It took hours of staring at the dimly lit orange ceiling of the tent before Kai could actually fall asleep. Since when was nature this silent? Who could sleep without a few car horns or sirens going off? And the sleeping accommodations. He never realized sleeping on the ground would be so, well, hard.

Maggie and Asher, though, they slept like a baby with warm s’mores in their bellies and the promise of a morning hike on their minds.

When Asher had told Kai and Maggie his hopes for a camping trip, their reactions couldn’t have been more polarized. Maggie started packing right away. Kai was still trying to understand the concept of the closest hotspot being twenty miles away. But, he wouldn’t be “Superdad” if he said he’d rather have a double root canal than go into the middle of Syken National Park and “rough it”.

Like everything else in his life, he felt it was best to approach it with a healthy dose of research. After figuring out the best tent and camping equipment to buy, he regrettably looked up what to watch out for when camping. Results included bears, rabid raccoons, bees, biological mutations, cultists, serial killers, and abandoned nuclear testing facilities. Of course, every iota of Kai told him to cancel the trip. If it wasn’t for his son’s extreme excitement, he would’ve, too.

Yet, despite the stress of packing and planning and plotting, it worked out pretty well. He breathed in the fresh air of the pristine woods and only sucked in three gnats. He only tried to get reception seventy times the first day. He did cry a little when he walked into a sticker bush, though.

Kai found himself finally asleep, dreaming longingly for strong cellular signals and streaming services. Yet, once again, he felt out of place and woke up. He sat up to look at his peacefully sleeping wife and son, hoping such a beautiful sight would lull him back to a serene slumber. Yet, instead, his heart dropped to oblivion.

They were gone.

In a heartbeat, an instant, all logic fled his mind and panic flooded inward, striking his heart. His lips were trembling. His throat went dry. His breathing went faint. And this is where his mind went.

Clearly, a serial killer had been in these woods from the very beginning. Perhaps he even lured his son into somehow subliminally wanting to go camping. Then, he altered Kai’s search results for him to choose this exact spot. And right when they went to sleep, his fun began. Raccoons scouted the joint. The bears came in as the muscle to make sure Kai wouldn’t get in the way. They were all radioactive and supremely intelligent, as this was obviously an abandoned nuclear test facility. Then, the bees and and the biological mutations came into the tent silently, put his wife and son into a trance, and lured them out. There, the serial killer waited with his cultists friends with their sacrificial daggers, ready to plunge them into their hearts to activate the power of the ancient forest gods to once again rule the world in a new age of darkness.

Obviously.

“Maggie? Asher?” he said in a trembling voice.

Then, he heard a brief, high-pitched scream. His wife’s scream.

“Maggie!” he yelled as he bolted up to fight the cultists to the death.

“Ugh, Mom, find another spot to pee, this one’s taken,” he heard Asher say.

“Oops sorry, dear, you scared, me. Carry on,” she said.

Bathroom breaks. They’re just going on bathroom breaks. What is wrong with him? Why can’t he just relax in the beautiful wild?

He laid down and breathed out a world of stress….

… And hoped to God that it was really a bathroom break and not something the cultists told them to say so he wouldn’t go out to save them.