That Camp I Will Never Forget

That Camp I Will Never Forget(Hansen Y) So there I was, inside my room preparing my stuff for school camp, when suddenly a strange voice rang in my head. It was a cold and dark evening, I wore 3 layers of clothing and still the wind chilled me to the bone. Trees and grasses outside the room were dancing wildly in the middle of the dark sky. The wind outside was cold enough to freeze the water.
As soon as I had my things ready, I turned off the TV and went to read the novel I bought the other day. The novel was interesting, but I wasn’t able to finish it as my eyes were already too heavy to read, and I went to sleep.
All of a sudden, I woke up exactly at 12 midnight to grab some food. I opened the door of the refrigerator and found some food. Then I heard the same strange voice from the attic of the house. I got curious and try to find out where the voice came from.
The attic was empty. But I was sure it was worth a try to find something unusual. There, I walked another step inside to the window of the attic and opened the curtain. I turned back and saw a glimpse of shadow outside the door of the attic. Slowly, I stepped outside the door, and looked behind the door, suddenly…… I don’t want to describe that face.
It was just a dream. I woke up in the morning with sweat all over my body, considering the fact that it was really cold that night. I made sure that I had everything ready for the camp, and then I rushed down the road to the school.
My school is not like the other usual school. We have a lot of military activities here, starting from a simple physical exercise to a heavy training like defending ourselves using blunt objects. The teachers here even taught us how to detect a furtive ethereal form of a spirit, which was my favorite subject.
As soon as I arrived at school, I hop on to the bus and found out that the bus was still empty. I took the rear seat and waited until one of my close buddy, Kevin, came. Unfortunately, most of the other students didn’t come, there were only 30 students who came. Our teacher, Mr. Bruno, decided to just leave them.
The bus was really quiet, until we reach the campsite. The campsite was labyrinthine; we lost our way a few times, but managed to roll our way to the place. We built our tent there, making a circle shape and prepare our camping equipments. Then, we gathered at the campfire in the middle of the tents. Though we were only 30 students, our teachers lavished more than $5000 to provide us lunch as we have a lot of voracious students. Our teachers also gave each one of us a bracer and talisman, as we were going to the forest.
Even there outside the forest, we could smell the strong redolence of the leaves. We entered the forest and got spread. Kevin and Chris were with me but neither of us brought with us a compass. We decided to make our own way out of the forest. In the middle of the burning sun, suddenly came a heavy storm. Chris dexterously led us to a cave, somewhere deep inside the forest. There, we went inside the cave. The cave was really dark and void, we met a lot of strange figure but weren’t able to clearly determine what animal those were.
I remembered that I brought my flashlight with me and decided to bring it out. After walking for few minutes deep inside the cave, we saw 3 aisles but Kevin convinced us to just stick together and entered the middle lane. The aisle led us to a huge room with a pool of water, something like a big pond, in the middle. Boulders and chunks of rocks were everywhere on the upper level of the room, and were ready to fall on us anytime. We decided to not stick to the wall.
In this point, we spot a tiny pulse of water beneath the water surface, sensing a threat was coming. A huge float of crocodile appeared from the pond and crawled towards us. Kevin took his 5 feet spear, Chris with his 20 kg flail, and I on the other hand, took my Excalibur. Kevin tried to stab one of them at its back, but the spear wasn’t able to penetrate inside the crocodile’s body.
The crocodiles pushed us back to another smaller aisle. There from the other side, was a leash of greyhound, trying to catch an archer, but she kept on shooting her explosive arrow to put away some of them.
“Watch Out!” she alarmed
“Stop the arrow!” Chris shouted back
I slashed my Excalibur on the ground, making our way to her, and giving her a spot to shoot. Then, I smoked the ground with a grenade and ran away to hide.
“Hey, thanks” she whispered
“How did you get here?” Chris asked
“I’ve been stuck here for 2 days, I think”
After few minutes had passed, Chris noticed a pattern that might be a hint. Kevin, despite having a placid and debonair looks, he was actually a cruciverbalist. He solved even the most useless hint, and got everyone out of the caves.
The next problem still lies ahead: The greyhounds scent our blood and somehow managed to chase us and it was still extremely dark outside the cave. We were on an impossible situation to make a decision: We could get out of the cave, or fight these hounds to death. Either way’s still the same.
“Hey Doggies, want some bones?” Chris was getting ready to fight. He charged fearlessly while spinning his flail beside him. The greyhounds leaped at him but he rolled, dodged and smacked them on their faces.
“Woohoo! That’s it?” He continued smacking each one of them
“Wait! Stop it!” Bianca shouted
“Yea! This is fun” Chris exclaimed
“What? You only make it worse”
“What do you mean?”
“If you kill one…. Two more grows”
“Oh okay”
“What will we do now?” I asked
“I don’t know if this will work”
Bianca took her last explosive arrow out of her quiver and shoots it on the roof of the cave. Boulders of rocks fell down rapidly but Kevin realized that it was an avalanche instead of an ordinary falling stone. He audaciously spun his spears like ZhaoYun to block the falling chunks of stones and shoots them towards the leash of hounds. After the avalanche, the entrance of the cave was completely blocked stones.
The rain stopped. We managed to get out of the cave, but we ended up on the other side of the forest…
Everyone was extremely exhausted especially Bianca and it was already late in the evening. Using the last minutes of my flashlight, everyone rushed to find some firewood and make a campfire. It was nearly impossible to make a fire out of soggy firewood, but with all our willpower and pertinacity, a fire blazed intensively.
Chris reckoned that the food supply is still good for another 2 days. Kevin and I helped Bianca building up her tent. She slept in less than 5 seconds. The sky was getting darker and darker; I decided to sleep as well.
I woke up the next day, having all of my body refreshed. It was about 5 in the morning; all of my friends were still sleeping. I decided to prepare for us breakfast, when suddenly I saw a shadow; leaping nimbly from one branch to another branches. It was so fast that I lost its track in less than a second. Then, I heard the same strange noise I heard in my dream the day before.
“Not now, please” I thought. My mind wandered off somewhere…
…
When I regain my consciousness, I leapt in confusion and realized I almost had my bagel over-toasted. My friends stared at me as if I was a thief. Yes, a thief, with those annoying expressions sprouted on their faces, and their mouth half-open.
I felt something cold on my shoulder and looked up: sleets of snow were falling down. I thought this could be fun at first, but then come to think again: we went in to the forest will all that strong fragrance of the leaves, which could only be one meaning: we were stuck in the caves for months!
“Hey! Snowfall” Kevin thought
“Guys! We entered the cave during summer” I added
All of a sudden, there was a sigil of silence.
“You’re right” Chris started, noticing there was an awkwardly unpleasant silence.
The next things I remember was we walked pass every single tree and found a small cottage which turns out to be an old shop. The wooden plank outside wrote: Goode Shoppe.
“Old Shop” Bianca said
We checked inside the cottage and there was still a clear writing of the menu:
Red Potion – 20 ₵
Blue Potion – 20 ₵
Red Elixir – 50 ₵
Coffee – 50 ₵
On the other side of the shop, there was some old furniture, dusty yet antique. There were also few clothes on the end of one room, but they were already old, torn and tattered. Chris took one of the blue checked uniforms.
“Look! It’s like the one we have at school” he said
“Shhtt” Bianca snapped “We don’t know if this place is still inhabited or not” she continued
Suddenly an old man with a low tone spoke from behind.
“Hello, young travelers. It’s been months since anyone came here inside my cottage, what can I do for you?” he asked
All I want to know was if there were any calendar in the shop, but I knew the best thing to do was to stay quiet.
“When was the last time this place was visited?” I asked instead.
“Well, it was about six months ago. 3 teenage of your age….”
“Was there any old man with a whistle on his neck” Chris interrupted
“Yes, I was going to say that”
As expected: the old man convinced me that we were really stuck in the caves for months. Then, something struck my mind, if really our friends were here before and there were broken and tattered school uniform, then something must have had happened to them.
I pulled Chris and Kevin aside to the exit door, Bianca followed us from behind.
“Did you guys feel the same thing?”
“Feel what?” Kevin asked
“Well, we could just kill him” Chris mumbled
“What if he turns out to be having a petrifying gaze like Medusa or whatsoever ability he has?”
Bianca didn’t know anything, but she sensed a threat was coming, noticing the old man slowly dissolved in the air with an evil smile. I felt a wave of terror and my mind went blanked. It was my entire fault, I thought, should’ve had noticed that it was only the spirit of the old man.
We ran as far as we could, away from the cottage hoping that it would lead us out from the forest. So it was. We managed to get out of the forest… somehow, and we end up in a field, a vast field. I felt a strong feeling of déjà vu, and that I’ve been in this place before, but this wasn’t the campsite.
The air pressures felt the same as the one in mountainous area. We walked out the field and went to the main roads.
“What is this place?” Chris asked
“Mount Diablo” Bianca answered, “This was where I came from”
“That means we travelled from the east, in Manhattan, far to the west, Mt. Diablo” I concluded.
From there, Bianca led us to her place. It was a military campsite. We met the camp leader and he allowed us to stay. The rules there were a lot stricter than the one we had on our school. After a few weeks there training, Chris, Kevin and I decided to go back to Manhattan with the help of the camp praetor. Bianca said her last goodbye to us with tears falling on her face.