//------------------------------// // Chapter 5 // Story: Don't Bug Me // by Starscribe //------------------------------// It was not a difficult process to retrieve the campers who had wandered. Amie knew the trails around Stella Lacus Adventure Camp of course, better than almost all the older counselors. She knew where frightened people wandering alone would likely flee, without needing to search for hoofprints in the mud. But without all this, she still could have completed her task. The fleeing campers hadn’t just left footprints, but also a different kind of trail, subtler and unseen. It was the same kind she had followed after first waking, when she tracked Wes up to Lookout Point. It was morbid, maybe even disgusting—but Amie could sense their fear. There was something to be said about the strength of an emotion and the depth of the trail it left behind. Where Wes had felt only mild curiosity, some of these campers were beside themselves with terror. Nothing else could drive someone to flee away from potential refuge, and out into the wild. She was part of a half-dozen counselors to begin the search, with a hissing radio strapped to her shoulder. It was a good thing cell service had been so poor up here even before the unclassifiable disaster that mutilated them, because Adventure Camp relied on handheld walkie-talkies to keep staff in touch, instead of just calling back and forth. It meant the same system could work without interruption or change. There were just over a hundred campers missing when the day began. Not knowing how many were staying in cabins that had not come along, there was no guessing the exact number they still had to look for.  They found eight total, and one staff member. Of those, Amie brought in a full third. She brought them all back to the multipurpose building, where staff members with experience as a very different kind of counselor offered the best reassurances they could. If nothing else, it helped to see the camp of fellow monsters. No one could believe themselves uniquely guilty when everyone else was also punished. It was late afternoon before the search was closed, and the rest of the crew was excused to rest. But not her—she was brought into the camp offices, for another meeting of the leadership staff. The room was sparser than it had been the night before. Only Poole remained from the counselors, and several office workers were gone too. Instead of two rings of chairs, there was only one. Since the last meeting, Mr. Albrecht had a pair of trousers in addition to his military cap. The design was crude, with simple cuts for the tail and ragged cuffs. But they fit, despite his alien body. That made Amie shift uncomfortably as soon as she sat down, along with several others. They weren’t all naked anymore. Why couldn’t she have clothes? At least someone had set up a pitcher of ice water against the wall. She drained several glasses, even if she had to use her mouth to carry the cup around. More embarrassment.  “We’ll go around in a circle,” Mr. Albrecht said, as soon as everyone was seated. “We have people off doing important things I didn’t want interrupted. And… some who wished to avoid responsibility.” He looked around the room, fixing each of them with an intense glare from bug eyes. Or maybe it was meant to be something else—reassurance? “I know the temptation to break down, give up, flee. Your calm until now is above and beyond any rational expectation for your performance. Thank you.” If people give up at this rate, this will be an empty room before too long. “Most important things first. Communication, Nate?” He shook his head once. “Bad news to worse, Mr. Albrecht. No signal, no response on any radio frequency—and no radio bands at all. We should be receiving hundreds of channels up here. There’s no GPS signal either, not with any of the devices I tested. I can only think of three explanations for this.” Mr. Albrecht waved one wing expectantly. “Every GPS device in camp was sabotaged while leaving their other functions intact,” he said, tapping one holed hoof on the conference table. “Two, something damaged the entire GPS network. The sun could do it, but if it did I think the camp’s power system would be down too. But there’s no damage, except for a blown fuse connected to the relay that fed the missing cabins. Option three—there are no satellites up there. We’re not where we came from, and there’s no one to call. There won’t ever be someone to call.” A wave of fear and discontent passed through the group. In just a few words, Amie could feel the immense emotional weight. Fear over the future, over family and loved ones now out of reach, over what would happen to the camp without supplies. It grew like pressure in the room, festering in the silence. “That is… a disturbing thought,” Mr. Albrecht said. His words of calm stilled some of those runaway feelings, at least enough to keep them from building completely out of control. “What about our other immediate needs? Mrs. Martinez?” She swore under her breath, a few muttered Spanish words that Amie could halfway understand. The feeling of anger and frustration was palpable beneath it all. “Everything that is not meat has gone rotten. Everything in the freezer, dried too. Even the flour that should last years. Even alcohol. That’s why there was no breakfast or lunch. Forget what I said about two weeks. We have much less.” “Don’t dump anything,” Mr. Albrecht said. “I find that… suspect. Even if we cannot eat it, there may be other uses for spoiled food. If what Mr. Conners suspects is true, we may have to turn our attention to the long term. Our adventurers are young, but clever and brave to be here. I have no intention of keeling over and accepting the cruel judgment of fate. Do any of you?” He glared around the room again, eyes electric with energy. Just like the despair Amie had sensed before, this emotion was just as overpowering. Mr. Albrecht’s resolve was a welcome replacement for her fear. “Very good. Onto the other details we learned. We were able to travel two miles down the interstate before the highway ends. Whatever did this doesn’t appear to have purposefully targeted the camp, but captured an oval of the mountain that includes most of camp, along with some of the facilities below. The gas station is still there, though it was locked up for the night. What about the search teams? Did you find anything useful?” Amie realized all the eyes were on her. None of the other counselors were important enough to make it to this meeting. But with the rate other staff were leaving, maybe this was more of a burden than a privilege. “There is a town a few peaks away. Don’t know exactly how far since the mountains weren’t there before. But the visibility is really clear, so… fifty miles? Half that if we could fly.” She glanced over her shoulder at her wings, which responded to her thoughts, opening from under their protective shell. “Do we think these are supposed to work? They seem so complicated to be vestigial.” “They could not possibly lift a body our size,” said the nurse, in a thick, vaguely European accent Amie couldn’t place.  “That’s what they said about the bumblebee,” Nate said.  Half the room groaned. Amie grinned, hiding her goofy smile behind a hoof. That worked better when there wasn’t a hole in it. The nurse ignored him completely. “I was up all night taking measurements. X-rays, blood samples. Nothing good. It is what you expect. We have no bones, no human blood. No MRI machine obviously, and I cannot do dissections. If I could, I do not know what I would find. If you have any medications, even aspirin, do not take it. This biology is so different we have no idea what it would do.” “Which means we have no medicine.” Mr. Albrecht tapped his own hoof against the desk, frustration growing. “No painkillers. No way to treat fevers or infections.” “We may be forced to test if patients’ lives are at risk,” Nurse Sobol said. “But we have no surgeon anyway. Most I could do is stitch up a wound, set a broken bone. We don’t have skin or bones, so my role is less clear.” He sighed. “I’m counting on you, Mrs. Sobol. Thank you for your hard work.” The meeting continued like that for another hour or so. They considered several options—debated how to keep everyone busy, and what changes to make around camp. Amie had very little to add, though she was still grateful to be there. Unless the adventurers tried to throw off their leaders, these meetings would mean being one of the first to know what the camp would do next, along with anything else they learned. In the end, the only change was an upcoming meal, cooked from some of the frozen meat they still had. But Amie barely cared. She still didn’t feel hungry. It was still light out when she made her way over to the pioneering building. The place was on the outskirts of camp. Beside it was an open clearing of various elevations, where poles driven into the ground simulated trees, and makeshift survival shelters were held together with unseen glue. The building itself was really just a large metal shed with some electric lights and plenty of storage. She found a dozen bugs inside, all working. At first she couldn’t even tell what they were working on—so many different bits of cloth, rolls of canvas, rope, and other unidentifiable things were scattered here. She couldn’t even see the floor through it all. But a few seconds of squinting through the doorway and she realized what she was looking at: backpacks, satchels, and all manner of carrying bags. Or they had been. Her students were in the middle of modifying them, with one unfortunate bug standing in the center as a model. Several others circled around, taking measurements with scraps of rope, or cutting cloth to size. “You’ve been busy,” she said, approving. “What’s all this?” Someone stepped forward. She didn’t recognize the bug by his appearance, but his yellow and black scarf was familiar to her. Marcus, the oldest and most experienced of her crew. He was so high in the Boy Scouts that she’d never actually taught him anything, instead relying on him to help her run things when there weren’t any other counselors along. “We want to be ready to run in a hurry. That means being able to carry supplies. We’re trying to make a bag these bodies can wear.” She kept her expression neutral, or tried. It was easier to keep the concern from her face than it was to keep her wings from opening. “That’s a good idea. Be conservative with what we have, don’t waste fabric. Once camp runs out of stuff, that could be it. We might never get more.” The campers abandoned their work then, surrounding her by the doorway. They wanted to know everything she did, about the future of the camp, about what their leaders planned. She didn’t know most of the answers, and the ones she did they were better off not hearing. But she couldn’t keep silent about everything, or else lose their trust. Given the cracks already starting to form in camp administration, she might need to rely on them sooner or later. “All the food isn’t bad,” she said, selecting a single useful fact among what she knew to focus on. “The meat is still good. I think we might be… obligate carnivores? They’re cooking a dinner tonight we can actually eat.” “Good, I’m already starving,” said one girl, among the youngest in her group. Even she had the strangely distorted voice of the alien insects.  “We should think about traps then,” Marcus said. “Hiking around camp, the mountains seem like they have plenty of animals. Fish in the river too, if we can eat those.” “See what you can do,” she said, inspecting their work. “I like what you’re coming up with. Rick, did you finish with the phones I left you?” A bug no different from the rest flopped off a folding chair near the back. A dozen or so phones were all plugged into the wall there, using a complex maze of chargers. A single actual laptop was there too, on which he had been typing with painful slowness. “Sure did! Still tweaking some of the specifics. Phones don’t have strong antennas these days. There’s a way to make a base node for a mesh network like this, with a really big antenna. If we can get it up high, it could probably reach anywhere with line-of-sight.” Amie took the two phones, sliding them away into her pack. “Marcus, see if you can get Rick a meeting with the robotics kids. They’ve got boxes and boxes of… smart stuff. Maybe together you can figure this out. “One other thing.” She lowered her voice, glancing nervously out of the building. But she could see no one in the forest there. The sound of usual camp activity was nowhere to be heard. There was no regular crack of gunfire from the range, or splashes of water from the pool. What voices she did hear were hushed, just like theirs.  “I’m going to bring my brother here. I know he was too big a wimp for the overnight. But he’s… I’m not sure I trust anyone else to keep an eye on him. I’m sure we’ll find something for him to do.”