Timberlands: Blood and Prey

by J.J. Mainor

  Chapter 18

  Raymond stumbled from the brush and into the campsite. He surveyed the area, spotting Gunner sitting beside Kimberly’s body. She lay on her back as if asleep. Gunner’s shorts remained soaked while the remaining dampness evaporated from his bare skin. Goosebumps covered the canvas of first and second degree burns while he remained oblivious to both. Approaching closer, Raymond recognized the body of their attacker.

  “Is he…?” Raymond couldn’t speak the next word as if doing so would make it false. Silly to think speaking a single word would jinx what he saw with his own eyes, and yet they had seen supposedly dead people walk in and out of camp all weekend, himself included.

  Still Gunner didn’t need to hear the word to understand the question. “Yes.”

  “Your brother?”

  Gunner didn’t know the answer to that one, nor did he know how to find out. The killer was no more, as were his friends. That was the extent of his knowledge. With the moon in its final moments, it seemed he could wait until the sun came out of hiding to figure out the next step.

  Raymond scrounged for a few pieces of wood to revive the fire. “You need to get into some dry clothes,” he suggested to the shivering young man.

  But Gunner refused. “It feels too good.” The pre-dawn chill was the only thing cooling the burns and keeping him from screaming in agony. As the flames from the fire leapt up and provided new light, Raymond caught a glimpse of the suffering.

  The old man suggested they get the van back on the road and fix the tires. If he could nudge Gunner’s mind toward escape, he could persuade the young man to a hospital. But Gunner would not be nudged. His single mission was to find Greg.

  Raymond gave up. If Gunner didn’t want his help, then he would get some sleep. He retired to his tent, leaving the younger man to watch over Kimberly’s body in private.

  And Gunner indeed watched in silence, spending the remaining moments of the night quietly mourning his friends. The magical nonsense the old man gave him was nothing but bullshit. Nothing helped Zach or Reese or Kimberly stay alive. Not magical trees. Not alien magnets. Certainly not his gun.

  A pitiful mess of a man with an ax and a knife, all by himself had killed those three and nearly took them all. He spied the ax on the ground by the killer’s body with disdain. And the knife. Where was it, he wondered. He thought the killer had left it in Kimberly’s body. Further inspection found that not to be so. Maybe the killer removed it after all and dropped it. He looked around finding no answer. No matter, what harm could it do now with its owner dead?

  Dawn came soon enough, bringing the new challenges Gunner had put off. He figured with the killer’s shack in ruin, Raymond’s logging camp was the likely place to find his brother. Gunner did not want to spend most of the day getting there, so fixing the van became the priority.

  After forcing some food into his stomach, Gunner left to assess the predicament of his ride. Had they but two minutes during the night, he and Raymond might have freed the van easily. The tires would be another matter. He had a spare to replace one, but the other would be a challenge. The can of Fix-a-Flat rolling around in the back somewhere could not patch the gaping hole made by the killer.

  He grabbed both ruined tires and returned to camp. The plan was to cut a patch out of one tire to melt into place on the other. It was a longshot, he knew, but it was all he had. He set to work building up the fire again, waiting for it to create a new bed of coals.

  In the meantime, he would check on the old man. Though it had been a long night, it seemed odd that Raymond was not up making use of the daylight himself.

  He called into the tent. When no answer came, he thought about leaving him alone. Last thing Gunner wanted was to invade his privacy, especially if he happened to be sleeping naked. But there had been too many people sneaking off in this camp for it to be ignored. Gunner had to brave the disturbing possibilities to make sure.

  When he pulled the tent flap aside, Gunner found a reality more disturbing than he expected. Raymond was dead. Slashed up so badly, the blood soaked not only him, his clothes, and his sleeping bag, but everything inside, including the tent walls themselves.

  His mind raced back to the fire pit. The killer was still dead beside the ring, wasn’t he? Gunner had been so focused on the van, he now had doubts. He raced from the tent, and spied the two bodies still on the ground. And yet, he had to be sure. He had to remove doubts that his bullets failed to end this nightmare, that this killer feigned death to lure his last victims into a false sense of safety.

  Gunner crept toward the fire, keeping his footsteps careful and quiet so as not to draw alarm. Drawing close, he picked up the ax from the ground. Common sense told him to remove the head as this monster had done to his friend. He should not chance surrendering the advantage. But he had to know. He had to be certain that this death was or was not a fake.

  Gunner moved the blade of the ax just above the killer’s neck, ready to shove it in at the slightest notice. His other hand moved in to find a vein at the back of the head, one that might register a pulse from a still beating heart. But he felt nothing. His quivering hand explored all along the back of the head with the same result.

  Gunner turned the body over reaching directly for the heart. There was no beating. There was no pulse. This body had no life in it. Was there another killer in these woods, or was the old man slaughtered by…

  Greg crawled from Gunner’s tent. His clothes were soaked with blood. His hand clutched the killer’s Bowie knife, it too coated crimson. Gunner didn’t want to believe the sight before him. He watched frozen with jaw agape as his brother approached.

  “What did you do,” Gunner managed to spit out.

  Greg stopped next to Kimberly’s body, staring at it with icy recognition. “You did this brother.”

  Gunner pointed defensively to the killer’s body. “He did this. He murdered Reese and Zach and Kimberly. He killed my friends…our friends.”

  “No!” Greg directed his dark, accusing eyes to his brother. “You brought them to him. You led my friends to their deaths.”

  As much as he tried, Gunner could not reason with Greg. Worse still, his older brother was intent on blaming him for being left behind last month. Gunner had distracted the killer during that first attack. He lured the monster away leaving his brother on the ground, but alive. This could have been ended a month ago. Greg could have been saved and their friends never put into danger had Gunner not played the coward that first time. As feared, Gunner would be held to account for his selfishness.

  He failed to notice Greg inching closer with each accusation. Maybe he still refused to believe his brother was the same kind of monster as this unnamed killer; the kind that could slice up an innocent old man.

  “This is the same knife,” Greg shared, “that almost killed me.” He thrust at his brother, who failed to react in time. The knife made contact with Gunner’s side. Instinctively, he dropped the ax and ran. Unwilling to fight his own brother, his sense of flight took over.

  Greg paused just long enough to pick up the ax, before chasing after Gunner with both weapons. He followed his brother back to the van, which the younger brother foolishly chose to hide in. The missing window didn’t make entry much of a challenge.

  Still Gunner dove over the seat trying to make it difficult. Greg didn’t play. He simply shattered the next window. After shielding himself from the incoming glass, Gunner recovered, and dove one more time into the back compartment. Greg followed by driving the ax through the metal paneling, not so much to get inside as to show his brother that his steel compartment wouldn’t protect him.

  Gunner dug through items littering his van for some kind of weapon he could use for defense. He found the can of Fix-a-Flat, not that he could use it now. The screwdrivers and sockets everywhere were equally useless. Then he spotted a large pair of bolt cutters. A little clumsy, but maybe he
could use them to knock Greg out.

  When the ax came through the window on the back doors, Gunner panicked and climbed forward once again, forgetting the bolt cutters or anything else he might use for a weapon. By the time Greg reached in to unlock the rear door, Gunner had already darted out the front, racing back to the campsite.

  With Greg on his heels, Gunner tripped over the corner of Zach’s tent. As he struggled back to his feet, Greg slashed the nylon structure into uselessness.

  “We don’t need that one, do we?”

  Gunner ignored him, returning to the fire pit. Uncertain of his next move, he turned to face his brother.

  “Don’t do this,” he pleaded.

  Greg responded by driving the knife into his brother’s gut. He threw the ax into the brush as Gunner crumpled to the ground beside the fire. Then straddling the younger man with his knees planted on either side of the chest, he brought the knife to Gunner’s throat.

  With his hand going unnoticed, Gunner felt around for some defense. It landed on one of the white hot rocks around the fire. Up he brought it across his brother’s head, not hard enough to knock him out, but hard enough to knock him off and take the knife away with him. Only then did he realize the temperature of the rock.

  But there was no time to suffer from his wounds. Gunner felt something in one of his pockets, driving into his leg. He remembered the pocket knife, and recovered it. It remained rusted shut, but he had to get it open. His fingernails chipped away as they broke the rusted bonds and pried the blade open.

  Greg recovered his posture and drove at his brother again, determined to finish off his guilt. As he drove the large Bowie knife once again into Gunner’s gut, Gunner landed his into Greg’s side. Then, as though blinded by his own will to survive, Gunner stabbed again and again and again.

  Greg could not recover his knife quickly enough. His brother had driven over a dozen small cuts into his side and continued. The pain soon overwhelmed him, causing him to release the Bowie knife still in Gunner’s gut. Gunner, in turn, pulled out the larger knife and without thinking, drove it between Greg’s ribs and into his heart.

  While the older brother collapsed into a lifeless heap, the younger finally allowed his injuries to overcome him. He lay motionless beside the fire gazing up at the summer sky. Though thirsty from the lack of rain, the dried ground could not drink up the blood as fast as his body offered it up.

  As his life poured out his wounds, Gunner lost all control over his mind. It was difficult to comprehend that the one person he cared most for was the one who died by his own hand. Flashes of symbols from past times kept peeking through against the corpses around him: a soccer ball, a pizza slice, Greg’s proud smile. But they didn’t last. Those treasured memories were not strong enough to overcome his own betrayal. His own mind had determined his last thoughts would be of that knife in Greg’s chest with his own hand wrapped around the handle.

  If there was one consolation to be had, it was that his own last moments would be spent at his brother’s side in these deceptively peaceful timberlands.

  Author’s Notes

  Some years back, I experimented with writing screenplays. At the time, I really enjoyed writing stage plays and maybe someday, a couple of them will see the light of day. But I wanted to experiment with a new format, and I understood a story is told differently for the screen than for the stage, so I knew it wouldn’t be writing the same kinds of stories.

  Timberland was the first script I wrote, and no doubt the best of the batch. I wanted to do an old-school slasher flick, killer in the woods, hunting down the kids one-by-one, that sort of thing. Friday the 13th was an inspiration with the simple settings and the very dark feel in the night scenes. If you go back and watch the later films, they increasingly use flood lights during the night shots. While that allows you the viewer to see what’s going on, it almost ruins the feel of the scene as a “night shot.”

  But I wanted a piece that captured that visual darkness. They have a camp fire to light the scenes at the camp site, and they carry flashlights so their time away isn’t entirely black, but for the most part, those light sources have their limitations which put the characters at a disadvantage.

  Another theme I was going for was that all the characters are strong in their own ways. In most films, the standard story is about a weak character who finds herself and the strength to battle the demon. Those around the heroine usually die unaware, unprepared, un-whatever. But I wanted characters prepared to handle themselves. I wanted characters who show up knowing what they’re about to face, and they give as good as they get. No one was meant to go down easy.

  Now, after all these years, I can’t remember what the inspiration for the overall story might have been, but I do remember the inspiration for Reese (and it’s likely I wrote the piece around him). At the time I had a high school kid working for me. He was a senior and played football, but after his final season, he turned to bodybuilding. He put on some size, boasted about his strength, and was all-around cocky; but not in the way everyone hates, more in the way where you laugh mildly at him. He used to always say things like “It’s all about the 18-inch guns!” and “come talk to me when you can bench press…” whatever it was he said he could press. At one point I joked back, “it doesn’t matter how much you can bench press to a man with a gun.”

  That ended up becoming my inspiration for Reese and the relationship he has with Zach. I imagined Reese to be more serious about his lifting, and bit more of a straight-man, and Zach is the clown of the two, but that is their relationship where they can rib each other like they do as friends.

  The original concept was to be an all-male cast. These characters are going into a situation where they know there is a killer, and it doesn’t make sense to bring their girlfriends along just for the sake of having them there. Maybe it’s sexist, but if I ever complete the trilogy, it will play into a theme where the gender roles reverse over the course of the three books (I envision a cast of all women with one man for book 3). I hope that perceived sexism makes more sense when I get around to writing that third book.

  But the problem isn’t just the hints of sexism behind the choice of cast. Having an all-male cast brings a homoerotic quality to the piece. In and of itself, it’s not a bad theme, but in certain cases, it can dominate the rest of a piece and suffocate the themes that were meant to be there.

  Think of Nightmare on Elm Street 2. It’s considered to be the “gay Nightmare.” Is it a good movie? Maybe, maybe not. All it’s known for is being the gay Nightmare (well, maybe that and the exploding canary) and is judge strictly on that interpretation. Jeepers Creepers 2 also earned a reputation for its homoeroticism, and like Nightmare 2, I doubt anyone considers the film either good or bad, just “gay.”

  Again, if this book comes across as homoerotic, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. I made the decision to include Kimberly in the cast to keep the speculation from dominating all other aspects of this story.

  Otherwise, I had conceived of Kimberly in the same light as I did Jeri. I had the idea for three, possibly four stories almost instantly after conceiving this one, and the initial idea for the women was to use them in the next sequel. As it is, Part 2 works with just Jeri coming back to learn what happened to her boyfriend, and Part 1 is all the better for including Kimberly.

  Now I suppose I might have tipped the hand in mentioning the sequels. Part 2 is already out, and it does sort of set up for the third piece I have yet to write. If you’re the kind who’s curious about the future, the idea is that the arc would tie up completely at the end of Part 3. There will be no loose ends to play out in a later book, the killers will all be dealt with definitively, and there will be no characters lying in the wings waiting to make an appearance in a later piece.

  The overall premise into how the killers are created in the first place will remain, allowing for a new villain in any potential fourth book and beyond. Now the
idea I’ve tossed about for a theoretical Part 4 would be a more personal and intimate story. It would be quite different from the killer in the woods idea of the previous books, and for that reason I have my doubts. Usually when you do an installment drastically different from the rest of the series, it tends to bomb, so I don’t know if it will be a good idea or not.

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  Also By J.J. Mainor

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  The Americium Shipment

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  Broken Saber

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  Crash Landing

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  Revenge With a Kiss

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