Chapter 93: Camping (End)

Everly’s favorite installment in the Blood Camp series was the third movie. She had watched it twice, so she remembered very clearly that at the end, the protagonists tricked Gary into a nearby quarry, set off explosives, and used countless rocks to pin him firmly underneath.

The other films used similar methods—locking him in a coffin and burying it, chaining him to a heavy stone and sinking him in a lake, running him over with a steamroller into a concrete foundation…

Unfortunately, the movie’s prequel had only just begun filming, so the quarry from the third film didn’t exist yet, and the location of a construction site was unknown.

Everly thought for a moment and then said to the four people in the second row of seats: “Gary is pinned under the car, and it’s safe outside now. Misha, you take the lead. The four of you go to the wooden cabin and the manager’s office to see if there’s any solid container large enough to hold him, and bring it over.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay here with Grandpa to watch the killer, just in case.”

“Understood.”

With tasks assigned, Misha quickly led the other three off the vehicle, heading toward the nearby manager’s office.

Everly and Old John also stepped down from the jeep.

There was no rush to leave anymore, so Old John finally had the time to tend to his injury.

Standing at the front of the vehicle, he called over a somewhat flustered Christina to help hold the arrow steady. He took pliers from the toolbox and carefully made a circular groove around the shaft.

This step wasn’t easy. Carbon fiber was extremely hard, and ordinary pliers required considerable force just to leave a faint mark on the surface. But once the groove appeared, he could gently snap the shaft along it, breaking the arrow cleanly. Its brittleness was one of carbon fiber’s main weaknesses.

While Old John tended to his wound, Everly stood guard beside Gary’s “corpse,” Glock 19 at the ready.

But after a short while, the head that had been crushed under the jeep’s wheels began showing signs of recovery.

The shattered skull rejoined, wriggling flesh pushed aside bullets, stones, and dust, fusing and mingling until it formed muscles, nerves, and skin, snug against the bone, restoring the inwardly caved-in face.

In the not-yet-repaired eye sockets, the brown eyeballs seemed to fill with liquid, plumping from their shrunken state. They rolled once, then slanted upward, staring directly at the girl holding the gun.

“…H-how… did you… know…”

The newly grown vocal cords were still tight, producing a voice dry and fragile, like one just waking up.

Though his words were fragmented, Everly immediately understood: he was asking how she had seen through his disguise.

She thought for a moment and answered, “Because of that mask.”

Gary had never revealed his face in the films. Everly hadn’t recognized him by appearance—the discovery that Andy was actually Gary was completely accidental.

When Everly first described the killer to Misha, she had used the descriptor “wears a white porcelain mask.” But after returning from buying fuses at the gas station, she suddenly remembered that in the earlier films, Gary didn’t wear a porcelain mask at all—he had a doll’s head costume.

When Blood Camp was first made, it was during the peak of the slasher-horror craze. The production team was chasing quick profits, so Gary’s character design was rough. In the first, second, and prequel films, his body type, appearance, and even personality shifted subtly. It wasn’t until the third installment—the most popular in the series—that his now-iconic white porcelain mask image was finally cemented in cinematic history.

In the third film, Gary had accidentally found the white porcelain mask in a family’s storage room. When he tried it on, he realized that the ceramic mask was far more convenient than the doll’s head costume. Its cold, hard texture gave him an intense sense of security.

From then on, he wore that mask constantly, never changing it. Everly’s strongest impressions came from the third movie and onward, so her initial description was simply mistaken.

Even though she had misremembered, when she encountered the arrows on the hillside, Everly was shocked to see the killer wearing a white porcelain mask identical to her description. She couldn’t help but suspect that the killer might be hiding among her own people.

“So… you deliberately… described it that way… haha. But after I wore it… I kind of liked that… mask…”

Well, of course he liked it. That mask was practically his second face.

“There are also two other things that intensified my suspicion of you.”

“W-what… things?”

Everly looked at Gary’s face. In just a short while, his facial features had mostly healed, no longer as grotesque as before.

Because he hadn’t yet accumulated many kills, the young man was tall but lean. To the eye, he resembled a neighbor’s boy—an appearance that could easily lower one’s guard.

But behind this seemingly harmless exterior was a naturally cruel person with no empathy. He lied compulsively, delighted in killing, and in the future would stain the serene beauty of Emerald Lake with irredeemable blood, time and time again…

Realizing she had said a bit too much, Everly turned her gaze away, focusing instead on his limp limbs, and closed her mouth, no longer answering his questions.

The young man trapped under the wheels waited silently for a while. When no reply came, he let out a long, disappointed sigh.

“Is it because I encouraged Benjamin to leave with a gun and a satellite phone that you became suspicious?”

Everly still remained silent.

He muttered to himself, “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking that through at the time. I should’ve done it more subtly… But I really hated Benjamin—always bossing me around just because he was older and had more experience. It annoyed me to no end. I guess he looks better as a corpse.”

“…”

“And the third one? Hey, Everly, tell me—what’s the third thing that made you suspicious?”

“Everly, Everly, Everly? Come on, tell me, I really want to know…”

Even though he was a cruel, ruthless killer, Gary didn’t care about appearances at all. Like a whining, throwing-a-tantrum child, he yelled over and over, eventually stretching out his almost fully repaired right hand and trying to tug at Everly’s pants leg.

Bang! Bang!

He was met with a burst of bullets. Seven or eight rounds struck precisely from his wrist to shoulder, pinning his painstakingly repaired arm heavily to the ground.

“Behave.”

Still unsatisfied with just firing, Everly lifted her foot and crushed the palm of Gary’s hand, pressing down with force.

Instead of fear or anger, Gary seemed fascinated, as if inspecting a rare curiosity. His brown eyes sparkled, a faint flush appeared on his cheeks, and he stared at Everly unblinking, sending a chill down her spine.

“Ah… it hurts… You remind me of my mom, but also… somehow different.”

“…”

What a terrible thing to say.

Everly decided to ignore him completely.

Gary also fell silent. He lay quietly on the ground, seemingly abandoning all resistance. Even when Misha and the other three pushed the massive refrigerator toward him, signaling their intention to trap him inside, he remained expressionless and remarkably compliant.

“You don’t have to break my arms or legs—I won’t resist anyway.”

As Everly raised her gun, aiming at the exposed joints of his limbs, Gary stared at her intently and spoke seriously.

Everly, of course, didn’t believe a word he said.

She fired with precision, systematically disabling his limbs, and didn’t forget to put one last bullet into his forehead. When Gary closed his eyes and went limp like a real corpse, she finally got back into the jeep, reversed, and carefully removed him from beneath the wheels.

By this point, Old John had used three drops of the universal medicine to heal the arrow wound on his arm. He held a shotgun, barrel trained on Gary, standing ready in case the killer suddenly sprang to life.

Yet even as the two boys, one on each side, shakily lifted Gary’s arms and legs and carried him into the open freezer, he remained utterly still, dead as a stone.

Everly stepped forward with her gun, prepared to put another round into him.

At that moment, a crimson bullet hole on his forehead, Gary suddenly opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Can you tell me now? What’s the third suspicious thing? I’m really curious.”

“Think about it in your grave,” Everly replied, raising her gun at him.

Looking into the black muzzle pointed at his face, Gary blinked helplessly. “Alright… fine. When I wake up, you’ll tell me then, okay?”

Before he could finish speaking, bang bang—the gunfire rang out. Amidst the spray of blood, Gary’s thin body toppled backward into the freezer, once again reduced to a seemingly obedient corpse.

“Talk too much,” Everly spat, tearing off the freezer’s sealing strip, slamming the door shut, and then directing everyone to fetch the metal chains from the back of the jeep. She wrapped the freezer over and over, turning it into a massive iron ball.

“All right, come on, help me get it onto the boat.”

“Y-yes…”

Intimidated by Everly’s ruthless demeanor, everyone obeyed. Together, the seven of them lifted the enormous freezer and carried it to the small boat at the lakeshore.

Old John, the best swimmer among them, got on the boat too. Paddling out to the center of Emerald Lake, he pushed the freezer into the water.

Without the internal sealing strip, water quickly filled the fridge. Under the force of gravity, the chain-wrapped freezer bubbled as it slowly sank into the dark, deep waters.

And so, the bloody massacre along the shores of Emerald Lake came to its grim close, marked by the trail of rising bubbles…

TN

Some bloody dark romance shx lol