“Just so you know, Erik likes me.” Her eyes narrow, her voice strong and clear. “And if you make a play for him, or if you tell him we had this talk? I’ll cut you.” She releases me, still smiling, then jogs up the hill ahead of me, revealing a glittery turquoise seashell on the back of her shirt.
Like, what?
I stumble up the incline, flabbergasted. Jada is beautiful. Prettier than most of the popular girls at my high school. How could she possibly be threatened by me? Maybe this Erik is a player.
In addition to being a killer.
I run, full speed, face flushing, eyes tearing. At Bellwood, the few times they allowed me to exercise, I was only allowed to shuffle in ankle chains. Now I sprint wildly through the high green grass, birds shooting low over my head across the blue sky, calling out like they’re cheering me on.
Way, way across the field, there’s a guy running against the dark wall of pines that surround the little cabins, parallel from me. The moment I notice him he smiles and speeds up. Okay. You want to race? Let’s race!
Down at the end of the field, on the lawn across from the main cabin, Dave stands with the rest of the campers beside an orange cone, a square blue tarp behind him and an air horn in his hand. He waves his arms over his head as the others clap and cheer, watching to see who will get to the cone first.
My atrophied legs are almost at their breaking point, but I tilt forward and gain speed, lungs burning, keeping just ahead of the guy from across the field, until he makes a final surge before I get to the cone and we knock into each other, hard.
Up close he’s way taller than I thought, and apparently made of iron. When I slam into his chest I actually bounce back.
“Whoa, easy!” he laughs, grabbing my arms to keep me from falling, and my forehead almost knocks into his chin. “You okay?”
I’m too winded to answer, he’s knocked the breath out of me, and then our eyes lock—his huge and dark and melancholy. Though maybe that’s just the tattoo at the edge of his left eye, a tiny blue tear poised to slide down the long, narrow line of his cheek.
“Earth to Signal! Get in line and listen up!” Dave claps his hands, and I break off our stare and take my place in between Dennis and Nobody.
“All right, guys, now that Javier and Signal have finally joined us, it’s drill time!” Dave announces to the group as I struggle to control my panting. “What better way to welcome the new recruits than a drill, am I right?”
There is scattered applause, not from me. I’m bent over at the waist as a cramp stitches up my side. If we’re going to do sprints or push-ups for this drill I might as well give up now. The blue tarp I noticed from the field is draped over a pile of something, a tall pile, almost as high as Dave’s waist. With my luck, it’s probably medicine balls.
“This is a timed drill. You have three hours, from now until dinner. It’s real simple, though I wouldn’t call it easy.” Dave leans down, grabs a corner of the plastic sheet, and with a flourish pulls it back. “All you have to do is hide a body.”
Eight limp bodies lie stacked on top of each other, their limbs tangled together, gazing up at the sky with unblinking eyes.
Chapter Three
The Bleeder
I’m going to faint. Right here, right now.
All the others lunge forward. There’s a loud rattle as Dave throws down what sounds like a drawer of cutlery. A box of knives, cleavers, and small saws spill out in the grass in front of us.
“Hey.” The guy with the tear, Javier, has hung back while the others bicker over the knives. “They’re not real.” He whispers.
“What?” I force myself to look at the pile of bodies, where one of the twins is working a busty woman loose from the arms of the other cadavers, and see the fingers of her hands are molded together. They’re … plastic? But they aren’t just mannequins—there’s no seams in their flesh, their hair catches the wind, and their bland faces are uncanny and individual.
“They get them different places—special effects houses, old medical mannequins, and some are uh …” His tone gets embarrassed. “Like, sex dolls we think.”
“Oh.”
“Freaked me out too, the first time,” he says, and then he lopes ahead of me and plucks a short male mannequin off the pile.
He saw. He saw me freak out. Did anyone else see?
Nobody hoists up the last mannequin. The tarp is empty, but Dave turns to me.
“Don’t worry, I saved one for you!” he moves aside the corner of the tarp to reveal a young female figure with long brown hair, lying face down in the grass.
“How thoughtful,” I mutter. She’s surprisingly heavy when I pick her up, and taller than me. I awkwardly cradle her in my arms. There’s two knives left so I grab one, struggling to carry it all.
“Don’t forget this!” Dave tucks a trash bag under my elbow, and I mutter a thank you.
I get about ten steps away from the tarp before I sink to my knees under the weight of my “victim,” a knot forming in my stomach that rises slowly toward my throat.
Around me buttons are popping off shirts as the others set to work, the flailing limbs of the mannequins rising over the grass as clothes are ripped clear of torsos so saws can ravage plastic flesh. One of the twins has a stockinged foot on his shoulder and is bending the leg sharply backward at the knee. Jada cuts four fingers off her mannequin with one knife stroke, her expression eerily remote. I see Erik’s head bowed over the grass and quickly look away.
“Now remember,” Dave lectures, circling us, “this is not about dismemberment skills, it’s about concealment. This is an evidence drill. If I find any evidence, even so much as a button, that’s a fail.”
“But we don’t have tarps to use!” one of the twins protests.
“Oh? I see two tarps on this field,” Dave chides, sounding exactly like my old AP Biology teacher during a lab. As the twins race for them I turn over my mannequin, smoothing the long dark hair out of her glass eyes. Someone has gone to the trouble of molding her face into a smile, and her skin is a horribly lifelike type of silicone. I look around, stalling, and my eyes land on Nobody sitting with a headless torso in her lap.
The remembered smell of blood, like a hot handful of pennies, burns at the back of my throat.
When I woke up in the shed that morning, I was sitting upright on the floor beside the scarred card table. Rose was curled up in my lap, facing away from me, her back against my stomach.
I could feel a pool of cooling warmth below us, and realized she’d drunk too much and wet herself in her sleep. I debated how to wake her up, if I should play it off with a laugh and make a joke out of it, or if that would hurt her feelings. At last I softly shook her shoulder, a smile in my voice, though my head throbbed and my throat was painfully dry.
“Hey, Rose? Rose, you got to wake up …”
I shook her harder then, and her head turned. But it turned the wrong way. The back of her head moved impossibly forward, dropping at an angle her neck could not allow. Her body was still in place, shoulders hunched, not moving, a thing separate from the head that was making a slow, long roll across the floor. The face slowly turned up and regarded me, red streaked across her cheek, eyes wide open and blank.