Chris brought the small pouch of food over to Madison and climbed into the sleeping bag with her. They began to share the food with small camping forks. Ethan brought his to Abby and did the same.
“Is there anything else I should know about sleeping in the woods; anything else that’s going to be so freaky?” Madison enquired around a mouth full of wet food.
“Well, small animals will be all around us and in the dark, they sound huge,” Chris advised. “My first night in the woods alone, I was fourteen and I thought there was a pack of bears all around the tent, digging and grubbing. I just sat in my tent waiting for them to begin tearing it apart; all the while, I had to piss so bad my eyes were beginning to float.”
“What’d you do?” Abby asked with a sly grin.
“Well, I opened the tent just enough and leaked out the door. Just hung it out there in the wind,” Chris smiled.
“Did you piss all over the tent?” Ethan asked.
“Not with his dick,” Madison said almost under her breath. She quickly covered her face. “I can’t believe I said that…”
“Not like you’re lying,” Chris added seriously, and Abby began to laugh. “It’s true,” Chris said defensively, and they all began to laugh, Chris being the last to join them.
“Oh, hey, guess what I brought?” Madison dug through her pack. She quickly produced a bottle of Wild Turkey and a large tin, the kind that holds those curiously strong mints.
“I’ll take some of the Turkey,” Chris said as he reached for the bottle.
Madison lifted the tin and popped the top open. A number of hand-rolled cigarettes popped up, bristling on one end.
“Hmm, and what would that be, my dear Madison?” Abby asked slyly. Madison’s party side never failed to produce the finest vehicles for escape.
“Some of the finest and I brought plenty.” She smiled.
It was becoming difficult to see very far, but not so that Abby missed the joint proffered her. She took a burning branch from the fire and lit it, passing it back to Madison. Chris just sat there taking hard pulls from the Turkey.
Ethan chose not to partake of any of Madison’s gifts, but sat and watched the fire closely. Even though these were the mountains of Pennsylvania, there were still bears and cougars about. If they were close, at least one of them should be sober. Since he seemed to be the only one among them that had even thought about this, he decided it should be him. Plus, he did not tell any of them he was carrying a weapon, something he did not like to share, and Turkey always seemed to make him want to.
When the doctors had finally cured him of his hallucinations after many years of intense therapy, they had not taken his paranoia. A child of age four could not even know to tell them he always felt threatened; like that dirty street man was lurking just beyond his reason. The doctors had never really convinced him until much later that the bum was not real, but by then, it was too late, and Ethan was always prepared for some form of eventuality, some type of horrible threat that others would be oblivious to. This is why, at a very young age, he started carrying a gun.
He was excited though; Abby was a bit more ravenous when she was stoned, more eager and willing to put things in her mouth. All he had to do was be patient and things would be rather interesting for him as well.
The girls had managed to get each other into a giggling fit that did not seem likely to subside soon. Chris was just sitting and watching the fire closely, intently, as if it offered the answers to deep questions only he had thought to ask.
Ethan’s legs felt good, if not oddly sore, and he looked forward to stretching out to watch the stars move slowly across the sky as he fell asleep. First, there would be major helpings of Abby, but then silence, the calming sensation of solitude, and the wonder of gently passing stars. He really did like camping.
The girls had finally ceased their hilarities, and Abby was getting that warm comfortable glow to her face, the precursor to a quick bout of passion that never failed to satisfy Ethan in a major way. However, a slow moving unease came over Ethan, working its way up his back and standing hairs up as it went. It was not unlike the sensation that someone was watching him, but mixed in with it was a dread with which he was not familiar, at least not recently.
He tried to shake the feeling that something was about to happen, that something horrible had come close and should not be. He began to search the edge of the fire’s light, looking for a source, the darkness beyond becoming more loathsome and unsettling. Without much thought, his hand found its way to the revolver in the top of his pack. The grip felt good in his hand, but lent no comfort to him as the dread began to rush over him.
The darkness that was the tree line became a border of reality to him. Just beyond this line waited the most horrible of creatures, the abomination of life itself. It waited there, silently, watching for an opportunity to do whatever wicked thing it had come to do. That’s when Ethan saw movement for the first time, and he drew the revolver from his pack and rested it next to him, drawing the hammer back until it clicked softly into its pent-up ready position.
Chris and Madison began to talk softly to each other, their sleeping bags beginning to boil and roll with their play. Softly, Madison giggled, and a large black man stepped into the firelight. He was barrel-chested and shirtless; the torn remains of his dungaree cover-alls the only clothing on him. He walked through the edge of the firelight barefoot, paying no mind to the people arranged there in their sleeping bags. Ethan raised the revolver and tracked him as he walked through.
If it had not been for his past troubles with his imagination and his reality, the numerous visits with doctors who just asked questions and listened, and the short stay in a special hospital, he would have shouted at the man walking through. He clamped down on his voice and refused it flight. Then, an older man came through, mostly naked like the first man, but trailing a young girl with him. This man was old and grizzled, but still healthy of body and ample of muscle. The type of physique earned through endless hard labor. He wore shorts, not nearly enough to protect him from the cold, and a straw hat, useless in the darkness. He, like the first man, paid no attention to those gathered around the fire.
Ethan lowered the gun as a woman came through. She was dark of skin, darker than he was used to when compared to the friends he had back at the college. She wore a torn and soiled sundress, a bit too small for her frame but functional. In the crook of her arm, she carried a small bundle, most certainly an infant. Before she left the firelight, a boy came through, really more a young man, trailing behind him a visibly exhausted male child. They were as thread bare and as mostly naked as the adults were. Not one of the many feet that had passed through wore shoes of any kind.
As the boy reached the edge of the light, he vanished—not like a wisp of smoke, more like an over-active imagination catching itself in a lie and trying to quickly right itself. Ethan jammed the gun back in the pack after relieving the hammer, satisfied he had an episode like the ones he used to have as a child. He had been off medications for a couple of years now, and it was an unsettling thing in and of itself, but he felt secure in the fact that it had all been in his mind.
He tied his pack tight and decided not to wait for Abby to come to her sexual senses. He took her gently, and she willingly allowed him. It was as short but as powerfully sweet as he had hoped and he was soon staring at the slowly moving stars with Abby a steamy puddle of satisfaction next to him.
It was not until the morning when Chris found footprints that Ethan began to wonder.
Chapter 3
“Well, who the hell would have walked through here barefoot? It was pretty freaking cold out last night,” Fear was prominent in Chris’s voice.
“I don’t know, man. What’s the big deal?” Ethan asked trying to sound more irritated than scared.
“And look here, there was more than one: a child it looks like, and two or three other bigger people. What’s going on here?”
“Relax, Chris, we got here late, it was dark, maybe they were here before we got here? It’s no big deal.”
