After cleaning herself up the night before in the counselor’s cabin, she’d tracked him and his friends down, singling out her savior. He smelled bad, as if he hadn’t managed to shower over the past forty-eight hours which, she supposed, not many had. He knew why she’d come looking for him and obliged her by following her to the counselor’s cabin where she tore his clothes off and, for lack of a better phrase, “fucked him raw” all night long until they were both dehydrated and soaked in sweat.
She then moved him into the shower and fucked him in there, too.
He hadn’t been sexually experienced in the slightest, admitting the following morning that he’d been a virgin aside from a couple of blowjobs from an equally inexperienced girlfriend the previous school year, but Cindy hadn’t minded because she’d been in charge from minute one and she’d enjoyed every physical second of it. She’d been so close to death, so close to what she figured might be even worse (rape by someone possessed by a demon – what if she’d gotten pregnant?!), that she just wanted to feel alive and knew this would fill the bill.
And the best thing was, it wasn’t even awkward around the camp the next morning. Everyone knew what she’d done, that Ian had been little more than a willing participant, but rather than feel embarrassed, Cindy only felt emboldened in her new leadership role. She’d never felt so good as she did that morning.
Ian had tried to talk to her when she’d run into him the next morning, even give her a kiss, but she was already past him, which he soon realized. She was nice about it, but it was, after all, only a fuck.
“If there’s an actual physical confrontation, some of you simply won’t be able to stab another living human being and that’s okay,” Cindy announced, recalling Whit’s less-than-heroic defense of her the night before. “But this is not a human being anymore and never will be again. If he attacks and you just manage to keep him at bay until one of the older campers can get there, that’s as good.”
As she was saying it, she thought to herself that she must sound out of her mind, like she was living in a world of dream logic. She had set three o’clock as the departure time, partly because she felt it would give them more than enough time to get to the highway, but also, if it failed miserably and they were routed, she thought that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have darkness on their side in order to make it back to the campsite.
She checked in with her campers who were filling the broken vehicle with water, food and weapons and saw that everything was running smoothly.
“All right,” she said. “Make sure everybody’s together. We’re just about ready to go.”
Excited, the campers fanned out to announce to the others that they were leaving for real this time. Cindy, however, had one more stop.
She made her way to Cabin 4 and slipped inside, covering her nose with her shirt, though that did little to keep out the stench of the many corpses lying on the bunks as well as the floor within. She headed straight for Whit’s body, which she discovered midway through the room on a bunk, covered with a bed sheet. She pulled it back and looked down at his rigid, sallow corpse. She thought he looked more like a mannequin than anything that so recently was inhabited by a soul and all she saw was his fragility.
All morning, she’d been surprising herself with how much angrier she was at him than David or her other attackers. They had an excuse, they’d been possessed. Whit had been content to stand by and let her die. What was his excuse? Being a spineless weasel? It was a feeling of utter betrayal.
But now he was on the slab and she was the last counselor standing. Fuck. Him.
“I’m glad you’re dead,” she said to the body.
She stared at him for a moment longer, but then reached down and undid his fly, tugging down his pants to expose his flaccid, useless penis. Realizing that that didn’t have enough of the effect she was looking for, she pulled his pants all the way down to his ankles and throwing the sheet aside. That’s how she wanted him to be found, as humiliated in death as he was going to let her be in the last moments of her life.
Now satisfied, she turned and walked out of the corpse cabin, gently closing the door behind her.
At the moment Cindy’s group took to the road, Faith was in the midst of plowing through the third book of her fantasy series, having been able to finish Book 2 that morning under her and Maia’s lean-to. She’d been right, the authoress making the ending completely unfulfilling in order to force the reader to read on and though Faith was a little disappointed, she turned right around and began hungrily devouring the next book.
Upon seeing the campers gathering to leave, carrying few belonging and eschewing water and food primarily for the wooden weapons they’d been fashioning throughout the morning, Faith suddenly felt a pang of panic. She looked over to Maia who seemed to be feeling the same way, staring intently on the retreating group as if they might be the last people to ever see them alive.
“Should we be going with them?” Faith asked, her voice rising sharply.
“I don’t know,” Maia replied, sounding like she meant it.
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know?’” Faith said, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. “If they make it out, that leaves us all alone with whoever it is out there.”
Maia thought about this, staring out at the weapons carried by the group, but then finally shook her head.
“We decided the way to survive was to rely on each other alone and I still think that’s what has kept us alive this long,” she said. “As much as I wish this was over and we could just get out of here as one big collective, I simply don’t think that’s true.”
Deep down, Faith knew she felt the same way.
“I know, it’s hard,” Maia continued. “But this is too crazy to take chances with. If there’s even a chance that the Devil planned for this and they’re walking into a trap, we’re still a wild card the longer we stay out here.”
“Okay,” Faith said, nodding. As Cindy’s campers disappeared, Faith returned to her book and tried to force the bad thoughts out of her mind.
In the screened-in classroom, Douglas could tell that plenty of his charges wanted to go with Cindy, but he also knew that most were too weak by this point to make the walk, himself included. They’d consumed most of the bottles of water they’d brought in, some kids simply taking sips in order to have something to put in their mouths before Douglas realized he was going to have to ration them.
“God will come, but for us, not them,” Douglas said, his voice hoarse, but nonetheless triumphant. “You will see soon enough.”
He looked around at the kids, seeing at least some hopefulness on a their faces, which made him feel hopeful as well, his message getting through.
He smiled. “Let us pray.”
It took Mark and Phil three long hours after their encounter with Father Billy to make it to the highway. They hadn’t said a word for the first half of that trek and barely a word for the second half either, a couple of grunts as they traded food and water from their packs. It was if they were terrified that the dream would end if they spoke aloud and it would turn out that Father Billy had killed them. Or, more likely, was walking just behind them, waiting to correct his earlier mistake in letting them go.
But that was really only part of it.
Both were still extremely troubled by the promise they’d made to Father Billy and felt the eyes of God staring down at them in anger. When they finally made it to the highway, they still had a few more miles to go before they reached a gas station where Mark used a pay phone to call for a cab to pick them out. In his wallet, he carried an emergency credit card in his name, but this was the first time that he’d actually planned to use it. He told Phil that he thought he could withstand the wrath of his parents when they got the bill.
“How long before they get out here?” Mark asked the dispatcher at the cab company. “Yeah, sorry about that. We’re way out.”
After he hung up (“Probably a half hour wait,” he told Phil), both boys l
ooked at one another and knew they were both considering picking the pay phone back up and dialing 911 to bring in the police, paramedics, the National Guard, whatever it would take, but they just couldn’t do it.
“He’d get arrested, he’d go to jail and he’d just start killing people in there until God stopped him there, too,” Mark rationalized. “Maybe this is our test to see if we can keep our word to God...”
Phil shot him a look and Mark just sighed. They went inside the gas station and bought some food as well as a couple of drinks, eating and drinking them in the parking lot as they waited for the cab. When it finally arrived, forty-plus minutes later, their salvation finally felt real and immutable.
“Where to?” the cab driver asked when they piled in the back seat, Mark slamming the door behind them.
“De Soto,” said Phil. “I’ll give you better directions once we get closer, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
Phil sank back into his seat and, within minutes, fell asleep even though he’d initially fought against it. Mark, too keyed up to do same, stared out the window, forcing himself to look at nothing at all.
It was mid-afternoon when they reached De Soto city limits, Mark gave the driver directions to Phil’s house, where they’d decided to camp out as Phil’s father and stepmom were currently out of town, visiting with Phil’s grandmother in San Antonio. Ten minutes later they arrived, Phil waking up as the cab pulled into his driveway. Mark signed the credit card receipt, leaving a forty percent tip, and they both grabbed what little gear they had and headed inside.
As they walked in, Mark immediately went for the freezer in the kitchen, seeing a stack of frozen pizzas waiting.
“Want me to nuke you one?” he asked, turning to Phil, but his friend was already gone. Mark closed the freezer door and walked down the hallway towards Phil’s bedroom, stopping short at a closed bathroom door.
“Phil?”
“I’m going to grab a shower,” Phil called from the other side of the door as he turned on the water. “I’ll get something when I come out.”
“Okay,” Mark nodded and headed back towards the kitchen.
In the bathroom, Phil sat on the toilet seat, staring at his shoes as the water in the shower stall whistled down the drain. He hesitated, but then put his hands together, interweaving his fingers.
“Dear Lord, I know I’m the last one to be asking for favors, but it’s not for me,” he began. “What I mean is, there are a bunch of people who could really, really use your help right now...”
Thirty-one campers, one more than a third of the number that had brought in a mere three days earlier, made their way out of the camp right around the time Phil began his prayer. Cindy had counted them twice, partly to know how many to keep track of, but also because she wanted to look in their eyes and see if they showed any signs of possession. Of all the campers, these were some of the ones she knew the least with a few exceptions, but when she looked into their faces, she saw one thing unifying them; they were all survivors. Each had that look of nervous awareness on their faces, a certain distrust of the rest of the pack that had kept them alive this long. She wondered how that would work in a fight as any feeling of teamwork might fall away under pressure and it might become every camper for themselves.
But she was optimistic.
“All right,” she told the group, now assembled around the broken Jeep. “We’re going to take turns pushing the vehicle, four people on the back bumper, one on either side with one driver.”
A 16 year-old girl named Nancy Powell had been tasked with sitting in the driver’s seat to steer and brake. Cindy had selected her because not only was she one of the lightest people in camp, maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, but also because she was a nervous type and the last thing she wanted the driver to do was allow the Jeep to pick up any kind of real speed and get too far ahead of the rest of the campers. While the Jeep wasn’t an absolute necessity, Cindy had said that some of the kids might get tired and it would be okay for them to sit in the back for some of the journey.
The real reason, however, was that she felt it would have the psychological effect of giving people something solid to hide in if things got bad, even though it couldn’t fit all of them at once. A group of thirty on open ground was one thing. That same number gathered around a would-be tank that could be locked up tight should the Devil attack, well, she hoped it made everyone feel less exposed and more confident in their mission.
“We’ll be working in shifts, so everyone’ll get a turn on the Jeep,” Cindy continued. “It is the job of everyone else to be the eyes and ears of the group. Eyes on the road, eyes on the woods. Anything out of the ordinary and you call out. No one will be left behind, but we need everyone to stay close to the vehicle at all times for this to work.”
After a moment spent surveying the faces of her charges, she added, “May God be with us.”
The kids nodded and Cindy let a camper named Patrick Noto lead the group in prayer. As soon as they had all said their last “A-mens,” Nancy climbed behind the wheel of the Jeep, Cindy took up her position pushing the vehicle on the driver’s side door and the group began moving it out of the parking lot. It was only a few seconds before they started picking up speed and a minute later, they were out of the parking lot and onto the road. There were a couple of furtive glances back in the direction of the screened-in classroom where the prayer circle was staying behind, but pretty soon, the camp was well behind them and they were a few hundred yards down the road.
For Cindy, leaving the camp had a euphoric effect.
At first, everyone had been incredibly cautious and as quiet as the surrounding woods, which betrayed nothing of what might lie just within the trees. But as time passed and everyone shared in the burden of pushing the Jeep, some climbing on top of the hood or the roof with their stakes, the atmosphere changed to one more akin to a jovial nature hike. People made jokes that had nothing to do with their current situation, there was some horseplay and when the Jeep did pull ahead, the kids all had to run to catch up, laughing all the way.
When Cindy finished her turn pushing, she walked out ahead of the group, figuring that was where a leader should be and looked out ahead with no fear. She looked up to the blue, cloud-strewn sky and imagined, for a moment, that the Devil had finished his business with them and was content to leave them be. The possession of David and the others turned out to be him “doing his worst” and now, once repelled, he wasn’t about to try anything.
The open road ahead seemed to confirm this line of thinking and Cindy began imagining herself at home, in bed, soon after dark. She wondered what that would be like, trying to assimilate back into her old life after all of this. Would it even be possible? Would she even want to?
“Smoke...”
Cindy turned around, having heard a word spoken, but wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. It turned out to have come from a boy named Andre Gonzalez who was pointing out towards the horizon from his perch on top of the Jeep.
“Smoke,” he repeated.
Cindy looked where he was pointing, seeing a thick plume of black smoke coming from the woods directly ahead of them. Her first response was to feel relief, seeing it as a sign of humanity that might ensure a rescue even earlier than they’d anticipated. But then, she realized the cloud was too thick for a camp fire, too expansive.
Two other campers soon chimed in.
“Smoke! Fire!!” they cried, alarmed.
Cindy wheeled around, having heard something different in the voices of these two kids and saw that they weren’t, in fact, referring to the smoke she and Andre were looking at. Instead, they were pointing at a dark, ashy cloud rising directly over the woods to their right. She could smell the fires now, the scent of burning wood and foliage hanging in the wind.
Suddenly, there was a distant, muffled explosion and a camper screamed, who Cindy recognized as Nancy, the Jeep driver. Everyone looked left and saw a rapidly expanding cloud of smoke and fire shuddering th
rough the woods to the east, causing the trees to shift as if having been blown by a heavy wind.
“What the heck is going on?” Cindy exclaimed, confirming to her charges that she was as intimidated by this turn of events as they were.
Then, they heard a second, distant explosion followed quickly by a third, even further away; each time the scent of burning trees hitting them first followed by the sight of black smoke rising over distant trees. Cindy, her eyes going wide, looked all around and saw that the first plume they’d spotted had now been joined by four more on the horizon. They were still easily a quarter of a mile away, but as the plumes all seemed to be moving towards them, the blood in her veins went ice cold.
That’s when she realized that they’d walked right into the Devil’s trap.
“Oh, God.”
IX
“Hey! Hey, quit it! Seriously – it’s getting in my eyes!!”
But Faith was laughing too hard to hear Maia’s words as she splashed her friend. They had decided to explore the lake, look for signs of life or a means of escape, more out of boredom than hopes of actually finding anything. They never went onto land, but would occasionally be enough in the shallows that they could stand up for a moment on the lake bed, which is when Faith took the opportunity to splash Maia again.
“Stop it!!” Maia howled, then found her footing and splashed Faith back. “You’re like a two year-old!”
Faith laughed, ducked under the surface and swam over to Maia. When she got there, she tried to yank her under, but Maia managed to wriggle away, pushing herself out of Faith’s arms as she tried to swim to safety, but Faith managed to grab her again anyway. Maia splashed her in the face, causing her to lose her grip and Maia dove under the water and away.
“Truce!” Maia called when she broke the surface again, a few feet away from the maniacally-grinning Faith. “Truce!!”
Faith pretended she was going to splash her again, but then wrapped her arms around Maia’s torso and brought her in close to kiss her. They’d both tiptoed around the previous night’s make-out session that morning, each wondering if they were going to keep it up or if it was an embarrassing one-off. But then, for no reason whatsoever, Maia had kissed Faith on the cheek, a sweet kiss more than romantic and after that, they’d found themselves kissing each other at odd intervals, two people just happy to be falling in love.
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