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There’s Something In The Woods At Camp Goodwill

tw: gore, body horror, vague, non-explicit implications of consensual sex, brief mention of sexual assault.

if there’s anything else youd like tagged, please let me know!! stay safe

Seventeen-year-old Katie Nicolson was not the first person to fall for Zediah Rennel, and she was sure that she would not be the last.

He was something of a catch, she thought. He was slender, long-legged, with deep-set eyes, a square jaw, and full lips that Katie very much wanted to kiss until they bled. His torso and some of his face were marked with pale, crisscrossing scars. They made Katie think of a roadmap that told a story of knife fights or broken shards of glass or...something similar, she thought.

Lost in her thoughts about the beautiful boy dozing beside her, Katie absent-mindedly began to run her thumb over the skin of his pale cheek. Her thumb grazed against one of the scars. The old wound felt like sandpaper against her thumb, a ravine carved into otherwise impeccably smooth skin.

His eyes—a startlingly pale green, nearly silver, soul-searching—fluttered open, and he smiled up at her.

“Hello, doll,” he said, smiling with all of his teeth. “That’s my job.”

Katie giggled. She giggled like she was supposed to, and let him cup her cheek with one calloused hand, sighing contently as he mimicked her affectionate gesture.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said, mostly to himself, and that was how Katie knew he meant it.

The wind howled outside their tent, owls called out into the night, wolves howled off in the distance, and thunder rumbled from some kilometres away, deeper into the woods, beyond Camp Goodwill.

Goodwill was a camp that prided itself on being a place where youth offenders went to reform, a glorified boot camp, really, taking the form of a summer camp.

Zediah was there on charges related to… possession of marijuana, if Katie remembered it right. Something like that. He certainly didn’t act like a pothead, Katie thought. After all, he was a conventionally attractive rich kid who came from fucking Wellington, of all places.  

Katie had been sent to Camp Goodwill for beating the shit out of one of her classmates. The bastard had tried to stick his hand up her skirt. The kid was an asshole, served him right, really. The teeth Katie had apparently knocked out were just comeuppance, just an Asshole Tax. Naturally, neither the cops nor the school administrators had believed a word of her story. As was the norm for cases like Katie’s, the smarmy, snivelling brat had gotten off scot-free with some bullshit about this or that, she didn’t remember.

Zediah wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in close. She hummed contently and buried her face in the pit of his chest.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“I’m with you,” was her only reply, and Zediah’s smile lit up her world. She folded her knees up and threw one arm over her...boyfriend? Oh, she hoped so. She hoped this wasn’t a one-time thing.

There was a heavy sounding thump from outside, and Katie sat bolt upright. Zediah laughed softly in response.

“Scared, babe?” He asked, sitting up with her and flinging his arms over her neck, letting his clasped hands dangle over her chest.

Katie snorted. “Hardly.”

Still, though, she got off the slightly too small bed and stumbled across the tent on wobbly legs, grabbing Zediah’s hoodie from the floor and throwing it over herself. Zediah was slim, yes, but he was tall, with broad shoulders. Katie was no slouch in a fight, as evidenced by her reason for attending Camp Goodwill, but she was still short and built like a bloody willow branch. Zediah’s hoodie swallowed her.

He laughed from the bed.

“Shut,” Katie hissed, although her cheeks reddened and her eyes danced with mirth. “I’m gonna go check what that was. Maybe one of the bear bags fell down.”

That would be a problem, she thought as she pulled back the tent flap, Zediah’s hoodie hanging over her knees. There were bears in the woods.

The wind was strong, shaking the trees surrounding the campsite and pulling Katie’s bleach blonde hair in front of her face, the winds carding long fingers through her pale locks.

Thump.

Katie picked up the flashlight she’d left just outside Zediah’s tent and turned it on, the blessedly powerful beam sending rays of light across the forest floor.

She ran the beam over each of the bear bags, still hanging from their places up in the branches.

Thump.

Katie’s breath caught in her throat, and she found herself holding the heavy-duty flashlight to her breast like a baseball bat. The wind stopped tousling her hair with all the care of a lover and started to slice at the exposed skin on her face and legs with frigid cold needles.

She bit her tongue to keep from calling out hello? That was how people died in horror movies. “Katie.”

“Fuck!” Katie spun around to where the voice had come from—just to her left, close enough that she should have been able to feel hot breath touch her skin. “Who said that?”

There was nobody there.

“Katie?” Her heart flooded with relief, and she took a step backwards, one of her bare feet crumpling the material of the tent just below the zipper. 

A freezing cold hand clamped over her mouth and nose. Katie screamed into the damp, cold palm, dropping the flashlight to the ground where it spun and sent bright light cascading around the campsite in a dizzying circle. 

“I’m fine. Just putting the bear bags back up,” said the thing gripping a struggling Katie, in a perfect imitation of her voice. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

“Zediah!”

Katie’s scream for the person who lay just a metre away from her went unheard, muffled by the hand of whatever the fuck made the woods surrounding Camp Goodwill its home. 

It wasn’t a fucking bear.

The thing pressed its face close to Katie’s cheek. It did not breathe. “You say a word,” it hissed. “And I will cave your skull in. Is that clear?”

Katie nodded. It let go of her face, and Katie pulled in a strangled breath.

It gripped her shoulders and yanked her away just as she turned back to the tent. 

Oh god, its face.

“There is not,” the thing that was not a person hissed, cupping her face in one hand in a gesture that almost mimicked compassion. “A person in the world who will save you.”

Katie whimpered. “Please,” she whispered. “Let me g—”

SNAP.

“Hey, babe?” hissed a voice that was almost Katie’s. “Could you come out here for a second?”

____________________________________________________________

The last person to wake up the next morning, oblivious to what had occurred the previous night, was Merrilyn Rakes, a familiar face to the managers of the camp. Her most recent stunt was breaking into her ex’s house and smashing his copy of that Empire game he’d been so obsessed over. Served him right, she thought, swinging herself up and out of bed, hopping off her lumpy and uncomfortable mattress. Stretching, she planted her feet on the much too thin sheet that offered a flimsy separation between her feet and the ground. Stones stuck up from beneath the mat and Merrilyn winced as she pulled her socks and shoes on.

There was some sort of commotion going on over at the guys’ neck of the woods. People were screaming bloody murder, Merrilyn could hear the shouting even through the tent and across the thin stretch of woods that led to the guys’ camp. 

She didn’t even bother to change out of her tank top and shorts. She just shrugged her jacket on so fast she missed the left sleeve and left her coat hanging off her right side. 

“What’s going on?” She said, sliding to a stop in the camp.

Kegan Merritt, an archetypical tough guy with a rap sheet a mile long, pointed one shaky finger at whatever people were screaming at. He was ghost white, although there was a faint green tinge to his skin. He then placed his hands on his knees and vomited all over his Nike Cortez shoes.

Curiosity got the better of her and Merrilyn pursed her lips. She started to walk towards the gathering. She covered her ears to drown out the screams about things bending in ways they were not supposed to bend. She tried to block out the sounds of nauseous gags and unanswered pleas for somebody to please call 111, there had to be a landline at the camp entrance if somebody just ran there oh god.

“Shut up,” Merrilyn hissed, and pushed some guy out of the way, one of the younger campers who seemed all too glad to be shoved out of the action.

Oh.

OH.

The first person Merrilyn saw was Katie Nicolson, lying...crumpled on the ground. She was nude, a hoodie that looked far too big for her lying beneath her head, folded neatly as if it were a makeshift pillow. There was nothing remotely attractive about the nudity. Katie lay on her side, bent fully in half. Katie’s arms reached outward as if to grasp at some aid that hadn’t come for her, her head resting by her feet. Her face was frozen, eyes wide open and bulging, jaw hanging loose. Dried blood and spittle pooled on the forest floor and at the corners of her lips. 

A couple metres away was Zediah Rennel, also nude. 

His torso and right arm had been crushed, blood and viscera pooling around his body. Merrilyn didn’t want to linger on the fact that he was looking at Katie, that his mouth was hanging open, not in a scream but a marker of his last, whispered word. She didn’t want to think about the undamaged arm. The arm that reached for Katie.

But she couldn’t tear her eyes away, even as her stomach flipped.

Somebody stepped forwards. It was Kegan, still green and shaking, but moving with a strange sense of purpose. 

He removed the hoodie from underneath Katie’s head and shook it out to its full size like he was unfurling a beach towel. With all the care in the world, he laid it over the poor girl’s body like a burial shroud. “She doesn’t deserve this,” he whispered.

Merrilyn took off her jacket and covered Zediah’s corpse with it. 

The campers calmed down somewhat, and one of the kids ran to get the counsellors. Everybody else sat tight and waited for their “supervisors” to arrive.

They knew the drill.

One of the counsellors arrived some minutes later, a scrawny, gaunt young woman with a round jaw. There wasn’t even a hint of green tinging her skin when she saw the two corpses. Worse, her admittedly already pale skin did not pale further when she removed the makeshift burial shrouds. There was a nametag on her plaid shirt, peeling off at one end. In faded text, it read: Counsellor Raine ツ 

Her hair was cut short, trimmed into a neat, blonde bob. She smoothed out her slacks and wrinkled her nose at the sight before her as though it were a pile of foul-smelling garbage and not the corpses of two innocent teenagers.

“Well,” she said. “That’s a grisly sight.”

She removed her walkie-talkie from her belt and spoke into it, voice flat.

“We’ve got another one,” Counsellor Raine said, glancing at the bodies. “Two, actually.”

There came a garbled mess of words and frustrated exclamations from the walkie-talkie, and Counsellor Raine walked away, talking animatedly with whoever was on the other end. 

“Another one?” Came a high-pitched voice to Merrilyn’s left. “What does that mean? Oh my god, what’s happening?”

Merrilyn stepped forward and wrapped one arm around a shaking girl. One of the newer campers, she thought, one who hadn’t seen this before. Chelsea, her name was, or something similarly youthful.

“C’mon,” Merrilyn said, pulling the quivering girl into a one-armed hug. 

“Let’s go down by the creek, okay? I’ll explain everything once we’re there.”

Chelsea glanced up at her with wide, trembling, chestnut eyes, and the two of them staggered down to the creek, just a five-minute walk from the campsite. 

They turned back only once, just in time to see a small group of counsellors removing the bodies and cleaning the gore as best they could from the forest floor. Chelsea whimpered from beside Merrilyn.

“What are they doing with the bodies?”

“Packing them into trash bags,” came Merrilyn’s terse reply. “And burying those bags deep in the woods.” “Oh,” Chelsea said, her eyes devoid of any spark or life as she stared down at the slow-moving waters of the creek. “Who...what killed them?”

Merrilyn sighed. “This is the part that gets a little...unbelievable.” “That girl—” Chelsea said, pointing one shaking finger towards the camp. “Was snapped in half from the inside. People don’t bend like that. Not unless their fucking spines are broken and their organs are shuffled around. And the boy—” She turned slightly, pointing at the approximate location of Zediah’s body. “That boy had his torso and right arm crushed so bad they looked like hamburger meat. Tell me it’s aliens from space, swear to god, I’ll believe you.”

Chelsea shuddered, her voice softening. “No animal I know of could do something like that.”

Merrilyn raised an eyebrow at the girl’s burst of anger and subsequent—and rapid—cooldown.

“Katie Nicolson and Zediah Renner.” “What?” “Those were their names.” Chelsea mouthed those words over and over again as if she were trying to commit them to memory.

Maybe she was.

“Now sit,” Merrilyn said, and swallowed, wetting her lips to prepare for the rather long, incomprehensible ramble she was about to spit out.

“It’s about the size of a bear,” she began, tapping her finger against her thigh. “You can mistake it for one if you’re not careful. Its skin melts and regrows rapidly, and you can tell where it’s been because it leaves oozing clumps of skin and flesh behind everywhere it goes. It’s like…” Merrilyn swallowed. “It’s like it’s constantly falling apart and then putting itself back together. Its face—” Merrilyn wrung her hands and rubbed the side of her neck. “Its face is all wrong. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s almost...it’s almost human, but the rest of it isn’t human at all, not even when it stands up. It just looks vaguely…bear shaped? Not quite, though. it’s shaped like something and the something is a little bit bear-shaped. It doesn’t look silly, it’s not like—” Merrilyn laughed despite herself. “It’s not like a human head on a bear’s body. It’s an animal's head, but it’s like if somebody stretched a human skin mask over it. The proportions look human, but stretched and warped. It doesn’t really...look like a bear, not up close, anyway. It has hands, for one thing, but they’re all wrong.”

Merrilyn ran her trembling hands through her hair. “That’s as much as I can tell you about its appearance.”

Chelsea crossed her arms. “How do you know all this?”

Merrilyn huffed, her temper rising. “You said you would believe me—” “I do believe you,” Chelsea said, rolling her eyes and leaning forward to poke Merrilyn in the chest, punctuating each word that followed. “What I asked was how. Do. You. Know?”

“Because I saw it!” Merrilyn said, her usually flat, relaxed voice spiking into a shout. “I saw it, and I survived it, and it should not be a thing. It’s all wrong, Chelsea!” Merrilyn ran her hands through her dark hair. “It’s all wrong.”

Chelsea’s shoulders slumped. “You can call me Chel,” she said and shuffled around so that she was sitting beside Merrilyn. “Do you...do you want to talk about it?”

Merrilyn took a deep breath. “It was a couple years ago,” she said. “I was fourteen, fifteen, ish? Your age.”

Chel nodded. “Go on—I mean—if you want to, that is.”

“I do,” Merrilyn said, pulling in a deep breath and sitting up as straight as she could. “I don’t even remember why I was here—god—something stupid. It was one of those things where you only get sent to a place like this if you’re young. If you’re older, it’s just acting out. I think I stole a bunch of shit from a grocery store or something like that. Sweets? Might’ve been books. But—” Merrilyn waved her hand in the air. “That’s besides the point. I was going for a walk around the area, ‘cuz I was bored. I think I was just sort of...stewing, y’know? I heard some weird sounds, but—well—it’s the woods, in the middle of fucking nowhere. You’re gonna hear some weird noises, so I ignored it. And then,,,” Merrilyn went very quiet, only then noticing that she’d pulled up several fistfuls of grass, the vibrant green blades now laying in her lap.

“It’s okay,” Chel said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t have to keep going.” “No—” Merrilyn said, rather abruptly, as she realised when Chel flinched. “No—I—I want to get this out there. I want to talk about it, tell somebody.” 

She coughed. “Somebody who won’t think I’ve lost my mind.” “I believe you,” Chel said, looking directly at Merrilyn, eyes firmly set. “I believe you.”

Merrilyn hummed—a thank you, of sorts.

“I don’t think I need any more background. It came crashing out the woods, broad fucking daylight, mind, and slammed me up against a tree so hard my head spun. I saw stars and I bit my tongue and shouted real loud, kicked and screamed and clawed, but it did no good. That thing...it’s built like a wall, honest to god. It got real close to my face, and its breath was disgusting. Candy canes. A kind of artificial, overpowering, minty smell. Like cold. I don’t know how something can smell cold, but it smelled cold. And liquor, too. It was like mint crossed with liquor, that’s what it was, and its breath was so hot, even though it smelled so cold. There was drool spilling out of the corners of its mouth and landing on my shirt. Its eyes were a pale, pale blue, and there wasn’t anything animalistic or feral about them. Its eyes were its most human feature, and they were filled with intelligence, and clarity, and morality.” 

Merrilyn swallowed. “So it was real close. Then...then it ducked its head so its mouth was right next to my ear and it—it told me that it was gonna—that it was going to tear my heart out, right out of my chest. It rested the almost-hand that wasn’t pinning me up against the tree on my ribs and I felt it puncture the skin like it was made of paper and it smiled.”

Merrilyn looked skywards, letting her mouth twitch into a satisfied smile, only dimly aware of Chel’s shallow, rapid breaths. “And its face was right next to mine and it was smiling and I was so angry, and my hands were free so I grabbed its face and I jammed my thumbs into its human eyes and it screamed and stopped its torturously slow process of tearing me open. And it dropped me, and I fell real hard, smacked my head again, scratched up everything that could get scratched up. I bit my lip real hard, and I’d already bit my tongue, so there was a fuckton of blood in my mouth, and the thing kept screaming, so you know what I did, Chel?”

Merrilyn ripped her gaze away from the sky and stared at Chel. “What did you do?”

“I laughed. I laughed and then I ran like hell. I was spitting blood as I went and I guess I’d knocked a tooth loose, either when I hit the tree or when I hit the ground because I spat my last baby tooth out that day in the woods. And I ran all the way back to camp and told everybody I’d taken a bad fall. Got stitches for the little slice on my torso. And that was that. That fucker never bothered me again.”

Chel sat back with a shaky breath. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said, with that tone of voice that indicated there was more to the story than that. “But..”

Ah. There it was.

“So this thing snapped Katie in half, tried to rip your heart out, and crushed Zediah? What—” Chel wrung her hands. “Where’s the pattern?”

Merrilyn cringed. “I don’t think there is one. I think...I think it’s experimenting, trying to find out what it likes best. Or maybe it just wants to spice things up, I don’t know.”

Chel’s shoulders slumped. “Experimenting.”

“Or for fun,” Merrilyn added. Chel stood up and off the ground. “Who’s next?” “Hmm?” “Who’s it gonna kill next?”

Merrilyn stood up with a cackling laugh. “Stick with me,” she said, wrapping an arm around Chel. “And it ain’t gonna be you.”

Chel smiled something fierce. “It ain’t gonna be me,” she parroted.

“And that’s all you can hope for at Camp Goodwill,” Merrilyn said as the two of them walked back to camp. “That it won’t. Be. You.”