The Wild: A Campfire Tale (Razorblade Candies Book 3) Read online

  She flinched at his touch.

  “Seems like you’ve found yourself in quite the goddam predicament here, don’t it?” he asked, looking her over from top to bottom with lascivious intent.

  “You seem like a tough gal, the way you handled my boy back there. You got some spitfire in you, girl. Shit, yeah, you do. I’m impressed. I’m impressed as hell.

  “Of course…” he went on. “You have got to know that you’re fucked, right? I mean, you have to. I’ve been watching you, and unlike Cole and Scott, bless their hearts, I’m no idiot. All that battery acid you got churning around in your guts…I can feel it…I can practically fucking smell it. You may be a tough little bitch, but you’re just about shitting all over yourself right now, am I right?”

  Amber held his gaze.

  “I could say the same thing about you…” she hissed.

  To her surprise, Finlay didn’t flinch, nor did he make any effort to rebuke her claim.

  Instead, he laughed softly. “Hell, girl, you may well be right. I’m thinking you can sense it in me just as sure as I can sense it in you. Takes a fighter to know a fighter, huh?”

  “We’re nothing alike.”

  “Oh, I think we are, sweetheart. I think you’re the type of bitch who’d twist my head off and drink my spinal fluid, given half the chance.

  “So what are you? A cop? You gotta be a cop or something, right? I saw you and your friends back there…you gals knew what you were doing. You looked…capable. Not something a fella sees of a day out here…a bunch of women who know the woods. I was mightily impressed. In fact, I came damn close to overlooking your little camp and searching for someone else. Figured you girls might just turn out to be too much trouble.

  “But, needs must, and the days sure aren’t as long as I wish they were. So here we are…”

  Looking over his shoulder, Amber saw Cole and Scott shift uncomfortably as he spoke.

  Finlay smiled. “Yep…they’re scared, too. They should be. We all should be. Fuck, man…we all are.

  “But you...you should be fucking terrified.”

  Amber fought back the tears as his words sank in, like poison through her pores.

  “What are you going to do to me?” she asked, dreading his answer.

  Instead, Cole muttered from behind where Finlay stood. “It’s getting fucking dark, Finlay. We really gonna do this?”

  Finlay kept his eyes on Amber. “You know we are, Cole. We don’t have a choice, good buddy.”

  “A’course we do, Fin! We could just pack on up and get the fuck out of here, right now. We could…”

  “That ain’t gonna happen!” Finlay barked. “We’re doing this. Plain and fucking simple, Cole, and if you try to run, then God help me, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Cole fell silent, clearly frightened by his leader.

  “How about you, Scott? You anything to add to this?” Finlay growled over his shoulder.

  “No, sir. Not me. I’m in all the way, Finlay. You know I got your back, brother.”

  Finlay smiled. Again, it felt less for show and more a mechanism for boosting his own confidence.

  What the hell was going on, here?

  “Okay, then…” he said, giving Amber his full attention again. “It’s time we got on with this thing. It’ll be dark soon, and it comes at night…” Finlay flashed her a nervous smile. “It always comes at night.”

  4

  Amber remained silent, letting Finlay’s words sink into her psyche.

  It always comes at night.

  What is God’s name was he talking about?

  As they’d shared their little back and forth, the sun had continued its descent over the unseen horizon. Now, the colours of the woodland faded. Then trees grew more imposing, darker, more threatening as they towered over her with cold malice.

  Amber was terrified to ask the question, but she understood the need to know…to fully understand her situation.

  It may well be the only thing that could save her.

  If anything could save her.

  Her confusion only grew as she mused on what Finlay had eluded to. He was silent for now, seemingly deep in thought. His words, it seemed, had unnerved him every bit as much as they had her.

  Again she wondered, what in the hell was going on.

  In her mind, Amber tried to piece the puzzle together.

  She’d been abducted by three men.

  She’d been brought deep into the woods, far from civilisation. Far from escape.

  She’d been tied to a tree.

  She’d been threatened, hurt only a little, but so far she’d not been assaulted.

  Why?

  Why had they brought her here, if not to do what evil men do?

  Pulling back from his thoughts, Finlay began to talk in a hushed whisper.

  “I’m gonna tell you a story, sweetheart. It’s gonna sound like horseshit, but that’s neither here nor there. You’re gonna listen, and I’m gonna talk, and then I’m gonna start cutting you, do you understand?

  “See…me and my brothers…we’re on something of a mission out here, and you may well be pleased to hear that this mission does not involve stretching you wide open with our dicks, as fun as that would most surely be…

  “No…we’re out here for our sister.”

  Amber frowned, her puzzlement a welcome deterrent from her fear. “Your sister? I don’t know anything about your sister! Why the hell would…”

  Finlay raised his hand. “Now hush up, girl. You don’t want to be raising your voice anytime soon. It’s getting darker. And when it gets all the way dark…well, let’s just say I think you’re going to want every single second to count. I wouldn’t be in any hurry to rush what’s coming.

  “We know you don’t know our sister. It would be pretty fucking hard for you to know Laura-Lee, because Laura-Lee is deader than shit.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she implored.

  “Are you fucking deaf, honey? I just said that, didn’t I? Our baby sister died six months ago. She was found out here, right near this spot where she’d come camping with her boyfriend.

  “When Kevin, her beau, made it back to the world, he was scared as a fucking jack-rabbit staring down the barrel of a gun, and ranting shit about something that took his girl. Something that took our sister. To begin with, we didn’t believe him, you understand. We’d taken that fine young man into our home, and we’d trusted him with the safety of our Laura-Lee. We’d given them the okay to come out here on their romantic little holiday, and we’d said our goodbyes. Imagine then, to find the sumbitch returning, saucer-eyed, covered in blood and babbling some fucking bullshit about our sister being ‘taken’.

  “We didn’t believe him at first. Saw him as a sick little bastard and reckoned he’d done away with her, his own self. Now, in our town, we deal with things our way, and we deal with things thoroughly…”

  “Yeah…” Finlay went on in his stoned drawl. “We took that boy back into our home, but this time we weren’t so welcoming. It took no more than an hour of cutting into that boy to realise the scrawny little shit was telling the truth. We’re no strangers to ‘inspiring’ a fella to come clean, and we knew…we just knew…that in spite of the outlandish nature of that boy’s story, he was sure as shit telling the truth to us.

  “Now a’course, we done him for, anyway. After all, the weasel had abandoned our baby sister out here in the wilds. He’d ran off like a little bitch instead of defending her like a man, and that’s not something the Kutcher family were ever gonna let go. So we done him, and we made it last, and when he was all gone and in pieces, we burned that little coward’s remains.

  “But we still knew he was telling the truth.”

  Amber held her breath as he spoke, looking from side to side and over his shoulder, deep into the darkening woods that surrounded her, imagining unseen eyes studying her flesh, boring into her soul.

  “Now let me tell you the story he told…” Finlay said. “I’ll
make it as quick as I can. We’ll be needing to get to work soon, but it’s only right you know. Not to mention, you should be scared. Real scared. It’ll help. You can try to stay cool…I know you will…but that shit is not gonna happen.

  “It was the second night. They’d been camping on the first night over on Beaver’s Ridge, just south of here. Spent the day frolicking in the woods, swimming in the lake and no doubt, having themselves some good old-fashioned adult time. By all Kevin’s accounts, it had been a swell day. The kind of day a fella remembers well for the rest of his life. Good moonshine, good weed, good loving and not a care in the big wide world.

  “Still, though, he said that all the time they’d been enjoying themselves, he’d sensed someone watching them, just beyond the treeline. He hadn’t seen anything, you understand, just sensed it. He tried to ignore that paranoid shit for a good while, but it wouldn’t go away, so he brought it up in conversation with Laura-Lee. She’d been sat atop a rock, warming in the sun when he’d told her what he was feeling, and he said that her eyes had all but lit up with fear when he spoke.

  “See…she’d been thinking the same thing, but our sister, well, she was fond of the weed, and it sometimes made her a little nutty, you know? A little paranoid. She’d figured that it was all in her head, but when Kevin had shared his trepidation…that had confirmed it for her. She was up and off that rock in seconds, and dragging his ass back to the campsite, demanding they git going. And git going they did.

  “It was late in the day, see, so with the night closing in on them, they really didn’t have much of a choice but to set up camp just a few miles down the road, so that’s what they did.

  “Kevin told us that they felt they were being followed all the way. Every single step. And when they set up camp and got to huddling together in that tent like frightened little critters, he says they knew…they fucking knew…that someone was out there in the woods…just outside the tent. They heard branches breaking. Footsteps. He said they heard grunting, heavy breathing.

  “By the time the tent was ripped apart from our sister’s side and she was dragged out into the woods, they were both just about frozen rigid with fright.

  “He said it all happened fast. One minute they were clutching each other real tight, and the next, sweet Laura-Lee was being dragged, hollering and screaming through a huge fucking hole in the tent.

  “Kevin…cowardly shit-wipe that he is…sorry, was…he just sat there, still as stone, while just outside the tent, our sister was torn to fucking shreds right before his eyes.

  “He saw it all. It was dark, but they were close, and he saw it all. Now here’s the thing…”

  Amber felt the woods close in on her as Finlay leaned in close. She felt his breath tickle her ear.

  “That boy was damn near scared out of his mind, and you know why, sweetheart? What he saw outside the tent...his girl being pinned to the forest floor and torn to shreds…that wasn’t the worst of it.”

  Amber swallowed her nerves. “I don’t understand.”

  Finlay grimaced. “It weren’t no man out there. And it weren’t no animal, neither. It was something else…”

  From behind, Scott hissed. “Please, brother, don’t talk about it.”

  “Talk about it…or don’t talk about it. It don’t make no difference. It’s real.”

  “What’s ‘real’?” Amber moaned, her terror rising with every passing second spent out here with these madmen.

  It was more than the men that inspired her terror now. It was something worse. Some primal part of her that understood.

  That believed.

  “That boy…he told us what he saw. He told us the best he could just what had taken our sweet sister and ruined her. Even in the dark, that thing had burned into that boy’s mind. Hell, he was more scared of the very memory of it that he was of us torturing him to death. He was plenty scared, let me tell ya. And with good reason.

  “He said it was at least seven feet tall…maybe taller, and had arms like tree-trunks, covered in muscle. He said its head was fucking enormous, and its eyes burned with an ungodly fury like nothing he’d ever seen before in his worthless goddam life. It grunted like a fucking animal, but it wasn’t no mountain bear. No sir. He said it was man, and wasn’t a man. That fucking thing that killed our baby girl was something in between.

  “Are you starting to get the picture yet?” he asked her.

  “I…”

  “I’ll spell it out for you, sweetheart. It was fucking Bigfoot. Bigfoot killed our sister. And now, we’re gonna use your fine ass to catch and kill that fucking thing…

  “You’re bait, bitch.”

  5

  This was crazy. Beyond the pale. In her life, Amber had seen, heard and done many fucked up things. She’d seen children blown to pieces by drones controlled by her own nation, she’d watched middle-aged women exploding in geysers of meat, their bodies obliterated by bombs they themselves had armed and adorned, she’d seen desert spiders, large enough to turn the bravest man’s heart to ice, scuttle across the endless sands like something utterly alien to all that was good and natural in this world…

  But Bigfoot?

  It was absurd.

  It was crazy.

  Bigfoot was a myth. It was a fucking legend good for nothing but tourist dollars and one-hour specials on shitty, creativity-free television networks.

  There was no such thing as the Sasquatch. A century devoid of any scientific evidence had assured its status as kid’s stuff; man’s imagination run wild amidst the endless unknowable world beyond the civilisation he’d built.

  Amber eyed the pitch black wall just beyond the campfire, where the trees had only minutes ago loomed. Now, all was black, and in that blackness, she saw monsters. Beasts of her own imagining.

  She thought about why Finlay had said they’d taken her…

  Bait.

  And despite herself, she wondered, what if…?

  Finlay was talking, again. His words brought Amber back to the unwelcome fullness of the moment.

  “And it didn’t just kill her. No, ma’am.” Finlay said quietly.

  The tremor in his voice only added to her horror. One thing was sure, he was certain this was all real.

  “That goddam motherfucking Sasquatch didn’t just slaughter our poor sister. It did much, much worse…

  “It had its way with her.” He let the words hang in the air like smoke.

  “It didn’t take a long time to find our Laura-Lee. No ma’am. Her fuckhead boyfriend had laid out all the details just fine before he died, and we got headed straight out here. A’course, when we got here, she was long past dead and beginning to stink.

  “We found her, splayed right here on the ground, right here by the tree you’re tied too, sweetheart.

  “She was real broken up…arms and legs cracked like twigs, head caved in, fucking brains leaking out like Mama’s Sunday stew from a broken bowl. But what that fucking thing did to her private parts…that was the worst…

  “I don’t know what that thing was packing between its legs, but it must have been the size and width of a goddam tree trunk. Her private place was aaaaaall mushed up, like meat pushed through a grinder, and that little hole she had between her legs…let me tell you, sweetheart, it was like looking into a fucking shotgun wound. I know…I poked around a bit with my 12.Bore. Had to on account a’not being able to believe it. You could’a fit a man’s whole head in there and still had room to light a cigar and invite a friend inside to complain about the smell.

  “That fucking monster out there in the woods…it fucked our baby sister to death. Stretched her out till she broke apart at the seams like a fucking dolly pulled in two directions. Ain’t never seen anything so horrible in my whole damn life.”

  Behind Finlay, Scott and Cole, whom she now understood were his brothers, lowered their heads; hollow eyes staring into the fire as though the past and all its horrors lurked within the flames capering light.

  Again, Amber felt her
stomach lurch. This whole situation was crazy, but she was no stranger to reading people, and these men, all three of them truly believed in this thing.

  “Please don’t talk about it, brother,” Cole muttered, poking the fire with a small stick, kicking up the ashes of his past.

  Finlay took a deep breath. “She has a right to know. She may be some uppity city bitch with more money than sense, but she has a right to know what’s gonna be coming down the road.”

  “I guess.” Cole sounded like a scolded child.

  Finlay snorted. “Well, I don’t guess. I fucking know. A little common courtesy can make or break a man, and you’d do well to remember that little brother.”

  As they bickered amongst themselves, a thousand questions throttled Amber’s spinning mind.

  Did they really believe this?

  If so, what did that mean?

  Were they insane?

  Were they on some sort of psychotropic substance?

  Were they on meth?

  She had no idea just what sort of horrible shit methamphetamine did to the ravaged minds of its users, but she knew that it was a substance that had an iron grip on the smaller communities of Northern California. Was that it, were they sharing some sort of group hallucination, cruising through their gathered dementia on a synthetic high?

  No. That’s not it, and you know it. These bastards aren’t on anything stronger than that moonshine they’re knocking back, and they sure as hell aren’t playing any games with you, Amber. They believe this shit. And you know what’s worse…?

  You’re starting to believe it, too.

  She willed the voice in her head to shut up. She was in deep enough shit without letting these assholes creep her out.

  Yet even as she scalded herself for her superstitious mind, she felt the darkness press in on all sides. The trees housed a million tiny eyes, all staring at her, as the critters of the forest night, huddled together amidst the fragile safety of the branches, waiting with rapidly beating hearts for the thing to come out of the wilds and find her.