#fudgeroach

Sam was the first to step forward (surprising no one), tying her hair back out of her face with a few snappy twists of her wrist. The Hacketteers had seen it happen a few times during the summer, the imaginary switch that occasionally got flipped inside of her, transforming her five-foot-nothing frame into the towering presence of a military official; she knelt down beside Nick alongside Abi and Kaitlyn, and as she got a better look at his leg, her cheeks hollowed in thought. When she spoke, it wasn’t with the calm, sunshiney voice they’d all grown accustomed to, but an authoritative snap that left little room for argument. “Nurse Kelly’s office,” she said to Kaitlyn, making sure to hold her gaze as she gave the assignment. “Hydrogen peroxide from the cabinet, gauze from the bottom left drawer, and then bandages. If you can’t find bandages, get tape. Go.”

After one last sympathetic look towards Abi, Kaitlyn was off, bounding towards the nurse’s office with force enough to make her sneakers squeak on the hardwood. Sam wasted no time; she turned first over her right shoulder then the left, her lips tracing the silent headcount she was running. “Eleven,” she muttered, tapping her own chest before running the count again and coming up with the same thing. “Eleven? I—okay, wait, who’re we missing?”

“Um, um Emma,” stammered Abi, her voice shaking like a leaf in a windstorm and her body not much better off. Her bare knees poked through the tears in her tights where she knelt on the floor, the skin red and raw from where she’d fallen, though that seemed to be the worst of her injuries. “E-Emma’s down at the…at the lake, and Jacob went to get her. I…right?” Her stare had been so far-off when she’d come tumbling out of the woods and into the circle of the firepit, and only now did it seem to focus, or sharpen at the very least, as though having four walls and a ceiling surrounding her was what it had taken to wake her up. Even though she kept both of her hands tightly wrapped around one of Nick’s, she wrenched her eyes away from him to look at Ashley instead. “Right?”

At first, all she could do was nod, her lower lip was so deep in her mouth. When she let it go (with an almost audible pop! at that) it was red and inflamed from her biting it. “Right,” she picked up, nodding with a tense sort of precision. “Jacob went to get Emma at the lake, and Matt and Jess went with him just in case he ran into that…um, guy he was talking about. The hunter, or whatever.”

His circuit complete, Mike gave the front door one last heave-ho before joining the rest of them. “So I’ll say it again: Déjà vu, table for however-the-fuck-many?”

From one of the tables, Chris lifted his head out of his hands. “Dude. Let it rest, okay? A-a-and that’s coming from me, all right? Just…drop it. Seriously.”

“This is bad.” There was the sound of footfalls as Kaitlyn came running back into the main room with her arms full of supplies, and even still it was Dylan most of them turned towards, Dylan who had been hanging back near the fireplace since they’d gotten in. “This is bad, bad, bad…look, I’m telling you guys, okay? You can call me crazy, whatever, I don’t care, this?!” He stopped his anxious pacing long enough to slice a hand through the air in Nick’s direction. “This isn’t normal. Guy gets attacked in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere by some…thing Abi draws to look like my sleep paralysis demon on steroids, it’s oozing black shit, and we’re just…what? We’re just not gonna say it?”

“Dylan,” Sam and Kaitlyn warned, sounding less a Greek chorus and more a couple of exasperated mothers.

He held both his hands up as if to acknowledge their scorn…and continued anyway. “This is horror movie shit. Legit fucking horror movie shit, and I don’t care if you guys think I’m a maniac or whatever, but I am telling you, we shouldn’t be bandaging that, we should just be cutting it o—”

“Dylan!” Kaitlyn snapped a second time, throwing him a frantic glare from where she bent over Nick’s leg. “You’re not helping!”

“No one is cutting anyone’s anything off,” Sam piped in. “Completely glossing over the fact Nurse Kelly never stopped to give any of us pointers on impromptu amputation, I’d just like to go on the record as saying immediately chopping body parts off when freaked out is a bad idea in general.”

She wasn’t looking anywhere near him, but Mike was more than happy to take the opportunity to flip two of the fingers he did still have Sam’s way.

“Fuck,” Nick breathed, his spine arcing impossibly when Sam splashed the hole in his leg with peroxide. He grit his teeth, squeezed Abi’s hands until she squealed – though from shock alone or pain, none of them could immediately tell – and screwed his eyes shut tight as the blood and tissue exposed to the open air sizzled and bubbled and foamed. “Fuckin’…I’m right here! Don’t talk about this shit like I’m not here!”

The pain in his voice should’ve been enough to end the conversation full-stop. It would’ve been enough, had it only been the younger counselors in the lodge.

He hadn’t said much since the firepit, and for that most of their number were grateful. When Josh did deign to throw his two cents into the mix, though…gratitude was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind. “Ives is right.”

“Shocker,” Mike muttered under his breath, joining Emily over near the windows.

“Josh. Don’t—”

“No, shut up. The facts of the matter are these: One.” And because he was who he was, he took two steps up onto one of the open tables, somehow managing to bring the audience’s attention to himself despite Nick bleeding out on the floor. “There’s something attacking people out in the woods. A bad start, I think we can all agree. Two. Whatever it is, it’s hungry, or at the very least, it’s teething. Now I don’t know about any of you guys, but I’ve seen my fair share of hickies and love bites in my time, and whatever the fuck did that…” As Dylan had before him, Josh pointed towards the wound Kaitlyn and Sam were trying (and failing) to dress. “…its mouth was a little bigger than we would like. Fair to say? Three. I’m sorry Nicky-baby, but you’re not looking so good right now.”

“Josh!” That time Sam got up, pushing herself from the floor to stomp over towards him. She grabbed the hem of his shirt and tugged, throwing off his balance and causing him to stumble to catch himself before he fell off the table entirely. “This is so not the time for – ”

“So you’ve got an explanation for all the black gunk, then? That what I’m hearing, Sammy?” He lifted his arms in a theatrical shrug, then let them drop to his sides. “Look at him. Look at him. We can see every vein in his goddamn body because of that crap. He looks like an anatomical model of a zombie plague victim. What’s the point in pretending – ”

“The point is,” she interrupted, each syllable clipped and final, “until we know what’s going on, we shouldn’t be scaring people.”

For a moment, brief and shining, it seemed maybe Josh was going to back down. Then he held up another finger. “Four,” he continued, looking away from Sam to search out all the others’ eyes instead. “Any of you aspiring astronomers take a gander up at the sky tonight, perchance? Notice anything…interesting, maybe?”

On the floor, Nick thrashed, succeeding in shoving Abi away from him, but not quite managing to throw Kaitlyn from his leg. Other than that, there was silence as the counselors fought to make sense of what Josh was saying.

“I mean…it’s a full moon,” Ryan offered. “But I don’t – ”

“Oh my God, it’s a full moon!” Like someone had stuck her with a pin, Ashley’s whole body shot back, back, back and away from Nick. She moved with the lightning speed of the truly panicked, nearly jumping the full length of the lodge to join Chris, Josh, and Dylan over by the fireplace. “It’s werewolves. Oh my God, it’s werewolves. It’s…oh jeez Louise, this is…” Only once she’d been enveloped by the guys did she stop raking her fingers down her face. When finally she spoke again, her voice had taken on a terrifying calmness. “We’ve got to cut his leg off.”

“Thank you! This is what I’m saying!”

“I—will you guys shut up?” Pushing himself away from the far wall, Ryan threw his arms out wide. “Do you hear yourselves? Werewolves?”

There was nothing especially friendly in the look Josh leveled at him as he asked, “What? Not, uh…bizarre or bona fide enough for you? Is that it?”

Nick’s injured leg spasmed as if it were a dying animal struggling to fight off a hunter, and the impact knocked Kaitlyn’s breath from her lungs. She went sprawling, moving her hands towards her ribs as if to grab at them, but hesitating to actually touch them once they began to throb. “Jesus Christ, Nick!” she gasped, using the rubber soles of her shoes to push herself along the floor, putting more distance between them. “I’m trying to help! I know it hurts – you gotta…”

He didn’t have much to say to that, it seemed, except a succinct, “Fuck off, Kaitlyn!”

As Sam and Abi both rushed to help her up, the others continued their grim debate; unfortunately for Ryan (and, in all honesty, Nick), one side was clearly louder than the other.

“In what world do you think werewolves – actual freaking werewolves – are real?”

“Uh, point of order,” Chris interjected, “you seem to be forgetting who you’re talking to, so hey, just real quick, ahem…hi, I’m Chris, this is Josh, this is Ashley, and we survived a cannibalistic monster attack back in 2015! Jesus Christ, did any of you guys listen to a word we said during ice breakers? Holy shit.”

“Not to take away from the argument or anything, buuut just FYI, we were all very much in agreement you guys were making that shit up completely.”

“…you what?”

“Yeah,” Dylan nodded. “We laughed about it after lights-out and everything. I mean…whoops. Obviously, whoops. I’d like to go on the record as saying I owe you guys a big old ‘my bad’ once we’re out of this shitshow, but…yeah. Definitely…definitely thought you were making that stuff up.”

There were a million things they could’ve said to that revelation. A million things between them. And still what ended up actually coming out was: “Mike cut two of his fingers off!”

“It’s true. I did. And look where it got me.”

“Really moving up in the world, aren’t you Michael?” She hadn’t had the slightest desire to join in the reindeer games, but there was only so much theatricality and tension Emily could resist. She turned away from the window and took the scene in with her arms folded tightly across her chest, one of her hands tucked neatly away beneath the crook of her elbow. There, near the fireplace, was the witch hunting committee; there, in the middle of the blood-streaked floor, were Nick and his three would-be nurses; and smack between the two factions was Ryan, dour and exasperated as always. “Mike’s right,” she said, and was then forced to deal with the indignity of him grinning and pumping his fist beside her. “This shitty one-act is familiar. And I for one am not dealing with it a second time.”

“Emily,” and man oh man, Sam was wondering if she was going to get to say anything tonight that wasn’t just her sounding out her friends’ names in increasingly frustrated tones, “look, I know things are weird right now, but – ”

“It’s not werewolves.”

Josh’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? Oh! Well, by all means, your majesty, please! Inform us lowly peons of the esoteric knowledge you’ve been withholding from us. I mean, after all, it’s not like any of us are experts on the subject or anything. Not like anyone in this room was literally raised on horror lore.”

They were too far away from one another to do anything about it, but when Sam and Mike locked eyes, it was immediately clear they both knew what was about to happen. There was no reason for that, nothing that could explain the bolt of understanding that ran through them, and yet there it was, plain as day – déjà vu, serendipity, kismet, fate, bad luck, whatever you wanted to call it, they both saw it rear its ugly head at precisely the same moment.

The moment, as it turned out, where Emily pulled her hand free from under her arm. “Whatever that ugly motherfucker was, it got me too.” The lights were off, there was hardly any illumination to speak of, and even so, there was no missing the jagged, shallow teeth marks jagging across her hand. There wasn’t as much blood as there had been on Nick’s leg, though there was a fair amount, and whatever that black stuff was, her wrist seemed to be shot through with it too.

“Guys.” It was only the stunned silence that had come over them at Emily’s admission that allowed Nick to be heard; his voice was a wet, phlegmy gasp caught deep in his chest. “Guys? I don’t…”

“It got me too,” Emily continued, “and look at me! I’m fine! I don’t feel sick, or infected with anything, or – ”

“Oooh no. Oh no no no no no! You are so…no!” As quick as she’d been to hide herself behind them, Ashley burst out from behind the guys to round on them instead, pointing frantically towards Emily as her words spilled out of her. “This is what I was trying to keep from happening last time!”

“…last time?” Ryan asked, only to be spoken over.

“They’re both bitten! They’re both infected! They’re going to change, or turn, or…or whatever, and when they do, you know what’s going to happen? They’re going to kill us! They’re going to kill all of us, and I didn’t make it off that stupid freaking mountain just to die here in the middle of some awful, sweaty, mosquito-filled woods!”

“Ashley…”

“You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.” Mike made a swipe for Emily, meaning to hold her back. Whether it had been a real effort, though, or one just meant for show…that was anyone’s guess, because she easily evaded him and marched her way over to the others, countering each of Ashley’s moves as though trying to bully her in a narrow school hallway. “How many times do you think you get to spearhead the ‘Let’s kill Emily’ committee before I haul off and wipe the ground with your sorry ass?”

“I really, uh…” Nick’s gasps had turned to panting, each breath uncomfortably wet on the inhale. “I really don’t…feel good…”

Ashley took a step back towards the guys and Emily took two forward; she sidestepped and Emily turned with her. “I-I was wrong last time,” she admitted, and while her eyes were huge and glassy with fear, her chin was high and her voice was resolute.

“You don’t fucking say.”

“But this is what I was afraid of! You become a werewolf when you’re bitten by one! That’s how it works! Everyone knows that’s how it works!”

“Oh yeah?” And before anyone could react, even to breathe, Emily lashed out with her uninjured hand, grabbed Ashley by the wrist, and brought her hand to her mouth. She bit down once, hard, letting go before she could taste blood but well after she felt the meaty crunch of tissue damage. “Then welcome to the party, bitch.”

“Déjà vu check?” Mike asked the room, and that time, Chris raised his hand. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Okay, look, shit’s…shit’s pretty fucked right now, I’m not even gonna lie, but Sam has a point, all right, you guys? Until we have some kind of proof that something spooky’s really afoot, then I don’t think we should – ”

It was Abi who screamed first, bringing their attention back to Nick. By then, it was too late. They turned just in time to see a tear, then two, then three, open in his skin, stretching wide to show the wet, raw muscle beneath as though he were simply wearing a human-suit several sizes too small for him. With one final heave of his body (and the horrendous sound of gore hitting the floor and walls and, God help them all, ceiling), something hulking and monstrous and sharp burst out of him like a moth from a cocoon, spreading not wings but limbs so long and so large as to defy all logic. It stared at them with eyes that winked gold and red in the darkness, then threw back its head and let out a sound like none of them had ever heard before.

Only then did Sam raise her hand, already starting to walk backwards. “This is starting to get familiar,” she admitted, grabbing Abi by the back of her shirt and hauling her to her feet, “this is starting to get really, really, really familiar, now that you mention it.”

Shock alone rooted the younger counselors to the spot, the older ones held still more by muscle memory and the hope what had kept them alive before would keep them alive now…but then Emily snatched Ashley up by both of her wrists and yanked her close enough to act as a human shield, breaking their stunned silence with a shrill, “Someone shoot her before she turns into one of those things!”

“You bit me!” she shrieked in response, struggling to reach behind herself and get a handful of Emily’s hair. When she couldn’t wriggle out of her grasp, she settled for stomping down on her instep as hard as she could, and if it hadn’t been for Mike and Chris both grabbing them and physically dragging them away, the thing that had very recently been Nick would’ve likely sliced through them both with a furious swipe of its claws.

“Holy shit, holy shit!”

“Yeah, welcome to our world,” someone said glumly, either Chris or Josh, it was honestly hard to tell.

“There’s a…there’s a fucking monster…right there!”

“Wow, gee, thanks!”

“And they’re just…going to fight each other?! Even though it’s…it’s right…”

“Like we said,” and that time it was Chris, his voice strained as he tried to physically slide himself between Ashley and Emily to keep them apart, “welcome to our fucking world!”