Camp Slaughter

by Sergio Gomez

  “We should get the fuck out of here,” Vanessa said, chewing on the nail of her index finger.

  “No,” Gavin said, stepping in front of the group. “We have as much right to be here as they do.”

  “Gav, what’re you doing?” Fred asked. “This is no time to be stubborn.”

  “Shut up, Fredster.”

  Gavin took a few more steps toward the pair of strangers.

  Less than twenty yards separated the two groups now. Gavin puffed his chest out some, and then yelled out, “Hey! Who are you?”

  To his surprise, and the surprise of the others, the old man stopped in his tracks.

  Emeril sensed the fear coming from the boy—the one he was thinking of as the “leader” of the group. He could almost feel the fear in the air, and he thought of the wave that had vibrated through his body. Surely, that had something to do with his suddenly heightened perception. And more than that, there was no doubt in his mind, this camp was the cause of it.

  They were standing on grounds that had inexplicable powers. Or perhaps, grounds that awoke latent abilities in people. Emeril wasn’t sure which one it was, but that was something he would ponder later. Right now, he had to figure out who these campers were and what they were doing here.

  The leader shouted a question aggressively at them, and Emeril stopped with about twenty yards between them. The group looked like nothing more than some young adults hiking on a summer day, but with how much fear was exuding from them, he was worried they might go into attack mode at the drop of a hat.

  Better to approach them with caution.

  “Not quite the ghosts we were expecting,” Molly said.

  Emeril looked over at her. Her face—and the energy he could feel coming from her—suggested she was the same old Molly as she always was. She wasn’t experiencing anything close to what he was, which supported his second theory that these grounds were awakening something in him rather than creating them.

  “No,” Emeril said, “but even the least ferocious animal can be dangerous when threatened.”

  “Hey assholes! Did you hear me?” the leader shouted at them. At some point when they’d been talking to each other, the boy had picked up a long stick from the ground. He held it in his hands like it was a sword.

  “Please, young man. There is no need for such language and hostility,” Emeril said, taking a few steps closer.

  “Hey! Don’t move until you tell us who you are.”

  “Sure, sure,” Emeril said. “My name is Emeril Dantes. The young lady behind me is Molly Sanger. We’re filmmakers out here doing a documentary on this abandoned campground.”

  “Filmmakers?” It was Fred who asked the question.

  Gavin grimaced at him.

  Seeing the boy relaxing his posture, Emeril dared to get a little closer. “Yes, yes. As you can see, my partner has a camera with her. I assure you, we come in peace.”

  He smiled at them, and now he felt the group dynamic change. The emotion in the air went from fear and anxiety to interest and curiosity. Except for the leader, who still seemed riled up.

  “If you don’t mind,” Emeril said to them, “We would like to get closer to the camp. Perhaps at a closer distance, we can have a clearer conversation and I can better explain what we’re doing out here.”

  “I wish somebody would explain all this,” Vanessa blurted out.

  Gavin turned to her and shot her a dirty look that she ignored. There was a murmur of agreement between the group and then, to the chagrin of the leader, they were inviting Emeril and Molly to come join them at the camp.

  “Well done,” Molly said.

  “Sometimes it just takes the right words to get the job done,” Emeril said, as they started up to meet with the group.

  “What’re you guys doing?” Gavin hissed. He was pissed off at all of them, but especially Fred and Vanessa for being at the forefront of the invitation. “You guys have no idea who these creepos are.”

  “Chill out,” Fred told him. “That guy looks as threatening as my grandpa and that woman looks like a spin class instructor.”

  Gavin pushed past them. “I’m getting out of here. If it turns out those two ask you to be in some weird ass outdoor porn movie, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “No need to fret, young man,” Emeril said. He was standing at a comfortable conversation distance from the group now. “Of course, you’re free to leave if you have no interest.”

  “Damn right I’m free to leave,” Gavin said, laughing. “I didn’t need your permission, old man. Sayonara.”

  He marched toward the path they’d hiked to get here.

  “Wait, Gav!” Brooke called after him, but it was no use, he kept on going ahead as if he hadn’t heard her. To the others, Brooke said, “I’m gonna go with him—Maybe I’ll be able to convince him to come back.”

  “Don’t bother,” Fred said, knowing how stubborn Gavin was.

  “He doesn’t have the map, though. What if he gets lost?”

  “Oh well,” Fred said. “That’s on him. He’s a big boy.”

  “Jeez, that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, man,” Fletcher agreed. “Maybe we should go get him.”

  Fred clenched his hands into fists. Up until now, he hadn’t been looking at anyone directly in the face, but now he turned to look at Brooke and Fletcher. There was a rage inside of him that had been building up that he wasn’t aware of until now.

  Anger at being rejected by Noelle, anger at Gavin for being a big baby, anger at the others for wanting to bend to Gavin’s whim, anger that he wasn’t sure he’d land a job after college and he might be working at that computer shop the rest of his life, anger at the uncertainty of his future.

  But there was one more underlying factor to his anger, something he couldn’t pinpoint. Fred Meyers didn’t know this, but it was the power of these campgrounds—of Camp Slaughter—channeling through his body and twisting his emotions into a bottleneck that was about to pop.

  “Fuck him!” Fred yelled. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth, and to Gavin he yelled out, “You hear me? Fuck you, you pussy!”

  Gavin half-turned around but didn’t say anything. Instead, he just turned back around, glad that he was too far for them to see the hurt look on his face.

  The others were stunned into silence.

  Chapter 38

  While the group had been splitting up and quibbling, Emeril had wandered into the campgrounds.

  They’d done it. They’d found Camp Slaughter. They were going to be the ones to put the kibosh on the debates of its existence, but as he looked around, he wondered at what cost.

  Dominating it all, because it was the biggest building, was a large wooden cabin labeled DINING HALL. The other structures were scattered around the dining hall, the angle of their placement making a rough circle. Behind him, the way they’d come in from, was the camp office. It sat several yards away from the core campgrounds.

  Behind the lodging cabins on the east side of the campgrounds, there was a broken and ruined playground. Steps were missing in the rope ladder leading up to a rusty slide, some of the jungle gym platforms had holes in them, the monkey bars were rusted, the swing set was missing all of its seats so that the only thing that remained were chains hanging from a bar. What once would have been a playset for children now looked like a collection of deathtraps and torture devices.

  And really, the playground told the story of the camp as a whole. There was no joy left in the place, even in the spots made pretty by nature’s touch. Anything that may have been painted colorfully was now faded. The wood on the cabins was spotted dark and swelled like skin suffering from leprosy. In some instances, the wood was so bloated it’d burst open and begun to splinter.

  With no electricity in them, the insides of the cabins were dark. It didn’t matter that it was summer, and the sun was out in full force. There were corners inside, far away from windows, that hadn’t seen an ounce of light in years.


  No longer were the cabins filled with laughter and chatter from campers. The grassy hills, now covered rampantly by weeds, would never be rolled down or played on by children. At nights, families wouldn’t be gathered around the firepits roasting hotdogs and melting smores.

  There was no life left in the place.

  Camp Slaughter. A fitting name indeed, Emeril thought, drawing in a deep breath.

  In the coming minutes, though, the name would make even more sense.

  Chapter 39

  Noelle was lying flat on top of a boulder. She had no idea where she was. She’d heard the screams from inside the cabin as she’d climbed out the window and bolted into the woods and ran as fast as she could with no idea of her direction.

  At the time, it seemed like her only option. If there were others with the machete man, her only chance at survival would have been to outrun them, so she’d ran until it felt like her lungs were going to explode and her knees were going to break. She’d finally stopped in the middle of a small clearing of trees with a giant boulder in the center. She climbed on top of it for no reason other than to avoid being bitten by a snake or a rodent.

  Now, she was listening for any signs of someone approaching. But there was nothing. Only her heartbeat slowing down with each breath she took.

  In the distance, nuts and fruits clattered against tree branches as they fell from trees, chipmunks scurried through the shrubbery, and a woodpecker’s knocks echoed through the woods. But other than that, there was nothing alarming happening around her.

  Noelle let out a deep sigh, but at the end of it there wasn’t relief the way she thought there would be. Instead, a wave of guilt filled her.

  She left Dalton and Wayne behind. Even after she’d told Wayne they’d be OK… Now he was probably dead—correction—they were probably dead.

  She’d ran and left them behind, left them there to die.

  Just like she’d done to her little sister, Rachel.

  Noelle buried her head in her arms and wept.

  Chapter 40

  “Your movies go on YouTube?” Vanessa asked the filmmaker duo excitedly.

  “Yeah,” Molly said, but she was distracted by the same thing that had Emeril’s attention.

  Emeril was at the edge of the campgrounds, staring out into the distance. About half a mile away from them was a grove of trees. The trees were packed together tightly, and the treetops crossed each other in a way that almost made it look like they were creating a giant thatched roof. In the middle of this grove, there was a shoddy farmhouse. If she took a picture of where they stood from this house, something told her the distance would be the same as in the ear necklace picture Harold Buckley had showed them. And if that were true, that meant…

  Molly gulped.

  “How many subscribers do you guys have?” Vanessa asked.

  Since Emeril explained to them what they were doing out here in Camp Slaughter, the Instagram girl was peppering them with nonstop questions about the YouTube channel and kept reminding them how much it sucked that there wasn’t any service out here to check it out. The others seemed enthused, but their excitement was dwarfed in comparison.

  “Around a hundred thousand or so,” Molly said. She walked up next to Emeril, away from the group before another question was flung at her.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she said to him.

  “Mm-hmm, I believe so,” Emeril said. “Before we go there, I want to see what’s inside that barn.”

  Until he pointed at it, Molly had somehow missed the big barn on a field between where they stood and the farmhouse. The barn looked to have been built in the same fashion as the other structures on the campgrounds and was just as weathered and worn. Except for the door, which looked new, and stuck out even from this distance.

  “There’s something going on here,” Emeril said. He meant two things at once but wasn’t going to bring up the supernatural feelings to Molly, not unless she did so first. What he was referring to was that all the evidence was adding up to human activity in the vicinity.

  “Yeah,” Molly concurred. “Maybe our friend Harold turned out not to be such a kook after all, huh?”

  “Get the camera ready,” Emeril said, and they both started toward the barn.

  “Hey, I thought you guys were going to interview us?” Brooke called out to them.

  Without turning around, Emeril shot his hand out in the air in a quick, dismissive wave.

  “After our preliminary investigation, youngsters.”

  The group all looked at one another, unsure of what to do now.

  “Should we go with them?” Fred suggested.

  “Why not?” Fletcher said. “It’s not like there’s much to look at here.”

  The rest of them showed their agreement with this decision by following behind the two filmmakers.

  Chapter 41

  Now that he was getting closer to the campgrounds, Ignacio’s super hearing picked up on the chatter somewhere in the woods. Human voices had a funny way of traveling, they bounced off tree trunks and echoed in a way that made them sound like they were coming from every direction. It was confusing to find where they were coming from sometimes.

  Worse than that, Varias Caras was nowhere to be found. That part of his brain had gone to sleep, after the killings back at the cabin.

  “Wakey, wakey… Please?” Ignacio pleaded with the monster inside of him, but it was no use. Ignacio was on his own for now, so he continued walking through the woods.

  He was following the shortcut from the cabin back to the campgrounds, and the closer he got home, the easier it was to zero in on where the voices were coming from. He walked in that direction, stepping as lightly as he could.

  Oh, no, no, no, no, Ignacio thought as he spotted the group walking across the field toward the barn.

  They were going to find his Barbie.

  This is not good. Not Good. Not Good! Varias Caras, I need help…please help, please!

  But there was no reply. Varias Caras was still slumbering.

  Ignacio crouched behind the bushes. He dropped the kid from his shoulder, there was a heavy thud as the dead weight crashed to the ground. Ignacio pulled the mask off his face, then put it back on several times, hoping that in some way this would wake Varias Caras.

  It didn’t.

  This whole mess was up to him to fix.

  He looked over at where the people were. There was no doubt they were going to inspect the barn. And each second he wasted, they got closer and closer to it. He had to act.

  There was less than a quarter mile of trees between him and the field where the group were walking, if he was quiet, he would catch them by surprise.

  Yes. That would certainly make things easier. But that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

  Ignacio unsheathed the machete from his back, then started toward them.

  Chapter 42

  “This isn’t the big sister I remember,” Rachel’s voice stirred Noelle out of wallowing in her own pity.

  She lifted her head up, and saw her little sister standing underneath a shaded area in the woods. The right side of her face was shiny—from blood, no doubt, even though she couldn’t make out the color because of the shadows the trees cast over Rachel’s face.

  “Rach, what’re you doing out here?” She wiped the tears from her eyes. The tears were cold.

  How long had she been sitting here, wasting time feeling sorry for herself? She wasn’t sure, but she knew it was too long.

  “Don’t you know by now that I’m always with you, Noelle?” Rachel laughed.

  “Oh yeah,” Noelle said. The truth was, in the panic of everything that’d happened to her, she wasn’t sure of anything. “You’re not…you’re not real.”

  “I guess that depends, doesn’t it?”

  Noelle sat up on the rock and shook her head. It was just like her little sister to talk in confusing riddles. “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m a manifestation
of your anxiety and guilt—and those two things are real, aren’t they?” Rachel stepped out into the light, letting Noelle get a better look at her.

  Rachel’s right eye was out of its socket, dangling down like a paddleball. The entire right side of her body was covered in lacerations oozing with blood. The white sock sticking above her Chuck Taylor’s was drenched red.

  “You left them behind, just like you did to me, Noelle,” Rachel said, grinning.

  Noelle clenched her fists. “Stop it. Stop!”

  “This is your second chance.” Rachel started pacing back and forth, every few steps hiding her back in the shadows, but no matter the lighting, Noelle could see her perfectly white teeth in her grinning mouth.

  “What’re you going to do, Noelle? Run away and let them die? Like you did to me?”

  “Stop!” Noelle covered her ears and buried her head between her knees. “I—I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to leave you there.”

  “But you did, big sister. That’s all that matters. All that matters is what you did, not what you meant.”

  “Stop!” Noelle opened her eyes, for the first time ever, hoping her sister was gone.

  To her surprise, the hallucination had vanished. It was just her in the woods again. She took in a deep breath and sighed.

  But as she did that, she saw a shadow crawl its way over her. Noelle turned and saw her little sister wasn’t gone at all. No, in fact, she was closer than ever. Rachel was sitting on the boulder next to her, her legs dangling off the edge and facing away from her. Noelle saw there were splatters of blood on the back of Rachel’s head and tank top.

  “Do you remember the summer when we stayed up way past our bedtime and you would read Shakespeare to me?” Rachel asked her.

  She remembered that summer very well, and she wanted to say so, but she couldn’t. The nostalgic feelings, the sad nostalgic feelings, the question brought with it had her tripped up. Her tongue felt too heavy to move, and an eruption of fresh tears threatened to come out of her.