The Haunted Forest Tour

CHAPTER ONE

We’ll discuss this on Monday…

It was the adult equivalent of “wait until your father gets home.” And just as Christopher Brummit’s mother had used that technique to extend the misery of upcoming punishments, Mr. Tylerson was going to purposely make him sweat all weekend. There was no reason they couldn’t meet this afternoon and get it over with, but the sadistic bastard wanted him to suffer, unable to eat or sleep, stomach churning, headache pounding, wondering if he’d still have a job when he wandered into the office Monday morning.

Christopher had been putting in seventy and eighty-hour weeks for the past several months. He wasn’t the only one. The lack of a life outside of work was a source of masochistic pride for his co-workers; hell, it was practically a competition to see who could put in the longest workweek. Simply working eight-to-five was unheard of. Lunch breaks were for the weak. If you weren’t a slave to Novellon, Inc., then you weren’t a team player.

Christopher did his work without complaint. Since his divorce a year ago, he really didn’t have a life outside of work anyway, unless you counted Netflix. But the long hours and non-stop pressure were wearing him down, and he finally made a mistake.

A big one.

Well, technically, a small one. A single typo in a spreadsheet. But it was a typo that made Mr. Tylerson “look like an ass” in front of the board of directors.

“Would you like to explain to me how this happened?” Mr. Tylerson had asked, tossing the flawed spreadsheet across his luxurious desk. His face—already naturally ruddy—was so red that Christopher worried that his pores might start seeping blood.

“I didn’t have time to double-check it.”

“What do you mean, you didn’t have time to double-check it?”

“You needed it quickly, before the meeting, remember? Normally I would double-check all of the formulas, but I didn’t get a chance.”

Mr. Tylerson gave him a disgusted look. “I don’t want excuses.”

“You asked how this happened. I’m trying to explain.”

“No, you’re trying to pass the buck. This is a business. Things move fast in the world of business. We don’t have the luxury of spending hours double-checking things that should have been done right the first time. We need to be at the top of our game every minute of every day. Otherwise there are consequences. We’ll discuss this on Monday.”

Christopher wanted to protest, and he also wanted to knock out a half-dozen of his employer’s teeth. He did neither. Instead, he got up and left Mr. Tylerson’s office without a word.

A couple of his co-workers gave him sympathetic looks as he returned to his cubicle. Novellon had pettiness and backstabbing galore, but Christopher was well liked, and everybody knew that a disciplinary meeting with Mr. Tylerson was serious business.

I’m gonna lose my job.

Would that really be such a bad thing?

Yes.

Maybe not if he’d quit or been laid off, but in this crappy job market, getting fired would be disastrous. He was thirty-eight years old and didn’t want to have to start over with a whole new career.

He struggled to work for the rest of the day, then went home and threw up.

Christopher lay on his bed on top of the blankets, still in his work clothes. Maybe that’s how he’d spend Halloween weekend: lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, and count the time in quarter-second intervals until Mr. Tylerson saw fit to reveal his fate.

His mother had told him weeks ago not to make any plans for this weekend, insisting that she had “an amazing, wonderful, thrilling surprise” that he’d just looooove, but Christopher didn’t feel up to anything more amazing, wonderful, and thrilling than lying here and getting in a lot of quality moping-around time.

The phone rang. He briefly considered letting it go to voice mail, but his mom wasn’t big on leaving messages and would keep calling until a live person answered.

“Hello?” he answered, still lying flat.

“Christopher? You sound mopey.”

“I’m not mopey.”

“Good. Are you ready for your surprise?”

“Yeah.”

“That didn’t sound very enthusiastic. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

“Too tired for… The Haunted Forest Tour?”

Christopher immediately sat up. “What?”

“Oooh, now you’re not so mopey, are you?”

“You got tickets to the Haunted Forest Tour?”

“Not just the Haunted Forest Tour. The Halloween Haunted Forest Tour. It’s the deepest any tour group has ever gone into the forest.”

“Are you kidding? How’d you get those? I thought they weren’t available to the general public.”

“What makes you think I’m the general public?”

“Seriously, how’d you get them?”

“I won them. Did you know that at one point The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to be called Headcheese?”

“No.”

“I did. That’s how I got the tickets.”

“How are we going to get there?”

“Well, since I’m not up for a twenty-three-hour drive, I bought us plane tickets. Our flight leaves tomorrow at seven. Sorry you don’t get to sleep in.”

Christopher couldn’t believe this. He’d been interested in the Haunted Forest Tour ever since it opened a year ago. Screw Mr. Tylerson and his We’ll discuss this on Monday crap. Screw lying around wallowing in self-pity. He’d worry about his potential for becoming an unemployed loser after the tour.

“How much were the plane tickets?” he asked.

“None of your business.”

“Then let me pay for the hotel.”

“How about you finally pay back that fifty cents you borrowed when you were six?”

“Never!”

“I’m paying for everything,” she assured him. “The downside is that you have to spend an entire weekend with your mother. It’ll be fun. You need some fun in your life.”

You couldn’t be more right. “Well, thanks!”

“So what were you moping about? Bad day at work?”

“Eh, the usual. Just waiting for the aspirin to kick in.”

“I won’t keep you, honey. Hurry up and get packed. We’ve got a great weekend ahead of us!”

“Thanks, Mom. I really appreciate this.”

“That’s what mothers are for. Happy Halloween!”

Christopher hung up the phone. Wow. His mom had actually made everything all better.

He got up and went to his closet. He would’ve done a load of laundry if he’d known he was leaving town for the weekend, but he could scavenge something wearable.

Four years ago, scientists were beyond baffled by the events at Cromay, New Mexico. An entire forest sprouted out of nowhere, engulfing the desert town and killing a presumed two hundred and seventy-three people. The tales shared by those who escaped were unbelievable, but yet difficult to contradict considering that there was now a forest out in the desert that hadn’t been there the day before.

Christopher and his ex-wife, Samantha, had watched the nightly news with fascination. Rescue teams went into the forest to search for survivors and never returned. The forest was too thick to explore from overhead, but news crews in helicopters were able to capture footage of eerie glows within the trees.

Mark J. Cardin, Jr., a hotshot reporter for Fox News, was grabbed by… something while doing a live newscast. Something big. His blood covered the camera lens, making it difficult to figure out exactly what happened after that, but neither Mark nor his cameraman ever returned.

“The Haunted Forest” continued to make nightly headlines. There was a lot of debate over whether it was truly “haunted” or merely populated by unidentified creatures, but the name stuck. The Internet was filled with conspiracy theories, the most common of which was that the United States government had developed a high-tech tree growth hormone that had gotten out of control, and that the creatures in the forest were being bred as super-soldiers.

The Haunted Forest eventually faded from the news headlines until a year ago, when H.F. Enterprises announced the Haunted Forest Tour. They’d installed track that, while it didn’t go deep into the forest, did circle the entire perimeter. The trams were reinforced and, according to the advertisements, “impervious to damage by any creature or ghost.”

The tours were a smash hit, making countless millions of dollars for H.F. Enterprises. Any type of photography or video recording was strictly forbidden, but tour patrons reported sightings of all manner of bizarre and frightening creatures. One elderly woman died of a heart attack when a fanged creature scraped at the window next to her seat. The resulting lawsuit was settled out of court. But beyond that, H.F. Enterprises proudly boasted of its “100% safety record! Nobody has ever been eaten on one of our tours, and nobody ever will!”

Christopher had really wanted to go, but that was right around the time of his divorce. There was no infidelity or any other single destructive event involved. Rather, it was twelve years of gradually accumulating annoyance with each other that finally exploded. Samantha flew to California to “find herself,” while Christopher worked, watched television, and ignored his mother’s advice to go out and try to meet people.

Then H.F. Enterprises had announced the newest incarnation of the Haunted Forest Tour. This one cut right through the center of the forest, with “shocking sights that will absolutely blow your mind!” The tour was set to open on Halloween, and he hadn’t realized that it was possible for non-millionaires to get tickets.

Christopher was almost giddy.

Scratch that. He was completely giddy.

He was slightly less giddy when the alarm went off at four-thirty. Even during one of his sixteen-hour days at Novellon, he got to sleep in later than this. But a hot shower and Godzilla-sized cup of coffee put him back in an excited frame of mind.

His mother stood outside waiting for him as he pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex. Mindy Brummit looked at least ten years younger than her real age of fifty-seven. In fact, the only time Christopher had seen his mother looking her true age was at his father’s funeral.

He parked and got out of the car. Not surprisingly, she’d packed three large suitcases for a two-day trip.

He gave her a tight hug. “You know, they only let you check two pieces of luggage.”

“Two each. How many suitcases did you bring?”

“One.”

“See? Problem solved.”

Christopher unlocked the trunk. His mother had curly red hair that she insisted was her natural color. Of course, she’d insisted that last month’s brunette shade was her natural color, along with the bleached blonde look of last year. She wore a blue and green Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sunglasses, a strong contrast to the slacks and white dress shirt that Christopher was wearing.

“At least you didn’t wear a tie,” she said, reaching up to adjust his collar.

Though she was a small woman, she was anything but frail. Christopher often joked that she could beat the crap out of him in a bar fight, but he secretly wasn’t entirely certain that it was a joke. She worked full time as a receptionist at a law firm, and devoted her spare time to gardening, gourmet cooking, pottery, bicycling, swimming, “power-knitting” (racing against her friends to complete a sweater in the fastest time), and karate.

How’d she end up with such a boring son? he wondered.

He put her suitcases—which weighed approximately eight thousand pounds each, or so he told her—in the back of the car, and they left for the airport.

“Thanks, Mom,” he said. “I really appreciate this.”

“Remember that when it’s time for my nursing home. I want the place where they don’t harvest your internal organs in the middle of the night. At least not the important ones.”

“Gotcha.”

“Are you ready to be scared out of your wits?”

“Absolutely!”