The woods are a lot bigger because I'm younger. Consciously, I know that the trees were just as tall, and it's I who was smaller, but I also know that's not true. The woods are also much scarier than they would be. I don't have as much experience, and what I do have ain't as broad. The thing is, when the unknown fails to materialize for too long, you start to assume it doesn't exist.
By this point, I know that bears and mountain lions and wolves and other nasty things roam the mountains. I'd even seen a few. I'd also heard of other strange beings that could occasionally be found. I had never seen those. I likely never would, the Mothman is far north of where I am. I'm growing content with the forest as I understand it, thorns and poisonous plants and icy rains and wolves and all. It's a filter that lets the true devotees in and keeps the masses out.
Something agrees with me. My dad's spare 9mm is another thing that's huge because I'm younger, but what I'm looking at ain't a threat. It's just a spectator.
There's a shadow staring at me from behind a tree. It's a silhouette kind of like a deer, but it's far taller than it is long, and it's far taller than me, as well. It steps out from its hiding place, the strange hole in reality coming close to me. It has no edges and no shape, just a sensation of what should be there, even down to the pale white dot eyes that dart around its face when I try to look into them.
It towers overhead, staring down at me, but I can detect no malice. Under its gaze, I realize I am mistaken, this is a creature made of malice, but its charcoal soul does not concern itself with me. It concerns itself with the others. Those who like to say they're one with the woods. They should be cut open by the thorns, consume the poisonous plants, freeze solid in the icy rains, be torn to ribbons by the wolves, let the forces of nature strangle them slowly like the trees strangle each other's roots for nutrients. Let them bleed, let them fall ill, let them starve and snap and burn.
All intruders will bleed, and it will drink their blood so that it may have the energy to slice open whatever parasite comes in looking for them. Its territory knows no bounds. Its hunger knows no limits. Its sadism knows no end. It is saddened when it must share its beautiful forest with another. It laughs into the night when an explorer vomits to death in his tent. It knows the names of every being in its sight and it hates all of them, every man, every woman, every child, all should be thrown into the river to drown, should have their organs pecked out by the carrion birds, should be forced to watch themselves decay and die for their trespassing.
I pull back. It turns and runs behind the tree I first saw it behind. When I realize that I am not in any more trouble, I slowly go to where it was, but there's nothing there. Maybe there was always nothing there.
"And that's when you woke up." Sticks finishes the story.
I adjust the grip on my fishing pole. The water gently babbles as it passes beneath us. "No, that's when I changed to a dream where I was playing a game about being a hunter, but for some reason the animal spawns were messed up and I ended up being assaulted by like fifty wolves. Well, that's what happened last night. When I experienced that for real, then that's the part where I went home and had a cheese sandwich."
"So you actually did see that thing when you were, like, twelve?" I nod. "Damn. Sounds like you were fated to be here."
"You've got it backwards." I suggest. "When I woke up, I remembered that experience vividly, but the first thing I thought was, 'Father', and I wasn't thinking about mine."
Sticks doesn't reply. He's such an odd figure. The sun always glints off of the lenses of his mask, but at one point I caught him in a dark room and I saw that there was still that glint. He has glowing eyes. Underneath that mask isn't someone of this world. At least, not a normal one. Out here in the sun, now that I know what to look for, I can see some slightly misplaced spots of dull orange light. What is he?
Well, he's an alright guy. Not exciting, but he's been hanging around me more than anyone else and doesn't seem to hate me, so that's nice.
"Yeah... yeah..." He begins. "It might have been him. I don't know. I've immersed myself in the ways of the Forest all my life and I've only just begun to grasp the things he takes for granted."
"He's a fucking weirdo."
"It comes with the territory, I think. The Forest never loves anyone like it loves its misfits, you know. After 170 years, well, you're going somewhere others can't follow."
I sit at attention. "170? You're fucking with me."
Sticks rubs his chin. "Well, he's closer to 180 now. 178 or 179, I forget."
"That, uh... is unusual, right?"
"Good acolytes are always in short supply. If you want to live that long, the Forest would love to provide." His fishing rod twitches and he reels it in. An empty hook drips in the air.
"I'm fine, thanks." I mutter.
He re-baits the hook and casts it back into the water. "Suit yourself. I still say you'd enjoy the midnight masses."
I shrug.
"Oh, speaking of the Forest, we're hearing that it might be time for your triumphant return." He speaks up.
God damnit. It had to happen eventually but it was nice to be living from day to day without worrying about having to do some shit. In the past few months I've done a few 'disappearances' to keep myself sharp, but those are supposed to be subtle. "Really?" I stand up and put on my mask.
"Yup. But I think you'll like this one."
Kanteen has her driver's license now. She is so proud of it. I don't blame her, but it is kind of funny how she uses any excuse to flex her newfound power. Right now that's convenient for me. Her family owns a home in the hills. A small mansion, from the sounds of it, which they rent out during the summer to other rich people as a vacation home. Some people are into hundred-degree temperatures and constant storms, but if you ain't, Appalachia is a great place to spend the season. It's cool, vibrant, scenic... and out of the way. There's no reason to live here except for recreation. There's just nothing nearby.
In a few weeks the warm season will start in earnest and the newest batch of migratory millionaires will arrive, but that's then. Now, we're using it for ourselves. It's spring break, so we're going to spend a few days all together having a great big sleepover. There will be bonfires, there will be pleasantly chilly nighttime breezes, there will be an internet connection, and there will be reminiscing. A second funeral for Marigold. They started planning this trip shortly before she died.
God. Every day, I remember, and I have to realize that it's been longer than I thought since it happened. Even now, it feels like it happened four weeks ago, not four months. Time can't dull the pain fast enough and it's not even trying to.
I catch myself. It could have been worse. The killer wasn't playing with her body, he was just searching her especially thoroughly for money and electronics. She wasn't abused before or after her demise. She might have passed away in unspeakable, pointless agony, but that one horror never materialized. Hopefully the fucker who killed her will die slowly.
Well, that's a thought for later. Now, we're supposed to be relaxing. Working out our personal issues. God knows I'm not the only one. Even though we all can't help but mention her sometimes, saying Mari's name is a sure way to put everyone on edge.
I might not even be the most affected. Minno won't be joining us. Honestly, I've taken her spot. It wasn't my intent. She just didn't want to be with us, watching us all look around awkwardly whenever someone mentioned the departed, when she feels like it was her fault. I don't know if she has a new circle of friends, but I hope so, she deserves to get over it the same as everyone else.
We're lucky that Marigold was the only of the killing spree's victims who we knew.
"Alright, any of you ever in the girl scouts?" Ryleigh asks as we pull off the mountain road and onto a gravel pathway. "Their motto is 'leave no trace'. That's how this is going to work. We can do whatever the fuck we want, but if this place isn't spotless when we leave, my parents are going to kill me, and I'm going to pass it on to all of you."
Freda is in the back seat with me. She mutters that that's not the motto.
"I'm sorry?" I offer.
"Their motto is, 'do something good every day'," She says louder. "'Leave no trace' is just a saying for when they go hiking."
Kanteen waves the hand that's not on the steering wheel. "Really? Well, point still stands. Didn't know you were a Scout, Freda."
"Sister was, actually."
Calling the house a small mansion is apt. On the right side is a garage. On the left, it's split-level to fit around the hill it's built on. It's probably twice the size of my own house, which, admittedly, is probably not that much cheaper since this one isn't within seeing distance of civilization. It's in the middle of a large clearing of verdant grass and surrounded by steeper hills on all sides. In the distance, the Appalachains loom in the cracks between the electric-blue sky, the last of the winter snow still sitting on the peaks.
With the dramatic sloping roof, it could be a ski lodge right out of an ad for Alpine tourism if it were higher up.
"Back in 'ye olden days'," Kanteen begins as she pulls into the garage, "Doctors would actually prescribe people to spend a while living somewhere like this. They thought the cool natural air would be good for the organs and the mind, mostly the lungs. We, girls, are going to be putting that to the test."
"Think Synne will notice a difference?" I joke.
The garage is a small dark cavern of utilitarian walls and concrete floors. Kanteen doesn't bother to close the shutter door before she gets out of the car. "Not a fucking chance!"
What sort of obscure forest cult would be complete without elaborate rites and rituals, especially ones they leave to initiates?
From what I've been taught, I think I can kind-of-sort-of understand what I'm doing, but it sounds like nonsense. I'd think they were hazing me if it weren't for the fact that magic is real in this world... in both worlds, I suppose.
My map has a red dot scribbled at a location which is currently right in front of me. I pull out a collection of spears from my backpack and look through each one. They're all hand-carved, with a stone tip tied to one end and marked with an etched facial expression in the handle. At the other end, the wooden rod becomes a figure of a deer. A four-legged deer. I find the one I'm looking for and jam the pointy end into the dirt with my weight. It has an associated rune which I carve on the trunk of the nearest tree with a pocket knife.
It ain't just locations, I'm taking a path through the mountains that I'd call "unnecessarily difficult" if it weren't that way on purpose. These spears mark intersections in the local flow of mana and potential and that's why it has to follow the path of the wind and something something something "reality is a veil".
I get back to walking and see a misshapen gray rod nearly my own height not far away. Something I didn't internalize until I was sent on this errand is that the woods around this area have a lot of these small stone monuments. If you wandered these hills back home, and you saw a tower of rocks stacked on top of each other, there would be no mystery. Someone was walking by and saw a pile of rocks and had an urge to construct. I done it myself when I was younger. Around here, though, once you start looking, you realize they're EVERYWHERE, and weird ones too. Huge. Discolored. Unnaturally stable despite being so tall and so thin. Now I know why.
The cultists do it when they're out and about. There's a special way of setting it up and everything. It makes the energies flow from the dirt better, and that keeps them upright. There's an interplay between the synthetic and the natural that results in symbiosis, but the nature of it, both practically and cosmologically, is beyond my ability to understand. The elders tell me that, for now, that's fine. All I need to know is what patterns to weave the world into for the benefit of the whole.
Whatever. I just think that hiking ain't fun when it's your job. I can't believe I let Sticks talk me into this shit.
The next location has me binding branches into a triangle with twine before leaving a few more spears. I wonder if this symbol inspired that one movie about those guys wandering around in the woods. I wonder if this world has its own version with the same symbol. Even if all this magical ritual is bullshit, this sort of thing really ought to keep out lesser intruders. At least, the biological ones. Supposedly there are revenants and other entities who we ain't trying to keep out. I carve words in an ancient language into the bark of the tree. One day I will know the language of the Forest, or so I'm told.
I look at the map. I'm not halfway done. There are water chimes to erect in the river, and from there I will grab a number of stones for a fairy circle in a clearing. My existence is proof that magic is real. I still think there's some element of make-work to this exercise. It's a gut feeling borne of experience. I'm sure that this is building character, and I'm equally sure that whoever explains that to me would decline to put their hand on the table so I could build them some character with a hammer.
There's something therapeutic about it, though. Is this what religion is supposed to feel like? Maybe. A feeling of liberation from working for a being higher than myself, despite, or maybe because, it is a psychotic god of decay and cruelty. It's a "free love" sort of vibe. The kind that rots in the back of your dad's old Wagoneer as you try and find your way home after killing it and taking it as a trophy. Like nothing matters and you can be yourself. Like you can eat all the meat you want.
...
I should finish this up. I think the void is starting to look back.
As I stand to catch my breath, I notice there's a lump on the side of one of the nearby trees. It's nestled in between two exposed roots and remarkably well-concealed considering the thing's the size of a damn softball. I barely saw it, but now that I know it's there I can obviously tell it's not part of the tree. What it is, well, that's another question.
I reach out to pick it up.
An hour or so later, Synne arrived. She did not, in fact, notice a difference. Everything smells like weed when the smell is coming from you. "No toking inside, you hear me?" Kanteen ordered.
"No problem, sis." Synne replied, joint hanging out of her mouth. She had come alone so that she could DUI without putting anyone else at risk. It's just weed, but it's still not ideal, and Ryleigh freaks out about it, and since Oswin and Ryleigh are attached at the pelvis that means those two were both going with Herra instead.
"You better not do that shit." Kanteen forcefully said. "The stench won't be coming out, and we've got all this pristine, beautiful, self-cleaning outdoors for it. No trying to touch the gun in the case above the fireplace, either."
Synne smoked on the back patio, staring out at the jagged horizon and the rolling fields of pine trees. She smiled, not because of her chemical haze, but because she was satisfied with where she was.
It was a long drive out here and the sky was darkening when Herra parked in the driveway and came in through the front door, the two lovebirds in tow. We all watched the sunset in near-perfect silence.
The stars were out and we gathered some sticks from the woods and piled it into the circle of rocks. This was no nature adventure: We lit the fire with a match and a cup full of gasoline. Synne tried to bet someone to drink from the cup before it was poured onto the stack. No one accepted. We felt the night breeze and sat in folding chairs as we watched the fire.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It was a morose night. Last week, Artio Cervio had been arrested for hitting someone while drunk-driving again. This time the victim might have been mad enough to not settle out of court. The week before that, a second Zagrostani war had started. At that moment, across the world, the Chimerican army was fighting a colossal maneuver war in a coalition with the Naharamites in order to seize the last oil fields from Zagrostan. The European nations were throwing everything they had to keep the Federation from expanding further, but Naharaim held the most powerful army in the region, and Chimerica held the most powerful army in the world.
Ryleigh's older sister had been called up. So had Herra's aunt, and Kanteen's cousin. Synne's mother was there from the start. We worried, but even personal letters promised, maybe not safety, but at least tremendous progress. At this rate, the war would be over in a few weeks, and how many could die in such a short conflict?
Oswin had come wearing a t-shirt of a boy with an army uniform and a machine gun saying "COOL YOUR JETS, MOUNTEN MONKEY!". It was captioned "Baxter Seward against EUROPEANS".
Was it tasteless? Yes. Was it really funny to see a cartoon 10-year-old with fucked-up colors carrying a gun and shouting racial slurs on this bootleg piece of shit t-shirt? Also yes. For the five dollars he paid, I think it was worth it, even if it was a reminder that one of my friends might be visiting another funeral soon.
There were eight chairs and seven of us. It didn't feel right to remove the extra. Freda took a can of beer and poured it onto the grass. "It's for Marigold." She said.
We all bowed our heads solemnly. "Isn't that a rapper thing?" Herra asked, making Freda grimace.
"It's hard to believe it's already been four months." I comment. The fire burns hot and loud. "Sometimes I wake up and it feels like the funeral was only a few days ago."
A cricket chirps in the distance as the stars twinkle. Occasional crackles and pops nearly drowns out the rustling of the wind through the pine needles and the grass. Herra is next. "Yeah, it's, uh..." She takes a breath. "I don't know. It just doesn't make sense."
"It ain't supposed to." Ryleigh says. "Her murderer just wanted to feel powerful. He wanted to destroy something beautiful."
Freda's eyes reflect the fire intensely. "There is no limit to the cruelty that can be dreamt of. We do not even control ourselves, we are toys, and fate is a capricious owner."
The talking subsides once again.
"I fucking hate algebra." Oswin says.
"God, it's the worst." Kanteen agrees. "And we def ain't using any of that shit in real life so I can't even make myself care. Guessing it's giving you trouble, too?"
Oswin nods.
"It ain't hard, girls. It's just useless." Ryleigh chimes in.
Synne pulls out a bag of giant marshmallows. She puts one on a stick and holds it over the fire. As Herra stands up to grab one and do the same, Synne starts talking. "It ain't useless, you ain't going into a line of work that demands it. I had to learn it for my other business 'cause there were a few times it came up. Nah, there's plenty of times that it helps you figure out how things are going money-wise and, uh, what you gotta do next. You can do it by hand but that takes forever and the results are the same."
"Oswin, honey, do you want to be a drug dealer when you grow up?" Ryleigh asks her boytoy.
"Not really." He replies, throwing an empty bottle of soda as hard as possible into the woods.
"What DO you want to be?" I question.
He shrugs. "I don't know. But it won't involve math, that ain't me."
"You're all lucky," Freda interjects. "Math sucks, but it has nothing on Britonnic. None of you are hardcore readers. You don't realize what utter garbage they're giving us."
"Hey, I liked The Weight of Destiny", I push back.
"Thamin, honey, you liked the sex scenes. You hated every other part of it." Herra points out.
"Yeah, it's terrible. Overwritten, overdramatic, overlong. I ain't even into girls and I can find you better lesbian erotica. Actually, remind me when we get back and I will. This dreck isn't literature, it's trends being kept alive by successive waves of old farts refusing to let time work and smothering the entire medium." I've never heard Freda so worked up about anything before. Until I hung out with these folks, I had never heard her worked up at all.
"Girls, I think we're all missing the point." Kanteen interjects. "Oswin, Ryleigh, we don't have anything in particular planned. The weather is nice, the night sky is beautiful, and the walls of the house are a lot thinner than they look. If you think you need to do some 'tutoring', just find a nice place in the woods."
"Why, thank you, Kanteen! I believe we will take advantage of that right now, if it's alright with you all." Ryleigh jumps up and says. Oswin smiles and winks at Kanteen as he gets pulled into the dark, his girlfriend not even waiting for real permission.
Moths dance in the firelight.
I ask what I've been hesitant to. "What's their deal, anyways?"
"Like, 'their deal' how?" Herra questions.
"When I hear them talk about each other, it doesn't sound like love. They're still attached at the hip." I wave in the direction they walked away.
"It's because they're fuck-buddies." Freda interrupts.
"Freda!" Kanteen shouts. "Don't be crass, they're nice people, even if Ryleigh won't share her fuck-buddy."
Herra chuckles. "Nah, but really. Oswin's a moron. Ryleigh loves having her own man and Oswin's grades can't afford to lose her, so even though he could have a small harem, he gets one 6/10 girl."
Synne mumbles through the melted marshmallow and the blunt she stuck in her mouth at some point. She swallows. "Nah, Oswin knows what he's doing. He just has different priorities."
"You saying Ryleigh's got something besides test answers that he couldn't get if he had me and Ragerta and any of the other girls who'd take him?" Herra raises an eyebrow.
"Hell yeah she does. Oswin could have the other three billion girls in the world for himself and he'd still wish he just had Ryleigh." Synne lays back. "Because she's fuckin' easy. She's a 6/10, right? And she's got one guy all to herself. 7/10 girls don't get that unless he's got a problem, and Oswin doesn't. He's not even a bad lay. She knows she ain't getting this deal again, not now, not ever. She'll do anything to keep it going. And Oswin gets to sit back and have unlimited sex and tutoring for free." The end of the hand-rolled joint glows orange. "He ain't ambitious, but he ain't dumb, either."
In the woods, branches snap loudly. Me and a few others look to see the pair coming back, but nothing happens. The sound vanishes into the mountains. Freda waves around her empty can of soda and throws it aside. She stands up and heads to the house to get another. The others start to chat about cars and my eyes glaze over. My own drink is empty as well so, soon enough, I'm in the kitchen as well. Freda isn't there.
I look around and see her downstairs. There's a double-barreled shotgun in a glass case above the house's fireplace that I caught a brief glimpse of. It looks ornate. Freda is staring at it. She reaches up. The case's padlock disengages as soon as she touches it. She pulls it out, then opens the case itself, slowly and carefully. She stares at the exposed weapon and shrugs. Once she has it all closed back up and the broken lock back where she found it, she looks around awkwardly. Her eyes meet mine. She grins sheepishly.
We both get another soda and don't say a word.
When we go back outside, the conversation is lulling again. Someone openly regrets that we don't have a cooler and the talk dies completely. I decide to bring my own topic. "I wonder what happened to the killer."
Herra grunts. "Hopefully he died."
"A million billion cops, the whole damn army, and they can't find one psycho hiding in the woods..." Kanteen complains bitterly. "Makes me understand why Minno's so angry all the time. Or was. I don't know how she is now. Sucks ass not being able to trust the authorities, though."
"That's nothing new. You can't trust the government." Herra grits her teeth. "Never could, no matter who you vote for. They're all corrupt old integrationists."
"As if we could vote." I point out.
"Yeah," Herra agrees. "We don't even have the option of choosing which greedy geriatric is going to mismanage the police into the ground. God's sake, there were a dozen witnesses and a shootout, how can they just vanish?" It was a valid question. To this day, any conspiracy or mythical monster was argued to be the reason why someone had appeared out of thin air, killed eight people, vanished, traveled an unfathomable distance supposedly on foot, killed three more, and then never been seen again.
"Can we... stop talking about this?" Synne speaks up. We look at her. She is suddenly forcing herself back into her chair and death-gripping the armrests.
"Are you okay, Synne?" I ask hesitantly.
"I... Oh, God." She moans. "It was fucking aliens. It really was. I thought I was just being weird but they're fucking real."
"Quit screwing around," Kanteen demands.
"I'm serious!" Synne shouts. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone. "Fucking... when she left that party, she was texting me constantly to complain about Minno, and then she stopped. And look at this. Look. At. This." She holds out the LCD screen for us.
We all have to crowd around to see the tiny letters, but...
11/12/02
I just don't get her
She'll be cool for days
Weeks
Then suddenly there's some bullshit and she just won't let it go
She has to be right
She has to see you back down
It's retarded
God damnit
11/29/02
NOTE: Due to connection issues, messages may have been received at a time different from when they were sent.
I think I'm lost, great
This is what I get for trying to navigate while angry
Sigh
And now it's foggy
Really foggy, I can barely see my own hand in front of my face
What the fuck? It was clear like ten minutes ago
Nevermind
That was weird
Oh it's back
The woods sucks
All the wildlife sounds like they're screaming
Don't gliding spiders sound like a dying baby when they get injured or someting?
There must be a spider war going on
I think I saw one of your friends
Either that or a hobo
She ran away when she caught me looking
I'm not far from town, my signal shouldn't be this ass
I saw her again. This is worrying
Maybe she's not a deer, I think her eyes are glowing
They are. A cat?
I hope to God you get these messages, I've been wandering for an hour
And this thing is following me and I don't know what to do
They're just watching for now, but like???
What am I supposed to do?
Did someone spike my drink?
This isn't natural
I tried to talk to them. They hid again
OKAY WHA T THE FUCK
IT'S NOT A PERSON
IT DOESN'T HAVE A BODY
IT'SW JUST A SHADOW WITH EYES
FUCK IT I'M RUNNING
I haven't seen it for a while
I found a road, I'm going to follow it and hope I go somewhere
Wish me luck
"See? See this shit?" Synne points. "I ain't talking to the cops about this because I'll get disappeared but HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST SIT ON THIS? ALIENS ARE FUCKING REAL!"
That's not the thing on my mind. Two weeks after Marigold died, the search was winding down from lack of any evidence or clues. Nothing new was being found outside of places where they already knew the killer had been. One of the things they never found was Marigold's phone, since the killer had it and they never found him. Despite that, more than two weeks after she died, her phone turned on and sent all the messages in the buffer.
"WHO THE FUCK WAS USING HER PHONE?!" I scream.
We talked over each other for a long time. In the end, we figured out that there was only one truth: There was nothing to do with this information. There was nothing we could do. The killer was still out there somewhere, there were things the government was involved with that we couldn't know about, and not only was there nothing we could do, in fact, there was less than nothing since admitting we knew about this could only bring the wrong kind of attention.
Kanteen was outside the ring of chairs, pacing nervously as she tried to work out the sense of dread. Herra was doing the same thing by sitting down. Freda had borrowed some weed from Synne and the two were trying to calm down that way. I was just offended, although I guess I'll be having a new sort of nightmare for the next few nights.
There's a host of shitty horror stories on the internet and I'm living one of them. How do you even respond to that? We all know the answer is to see if it gets any weirder, or if this is just us briefly falling into the wrong side of the fence and spending a day in the wrong reality.
Fucking... this isn't how it's supposed to go. We're supposed to be dealing with boy troubles and hormones, not aliens plowing cars into people for fun.
Freda whips her head around. "Hello?" A voice calls from the woods. We all turn to look. It's not a crazed killer appearing out of thin air to kill us. It's a lanky WHITETAIL hiker. He's tired and dirty and battered and sad. He drags his feet as he walks over to us.
"Who are you?" I yell back.
"I'm, uh, Oski. I got really lost in the woods for, uh, all day. Can I... can I sit by your fire a while?" He asks.
I look at the others. "Yeah, I guess." Kanteen says.
He pulls himself over and collapses into... Marigold's chair. "God, I am so glad to see you. I'm out of food, almost out of water. I don't know how long I was going to last." He relaxes, falling nearly limp. There's a spare water bottle and a few snacks around the place but he doesn't touch any of them.
He doesn't do much of anything at first. "You can eat some of that stuff if you want." Kanteen offers coldly.
"Oh, I can?" He jolts upright and reaches for the graham crackers. He starts shoving the large wafers into his mouth.
"So what happened?" Freda asks.
"I can't say. One minute I was hiking, the next I had no idea where I was." He explains, breathing heavily between bites.
Freda pauses. "Well, I was thinking more about that." She points to one of the sleeves of his jacket, which has been torn off to be used as bloody bandages for that arm.
"I don't want to talk about it." He says.
"Bark Lobsters are fucking brutal, dude. That's why there's loads of signs telling you not to touch them." Herra interjects.
"Yeah, I fucking know that now." The hiker thinks out loud. "We, uh, ain't got them where I come from."
"European?" Kanteen pushes.
"Yeah. Briton." He answers. We all look at each other. He doesn't sound like a Briton. He ain't a foreign spy, though. Too young, but also too dumb. That's my interpretation and everyone's unconcerned eyes tell me they agree.
"Well, you can hang around here until someone gets you." Kanteen tells him.
"You guys have cabs?" He's sinking back into his lawn chair.
"Yes, we have cabs. We have service so you can call one." Kanteen deadpans.
"Just let me sit here for a bit, I've been on my feet all day."
"That's fine, but you're not staying overnight." Kanteen orders.
"Don't worry." He says in a failed imitation of a reassuring tone.
Herra leans in close to me and whispers. "It's good he's calling a taxi, that way he can have the driver navigate." I chuckle, but he sees that it's at his expense and pulls into himself. Let this be a learning experience for him.
The conversation stops for a minute. Kanteen pulls out her phone. There's a buzz and she walks over to pick up Ryleigh's cell from the grass besides the chair she had been sitting in. She grunts. She tries again. "Oswin forgot his phone at home." Herra says.
"Hell. They've been gone long enough." Kanteen mutters. "Hey, Oski, did you hear two deer fucking in the woods on the way over?"
"I heard some weird noises that ain't seem like normal wildlife." He replies.
"But it wasn't sex."
"It may have been."
Kanteen folds her arms. "Oski, how old are you?"
"18, why?"
"And you don't even know what sex sounds like?"
Oski looks around, embarrassed. "...No."
Kanteen throws her arms up. "Just fucking show me where these 'strange noises' were."