by Mary McCoy
Becca considered her answer, and said at last, “Oscar’s shed.”
Corinne shot Wallis a dirty look and issued the group’s next instructions: “Lead the way, Wallis. But if Oscar’s not there, or if anything about his place seems even the slightest bit off, we run straight to the equipment shed. Agreed?”
They all nodded and went down the stairs from the camp director’s quarters to the deserted mess hall. The sticky varnished tabletops gleamed eerily in the moonlight. Megan had made the girls from Cabin 2 clean up after themselves, but some of the tables were still strewn with crumbs, half-eaten hot dog buns, and greasy paper plates. Wallis led them through the kitchen, past the racks stacked high with canned pudding and green beans. Corinne picked up a paring knife that had been left on the butcher block. Following her lead, Shea took a meat tenderizing mallet and put it in her back pocket. Hennie took a ladle for herself and handed a whisk to Becca. Clutching her flashlight like a weapon, Wallis led them out the back door and into the yard behind the mess hall.
A few yards away stood a wooden shed that looked ramshackle, but homey. Yellow checked curtains hung in the windows, and a pair of work boots sat on a reed mat by the door. Wallis breathed a sigh of relief that she’d been right, and now hoped that Oscar would be able to help them. She crossed the yard and knocked quietly at the shed door. From inside, a familiar voice called, “Who’s there?”
“It’s us,” Wallis whispered. “From Cabin 2. We need your help.”
The door flew open, and Oscar filled up its frame, still wearing his coveralls. He ushered them inside, scanning the woods around the mess hall for movement before closing the door behind them.
“So she’s struck again?” Oscar asked. He sounded like he’d been expecting it.
The girls nodded as they peered around Oscar’s shed. It was nicer than they’d expected, and bigger, too. Around the utility sink and garden tools, he’d made room for a cot, an oval-shaped rag rug on the floor, a nightstand with a candle and a transistor radio on it, a small table set with a single plate, fork, and coffee cup, and a straight-backed wooden chair.
“We need to go for help,” Corinne said. “Is there a car or something around here?”
“There’s a truck up at the equipment shed, but it hasn’t been driven in a while. Some rats got at the hoses and chewed them up pretty good.”
“Can you fix it?” Wallis asked.
“Well, sure, I can fix it. It’d be easier to wait until morning when there’s light, though.”
“I don’t think this can wait until morning,” Corinne said.
“WE’LL HELP,” Shea said. “WE’LL HOLD THE FLASHLIGHTS AND STAND GUARD.”
Oscar gnawed thoughtfully on his lip, then said, “Well, let’s get a move on.”
They took the dirt road from the mess hall to the equipment shed, running past the art barn and the campfire pavilion. Oscar knew every inch, every pebble of Camp So-and-So, so they ran without flashlights to guide their way, following instead the soft footfalls and panting breaths before them.
When Wallis felt a hand close around her shoulder, she stifled a scream, then realized that it belonged to Corinne. Without slowing her pace, Corinne leaned forward and whispered, “It was a good idea going to get Oscar.”
“Thanks,” Wallis whispered back, surprised to find that even in the midst of all of this, Corinne’s approval still meant rather a lot to her.
Corinne gave Wallis’s shoulder a squeeze, and then she ran to the front of the pack with Shea and Oscar. Wallis allowed herself a moment to beam, then turned her focus back toward keeping up with the other girls, all of whom seemed to be in much better shape than she was. Hennie was gawky, but her strides were long, and even though Becca was being pulled along every step of the way by Shea, she wasn’t winded. Wallis was small and inclined toward stoutness. She knew that if she stopped running, she was as good as dead, but even so, it was tempting to take a break.
If this works, you’ll be riding in the truck back into town by sunrise, she reminded herself.
But then, just as Wallis had known that they needed Oscar’s help and where to find him, she knew something else.
Wallis knew that this wasn’t going to work.
This happened to her sometimes, knowing what was going to happen next. Not because she was psychic, or at least she didn’t think so. It felt different than that.
A Note from the Narrator: I believe I already made it clear that there are no psychic girls at Camp So-and-So this year.
Wallis always knew who the murderer was on crime shows, and when she went to the movies, she always figured out what the big twist was ages before everyone else. It happened in real life, too. The moment she unwrapped the talking cat toy her parents gave her for her seventh birthday, she’d known that she was never going to play with it again after that day, that wanting it had been the best thing about it.
It wasn’t always as boring or depressing as it sounded. Sometimes it was reassuring. When Wallis had butted heads with her English teacher, Miss Kriss, last September, she’d known that they’d learn to appreciate each other by the end of the school year, and that’s exactly how things had turned out.
Still, it was nice to be surprised every now and again. That was why she read the Isis Archimedes books. It had been a year since she finished reading the fifth one in the series, and still, she didn’t have the slightest idea what the author, Eurydice Horne, was going to do next. This was mostly because Isis Archimedes was murdered in the last scene, and try as she might, Wallis couldn’t see a way out of it.
But this wasn’t like that.
As they ran toward the equipment shed and the truck that Oscar could fix, the truck that would get them to safety, Wallis knew that he couldn’t, that it wouldn’t.
There was nothing she could do about it. If she warned the others, they’d think she was crazy, especially since it had been her idea in the first place. All she could do was brace herself for failure and be ready to act before Abigail could strike again.
When they reached the shed, Oscar took a ring of keys out of his pocket, felt out their shapes in the dark until he found the right one, and unlocked the padlocked door. Once they were safely inside, Corinne turned on her flashlight, and Shea followed suit.
The truck was there, just like Oscar had said it would be. None of them had ever been so happy to see a 1989 Toyota 4Runner in all their lives. It turned out that Corinne was halfway handy, so she and Oscar worked to replace the tattered hoses while Wallis and Hennie shone Corinne’s flashlight under the hood. Meanwhile, Shea stood guard, shining her flashlight into the corners of the shed and along the walls, keeping an eye on the still-shaky Becca, and looking for any signs of Abigail. The shed was cluttered and packed full of canoes and life jackets, harnesses, spools of net, and half-rotted lifeguard chairs. Plenty of things for a person to hide behind.
Suddenly, Shea caught something in the beam of her flashlight and let out a shriek that made Corinne drop her wrench on the ground. When they turned around to see what had happened, Shea’s face was deathly pale, and she was pointing her flashlight toward an archery target stained with blood.
“Don’t think about being afraid,” said Corinne, who seemed almost incapable of becoming rattled. “Think of it like a row of hurdles we have to jump over. We fix the truck. We drive into town. We get the police. We call our parents. Then everything goes back to normal. We can all be sitting in the police station drinking hot chocolate in less than an hour.”
Corinne’s speech seemed to have a calming effect on everyone, even Wallis.
Why not hope? Wallis thought. She hoped that the plan would work. She hoped the feeling in her gut was wrong.
“Okay, I think that just about does it,” said Oscar, helping Corinne to her feet and slamming the hood shut. “Let’s see if she’ll start.”
Corinne stood with the other girls as Oscar climbed behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The truck sputtered and choked, but then Oscar nudged the gas pedal, an
d the engine turned over. He let out a whoop and stuck his arm out the window, motioning to the girls from Cabin 2.
“Climb in!” he said, and put his foot on the clutch, shifting the truck into first gear.
The explosion killed him instantly.
It ripped through the dashboard and shattered the windshield, and then the cab burst into flames. Thick white smoke poured from under the hood as the girls screamed.
To Wallis, the whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion. What happened? What went wrong? she wondered. She hadn’t seen anything under the hood while Corinne and Oscar were working. Clearly, they hadn’t seen it either. Whatever the device was, it must have been well-hidden, not that this mattered now.
Small fires began to ignite around the shed as flaming debris rained down. The fires spread and joined up with each other, and Wallis realized that if they didn’t hurry, they’d be surrounded.
It was Corinne who found the stack of buckets by the door and began thrusting them into the arms of her cabinmates.
“Go to the lake. Get water,” Corinne instructed.
A small boat dock separated the equipment shed from Lake So-and-So. Wallis and Hennie took the buckets from her and ran toward the lake.
Shea had been knocked to the ground by the explosion. Blood streamed down her face and arms. Her eyes were half-open and unfocused, and she couldn’t stand on her own. While Wallis and Hennie ran to the end of the dock to fill their buckets, Corinne got behind Shea, hoisted her up under her arms, and dragged her outside. Once she’d moved her out of harm’s way, Corinne went back for Becca, who was still cowering near the flames, her eyes blank with shock.
By this time Wallis and Hennie had returned with the buckets of water. Corinne pointed them toward the small fires threatening the shed, while she went back to the truck. Even if Oscar hadn’t been beyond help, there was no way she could have reached him. The entire cab was engulfed in flames and smoke.
Once the girls had gotten the smaller fires under control, Corinne motioned them toward the truck. They formed a line, and the three of them passed bucket after bucket to the front, where Corinne stood and tossed the water onto the flames.
Finally, after five dozen buckets, the blaze was out. Their faces were smeared with ash and sweat, their throats raw from smoke inhalation, their arms aching. But they were better off than Oscar.
“Check on Shea and Becca,” Corinne barked at the other girls, her voice ragged.
They found the two girls propped up against the boat dock railing. Blood oozed down Shea’s face from a deep cut on her forehead, and yet, she was still more lucid than Becca, who clung to her arm, quaking.
Hennie dropped to her knees, ripped a strip of fabric from the bottom of her t-shirt and pressed it to Shea’s head while Corinne headed back to the shed.
“Help me,” she said, motioning Wallis to follow her, and in a horrifying, sickening second, Wallis realized what it was that Corinne needed her help to do.
The two of them climbed inside the sodden cab of the truck and pulled Oscar’s body out. A piece of metal had speared him through the eye in the explosion. He probably didn’t even have time to wonder what hit him. Corinne took his hands and Wallis took his feet, and in that way, they carried him out of the equipment shed and laid him down on the dock.
“Should we bury him?” Wallis asked.
Corinne shook her head. “No. We’re still going into town to get the police. They’ll want to see the . . . body.”
Corinne choked over the last word and buried her face in her hands.
“We should cover him, though,” Wallis said. “He said there were rats.”
“We should have covered Megan, too,” Corinne said, her voice heavy with guilt. “We should have at least cut her down.”
Wallis didn’t know what to say. She pulled a tarp off of a pile of firewood stacked outside the shed and handed Corinne a corner of it, and the two of them pulled the tarp over Oscar’s body and weighted it down with stones from the shore of the lake.
All of this was her fault. She was the one who’d made them bring Oscar into this, and now he was dead. Worse, she’d known something bad was about to happen, and she hadn’t kept him from starting the truck. Of course, it wouldn’t have made sense to any of them if she’d tried to explain: No, we shouldn’t take the truck. We should try to escape from camp by walking twenty miles or so in the dead of night to the nearest town. Why? Because I just have a feeling. She would have sounded crazy, they wouldn’t have listened to her, and the same thing would have happened, but Wallis still wished she’d tried to stop them when she had the chance.
“How did she do it?” Corinne wondered aloud as they worked.
“Abigail?”
“I looked under the hood. Oscar and I both looked, and there wasn’t anything there.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Wallis said, patting Corinne on the shoulder. It wasn’t a gesture she was used to making; however, if she was doing it wrong, Corinne didn’t seem to notice.
“What should we do next?” Corinne asked.
The truck was done for, that much was clear. They discussed waiting until morning or trying to go on foot immediately, but neither idea sat well with them. Had Kadie Aguilar been in their cabin, she would have told them about the existence of the Inge F. Yancey Young Executives Leadership Camp, and they might have chosen to row across the lake for help. However, all five were new to Camp So-and-So, and on that moonless night, they saw only acres of dark, wooded nothingness on the far side of the lake.
They rejoined the other girls. After bandaging Shea’s head wound, Hennie had inspected her for any other injuries and, finding none, helped her to her feet. Shea was still dizzy, dazed, and probably mildly concussed, but they all knew how much worse it could have been.
“Can you walk?” Corinne asked.
“I THINK SO,” Shea said, and then suddenly Wallis came up with a plan so Shea wouldn’t have to.
“We can take the horses,” she said. “The stables are just through the woods behind our cabin.”
“What about her?” Corinne nodded grimly at Becca, who was still crouched on the ground, arms wound tight around her knees, rocking, rocking, rocking.
“Get up,” Wallis said, stretching out a hand to her, but Becca ignored it.
“SWEETIE?” Shea asked, touching Becca’s shoulder. Becca flinched, but the sound of Shea’s voice made her lift her eyes and transform back into a person who could be reasoned with.
“WE NEED TO MOVE,” Shea said. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
“Don’t leave me here,” Becca whispered.
“NOBODY’S LEAVING ANYBODY, BUT YOU HAVE TO GET UP,” Shea said. Wallis wondered how she was standing at all, much less counseling the shell-shocked Becca.
“OKAY?”
Shea met Becca’s eyes and refused to let her look away until Becca nodded and whispered a small “Okay.”
“OKAY,” Shea said, helping Becca to her feet. It was too much exertion for her, though. She swayed briefly, and the other girls in Cabin 2 lunged forward to catch her. But she waved them away and caught the boat dock railing to steady herself.
“LET’S GET THOSE HORSES AND GET OUT OF THIS PLACE.”
It was a plan they could all agree on.
INTERMISSION
From the spot in the treetops where the two stagehands sat, they could see the girls from Cabin 2 fleeing toward the stables. In the other direction, shadowy figures raked the smoldering remains of the equipment shed. Soon enough the two stagehands would be down there with the rest, tidying up, clearing the set, making it look like the whole thing had never happened.
But it would be at least a few more minutes before they were missed. Might as well sit in the treetops and enjoy the night while they could.
One stagehand turned to the other and asked, “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”
“It wasn’t in the script,” the other replied, adding, “Poor Oscar.”
“Yeah, poor
Oscar,” the first stagehand agreed. “He had a good run, though.”
“Did he?”
They sat without speaking—a moment of silence for the fallen groundskeeper.
At last, the first stagehand spoke again. “If they’re not following the script, that means . . .”
“Better hold on to our hats.”
The first stagehand frowned and shook his head.
“Better hope we end up on the right side of things.”
CABIN 3
THE HERO’S QUEST
[SCENE: On a path in a wood that holds a cave that holds a beast]
As dusk fell on that first night, they set out from the stables on foot into a forest so thick that it seemed to swallow them up. They traveled in single file, speaking only when absolutely necessary—which, when they came to a fork in the path, it was.
First you must slay the beast inside its lair
And then set free the one imprisoned there.
The girl with beads in her hair shrugged the backpack from her shoulders and unzipped the side pocket. Inside was a copy of the prophecy they’d found written in the rafters of their cabin and a map of Camp So-and-So she’d sketched from the disk of lumber outside the mess hall. At the time, it had seemed like good planning, but now she worried that a map carved into a piece of wood might not divulge every twist and fork in the vast forests of Camp So-and-So. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. It wasn’t like there was a spot on the map labeled BEAST’S LAIR.
This was not her only worry, though.
As long as they kept moving, it was easy not to think too much about what they were doing out in the woods. Or at least it was easy not to feel silly about it.
We’re just having fun, thought the girl with beads in her hair. There’s no way this is really happening.
But deep in a secret corner of her heart burned a hope that it was real.
The girl with beads in her hair had spent years staring down the barrel of real, an endless barrage of SAT practice tests; community service hours; tedious, venal boys; and girls who turned into simpering invertebrates in their presence.
