by Derek Slaton
“Well I really didn’t care where we were staying, since I usually end up passing out in random spots anyway,” Jake drawled, leaning against the bumper of the van. “The odds of me ending up in my own bed at the end of the night is about the same as me passing a piss test for a job. Or putting in an application for that matter.” He paused, trying to remember what he’d been saying. “Oh, anyway, I just chilled in the van while y’all were talking.”
Pete recovered from the defibrillation of his heart from Jake startling him. “Hey man, you want to give me a hand with the bags?” he asked.
Jake grinned and shook his head. “Nah man, I think I’m gonna go hit the lake.”
“No worries. Just a heads up though, I’m pretty sure your sister is getting ready to go skinny dipping,” Pete teased.
“Eh, I’ve seen worse,” Jake replied as he stumbled towards the path.
Pete pulled out the last of the bags and shook his head. “Don’t want to know.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Ritchie emerged from the woods about the same time Edgar did, both of them stopping dead in their tracks when they took notice of the beauty before them. Heather and Marie stood no more than ten yards away, their porcelain skin radiating in the light from the low hanging sun.
“Enjoy the show,” Edgar said and ripped his clothes off before running towards the girls. When they got a glimpse of the nearly naked Edgar, the nubile goddesses screamed and laughed and ran towards the water.
Ritchie stood motionless, mesmerized like a toddler sitting three feet from a television set. His moment of bliss was broken when Cooper popped up behind him and delivered a light cup check.
“Hey now, are you looking at my chick or his dick?” the blonde teased as his victim doubled over from the love tap to his junk. “Nah never mind, there’s not a good answer in there for you.”
Ritchie’s nostrils flared as Cooper stripped down on his way to join the others. Deep down he wanted nothing more than to pick up the nearest rock and crack open the guy’s skull. Before that could happen, however, he needed to sit down and recover from the nut shot. As he rocked back and forth and took deep breaths, his anger subsided a bit as he watched the woman of his dreams pop out of the water, giving him an ever so brief glimpse of those luscious Ds.
Daphne got to the end of the trail and took a moment to admire the scenery. Between class and volleyball she hadn’t had much of an opportunity to get out and enjoy nature. She wanted to savor the moment.
“Hey Daphne,” Ritchie squeaked out, pain still resonating in his body.
“Ritchie, are you okay?” Daphne asked as she sat down next to him. “What happened?”
“That asshole Cooper happened,” he groaned, and sat up with a wince. “He hit me in the nuts because I was checking out Heather. I mean, I just don’t get it. Why would a beautiful goddess like her want to be with a dick bag like him?”
Daphne struggled to come up with an adequate answer, but the thought of walking home if Ritchie left got her to dig deep. “Well a lot of girls go through a bad boy phase. She’s just young and naive, and having a good time. When she gets a little older and a little wiser then she’ll go for a nice guy.”
“A nice guy like me?” he asked.
“You never know Ritchie, you never know,” she replied, and gently patted his shoulder.
“Damn Ritchie, this place kicks ass,” Jake said as he stumbled by the duo.
They watched in amusement as he staggered to the short pier that extended a good ten feet off the shore, holding their breath every time it appeared as though he was going to take a header into the lake. He got to the end and was somehow able to find a seat at the edge, plunking his legs into the water and staring straight down into it.
“Hey you look familiar man, where do I know you from?” Jake slurred, smiling at his reflection.
“Say what you will about Jake, but he appears to get some incredible stuff,” Ritchie said before focusing his attention back on the foursome in the lake. He hoped to catch another glimpse of his forbidden fruit.
Daphne scanned the lake, admiring the beauty of the setting sun reflecting in the water. As she stared out something caught her attention from the corner of her eye. Turning her head quickly she saw a large figure about seventy yards away peeking out from the tree line. As she got up, the figure quickly darted out of sight.
“Ritchie, is there anything around here? Anybody live in the area?” she asked, panic in her voice.
Ritchie startled. “Huh? Oh, no we’re alone for about ten miles, and honestly probably further than that since the camps in the area are closed for the season.”
“I…I just saw someone in the woods.” she stammered.
Ritchie only paid half attention to her, still squinting at the glistening bodies in the water. “You just saw a deer, calm down.”
“I saw someone looking at us!” Daphne screeched, getting the attention of everyone in the water. “Now are we alone or not?”
Ritchie was taken aback by her mini-freakout. “Daphne it’s okay, we really are alone up here.”
“Man, what the fuck did you do to her?” Cooper demanded, stepping in between the two.
Ritchie put his hands up. “Nothing man, she just freaked out when she saw a deer!”
“It wasn’t a deer, it was a person!” Daphne insisted.
The other three swimmers scrambled to wrap towels around themselves to prevent Ritchie from passing out.
“It’s okay Daphne,” Heather said, putting her arm around her frazzled friend. “What did you see?”
“I saw a large man down there, he was staring at us from the tree line,” the brunette said, pointing at the spot, “then he vanished when he noticed me.”
“Hon it’s okay, it was probably just a pervert wanting to get a look at the goods,” Marie said as she joined them.
“Yeah well, we already got one of them,” Cooper said as he smacked Ritchie in the back of the head. “Come on, let’s get back to the house. Don’t worry girl, we’ll be all right there.”
Daphne nodded as the group gathered their belongings and moved up the trail.
“Hey Jake, come on man, story time at the fire pit!” Marie yelled over her shoulder.
“Dude man, great talking to you. I’ll be back a little later and we can keep chatting,” Jake said to his reflection as he followed the group. Just before reaching the trail he noticed a large figure staring at him from the tree line. He shook his head before continuing his trek. “Man this really is some good shit.”
CHAPTER SIX
Pete stoked the fire, creating a massive blaze that illuminate a twenty foot radius even though the sun hadn’t fully set for the evening. He perked up when he heard the group approaching. “It’s about time y’all got back. If you stayed any later you would have been finding your way back by moonlight.”
“Yo Pete, get over here man,” Edgar yelled as soon as he and Cooper came through the trees.
Upon seeing Heather and Marie supporting Daphne, Pete dropped the stick he’d been holding and ran to them. “My god, Daph, are you okay?”
“Yeah, she just got a little freaked out, that’s all,” Heather said as they handed her off to her boyfriend.
“There was a man in the woods staring at us,” she murmured as she wrapped her arms around him.
“It’s okay baby, you’re safe now. Come on, let’s get you warmed up by the fire,” Pete said, causing Daphne to stop in her tracks. “Y’all go ahead, we’ll be over in a second.” He waved at their friends.
“Pete, I wanna go home,” she hissed.
He gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “Baby we’re okay. There are eight of us here, we’re all together in a big house.”
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. “Pete, please!”
“Daphne, we’re safe here,” he assured her. “You’re surrounded by friends, and more importantly, you have me to protect you. Remember, you were brilliant enough to pick me, so you know deep down you p
icked me for a reason?” He lightly tickled her ribcage, and she cracked a smile. “There’s my girl.”
“I’m sorry,” she sniffed, blinking away her tears. “I didn’t mean to freak out there. It’s just, ever since my mom…”
“Daphne,” he interrupted and gently raised her chin so their gazes met. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
She grasped his collar and drew him in for a kiss.
“Whooo! Get a room you two!” Cooper catcalled from the fire.
The couple’s kiss dissolved into laughter and Pete took her hand.
“Come on Daphne,” he said, “I’m pretty sure there’s a burger and a beer with your name on it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Pete, where in the hell did you learn how to grill a burger like this?” Edgar mumbled around a mouthful of cheeseburger. “This is nothing short of amazing.”
“My boy Pete there learned at the foot of the master,” Cooper declared.
“Oh please man, you don’t know how to cook no burger. Hell you can barely make cereal,” Edgar scoffed.
“Nah man, not me. Although it is good to know that I’m the first thing you think of when you hear master,” Cooper retorted, eliciting a playful middle finger from Edgar. “Pete’s daddy had a pretty good sized livestock farm back home. Every Sunday after church they’d have this big ole cookout for everybody.”
“That’s right, my dad has this fifteen foot pit and he’d fill it up and grill for hours till nobody could eat another bite. Those were great days, but football season was the best though,” Pete said.
Cooper nodded. “Oh, you ain’t kidding. Every time we’d win a game he’d celebrate by smoking a full pig.”
“Didn’t that get expensive?” Daphne asked after swallowing a mouthful of beer.
Pete chuckled. “Well luckily for my Pops, the team wasn’t very good.”
“Mother fucker I was the quarterback!” Cooper shouted.
“Then you should have known just how bad you sucked,” Pete teased.
“He’s got you there babe,” Heather said as she rubbed her boyfriend’s shoulder. She could tell he was getting perturbed, and hoped that some caressing would extinguish his short fuse.
“So Ritchie,” Edgar said as he popped the top of another beer, “Now that we are all fed and on our way to being sufficiently inebriated, why don’t you enlighten us to the history of Camp Barlow?”
“Yeah I haven’t heard this, what’s the story there Rich?” Cooper asked as he motioned for Edgar to toss him another brew.
“Guys, I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Pete cut in.
“Babe, it’s okay.” She squeezed his hand tightly. “I’ll be fine, because I know I have you here to protect me.” She offered a smile and he kissed her temple affectionately.
“Okay, so is everybody ready for story time?” Ritchie asked, and received grumbles of impatience in return. “Alright, alright, well this story isn’t for the faint of heart which is why I wanted to make sure everybody was on board. Jake, did I hear a yes from you?”
Jake lay just outside the circle people, feet propped up on a rock, a hat pulled over his eyes, and a half eaten burger resting gently on his chest. “Just doin my own thing, brother,” he said. “You do you, I’m just along for the ride.”
“Alrighty then, here we go.” Ritchie leaned forward so that the light from the fire fully illuminated his pasty face. “The year was nineteen seventy-six, and Camp Barlow was in their fifth year of operation. The owner and his wife were really big into fostering children. It broke their hearts to know that they couldn’t take in all the kids who needed parents, so they did the next best thing and started the camp. This was a place that was exclusive to orphans, so if you had parents then no summer fun for you.”
“Well unless your parents took you to Disneyland,” Cooper cut in.
“Or the movies,” Marie added.
“Or the beach,” Heather chimed in.
“Okay, okay, you get the point about the camp,” Ritchie scowled. “So ten years ago, one of the camp counselors just snapped. Nobody knows what caused it, if he was off his meds, or he caught his girlfriend cheating, or if the kids just drove him over the edge.”
“I can totally understand how children can drive someone to kill,” Heather said.
Marie gaped. “I thought you were studying to be a teacher?”
Heather shrugged. “That’s just because I want summers off.”
“Ladies, do you mind? I’d like to find out what the crazy cracka did after he snapped,” Edgar said.
“How do you know he’s a white guy?” Pete raised an eyebrow.
Edgar snorted. “Dude it was Texas in the seventies, if there was even a single white child there they weren’t letting a brotha watch them unsupervised.”
“Edgar’s right, the crazed counselor was a white kid by the name of Andy Carpenter,” Ritchie said as he took back control of the conversation. “According to the official police report, just after meal time he went out to the storage shed, grabbed the biggest axe he could find, and paid a visit to the counselors cleaning up in the kitchen. One by one, he hacked them to death. And when the axe stopped working for him he picked up whatever he could. Red hot pokers, butcher knives, you name it. If it could inflict pain, he was putting it to them. And when the final counselor dropped, he turned his attention to the kids.”
“Jesus, he killed the kids too?” Edgar grimaced as he downed the rest of his beer in a vain attempt to rid himself of the mental image.
“There were two bunkhouses that had kids,” Ritchie continued, “twenty-two children tucked tightly into their beds. Eleven of them went quickly when Andy chained the door shut and set the building on fire. When the kids in the other building heard their friends screaming, they ran outside, only to be met with a gruesome demise.
“All but one. Fourteen year old Buddy Bagwell. This kid was a beast too, over six feet tall and two hundred pounds. Unfortunately his brain broke a few years prior. When he was eleven, his parents were murdered in front of him, and ever since that day he never spoke a word, only laughing creepily when the mood suited him.”
“Poor kid,” Marie said, eyes wide. “How did he survive? Hide until the cops arrived and took out the killer counselor?”
“No, see, this is where the story gets interesting,” Ritchie said as he motioned for Edgar to toss him a beer. His dark-skinned guest was so enthralled with the story that he complied without question. “The first officer on the scene arrived to find the fire raging and everyone in sight a mangled corpse. The only sound he heard was a child laughing. He tracked it to the back room of the house and found Buddy Bagwell, playing with the severed head of Andy Carpenter.”
The group, save for Jake, erupted into a chorus of disgusted noises.
Ritchie held up his hands to calm the rabble. “Now, the official story is that Andy Carpenter killed everyone, and that Buddy acted in self defense. But if you ask the original investigators they will swear up and down that Buddy was the one who decimated the camp.”
“Wait, why would they cover that up though?” Pete asked.
“They had a lot of respect for the owners of the camp, and they knew if they blamed it on a kid they brought in that it would destroy them both publicly and privately. So they pinned everything on the counselor since he had a criminal record and was only on site because the head counselor hired him without the owner’s knowledge,” Ritchie explained.
“What about Buddy though?” Heather asked. “If he killed all those people then why did they let him go?”
Ritchie leaned forward. “The police had that covered. He was a ward of the state, and given the trauma he had been through and the mental state he was in, they had Buddy committed to the Bastrop Asylum for the mentally insane. Couple of backroom deals later and they knew he’d be locked up for good, especially since nobody was going to come looking for him and demanding his release.”
Heather gasped. “Bastrop Asylum? Didn
’t that place just burn down a few months ago?”
“Right you are my dear, it did burn down. And if you go back and ask the detectives who are in the know, they’ll tell you Buddy Bagwell did it so he could come back to the only place he felt like home. Camp Barlow!” Ritchie bellowed with wide eyes, and waved his hands around.
“Dude that’s enough,” Pete snapped.
“You’re not scared, are you, Pete?” the storyteller teased as he rode his brief moment of popularity.
