by Sergio Gomez
It hit him. Hit him like a sledgehammer to his heart.
Noelle knew his pain very well, but she needed answers. “What happened in the woods?”
Ignoring her question, Gavin sprinted into the cabin.
“Gav! Wait!” Noelle called, but it was too late.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Brooke said. “Dalton and Wayne…they’re dead.”
“Yes, Brooke. They are.” Noelle’s shoulders slumped. “We got attacked by a man with a machete.”
“The cannibal,” Brooke said, and suddenly the temperature outside turned freezing cold.
“Cannibal? What’re you talking about?”
“We met an old man in the woods.” Brooke had calmed, maybe because she was in some sort of autopilot mode from the shock of hearing her cousin was dead, but she wasn’t blubbering her words anymore. “Said something about a cannibal out in the woods. Wanted us to be in some movie him and a girl he was with are making.”
“Okay,” Noelle said, somewhat following. “Then what?”
“Gavin got pissed before all that, though, and went back through the woods himself. The rest of us stayed to be in the movie, and we were walking to this barn out in the woods when the cannibal showed up. I ran back here and found Gavin on the trail and now…now…they might all be dead?”
Noelle was too stunned to respond.
Brooke gulped, then continued. “We have to get out of here, Noelle.”
“What about the others? Did you see what happened to them?”
“No. I think they all ran a different direction. I don’t know what happened to them, but we heard gunshots.” Brooke pointed her chin toward the cabin. “I think he wants to take one of the cars back to the camp to help them.”
Noelle felt her head spinning. There was so much going on, so much to take in. She wasn’t sure what was happening or what would happen. But one thing she was certain about was that they were in danger out here.
Gunshots. A maniac wielding a machete. Dead bodies in the cabin. None of this was good.
Brooke started for the cabin. Noelle followed, worried about what condition Gavin would be in when they found him.
He sprinted through the cabin, not caring about anything. Not caring if a whole cannibal family was in there wielding chainsaws, ready to cut him up and turn him into their next meal. In that moment, he felt he could run through them. Run through anything.
He went into the den. At the far wall he saw his little brother’s head, stupid mop-top he’d always given him grief about and all.
It looked fake detached from the body that was always wearing a video game themed or Mountain Dew t-shirt. It looked like plastic.
It wasn’t Wayne’s, it couldn’t have been.
This was a joke from the others to get him back for being a shithead. Everything about it had been a setup. Fletcher finding the map, running into the movie makers in the woods. The story about the cannibal.
Yeah, that had to be it. This was some elaborate joke.
They wanted to see him on the verge of tears. Everyone would pop out from their hiding spots and come into the den to laugh at him. Wayne would pick up the plastic head, duck his real head into his shirt, and laugh at him for thinking he’d been decapitated by a crazed killer.
This was payback for him being an asshole to them all these years.
A big scare.
(Ha-ha, real funny guys!)
They’d all laugh at his expense, and really, he wouldn’t be mad. He deserved it, and after the initial embarrassment he would laugh, too.
The old man and the woman, they were probably some sort of professional pranksters. He’d seen some of those people on YouTube before.
Yeah, it made sense. There was no way that was Wayne’s head laying by the wall over there. That’s why it was face down, so it looked more convincing. He’d flip it over and there wouldn’t even be a face on it, that’s how fake it was.
The others would come out soon, pointing and making fun of him, like some fucked up reverse surprise party where the goal isn’t a nice gesture for the person. Instead, the goal was to make the person’s knees weak and get them to feel all of the pain they’d inflicted on anyone in their life reflected back at them.
And it worked. Their stupid prank worked like a charm, or a curse, whatever, because Gavin fell to his knees and felt as if someone had reached into his chest and pulled his heart out.
He waited…waited for the reveal of the joke to come.
But it never came.
He cried harder than he’d ever cried in his life. He closed his eyes, but his little brother’s decapitated head was burned into his mind’s eye, and it was all he could see behind the darkness of his eyelids.
Chapter 48
Molly was driving the Subaru down the road they’d taken to get to Camp Slaughter. She was maybe a mile out from the campgrounds. Maybe two. Maybe only half a mile. There was no way for her to tell, these damn woods all looked the same.
The moment the cannibal showed up, the beauty and the serenity she’d been appreciating when they first entered the woods had vanished. After hearing the first screams of someone being murdered by him, the woods became a labyrinthine nightmare for her.
She stopped the car and buried her face in her hands, resting her elbows against the steering wheel. She didn’t cry, but she just sat there in that position for a good while, taking in deep breaths to try to get ahold of herself. It wasn’t a time for emotions right now, it was time to think things through.
She could continue driving, get out and find safety. Call for help or find it somewhere. Hadn’t there been a police station or something a few miles before they’d found Camp Slaughter? Maybe not. Maybe that was a false memory being recreated by her heart’s desires, or something like that.
This whole mess was confusing.
The one thing she was certain about was that she’d left Emeril behind. She’d seen him going the opposite way she ran—the wrong way by all accounts—straight toward where the cannibal was going.
That idiot, she thought.
But she’d heard a gunshot go off. It’d been his pistol. Had to have been. A flicker of hope stirred in her that he was alive.
If he was, the right thing to do would be to turn back to help him.
And if anyone else had gotten away—shit, for all she knew the college kids could have been packing and gunned down the cannibal themselves—they would need an escape vehicle, too.
Molly turned the key in the ignition, firing the Subaru’s engine back on. The engine starting up sounded like a lion’s roar, and it helped to psych her up for what she was about to do.
Molly flipped a bitch on the road and started back to Camp Slaughter, flooring the accelerator.
She hadn’t fired a gun in ages—at least ten years—but she assumed it was just like riding a bicycle. A skill that once you acquired you never unlearned.
Aim, shoot, and kill. It would be that easy. She hoped.
The new Barbie was still hanging from the tree where he’d left her. Her eyes closed, her breathing slowing down. He needed to get her back to the barn and her wounds cleaned up soon.
Ignacio unhooked her from the tree branch, then slumped her over his shoulder like a sandbag. Blood dripped to the ground from her injured legs as he took her back to the barn.
In the barn he had supplies he would use to cauterize the wound, bandage her up, and then wake her to start the party.
This had become a messier job than he’d hoped for. The thought occurred to him that the blood was leaving behind a trail straight to him and where he kept his toys, but that was fine. He’d come back to wash it off the grass when he was done fixing up the new Barbie.
He didn’t think either of the girls who’d gotten away would be coming back. They’d been terrified when they ran away. And the police wouldn’t be here for a good while—if ever. They might not even be able to find the place.
Not a lot of people came by the campgrounds.
> Ignacio pulled the barn doors open. The old Barbie had moved into the darkest corner that her chains allowed her to, but he could see the yellow glow of her eyes peering back at him. Could sense her fear in the air, too.
He stuck his tongue out past the mouth hole of the mask and licked the air. Sweet, and ripe. A hollowness began to grow in his heart at the thought he would slaughter her at the end of the night.
Varias Caras walked through the barn and placed the new Barbie on the floor near the chains he’d set up yesterday. The new Barbie was out cold, not a muscle moving. There was no point in restraining her just yet.
Ignacio took the box of matches out of his pants, lit one, and then went over to light the torches. He’d need light to fix the new Barbie up.
While her captor was rummaging through a rusty filing cabinet where he kept medical supplies, Nadine stared at the young girl. The girl’s legs had been cut off, just how her feet had been. Except this was worse, because her legs were cut off from the middle of the shins down. Blood gushed out of the holes with no signs of stopping, and Nadine wondered if the girl was going to stay alive much longer.
The thought made her cry. She tried to stifle it by pressing her lips together, but that did nothing. She sobbed and heaved at seeing the poor girl laying there, out cold. This was worse than she’d imagined it would be.
Then, ice-cold fingers of fear clutched around her heart tighter as she wondered what that meant for her. Her crying grew louder and more rapid, and she was sure that it was going to set Varias Caras off the deep end as it had before.
But it didn’t do anything. The most attention of his it drew was that he glanced away from the cabinet he was rummaging through, then he went back to his task.
He had a new toy, a new Barbie. He didn’t care about Nadine anymore.
I’m old, Nadine thought. Old toys get thrown out.
She gulped, looked over at the machete on his back—still stained with blood from his last victims, no doubt.
Nadine felt another touch from fear’s hands. This one wrapped around her throat, and squeezed it shut, as she realized she would be dead soon enough.
Chapter 49
“Gav, come on. Let’s go,” Noelle pleaded.
Outside the cabin, they heard Brooke start up Fletcher’s Jeep. She hadn’t even bothered to come into the den to see her cousin. She scooped the keys up from the kitchen counter and ran back outside to escape out of the woods. While doing this, she’d called into the den to Noelle and Gavin telling them she was going to call the police the moment her cell phone had service and kept reminding them that they were free to come with her.
Noelle silently turned down her offer, because the guilt of running away and leaving Wayne and Dalton to die still crushed her. She needed to be valiant, as Rachel had said.
She wasn’t going to let Gavin go back to the camp by himself and get killed. At the very least she was going to try to convince him to escape out of here with her in the other vehicle. But before that could happen, she needed him to get control of himself.
He was sitting on the floor, hunched over and crying into his hands. Noelle was kneeling over him and rubbing his shoulders. Everything she’d tried to get him to compose himself had failed. Really, though, there was nothing that would have worked, because there was nothing that could fix the grief of seeing the remains of a loved one’s murder.
Then it happened suddenly. Gavin stopped crying. From full-throttle weeping to zero in an instant. He shook his head, rubbed his puffy eyes, and sighed. “I’m going back to the camp.”
“No, Gav,” Noelle argued. “Think about this. Brooke told me what happened, the same cannibal did this—”
“I don’t care. I’m going.” He brushed Noelle’s hands off his shoulders and got to his feet. “You can’t stop me, so shut up. Go with Brooke if you’re scared.”
“It’s no time to be a tough guy, Gavin,” Noelle said, getting in front of him.
“Out of my way, Noelle.” There was an edge to his voice. “I’m going back to kill this fucker myself.”
“You don’t have a weapon.”
They heard the Jeep’s tires crunching on the gravel outside the window as Brooke pulled out of the driveway. The sound got fainter and fainter as Brooke escaped, leaving them with only one car.
“I’ll find a weapon,” Gavin said, and started walking around her.
“What if he’s already dead? What if the gunshots you heard meant someone killed him? We’d just be wasting time.”
“Then I’ll piss on his corpse,” Gavin said. He needed to quench his thirst for revenge in any way possible.
“We should let the police handle this. Think this through. I know you’re mad and everything, but just stop and think.”
“You think he stopped and thought about killing my little brother, Noelle?” Gavin had been walking out of the room but stopped at the doorway. He turned to face her. His eyes were red and puffy, but a darkness hovered over his face. “I guess you wouldn’t know, since you ran away and left him and Dalton to die, though, right?”
“Th-that’s not fair, Gav. I was scared…I…I didn’t know what to do. I panicked…”
“Yeah, well, I know what I’m doing.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“If that cannibal doesn’t kill me, my parents will, anyway.”
Noelle wasn’t sure if she imagined it or if it actually happened, but she saw a smirk flash across his face. And it was that phrase, that moment, that made her realize just how young they truly were.
“There’re knives in the kitchen,” Gavin told her, continuing out of the room. “Grab one and meet me by the car. Or stay here, or whatever you’re going to do.”
Chapter 50
The blood and the bodies told Molly everything she needed to know. She was the last survivor.
She saw Emeril first. He was about five feet off the ground, hanging from a tree branch that had pierced through his abdomen. Gravity had slumped him over to the right side, and his neck was bent so his head rested against his shoulder on an angle that would have been uncomfortable if he were alive. The blood around the gaping hole in his stomach was turning into a thick, maroon crust.
Several yards away from where her business partner had been turned into a human shish-kabob was one of the college kids. It was the scrawny one, the one who’d gotten into an argument with the muscled kid. His back was bent in half, and one didn’t need to be an expert in anatomy to know his spinal cord was snapped—most likely in several places. It was like something out of a possession horror movie, where the director shows the audience how much the demon has taken over by twisting the person into unnatural positions. Only this wasn’t special effects or a camera trick. This was an actual person’s body curved into a “U.”
Molly felt an uneasiness in her stomach. This was her first time seeing a murder scene, or dead bodies for that matter, and it was gruesome. But she had to stay strong. Now was not a time for weakness.
She started for the barn, wishing her plan of finding the cannibal out in the open and running him over would’ve worked, but he was nowhere to be found.
She was going to have to do this the old fashioned way. The most dangerous way, and probably the stupidest way, too. She’d have to approach him and kill him with Emeril’s revolver.
At the front of the barn there was a trail of blood leading past the doors, which meant the cannibal had at the very least gone inside at some point. She hoped some of the blood she was seeing belonged to him. Maybe he’d retreated in there because he was badly wounded. And maybe it would be as easy as shooting him in the head from point blank.
She couldn’t go in just yet, though. It wouldn’t be smart to just barge in.
Better to investigate around some more. It was her own voice giving her the advice, but it was a skill she’d learned from Emeril. He’d always made sure to investigate what was in plain sight before barging in through any doors.
Clues could b
e anywhere.
Molly traced another trail of blood. It took her through a tangle of weeds and thorny branches that made small cuts on her shins that she ignored. The bloody trail led her to the oak tree Vanessa had been hanging from. The girl wasn’t there, of course, but the pools of blood from her hacked off legs were, nearly touching to form one bigger puddle.
Molly looked up the tree, expecting to see a dead body dangling, but saw nothing.
To her, this confirmed where the cannibal was. Or at the very least, where he’d been after having killed Emeril and Fred. Maybe he’d just stored the body into the barn and then gone back to wherever the hell he stayed permanently.
She considered this as she doubled back to the barn, back through the irritating thorns cutting at her shins.
This is nothing compared to the pain Emeril must’ve felt, she thought, with a pang of both guilt and pain ringing in her heart.
She got to the barn and froze, realizing the enormity of the task.
The cannibal might be in there. She knew he’d gone through at least three people in a matter of minutes, and here she was with just a revolver, about to take him on herself.
Molly shook her head to rid the doubt out of it. She could do this. He was a human, nothing more.
A bullet to his head or his heart would end it. All he’d been wearing was a vest, cargo pants, boots, and that disgusting mask on his face. No body armor she could remember.
Then again, she’d only caught a glimpse of him.
But still. The leather mask, as scary as it was and as long as it might haunt her nightmares, wouldn’t protect him from a bullet.
An image of Emeril hanging skewered from the tree branch flashed into her head, and anger pushed past her fear.
Molly drew the gun out of her pocket and checked the cylinder to make sure it was loaded. All six bullets were in there. She snapped the cylinder back into place, gripped the handle tight with one hand, and with the other she threw the barn door’s latch open.
