by Jeff Strand
At least these ridiculous vengeance thoughts were keeping him from focusing on how frightened he still was.
Well, no, he was still focusing on that pretty well.
They could still be coming after him.
He thought that he could probably find the dirt road that had taken him to camp in the first place, but it had been fifteen miles long. Fifteen miles before he could make it to a road that might contain actual traffic to flag down for help.
A much better option would be to find the music camp. Except that he could wander around forever looking for it. Not literally forever. They’d eventually find his shriveled, dehydrated body lying on the ground somewhere. And then they’d say, “Oh, look, the music camp was just past that tree. How ironic.”
So getting help was going to be a nightmare. But really, that wasn’t his top priority right now. He had to warn the others. He couldn’t let them go back to the building.
Somebody moved maybe ten feet away.
Henry’s stomach lurched. How had they gotten so close?
More movement. Somebody running from the cover of a large tree to the cover of another large tree.
“Who’s there?” Henry demanded. No way could Ethan or Mr. Grand have followed him that closely without him hearing them. Had he been so unfortunate as to run in the same direction that the third guy had been searching?
Erik stepped out from behind the tree, pointing his paint gun at Henry. The paint gun looked significantly less scary now that he’d encountered the real thing. Henry breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God.”
Erik shot him in the chest. Relieved or not, it still stung like crazy.
Erik shot him three more times as he walked over to him. Henry tried to block one of the hits with his palm, which hurt much worse than just taking the shot to the chest.
“Erik, listen to me,” said Henry, wiping his orange palm off on his shirt.
“No, you’re cheating.”
“No, no, it’s not like that.”
Erik grabbed Henry by the back of the neck and pushed him forward.
“Erik, listen. Max is dead!”
“Uh-huh. Right.”
“He’s dead! Didn’t you hear the shots?”
“Yeah.”
“That was Max being shot to death! I saw his body!”
“Stop being such a loser.”
“I’m serious! These three men showed up at camp and they murdered Max!”
“You just don’t want him to know you got out first.” Erik continued to push Henry forward. Wow. The guy was even stronger than Henry had expected. Under different circumstances, Henry would have been impressed and perhaps even complimentary.
“I’m not lying! I wouldn’t lie about that! Can’t you hear me spazzing out? Would I spaz out like this if I wasn’t telling the truth?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re going to get us killed!”
“You’re already dead. I thought you were cool, but you’re a cheating weasel. Max is gonna throw a fit when he finds out.”
“Corpses don’t throw fits!”
“Just let it drop,” said Erik. “I’m taking you back to camp, so you’d better deal with it.”
WILDERNESS SURVIVAL TIP!
If a bear is chasing you, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the person you’re with. Always bring a spare slow-running relative for just such an occasion.
Chapter Nineteen
Randy and Stu walked through the woods together. They’d both run in the same direction after Erik got to the box first, and since neither of them had acquired paint weapons yet, they figured they might as well have somebody to talk to while they searched.
“Did you hear that?” Randy asked.
“You mean that really loud gunshot that anybody would have heard?”
“Yeah, that.” Randy was very good at ignoring sarcasm. A couple more shots followed. “What was that?”
“A gun maybe?”
“I mean, do you think Max lost his mind and started shooting up the place?”
“Maybe they came from the music camp.”
“Why would there be gunshots coming from the music camp?”
“That stuff is competitive. You don’t know what it’s like. A piccolo player misses out on first chair and things get ugly.”
“That’s not it. It came from our place.”
“I guess you’re a human GPS.”
“Do you really not know how to directionalize sound?” Randy asked. “It obviously came from our place. And being a human GPS would not mean that you could tell where sounds came from.”
“Well, ‘directionalize’ isn’t a word.”
“Yes, it is.”
“If it is a word, it would mean to be able to make sound go in a certain direction, not to tell which direction sound came from. So it’s either a fake word or you’re using it wrong.”
“Maybe we should walk separately,” Randy suggested.
“That’s a good idea,” said Stu.
They continued to walk together. Randy noticed a small box resting next to a tree and tried to be casual about it. “I’m just going to stop and let you go on ahead.”
Stu regarded him with great suspicion. “Why?”
“Because we just established that we’re annoying each other.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing.”
“So let’s walk together for another few minutes.”
“I have to tie my shoe.”
“I’ll wait. I needed to tie my own shoe anyway.”
They both bent down and pretended to tie their shoes.
“We’re not doing each other any good hanging out together,” said Randy. “You go that way. I’ll go this way and we’ll meet up again when we’re ready to kill each other.”
“You see a care package, don’t you?”
“Nope.”
“Where is it?” Stu began turning his head in all directions, including a couple of directions that seemed like a head shouldn’t swivel without the assistance of a demonic possession.
“I didn’t see one.”
“You’re full of beans.”
“Beans?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never heard that expression.”
“Everybody uses it. You need to get with the times.”
“I’ll say it every day if you just leave me alone.”
“I’d have no way to verify that you said it.”
“Look, Stu, why don’t you just—” Randy finished his sentence with an expression that he knew was in heavy rotation.
“That’s classy.”
“The Survival Games aren’t about being classy.”
Stu’s eyes widened—again, in a manner that seemed enhanced by spirits of darkness—and he pointed. “That’s what you saw! You liar!”
Stu ran for the package.
Randy would have tried to stop him, but he’d been looking at a different box. He ran for his own package, hoping his contained a paint grenade and that Stu’s contained a paint turd. But his was about the size of a shoebox and Stu’s was about the size of an Xbox box, so he worried that Stu might have the advantage.
Randy tried to lift the lid, but it was nailed shut.
He looked over and saw Stu lift his lid without any problem. How was that fair?
Stu reached into his box and removed what was inside. “Another box?” he exclaimed. “How is that fair?”
Randy didn’t have any tools with which to pry open a wooden box lid, so he began to kick the box. He assumed that if there were a squirrel inside, he’d have heard it scurrying around in there.
Stu opened the lid to the second box. “Another box!”
Randy’s box wasn’t breaking. He picked it up
and slammed it against a tree. The tree received a much bigger dent than the box, even though they were both wood.
“Another box!” said Stu.
Randy slammed the box against the tree a few more times, but that wasn’t doing any good, so he dropped the box on the ground and began to jump on it. That worked. The wood cracked immediately, and after the third jump he was able to see what was inside—another box.
He tossed aside the pieces of the first box, picked up the second box, and swung it against the tree. This turned out to be unnecessary, since the lid hadn’t been nailed shut and a long plastic knife fell to the ground.
Filled with a gleeful sense of approaching victory, Randy snatched up the knife and turned toward his opponent. Stu had finally opened the last box and held up his own identical plastic knife.
“You’re not allowed to stab me in the face,” said Stu.
“I know that.”
“Just making sure. You also can’t stab me in the ear.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“No head stabs at all. That’s what Max said.”
“I was there. You don’t need to repeat the rules.”
“Just making sure.”
The boys began to circle each other, fierce warriors about to do battle.
“I vote we test these first,” said Stu. “They’re only plastic, but if the blade is stuck, one of us could get hurt.”
“That makes sense.”
“Just test it on your arm to make sure.”
Randy jabbed his arm with the blade. It retracted all the way into the handle, leaving behind an orange mark. “Mine’s fine. Test yours.”
“That counts as a stab,” said Stu. “Max never said you couldn’t stab yourself. You’ve got one injury.”
Randy felt like this was something they could argue about for the next 857 hours, so he decided to let it drop. Instead, he charged at Stu, tackling him to the ground.
He stabbed Stu in the chest.
Stu stabbed him back.
He stabbed Stu again.
Stu stabbed him back.
More gunshots rang out.
They stopped stabbing each other for a moment.
“What do you think’s going on?” Randy asked.
“I’m telling you…Max is hallucinating communists.”
“Maybe we should go back and make sure everything’s okay.”
“Maybe you should—” Stu stabbed Randy in the chest “—go back and tell him you’re dead.”
“You suck, Stu.”
“Apparently not.”
Randy got up and brushed himself off. Great. He’d lost to Stu. At least if he’d lost to Erik, people would say, “Well, it’s a shame that you lost, but Erik is pretty awesome, so if you had to lose to anybody, it might as well be the strongest and fastest of you all.” And if he’d lost to Henry, he could at least say that he’d lost to his best friend. And if he’d lost to Jackie, well, Jackie would be really happy that he’d won the fight, and Randy could have pretended that he’d let Jackie win in an effort to help with his self-esteem issues. But losing to Stu was pure suck.
“A good sport would help me up,” said Stu.
Randy wasn’t feeling like a good sport, but he helped Stu up anyway. He half-expected Stu to try to yank him back to the ground so he could get in a hearty chuckle, but Stu probably realized that his twig arms weren’t up to the task, so he merely said, “Thanks.”
“I hope you feel good about a dirty win,” said Randy.
“It feels better than a clean win actually,” said Stu. “I’m kind of uncomfortable with what that says about me.”
“Well, have a good game. Maybe somebody else has died already and I’m not the first one out.”
“Max hasn’t announced anything over the megaphone, so you may be in luck. Of course, if he’s shooting at nightmares, he’d be too distracted to keep us updated.”
“Maybe we should go back and see if anything’s wrong.”
“Sure, if a whack nut is shooting randomly, that’s where I want to be.”
“What if he hit somebody?”
Stu laughed. “C’mon, Randy, you’re way too uptight. Nobody’s hurt. Max is out there shooting blanks to rev us up. Here, I’ll walk you back as my dead prisoner.”
***
Jackie sat comfortably in a tree. This comic book he’d found in a care package was fantastic.
***
“So what do we do?” Ethan asked.
“First of all,” said Mr. Grand, “we ask ourselves how that little twerp got away from us.”
Ethan shrugged. “He ran to throw up, locked himself in the office, and then tossed a fake grenade at us.”
“Do you really believe that I was asking for a literal answer? Seriously?”
Chad walked back into the building. “What happened? I heard shots.”
“The kid got away.”
“How?”
Mr. Grand ignored the question. “Did you find any more?”
“Nah, they could be hiding anywhere in the woods, I guess, but I didn’t see any.”
“There are probably four more,” said Ethan.
“Ouch. Are we calling for backup?”
“I hate the idea of getting backup for a few bratty kids…but yes, that’s what we’re going to do. It will take a while for a team to get out here and I’d rather pay them to waste their time than have this situation get out of control.”
Ethan and Chad nodded. Ethan hoped that Foamer would be part of the team. It amused him to no end to watch that guy go all rabid-dog on a victim.
“Get the body into the trunk and clean up the mess,” said Mr. Grand. “I’ll keep an eye out on the perimeter while I make the call.”
“Shouldn’t I hunt for them some more?” Chad asked.
Mr. Grand shook his head. “Waste of time. They could be anywhere.”
“All right. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll just walk right back here.”
WILDERNESS SURVIVAL TIP!
As it turns out, poison ivy actually exists. I always thought it was a myth. I don’t think that anymore.
Chapter Twenty
“You have to listen to me,” Henry insisted. “You’re gonna get us killed!”
“Enough!” said Erik.
“They had me at gunpoint! I faked them out with a phony grenade and then ran out the door!”
“Oh, yeah? Did you knock them all unconscious with your amazing kung fu action too?”
“Why would I lie about this?”
“Millions of reasons. I don’t believe you and I’m not going to believe you, so stop talking! By the way, you reek.”
“That’s because I threw up! I puked when they had me at gunpoint!”
Erik stopped. “Let me see your mouth.”
Henry opened his mouth. Erik ran his finger over the side of Henry’s mouth and then sniffed it. “You did puke.”
“I told you!”
“I don’t believe you, but for now, we’ll pretend that I do.”
“Thanks,” said Henry.
“So what should we do?” Erik asked.
Henry had been hoping that Erik would come up with a detailed and brilliant plan immediately after acknowledging that Henry might have been telling the truth, but he didn’t want to say, “Duhhhh, I was hoping you could tell me!”
“We need to get help,” Henry said, “but first we have to get back to camp. Nobody else knows what’s happening, so if Randy, Jackie, or Stu are out of the game, they might be walking into danger just like I did.”
“Do you think we can just shout out to them? Warn them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think we should give away our position. If all three guys come running after the sound of our voice, we could be in serious trouble.”
&
nbsp; Erik nodded. “And if I were Randy, Stu, or Jackie and I heard you or me shouting, ‘Don’t go near the buildings!’ I would think it was a trick. It’d make me more likely to run back.”
“Right. We just need to get close enough to camp that we can see them and warn them but not close enough to be seen by the killers.”
“So when I was dragging you back to camp, I was actually following the plan, even though I didn’t know it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“We need to be stealthy.”
“Right.”
“You’re not very stealthy, Henry.”
“I know. But I will be. It’s like a video game where aliens are attacking the earth, and if you mess up in the game, the aliens come out of your TV screen for real and start disintegrating your family. Because in a real video game, it doesn’t matter if you mess up. You just restart or go back to your last saved position. But you have to play this video game as well as you can. You can’t lose your focus for even a split second because if you do, the aliens will destroy the world. It’s like that.”
“Or you could just say it’s like real life. You don’t need all of the video games and alien stuff.”
“No, you’re not getting what I’m saying. I’m saying that it’s not like a…okay, yes, I didn’t need the video game and alien stuff. Thanks, you just screwed up my attempt to inspire myself. Okay, a better way to have phrased this is that we’re not playing survival games anymore. This is real, so things that I would have botched during the past week, like stealth, I’m not going to botch now. The stakes are too high. I’m going to rise to the occasion.”
If Henry lived through this experience, he was going to write down a more eloquent version of that for the eventual movie version. He wished he had background music, something operatic that switched to electric guitar after his speech was over. Maybe he’d ask Monica about that later.
Anyway, he was now going to become the new Henry that he’d vowed to become a few days ago. The Survival Games were stupid. It was hard to believe that he’d ever even cared about them. Orange paint. Ha! Baby stuff. This was man stuff, and Henry was going to prove that he was the hero that he had recently sort of suspected that he truly could be.
***
“What did the man say to the monkey driving a steamroller?” asked Randy.
