“Stupid bitch,” David said, moving around the impaled counselor to shove Cindy away. He then raised his foot and planted it on Judy’s posterior, giving her a sharp kick that sent Judy’s body vaulting forward, sprawling to the floor like a ragdoll with post still stabbed through her torso.
David turned his attention to Cindy and Whit, his arms covered in blood all the way to his elbows.
“You ready to make this easy?” he asked, as casually as someone might ask for directions. “I mean, you’ve seen the alternative.”
Cindy responded by reaching down and yanking the knife out of Troy’s face. She took three quick steps towards David only to have him grab and twist her arm around until she dropped the blade. As she cried out in pain, David picked her up and half-shoved, half-threw her over the coffee table and onto the sofa.
When she landed, her legs were outstretched and her shorts hiked up a little. David stared down at her long, tanned legs.
“We’ve been dancing around this all day,” he said, moving over to her.
“Whit!” Cindy screamed, furious at the other counselor’s inaction. “Do something!”
Whit stared at her in horror, still unable to move. He’d gone white as a sheet and she could tell that he’d actually urinated in his pants as the front of his shorts were wet and there seemed to be liquid dribbling down his thighs.
“Whiiiitt!” Jeffrey mocked, coming into the cabin now, followed by Peter. The linebacker picked up the knife David had wrested out of Cindy’s hand and moved over to Whit, holding it in front of him.
“Whiiiiit!!!” he said again, curling his lips in a twisted grin.
Whit started to smile back and Jeffrey immediately drove the knife into his chest, screaming the name again into his victim’s face. “
Whiiiiit!!!
”
As blood misted out of his lung, Whit dropped to his knees, holding the hilt of the knife as Jeffrey laughed. David glanced over, shaking his head.
“You’re such a pussy,
Whiiiiit
!
” he said, mimicking Jeffrey’s voice.
When David looked back down at Cindy, her eyes were ablaze with anger.
“I told you, you were with us or against us,” he teased, this time softly as he leaned down and roughly grabbed the back of her shorts.
That’s when Peter’s head exploded.
Or, at least, that’s what it looked like had happened. A baseball bat had struck it perfectly at the back of the skull, causing such an instant build-up of pressure that parietal bone splintered through the scalp and the boy’s eyes popped directly out of their sockets like in a cartoon.
Peter immediately hit the ground and the bat swung again, a powerful, determined swing, but this time aimed downwards and crushed whatever was left of his skull. The holder of the bat, a fifteen year-old named Ian-something that Cindy hadn’t given much thought to over the years, walked in followed by two other kids that seemed to have raided the sports equipment locker for this very purpose.
“Hey, dickhead, what’s with the bat?” slurred Jeffrey, standing over Whit’s corpse, obviously unaware how dire his situation had just become.
Without a word, Ian swung the bat again, this time aimed at Jeffrey’s head, though it had the exact opposite effect on his head from Peter’s. Instead of blood and popped eyeballs, there was only a sick, echoing “thock!” that sent Jeffrey, stunned and concussed, to the ground. Ian nodded to his two friends who walked over, pulled out a broken ice skate and slit Jeffrey’s throat with the blade.
David stared at Ian’s eyes, but saw no sign of red there. He quickly shook his head, as if meaning to correct a simple clerical error.
“No, no – we’re on the same side, man,” David explained. “These are
demons
.”
Thock!
The bat smacked into the side of David’s head, sending him smashing against the window behind the sofa, shattering the pane. With a viciousness he hadn’t shown with Jeffrey or Peter, Ian bashed away at David’s torso with four or five more
thwacks
and then yanked the football hero’s body back off the sofa, where it crumpled onto the floor. Ian nodded to his two friends a second time and they walked over to cut David’s throat as well. Despite the savagery of Ian’s attack resulting in countless broken bones and internal damage, David was obviously still alive and gurgled blood as they did so.
“
Demons,
man...,” he whispered as he died.
Cindy rolled over on the sofa and stared over at Ian in surprise. The boy’s blank expression hadn’t changed through the entire affair.
“You’re welcome,” he said, exiting the cabin, followed by his two friends.
Mark and Phil had watched this all from the windows of Cabin 2.
They’d seen the initial fight on the beach, of course, even the attack on Penny, who Mark immediately admitted to Phil that he’d once had a crush on. Then, they saw Faith running towards the melee, only to be grabbed back by Maia, which caused Phil to breathe easier, though he hadn’t made a move towards the door himself. Other kids had exited the cabin, taking nervous, curious steps towards the center of camp as if planning to take on the David themselves, only to scurry back when spotted.
It was when David had turned his attention towards the administrator’s cabin that Ian Hester rose from where he was watching. Ian was a semi-gothy stoner-type who had always told anyone who’d listen that he planned to go into the Navy and hopefully even the SEALs when he graduated. Ian looked around at the handful of other campers taking refuge in the darkness of Cabin 2 and sneered.
“Nobody’s going to do anything?” he said, disgusted.
He nodded to a couple of his friends and they slipped out a side door, making their way over to the sports equipment shed.
“They’re fucking dead,” another camper said, though Phil couldn’t tell who it was.
Outside, Troy led the attack into the administrator’s cabin and though everyone kind of half-cheered when they saw Ian moving stealthily up to Peter with a baseball bat, they all winced when he plowed it in to the kid’s head. Still, there was some elation. A point for their team.
“Christ,” grunted Mark, turning away. “He’s the psycho I always figured for ‘Most Likely to Columbine Our School.’ Guess I was kind of half-right. Glad now.”
Phil kept starring through the window, unable to take his eyes off the particularly grizzly train wreck unfolding before his eyes and the rest of his body went along with it.
When Ian and the others finally emerged victorious from the cabin, Phil managed to look over at Mark.
“Tomorrow morning, first light – with Faith or without her,” he said, hoarse. “Okay?”
Mark looked back at him and nodded.
“Oh, you betcha.”
At the exact moment of David’s death, Faith was taking her first step into the lake, barely troubling the water as she held her clothes and supplies up in a garbage bag over her head. She and Maia, at the last moment, had decided to swim out to the diving platform naked, bringing towels in the bags as the sun was now completely down and they wouldn’t be able to dry out in the sun anymore. This meant swimming one-handed, which was initially difficult, but Faith got the hang of it after a few seconds and was able to push ahead into the lake.
“You okay?” she called back to Maia, who seemed to be having trouble keeping up.
“I’ve got it,” Maia replied, then made a big effort to prove it by launching herself past Faith, splashing her with water as she went.
“Oh, you’re going to get it,” Faith said, accelerating.
The two continued this merry back-and-forth as they left the shore behind them, laughing and splashing all the way to the diving platform. It took a good twenty minutes to reach it, the pair having underestimated the strength of the waves at night.
Faith got there first, tossing her bag up onto the planks and climbing out of the lake, happy to have won the de facto race.
“Tada!” she cried, dancing around in a circle, wrapped in darkness.
Maia, feigning annoyance, tossed her own bag onto the platform and climbed up, taking a seat on the edge.
“At least it’s still a little warm out,” she said, pouting a bit.
“Oh, that’s what you noticed? Not the fact that I beat you?” teased Faith. “Because, if you didn’t notice, perhaps I should remind you, I did! Me. Better swimmer. Faith over Maia. Maia loses to Faith.
Big time
.”
“Better
one-handed
swimmer,” Maia corrected, feigning annoyance. “Not the same thing. You’ve won only the hollowest of victories.”
“Oh, bull,” Faith laughed, opening her bag and removing her beach towel.
The girls dried off, bumping into each other as they did, so small was the platform. It got worse when they tried to put on their clothes, Faith almost knocking Maia into the lake at one point.
“Oh, sorry!” she cried, grabbing for her friends arm again.
“Keep that up and you’ll be right back in the lake,” Maia growled, giving Faith her most threatening glare.
Instead of a chuckle or reply, she found Faith staring at her again, illuminated only by moonlight. This time, rather than wait around, Maia reached forward and pulled Faith towards her, kissing her squarely on the lips.
Maia had never considered herself a lesbian, didn’t even really know what that meant. So when she kissed Faith, she waited for when it was going to start feeling weird, but it never did. When Faith kissed her back, putting her arms around her and drawing her close, she thought she’d never felt anything more right in her life. They didn’t say a word for the next half hour or so as they continued kissing, their sense of urgency rising and falling with every breath.
By the time the moon reached its apex, they had fallen asleep, wrapped in each other’s arms as the water gently lapped against the platform.
VIII
On Wednesday morning, Father Billy awoke with the sunrise out on the forest floor. It was a beautiful summer day, sun streaming through the tree canopy, a blue, cloudless sky high above. The smells of the lush forest floor permeated his nose and made him inhale deeply, enjoying their rapturous scent.
His mind wandered back to reality and he kind of half-wondered what was going on back in the camp. One scenario that he imagined was that David and the others he’d drugged had managed to kill everybody and then overdosed and died themselves, but that didn’t seem very likely. That said, he figured they’d done at least
some
of the work for him. How much, well, that was still a mystery.
He was hungry, so he decided to head back to camp, but realized that he still had on one of the black Nomex suits and the gloves. His facial bandages were strewn all around him as if he’d tried to tear them off in his sleep, which he figured wasn’t too far from the truth. He felt around in his pants pockets and was relieved to discover all three of the nails in case he ran into anyone.
That’s when he turned and saw Mark and Phil standing a few feet away from him, both wearing their backpacks, obviously on their way out of the camp. They were just staring at him, both with quizzical looks on their faces and, for a moment, Father Billy wondered if they were actually there or were some kind of hallucination.
“Hey, Father Billy,” Mark said, trying to sound blasé. “What’s new?”
Father Billy considered nodding a “good morning” and letting them pass unmolested only to catch up with them a few minutes later, but then he looked down and saw that his Nomex suit and gloves were still covered in the blood of Amy, Bret, Shane and Paula. He looked back up to the boys and a long silence passed between them. But then, Father Billy started eyeing Phil peculiarly, as if noticing something odd.
“What?” asked Phil.
“Why are you all wet?” Father Billy inquired.
Phil sighed.
When Phil had woken up that morning, Cabin 2 was completely empty. For a moment, he thought he was in another dream or, perhaps, dead and now haunting the camp, which he thought would suck. But then, he had gone to a window and saw that the surviving campers, t-shirts or towels tied around their faces, were helping Cindy pick up the bodies of the dead from the night before and carry them into Cabin 4. It was a gruesome sight, lifeless limbs and grotesque, ragged wounds, but Phil saw Mark among the detail and realized that he should have been taking part.
“What’s going on?” Phil said to Mark, who was helping one of Ian’s throat-slashing accomplices heft a body into the “corpse cabin.” It actually took Phil a moment to recognize the body as Leilani.
“
Jesus
...”
“Yeah,” said Mark. “There’s like, twenty-four dead bodies. It’s like Jonestown.”
“Jonestown?” asked the boy holding Leilani’s feet.
“Mass cult suicide,” Mark replied, matter-of-factly. “Seventies. It was religious lunatics there, too.”
The boy nodded, pretending he understood, as he and Mark lifted Leilani past the steps and into Cabin 4. The moment Phil walked inside behind them, the smell of death hit him like a freight train and he knew why everyone had their mouths covered. He had to fight to keep from vomiting right there amongst the dead
“Aw, Christ,” he said, turning around, only to bump into a couple more people bringing in the body of Penny Mendenhall. “Sorry.”
When the doorway was clear again, Phil quickly exited out into the yard, walking a few feet away from the cabin to try and inhale some fresh air. Before, the deaths had been offstage, up the road or in the woods. Seeing the actual bodies reminded Phil of when he’d glimpsed a motorcycle accident he’d seen on the highway late one night when being driven back from a band competition in Austin.
He’d heard dead bodies described as ‘meat,’ but to Phil’s eyes, they looked like broken robots, not anything from the butcher counter. Eyes popped out, too-long-to-
really-
be-human tongues lolling over bottom lips, fluids leaking out. They needed repair, not burial and then they’d be right back on their feet. This thought made Phil realize that that was how he felt about most of these kids when they were alive, too.
This feeling elated Phil and he knew why. He was one of the living, a survivor, not the perished, and it made him feel good. He took a few more deep breaths and was glad that he didn’t have to actually touch any of the bodies.
“Hey.”
He turned and saw Mark walking up to him, wiping his blood-smeared hands in the grass to clean them as he went, doing the same with limited effect to his shoes.
“What’s going on?” Phil asked.
“Cindy has some kind of plan,” Mark began, dismissively. “She’s going all Boudica and wants to make wooden weapons to fight the Devil with. She has some kind of new theory that it’s not the Devil, but some possessed guy out there who’s been possessing others. So, they’re going to get the Jeep and try and roll it down the road and out of here, like some kind of tank.”
“A tank for how many people?” Phil asked.
“Thirty or so,” Mark replied. “Doug Perry and the prayer circle bunch are still waiting until they get the word from God or Father Billy to go, so it’s just the rejects.”
“Fuck ‘em. When is Team Cindy leaving?”
“Soon as they make the weapons.”
“When are
we
leaving?” Phil countered.
“Soon as
you’re
ready.”
Phil nodded. “Where’s Faith?”
Mark hesitated just a beat, but then turned and pointed out towards the water. Phil saw, out in the distance, two people on the diving platform.
“You coming?” Phil asked.
“This is your quest, Bedivere.”
Phil gave Mark a bemused look, but then headed down towards the water’s edge. As he went, he noticed that the ground was particularly muddy, but then he realized he was walking across earth still so soaked with blood that the dirt hadn’t been able to absorb it all yet like after a particularly heavy rain. Disgusted, he moved closer to the girls’ cabins, eschewing the bloody center of the camp, and finally made it to the lake.
“Heeeey! Faith!!” he called.
When neither Faith nor Maia reacted, he realized they couldn’t hear him. He quickly took off his shoes and socks, placed them to one side and waded out into the water, which was still cold from the night.
“Faiiiiith!!!”
He finally saw that their backs were to him and they were eating something for breakfast. He then saw Faith lean over and kiss Maia on the lips. Just a peck, but Maia grabbed her and pulled Faith’s lips back to her, giving her a longer, more lingering kiss before they both laughed and looked back out to the water.
“
Gunh
,” said Phil.
It was like somebody had grabbed Phil’s heart and was refusing to allow it to beat, much less allow Phil’s lungs to take in breath. Every feeling in his body was draining out through his feet and he felt limp.
Phil found himself remembering something Mark had said about seeing Rachel after they’d broken up. It was all about in the body language. He didn’t even have to see the kiss to know where he stood. Whenever Phil was around Faith, she reacted to him like she did to everybody else. She was closed off, kept her arms against her body and never opened up, really.
But now he was seeing what she looked like around somebody she like-liked. She was looking at Faith in a way he’d never, ever seen her look at somebody before. She was giddy, she was flirty and she was in love; her face and the angle of her movements telling the whole story. She looked free, more than anything, as if finally having tossed aside whatever shackles had been keeping her down for so long.
Phil looked to the greenish water swirling around his freckled, pasty shins. He knew he should just turn right around and go with Mark, leave the camp and never look back, but he couldn’t do it. Instead, his face red with anger and humiliation, he pushed himself forward into the water and began swimming to the diving platform.
He swam quickly, but was hardly the world’s most graceful swimmer. The further he got from shore, the more the waves pummeled him, splashing in his face and sending him under. He kept going, however, so driven was he and was soon within shouting distance of the platform.
“Faiiith!!” he cried.
Upon hearing her name, Faith whipped around, getting quickly to her feet and grabbing one of the last knives that had been left in the kitchen which she and Maia took out to the diving platform. Maia got up as well, but merely eyed Phil with suspicion.
“Phil?” Faith asked, surprised. “What are you doing out here?”
“We’re leaving — me and Mark are leaving — right now,” Phil said, out of breath as he treaded water a few feet from the platform. “I want you to come with us.”
Faith stared at Phil as if he’d suggested she sprout wings and fly, but then shook her head.
“We’re going to stay here,” Faith said. “But good luck.”
“
No!
” Phil demanded, the vociferousness of his voice causing Faith to jump. “If you stay here, Father Billy’s going to kill you. You know how many people died last night?
Twenty-four.
”
“But they killed each other,” Faith retorted. “How can you still say that’s Father Billy?”
“He
made them
kill each other!” Phil exclaimed, though even he didn’t know how that could’ve happened. “He drugged them or something. This isn’t over. He’s planning to kill all of us. That includes you guys. The only way to avoid it is to leave.”
“If he — if the
Devil
— or anybody, for that matter, comes out here, we’ll hear him long before he can get to us and we’ll either fight him off or swim away,” Faith replied. “We’re safe.”
“What if he swims underwater?” Phil said, as if incredulous that they hadn’t thought of this.
Which made Maia laugh.
Phil stared at her with venom. “Fuck you!” he yelled. Maia looked at him with surprise, so he added, “You heard me!” For emphasis.
“Phil?” asked Faith, scrunching up her nose. “What the heck?”
Phil looked around, almost crying now. He stared out past the platform to the far sides of the lake. He felt like diving under and never surfacing.
“This should have been
us
out here,” Phil said, looking right at Faith. “I
love
you. I’ve
always
loved you. You, Faith. That’s all. I wanted to be your boyfriend.”
Faith stared at Phil and knew what he was saying was probably true. She thought back and figured she’d considered him as a potential boyfriend here and there, but never seriously. More like a friend she could go to Homecoming with or a band dance or something. She “liked” him, but every time she thought she might be coming around to really liking him, he did something that pulled him up short in her eyes and she let it go.
“Phil, I’m sorry,” said Faith quietly, squatting down on the platform to be closer to him. “The last couple of days have really made me think about things and this is where I belong. I don’t know if it’s where I belong forever-for good, but it’s where I belong for right now. And as I have no idea, and neither do you, how long ‘right now’ is, it may as well be forever...”
Phil didn’t let her finish, but simply turned around and started swimming back to shore, unwilling to show her his crying eyes. He was in real, physical pain, wasn’t even sure he could make it all the way back, but kept his arms pumping away as his heart and mind raced. All he wanted to do was head into the woods, find Father Billy or the Devil or some other demon-possessed kid and ask them to stab him dead right there and send him straight to Hell.
“I fell in the lake,” Phil told Father Billy, finally.
Father Billy scoffed, but then got to his feet, extracting the iron spikes from his pocket, an act that couldn’t help but change the tenor of their palaver.
“I’m going to tell you what I’ve told everyone else,” Father Billy began, wearily. “When I kill you, I need you to tell God that without Divine Intervention, I will just keep killing, make others kill, and make people kill themselves. I will
not
stop. You two will die because of His inaction, not my action.”
Phil stared at Father Billy and now knew that not only was Mark right about who was behind the killings, but also that Father Billy was completely and totally out of his goddamn mind. He had acted normal, obviously for some time, but this was the real man they were seeing for the first time; a loony who had detached himself from rational thought entirely. A man who was using mass murder as others might use a telegram.
But all that said, Phil couldn’t escape the same question facing the priest – why
hadn’t
God killed him?
Phil turned quickly to Mark, but saw something on his friend’s face that he recognized as sympathy.
“Shit –
that’s
why you’re doing this?” Mark said, regarding his would-be killer wearily. “What happened?”
“What do you mean?” Father Billy asked.
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” Mark replied, sounding annoyed. “I,
we
, have known you for awhile, so we have to figure something happened to you. Something changed.”
Father Billy stared at the two boys for a long moment, but then nodded. He hadn’t told a living soul about the pulse in the sculpture and even though he didn’t particularly like Mark that much, he’d always known him as a curious kid who never failed to raise interesting theological questions, even if he was doing it just to piss off his Sunday school teachers who may well have no idea the answers.
“Have a seat,” Father Billy said, nodding to the ground in front of him.
Mark sat down, but Phil remained standing. He blinked, as if he was going to bolt, but Father Billy was back on his feet, faster than any human Phil had ever seen. He raised an eyebrow at Phil, who finally sat down, his eyes like those of a rabbit who finds itself down a foxhole.
“It started on Good Friday, this year...”
Father Billy told them his story from start to finish, the sound of the beating heart, the feeling of the pulse, the fall to the pulpit, the lies, the prayers, the counseling of sin and the ensuing silence from God leading him to his current course of action. All through the story, Mark nodded and clicked his tongue, engrossed, all the answers falling into place.