Camp Witherby Survived

Addie Sparks

It was Wednesday when the camp director called us all into the staff hut. It was night, and with any luck the girls wouldn’t notice that we were gone. Some of us had protested, of course. You couldn’t leave kids unsupervised. That was basic training. But the camp director hadn’t been given the camp name ‘Boulder’ for nothing, and when she asked you to do something you did it. 

I remember combing the braids out of my blonde hair with my fingers as I walked from the cabin I was watching over to the staff hut. This was weird, but it wasn’t serious yet. Half of us showed up in pajamas. I was in an oversized band tee, shorts, and hiking boots pulled over fluffy socks. 

The first thing off about this meeting was that Boulder was smoking. We all knew she smoked, coming to the orientation meeting smelling vaguely of cigarettes. But that was the weekend. She made a point not to smoke while camp was in session. Her expression was grave.

“How many of you have looked at your phones in the past four hours?”

No one raised their hands. Too busy with s’mores at the firepit and getting girls nestled cozy in their bunks. Making double and triple sure they didn’t need anything before we left. She sighed and pulled up a news report on her phone. Gasps and cries rang out around the room as every counselor saw what had happened. Nuclear annihilation, they had called it. Every major city in America, gone. All the internet, gone. Roads destroyed, factories in rubble. All of it made one thing clear: the world had ended. 

We let ourselves cry for an hour until someone pointed out the obvious. “What do we tell the girls?” 

It was Wednesday. Camp ended Friday. But no one was coming to pick them up. These were city kids, here to experience the great outdoors. How did we explain that Mommy and Daddy weren’t coming? That they would never see them again?

Even worse, the question of “What do we do?” 

My eyes were still wet with tears, my heart still mourning the life I’d just lost, but the camp name I had been given was Brainiac. 

“We stay here,” I said, to confusion from my fellow counselors, but grim silence from the camp director. “We stay here, with our garden for food and our river of fresh water. We stay here, with fire starters and knot skills and all the core needs for survival. We have shelter, we have clothing, we have a steady supply of food. We stay here.”

Some people wanted to go home, but all us counselors had been city kids ourselves. Campers before that, learning survival skills with our troops and playing apocalypse for badges. Our homes were gone. Dead. But Camp Witherby survived. The question now was “For how long?”

Some of us left after that, though no one attempted to go home. They went to stay with the girls. Watching over them, mourning the lives they could have had. They were the more emotional counselors, the ones who were the best at helping with homesickness and finding joy in everything. There wasn’t a lot of joy to find in this. We would need all their help in due time, but not at that moment. Now we planned. 

In the morning, the Camp Director made the announcement at the fire circle. “Guess what kids? You get to stay here forever!” There were mixed reactions, of course. But we tried to spin it around to be happy. Some of the more cool-headed counselors gathered the older campers into the main hall and explained, as calmly as they could, that there would be no end of camp. It hurt to see them, some of these kids in their last couple years of high school, trying to have one last summer of fun before they needed to become adults. It hurt even more to see them step up to the challenge. Say they’d help with the little ones, list out skills they could teach them, volunteer in jest to be the first one eaten if we ever needed to.

I remembered when I was like them. Eyes wide, t-shirts and beaded bracelets, not all that different from how I dressed now. I was on top of the world. I only wished I could spare them the fate we were in now. 

There would be no more off days for us counselors, so we shed our true names. Becoming only “Bunny” or “Chocolate Chip” or “Brainiac.” Our old names only to be whispered with reverence when we cried on each other's shoulders at night. We were leaders now, more than just for a week at a time. Katie and Sarah and Amara didn’t have a clue what they were doing. But Bunny was always peppy, explaining how to carve spikes from sticks to make a defense wall. Chocolate Chip knew how to ration the food and which seeds to plant when so we’d always have some kind of crop. 

And Brainiac? Brainiac taught little girls how to kill deer three times their size with bows and arrows. Enough pull back on the string, camp issue arrows sharpened, a quick “Watch your elbow Shelby,” and meat was no longer a scarce resource. 

Brainiac had blood on her hands, but a determined look in her eyes as she taught a camper how to butcher a doe and keep the bones. “For later,” I always said. I didn’t know what I was keeping them for. 

And so went life. We lived. Camp Witherby survived three whole weeks by making everything into a game. Knife skills competitions, fun days of building defenses around the property. “Whoever catches the most fish wins!” The girls had fun. They were smiles and giggles, like there should be at a summer camp.

That was when the first of the looters reached us. A man with a gun to a child's head demanded we give him all of our food. But I taught my girls well, and an arrow is easy enough to aim at a man's neck at close range. He was our first killed, and the one who killed him was named Hanna. Age fourteen. Braids in her hair, blood splattered on her face, and a look of pure fury in her eyes. I understood, then, that she would kill again.

I don’t remember who it was who gave her the name Bullseye. Maybe it was all of us, but the shift around her was palpable after that. Respect was on her name, and soon Hanna was forgotten, and Bullseye was born. Sleeping in a pink sleeping bag in a wood cabin by night, showing little girls where a man's arteries were and how best to hit them with their smaller size by day. 

It was another Wednesday, three weeks after the first man was killed, that Bullseye woke me at the crack of dawn. She had a crowbar in one hand, and an ax in the other, what had now been dubbed “her” bow strapped to her back. “Come on, Brainiac.” She whispered so she wouldn’t wake up the eight and nine-year-olds in my cabin. “We need to get going if we want to be back in time for dinner.”

We walked silently through the forest. My pants and hiking boots protected me from the stinging nettles. It was so calm out here. It was times like these that I considered the possibility that nothing had changed. The forest was still the same. Maybe we were keeping these kids here unnecessarily. But if that were the case, someone would have come to find us already. 

I didn’t ask Bullseye where we were going until we’d reached our first stop. The old camp sign, carved out of wood. The words “Camp Witherby.” Bullseye handed me the ax. “You're stronger than me. I need your help to destroy it.”

My eyes widened. “What? Why?”

Her eyes were grave, a contrast to the tie-dyed shirt and ribbons around pigtails she wore. Her beaded necklace had never come off, three beads for the three years prior she had got to go home after camp. She explained “There are signs on the highway pointing to camp. They're going to lead more people right to us.”

I heard what she didn’t say. “More people that will hurt us. More people who will harm us. More people who I will have to kill to protect us.” I didn’t say anything, and I hoped my eyes could convey that I understood. I heard her soft tears as my ax broke the sign into bits. 

“I’m sorry, Hanna,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

She brought the crowbar to wedge the metal signs off their posts once the screws were loose. We spent the hikes between signs singing camp songs and keeping our minds off why we needed to do this. Bullseye was right. We were back at the main hall with just enough time to spare for dinner. We sat at the same table, me at the head and her to my right, with kids ages seven to fourteen around us. One of Bullseye's cabin mates was curled around her, arm around her shoulder, silently saying “Lean on me. Let me take some of the weight.”

We’d tried to shelter them, even the oldest ones. We’d failed. 

Two days later, we called her to the staff hut before lights out. As we stood in a circle, I walked forward. I’d learned why I had been keeping the deer bones. In my hands was a bead. A simple thing. Her eyes lit up when she saw it. Her hands reached out and she took the camp necklace off her neck, letting me thread the bead onto the string. In the silent dead of the night, she watched me mark her transition from a camper to a counselor in training with something part reverence, part dread. 

When it was over and her camp necklace was firmly around her neck, the circle of counselors swarmed us. The hug was tight, loving, and mournful. “Hanna,” we whispered. “Thank you for all that you’ve done. We’re sorry you had to do it.”

In the morning, Bullseye took her rightful place at the head of a dining table. Her cabin mates sat on either side of her. Their eyes, full of pride.

Bullseye was the first counselor in training, but not the last. Next up was Speeddrive, a sixteen-year-old who stole a counselor's car, drove the twenty mile drive into town, and fought off looters to bring back a full load of canned goods and junk food. She arrived back at camp grinning from ear to ear, covered in blood. We gave her a bead that evening.

Typewriter was the last that summer. She got her name when she found an old, unused typewriter in the attic of the main hall. With natural inks made from berries, she got it working again and started writing. Her work was read at night to the girls like gospel. Something new and exciting. Soon, she was leading a writing group. They made paper from tree bark and brought a new age of art to the camp. On the last Saturday of August, the fifteen-year-old Journey officially became Typewriter. 

Fall came quickly after that. Colder. We pulled some of the older kids in the outlying cabins further in, cramming mattresses in the open-air wood buildings. We used towels and deerskins to block out the openings of the cabins, connected with pushpins from the roofs to the outer walls. 

The acorns on the ground made for a fun game. The squeals of little girls filling the air as they rushed to pick up as many as they could. Throwing them into the cardboard boxes Chocolate Chip had saved with a smile. We raked the leaves off the ground and let them jump in the piles as many times as they wanted. We carved the pumpkins from the gardens, separated the seeds and ate the insides as pie. 

But there was an air of fear around the counselors. You could see it in the way we fiddled with our beads. Feel it in the chill of the air. It got cold in winter. Too cold for girls who had only brought summer clothes. Too cold for open air cabins. 

Speeddrive was the one who proposed the plan. Take a car and drive to town. Arm it with knives and spears. Get as much winter gear as we could. Speedrive and Bunny left. I watched them speed out of the parking lot, and I was there when the headlights of the vehicle flashed to let the campers know to lower the bridge over the defense wall. Speedrive was the only one to come back, and she wasn’t smiling. 

I held her in my arms as the other counselors unloaded the piles and piles of clothes. “It’s enough,” I whispered into her ear. “It’s enough. We’ll survive.” 

“Bunny” was painted on the outside wall of the main hall. Not Katie. Never Katie again. 

When winter came, we were ready. We cleared the tables from the main hall, staff hut, and the youngest kids’ cabins. Anywhere that had all four walls and at least some amount of insulation. Everyone dragged whatever they could carry. Mattresses, bags, clothes. We laid them on the floor, huddled together for warmth under every emergency blanket and spare sleeping bag we could find. 

“Don’t open the door unless you really need to,” Boulder explained to a group of what had been seven-year-olds, now starting to turn to eight-year-olds. “We need to keep all that heat in here!”

We spent the cold months playing cards and board games, gossiping from our mattresses, and singing songs. Every Monday, Typewriter would lead a troupe to put on a short play. Every Friday we pushed our mattresses away from the floor and had a dance party with an old CD player. It was fun. Really fun. In a look I shared with my fellow counselors, I knew they felt it too. Pride. “Look at what we’ve made, in the face of the end. They’re still happy.”

There were cheers of joy when the first rains of spring graced our camp, and camp director Boulder deemed the temperature warm enough for us to go back to our cabins. With the rain, though, we could only spread out to the nearest cabins. The ones that you could run down the gravel covered paths and get back to the main camp. The outlying cabins were connected only by dirt roads. Fine in the summer, but during the spring the heavy rains made them dangerous to cross. Still, the extra space was well appreciated after three months packed tight like sardines. 

The children arrived at dinner soaked to the brim each day. We got our next new counselor in training, a thirteen almost fourteen-year-old we named Rainstorm. She started a trend of innovative ways to block the rain. Handmade umbrellas, shirts pulled over heads, the biggest leaf you could find. The giggles as kids ran into the rain with their inventions, returning completely soaked when it didn’t work, was infectious. She smiled when we handed her her deer bone bead.

We’d nearly made it all the way to summer when they first arrived. Leapfrog was the counselor in charge of the waterfront, so when two canoes were missing one morning no one was surprised that she was gone with them. We were surprised that a camper was missing as well. It was a foggy day, but not raining. Perfect cover if you wanted to use a canoe for stealth. 

I didn’t see them return, but I heard the uproar later. Leapfrog and a camper we would soon dub Foggy had taken the canoes down the river to raid empty houses on the water’s edge for supplies. Except they weren’t quite empty. 

Three families. Leapfrog and Foggy had found three families with children who had been living off the water. Fishing from their docks and defending their houses. But they were lonely. Very, very lonely. Leapfrog's one flaw was that she had a heart of gold and would let campers get away with a lot if they could give her a good reason. This extended to other people. 

There was a fight between counselors. The families had been told to stay in the boathouse. Bullseye crouched in front of the door, tie dye dripping a little in the rain. Her bow clutched in her arms. Leapfrog and Boulder were in a glaring match. “We can’t just leave them to fend for themselves,” Leapfrog said.

“We could,” Boulder insisted. “We’ve got plenty of mouths to feed as is.”

“I’m not saying we feed them. They’ve been taking care of themselves. We should just… talk to them. Let the kids talk to them. God, let the girls meet some boys for Christ's sake. They’ve got kids the camper’s age.” Leapfrog defended. 

I’d asked them earlier. In our boathouse at the time, we had two grown women, three grown men, a fifteen year old boy, a fourteen year old girl, a set of twin eight-year-old boys, and a seventeen year old boy.

Bullseye spoke up. Quietly, and for a second I didn’t know if she was talking to us or not. “Treat others the way you want to be treated. That’s the golden rule, right? It’s in the scout’s pledge.” She had a faraway look in her eyes. “If we’ve forgotten our pledge, what’s left of us?”

I watched both Leapfrog and Boulder crumble. I could feel myself crumble a little. Saw Bullseye rub her wrists like she was rubbing the blood from her hands. Boulder grumbled. “They can come to dinner. That’s it.”

That wasn’t it, and I think Boulder knew that when she allowed it. Because soon, the campers were taking the boats themselves to go visit their new friends. It sparked something, to have a connection to the outside world again. And so, the first expeditions were created. Led by Leapfrog and Foggy, a trade network was established with the various communities of survivors up and down the river. 

Life continued with our new version of normal. People stopped by occasionally, but it was still just us living at camp. The communication network brought forth the realization to me. Watching the river kids get confused by our song and not understand what the camp names meant. They thought they were just nicknames. We knew better. I realized we’d built something here. Become something separate. We had our own culture, our own traditions. 

When spring made way, once again, to summer, Chocolate Chip held a feast. It was a grand party, with no outsiders. We made decorations from homemade paper, used branches to add some greenery to the main hall, and Chocolate Chip broke out the s'mores supplies she’d been saving for a rainy day. The campers danced with smiles on their faces. Taking in the sunshine as a welcome relief. Right before dinner they all lined up in front of me in order of their cabin group, and I placed a single green bead in each one of their hands. I gave the younger ones their first camp necklaces, the older ones added the bead to theirs. “We’ve made it,” I heard them say. “We survived.”

I sat on the back deck of the main hall, watching the sunset. Boulder walked up beside me. In her hands was a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked since the first day of what was supposed to be the end. “It’s not a miracle that we’re still here, you know,” She started. “It’s hard work. Dedication. I should tell everyone this, but I’m starting with you. Good job, Amara. I’m proud.”

I smiled. 

Now that we’d been through the seasons, we had an idea of what we were doing. It was easier after that first year. Soon we were chugging through time like it was second nature. Move everyone closer in the fall, hide from the cold in the winter, keep everyone close in spring, release the reins in summer. We had a cycle now, a plan. 

The years went by. I became camp director after two years. Boulder passed three years in. She’d been close to retirement when this all started, and the extra stress wasn’t doing her any good. She left it in her will that I be given the camp when she was gone. Her name is proudly painted on the exterior wall of the main hall. 

The girls grew up. We’d taught them well, and they became fine young women with energy for days and a hunger to fight to live. Some left, of course. Speeddrive was the first. She and a few cabin mates took a car when they turned twenty to go see what was left of the world. They painted their names with smiles and giggles on the wall.

Others found romance with the river kids and left to start a family. They’d bring their children back and drop them off for the summer so we could teach them all we knew. Each one was doted on. A treasure.

I’ve stayed here, and I’ll stay here as long as I can. Maybe there is still a world out there. Maybe people built something new, just like we did. I don’t need to see it. Not when there are still girls who need me, who need Camp Witherby.

Last night, we had a bonfire like we do every Friday night. As the smoke wafted into my eyes, my thoughts drifted back to that first night, when the world was quite literally ending. I have always been a bit of a pessimist. I thought when I proposed staying here that we wouldn’t last until winter. I was buying us a month of time, tops. But at least we could have given the girls that. At least we could have had that. Boulder always says it was us who pulled through. Others say it was a miracle. I think it was a little bit of both, in the end. 

I know I had every reason to have been scared, back then. But at the bonfire, surrounded by the next generation of campers, with smiles on their faces, braids in their hair, and melted marshmallows getting all over their hands from s’mores, I struggled to imagine a world where this turned out any differently.

I fiddled with my camp necklace. There are so many beads now, stretching from the middle of my chest all the way to the top of my collarbone. A smile stretched across my face. We did good, didn’t we? I hope everyone had a good time at Camp.

Addie Sparks (He/Him) is a trans author from Seattle, Washington. He is a recipient of the YoungArts award in fiction, and has won silver keys in fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, and script and screenplay from the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards. His work has been featured in Etymos Review, and he was a two-time playwright with the 14:48 Highschool Playwriting Festival. He is currently in his senior year at Interlochen Arts Academy.