by Sergio Gomez
If he went back to the cabin, he could find a weapon—the fire poker or the axe in the kitchen, for example—and then drive one of the vehicles to the camp. He’d mess up some grass and a bunch of bushes in the woods, but fuck nature.
His friends were in trouble.
Without wasting anymore time, he sprinted down the path in the same direction Brooke was going.
Chapter 46
Vanessa wasn’t sure what happened between being yanked to the ground and waking up to Fletcher and Fred pulling her to her feet, but she knew they’d saved her life. With her holding onto them for support, the three of them ran as fast as they could through the woods.
Everything was blurry and spinning in Vanessa’s vision and she could barely feel her legs underneath her. The back of her head throbbed in the spot that had struck the ground.
They climbed over a huge, fallen oak tree and Fletcher told her to lay down. For a moment, the three of them sat on the grass, trying to suck in air into their lungs as quietly as they could.
Fred caught his breath first, and then raised up into a crouch to peer over the top of the tree trunk. The grass underneath him rustled at an alarming volume, but really, any sound was alarming given the situation.
His head cleared the tree just enough for him to see the area ahead. There were no signs of the cannibal, and the hope in his heart that the gunshots had been the killer getting gunned down strengthened.
“Any signs of him?” Fletcher whispered, too worried about making noise to get up to look for himself.
Fred shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
Satisfied with that answer, Fletcher said to Vanessa, “Are you okay?”
“Head hurts, but other than that, I’m okay… I’ll be okay.”
They were speaking in whispers that were just audible. Fletcher went to get up to look where Fred was looking but stopped when in front of him, he saw a figure approaching them from the trees.
No fucking way, Fletcher thought, feeling a hot wetness at the front of his crotch. He screamed.
Fred turned, saw the cannibal coming out of the woods, and started running. The others ran, too.
The chase was on once again.
Vanessa ran into an area thick with thin trees and scruffy bushes, her strategy was to get lost behind the wildly growing foliage. But she hadn’t considered that the overgrown plants would make seeing the ground difficult. The front of her shoe struck an unseen root protruding out of the ground. Her ankle twisted from the sudden stop, while the rest of her body kept falling forward. Vanessa yelped like a chihuahua that had just gotten kicked. She stuck her arms out to keep from faceplanting into the ground.
The stumble gave Varias Caras enough time to catch up to her. He grabbed her by the ankle with one hand. With his other hand, he swung the machete down at her leg.
She screamed—this time it was a loud, from deep down inside type of scream—as the blade chopped her leg off from the shin down.
Ignacio stomped on her back to keep her from moving away. Vanessa screamed again, not just from the pain but from the fear. She screamed so loud that she began to throw up. The morning’s breakfast burrito and a deluge of bile poured out of her mouth.
Using both hands, Varias Caras raised the machete over his head and then brought it down on her other leg. One whack was all it took, and the girl’s leg was hacked off at relatively the same spot as the first. The cut veins spurted blood all over Ignacio’s arms. It was hot and sticky and tickled against his skin. It tickled so much he let out a small giggle.
Meanwhile, Vanessa howled in pain one last time, dug her nails into the earth, and then her eyes rolled to the back of her head as she lost consciousness.
“I am sorry,” Ignacio said, staring at the bloodbath on the grass left from his hacking job. “But this is what happens to bad Barbies.”
Ignacio took off one of her pink Converse sneakers. They were tiny to him, like a little doll’s shoe—a Barbie’s shoe, if you will. He put it in the back pocket of his pants. He would present it to her later, after cleaning the splatters of blood from it, to make her feel more comfortable in the barn.
To make her feel welcomed.
With one arm, Ignacio scooped her up. She was much lighter now. He carried her to a tree nearby, leaving a trail of blood behind them. Ignacio hung her onto a sturdy-looking branch from the collar of her shirt. He tugged on her waist to make sure she was on there securely. She was.
Satisfied, Varias Caras started off through the woods. He was going to hunt them down and kill them all before they could come back and take his Barbie away from him again.
No way was he going to let that happen a second time. Ignacio was a dummy, but he wasn’t that big of a dummy.
Ignacio closed his eyes and focused his hearing to locate the others. He could hear two of them running. He could hear their shoes beating against the ground as they ran. Hear the leaves rustling and twigs swaying as they blew past them. It was like the trees…no, like the woods themselves were on his side, whispering where the prey was to him.
He located three of them. One of them had just gone through a window of one of the cabins. He could hear the kid’s elevated heartbeat. It was faint, but there was no rhythm like that of a panicked human heartbeat.
A second one had just fired up a car. That one was going to get away, but that was OK, there was nothing he could do about that.
The third one was closer, running through the trees. He was slowing down, though, and Ignacio knew which way to go to cut him off.
He started after this one first.
These next ones weren’t like Ignacio’s Barbie. These he was going to kill for the thrills. Varias Caras took full control of the reigns now.
Vanessa’s screams echoed throughout the forest. Each one was worse than the last, and each one twisting his stomach up into a tighter knot. Fred couldn’t contain it anymore, he had to stop.
It was a one-two punch of imagining what was happening to Vanessa and the strain from sprinting that made Fred drop to his knees and vomit. The retching came all the way from the very bottom of his stomach. It came out so violently and strong that his head felt like it was going to burst.
Fred finished throwing up with a cough and wiped the saliva and throw-up from his mouth with the back of his hand.
The worst wasn’t over for Fred Meyers yet, though.
Out the corner of his eye, he saw Varias Caras coming after him through the trees. He must’ve taken some shortcut—again—or maybe he was a ghost (hadn’t the old man mentioned something about ghosts?). Fred forced himself to start running on wobbly legs, feeling like he was going to fall over at any moment.
Varias Caras powerwalked after him. The kid must have found a second wind, because he was moving quickly now. It was time to change tactics. He took the knife out from his back pocket, aimed it at his leg, and launched it through the air.
The blade went through the back of Fred’s knee, and immediately took his leg out from under him.
“AH! FUCK!” Fred yelled, dropping down to his good knee. He reached around to pull the knife out from his leg.
Varias Caras leapt forward and grabbed Fred by the shirt before the kid realized it. He lifted him into the air with both hands.
The kid was light—not as light as the Barbie, but light enough for him to pick him up over his head like he was a pro weightlifter. Then, Varias Caras did a motion similar to a forward lunge, so that his knee was bent, and at the same time slammed the boy down onto his knee, back first.
Fred’s spine snapped, and he died instantly. Varias Caras let the boy’s deadweight roll off his knee. He got up, pulling the knife from the dead kid’s leg as he did so.
Varias Caras closed his eyes and focused his ears to locate the others. This close to the campgrounds, his super hearing was even more extraordinary. He could hear the heartbeat of the camper hiding in the cabin. The others were further away, almost inaudible to him. He probably wouldn’t be able to catch them.
Oh well. Not like it mattered too much. There were enough dead bodies to feed him for weeks already, and he was going to kill the one hiding at the camp, too.
Varias Caras kept his ears homed on the camper’s heartbeat as he trudged toward the cabins, noticing that the pace was slowing. The person must feel safe in their hiding spot. But in a matter of moments, they wouldn’t feel that safety anymore.
Fletcher found himself in one of the larger cabins that had multiple rooms, hiding underneath a bed. His skin was crawling from sharing a space with a bunch of dust bunnies and rodent droppings, but it was better than being exposed.
He could barely remember how he ended up here. One minute he was watching the cannibal coming out of the woods after them, the next he was in this cabin looking for a hiding spot.
The bed seemed as perfect a hiding spot as possible. It was in the middle of the room, so that if the cannibal came in through the front door, he could slip out the side closest to the window and jump out of it. If he came in through the window (which Fletcher had already opened in preparation for scenario number one), then he would slip out the other side of the bed and run out the front door.
The more his heart slowed to a regular rhythm, the more convinced he was this was a solid plan of survival. Shit, he might not even need it. The killer might not be able to find him and give up looking for him.
He couldn’t remember if the guy was chasing him or Fred or Vanessa, but he knew they’d all ran in different directions. That much he did recall; looking over his shoulder and seeing the other two running deeper into the woods.
By how it seemed, their assailant hadn’t come after him. He’d been under this bed for a while—fifteen minutes, maybe less or maybe more. Time didn’t exactly operate the same when you were in danger of being murdered.
The only thing he was sure of was the quietness that surrounded him. Some bugs buzzed their songs in the bushes outside, but besides that, he hadn’t heard a thing. No leaves rustling or grass being moved. Not even birds in the trees or a mouse running around.
It was a stillness so prominent that it seemed to have stopped time. Fletcher wondered if when he finally crawled out from underneath this bed, and went back to the real world, if it would be years in the future. He wondered if maybe he’d found some magical spot in the woods where time operated differently than the rest of the universe.
A loud bang at the front of the cabin made these stoner thoughts disperse from Fletcher’s mind. He realized he wasn’t as safe as he thought.
Before he could crawl from underneath the bed and escape out of the window as he’d been planning, he heard heavy, quick footfalls just outside the room he was in.
The heartbeat got louder and louder the further he walked down the short corridor. Whenever Ignacio was searching for prey, it reminded him of playing Hide ‘N’ Go Seek with the neighborhood kids when he was a child and how good he was at it. That’d been when he was really little, back before he or the other kids realized he was different. Before they stopped playing games with him and started calling him names like “big retard” or “tonto” if they knew Spanish.
Just like the kids back then, his prey didn’t realize Ignacio’s ability to hear better than anyone else. They thought their hiding spots were good, and maybe they were, if they were hiding from anyone other than him.
The stakes were different when hunting and playing Hide ‘N’ Go Seek, of course. Finding the neighborhood kids meant winning a game. Finding prey meant food.
But the rush? The rush was just the same.
Varias Caras entered the room the hiding camper was in. He could hear his heartbeats coming from underneath the bed. To Ignacio’s ear it was as loud as someone hammering a nail into the floorboards.
He heard the kid move, then rethink his movement, and stop.
Varias Caras trudged over to the bed, hearing the pace of his victim’s heartbeats increasing with each second. It was these moments that Varias Caras lived for. The surge of power that coursed through him before murdering someone was like nothing else. When he looked into his victims’ eyes and saw them pleading for mercy, when they were shaking in fear of his presence, when they screamed for their lives, he felt like a god.
Varias Caras crouched down and reached under the bed to pull the kid out—but his hand clasped around air. The kid had summoned up some courage at the last second and slipped out the other side of the bed.
Varias Caras hopped to his feet. The kid was running for the open window.
“You like window?!” Ignacio yelled at him.
He jumped through the air, clearing the bed and the space between him and the kid in one giant leap. He wrapped his arms around Fletcher.
Fletcher kicked at the air, and threw a punch over his head at Varias Caras, but there was no power to it. It was nothing more than a glancing blow.
Varias Caras picked him up off his feet, and suplexed him head first onto the floor. Stars exploded in Fletcher’s vision, and his limbs uselessly went limp as he laid on the ground.
Varias Caras went over to the window and closed it shut. Then, he went back to Fletcher, and lifted him up off the floor by his waistband with two hands. He swung his arms back, and then launched Fletcher at the window.
Fletcher went headfirst through the glass. Shards cut his body open as the rest of him flew through the broken window and landed outside the cabin a crumpled, bleeding mess.
Ignacio opened the window and climbed out of it. He took his time, knowing full well his prey was wounded and had no fight in him.
He grabbed Fletcher by the hair. The kid’s useless legs dragged across the floor as Ignacio pulled him to the window. Ignacio balanced the kid’s neck on the sill, so that his head was inside the cabin, but the rest of his body was outside.
The odd positioning woke something in Fletcher up, and he came to.
“Wh-what are you doing…? NO, NO, NO!” Fletcher pleaded. He realized what was going to happen and started thrashing his arms and legs.
But it did him no good, because Ignacio was pressing against his back with one strong arm that felt like a boulder was crushing him. Even if he had all his strength in him, Fletcher didn’t think he’d be able to budge from underneath him. He closed his eyes and waited for it to be over.
“I like window, too!” Ignacio laughed, then with his free hand slammed the window closed as hard as he could.
Ignacio’s strength forced the window to act like a guillotine, and Fletcher’s neck was split in half. His head hit the cabin floor with a hollow thud like someone dropping a head of cabbage, while his body slumped onto the grass outside.
Ignacio danced around in a circle, clapping his hands over his head. The old man was dead. The two boys who had been with the Barbie were dead. He couldn’t get the woman or the other girl in their group, but that was OK.
He had the Barbie.
It was time to celebrate Mamá’s birthday.
Chapter 47
The area around the cabin was quiet, but now that Noelle was looking into the den through the very same window she'd escaped from, she knew why.
She followed the splatters of dark, drying blood with her eyes and saw the first head laying on the ground by the pool table.
Dalton stared up at the ceiling, an expression of pained agony from Ignacio’s punch frozen on his face. His blue hair was turning purple because of the blood that had seeped and mixed in with the dye. Next to the head was his body. The back of the flannel shirt, like his hair, was drenched from the pool of blood.
She spotted the second head further into the room, by one of the walls. Even though this head was face down, she knew it belonged to Wayne. A pang of guilt struck her heart as her empty words of telling him they’d be OK echoed in her mind. She wanted to crumple to the ground and cry, but she knew she had to stay strong if she was going to survive this.
Then, she heard sobs coming from the woods. Sobs that were loud enough to be confused with screams, and she turned to see Brooke
coming up the path her and the others had used to go into the woods earlier. It had been just this morning, but it felt like that’d happened an eon ago.
Mascara ran down Brooke’s cheeks in dark rivulets. Something had happened in the woods, and something told Noelle it had to do with the man who’d murdered Dalton and Wayne.
“Brooke!” Noelle called to her.
She looked over at the side of the cabin where Noelle stood and then shuffled toward her. They met at the front of the vehicles and threw their arms around each other.
“Brooke, what happened?” Noelle asked.
“A crazy guy came out of the woods,” Brooke buried her head into Noelle’s shoulder and cried harder. After a few seconds of that, she raised her head up. “And then there were gunshots. Oh God, it was awful—Where’s Dalton?”
Noelle shook her head. “He—he didn’t make it, Brooke.”
“What do you mean?” Brooke let go of her and stepped back, her eyes huge. “What do you mean he didn’t make it?”
She sucked in a deep breath and was ready to tell her it all in one go, when over her shoulder Noelle saw Gavin racing out of the woods.
Unlike Brooke’s face, his was full of color. It was a red that was somehow pale and vibrant at the same time, like the color of a cherry-bomb firecracker.
“What’re you two doing!” he yelled at the girls. “We’ve gotta get going!”
Gavin ran past them without slowing down.
“Gavin, stop!” Noelle yelled, and started after him.
He’d hopped over the porch steps in one hurried leap and was at the top of them when he stopped and turned to Noelle. “What? Where’re the others? Where’s Wayne?”
“He didn’t make it, Gav,” Noelle said, using the same phrase as she had telling Brooke about her cousin. “I’m sorry…”
Gavin shook his head, and his face contorted with emotion. “What the fuck are you talking about, Noelle? Didn’t make—?”
