Space Kid wasn't sure what it was about Harrison's statement that made David turn into a pillar of steel, but he definitely knew that he no longer wanted to be held in the counselor's previously comforting arms when David said, too calmly, "What the fuck did you just say?"
Gwen's instinctive, "Holy shit!" went unnoticed by Space Kid - he was more caught by the fact that Max had just hauled back and kicked David in the shin without getting a reaction.
"You delirious shit," Max hissed up at them - well, at David, probably, but Original Neil - as Space Kid actually thought of himself - was up there, too, and could thusly hear Max spit out a whisper perfectly well. "You know that's not what he means. He's a camper."
Space Kid tried to wiggle away but David's arms of metal grip force didn't seem to notice.
Harrison seemed similarly taken aback, "Uh, I mean that there is a medium to high chance that dark spookery," his fingers waggled, even as his eyes remained wide and he stayed safely out of reaching range of David - the lucky sod, "is going on to weaken the seal and let the Kronics' influence seep into our dimension and... mindfreak reality?"
"What an interesting theory you thought up just now using only deduction," Max ground out, eyes pointedly wide and still fixed on David. Space Kid couldn't help but feel that maybe Max was addressing David more than Harrison.
"Right," David said, closing his eyes and repeating in a strained tone, "Right." The muscles Space Kid was uncomfortably crushed into untensed one by one, and the concerned space cadet finally wriggled free of the counselor's death grip and to the ground with a light cry of triumph. With a short, tired laugh, David shook his head, "Magic." The word sounded like a curse.
"Okay, what the fuck is going on?" Thanks to that cornucopia of shadiness that Max and David had just dropped on them, Gwen appeared to have roused from her panic with reddened eyes and some snot still dripping from one nostril but also a righteous fury matched only by the unholy variant Max could produce on command, "David, Max, you're going to spill what you know right the fuck now or I- I'll-" she glanced around for help and, finding none in the kids both conscious and not, pointed at the duo with determination anyway, voice coming out in a low promise, "I'll do something you won't like!"
Max turned on Gwen with surprising ferocity. Well, surprising in that it was in defense of David, anyway. "It's just David being gullible and delirious!" His fists were clenched, now. "He's got some weird fever dream shit going on to do with that phrase that- that he's talked about before and it's nothing."
"We could all die here," Gwen broke in, but before she could continue her impassioned protest, David had put a hand up for silence in an uncharacteristically sharp gesture, making the words die on her tongue.
"I think it's connected." David's gaze slid over to Max, "And I'm not smart enough to figure out how on my own." Before Max could even draw breath to cut in, David added, now directly addressing the boy without acknowledging the rest of the campers at all, "You're much smarter than I am, Max, but you don't know much about magic, right?"
The averted gaze and how Max's hands sought pockets he didn't have was answer enough. Instead the kid's hands twisted the hem of his shirt before he shot David one last baleful glare and deliberately crossed his arms over his chest, lips thinning into a grim line. It seemed Max would let David dig his own grave if he didn't expect Max to help him out of it again.
Still, there was no way David could just let his campers get stuck here and starve and die when he'd already done so much to ensure that wouldn't happen.
It would make all of the... all the death on his soul, the blood on his hands, be for nothing.
No, David was not going to let any of them die on his watch. Not his campers. Not his- his whatever Max was to him. No matter what. He'd have to give them as much truth as he could manage for now, even if they might draw some unfortunate, correct assumptions from what he had to say.
Taking in the simmering, impotent fury in Max's hunched form, David wondered if that made Max right.
Maybe in the end, he was just selfish.
"For a long while now, people have... wanted the kids here... gone," David said carefully, "And some of them were willing to- well, to do it themselves. They said the kids were marked, and that meant they were stressing a seal that would let in something evil and powerful."
"What? David, when did this happen?" Gwen took a step forward, putting herself thoughtlessly between David the three conscious kids nearest her, "And why didn't you tell me when it started?"
"It's been happening for six years," Max put in unexpectedly, scuffing a foot in the dirt like the forest floor had offended him with its unmoving apathy, "Little before your time, Gwen."
Ignoring this with the ease of practice, Gwen didn't let up on the main suspect. She narrowed her eyes at David, "And what does Max have to do with it?"
"He found out," David said simply, one hand making a tired gesture to encompass how very little control David had had over that turn of events. "I didn't want any of the campers to be afraid, and the camp couldn't afford to lose any more staff, so I kept it all to myself, but now it seems like they had something to do with these... Kronics." A deep breath, "And here's what I know." A heavily edited version of the truth spilled out of him. The things Georgio had said and done, but not how he'd stopped him. What he'd extracted from various attackers over the years, but now how he'd done it. And lastly, the half-remembered way Daniel had elaborated on these points.
"It's not... clear," David explained, one hand going almost subconsciously to his head.
Grudgingly, Max picked up the lead, "The cultist said he was high priest of an enemy of the Kronics, and that if he killed us while we were 'cleansed,' it wouldn't let them in."
"Wait," Harrison cut in, "Daniel said if he killed us it wouldn't let them in - if we were cleansed of being marked, first? And this George person and the rest of the... other people who wanted us gone said we had to be killed because we were marked, so we wouldn't let them in?" At Max's nod, he muttered a little to himself, pointing one way and then the other, producing a spray of glitter at one particularly strong wave of the hand that he ignored settling onto him and the ground at his feet in favor of whatever he was thinking through. Snippets of words escaped the strange black hole of thought he'd become. "Enemies...but if he...so what...of the two...alright."
He clapped his hands together, a small bouquet springing into existence very close to his face. At this, the illusionist startled slightly, dropping the flowers and blinking at them perplexedly for a moment.
With a shake of the head, Harrison said in a more audible tone, "If we have to pick one of them to believe, it should be Daniel. He was already going to kill us before he knew about the marks you mentioned, and he claimed to be an enemy of the Kronics more than once. He would not want them to escape any more than we would. And from what you said about the other people, David, he seemed more... present." It was clear from the expression of distaste on the magician's face that he would prefer not to think of the man that might have killed him as anything approaching sane, but couldn't find a better way to phrase it. "So we should assume that our deaths will actually break the seal, if we regain our marks."
"Daniel said the cleansing was temporary," David put in quietly, one hand just barely covering the edge of his mouth as he visibly and painfully tried to remain focused.
"And that means someone lied to the other people," Nerris realized aloud, "Which is probably the Kronics, since the influence of a sealed eldritch monstrosity must have been leaking for a long time to completely cut off a camp like this!"
Next to her, Harrison deflated, shooting her a look as he grumbled, "I was about to say that."
She smiled smugly at the taller boy's annoyance, "I do have arcane knowledge skills."
"Yeah, yeah," Harrison sighed.
"So the Kronics might let them through," Max said slowly, eyes fixed on the near-far fog, "To try and get us killed so they can get out- in- free or whatever."
"Okay, wait, this doesn't make any sense," Gwen interjected, waving her hands around as if to make it all stop. When she had everyone's attention, she rested light fists against her hips, "If there have been people who wanted to kill the campers - for years, supposedly - how the hell are we all alive? There's only one documented death of a child at the camp! You can't honestly expect me to believe you've been scaring them off, David. Not if they're as nuts as you said, and not with you being... you," she flicked fingers at his haggard appearance for emphasis. "Why aren't we overrun with fucked up attackers? I know you've managed to somehow run off one or two this summer, but where did the others go?"
David hesitated, but it was Max that gave him away.
As Gwen glared the two down, she shifted her focus back and forth from one to the other and coincidentally caught the very moment the boy's eyes darted to a bloody heap of tablecloth before he forced his gaze down to his feet once more.
"Daniel... died," Gwen repeated suddenly, the information not having quite clicked into place with the usual cause and effect such an event would typically prompt. She'd had a lot dumped on her in a short amount of time, alright? Miraculous as it was that she'd dragged herself back into any kind of coherent function, she hadn't exactly had enough divine blessing to have sorted through all of the details just yet. "How did Daniel die?"
"Knife to the back of the neck," Nerris said promptly, looking only slightly green, "And a little to the front."
"Through, it was through," Harrison corrected, "And clearly self defense of some sort."
"Who... did...?" Her eyes made a wavering track up from the blood to David's face as she let the question trail off, unfinished. There was still blood spatter on his skin. How had she not noticed until now? The other counselor had the audacity to wince.
"Gwen, I know it looks bad-"
A fist thumped against his chest, "You're a murderer who has murdered god knows how many people! " She shoved him back and raised a finger furiously his direction, "Stay away from me and stay away from the kids. I should have known someone so happy all the time couldn't be real!"
There were some strong Max parallels, there, and it took David a second longer than it should have to shake it off. "Gwen," he tried again, extending a hand her direction.
"And you found out!" she cried, incredulous, which didn't make any sense. "But you didn't say anything! We could have evacuated the camp! David's insane, so I expect it from him, but you? Do you really care so little about the other campers that you would let them die out of- out of spite or something?" Oh, she was talking to Max. Max, who was...
Was...?
Was it David, or were Max's eyes suspiciously bright?
"Fuck you, Gwen, I literally just saved the camp today," he shot back, voice tight, "And David's been saving this godforsaken hellhole over and over again, alone, for goddamn, motherfucking years! How many campers got hurt? You said it yourself! You should be up to your fucking eyeballs in relentless murderers!"
Nerris paused in the periphery, unnoticed. "That's a good point," she whispered to Harrison, garnering a concerned look from the magician in question.
"The berserker is going berserk," he reminded her with a hushed urgency.
"That's a good point, too," she snapped her fingers and they resumed trying to sidle off towards the still-unconscious campers in order to roll them to safety, a bewildered Space Kid on their heels.
"So what if David's some fucking loser who can't think of a better way to take care of the problem?" Max ranted, on a roll and unwilling or unable to stop, "He did the best he fucking could with his sad little brain without anyone to help him out and still somehow-" took care of us. Of me. Like a switch had been flicked, the momentum Max had built up dissipated as his face went stony and he cut himself off, picking his edited final words with a bit more thought, "And still tried to stay positive."
Gwen and Max shared a long, fiery stare, the wind rustling through the trees over and over in what sounded like a loop.
Quartermaster stepped out of the craft hall, dressed in a robe and clearly sweaty from the purification sauna. He glanced at the wild west stand-off near a pile of unconscious campers and snorted.
"What'd I miss?"
.
Once the Quartermaster had been brought up to speed, staring his way blankly through the ensuing explanation and ongoing argumentative corrections and protests between Max and Gwen as they fought to get their own point across, the elderly man took a swig of some unpronounceable liqueur.
"Sounds like Kronics," he grunted in agreement, wiping his mouth and mustache with a swipe of his sleeve. "Used ta call 'em-" an unutterable noise exited his lips, even the shape hidden by his aggressively thick facial hair, "-back in the day."
David breathed in and out deeply through his nose.
Then Quartermaster was clutching his own nose and swearing while David wiped the mucus and blood off of his knuckles.
Ignoring the varied protests and questions this raised, David took advantage of Quartermaster's distraction to swipe his feet out from under him. Kneeling over him, one knee on the older man's chest and one hand holding down his shoulder, David asked, almost pleasantly, "How long have you known this?"
"Hell, boy," the Quartermaster spit some blood into the pine needles, "It's basic knowledge for any Sparrow Loremaster. We're sittin' on the seal, almost."
"The Order of the Sparrow lore? In the handbook you have never let me see, in all the years and years I've been here?" David's voice was high, crackling over with tension, "That lore?"
Quartermaster stared at him for a moment, took another swig of the drink he'd painstakingly saved in his forced stumble, and braced himself.
"Yup."
He'd been right to prepare, the Quartermaster mused as he was lifted bodily a few inches off the ground and slammed back into it. Davey really packed a punch when he was pissed off, though he hadn't seen the boy so angry since he first came to camp, over a decade ago.
The elderly man tried and failed to take another drink, wincing when David grabbed his stump wrist with an audible crunch.
"Is there a way to fix the seal in there?" David's voice was dangerously low, now, swinging wildly into a new mood with all the abandon of a man with nothing to lose.
A weak attempt to escape and the Quartermaster sighed, resigned to going through this in a state of not drunk enough.
"Yup." Before David could hurt him again, the Quartermaster added, "Cryptic, though."
A folding chair slammed into David from behind, sweeping him off the Quartermaster, who took an immediate, deep pull from his flask.
Protests falling on deaf ears, Gwen had taken the next best route.
"He is an old man," she shouted for the nth time, but the first David had actually registered, "A nearly naked old man! Leave him alone!"
"I can't believe you hit him with a fucking chair!" Max exclaimed in the same tone, still wrapped around her leg where he'd been trying to hold her back. "He got stabbed three hours ago!"
"Shut up," Nurf groaned from where Nerris was trying to stuff him under the nearest table, easily swatting her away and rolling over to grab Dolph like a teddy bear, "Don't you know we're all trying to sleep?" Dolph's sleepy agreement was lost in an unintelligible murmur, but Nurf still offered blearily, "See?"
The kids weren't getting any safer sitting around like this. Or laying where Gwen had smacked him, in David's case. No matter how sore he was.
"We need that handbook," David gritted out, clutching his side and rising unsteadily to his feet carefully outside of Gwen's apparent range, "Quartermaster..."
"In my room," the Quartermaster offered up in response to the unspoken question. He raised his flask to his lips, paused, and held the rim over his eye as he peered into the sad, empty depths. This, he would not take lying down. The Quartermaster was on his feet in a blink, the motion nearly imperceptible with the naked eye, "Let's go."
"Gwen..." David shook his head, eyes shuttering to something unreadable as he rolled his shoulders with an unsettling crackle, "Stay with the kids." Before following the Quartermaster, he took a minor detour towards Daniel's body.
"I can't just let you go off-" Gwen began, but there was a discomfiting squelch and David had freed his knife from the body beneath the tablecloth.
He wiped the gore from the blade and flipped it once before sheathing it. He glanced up at his co-counselor with a heavy gaze and repeated, "Stay with the kids."
When the magic kids and Max made to follow, Gwen made an aborted reach for them that she curled back into her own chest, worried, confused and strangely irritated in equal measure.
"We'll be fine; I can protect us and besides," Harrison said, wiggling his fingers at her as he passed, "David would have killed us months ago if he was going to do it at all." He deliberately didn't say anything about Max and their relative safety with him around.
"We are particularly adept at havoc," Nerris agreed.
Max was already gone without a second glance.
As Gwen watched them run to catch up with David, the kids around her snoring lightly after whatever the magic kids had done to break them out of Daniel's hypnosis, she sat heavily on the ground, voice barely a whisper on the wind.
"Okay."
.
"Quartermaster, what is this written in?" David demanded, holding the ancient book at a strange angle as if to make sense of the squiggles. They seemed to shift on the page in a nausea-inducing disregard for known laws of literary formatting. Even Harrison was looking green about the gills, one pupil blown wider than the other and a hand to his temple as he glared at the book.
"Moon runes," the Quartermaster grunted. This resulted, of course, in Max yanking the book from David's hands and shoving it into the Quartermaster's midsection until he gave in and accepted the handbook back with his grabbing hand.
That done, Max returned to the realm of the verbal once more and used his words instead, "What does it say about the seal?"
"Prophecy, mostly," the Quartermaster grumbled.
They waited, unknown liquids oozing slowly from the corners of moldy boxes on over-packed shelves around them, for elaboration. It was, again, Max that realized their mistake, bristling at the unhelpful nature of the Quartermaster's peculiar apathy as soon as he recognized it as the stopping point.
"What prophecy?" he prodded irritably. "What does it actually say ?"
The Quartermaster cleared his throat. Loudly. Wetly. Then he flipped a few pages and his thick grey hair rose up in an intangible wind, eyes rolling back as he recited in an echoing, multitonal voice, " The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches- " Abruptly he looked back down at the book, normal once more, "Wait, wrong page." Flipping a few further, he cleared his throat again with a horrible hacking noise until some phlegm smacked into the opposite wall and slid sadly down to the floor. "Right. Need somebody with a magical spirit to rebalance the magic of the seal by completing the quest of destiny and thus quelling the evil what dwells in the volcano."
Another moment of expectant silence, because they hadn't yet learned their lesson.
"What is the quest?" Max burst out impatiently, having cottoned on quickest once again.
"Different page," the Quartermaster flipped to the back, "Gotta check the index."
As he grumbled over the index and its moving, wiggling contents, Nerris stepped to the front of the group and turned to face them with a hint of swagger.
"Well, mortals," she sighed, "It's been nice partying with you. Alas, I must soon set out on a dangerous quest to save your very souls," here she gripped the air before her with tangible drama Preston might have swooned for, were he awake and present, "but do not weep for me! I only do... what a magical hero must."
"Oh, please, we all know I am the most magical here," Harrison dismissively produced a bouquet from thin air, stepping forward and waving it in Nerris' face, "Your spells don't even work half the time."
Even David could tell that was not a smart thing to say.
"Because. I get. A low. Roll!" she punctuated each furious word with a punch to Harrison's arm, making the boy flinch away, rubbing the sore spot as the flowers vanished back into nothingness.
"I thought strength was your dump stat," he complained.
"I thought illusionists had to prepare for anything," Nerris shot back.
"That's Wood Scouts," said illusionist corrected her.
"Here it is," the Quartermaster grunted, stopping the argument in its tracks. The kids leaned in as one, David not far behind. "Quest of destiny is you gotta go up the volcano and willingly sacrifice yourself to its scorchin', deadly lava. Easy. People used to do that all the time when Cameron was done scammin' 'em."
"People used to throw themselves into the volcano on a regular basis because Campbell... what? Conned them out of their life savings?" Max's tone was flat.
"Stopped 'bout the time he picked up that cursed gem of the mountains," the Quartermaster confirmed in his usual rolling grumble, "And my pay cuts began."
Eyes narrowing, Max's tetchy voice unhappily made the trip from him to the rest of the group, "Would you say that was about six years ago?"
Before the Quartermaster could confirm or deny, David cut in, standing protectively over the paling magic kids, "Isn't there some other way to fix the seal?"
"Could rip it off 'n' make a new one but the other shit'll escape even if ya seal the Kronics back in all the way." The Quartermaster sniffed loudly, wiping his nose with an already disgusting handkerchief and throwing it into a box labeled, For Future Use. "Needs more sacrifice, too."
"What other shit?" David asked wearily, not even flinching at the swear right then.
"Seal creatures."
"I don't even want to know," David admitted, before continuing with just a little trepidation, "And what does it take to have a... magical spirit?"
At the point the Quartermaster had pushed the book back into Max's grip and gone rummaging through the box marked Old Booze between New Booze and Ancient Booze. "Connection to magic. Like throwing yourself in a magic volcano."
"Oh," David put a hand on either magic kid's head, patting them absently as he thought. "That's not as twisty as I guessed."
"Now we just go up the mountain and one of these kids goes out in a blaze of glory," the Quartermaster coughed, "Which of ya will it be?"
David's fingers twitched lightly, "Quartermaster, no ."
"It's gotta be someone with a lot of life energy or the seal will just give out again in a year, which is pretty annoying." The Quartermaster shrugged, "Unless you're into that sort of thing." That wasn't at all promising. Still pale, but rallying, Harrison dove into an argument with the Quartermaster about animal sacrifice that Nerris joined in on and David seemed to watch with a helpless fascination as it unfolded into ever more technical and contradictory language.
Nothing, however, was getting done.
"This is all bullshit," Max decided, leaning back against the doorframe and out of the conversation, "and we're all gonna die."
.
"This is fine," Gwen said to herself, patting Ered on the head from where the girl had nestled against her leg, Nurf and Dolph at her back, while Preston, Nikki and Neil lay sprawled under Space Kid's watchful gaze. There had been a strange, ominous wind sweeping the mostly deserted grounds a few minutes after all the other adults had left and it had roused the kids just enough for them to crawl, wiggle, and roll into the heap of campers Gwen now found herself surrounded by.
They were sort of... sweet when they were unconscious.
Not that it made Gwen like them any more when they were awake.
A rustle made her jump slightly, trapped as she was by children.
Slowly, she turned. Nothing should be on the grounds that could... rustle.
Right?
That ominous wind swirled through again in a clear repeat, playfully dragging her hair into her field of view as Gwen tried and failed to convince herself her stomach hadn't just dropped a few metaphorical feet as her danger sense kicked up a notch.
Behind her, tangled in the tablecloth...
Was the platypus.
"Oh god, you scared the shit out of me," she hissed out in relief, earning her a muted muak from the creature as it fought free. It turned and flipped its tail up at her before scampering off, away from the stained tablecloth it had been struggling to escape.
The stained tablecloth... she thought had been covering Daniel's body.
Well, it was possible she'd been wrong, and they'd just used it to... transport the body, or something.
But when was Gwen's luck ever that good?
She took in the creepily empty yard and the sleeping children she was now in sole charge of with a deeply felt, "Aw, shit."
Okay, it was still okay. She could do this. She'd used up all of her panic energy already so all that was left was apathy or survival mode. Apathy would not help here, so she'd need to dip into some fight or flight adrenaline if she didn't want to get creeped up on like a B-rated horror movie bimbo.
The kids were mostly centralized, so at least she didn't have to worry about them being a bunch of separate targets she'd have to keep her eye on. Staying this immobile, however, was a no-go. Gwen gently pushed Ered over until she was leaning on Nurf's other side, Dolph still occupying the other.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to call the police? It was only when she'd discarded the idea of getting to the counselor's cabin and her baseball bat that someone spoke up.
"Uh, hey, Gwen."
The punch she threw hit thin air and a shocked, "Jesus!"
"Glen?" she exclaimed, the breath knocked out of her to see her ex-boyfriend sprawled in the grass after stumbling under her punch in an accidentally successful dodge.
"Hi," he said with some force, accepting the hand she reluctantly extended to get back to his feet, "What's with that welcome?" Glancing down at the unconscious campers, he added, "And what's up with the weird, midday slumber party?"
"We had a little mishap with... sugar," Gwen decided, thinking on her feet, "So they've crashed, for now." That was probably believable. Honestly, Gwen wasn't sure it hadn't already happened once this summer. "What the hell are you doing here?" Yeah, that was a valid question. Gwen was killing this.
Glen ran a hand over his mohawk, black roots showing under the peacock-like greens and blues, "Look, I came up earlier in the day to see you and... I've been sort of working up the courage to say..." He looked up at her, sea-blue eyes earnest, "I think I know where I went wrong, and I want you to give me a chance to make it up to you."
"Uh-huh," Gwen crossed her arms over her chest, "And how's that?" She already told him she didn't want to be with him anymore because there was no chemistry and they had no shared interests, but alright. Where the winding path Glen's mind had taken might lead, she had no clue.
"I wasn't attentive enough, I get that now," he reached out for her hand, but she kept hers firmly tucked against her elbows and he dropped his arm back to his side, "Gwen, I miss you. I shouldn't have spent so much time with the band - we didn't really need to practice that much; half the time we were going out and getting drunk! It was so selfish and I should've been there with you."
The wind whistled slightly, a new noise in what had seemed like a looping breeze through the trees and past the sleeping children.
Alright, it was getting creepy out here and Gwen really just wanted to be left to roll the kids indoors or something with Space Kid's help. Glen was, as per usual, way off target and she was pretty sure she needed to nip this in the bud before it got unmanageable.
Bluntly, she informed him, "Glen, I don't like you."
His lips thinned as he leaned back, nodding once like he'd expected that, and he pulled his fraying jacket closer about him, "I know there's bad feeling between us, from how we parted-"
"I'm not doing this again," Gwen interrupted, "You should just-" go home. But he couldn't go home, could he? He was trapped up here with the rest of them. Damn it, she didn't want to be stuck with an upset ex for however long it took them to figure all this out! "Look, we're actually kind of having a situation up here. An emergency. There's no time to sort out whatever is or isn't between us. You've stumbled into it, too, so you're in just as much danger as the rest of us."
"An emergency?" Glen echoed, thankfully focusing on the important information instead of trying to push his agenda. His brow creased, the skin shiny with sweat and streaked slightly with dirt from the hike up, "Is one of the kids diabetic or something?"
"No there's... Well, you won't believe this without proof..." Gwen trailed off, talking more to herself than him at this point.
"Try me," he insisted, looking reassuringly intent and present. God, it would be nice to have another adult to buffer her from David - maybe then they could figure this out without Gwen joining her co-counselor's body count, as she half-feared might be in the cards.
"Okay," her tone firmed as she realized there was an easy way to prove it, "Okay. Come with me." She stepped gingerly past the sleeping kids, Glen trailing a bit behind her, glancing back at the campers.
"Is it safe to just leave them there?" he asked, picking at a jagged fingernail as he followed.
"We are not going far," she assured him.
Gwen made good on her word as they stopped seconds later near the boundary of the camp and still within easy sight of the kids, Gwen scrounging around until she found a decent sized branch. Hefting it up, she blew some escaped hair out of her face and positioned herself.
"Watch closely, alright?"
At his nod, she chucked the branch into the fog. It flew into the fogbank and paused, frozen in the air before it twisted nauseatingly and cracked loudly into a thousand smaller pieces that repeated the process until nothing was left.
"Oh, my god, what is that?" Glen exclaimed, one hand going up to his cheek and the other to his chest as he cringed away.
That was pretty... animated of him. Then again, it was an abnormal situation.
"The edges of a bunch of timelines, according to our tiny magic expert," Gwen explained with some urgency, leaning in towards him, "So we're all trapped here, until we can figure out how to get rid of them. I'm not gonna lie, I could really use some backup, and it's your life on the line, too, since you've come up here and gotten trapped along with the rest of us."
Glen nodded slowly, "Okay, this is a lot to take in... Maybe it's all... I don't know... a satanic ritual gone wrong?" He began to postulate on what could be causing the problem, having always had an interest in the occult. The theories blended into each other as something began to niggle at Gwen's mind.
It really was bad luck Glen had gotten trapped with them, wasn't it?
That he'd chosen today to...
To come up to camp.
Gwen made an affirmative noise at whatever Glen was still talking about, unable to stop herself from glancing at the fog surrounding the camp on the town-facing side.
Maybe there was a way out towards the lake?
But then, how would Glen have known to go around?
How had Glen gotten in?
Once she'd had the fog brought to her attention by Harrison, it was like it had settled into her memories' background for the past week. As if it had been there, unnoticed, for days, and Harrison mentioning it made it suddenly reveal itself past and present. Daniel had apparently been a high priest of some other horrible thing, so that might explain how he'd navigated the fog without getting chopped into a million pieces and scattered across time.
But Glen?
"Glen," she said, breaking into his hypothesis about Pan or whatever, "How did you get here?"
"I walked; car is still in the shop from an accident I had a while back," he replied promptly, "Shouldn't we be focusing on keeping those campers safe, though? It'd be better with more adults around. Isn't there another counselor out here? David, right?"
"Yeah," Gwen agreed hesitantly, "He's with the Quartermaster right now."
A sage nod, and Glen was suggesting, "If you want to go get them, I can watch the kids for a few minutes. It's probably better to all be in a single group, right?"
"It's okay; they'll be back soon," Gwen dismissed, taking a half step back and adding firmly, "Very soon. They aren't far."
"Even still, they shouldn't have left you all alone here," Glen echoed her step, keeping the space between them constant, "God only knows what might have happened. What if one of those violent people came after the kids?"
Hadn't Max said something...? The Kronics might let them in to kill us.
"I never said anyone was after the kids," Gwen whispered, eyes wide and fixed on her ex. His shoulders relaxed under the ragged jacket, gaze inhumanly bright as the concern dropped from his face.
"I never liked how smart you are," Glen told her, and lunged. He grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to turn with her, as if to throw her into the fog.
"Stop!' she screamed, clawing one of his hands away and ducking out of his grasp, "Glen, whatever it told you, the kids aren't the problem!"
"Liar," he sniffed and pulled an illegally large pocketknife from his pocket, flicking it open, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Gwen. Those kids have to die."
Her breath was already coming too fast, heart jackrabbiting in her chest, but the sight of the shine off that knife still sent a jolt of cold fear sharply through her system.
"Just let it happen!" He thrust forward, but Gwen had spent a summer with Nurf and the terrible trio's occasionally flaming projectiles and she spun to the side, lashing out with an instinctive roundhouse kick that knocked him off balance. "Gwen!"
She took the stolen moment to scan the ground for literally anything she could use. Why had she thrown the largest fucking branch into the fog? Jesus Christ.
In seconds he was on her again, and it was all she could do to avoid getting slashed open. That knife kept flashing closer and closer. Gwen didn't know how long she could keep this up. If only she could get her hands on a weapon! She wasn't built to fight mano a mano!
And she really hated how grateful she was that Max, Neil, and Nikki had caused so much life-threatening chaos for her to dodge over the weeks they'd been here.
Not to mention the rest of the hellions.
A loud battlecry distracted them both for a crucial second before Space Kid barrelled into Glen's legs.
"Don't you hurt Gwen!" he shouted, bowling them both over and rolling past Glen dangerously close to the fog.
And he was still going.
"Fuck!" Gwen dove and grabbed Space Kid at the last possible moment, dragging him back with excessive force to her chest as they both hit the ground, back a ways from the danger.
Or that danger, anyway.
"Oh, Gwen," Glen was getting to his feet, swiping more dirt from his face uselessly - really just smearing it around, "He was always going to have to die."
They were pinned between him and the fog.
"I'm sorry," Space Kid murmured, eyes wide and arms clutching her middle, "I'm sorry, Gwen."
"It's okay," Gwen whispered back, popping off the boy's helmet and running a hand through his hair.
Fucking hell.
Fucking hell, they were going to die.
She squeezed her eyes shut and curled further around Space Kid.
The blow...
Didn't land.
There was a horrible hacking noise.
Gwen looked up and there was an arm wrapped around Glen's neck, David's other hand gripping Glen's knife arm, knuckles white and getting whiter until the knife finally dropped from Glen's slack fingers.
Then David reached up and snapped his neck in one smooth motion.
The body dropped.
There was a glint in David's eye as it lingered on the corpse for a second too long, but then he was stepping over him- over it and crouching down to pick up the pocket knife Glen had dropped.
He looked over the knife, flicked it shut, and met Gwen's gaze.
Without any visible reluctance, he held the blade out her direction.
"You might need this," he prompted when she didn't move.
That was... She could barely...
Swallowing hard, Gwen's fingers wrapped around the knife.
...
(Photo sourced from https://unsplash.com/@doso7)