Camping

When an opinion is needed, you consult an expert. When you’re car is dying on the side of the road, you go to a mechanic. When you’re feverish and vomiting, you consult a doctor. When you and three close friends decide to go cave diving on a camping trip in the middle of nowhere, you get advice from a park ranger. But when you need advice on how to give up and die, who are you supposed to ask? Everyone who was good at it is dead and everyone who is alive is not good at it? So where do you find help with being helpless.
Logic says I should have died a while ago, but apparently bleeding out is harder than it looks. You assume you’d just have to sit and bleed. If only it were that easy. It would be some much easier to die, if I still had hands. There only so many times you can run head first into a wall before you get knocked out, and I can’t exactly kill myself if I’m drooling on the floor like some Woodstock hippy who took a tab too many.
I miss my hands. It is so hard to pass the time without them. You can’t play solitaire, you can’t jack off, and you most definitely can not sharpen a rock in an attempt to impale yourself.
When you are trapped inside a cave with the partially rotted bodies of your friends who swore that cave diving would be fun, and you are desperately looking for was to expedite your inevitable death, You’ll have to find someone else as I am repeatedly proving I am no expert. I am barely an amateur.
I think it had been three months since a rockslide had buried the entrance to the cave. I should have known something would have happened with my luck. My mother always said that if I ever won the lottery, I’d probably get hit by a car before I’d even get a chance to redeem it.
It wasn’t so bad the first week in here. Scott had packed a bunch of freeze dried food. Monique and I had had found a little spring in the back of the cave. We lived like kings the first week. We tried to clear out the cave entrance, but if anything we made it worse. so we had spent most of that week playing with a deck of cards that Thomas, The fourth of our ill-fated expedition force and Monique’s plump of a boyfriend, had brought.
When you’re in a burning building, you call a fireman. If you’re being mugged, you promptly call an officer. When you need a large pile of rocks moved out of the way of an opening that is the exit from a cave you are trapped in with three friends, one of which who likes to sneak into your already small supply of food, you call someone who can operate a backhoe.
Since we could not contact any such person, we had to take care of our food supply that had been diminished the first week. Monique was against the idea at first, but after a few days without food, she was more open to our suggestions. She still didn’t want us to do it, but I heard no complaints from her as she tore through the arm meat that I’d cooked up on Scott’s little camping stove.
When you in a cave with now food for an extended period of time, and kill one of your dear friends so that you can dine upon his muscle, and you want it cooked so that it taste better than any other meal you have ever had, but all you have is a tiny camping stove, You call a professional chef. We did not have anyone like that sitting around, but in my opinion, It tasted pretty damn close to the best thing i’d ever had.
Thomas did a good job providing for us for about three weeks, despite the number of new maggots he’d been acquiring, and life got easier for us for those weeks. Well, for Scott and I at least. A new kind of boredom had fallen across our group and Scott had the perfect solution. Monique slept pretty deeply at night, so it wasn’t particularly hard to tie her up during the night. We found some nice rocks towards the sides of the cave that spread her arms and legs far enough apart that we could get in without fear of being scratched or kneed.
When you’re in trapped in a cave with two friends and the gnawed on remains of a third and you start getting bored and horny, you call a prostitute. Despite how much we wanted one, we couldn’t find one, but Monique worked just as well.
Other than just taking turns screwing Monique till she screamed bloody murder, Our new captive gave us something to do almost all the time. Whether it be force feeding her pieces of her boyfriend, nearly drowning her to get her to drink, or scooping up the piles of shit smashed flat by her ass, having her around kept us busy and kept our minds off the fact that every second brought them closer to death.
Well good things can’t last forever and in the blink of an eye, Thomas was gone and so was the food, but we didn’t go long without food. Monique didn’t last to long after her already small food was completely taken away. It was a bit sad ripping her apart, but she did taste a lot better than Thomas. There was a lot less fat on her. But then there was just the two of us, Scott and me. Me and Scott. Just the two of us. We simply stopped sleeping after Monique had taken her last breathes, we both understood what came next. We both wanted to get the to the other one before they got to us.
If you are intending to betray the best friend that you have ever had and the guy that you’ve known since before either one of you was even old enough to not shit your pants on a daily basis, and then violently murder him in him in his sleep with the largest rock that your envernated body will allow you which you will use to shatter his skull, you will most likely want to talk to an gang member or a politician, but I had a creeping suspicion that it was soon to be a skill I mastered.
So for three days, we sat, we waited, and we ate. Never looking away from each other, never getting two close to each other, and never dozing off for the sleep our bodies so obviously craved. This was our fight for our lives, this was our life or death battle, this one a game of who wanted to die least. So we sat and we stared, him at I, and I ate him, waiting for the opening. We only moved when necessary as the spots we had chosen were as far away as possible, we walked backward to reach the spring and the still fresh Monique.
This was so much different than first lives, they were taken out of necessity for food, They were in no position to fight death. Now, It’s no longer killing my prey, It’s fighting my predator. Try not to think of me as a savage for saying this, but this was bliss all my base fear creating wonderful chemicals that kept me wide-eyed for five consecutive days. Five days of alertness from the time the first bird sang outside the cave, which was in my mind is more often thought of as a tomb, to the last croak of the bullfrog at night.
But on the fifth day it was different, My body finally subcame to exhaustion. It seemed like nothing more than a blink, but in that blink, he was on me. My body forgot its previous exhaustion and the world slowed as I watched My friend drop a rock that would most certainly crush my ribs, sternum, and whatever internal organs tried to impede its one way trip to the floor.
Even in this slowed world I was in, I was fast enough, the rock did not land on my chest, it made sure that my left arm from the hand to the help was nothing but broken blood vessels and dust that used to be bone. With the still operable right arm, I threw a strong hook that threw Scott, still dazed from his failed murder. I stood with one arm dangling in the wind and the other read to defend should it need to. Scott did not move, but i knew that punch was would only keep him down a few seconds longer. I mounted him digging my knees into forearms to prevent anymore fight. I grabbed his chin trying to wake so I could tell him “sorry” before I snapped his neck and watched the life drain from his body. The next few seconds were a flurry of pain and rage, before a full thought could come through my hand was no longer on his chin, but instead inside his mouth all the way to the knuckle. It only took that moment for me to go from five fingers to just a thumb.
When you have an incredible burst of white hot rage, you call a therapist. I decided I was not ready to take the time out of my day to set up an appointment with a therapist, and was forced to be contented with closure I got from violently jabbing thumb into his eye socket, which was rapidly filling with the blood from the stumps of my hand, and pop it out so that is hanging from the optic muscles.
The act was easy, it was the scream that annoyed me. I had never heard a more blood-curdling scream than i did at that moment. I had to stop it. I unmounted him and stood next to him, he writhed in pain cupping his eyeball in his hand and continued with his wail. I kicked in the chest and heard the snap snap snap of breaking ribs. His arm instinctively grabs his chest and raises his volume to match his new level of pain.
I raise my foot off ground so that the tread of my boot is about 8 inches above the ground, take a deep breath as I look at scott once more, and I drive my heel into his throat crush trachea and changing that horrid scream, into no more than a breath death rattle. I stomp again, and again, and again. I stomp long after he is without pulse. I stomp till I feel I have vengeance. Then I sleep.
When I awoke, the only thing that broke the silence is my own breathing echoing and reverberating in that lonely space. The adrenaline has worn off and I can feel the pain of my limbs, one complete inoperable that couldn't even be raised the slightest bit without feeling a pain so intense I nearly lose consciousness and the other caked in blood, some of it Scott’s and some of it mine. I stood and walked to the spring where I washed myself as best I could without irritating my open wounds, took a few swallows of water, and land back down to rest.
Now, you're all caught up on my story. The day of Scott's deaths was a few days ago. I spent that time eating off of Scott, trying my best to die, and screwing whatever was left of Monique. Yeah, me and Scott were pretty smart when it came to her. We knew we didn't want to be rid of our fun, but we needed to eat so we found a compromise. We only ate above the belt and below the knee. Now, I don't even need to worry about using her for food and I get her all to myself. Of course, it's not easy. I had to prop her up against a rock so I didn't need to use an arm. But it was definitely worth it.
But now, now is what is important. Now, I stopped mid-thrust listening as voice drift through the rubble at the entrance. It's sudden, I see a light. It looks like I didn't need to call to get someone with a backhoe. The light floods in and I stand, pants around my ankles, blocking the light that is burning my eyes with my palm. A shadow walks in, A man's shadow. Then the owner of the man's shadow let's out a man's scream. The owner screams out for a solid twenty seconds and suddenly stops. He leans over and vomits until he has nothing left inside, covering the floor of the cave in an orange-ish brown slurry of his past meals. He looks at me and sees all the dried blood and shit and dirt and I smile at him, “Looks like you made a mess, sounds like you should call a janitor.”