The Truth Circle

by Cameron Ayers

  “Dude, you don’t have to suppress it,” Lamar coaxed. “It’s okay to be ‘out’ nowadays.”

  “No,” Coop replied quietly, pulling away.

  “It is,” Lamar insisted. “In many circles, it’s considered a plus. Like, ‘Look at how progressive I am, I’ve got gay friends!’”

  “Stop.”

  Lamar pressed onward, refusing to heed Coop’s warning.

  “I mean, you can’t control who you love,” he insisted with a chuckle to reinforce how obvious it was.

  “Yes, you can!” Coop practically screamed, his face contorted in anguish as he leapt to his feet and confronted Lamar. “Some of us have no choice!”

  Lamar sat there in stunned silence, shocked by Coop’s outburst. Faint chirping noises could be heard in the distance.

  Coop sighed and sat down again, struggling to regain his composure.

  “His name was Johnny,” he said after a few moments of awkward silence. “He was the boy next door … literally. He used to come over and play all the time.”

  “A childhood friend,” Lamar mused, nodding empathetically.

  “He was curious about, well, everything,” Coop continued. “One day, I showed him some videos. He didn’t understand so I … I …”

  “So you demonstrated?” Lamar offered.

  Coop nodded.

  “I convinced myself that it was love,” he said, putting his hand over his mouth as he tried to rein in his emotions. “Even when he asked me to stop, I just couldn’t. I thought I could win him over.”

  Coop took a deep breath and then continued.

  “After a while, he stopped coming over. Then he began acting out at school and home. Three guesses why that was. His parents shipped him off to juvie.”

  Lamar nodded for him to continue.

  “I heard the older boys there abused him,” Coop said, his voice wavering in emotion. “He was victimized all over again. He couldn’t take it, so one night he slit his wrists. That perfect, beautiful angel would still be alive today if it weren’t for me!” Coop sobbed, his condensed breath coming out in short, ragged bursts.

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Lamar said, trying to sound comforting as he put his arm around Coop. “You were just a kid.”

  “No, no, no! You don’t understand!” Coop insisted, pulling away. “He was 12. I was 25!”

  Lamar froze as he tried to process this. His eyes suddenly went wide with realization.

  “You mean, you’re … one of …”

  “Just say it,” Coop said with a sigh of resignation.

  “A pedophile,” Lamar said in a hushed whisper.

  “I’m a convicted sex offender,” Coop replied bitterly, fairly spitting out the words.

  Lamar found himself unconsciously inching away from Coop, and had to will himself to remain in place.

  “That picture isn’t a memento of first love,” Coop explained. “I look at it every night to remind me of the life I destroyed. Of the childhood I stole. He was so innocent, and I robbed him of that innocence!” he wailed, pounding the rotted log with his fist.

  Beside him, Lamar struggled with his own emotions, trying to reconcile this new, disturbing side of Coop with the steadfast companion he’d come to know and rely on over the past five days. While this revelation explained many of the small mysteries surrounding Coop, it didn’t make the knowledge any easier.

  “So that’s why you wore the ankle monitor.”

  “A thousand feet,” Coop replied. “That’s as close as I can come to any school without setting it off. I had to get special permission from my P.O. for this trip.”

  As they talked, Lamar felt as if he’d reached a spiritual crossroads of sorts. One was the path of moral outrage, and the other the road to compassion. He had no idea which one to take.

  “Is that why you came here?” he asked, buying time while he tried to decide. “To control those urges?”

  Coop sniffled and looked up at the night sky wistfully.

  “This, and every ashram with decent online reviews,” he said. “I keep hoping that if I find the right path, if I settle on the correct mantra, I can … stop being what I am. That’s what I do day and night: pray the pedo away.”

  That settled it for Lamar. Societal expectations be damned, he’d made his choice.

  Lamar slowly put his hand on Coop’s back, patting it comfortingly.

  “And I take it nothing’s worked.”

  Coop shook his head.

  “So why is all this coming up now?”

  “Last night, when everyone was trapped in the teepee and we were all convinced we’d die, all I could think of was Johnny,” Coop explained, between sniffles. “The thought of seeing him again … it scared me. Not just the dying part, but having to own up to what I did. How do you atone for something like that?”

  Coop hid his watering eyes in embarrassment.

  “It happened again when I leapt on the fire, only this time … after everything we’ve been through today …”

  Coop paused a beat to compose himself before continuing.

  “I felt like … part of me welcomed death, even felt grateful, like I was looking forward to it.”

  Coop fell forward, sobbing on Lamar’s pudgy shoulder.

  “I wanted to die! I really wanted to die!” he burst out crying as the floodgates on his emotions opened wide.

  Lamar put his arms around him, unsure what to say as Coop sobbed in his arms, his breath coming in heaving, wrenching gasps between the tears.

  “I want to die!” Coop screamed in anguish. “I want to die!”

  Lamar held him fast, rocking his crying friend back and forth as he watched the sun’s last rays disappear beneath the horizon.

  * * * * * *

  “No, I told, you to lock the spindle in place!”

  “I can’t see anything. Bring the light closer.”

  “You’re only rotating it in one direction. Spin it back and forth.”

  Gaby hovered over Ken as he furiously worked John’s bow drill in the wigwam’s central firepit, shining the flashlight on his work and instructing him as he struggled to get a friction fire started.

  Ken gritted his teeth as he sawed the bow back and forth on a rotating spindle that was slowly boring a small groove into a fireboard. As Ken’s hand movements sped up, the friction between the spindle and the board produced friction heat and small wisps of smoke, but not the spark they needed so desperately to ignite the tinder in a small notch of the fireboard.

  In the distance, the chirping of the iku was growing stronger and sharper, a cacophony of tens of thousands of voices as night gradually enveloped the forest. It was already pitch black within the wigwam, save for the flashlight trained on Ken’s hands. The outer bands of light revealed Beverly, passed out on her bedroll, oblivious to their increasingly desperate circumstances.

  “Pull it closer,” Gaby instructed. “You’re making more work for yourself by keeping it at arm’s length.”

  Ken stopped working the bow and glared at Gaby.

  “If you’re such an expert, why don’t you do it?” he groused, the agitation evident in his voice.

  In reply, Gaby held up her injured left hand, which she’d bandaged with one of Beverly’s scarves. Ken rolled his eyes and got back to work.

  But lingering in the air between them was the unspoken fear that neither of them could make it work. Until now, Gaby had been the only one to even try using the bow drill, and that was four days ago. And despite operating it in the middle of the afternoon, with no pressure and under John’s expert tutelage, her efforts had ended in abject failure. Now they had to do it on their own, in the dark, with legions of otherworldly creatures barreling down on them, ready to do God knows what to them.

  The door to the wigwam creaked open behind them. Gaby whirled around in panic, shining the light on the intruders. In the flashlight’s glow, Coop’s red curls bounced into view as he ducked to fit in the narrow entrance, his hand shielding his eyes from the sudde
n assault of bright light. Behind him came Lamar, who closed the door tightly behind him.

  Gaby relaxed and lowered the light. The pair both looked out of breath, as though they’d been running.

  “Where the hell have you two been?” Ken greeted the pair in his characteristically caustic fashion before either could say a word. “We’re busting our butts to get a fire going, while you two pop off to give each other tea and sympathy handjobs!”

  “Those things are on our heels!” Lamar warned, ignoring Ken’s jibe. “We’ve got maybe two minutes.”

  Everyone paused to listen. It sounded like the iku were right on top of them. Ken cursed under his breath and redoubled his efforts.

  Coop fretted as Lamar started to tie off the upper and lower enclosures to the door. In the peripheral glow of the flashlight, Gaby could see that Coop’s eyes were red and puffy, like he’d been crying.

  “No, don’t tie it off,” Gaby said.

  Lamar stopped mid-knot and looked at her like she was mental.

  “Someone needs to stall them until we have a fire going.”

  “I know you’re not talking about me!” Lamar exclaimed, horrified by Gaby’s suggestion.

  “I’m not saying you have to sacrifice yourself,” Gaby insisted. “Just distract them!”

  “But we have the flashlight for that,” Lamar pointed out. “We’ll just do what we did last night.”

  Gaby opened her mouth to answer, but Ken interjected.

  “Will you bring that light over here? I can’t see a damn thing!” he barked.

  Gaby shrugged.

  “The light’s spoken for,” she said simply as she turned the beam toward Ken.

  “So what am I supposed to use if there’s no light?” Lamar protested.

  “How about your B.O.?” Ken sneered between gritted teeth as he furiously sawed with the fire bow. “One whiff of your pits should insta-kill those little fuckers!”

  Lamar shook his head in disgust rather than engage with Ken.

  “Hang on,” Coop said as he headed for the rummage pile on the opposite end of the wigwam, where they’d discarded all the knickknacks salvaged from the former storage shed. After a few seconds of digging through the pile, he came up with lava rocks, the ones John had used during the purification ceremony on their first night.

  “Throw these,” he said, handing him six rocks.

  Lamar took a deep breath before grabbing hold of the door handle.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered to himself before pushing the small door outward and poking his head out cautiously.

  A gust of wind blew through the opening in the fence line, hitting Lamar with a blast of shockingly cold air that made him wince. He squinted, trying to see in the dark as he nervously clutched one of the lava rocks.

  The moon was high in the sky but largely obscured by overhead clouds. And the night was filled with shrill chirping, like they were about to be invaded by millions of mutant crickets. Lamar forced himself to breathe slowly and steadily.

  Inside, he could hear Gaby and Ken squabbling over their progress.

  “Here’s the problem,” Gaby said. “Your jerking motion pulled the fireboard away from the leaves. There has to be something to catch the spark.”

  “I would have gotten it working ages ago if you’d stop butting in,” Ken protested.

  “Just give it here,” Gaby insisted.

  Lamar shivered in the cold, his exhalations rising into the night sky in a slow, uniform fashion. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he could just make out the shriveled hedges on the opposite side of camp.

  “See?” he heard Gaby saying with a note of self-satisfaction in her voice. “Now we’re getting some real smoke.”

  “Just hurry up and get the fire started,” Ken replied sourly. “You can pat yourself on the back if we survive this.”

  Lamar concentrated on the hedges. It looked like they were starting to sway ever so slightly. His puffs of heated breath began coming faster now as his pulse quickened.

  “Why aren’t we seeing a spark?” Ken complained from inside.

  “Move the light closer,” Gaby instructed him. “No, that’s in my eyes!”

  The hedges were clearly moving now, undulating wildly, even though the wind had died down. The moon came out from behind a cloud momentarily, bathing the campsite in an eerie glow that revealed the iku swarming the perimeter in piles of heaving masses three feet high. It looked like millions of them.

  Lamar’s breaths were now coming in short, panicked bursts.

  “Uhhh, guys,” he called out. “They’re here.”

  “You hear that?” Ken asked Gaby. “Hurry up!”

  “Stow it!” she shot back. “You couldn’t do this even with two good hands!”

  Lamar watched as the creatures spilled over into the campsite, crashing down upon the central firepit in a wave of inky, writhing bodies. The chirping was getting louder and more incessant. Lamar clutched the lava rock in his palm so tightly that he started to lose feeling in his fingers. He retreated a couple of steps into the wigwam, until only his head and his hands were peeking out of the entrance. The moon went behind another cloud, and darkness consumed the landscape.

  Lamar looked to and fro, struggling to see anything. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it would leap out of his chest. He struggled to catch his breath, and some part of him dimly realized he was hyperventilating. He saw motion just in front of the fence line, not 10 feet away. He steeled himself, reared back and threw the lava rock in the general direction of the invaders.

  The moon came out of hiding just in time for Lamar to watch the igneous stone sailing end over end toward the gap in the fence. The mass of creatures swarming just outside the entrance suddenly stopped chirping. They split ranks clear down the middle, moving as if they were one, leaving a gaping hole of ash-covered dirt where the lava rock landed with a muffled thud, kicking up a small cloud of dust that shone eerily in the moonlight.

  The silence was suffocating. It was so quiet Lamar could hear Gaby furiously sawing back and forth on the fire bow.

  The iku re-formed ranks and inspected the rock, probing it for a moment or two, as if trying to decide whether it was a threat. Lamar heard a single chirp. Then another, and another.

  Suddenly the night was filled with their cries, and the iku pressed forward.

  Lamar shrieked and leapt back inside, slamming the door behind him. He struggled to fasten the ties, his fingers shaking too much to obey him. All he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat jackhammering in his ears as panic seized him in its icy grip.

  “They’re right outside!” Lamar said, his voice cracking in anxiety. “How’s the fire coming?”

  “It’s not fast food! It’ll be done when it’s done!” Gaby snapped, grimacing in pain as she used her injured left hand to hold the spindle in place while her right feverishly worked the bow.

  Through the haze of smoke Gaby was generating, Lamar could see blood oozing from beneath her makeshift bandage, staining the top of the spindle a dull red. Ken kept the flashlight trained on Gaby’s work, but his eyes repeatedly flitted toward the canvas walls, which were beginning to bulge inward against the lattice frame near the door.

  Coop grabbed the small wood hatchet and held it at the ready, as though that would do anything to deter the creatures if they made it in.

  The bulging at the base of the teepee started to spread as the creatures surrounded the structure and began trying to force their way inside, chirping incessantly. The siege had begun.

  “C’mon, you almost got it,” Ken coached Gaby, even though his eyes were glued to the swelling sides of their canvas cocoon.

  “Watch the shadows,” Lamar cautioned the others, though it was hardly necessary, as all eyes except for Gaby’s were scanning the dark outer ring of the wigwam for any signs of movement. “If they squirm under the flaps like last time, we’re going to need that flashlight.”

  “Nearly there, j
ust a little more,” Ken coaxed Gaby, who was grunting in pain. Sweat was starting to roll down her face, and her right hand felt like it was about to fall off.

  Lamar scrunched his eyes as he stared into the shadows. He could have sworn he saw … there it was again. Movement.

  “They’re inside,” he warned the others.

  “Keep going, keeping going,” Ken coached.

  Inky tendrils swayed to and fro in a darkened section to the left of the door. They grew and massed until they eclipsed the shadows. Lamar held his breath. The black mass started to move inward.

  Lamar snatched the flashlight from Ken’s nerveless fingers and trained its beam on the moving mass, which started smoking and juddering uncontrollably, as though it were in its death throes, before vanishing. He spun the beam around, aiming it at another shadowy mass several feet from Coop, which met the same fate. The iku outside chirped furiously. He started to slowly spin in a circle near the center of the wigwam, training the moving light on the base of the wigwam.

  As before, everywhere the light touched, the bulging ceased. Lamar spun faster, trying to keep pace with the relentless iku.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Coop said unconvincingly. He lowered the hatchet and exhaled slowly.

  “How’re we doing, Gaby?” Ken asked.

  “I think I’ve got something,” Gaby said, redoubling her efforts as smoke started to pour from the leaves beside the fireboard.

  As Ken started to relax, he noticed movement along the canvas walls several feet above the base, much higher than the creatures had ventured the night before.

  “Lamarrrr,” he intoned.

  “I see it, I see it,” Lamar insisted, noticing movement out of the corner of his eyes at varying heights along their canvas border. The iku were climbing. He suddenly found he had a lot more surface area to cover as the iku wormed their way up the exterior of the wigwam.

  Shuffling noises could be heard above the chirping din as the iku slithered against the fake animal skins on the wigwam’s exterior. Anywhere the light wasn’t touching, they kept climbing. Knee level, waist level, eye level.

  Lamar shined his light to and fro wildly as his pulse quickened, not sure where to point the beam, as the canvas seemed to be bulging inward from all sides and heights. Everywhere he aimed the beam the iku quickly pulled back, but resumed climbing as soon as the beam moved. The others could see that despite Lamar’s best efforts, he couldn’t keep up. It was simply a matter of time.