the president of the PTA, had bought up more than half the tickets to guarantee the win) and left it at that.
Since then, Cindy was far more judicious with her prayers, but even when it came to things you were “supposed” to pray for – serious illness in the family, life questions, issues of fait
h – she never felt any kind of answer that she wasn’t able to explain away as something she was already considering or could’ve found her way to anyway. Because of this, the last time she’d prayed not in church or with a group might’ve been five or six years ago now.
But here she was, silently praying for her life and the lives of her fellow campers. When she was very little, she’d always been able to imagine God listening on high, but not responding for one reason or another that she’d then try and puzzle out. This time, she found it impossible to imagine Him there at all, each silent, prayerful word her lips mouthed feeling more insignificant and useless than the last.
“I just don’t understand how Phil can believe that,” Faith told Maia.
They were seated at the water’s edge where Faith was filling her in on Phil and Mark’s theory, a couple hundred yards from where David, Leilani and their clan were now mostly passed out by the dock, their mid-day revelry winding down.
“It’s crazy, right?”
Maia remained silent, however, not offering an immediate response. She turned and stared out at the water and Faith thought she might actually be considering the plausibility of Mark’s theory.
“Right...?” Faith pressed.
“I’m thinking,” Maia retorted, sounding perturbed, enough that Faith shut up.
Finally, she turned, a resigned look on her face.
“I don’t think it matters.”
“What do you mean?” asked Faith, surprised.
“I don’t think it matters who it is – Father Billy, the Devil, some crazy man in the woods, one of the other campers, the result is the same,” Maia explained. “If we’re fated to die out here, we’re going to die. If we’re not, we’re not. It’s as simple as that.”
Faith fell silent, unsure where this was going.
“And if there’s anything I do know, it’s that you can’t change fate,” Maia continued. “Mark may be right in that the way to survive is to leave the camp.”
“But if we go into the woods, we’ll be killed!” Faith protested.
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