Or YouTube.

That’s it. I made up my mind right then to destroy his fucking computer when the day was over. Sleep first. Destroy computer second. Then maybe he won’t be able to search for new ways to torment us and besides, a little less porn wouldn’t hurt the kid.

“It’s not the outdoors that’s pissing me off. It’s the fucking cunt of an hour,” I muttered, running my hand through my hair. Preppy rolled his eyes and parted the leaves of a tree that didn’t need to be parted with the machete he insisted on bringing.

“So why do they call you Bear?” Preppy asked. Grabbing a handful of dirt, he tossed it into the breeze and sniffed it before the wind blew it right in King’s face.

I was also canceling the Discovery Channel.

“Do you know?” Preppy asked King who ignored his question and growled while shaking the dirt from his shirt.

“You don’t want to know,” I said with a sigh, making it sound like the reason behind my name was a lot more sinister than the real story, which was as simple as the cleaning lady at the club calling me Abel Bear every time she visited, which turned into everyone calling me Bear. Thank God she didn’t call me Abel Lovey or Abel Babydoll.

I’d be fucked.

“Whatever, RALPH,” Preppy said, and on any other day I would bitch slap him into tomorrow.

But not today.

Today I was under strict orders from King that there would be no bitch slapping of any kind.

How many hours until tomorrow?

The sun finally started to make an appearance, shooting soft rays of pink through the tops of the trees, reminding me of the hours we’d already been awake thanks to Preppy’s 4:30am wake up call where he’d jumped on my bed like it was Christmas morning and Santa had just delivered a shit load of blow and porn.

Preppy was so amped up that for a minute I thought his excitement was going to burst right through his skin. Unfortunately, at that hour, his excitement was not contagious.

We’d driven an hour in the dark to a plot of land near Charles Harbor where Preppy was convinced we’d find the biggest and baddest wild boar, just begging to be hunted down. The way he pitched the idea made it seem like the pigs would come out of the brush waving a white flag before putting our guns to their own heads and finishing the job for us.

A sharp poke drew my attention down to where yet another bunch of sandspurs had attached themselves to the bottom of my jeans. I plucked them off and tossed them into a nearby bush, hissing through my teeth as one of the sharp-ass seedpods pricked me. A drop of blood pooled on the pad of my index finger. “Fuck,” I muttered, sucking the coppery red from my skin then waving it into the air to dry it off.

“Tell me why the fuck we’re out here again?” King asked on a yawn as Preppy led us through the tall grass and deeper into the woods. In Logan’s Beach, the woods were wet and swampy with dark green foliage and soft mud, where as the area around Charles Harbor was dry with brittle grass and hard packed dirt that cracked into pieces under the weight of our boots.

In our part of Florida, hunting after school or on weekends for guys our age was as commonplace as getting your driver’s license or feeling up your date after prom. It was what the normal guys did.

We weren’t the normal guys.

Never were.

Never wanted to be.

Some of my brothers in the club were avid hunters. I’d even gone out with them on one occasion. But in my eighteen years I’d already shed enough blood of the human variety to not really give a shit about the pointless killing of a dirty animal that, when sliced open, the inside of it’s belly smelled worse than a fucking rotting corpse.

“Well, my friends, we’re out here because I’m a man now. And this is the kind of shit that real men do. So come on, little girls, pick up your panties and grab your balls because we are gonna kill us some fucking wild piggies,” Preppy said, before giving us his best nasally impression of a wild hog oink.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. I reached into my cut for my smokes. Unlike Preppy, who was dressed for the occasion with his cargo pants, bright orange vest, and a camo hat that read PUSSY HUNTER in neon green lettering, I opted for my usual uniform of my cut, no shirt, and dark jeans. I held my shotgun in the crook of my arm with my chin across the barrel while I fished a lighter out of my back pocket. I wasn’t exactly following proper gun holding etiquette. Hell, I didn’t care if I blew half my face off in the process, because nicotine was going to be the only thing able to keep me from jumping into the harbor and swimming back to Logan’s Beach.

“I’ve been practicing my feral hog mating call so that the biggest and baddest alpha motherfucker comes out to play ‘catch a bullet’ with us. And what the fuck are you doing smoking, Ralph? Put it out! They will smell it or see the smoke and they’ll spook and run the fuck off!” Preppy scolded. Turning back around, he crouched down and scanned the foliage around us for any sign of his feral fucking pigs.

I stayed upright and so did King. I rested my gun against my shoulder in a very not-ready-for-this-shit kind of way. I had no intentions of putting my smoke out, but out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the look King was flashing me, a reminder of the reason why we were there in the first place, and, reluctantly, I put out my smoke on my boot and flashed King an exaggerated “You happy now?” smile.

There was only one reason on fucking earth why either King or myself would be up before the sun and in the middle of the fucking woods, and thank fuck that reason only came around once a year.

Preppy’s birthday.

In the three years or so since I’d met King and Prep, I’d been roped into their unspoken tradition, where for one day, Preppy calls the shots. “I should have skipped town when I saw you looking up these beasts on my computer” I said, stepping over a downed pine tree.

“You were just shocked he wasn’t looking at porn for once,” King quipped, and he was right. It may have been the one time I would have preferred to open my screen to find some of the sick shit Preppy liked to occupy his time with, rather than what he had in store for us on his birthday.

“Actually, if you motherfuckers must know, I was looking up porn,” Preppy said with a shrug of his shoulders. There was a rustling in the brush up ahead. A huge brown hog with wiry hair and a broken tusk darted out from its hiding place and into the clearing, making a run for his life through the trees. Preppy lifted his gun and pulled the trigger. He missed the fast moving pig and the bullet blew a huge hole into a tree stump. “But you’d be surprised how one little misspelling of the word BEASTIALITY can change the entire fucking nature of a search.” King and I looked at one another and followed Preppy, who started reciting lines from Braveheart as he ran full speed after the hog there was no way he was ever going to catch.

After an hour of chasing Preppy through the trees and almost accidentally shooting one another a few times, Preppy finally gave up and we headed back out to the truck. “Fuck this. I’m just going to get one of those plastic pig heads they sell at the gas station and mount it in my room.”

“Could have decided that a lot fucking earlier,” King muttered.

Preppy cracked his knuckles. “And now for the business portion of the day,” he said, grabbing two shovels from the bed of the truck which were laying over a blue tarp. He tossed us each one and pulled off the tarp, revealing the tied up body of a man underneath.