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“Just stay behind me,” he says through gritted teeth.
He carefully picks his way through the brush. I follow, but I’m much louder than he is. It’s like I step on every dry twig there is without meaning to.
Not that it seems to matter. The man is now yelling for help in a non-stop repetition. “That doesn’t sound good.” I shiver as my stomach sinks with dread.
“It’s better than him suddenly going silent.”
We walk on another several yards, the sound of the yelling man getting louder and louder. I’m watching the ground, trying to walk quietly, when Noah stops suddenly and I run into his back.
“Oh, my god.” Noah’s voice is breathy and disgusted.
He’s a doctor who’s seen probably every gruesome wound known to man. If he’s disgusted, I don’t want to see whatever is up ahead.
“Is it Bigfoot or a bear?”
“Neither,” he says. “But you really don’t want to see this.”
“Is he really bloody?” I keep my face pressed into Noah’s pack, confused as to why he’s not running ahead to apply pressure or whatever.
“There’s no blood.” The man’s shouts are so loud now I can barely hear Noah. “Just a very naked man covered in something that looks sticky.”
“It’s honey,” a female voice says, accompanied by the sound of crackling leaves.
I pull my face out of Noah’s pack to see two women approaching us. One has her hair in two blond braids and is tall and reed-like, with bronzed skin that’s clearly seen a lot of sun. The other has her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and is petite, probably under five feet tall, with olive skin. They both have small packs on their backs.
“And he’s fine,” the dark-haired woman says. “You two can go back to your hike.”
Without even meaning to, I glance into the clearing and see the man. He’s fully nude, as Noah said, except for a blindfold over his eyes, ropes around his wrists and ankles, and the stickygleam of what must be honey over his shockingly pale skin. The guy looks to be the same age as the women, which is the same age as me and Noah. We’re just a bunch of twenty-somethings hanging out in the woods, one of us covered in honey and tied naked to a tree.
“I hear you out there,” the man yells. “I didn’t agree to this. Let me go.”
“Not until you’ve learned your lesson, pervert,” the blond woman yells back.
“What did he do?” I ask.
“He was peeping in the windows of our RV.” The dark-haired woman holds out a hand for me to shake. “I’m Marcy and this is Bridget.”
I shake their hands. “I’m Daisy and this is Noah.”
Noah shakes their hands, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “How’d you get him up here?”
Bridget rolls her eyes. “This guy actually seemed nice at first. We’d been hanging out with him, looking for Bigfoot. We didn’t tell him when we realized he’d been peeping at us—”
“And taking videos of us changing,” Marcy says.
“Right,” Bridget says. “We told him we had a new plan for catching Bigfoot, but we needed bait.”
“There might have been some good weed involved,” Marcy says. “But we convinced him to be the bait.”
“Why’s he screaming for help if he’s supposed to be bait?”
“Because after we got him all tied up, we blindfolded him and told him we were going to murder him after we made a bunch of videos of his naked ass pissing himself in fear.”
“Diabolical,” I say, more than a little impressed. “How’d you convince him to get naked?”
“Bigfoot hates the smell of human clothing. It has something to do with the factory process we use to mass produce clothing.”
“Right,” Bridget says, nodding seriously. “That’s why no one else has caught Bigfoot. They’ve gone after him wearing clothes.”
