Xander was bored. Truly, deeply, sincerely bored. Video games lost their interest after the first week or so. Trying to convince his parents that he really needed a car of his own killed a few days. Hitting the blockbusters was a way to spend afternoons a couple times a week. He'd done the part time job bit over spring break, working in Buffy's mother's gallery, and really didn't want to do that again.
Why was it that he never remembered how boring summer was when he was in school?
That was when he had his Truly Brilliant Idea: Camping trip. A week out in the wilderness, man against nature. Well, men against nature. He didn't want to go alone. So he called up Wendell and Pete and Josh and told them of his Truly Brilliant Idea. Since they were as bored as he was, they went for it.
Planning took care of a week. They needed tents, backpacks, hiking shoes, food, insect repellent.... His mother asked him if he was planning the Normandy Invasion. A phone call from Willow barely stirred the edge of his interest. The Trip was all.
Xander's mom drove the four boys to a popular camp site in the nearby Santa Trista mountains. "I'll be here on Friday to pick you up, right?" she asked anxiously.
"Sure, Mom," Xander said, hefting his backpack.
"Be careful! Watch out for snakes! And scorpions! A scorpion sting could kill you!"
"Actually, Mrs. Harris, out of ten species of scorpions that live in the Southwest, only one kind is of any danger to humans, and that only to children and the elderly--"
Xander slapped a hand over Wendell's mouth. "We'll be careful, Mom. Promise. Bye now."
Finally, the only thing that remained of parental worry and fussing was a dust cloud in the distance. The four boys looked at each other. "Okay, now what?" Pete asked.
"Um... we start walking, right? I mean, there are a lot of trails around here," Josh turned in a slow circle. The sun was beating down on them intensely, and the wind was blowing grit into their eyes.
"Well, we can't just stand here," Xander said finally. At random, he picked a trail. "Okay, we're going that way."
Slowly, the four boys shouldered their packs and set off into the vast reaches of uncharted wilderness.
* * *
"Why did we decide to do this, again?" Josh panted. "Hold on, I've got to stop."
"Come on," Xander urged, bouncing from one foot to the other. The diffuse light under the trees was cool, and they walked on a cushion of pine needles. "Think of it: Making it in the great outdoors, meeting Nature on her own terms. We're strong! We're proud!"
"I'm getting a blister!" Pete whined.
"Hey, you were the one who wanted to go fishing, right?"
"We've been walking for three hours. Can't we make camp?" Josh asked, sagging against an equally tired looking pine.
"What, now you want to wuss out on me?" Xander asked.
Josh and Xander started to go toe-to-toe. Wendell intervened. "Hey! Let's walk another hour, okay? If we hit a stream before then, we'll stop. We'll need more water by tomorrow anyway. If we don't hit a stream, we'll camp there, and go looking for water in the morning."
Josh looked like he badly wanted to take a swing, but shrugged and said, "Okay."
"Fine by me," Xander said, reeling his chin back in.
Luckily for Xander's chin, Josh's temper and Pete's blisters, they found a beautiful clear stream in less than fifteen minutes. A small clearing sat near the bank, and the four boys set up camp for the duration. There was a rock formation a half-mile away for climbing, the stream for fishing and swimming, and the woods to wander in. The perfect campsite.
Tempers restored, the boys stripped down to their shorts and had a noisy water fight before pulling out their packed rations. "Tomorrow, fresh fish!" Pete bragged.
"Yeah, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it," Xander dead-panned. Pete threw pine needles at him.
They carefully cleared ground for a fire, circling it with rocks, gathering kindling. "Guess all those years as boy scouts paid off, huh?" asked Wendell.
"Remember Troop Leader Bently?" Josh snickered.
"Yeah. How did he become a troop leader? His knot was a little less than half-hitched. His piece of wood was half-whittled. His merit badge had a few demerits. His--"
"We get the point, Xander," Wendell cut him off. "At least he taught us the rudiments of cooking on the trail." Wendell tossed Xander the pot and a can of beans. "And, if I remember correctly, you were his prize student."
"Oh, man," Xander muttered. "One tuna casserole, and I'm the King of Home Ec for life..."
Exhausted, the guys crashed early, arraigning their sleeping bags around the banked fire. Xander woke only once during the night, to hear Wendell muttering in his sleep, "Get them off me! Get them off me!"
~Man, he's remembering the spiders,~ Xander thought with a little shudder. It hadn't taken him, Buffy, Willow and Giles long to figure out that only the people present in Billy's hospital room when the little dreamweaver woke up remembered the nightmares that had come true. Which was a vast comfort to Xander, but weird now, since he knew exactly what Wendell was dreaming about.
"Just hope the dream doesn't come true," Xander murmured sleepily, dropping easily back asleep.
* * *
"*That's* your big catch?" Josh hooted with laughter. In the slanting, setting sun, the string of three goldfish-sized fish that Pete held up glimmered with tiny sparks of silver. "Oh, yeah, I can see that you're going to feed us. Wow, you think we'll be able to eat all that?"
"Josh, you're being a butt-head," Xander said mildly. "Shut up."
Pete looked at his catch. "I think we scared away all the fish when we went swimming. Or maybe it was that I didn't start until noon. Aren't you supposed to fish in the morning?"
Wendell clapped Pete on the shoulder. "So get up early tomorrow and fish before we disturb the fishes."
Pete's troubled face cleared. "Yeah. Good idea."
Josh pulled out a radio and popped in the demo tape for a band that played in the Bronze, and rock floated through the pine trees. Twilight slid into full dark, but none of the boys was as tired as they had been the day before.
"You know what we need?" Wendell asked, tossing another stick on the fire.
"Marshmallows?" Josh asked.
"Yeah, marshmallows. And chocolate and graham crackers. 'Smores!" Pete enthused.
Xander groaned and turned over onto his stomach, staring into the fire. "Torture me, why don't you? Here we are, camping, and not a 'smore in sight."
Silence reigned for a few moments, until Wendell said in a dark and spooky voice, "Then how about ghost stories?"
Pete sat up. "Cool! Yeah!"
"Who starts?" Josh asked.
"We'll tell one every night," Wendell improvised. "And whoever's is the scariest, wins. And since I thought up this contest, I'll go first."
The other boys settled back down, drowsing in the firelight, and waited to be scared.
"Okay, so there was this guy and girl. And they went out to a quiet hill to make out. And while they were there, they heard this report on the radio that this guy had escaped from the Correctional Facility, and that everyone should be inside tonight, because--"
"Aw, man, I know this one," Josh groaned.
"Shut up," Wendell told him calmly. "Let me tell it. Anyway, this guy was really scary. He apparently had Hannibal Lecter as a role model. He had a particular fondness for eyeballs. In his trial, he said they were the tenderest part of the human body. When he was in jail, the other inmates were really freaked by the fact that he was a cannibal, and one of them cut off his hand and pretended to eat it. So ever since then, this guy had worn a hook on his arm. And he sharpens it regularly, to a gleaming silver point. And he used it to tear the guy who cut his hand off to pieces.
"So this guy and girl hear about this guy on the radio, and she wants to book. Especially since the guard there was found in pieces -- with his eyeballs missing. The guy was just getting lucky, so he tries to talk her out of it. 'What? Like he's going to come all this way and bother us? Yeah, right.' She's really scared. 'I think we should go now.'"
The three other boys snickered softly at Wendell's sudden, trembling falsetto for the girl's voice, but settled quickly back into listening mode, caught by the story and Wendell's storyteller's cadence.
"But she keeps thinking that she hears something, sees something. A shadow. A footstep. She's really wigging out now. Finally, the guy gave up, and started the engine. The car wouldn't move for a second -- it was like they were caught on something. He started getting freaked and floored it, and after a moment, they shot out of there. He drives her home, and she's shaking too hard to get out of the car, so he gets out and goes around to her side to let her out."
Wendell paused dramatically. "And there was a bloody hook on the door handle, sharpened to a gleaming silver point."
"WHOOOOOOO!"
"Arrrrrgh!" Pete screamed, and dived under his sleeping bag. A few minutes later he came back out, sheepishly grinning at his friends who were howling with laughter. "It was an owl. I knew that."
"I'm going tomorrow," Josh stated.
"If you think you can top that one," Wendell told him.
"Yeah, I've got a good one my dad told me. No prob. No, wait, I wanna go last."
"I'll tell one tomorrow night," Pete volunteered.
"Fine by me," Wendell shrugged. "You're still not going to be able to top mine."
"Will to," Josh taunted.
"Will not."
"Will to!"
"Will not!"
"Boys!" Xander shouted. "Can we please pretend we're not eight years old?"
A few minutes later, all four of them settled down to sleep. This time, Xander didn't wake to hear if Wendell had any nightmares about spiders.
He did wake up when Pete rose just before dawn to try for a better catch. Yawning, he untangled himself from his sleeping bag and went to take care of certain morning necessities. Still sleepy, he decided to head back to bed when the scent of freshly-cut wood accosted him.
Confused, he looked around. They hadn't cut any wood for their fires. There was more than enough deadfall, and they wouldn't be able to dry out enough live wood in the time they were there to make it worth the effort.
After a moment, he saw which tree was releasing the scent. On the dark bark, he could see deep, deep gouges, the wounds showing white and clean. Freshly made.
And they looked like they had been made by a hook, sharpened to a gleaming silver point.
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