Camp Cannibal

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  “It most certainly is,” he snapped back without a second’s hesitation.

  This was my chance.

  I cleared my throat and lobbed Animal Farm straight in his face.

  “No one believes more firmly…that all campers are equal.”

  Peashooter’s eyes slowly opened wider.

  I kept reciting—“He would be only happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves.”

  Peashooter’s mouth cracked open as the words sunk in, his jaw drifting down to his chest.

  I didn’t let up—“But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

  Peashooter looked as if I had yanked his reading list out from underneath him. I took advantage of his shock and deciphered. “Peashooter says he treats you as his equals, but has he really given you back your power? Or is he calling the shots?”

  The Piranhas turned their attention to Peashooter, waiting to see how he would react.

  “There’s no way…” he started to say, but the words died in his mouth. He started up again. “There’s no way you could’ve read Animal Farm.”

  “George Orwell’s great,” I said. “He knew that when a man turns into a tyrant, the first thing he destroys is his own freedom.”

  Peashooter closed in on my cage. “Don’t lecture me about Orwell.”

  “Frightening, isn’t it?” I asked the Piranhas. “It’s always the people who are so ignorant that have so much influence.”

  The Piranhas collectively winced. Together, they all took a sharp breath through their gritted teeth—Oh, snap!

  Peashooter reached his arm through the bars, but I leaned back before he could grab me.

  “You don’t think I’ve read it like a hundred times?” The expression on his face knotted as he threw a quote from Animal Farm back at me: “Bravery is not enough…Loyalty and obedience are more important…Discipline, comrades, iron discipline!”

  Peashooter didn’t waste any time following it up: “Translation—­Loyalty to your Tribe is what matters most, no matter what this subversive element says.”

  I lobbed another quote back at him: “…this was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow…”

  “Don’t listen to him!” Peashooter blurted. “He’s trying to undermine the Tribe’s authority with a…with a book!”

  “And Peashooter’s trying to brainwash you!”

  Peashooter’s eyes darted around the amphitheater as he desperately searched his memory for another Orwellian retort.

  Nothing came.

  He grabbed hold of the bars on my cage and gave them a good shake, his face inches away from mine.

  “You think you can beat me, Rat?”

  “I think you’re losing control of your new recruits, and that scares you. I think you’re in over your head, and I know you know I’m right. I think things are going to get pretty hairy around here, and I for one don’t want to see what happens next.”

  Peashooter wiped his face clean of any emotion.

  Without betraying a single sentiment, he unlocked my cage.

  He flipped the lid open and stepped away.

  “Then leave.”

  Peashooter held out his hand as if to offer the woods up to me.

  “Go.”

  I slowly stood up. My spine sang a song of relief as I stretched. My back was aching from countless hours of crouching.

  I was free. Actually free.

  “But before you run away,” Peashooter said. “I’ve got one last question—where are you going to go?”

  “As far away from here as possible. See you around.”

  Peashooter only shook his head. “The sad truth is, you’ve got nowhere to go. No home, no school. No friends. You’ve got no one.”

  “Nice try,” I said. “My mom’ll take me back.”

  “Really? You mean your mom who you lied to so many times that she stuck you with your deadbeat dad? That mom?”

  “You don’t know anything about her.”

  “That’s interesting, because when the two of us talked on the phone the other day, she said she felt like she couldn’t protect you from yourself anymore.”

  My knees softened.

  “Not from us,” Peashooter said. “Not from the outside world. She can’t protect you from yourself. You, Spencer.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I?”

  My mind drifted. I couldn’t think of a comeback quick enough. “I’ll go back to my dad’s, then.”

  “How many times did you break out from his house? Ten? Twenty times? You really think he’ll take you back?” He recited—“Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.”

  I took a deep breath and grabbed hold of the cage, ready to hoist myself out.

  My wrists locked.

  Freedom was in my grasp. All I had to do was lift one leg over the side of the cage and then the other.

  All I had to do was walk through these woods.

  Just cut through that vast, desolate stretch of trees and then…

  And then what?

  “What’s wrong?” Peashooter asked. “Can’t think of anywhere to go?”

  The Piranhas kept looking back and forth, waiting to see what I would do next. They were egging me on with their eyes—

  Runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuuuun.

  “Admit it, Spence,” Peashooter said. “We’re the only family you have left. You’re one of us and you always will be, no matter how hard you fight it.”

  Before I knew what was happening, I was slowly sinking back into the confines of my cage.

  The bars lifted over my head, and Peashooter locked the lid, sealing me in.

  “Welcome home, Rat,” Peashooter said.

  I brought my legs up to my chest and held myself back from crying.

  Peashooter was right.

  This was the closet thing to a home I had now.

  DAY FIVE: 0600 HOURS

  ood morning, cannibals,” Peashooter’s voice rumbled through the PA system, dragging me out from my sleep. “Today, we’ll be reading from White Fang.…”

  The sky was still gray. It must have been early. The sun barely reached through the surrounding woods. Dew dampened my clothes.

  What day is it? What time?

  Time had lost its shape. I felt I’d been caged for weeks. The only way to determine the days passing were the morning announcements, where Peashooter read from the Tribal Required Reading List:

  “The aim of life was meat,” he recited. “Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.”

  I hadn’t eaten for what felt like months. Weakness was seeping into my bones. All I could do was sit and bake in the sun, growing more disoriented.

  A silhouette outside my cage shifted before me, moving closer. “Who’s there?” I rasped. “Who are you?”

  I blinked, but I couldn’t focus. The fuzzy form took a step forward.

  I couldn’t believe it. Air escaped my lungs with a croak.

  “Dad…?”

  I rubbed my eyes and squinted.

  “Dad—is that you?”

  “Spencer?” His voice was thick, distant, as if my ears were wrapped in cotton.

  I could feel my heartbeat quicken. “Dad, please—you’ve got to help me.”

  “You could’ve stopped this,” he said. “All you had to do was run away with your li’l head-hunting friends when you first had the chance. You really would’ve done me and your mom a huge favor. I don’t know how she put up with you for so long….”

  “At least she tried.” I lost it. “That’s a lot more than you can say!”

  “Adm
it it.” Dad rubbed a hoof over his ear. “All those times you broke house arrest were just half-assed attempts at getting my attention, weren’t they? That’s why you always got caught. You wanted to get caught, so I’d take you back.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Are you gonna eat that grass?”

  “…Dad?”

  That’s when I noticed he had a set of antlers.

  “Do you mind if I take a nibble?”

  A six-point buck had wandered up to my cage. It had a tawny brown body with white patches speckling its haunches. It stared back at me, chewing.

  I had been talking to a deer.

  “Sorry about the outburst earlier….I really haven’t been myself lately.”

  The buck’s ears fanned backward. He abruptly spun his head around, sensing someone coming our way. He bounded off into the woods with a series of quick leaps.

  “Send help,” I called out after him.

  Compass came down the path carrying a plastic honey-bear bottle tied to a string. “Who’re you talking to?” he asked.

  “Nobody you know.”

  Compass fastened the honey bear from a branch just over my cage with its head pointed down, golden fluid welling up within the bear’s see-through skull.

  “Breakfast’s served,” Compass said as he popped the container’s cap.

  Amber ooze sluggishly seeped out from the spout. I craned my neck until my head was positioned underneath the flow and opened my mouth.

  Wait for it…

  Wait…

  Wait…

  The first dollop of honey hit my nose. I’d been off by an inch.

  I corrected my receiving position.

  Honey landed on my tongue and rolled down. Its sweetness spread throughout my mouth. Finally—my first meal in what felt like forever.

  “Thanks,” I said in between swallows. “You’re all right, Compass. Really.”

  Compass waited for me to swallow. “That’s very sweet of you to say. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you’re stuck in a cage right now.”

  “I know we’ve never really seen eye to…” I started, suddenly forgetting the rest of my sentence. “Eye to…”

  My eyelids started to feel heavy.

  Dizziness washed over.

  Compass started talking. “Peashooter should’ve gotten rid of you when he had the chance.” The sound of his voice dropped several octaves. “I told him to, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He likes you too much—and that makes him weak.”

  “He suuuure has a funny way of showing it,” I said, my words slurring.

  “The truth is,” Compass said, “if Peashooter had his way, you would join us once and for all. But if you became a member of the Tribe, before long, you’d be Peashooter’s second-in-­command. And where would I be?”

  His acne undulated in fluctuating color.

  “I feeeeel funny,” I said, and shook my head.

  “Sweet dreams, Rat,” Compass said before his head became a pimple-ridden balloon and floated off his shoulders.

  The honey continued to dribble down my face. I was too sleepy to duck the flow, trapped like a prehistoric insect as it slowly becomes fossilized in amber. Archeologists would excavate my perfectly preserved remains centuries from now.

  I’d be the discovery of a lifetime: a petrified cave-camper.

  •••

  I had the strangest dream. My skin was crawling away. It felt so unbelievably real. Even in my sleep I would’ve sworn my flesh was marching right off my bones.

  Wait a minute…

  My flesh was on fire. Hundreds of pinpricks were scattering along my arms and legs.

  I opened my eyes and discovered I was covered in ants. They nibbled on the film of honey I was glazed in. I tried swatting them off, but they simply skittered across my hands. I could feel them scrambling across my scalp and down my shirt.

  “Ah!” I yelled. One had crawled into my ear.

  When Compass had said breakfast’s served, he wasn’t talking about my meal.

  He was talking about me.

  I was a human picnic.

  A splash of water snapped me out of my panic.

  Compass stood in front of my cage with a bucket. He splashed me again, extinguishing the ants crawling across my body. Who knows how many hundreds of times I’d been bitten.

  Compass leaned over my cage and examined me. The ­Rorschach test of his acne had changed since the last time I saw him.

  “Check out that sunburn,” Compass exclaimed. “You’re as red as a lobster!”

  That’s when I noticed his pinkie.

  Fastened to the end of Compass’s missing fingertip was the metal spike of a drafting compass. He had disassembled the two halves at the hinge, throwing away the pencil fastener and keeping the needle.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I had to ask.

  “Make a point,” he said as he waved the spike perilously close to my left eye.

  Klepto entered the amphitheater behind Compass. “Coast is clear.”

  Compass popped the lock with his pinkie and flipped the lid open. “Get out.”

  “If it’s okay with you,” I said. “I’d rather just stay in here….”

  They each grabbed an arm and yanked me out from the cage. My feet scraped the ground as they dragged me away, leaving two trails of overturned dirt in my wake.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Archery range,” Compass said. “Peashooter gave Klepto a copy of Robin Hood, and he ate it up and now he wants to be an archer.”

  Klepto nodded, reciting from the book—“…I could put this arrow clear through that proud heart of yours before a friar could say ‘grace.’”

  “Only problem is,” Compass continued, “when it comes to target practice, there’s not a lot of variety.”

  The camp had transformed itself over the last few days, now overrun with propaganda from some kind of despotic presidential campaign. I spotted posters of Peashooter’s countenance hanging from the trunks of trees. Quotes from his favorite books had been graffitied across the cabin walls.

  The Tribe’s stick figure had been spray-painted across each cabin door, its spear raised over its head. Wrapped around the emblem in bleeding letters, it read:

  LONG LIVE CAMP CANNIBAL! LONG LIVE THE TRIBE!

  “Love what you guys have done with the place,” I said.

  Compass pushed me toward the archery range. “Just keep moving.”

  I was shoved before a hay bale, my back pressed against the target sheet. Klepto tied my hands together. “For your safety,” he said.

  He shook a can of spray paint—clack clack clack—and spritzed a series of black rings across my T-shirt. Black tendrils of paint dribbled down my shorts.

  “Hold still,” Compass instructed. He polished a red apple on his shirt and took a bite before perching it on top of my head.

  All my bones had turned to jelly by the time Klepto and Compass had situated themselves behind the firing line.

  Klepto slipped an arrow into his bow and pinched his good eye shut. It looked as if his lazy eye was staring off somewhere behind me.

  A tremor rushed up my spine that sent the apple rolling off my head.

  “Um—guys?” I called out across the field. “The apple fell.”

  “That’s okay,” Klepto shouted. “I wasn’t aiming for the apple!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on a sec. I was under the distinct impression Peashooter wanted to keep me alive.”

  “Guess we’ll just have to tell Peashooter it was an accident.”

  My knees buckled underneath me.

  “Help!” I shouted. “Anyone! Help!”

  Compass ran over and picked up the apple at my feet by stabbing it with his compass-pinkie. He stuf
fed the partially eaten piece of fruit into my mouth.

  “Ssh.” He pressed his compass-pinkie to his lips. “Keep quiet so Klepto can concentrate.”

  Compass rejoined Klepto behind the firing line and shouted, “Show them how we shoot in Sherwood!”

  Klepto resumed his firing stance. He slipped the arrow between his fingers and pulled back on the bow’s string.

  My teeth sank deeper into the apple’s skin. The hinges in my jaw started to ache. Juice dribbled down my chin.

  “Ready,” Compass instructed.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Aim…”

  Apple juice was pooling up at the back of my throat. I almost choked.

  “Fire!”

  I heard a swift swish as the arrow buried itself into the hay bale at my left.

  “I thought you said you were a pro at this,” Compass said. “You were way off!”

  “That was a warm-up,” Klepto insisted.

  I spat out the apple. “Guys—don’t do this.”

  “Ready,” Compass intoned.

  Klepto slid a second arrow in between his fingers.

  “Aim…”

  Klepto pinched his good eye. His lazy eye drifted up toward the sky.

  I closed mine as tightly as I could—and in that darkness, I felt a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. surge up from my throat. I had no choice but to release it:

  “The non-violent resistor not only avoids external, physical violence,” I shouted, “but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him!”

  Desperate times call for desperate measures. And I was just about as desperate as they come.

  “Nice try, Rat,” Compass called out. “Fire!”

  I had less than a second for all thirteen years of my life to come flashing before me—birth, elementary school, holidays, vacations with Mom and Dad, middle school, joining the Tribe, my first kiss with Sully, getting kicked out of the Tribe, coming to camp—and now, my execution.

  Um…Why am I not dead yet?

  I slowly cracked one eye open.

  Yardstick was standing between me and Klepto’s empty bow. He had pulled off one of his athletic shoulder pads and was holding it in front of my face.

  The arrow had lodged itself within the padding—the tip of the arrowhead poking through.