Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories

by Bryan Smith

  Rather than proceeding directly into the clearing, he hesitated, lurking behind a tree as he scanned the area for signs of the campers. He still believed he was likely to find these people welcoming and friendly, but it was probably smart to proceed with a bit of caution. The music was coming from an old-fashioned boombox placed within a few feet of the smoldering campfire. It made sense that a bunch of traveling hippies would listen to their music on such an archaic device. In Travis’s experience, his people were often not up-to-date on the latest technology and gadgets. Such things were expensive and hippies rarely had the money to spend on them. What money they had was mostly spent on gasoline, food, and weed.

  As he continued to observe, however, he began to feel slightly wary. He’d been standing there a few minutes without catching sight of any of the campers. Either they were in their tents or they were out walking around in the woods. Which begged the question of why music was playing on the boombox with no one around. He guessed it was possible most of them were still asleep in their tents while the one person who’d been jamming the tunes had wandered off into the woods for a few minutes to take a leak or a shit.

  A plausible explanation, for sure. The best course of action might be to wait around until that person returned before stepping into the clearing and announcing his presence. Otherwise he’d risk startling the people in the tents. So he stayed behind the tree and waited a while longer.

  Maybe ten more minutes passed before he started getting antsy. There was still no sign of anyone in the vicinity. He was starting to think about how much time had passed since he’d left the road. It was getting close to a solid half-hour. Maybe not enough time yet for the dead to catch up with him, but enough to close the distance significantly. If these people didn’t show up soon, he might be forced to head back to the road. Otherwise he ran the risk of having that avenue of escape cut off, trapping him out here in the woods with no idea of an alternate way out.

  He waited a couple minutes longer, his frustration mounting until an impulse caused him to step out from behind the tree and tentatively enter the clearing. Out in the open now, he craned his head around, still scanning the area for signs of anyone at all. Once again, he saw nothing but the surrounding trees and the stillness of the seemingly empty clearing. He was less concerned now with the possibility of disturbing anyone who might be in the tents. The time for being considerate had come and gone. Waking them up and alerting them to what was happening was for their benefit as much as his own.

  He was within several feet of the campfire by the time he was able to get a look inside one of the open tent flaps. His brow furrowed in confusion when he saw it was completely empty. No sleeping bags or other camping supplies whatsoever. This initially struck him as only slightly odd, but then he moved on to the other tents and found them empty as well.

  After staring into the last of the empty tents for nearly a full minute, he retreated to the center of the clearing, where he stopped and took another look around. By then the truth was impossible to deny. No one else was here. He began to feel deeply unsettled. The music playing in the middle of nowhere with no one around to listen to it felt off and wrong.

  It felt fucking strange.

  The eeriness of the situation made him think of the stories he’d heard of large groups of people who went mysteriously missing with no explanation. The lost colony of Roanoke and the vanished crew of the Mary Celeste. In the case of the latter, the ship was found adrift with its cargo intact and the crew’s belongings still on board and undisturbed. Neither mystery had ever been definitively solved as far as Travis knew.

  Could this be a similar situation?

  He thought about it a moment and decided it wasn’t likely. There was a real threat out there, but it had nothing to do with ancient mysteries or other flights of the imagination. He had no clue where these people had gone, but there was a rational explanation, he was sure of that. He decided to take one last stab at establishing contact. If nothing came of it inside of about a minute, he’d hurry back out to the road and pray he hadn’t lingered here too long.

  He knelt and hit the stop button on the boombox, cutting off “Friend of the Devil” mid-song. After taking a moment to clear his throat, he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to the unseen campers. “Hello! Is there anyone out there?”

  Some moments passed.

  Travis again craned his head around and scanned the entire perimeter of the clearing. Yet again, he saw nothing. And no response came from the missing campers. He was ready to give up, but he decided to give it one more try.

  “Hello! If you’re out there, please show yourself. Something terrible happened at the music festival and we all need to evacuate the area as soon as possible. I’m fucking serious here. This is a life and death situation.”

  He fell silent and waited a beat.

  Just when he was sure he’d have to give up and head back for the road, he heard a crunching sound. Someone out there in the woods, just beyond the line of trees from the sound of it, had stepped on a stick. He held his breath a moment, waiting for someone to appear.

  When someone finally did emerge from the woods and enter the clearing, his mouth dropped open in surprise, because this person was not at all what he’d been expecting. Pretty much the exact opposite, in fact.

  The man who approached him was a tall and bearded beast with bushy brown hair. In addition to being tall, he was hugely fat. He wore dirty denim overalls, and a Miller High Life baseball cap sat perched atop his head at a crooked angle. His beard was not the well-kempt and groomed type associated with hipsters. It was scraggly and there were bits of what might be food in it. A toothpick was wedged into a corner of his mouth. Most disconcertingly of all, a double-barreled shotgun was propped over his right shoulder. His eyes had the dead-eyed look of a dedicated meth user and his smile was not at all friendly.

  Every instinct Travis had told him to immediately turn tail and flee back into the woods before this walking redneck cliché forced him into some act of horrifying backwoods perversity. It was what he wanted more than anything just then, but he felt rooted to the spot, unable to move, barely able to think.

  His mind tried to rationalize the situation as the man came closer. He told himself the fear he was feeling was a product of unfair and shameful stereotypes. This man didn’t really mean him any harm. What he had to do here was stay calm and try to warn the man about the approaching dead horde.

  He’d just opened his mouth to attempt that very thing when more people stepped out of the woods and came into the clearing. There were three more of them now. Two more men and a young woman. The other men were dressed almost identically in flannel shirts, dirty jeans, and boots. Both flannel shirt guys carried bolt-action rifles.

  The woman was smaller and much skinnier than her male counterparts. Her tight jeans were ripped and frayed in numerous places, allowing for what would’ve been tantalizing glimpses of creamy smooth flesh under other circumstances. She wore a dark blue mechanic’s work shirt with the name Darlene stitched on a patch above her left breast. Black hair framed a pale, almost pretty face devoid of makeup. The black ballcap she wore was adorned with a confederate battle flag patch. The smile she showed Travis when he looked at her revealed multiple missing teeth. He guessed she was in her early twenties, younger than her friends by several years at least. Unlike the others, she was not carrying a gun.

  Travis trembled as he realized they’d formed a circle around him. The circle was slowly tightening as they moved steadily closer. It hit him with sudden, undeniable clarity that these people would absolutely kill him if he didn’t somehow get away. And they might well do a lot worse than just kill him first.

  The woman laughed. “Got another one to take a bait.”

  The others laughed, too.

  The man in the overalls sneered and reached down to scratch his balls through the denim.

  One of the flannel shirt guys said, “Works every time. Ain’t a hippie alive can resist
the Grateful Dead.”

  The other flannel shirt guy said, “This keeps up, we’ll have enough meat stored away to last us the rest of the year.”

  Overalls guy made a deep, rumbling sound that might have been a kind of guttural laughter. He was still fiddling with his balls in a way that was increasingly seeming less like the scratching of an itch and more like something far more sinister and upsetting. “Gonna have to tenderize that shit first, though. Tenderize it real good.”

  Darlene was closer than the rest of them, just a few feet away now. She smirked and looked Travis up and down. “Look how bad the sumbitch is shaking. We’re gonna have some fun with this one.”

  Travis felt on the verge of fainting.

  Then he felt a flicker of anger and a new resolve.

  Goddammit, he hadn’t spent the morning outrunning a horde of fucking zombies just to wind up getting gang-violated by a bunch of hillbilly freaks. He turned in the general direction of the road and bolted, but before he could get beyond the circle of rednecks, the stock of a rifle cracked against the side of his head and knocked him to the ground.

  He felt woozy as he looked up and saw Darlene standing directly over him. “You ain’t goin’ anywhere, you dirty fuckin’ hippie. This party’s just getting started.”

  She hocked up a wad of saliva and spat it in his face.

  Then she stomped a boot down on his head, causing the world to first go gray and then turn black.

  SIX

  BACKSTAGE PERSONNEL AND BANDS PLAYING the festival that weekend were not spared the ravages of Delight, with the drug circulating as widely behind the scenes as it did among attendees. Members of nearly all bands present that first day tried the drug, along with many members of their road crews and entourages. A positive initial buzz led to a high level of interest. It was reputed to be a feel-good party drug that wouldn’t inhibit the ability of musicians to play or crew members to do their jobs. In the early stages, this description struck most indulging as accurate, but the detrimental effects of Delight did not begin to take hold until after the last band finished playing that night.

  Inside a fenced-off compound housing dozens of trailers and buses, access was limited only to those with the proper credentials. This was where artists and assorted hangers-on were able to relax and hang out without being hassled by fans. The party vibe in the compound was just as wild as the debauched indulgences of festival attendees. In the first few hours of the festival, Oscar Perez personally witnessed no fewer than a dozen sex acts being performed right out in the open, with no one at all batting an eye. Hot girls in hot pants glided around on roller skates carrying trays with piles of cocaine and plastic bowls filled with various pills. The whole scene was like something straight out of the decadent 70s. It could not have been more at odds with the peace and love and progressive hippie message the festival endorsed in all its public marketing, but virtually no one in the compound appeared to have any qualms with this apparent contradiction.

  The contrast was interesting, to say the least. The young people who’d come from all around to see this thing were all about weed. A lot of them also loved ecstasy and consciousness-expanding psychedelics. From what Oscar had observed at past jam band festivals, they were decidedly not into things like cocaine and meth. These were the drugs of aggression and toxic behavior. They were not viewed favorably by most in attendance. Behind the scenes, however, so many of the musicians they admired appeared to love coke above all other substances. He wondered how disillusioned the attendees would be if they could see what was happening backstage.

  About that, he was not sure. He’d covered a number of similar events in recent years and what he was seeing here wasn’t common. Oh, you always saw a few people doing little bumps of coke at these things, but nothing on this scale. It struck him as being something unique to this particular event. He couldn’t help wondering if perhaps the organizers were also drug traffickers on the side. Or maybe the drugs were the main thing and the festival was nothing more than a gigantic money-laundering endeavor.

  Or maybe he was just getting really cynical the closer he got to turning thirty.

  Oscar was not a musician and was not here as part of anyone’s crew or entourage. He was a journalist covering the festival for Pitchfork. On countless occasions since arriving at the festival and getting his compound pass, he was offered the opportunity to sample the various substances going around. Sometimes it was the roller skate girls offering him a taste. Other times members of the bands would do it right in the middle of an interview. Numerous other reporters at the festival enthusiastically accepted these offers, but Oscar declined every time. He wasn’t above having a good time now and then, but he took his job seriously. He was here to gather substantial material for a nuanced and in-depth piece about all aspects of the festival and he meant to do precisely that.

  Of course, the piece would need a fair amount of sugarcoating to be publishable. He could tell the general truth about the backstage decadence, but not the full truth. Some of the more famous band members would have to be referred to anonymously, with the exception of those who gave him express permission to use their names. Not that it mattered, because most reasonably astute readers would be able to infer identities from certain telling details the article would include. His phone was packed with outrageous photos of stars engaged in all manner of illicit activities. Some of the more interesting ones would surely stir massive levels of controversy if ever released to the public, which wasn’t going to happen. He had too much integrity for that. Nor would his publisher allow it, in the highly unlikely event he submitted them for publication. It wasn’t like he was working for TMZ, after all.

  He was sitting at a table in the compound nursing a beer while reviewing the hundreds of festival photos he’d taken when he first noted indications of things going wrong on a widescale level. It took longer than it probably should’ve, but for a time he was too deeply engrossed in the process of deciding which photos to delete and which ones to transfer to a password-protected album online later on. He’d deleted somewhere around one-hundred photos when he began to perceive sounds of people in distress.

  Frowning as he looked up from his phone, he took a look around and saw people huddled together and crying at various locations throughout the compound. Some were wailing on their knees in a way that made him think of extreme displays of bereavement at funerals. He’d never seen such a thing in real life, but he’d seen portrayals of it often in movies. These were displays of grief of some kind, he had no doubt.

  That it was happening on such a widespread level got his journalistic instincts buzzing. He didn’t yet know what this was in response to, but he could think of some obvious possible reasons. Right up at the top of this list was the possibility that someone at the festival had died. And to provoke an outpouring like this, it’d probably have to be someone important or famous. There were a lot of big bands at the festival. Maybe a singer or some other musician had OD’d. With the abundant supply of potent drugs floating around, this certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

  Gears in his mind were turning fast as he began to envision a very different kind of article from the one he’d originally planned. The reconfigured article would be more in the vein of a devastating expose. If this thing turned into a debacle on the scale of the Fyre festival—or even close to that—he could have his hands on something big here. Something that could make him famous or even lead to a high-profile gig with a major media TV outlet.

  He decided he was done deleting photos. There would be no deferring to celebrity anonymity in the kind of blistering expose he was beginning to compose in his head. Nothing would be off the table, including even the most outrageous of all the photos he’d taken. Even the ones he’d deleted weren’t irretrievably lost. They were sitting in his “recently deleted” folder. Thinking fast, he went to that folder and immediately restored all the deleted ones to the main photo album.

  Next he opened his news app and scrolled t
hrough the headlines to see if any early word of the apparent festival tragedy had leaked out to the media. A big grin spread across his face when he saw nothing about the festival. A quick search of Google also failed to yield results. His grin got bigger. He was right on top of this thing, but he needed to start shifting into investigative mode right now because he had a lot of colleagues here who were probably all thinking the same thing.

  He just needed to try one last online search before he got up and started asking questions. There was information he needed that might not be easily accessible via Google. He decided to hit up LexisNexis to see if he could quickly dredge up any legal dirt on the festival’s organizers, but there was a problem—he was no longer getting a signal.

  That was weird.

  New cell towers had been erected nearby prior to the first year of the festival precisely for this reason, to facilitate better service and connections to the outside world. This was the middle of nowhere, basically, at least as close as you could get to that in the heart of America. With the amount of people converging on the place over the weekend, the ability to communicate with the larger world in the event of an emergency was crucial. And until now he’d had no service problems at all. His phone had shown four bars of strong signal strength from the moment he’d arrived, but now all he was getting was a “no service” message.

  He stood up and moved away from the table, holding his phone up in the air and turning it this way and that in an increasingly frantic effort to get a signal. Even one weak bar would suffice, but nothing he tried worked. In desperation, he found a ladder, climbed atop a trailer, and again held his phone aloft, once again to no avail. By then he’d noticed other people trying similar tactics. Judging from their reactions, no one else was having any luck either.