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“So…anyone else getting mad déjà vu right now, or is that just me?” Save a few furious glares shot over shoulders, no one seemed especially interested in dealing with Mike at just that moment. He shrugged the worst of it off, then went back to circling the lodge, rattling doorknobs and window frames to make sure everything was locked up tight. “Just me then! Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Good talk, team.”
One might’ve expected that the lodge would feel empty with all the campers gone for the season, that the railings and dark eaves above them might’ve given the place a hollow, echoey feeling…but empty tables and vacant coat hooks be damned, the lodge had never felt smaller. Panic and confusion had narrowed the space until the woodgrain became smothering, choking, a prison smelling of pinesap and industrial grade disinfectant and, now that they’d gotten Nick laid out, blood. It was a madhouse. A charnel house.
Or it would’ve been, had the older counselors not been so nonchalant.
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. Luckily for her, those scrapes 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, 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, but 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, his leg’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 an asshole or all of the above, 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. Don’t believe me? Ask Mike.”
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 whether out of surprise or pain, none of them could immediately tell – and screwed his eyes shut tight as the blood and flesh 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 probably would’ve been enough too, had it only been the younger counselors in the lodge.
But of course that wasn’t the case.
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, Dr. Frankenstein siding with the guy yelling to go all Texas Chainsaw on the kid,” 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 everyone’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. Even those of us without prior experience. 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 any of us would like it to be. Fair to say? Three. I’m sorry Nicky-baby, but you’re not looking so hot 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 – ”
“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, younger and older alike, 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 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 mean…unless the infection’s already spread. Then…then maybe we should just…” Her lips twitched into a grimace for a second there, then dropped just as quickly. “Y’know?”
“Maybe we should just…what? I—okay, wait, we can’t just shoot the guy!”
“Oh, I’m sorry Dylan, you’d rather get torn into itty-bitty pieces by a frigging werewolf?!”
“We can’t just shoot Nick, Ashley!”
“Not without silver bullets, we can’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, that was exactly my problem with the whole idea, Chris! I don’t know where Mr. H keeps the silver!”
“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. More well versed on the finer points of horror movies, too.
“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, that’s Ashley, and we survived a cannibalistic monster attack back in 2015! Real thrilling stuff, we all ended up with frostbite in places you don’t even want to imagine. Anyway, my favorite color is blue, and I also really enjoy long, moonlit walks, which honestly, this is putting a real crimp on. I mean...did any of you guys listen to a word we said during ice breakers? Holy shit! Of course werewolves are real! I-I-I met someone in a support group who was attacked by an intergalactic, subterranean Dracula lizard! I’d be more surprised if werewolves weren’t real, at this point!”
“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 in an abandoned hospital!”
“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 the others’ 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 just like it got Nick,” Emily continued, “and look at me! I’m fine! I don’t feel sick, or weird, 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 floor 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…”
A finger of dread slid its way down the back of Abi’s neck when she looked back at Nick and realized something was wrong with his eyes. Something was very, very wrong with his eyes. “Uh,” she stammered, “um, hey? S-someone?”
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.”
Around her, there were a few gasps and low sounds of concern. Unsure of themselves, Dylan and Ryan each took a step away from her, and all Chris and Josh could do was trade stymied looks over her head, but for Ashley’s part, she simply stood there, still as a statue, staring down at the imprint of Emily’s perfect teeth in the flesh of her hand.
“Not so loud now, huh? Not really feeling the whole ‘let’s just kill them’ option now that you’re in the boat with us, are you?”
“Déjà vu check?” Mike asked the room, and that time, Chris slowly 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 – ”
Only Abi was suddenly screaming.
And by then, it was already too late.
They turned just in time to see a tear, then two, then three, open in Nick’s skin, stretching wide to show the wet, raw muscle beneath as though he’d simply been 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 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 too!”
“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.
As a unit, they stumbled and staggered across the lodge, Kaitlyn finding her footing and leading the rest of them towards Mr. Hackett’s office. She threw herself at the door and said a silent thank you to anyone that might’ve been listening when it whipped open on its hinges.
“Go, go, go! Get inside!” She beckoned the lot of them in, only too aware of the gangly thing slip-sliding its way on the hardwood behind them. Maybe it wasn’t used to the body it was in, or maybe Nick had just left too much blood on the floor, but either way, its movements were ungainly enough to buy the counselors a few precious seconds. She held the door open until the last possible second, eyes zipping back and forth as she ran a headcount of her own.
Ryan all but somersaulted into the office, holding out an arm to keep from crashing into one of Mr. H’s file cabinets. “Holy shit, holy shit!” he managed to get out between panted breaths. “What the fuuuck?”
“Yeah, welcome to our world,” someone said glumly, either Chris or Josh, it was honestly hard to tell, especially since both of them were straining to pull Emily and Ashley apart. Now that they’d gotten started, though, it looked like a losing battle. Ashley had gotten both of her hands on Emily’s shoulders, winding up to shove her back with all her might, and even though she wasn’t the strongest of their number, it might’ve actually worked…had Emily not grabbed an entire fistful of her hair. When Ashley shoved, Emily went down for sure, but she went right down with her, and it was only luck that kept Chris, Josh, and Mike from joining.
“Oh for the love of…” Once their feet were all past the threshold, Kaitlyn slammed the door shut and locked it, vaulting over the juvenile display to grab something – anything – to build a barricade with.
One hand pressed tightly to his chest, more or less willing his heart not to break out through his ribs, Ryan watched the scene go down with something like wonder. “There’s a…there’s a fucking monster…right there!”
“Wow, gee, thanks! Hadn’t noticed.”
“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 and Josh both grabbed Ashley by an arm, trusting Mike to get a handle on Emily in much the same way, “welcome to our fucking world!”
“Just don’t let her near any arts and crafts supplies this time around, sound good?” Josh grumbled through a grit jaw, hoisting Ashley up and into the far corner with him and Chris. “You hear that, Encyclopedia Brown? I see something pointy in your hands, I will not hesitate.”
The thing that had burst out of Nick rammed itself against the door once, twice…and then went silent when it met resistance. Having stayed closest to the door, it was Kaitlyn who heard what came next – a snuffling, whispery sound like a dog trying to sniff out a treat. Her guts turned to ice as all the werewolf talk started to fall into place, and not even the sound of the creature’s heavy footsteps growing more and more distant provided any sort of relief. Instead she went weak, her body falling lax against the pile of office furniture as her adrenaline crashed. “I think it's gone,” she heard herself say as though from somewhere far-off. “Everyone just…just…for the love of God, use your indoor voices, maybe?”
Again it was Sam who moved to act first, but Abi had clung so tightly to her arm she found she couldn’t immediately pull away. “Hey, Ryan? Dylan?” she asked in a whisper. “Go slow, but do me a favor and shut the blinds, would you?” She looked from one of them to the other, nodding the whole way through, and as they set off to do as they were told, she bent towards Abi and patted her hand until she let go. From there, she rubbed some sort of feeling back into her face, pushing a few sweaty tendrils of hair away from her forehead as she locked eyes with Mike. “Don’t.”
A passerby might’ve thought he and Emily were posing for a couple’s photoshoot, the way he was holding her from behind, his hands locked in a knot around her middle. The fury on her face probably would’ve ruined the prints, though. They at least would’ve had to pay extra for the photographer to photoshop the murderous intent out of her eyes. “I wasn’t gonna say anything. But you were thinking it…”
She dropped her hands from her face and took a deep breath. With the blinds shut, the only light in the office were pale, silvery slashes of moonlight peeking through the gaps, and much as she wanted to, there was no denying Hackett’s Quarry felt an awful lot like Blackwood Pines tonight. “Okay,” she said just as much to herself as the rest of them. “This is a lot.”
“You fuckin’ think?!”
“This is a lot,” she repeated, “but…jokes aside, some of us have been through a lot before, and we made it out, so let’s start there: Making it out is doable. More than doable, really, when you think about it, because we’re not going in blind. Now, if we’re going to do this, we need to be a team, all right? That means no arguing – ” she glanced towards the guys, “ – that means buckling down through the hurt and focusing on the here and now – ” she turned to Abi, “ – and most of all, it means no doing the monster’s work for it by killing each other ourselves.” She’d saved the most withering look for Ashley and Emily, and thankfully it worked like a charm.
“Whatever,” Emily muttered, smacking Mike’s hands away from her. “You had your shot, Romeo, and you blew it. Get off me.”
Ashley took a second longer to fold, but fold she did, her lower lip pooching out in the beginnings of a pout as she slumped against the wall. “Sorry.”
It was a start. Considering what she’d had to deal with back on the mountain, Sam decided she’d take it. “Here’s what I think we need to do before anything else. Josh? Ryan? Anyone else who’s been bingeing crappy horror movies lately? You need to give us a list of everything there is to know about werewolves, okay? Everything. Even the old stuff, even the weird stuff, just…everything. Remember how much the journal that freaky old guy with the flamethrower gave us helped? We need that.”
“I—freaky old guy with the flamethrower?” Dylan repeated. “Literally where do you guys usually hang out, the Bermuda Triangle? The Twilight Zone? Florida?”
“Everyone else,” Sam continued, an expert at ignoring witty interruptions, “it looks like we’re safe in here. Not forever, but for the moment. We need to rest, we need to regroup, and once we’ve caught our breath and have a little more information to go off of, then we’ll make some kind of plan to link up with the others, all right?” She looked around to the lot of them, bolstered by the number of nods she was seeing. “Okay. Okay, good. Now, is anyone hurt? We left most of the first-aid stuff out in the main room, but I’m not above poking through Mr. H’s medicine cabinet to see what he has.” When no one immediately answered, she turned to Emily. “I saw your hand, Em. C’mon, let me patch that up.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine.”
“No it’s not. You were bleeding. And I don’t want to hear anything about – ”
“No, Sam, I mean it’s fine.” With one final twist of her hips, she managed to squirm out of Mike’s grasp, walking instead over to Sam. “See?” Like a princess looking for a gentleman’s kiss in a sappy romance novel, she offered her hand to Sam, shaking her head. “I don’t know how it happened, but…it’s fine. No bite.”
“Well that’s…something new,” she muttered, turning Emily’s hand over one way and then the other. “Ashley?” she asked. “What about yours?”
“I – ” she began, and then froze. The bitter expression on her face melted into something entirely different as she took a good look at her own hand in one of the shafts of light. “Oh my God,” Ashley breathed, and strangely, she sounded close to laughter. “Oooh my God…it’s fine! It’s fine! I can still see the marks, but…oh my God, I don’t think she broke my skin! Not even a little!”
Sam opened her mouth, but that was as far as she got before Emily took two brisk steps over to Ashley, took her hand once more, and chomped down twice as hard as she had the first time.
“Oooh no, you and me are in this one together,” Emily said, giving Ashley’s now bleeding hand an almost affectionate pat. “Let’s call it a lesson in empathy. See if maybe we learn something about walking in other people’s shoes.”
When she found it in herself to move, Kaitlyn scooted her way across the floor to sit beside Abi, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders as she shook. “Quick question: If this is how you guys get along in emergency situations, uh…how, exactly, did you survive your first monster…dealie?”
Having washed his hands of the whole girl-fight thing, Mike shrugged and turned her way. “You want the feel-good Mr. Rogers answer, or the shitty one?”
She didn’t need to think about it. “Eh, I just don’t think I can buy ‘the power of friendship’ as the answer, given…uh, that. Hit me with the shitty one, I guess.”
Mirroring Sam, he took a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and felt a horrible idea begin to form. “We burned the lodge to the fuckin’ ground with those things inside of it, is what we did. Lit up the whole mountain. Hey, speaking of which, do you guys think this place is insured, or…?”
“No one’s burning down the lodge, Mike,” Sam groaned. “Especially not when at least one of those things is our friend! Sort of. A little. Maybe?”
“There’s that déjà vu again,” he said, already searching Mr. H’s desk drawers for a lighter, or a book of matches, or maybe just a couple sticks to rub together really hard. “Next time you guys invite me out to a lodge in the middle of nowhere, sorry not sorry, I think I’m just gonna have to say no.”