by Aaron Niz
“Is there any blood on it?” Tyler says.
I look closely. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why did you have this in your bag, dude?” I ask Reyes.
“Why are you going through my stuff?”
“We were looking for weapons we could use,” Neil says.
“Who told you it was okay to just go through people’s things?” Hetridge replies.
He’s got yet another beer in hand.
“We said we were going to scour the house for weapons.”
“Well, you found one,” Reyes says. “Glad I could help.”
“Why didn’t you mention this knife was in your bag when we needed weapons to give to the brothers who left on the search party?” Tyler asks him.
Reyes shrugs, still smiling. “Must’ve forgot I had it.”
“You’re a dick,” Tyler says.
Stutty’s face is beet red. “How do we know you didn’t use that knife on Eli?
Maybe you’re the one who’s doing all this shit!”
“Calm down, Stut.” Randall grabs him by the arm as Stutty lunges at Reyes.
Reyes just giggles. “Aren’t you out of my weight class? Not to mention old enough to be my dad.”
“Fuck you! Fucking killer!”
Stutty has lost it. Spittle flies from his mouth. His eyes are all white.
After a few minutes, Stutty calms down. We sit him on the couch and Randall stays beside him, whispering in his ear. I don’t know what he’s saying but it seems to be keeping him relaxed.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Reyes says. “Not that I’d mind it if I have the chance.”
“What does that mean?”
Hetridge tosses his crumpled beer can on the floor. “It means that if someone is coming after us, he’s willing to do what needs to be done. Same as me.” I heft the bowie knife in my hand and look at the serrated edge. “Well, I’m holding onto this knife.”
“Fine.” Reyes shrugs. “Do you want some of my underwear too? You and Neil can swap them. I know you’re into that sort of stuff.”
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Reyes doesn’t respond. His smirk widens somewhat, like a class clown getting under the teacher’s skin.
“This is a serious situation,” I lecture, dropping further into my role as Reyes’
stuffy teacher. “Don’t you get it? Someone died and you’re acting like a goddamn idiot.”
“I’m just being myself.”
“Maybe you could try and think about someone else for a change.”
“You be you, Gabe. Being self righteous seems to work for you.”
“You’re such a fucking punk,” I say, breaking down. I can feel heat spreading over my face, prickling my skin.
“Everyone calm the hell down,” Tyler yells. “What we need to do now is stay put, in this room, and set up for a few lookout shifts through the night.”
“Agreed.”
“Count me out,” Hetridge replies, and goes downstairs. Reyes follows him, still grinning like the kid who got kicked out of class and doesn’t really care.
Randall takes another long drag from his cigarette and becomes philosophical.
“Seems like Hetridge needs to be in control of everything. This situation is driving him crazy because he’s out of control.”
Vinnie stares at Randall. “Holy shit. That’s actually pretty deep.” Randall nods as if to say, of course it’s deep. As if everything he thinks and says is profound.
“Well, regardless—we need to start organizing to defend ourselves. What’s the best room for us to stay in tonight?” I ask.
“Maybe in here,” Tyler says. “Access to the stairs, to the front and back door, but we stay in one room and set up people with weapons at each entrance.”
“A bedroom might be better,” Neil says. If someone tries to come in through the doorway, we’ll hack their fucking arms off.”
Vinnie peers over the bannister leading downstairs. “But we’re sitting ducks in one of the bedrooms. If someone comes in, we’re stuck, no place to run. What if they have a machine gun and just start unloading rounds on us?”
“Okay, we’ll stay right here in the living room area,” I say. “Set up a watch post at the back deck and the front door. We’ll each do an hour shift through the night.
That’s seven hours to account for.”
I’m still holding Reyes’s hunting knife in my hand. It gleams dully in the lamplight. I wonder if at some point soon I’m going to have to use it.
***
It’s late night and I’ve just woken from a restless sleep.
For a moment I wasn’t even sure where I was. The room is dim, but we kept one light on so that we can still see.
Vinnie is guarding the back deck and Neil is guarding the front door. There’s the sliding door in the basement too, but that’s where Eli’s body is located and nobody wanted to do be near him.
Anybody trying to break in through the sliding glass door downstairs should be seen by whoever’s looking out the back deck.
All of these details go through my exhausted mind as I sit up and try to shake off the cobwebs. Everyone else in the room is asleep. Tyler’s lying on the couch, mouth open, snoring. His snores get progressively louder until he makes a slight choking noise, stirs, changes position. And then all is quiet for a moment before he starts snoring again.
Randall is splayed out on the floor.
Stutty is in a recliner, snoring.
The nervousness instantly comes back into my stomach, the tension, anxiety. It’s still night. Barely an hour has gone by since I dozed off and it won’t be light again for what feels like ages.
I tell myself everything is fine. Maybe the “search party” we sent out earlier got lost, but eventually they’ll find their way to safety. It’s just beyond belief that someone out in the woods is waiting and killing people as they leave the cabin.
I stand up and my knees crack.
I stretch my arms. There’s a crick in my neck. I feel like I’m missing something, but what? Looking around the room, it dawns on me that the hunting knife I was carrying is gone.
My first instinct is to yell, to wake everyone up. Why someone would have taken that knife unless they were planning to use it?
Then I consider that there could be a valid reason for the disappearance. Perhaps someone heard a suspicious noise and grabbed the knife just in case. I walk out through the kitchen to the back deck, where Vinnie is standing. He’s carrying a hammer in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“Vinnie,” I call, just loud enough to get his attention.
He jumps and turns to me. His eyes are huge and frightened. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just woke up. My knife is gone.”
His eyebrows rise. “Someone stole it?”
“You didn’t take it, did you?”
He holds the hammer up for me to see. “Does this look like a knife to you?”
“Do you think Neil might have taken it?”
“Ask Neil. I have no idea.” He sighs and turns back to watching the woods.
“Have you heard anything, seen anything at all?” Vinnie just shakes his head. “No. But being out here gives me the fucking creeps. I can feel that there’s something out there, man. Know what I mean?”
“Unfortunately, yeah, I do.” I head through the kitchen back to the stairs down to the front of the cabin.
I find Neil standing watch at the landing by the front door. It’s pretty dark with just the light from the hallway in the basement cascading out to the stairs. He’s got the door open and he’s holding an old wooden baseball bat like it’s a cane, resting the wide part of it near his foot.
“Yo, Neil,” I hiss.
He doesn’t even turn his head.
“NEIL,” I say, louder this time.
Still no reaction. Christ, I think. This is the guy we have guarding the door to
our house. He can’t hear a damn thing.
I tap his shoulder and he spins.
When he sees me, a look of relief spreads across his face. Then, tentatively, his usual grin. “Come to watch the scenery?”
“Not exactly. You didn’t take my knife or anything, did you?” The grin fades. He shakes his head. “You think someone stole it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Where’s Reyes?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Hetridge?” Neil says. “I saw him going upstairs a little while ago.
We didn’t talk.”
“Was he drinking?”
“Huh?”
I guess he’s having trouble reading my lips in the dark. “Forget it.” I clap Neil on the shoulder. “Take it easy, I’ll be back in a minute.” I walk the rest of the way downstairs and peek in the bedrooms. Nobody’s in either of them. Now I look down the hallways towards the basement where Eli’s dead body lies just out of sight.
Shit, I don’t want to go in there. Not in the middle of the night. Just looking down the hallway is enough to send shivers up and down my spine.
And what if someone’s sneaking around inside the house?
What if the killer is here—what if it’s Hetridge? I try to wrack my brain and think back to how and when we found Eli. Could Hetridge have somehow killed him?
But then what about Diggler and the other brothers that left and never came back or sent help?
I don’t think Hetridge killed all those brothers on his own.
Maybe they’re not dead. Maybe they just got lost in the woods. We’re surrounded by miles and miles of woods and we just assumed they’d be able to find their way to the main road and a pay phone. In the dark, if they strayed off the path…anything could have happened to them.
But I know it’s not true.
There are people out there in the woods right now who intend on killing all of us.
In my heart, in my bones, I’m sure of it.
Despite my rising anxiety, I force myself to walk down the hallway. Before I even reach the room where Eli’s body lies, I can smell him. It’s a deeply rotten scent, and unmistakable. Reminds me of that time a few years back when I opened the trunk of my car after accidentally leaving a McDonalds Big Mac in it for two weeks in July.
My stomach lurches and I pull my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth.
I can smell my own sweat as I breathe inside my shirt, but at least I don’t smell that disgusting odor of death anymore.
Finally I turn the corner in the basement. The light was never turned on, so the only illumination comes from the moonlight filtering in through the sliding glass door.
Which just so happens to have been left open.
I freeze where I’m standing. As my eyes adjust to the room, I’m fairly certain no one’s lurking in here. There’s just Eli, lying exactly where we left him. The floor beneath him is black. Those tiles used to be white, I think, and my stomach gurgles sickly at the thought.
“God, Eli,” I whisper. It seems criminal to have just left him alone. But nobody wanted to stay down here with the body and I can’t say I blame them for refusing. Lord knows I didn’t volunteer for that gig.
It’s bad enough that Eli’s dead, but this room feels unsafe.
I avoid the body and tiptoe to the door, which I intend to close and lock.
Just as I’m about to slide it shut, I hear something outside. Footsteps.
My breath catches in my chest. A shadow appears in front of the sliding glass door. Whoever’s out there must see me. And I don’t have a weapon in my hands. I don’t have anything to defend myself.
I start to back up and forget that Eli’s body is behind me. My right foot slips in the still wet blood and I tumble onto the floor. My hand slaps cold, dead flesh.
“Shit!”
As I scramble to get up and run, the figure outside moves closer and I can finally see who it is.
“Fucking Hetridge,” I whisper. “You asshole.”
He’s carrying my hunting knife in one hand. His eyes are dark and focused on me. “What the hell are you doing down here, Gabe?”
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“You stole my knife.”
He laughs and then looks over his shoulder out the back door. “Borrowed the knife. And it isn’t yours, it’s Reyes’s.”
I get up and try to ignore the slimy wet blood soaking through my pants and shirt.
Eli’s blood. “Where were you just now?”
“I found them.”
“Who?”
“The motherfuckers that killed Eli. They’re in the woods, right back there, hanging out and laughing it up. Like they’re tailgating at Gillette Stadium or something.
The only thing missing is the hamburgers and sausages.” I peer out into the blackness. “I don’t see anything.”
“Come with me, I’ll show you. They’re camped about two or three hundred yards from our cabin. There’s probably three or four of them. Maybe a few more, I’m not sure.”
“I’m not going out there.”
“We need to get them,” he says, and there’s an intensity in his eyes that I’ve never seen before. He’s a competitive runner—he’s done more than thirty Triathlons--and maybe that’s the part of him that I’m seeing now. Not the happy-go-lucky binge drinking frat boy, but the guy who runs and swims and bikes miles and miles, pushing his body to its very limits. “We’re going to fucking get them,” he says again.
“I don’t know about this. Let’s take a second to discuss.”
“We need to wake everyone up. Round them up. Now.” Hetridge may have totally lost his mind. He looks completely insane right now.
And he’s brandishing a large hunting knife in my general direction.
“Okay, man. Calm down.”
“Calm down? You want to wait for them to come here and slaughter us like they did the others?”
“We don’t know what happened to the others.”
Hetridge shuts the back door and locks it. “Gabe, get your head out of your ass.
They’re dead, just like Eli. Look at Eli’s head, dude. Someone stabbed our brother—my friend—in the head. And they did the same thing to everyone else who tried to leave the cabin.”
“And you saw them outside? You’re sure it isn’t some random campers?”
“I’m not going to keep doing this.” He brushes past me and I follow him down the hallway. “Everyone wake the fuck up!” He screams.
As we go upstairs, Neil looks at us. “What’s going on?”
“Come on, follow me,” Hetridge says. “Fall in line.” I give Neil a look that lets him know Hetridge has gone rogue. Totally bonkers.
Neil starts climbing the stairs right behind me.
“He has your knife,” Neil whispers in my ear.
“Good catch. I hadn’t noticed until you mentioned it,” I tell him, but he misses my obvious sarcasm.
By the time we arrive upstairs, brothers are roused and waiting for us, their faces pale and apprehensive.
“I found them,” Hetridge announces breathlessly. “I found the people that killed our brothers and they’re going to kill us all if we don’t do something right away.”
“He thinks he might have seen a group of people just a few hundred yards from our cabin,” I tell everyone.
Hetridge turns on me. “I don’t think I saw them. I know I saw them.” Vinnie takes a step back. “I didn’t see anybody out there and I’ve been watching all night.”
“You couldn’t have been looking very hard then,” Hetridge replies. “I walked into the woods through the backyard. Maybe you fell asleep.” Vinnie mutters under his breath but doesn’t fire back.
Hetridge looks at each of the brothers in turn. “Get something to fight with. Get it now and come with me. I’ll go alone if I have to, but I’m not sitting here waiting to get murdered in my sleep.”
My insides are churning with fear and adrenali
ne. “Now hold on. We need to think this through.”
Hetridge glares at me. “You want all of us to get killed just so you don’t have to go outside in the dark?”
“The brothers voted me to lead us through this and someone needs to stay calm.” Randall steps in between us, sensing the rising tensions.
“Get out of my way,” Hetridge warns him.
“Stop freaking out.”
“I’m fine.” Hetridge shakes Randall off. “I’m fucking calm. But I’m going out there. You all going to let me do it on my own?” He waits for someone to say something.
“Tell us who you saw,” Stutty says. His face looks like a blob of old clay.
“Three or four guys, in the woods. Scoping our cabin. I heard them joking around about shooting fish in a barrel.”
“And you just want to run out there and start hacking away at them with our kitchen knives and hammers?” Vinnie asks. “What if they’re just random campers and we kill innocent people?”
Hetridge stares at him with something approaching pure hatred. “Yeah, random campers sitting twenty yards from our cabin, talking about how easy we are to murder.
Makes a lot of sense.”
“You’re worked up,” Tyler tells him.
“Yeah, I’m worked up. They killed my friends.”
“Maybe you imagined some of it or misheard.”
“Fuck. You.” Hetridge pushes past the brothers and heads downstairs. Nobody follows him.
“Is he seriously going out there by himself?” Stutty whimpers. His obvious display of weakness makes me kind of sick and disgusted. Maybe because it reminds me of myself.
“So what next?” Randall asks nobody in particular, fiddling with a new cigarette.
“We’ve got to stop him,” Tyler says. “We can’t let him go into the woods and try and fight a bunch of crazy dudes on his own.”
I fold my arms. “If people are out there—and that’s a big if—I don’t think we should try to fight them in the woods at night. The plan was to wait until morning.”
“What if they attack us first?” Vinnie asks.
“This was your idea, Vinnie. Wait until daylight so we can see what the hell is going on. Remember?”
“We need to go with him,” Stutty says, but he doesn’t sound enthusiastic about it.
“No. We wait until morning as planned,” I reply. “That’s the decision.” Vinnie and Randall are staring down at the floor, their eyes concerned and confused. Neil and Tyler are watching me as if I’ve changed into someone they don’t recognize. Stutty is on the brink of tears. And Reyes…
