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I never believed in having a sixth sense until I could feel the alarm bells going off in my own fucking head. Screaming at me to get my ass in gear. Which was only worsened by the fact that my bladder was full. It was annoying and mundane and completely at odds with the impending doom that wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. So I had no choice but to shove that doom aside and stumble out of bed. My eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness as I made my way towards the door to take a piss outside.

I passed the plastic container on my way across the room. Barely visible in the shadows. The creepy little fucker was probably sleeping, wrapped up in whatever spiders wrapped themselves up in before they went to bed. Unless they were nocturnal?

That thought sent a chill down my spine. I didn’t like the idea of somebody watching me while I slept, even if that somebody was the size of a quarter.

“Look, shithead,” I whispered to the cage. “Just because you saved my ass from that fly doesn’t mean you got my permission to creep on me when I’m sleeping. Or getting dressed. Or jerking off. The polite thing to do is turn around.”

The spider, predictably, didn’t answer.

I stood there for a moment longer, trying to get my bearings before yanking a pair of sleep shorts over my boxers and making my way outside.

The night air hit me across the face as soon as I walked through the door, reminding me I should have grabbed a shirt. But I wasn’t about to go back for it now. My foot caught on a branch and I paused to look up at the sky.

The moon was nearly full, hanging low and fat and yellow over the lake, and it cast everything in this eerie, silver-blue light that had the world looking like a photo of itself. Unreal. Detached. Dream-like. Almost as if I reached out and touched something, my hand would go right through it.

I started walking without any real destination in mind, just following the path that led away from the cabins, towards the woods that had become so familiar over the last few weeks of bug catching that I could probably traverse them blindfolded. My feet knew where to go even when my brain was somewhere else.

The trees materialized up around me, their branches skeletal against the moon. An owl called out somewhere in the distance, and I almost chuckled at how much this felt like a horror movie. All I needed was a mask-wearing psychopath and a knife, and we’d have the whole package.

By the time I stopped walking, I could just barely make out the glow of the cabin behind me. I turned back around, and a flash of something blue caught in the moonlight for just a second before the shadows swallowed it again. Blue that was too bright to be anything natural. Blue that belonged to only one person at Camp Dix.

My entire body went rigid.

“Alvin?” I called out, and my voice cracked in the middle of his name like I was fourteen again. “Alvin, is that you?”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I was already moving, my walking pace accelerating into a jog, then a run. The path was uneven in the dark, and I nearly twisted my ankle twice, but I didn’t care. That sense of dread that had pulled me from my sleep manifested into reality.

Into my worst fear.

The blue got closer, and then I saw the shape of him—or what was left of the shape of him—crumpled up at the edge of the clearing like a broken toy that someone had gotten bored with and discarded.

I stopped running. I wish I could say that I stopped because I needed to catch my breath, or because I was bracing myself for what I was about to see. The truth was more pathetic than that. I stopped because some part of my brain was refusing to process what my eyes were showing me, and my body had simply shut down in protest.

It took me three seconds to start moving again, three seconds that felt like hours.

“Oh my fucking god…” It came out in a whisper, then a gasp, then a sound that might have been a prayer or a curse or both at the same time.

I covered the distance between us and dropped to my knees beside him.

Alvin’s face was barely recognizable. His left eye was swollen shut, the skin around it so dark and angry that his bruises appeared to have bruises. There was a gash on his forehead, deep enough that I could see the raw meat of it, crusted over with dried blood that was black in the moonlight. While his swollen mouth looked like it had been torn open and sewn back together by someone who didn’t give a shit about the results.

His body was worse. There were scrapes and cuts covering his chest and arms, gaping ones that went down to the fat. Some of them were weeping blood, slow and steady, as if his body was still trying to bleed him dry even now. His left shoulder was a landscape of bruising, the surface there taking on this mottled purple-black color that made my stomach lurch.

And his legs? Fuck, his legs.

The flesh from his hips down to his ankles had been peeled away. There were lacerations and gouges and places where the tissue had been so thoroughly abraded that it looked less like skin and more like ground beef. Gravel was embedded in the wounds, catching what little light there was and glinting like cruel little diamonds. His left ankle was swollen to nearly twice its normal size, and there were dark, angry marks around it. Marks that looked an awful lot like chain imprints.

He was pale. The waxy pale of someone who’d lost too much blood and was running on fumes. His breathing was shallow, barely visible, and his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, the knuckles scraped raw.

I reached out with shaky hands and touched his face. Just barely. Afraid that if I pressed too hard, I’d do more damage than good, that I’d break what was left of him into even smaller pieces.

“Alvin,” I whispered. “Alvin, can you hear me? It’s Dee. It’s me.”

His one good eye flickered. And there was this brief moment of hope where I thought he was going to wake up. That he was going to open that eye and I’d see that terrible, infuriating intelligence looking back at me and everything would be okay. Because he was Alvin fucking Carter, and Alvin fucking Carter was indestructible.

But his eye closed again, and he didn’t wake up.

I looked around the clearing, my mind struggling to put together what had happened. There were drag marks in the dirt. Long trails that led away from where Alvin was lying, disappearing into the darkness. There was blood scattered in an arc on the ground, pieces of fabric, and what might have been a shoe.