"You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight" by Kalynn Bayron, Chapters 1–3

Above me, the moon is just a sliver of silver hanging in the sky, but I’m thankful.

She has a raised welt on the side of her face, and her bottom lip is split open.

His six-foot-eight frame looms in the shadows like a ghost.

His mask is horrifying in the dark. It’s a dingy white color, smeared with red and mud.

The timbers of the giant sign that flank the entry gate materialize out of the dark.

The glinting handle of a large knife protrudes from her back.

After two summers—the first as fake-blood cleanup staff and the second as Staff Victim #3—I finally got promoted to the most coveted position in the entire park—Final Girl.

It chronicled the bloody rampage of inhuman serial killer Scott Addison as he slashed his way through an eighties summer camp full of campers and their inept teenage counselors.

It chronicled the bloody rampage of inhuman serial killer Scott Addison as he slashed his way through an eighties summer camp full of campers and their inept teenage counselors.

The Camp Mirror Lake experience requires all guests to sign a thirty-three-page waiver.

Nobody ever reads the whole thing, but it explicitly states that staff members are allowed to push, shove, and restrain the guests.

We have to dial the fear up to ten so the guests can run home and tell all their friends how scared they were. That’s what keeps people, with what I’m convinced is some kind of masochistic streak, coming up here night after night.

There’s an air of calm that stands in stark contrast to the frenzied chaos that had taken place only a little while before.

It’s on this path that Victim #2 meets their grisly fate during our terror simulation. There are little bits of fake guts and dark patches of fake blood still on the ground.

I reach into my shower kit, pull out a can of Mace, and flip off the safety.

My flashlight falters, blinking on and off twice.

I really think we may have hired baby serial killers looking to get in some practice. Good thing they’re easy to spot, always asking too many weird questions about the legality of what we do. Wanting to make sure that if they should just happen to slip up and really stab, maim, or kill somebody, they won’t get in trouble.

There are still thirty minutes left before my alarm goes off, but something has roused me from what I assume was a pretty deep sleep, judging by the drool on my pillowcase.

A light layer of dew has laid itself across the ground during the night, and the dappled morning sunlight is making it sparkle.

It should add to the faraway feel of this place, to a setting that, when we’re not engaged in the game, should feel idyllic—but there is always the lake.

It’s the backdrop of this place, and no matter how hard I try, I can never quite force myself to think of it as anything other than foreboding. Upstate New York is filled with lakes, but this one makes my skin crawl every time I look at it.

A layer of mist rises from the ground and billows around my ankles like a low-lying cloud.

The fuel indicator reads full, and the little green light in the corner is steady, which means it’s ready to kick on in case the main power fails.

“Reservation for Kennedy,” I say, finding the name scrawled halfway down the page.

She shoots Kyle a smug little smile. “At least somebody around here knows what they’re doing.”

There’s a rustle of static across the line as my earpiece clicks on.

My single complaint is that the fake blood he’s drenched in is too opaque. I like it better when I can see through it just a little.

Over the course of the next few hours, the guests move through a carefully curated series of experiences.

Halfway through the game, the guests end up separating, and Javier and Tasha have to herd them back to a common area so that we can move them toward the next gruesome display.

Javier’s voice cuts through the static in my earpiece.

A wave of relief rushes over me, and I heave an exasperated sigh.

Javier closes the curtains in the main lodge, trying to keep the light from the rising sun from accosting us.

The seat is so low, I’m almost touching the floor. It used to have a trundle underneath that kept the middle from sinking in, but during a game a few weeks ago, some of the guests thought it’d be funny to use it as a raft on the lake.

“Punctual” was one of the words his previous employers had used to describe him.

Listen, we’ve had a bunch of no-shows, and I’m running on a skeleton crew. I think we can handle the game tonight and tomorrow, but we need to talk about who we’re bringing on next season. Turnover is always high, and there’s always one person who just up and quits mid-season, but Felix, Heather, and Jordan are all no-shows.

The game begins when a staff member busts into the lodge drenched in fake blood. It has to look authentic enough to pull the guests into the game.

We also have an assortment of latex body parts we grabbed from a thrift shop in town.

I race to the parking lot as a car careens down the last part of the two-mile-long driveway that snakes up from the main road.

Strange occurrences at the lake are fodder for all kinds of wildly overexaggerated stories.

“And everybody else’s wigs look like hot garbage.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Bezi looks skeptical.