Inktober 2019 #20: Tread
Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.
They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.
Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.
“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”
Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”
“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”
With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.
“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.
“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.
“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” The smirk on Trevor’s face indicated that he didn’t really believe that.
“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for yesterday and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”
“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.
Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge?There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”
“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”
“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.
“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”
“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.
“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”
“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.
“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”
The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.
“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”
Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.
***
“I don’t believe this shit.”
They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”
“What do you mean?” Steve asked.
“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”
“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”
“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”
“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”
“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.
“Why?”
“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”
Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.
“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.
Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”
In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.
“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”
“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.
“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”
The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.
“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”
“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”
Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.
“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”
Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”
“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”
“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.
“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”
“Yeah.”
And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.
This concept has fan art:
Fablepaint version
Sollid Nitrogen version 1
Second Sollid Nitrogen
Sollid Nitrogen 3