63 Days

Morning came again, I watched the sun peek through the Ghost Bead trees that were sprouting out of the slick red rocks that surrounded our camp. Other kids were up, rolling their ponchos and blankets into neat bundles, tying them with the short rope they gave us, leaving loops for their arms, making a homemade pack. Stephanie was next to me, she was very still, and as I reached over to see if she was breathing wake her, she moaned a tiny bit and slowly her eyes opened. I realized that I’d been holding my breath, waiting for her to make some sort of sign of life.

“Its time to get up,” I said to her quietly. “Murdock and the other guys are over by the fire talking. Don’t make them mad today, just get up ok?”

She started to get up, and after the 3rd or 4th try, she finally was able to sit up a bit. She was weakening every day. She weighed about 80 lbs. and was 5′6″…way too skinny for anyone her height. She’d been slowing us down for 3 days now, and we were all about ready to be punished for her slow hiking. She was getting us farther and farther away from our food drop that we were supposed to reach in 2 days. The other students were getting upset with her, and I truly feared for her life. Hungry, emotional, angry teenagers can be cruel…terrorists almost. I prayed really quick in my head that she’d keep up today.

“ALL RIGHT FOLKS! Thats it! Rise and shine, its time to break camp!”

We all got ready to go, pulled on our dirty socks and shoes and after putting on our packs, we set out for the daily hike to our next water stop. We swept the ground quickly with branches we’d found laying on the ground to cover our tracks and we buried the firepit with sand and dirt as quickly as we could. Then we got in line, single file and our 15 mile hike in silence began.

There was no showering for us…no toilet paper…no sanitary products…no soap…no deodorant. Nothing except the clothes on our backs and the dirt that was quickly building all over us. Food was beginning to become almost like an obsession. Boys who, on the first day or two, were talking about who they’d beat up, or who they’d fought with back home were now talking about their favorite chips, or what kind of soda they missed the most. Some were sharing recipes.

Girls who came in talking about their nails and hair and boyfriends were now talking about how they’d kill a sheep or a deer for food if they came across one. It seemed this program was doing something, but what exactly it was going to teach us about trust and family was becoming less and less apparent. I’d hear girls whispering about how they let a counselor feel them up the night before so they could get a single kleenex to use the bathroom with. One girl whispered about how she’d performed oral sex on a counselor for some raisins. If this was happening already by the third day, what in the hell was going to happen 20, 30, even 40 and 50 days down the road?

Suddenly I heard a muffled crash. When I turned around, Steph was on her back like a turtle, pack keeping her from being able to get up. I went back, helped her up and we continued walking. During the next 5 hours, she would drop more and more frequently. She yelled a few times, she started going into a delirious rage. Her eyes started to look more and more like an animal, and our group, we were going nowhere. We were going to be left without water, and possibly one more day, a total of 6 days then without food. Soon we were practically carrying her and with a quick clap, we heard Murdock shoot off his shotgun.

“GET THE HELL UP! I SAID GET THE HELL UP!” He marched over to where she was laying on the ground. “If I say it again, I’ll pull yer ass up by yer hair, you got that? Now get up!”

Nothing. She looked right through him, weirdly grinning.

“Ok, so you wanna play like that, fine.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a length of white nylon rope. Tying her feet like a baby calf, he strung the other half over his shoulder and began to walk. She was dragging behind him, squealing like a pig.

“You motherfucker! Let me ayout! Uhn tah me nayow! I said UHN TAH ME NAYOW!!!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

He stopped and turned to her “You gonna git up?” She nodded yes. “You gonna be a good girl?” She nodded yes, and he bent down to untie her and without any warning, she threw sand right in his face.

“Thats it, you little SHIT! I’m draggin you, and these kids, your comrades here?” he said looking accusingly at all of us “well, they’re gonna kick dirt in YOUR face now. You like that fatso? Huh fatso?”

He took off walking, quickening his pace. Her shirt was beginning to ride up and her exposed tailbone and bony back was grinding on the dirt and rock path we were carving out on the hillside. Her pack had been tossed to another boy there, and he was ordered to carry it so her arms were flailing around, she was screaming, and we were all just hiking alongside her, in utter shock. None of us knew what to do. I could see some of the girls were starting to weep, and just then noticed my hands had big wet drops on them in the dust that layered my skin from my own tears.

Murdock turned around and yelled to us to kick dirt in her face. We all stopped. He ordered us again. Nobody did anything. He turned on his heels, and walked straight up to all of us and put up his fist. “Listen here, she is stopping you from getting food. Do you want to starve out here? The coyotes would LOVE to come across your dead bodies. Think I’m kiddin? I’m not. Now. Kick. Dirt. In. Her. Damn. Face.”

He resumed his trudge, dragging her once again, and by this time, she was too weak to fight. She was cussing and mumbling and making what sounded like growls, her shirt in the back exposing her raw skin to the dirt, and she wasn’t even fighting anymore. A few of the boys cried as they gently kicked dirt in her direction, and when one of them got a bit close to her face, she snapped like a rabid dog at his boot. This just freaked some of them out, and they began to kick a bit more furiously. You have to understand, we were all deprived of sleep, food, water, support…I don’t blame these boys at all… It was survival of the fittest, they were going back to the roots of our civilization, where only the strong survive, and she was keeping us from food and ultimately, our homes.

Finally we got to the top of a hill where we could take a rest and Murdock came back and propped Stephanie up on a tree stump, and I could hear her gurgling and snorting little spit bubbles out of her mouth. “You,” he said to me, “you like this kid right? Well she needs her teeth brushed, she can’t eat no dirt, she’ll get worms, then we’ll all get the worms. Brush her teeth.” He tossed me a toothbrush he’d pulled out of his pack and I went over to her to brush her teeth. Her eyes were empty. I mean EMPTY. She didn’t even appear human anymore. When I tried to get close to her mouth, she snapped at me, foam flying onto my arm. One counselor came closer to help me by holding her jaw open and she bit his forearm and he went into hysterics. She was an animal. An animal now.

After we got to camp, dragging and carrying her the rest of the way, we all sat in silence as a female counselor came out and dressed her back and arms and layed her down in the teepee she’d brought out for us to use that night. A medic came out, but he only came AFTER she’d been put in the teepee, so when he only gave the counselor who’d been bitten a rabies/tetanus shot and did nothing with Steph, we all realized the most frightening part of this whole episode. Nobody knew nor would know what they were doing to us. We were like fish in a barrel. Stuck.
That night we all went to bed in silence, and I layed next to her, listening to her moan.

“Allison. Allison?” she mumbled. “I’m dreamin’ of a marshmallow island, with trees made of lollipops with M&M’s for coconuts! I love M&M’s, they’re mah faaaaaaaavorite… and the ocean…its an ocean of diet Coke.”

I cried and mumbled to her to get some sleep and she closed her eyes and we all fell asleep, we were all exhausted.

The next morning, she wasn’t next to me. Her stuff was gone, and she was nowhere to be found. Some kids swore they heard her gagging and gurgling in the middle of the night. One boy said he saw her have a seizure and then they took her outside and started doing CPR. All I know is that I dreamed about angels flying around our teepee and they were sprinkling m&m’s down on us in our sleep.

The counselors never said a word. We weren’t allowed to talk about her. We couldn’t even say her name again. We were warned. We were given a can of peaches, a day early. Bribery, of sorts I guess. That day, I went up to Natalie, the big girl from the first day, and told her that I had to get the hell out. She said she’d already thought of a way. Thus began our planning of the escape. I had to get out of here and tell somebody what was going on.