Camp Cannibal

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  Yardstick sported football shoulder pads, and his legs were wrapped in shin guards. On his feet, he wore cleats that left pinpricks in the floor behind him.

  He pinned me in place by pressing his prickly feet against my chest.

  “Stay,” he said. The spikes burrowed into my skin.

  I did as I was told.

  “Spencer, Spencer, Spencer…”

  Somebody was savoring the sound of my name.

  I heard the warp of wood just behind my head.

  Peashooter waltzed into view. He leaned over me. A bitter chill seeped out from his stare. I would’ve sworn his irises were made of ice. His baby face had peeled away. He now wore a weathered countenance, his skin coarsened from constant exposure to the outdoors.

  It had been six months since I had watched him run off, his face slathered in blood. What was it that he had said to me?

  “This isn’t over between you and me. You’re dead, Spencer! Dead!”

  How could I forget?

  “Miss us?” he asked. “We sure missed you….”

  Peashooter had wrapped himself in animal hides. His arms were covered in crow feathers. It almost looked like he had wings. A bleached bird skull was perched on each shoulder, their beaks pointing over his arms.

  Branching from behind his head were a pair of deer antlers.

  A crown of horns.

  I could make out the slight scar on the cartilage that linked his nostrils together. The scar I’d given him.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Your father’s been awfully worried about you. All the trouble you’ve been causing lately…He and I agreed it was high time for an intervention.”

  “That was you talking to my dad?” I asked. “You were the one who kept calling?”

  “He was planning to send you to military school, you know. Can you imagine? You, Spencer Pendleton, at a military school?”

  “You wouldn’t have lasted a week.” Compass sneered. The acne spread along his cheeks and forehead had cratered into jagged pockmarks, like a lunar landscape.

  “Somebody had to step in,” Peashooter said. “Change your father’s mind.”

  I hesitated, caught off guard. “Coming here was your idea?”

  Sporkboy held up his hands and shrugged—Guilty as charged. Four green Girl Scout sashes were strapped over his shoulders, like bandoliers, crisscrossing at his chest in an X.

  “Love the new outfits,” I said. “Where’d you get them? Headhunters ‘R’ Us?”

  “I’m borrowing them from troop sixty-two,” he said. “I’m collecting the whole set….Tonight, I think I’m going to earn my skin-filleting badge.”

  I noticed their arms were free of Magic-Markered mantras.

  “What happened to your tats? Run out of Sharpies?”

  “You took our words away, Spencer,” Peashooter explained. “When all our markers ran out, our phrases faded away. Now our skin is just…skin.”

  That’s when I realized somebody was missing.

  “Is Sully here?”

  Peashooter pushed Yardstick aside and dug his heel into my Adam’s apple.

  “Mention her name again and I swear I’ll bury you in your sleeping bag where no one will find you.”

  A simple “no” would have sufficed.

  Peashooter lifted his foot and started to wander about the office, holding his arms behind his back and puffing his chest out—while I clutched my throat, coughing. He plopped into the swivel chair behind George’s desk and leaned back. “I could get used to this,” he said, giving himself a spin. “What do you think?”

  “Looks good.” Sporkboy nodded. “You look good.”

  “You really think so?”

  “It suits you,” Compass agreed. “You were born for it.”

  “What about the counselors?” I coughed, interrupting the love-in. “What’re you going to do with them?”

  “They can hang out without us for a while,” Peashooter said. “Would you feel more comfortable with them? Yardstick here could take you back—”

  “If the kids don’t phone home,” I cut him off, “everybody’s going to start worrying. They’ll call the camp. And when the counselors don’t answer, the next call everybody at home is going to make will be to the—”

  “We had a home once,” he interrupted. “Until you took it away from us.”

  “Now we live like animals,” Compass said.

  “But not anymore.” Peashooter flipped the switch on the intercom.

  A surge of feedback ricocheted throughout camp.

  Bringing the microphone to his mouth, he announced, “Attention, campers! This is your wake-up call. We are sorry to interrupt your regularly scheduled deprogramming, but there has been a change in your summer plans….”

  Hello mother, hello father…

  I send you greetings from camp slaughter.

  Grub is rough here. Flesh is more palatable.

  I guess that’s why this place is called Camp Cannibal!

  DAY TWO: 0000 HOURS

  ll campers were woken up and called to the amphitheater. Even the Piranhas were unleashed from their cabin.

  Everyone filed in, half-asleep, and took a seat circling the fire pit, probably anticipating some midnight “sharing session” with our counselors. A look of unease was settling over each camper’s face as whispers passed through the amphitheater.

  I spotted Charles. His eyes widened as he took in my situation—­bound to a shower curtain rod before the fire pit. Sporkboy and Yardstick had hefted each end of the rod over a shoulder, like I was a pig on a rotisserie spit.

  Compass heaped a pile of kindling into the pit. He lit the fire and the smell of burning pine needles drifted through the air.

  “Drop him,” Peashooter commanded from the center of the amphitheater. Sporkboy and Yardstick did as they were told, and I landed before the fire—Ouch.

  Peashooter looked down at me lying there and smiled. The cold looming within his eyes seemed to lower the temperature whenever I stared at him.

  “Ready for this?” he asked me.

  “Are you asking if I’m ready for more of your theatrics?”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  Peashooter’s spine went ramrod straight. Chin lifted, eyes wide, he summoned all the fury his throat could muster and howled straight into the air.

  “Ooooooooooooooow!”

  All whispering ceased. The crowd of campers regarded Peashooter with a fidgety apprehension—Who is this crow-­feathered freak?

  Peashooter’s arm shot up over his head. Something was in his hand.

  Something fuzzy.

  It looked like a scraggly blond paintbrush without a handle. It didn’t take long for everyone to figure out what it was.

  A ponytail.

  Peashooter presented the severed clump. “Do I have everyone’s attention?”

  Nobody said a word.

  “Good.”

  Peashooter tossed George’s ponytail into the fire—Sssssssssss.

  “We are not here to hurt you,” he announced. “We are here to help. Your counselors are no longer in control of this camp. They are no longer in control of you.”

  He paused long enough to let the echo of his words fade.

  “You are.”

  The fire behind him crackled as a piece of kindling snapped, sending a flurry of sparks into the air.

  “Your parents saw this camp as a tourniquet. A quick fix to stop the bleeding, a temporary solution for what they couldn’t be bothered to understand. They would rather throw money at the problem, and ship you off to some program so that you’d return home to them good as new. They wanted to change you. Modify you. How? With pills. With prescriptions. Your parents have manipulated the miracle of modern medicine to bend your brains
to their frivolous will. Why? Because they don’t understand you.”

  Peashooter stopped and grinned, regarding each camper with the unbridled enthusiasm of a boy about to open his ­Christmas presents.

  “But we do.”

  Peashooter turned and acknowledged Thomas. I could see Thomas weigh his options: Should I make a break for it or stay put?

  “If this is how your parents treat you,” Peashooter offered him, “if they think you’re nothing but a broken toy they can ship off to get fixed—then I say they don’t deserve you in the first place. Because, to us—you’re perfect just the way you are.”

  The sound of his voice flooded the amphitheater and seeped into the surrounding forest. His words were everywhere.

  Inescapable.

  Thomas sat upright on his log, his eyes never breaking from Peashooter. His decision was clear—stay.

  Peashooter pointed to the parking lot where we had been dropped off. “Out there, everyone calls you a delinquent. Back at home, your parents call you emotionally disturbed.”

  He looked around to make sure the words were sinking in.

  “Well—this is your new home now. And your parents will never be invited into your house!”

  Peashooter looked to Mason. Mason absentmindedly rolled up his sleeves, exposing a rugged terrain of scar tissue that ran the length of his forearms.

  “Whatever your mother and fathers are afraid of in you, we want to embrace it,” Peashooter said. “We want to nourish that fire within until it scorches the earth!”

  Mason nodded. Even from where I was lying, I could see the words landing.

  Summer camp was definitely over.

  “The first step toward emancipation is to cut ties with those who hold you back,” Peashooter pushed on. “Your mothers and fathers, your brothers and sisters, because they don’t deserve to be your family.”

  He paused. “We’re your family now.”

  Peashooter was like the undertow, that invisible force underneath the ocean’s surface that pulls hapless swimmers farther and farther away from the shore—until they drown.

  I should know. Peashooter had nearly drowned me. I’ve witnessed the spell he casts over others with nothing more than the power of his words.

  Or somebody else’s.

  “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty,” Peashooter recited. “Henry David Thoreau wrote that almost two hundred years ago—and it remains true today. We have liberated you from adult supervision. We have liberated you from the rules of the outside world. The one thing—the only thing—we ask for to prove your commitment to our cause is…”

  “What is it?” Thomas’s eagerness betrayed his excitement. “What do you want from us?”

  Peashooter turned his head toward me and grinned.

  “Him.”

  DAY TWO: 0030 HOURS

  o,” Peashooter called, “what are we gonna burn first?”

  Most kids looked at him as if he’d just spoken to them in Latin, but Mason’s eyes widened. He jumped to his feet, unable to control his excitement.

  Peashooter stood before Mason, gauging him. “You’re the pyro, right?”

  Mason dropped his gaze. Peashooter grabbed his chin and lifted his head back up.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” he insisted. “Everybody here has a talent. Yours is the ability to burn. Think of this fire as a symbol for everything that scalds and blisters inside of each and every one of us. Now that it’s lit, it will be your responsibility to make sure the flames never die out. Think you’re up for it?”

  Mason’s face brightened. “What can I use for fuel?”

  “Anything that burns.”

  Personally, I didn’t think it was such a swell idea to put a pyromaniac in charge of the camp’s bonfire, but I figured I would keep my opinions to myself.

  Mason hurried out of the amphitheater.

  “This fire isn’t going to feed itself, people!” Peashooter shouted. “It needs to eat! So I ask you again—what are we gonna burn first?”

  Mason returned dragging back the banner from the parking lot—TIME TO TURN OVER A NEW LEAF—and before anyone could stop him, he tossed it onto the bonfire. The letters warped and melted into ropy bits of plastic. The air was suddenly suffused with a strong toxic odor as the fire greedily ate through the tarp.

  “That’s the spirit,” Peashooter said. “The rest of you—go to your cabins! Find me fuel! I want a fire so big, it reaches the treetops!”

  That’s all it took.

  Everybody fed the flames, contributing to the conflagration.

  Thomas offered up a stack of family photographs. He flicked each pic into the fire, one picture of his parents after another, like he was dealing the flames a hand of dirty poker. The images of his family incinerated in seconds, a royal flush of fire.

  Then came a rocking chair. A ratty mattress. Several sleeping bags. Nothing was too small or two large to go in.

  Capone tossed George’s acoustic guitar in. I heard its six strings snap under the intense heat—Plink! Plink! Plink!

  No more crappy sing-alongs for us.

  Several of the Piranhas brought the watercolor portraits they’d been working on in Arts and Crafts.

  One brought his suitcase of clothes. He was about to throw the whole thing in when Peashooter asked—“Why torch your clothes, kid?”

  “MymomboughtthemIhatekhakishortsIhatebuttonupshirtsIhatethemall!”

  “Fair enough.”

  Peashooter lifted up the Piranha and placed him onto his own shoulders.

  “Have at it!”

  Like an eight-foot-tall shot-putter, Peashooter spun around in place while the Piranha swung his suitcase over his head before finally letting it go.

  Wham! Right into the fire.

  Peashooter and the Piranha stumbled back, grinning as they watched his suitcase get swallowed by the flames.

  Mason slung a sleeping bag over his shoulder as if he were Santa Claus carrying his sack of presents. He upended the bag before the fire, emptying its contents before me.

  My books.

  Their pages flapped helplessly through the air before hitting the ground.

  “Don’t!” I shouted.

  Peashooter turned at the sound of my voice and nodded. “No books go into the fire,” he announced.

  “Yeah, but. You said—”

  “Nobody burns books, understand?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they teach us.”

  Yardstick used his bulked-up arms to heft an entire file cabinet filled to the hilt with folders. At first, I figured it was going into the fire along with everything else.

  “Put it down,” Peashooter ordered, pointing to the stretch of ground between me and the pit.

  Yardstick dropped it, metal rattling throughout the amphitheater, then returned to his guard position just above me, digging a cleated heel into my hip.

  Peashooter grabbed the top compartment’s handle and yanked. The drawer shuttled out on its rafters as if it were a human sacrifice he had just disemboweled with his bare hands, exposing all the gory guts of paperwork inside.

  “This is what the outside world thinks of you.” Peashooter solemnly shook his head as he plucked a single folder out from the drawer and waved it over his head. “This is all that connects you to the old life you had beyond these woods.”

  Peashooter lobbed the folder high up into the air. Sheets of paper drifted listlessly back down to the ground. Several landed in the fire, where they burned in a blink.

  “I want each of you to come here,” he commanded. “Take your old self, and make a choice. Keep it—or free yourself forever.”

  Mason stepped up first. He sifted through the roster of files before plucking out his folder and opening it.

  “Out here, you are free to be who you tru
ly are,” Peashooter said. “So…who are you?”

  Mason scanned the forms. He shook his head and flung his folder into the flames.

  Peashooter pulled a scorched piece of plywood out from the fire and ran his thumb along its charred end. Bringing the dirtied digit up to Mason’s face, he rubbed a streak of ash across his forehead.

  “From here on,” Peashooter said, gripping Mason by the shoulders and grinning, “your name is—Firefly.”

  Thomas leapt up and raced toward the file cabinet. He found his file and it followed Firefly’s into the flames.

  “You, we’ll call—Klepto.”

  One by one, the drawer emptied, until the blaze lapped at the stars.

  “That’s it!” Peashooter raised his hands as if to embrace the flames. His shadow looked like a mutated crow towering above the trees. “Let yourselves go!”

  He spotted Charles sitting by himself. “You.”

  Charles looked behind him, then looked back to Peashooter. “Me?”

  “Yes—you. Come here.”

  Charles stood up and stepped before Peashooter, head bowed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Charles.”

  “Not any longer,” Peashooter said. Rubbing his sooty thumb across the length of Charles’s forehead, he christened him—“Jaws.”

  “…Really?” Charles’s face brightened.

  “You know what to do.”

  Charles flipped through the remaining files and chucked his into the fire. He looked back at me, beaming, as if he thought I’d be proud.

  Can’t say that I was.

  “You are new men now!” Peashooter wrapped one arm around Charles’s shoulder as he regarded the rest. “All of you! You are members of the Tribe!”

  Compass raised his fist into the air, beckoning the others to shout along with him—“To the Law of Claw and Fang!

  Thomas joined in—“To the Law of Claw and Fang!”

  Mason followed—“To the Law of Claw and Fang!”

  Before long, most campers were chanting—“Claw and Fang! Claw and Fang!”