Dale smiled, wiping sweat from his bald head. “You think we’ll make friends with the locals?”

The bees took that personally.

Tucker and Dale had absolutely no business being on that mountain.

“I’m telling you, Dale, this is the start of something good,” Tucker said, heaving a rusty lawn chair onto the porch. “Just two buddies, some cheap beer, and a wood chipper that only occasionally spits fire.”

Dale stopped, genuinely hurt. “I don’t even own a lamp.”

An hour later, they had a bonfire. The rest of the college kids, untangled and de-mucked, sat sheepishly around the flames. Chad, sporting a bruise shaped exactly like a two-by-four, shook Tucker’s hand.

Tucker had finally gotten the ancient machine to start. It roared to life, belching black smoke and a single, forgotten squirrel that shot out like a fuzzy cannonball. The squirrel, understandably enraged, latched onto Chad’s hair.

Tucker was a wiry ball of nervous energy with a trucker cap pulled low over his eyes, and Dale was a gentle giant with a heart the size of a water tower and a flannel shirt to match. They’d just bought a fixer-upper vacation cabin—a real steal, according to the listing that failed to mention the “murder swamp” out back or the family of raccoons living in the stove.

Then came the wood chipper incident.

Allison looked at the chainsaw. At the jar of pickled eggs. At the two most terrified, well-meaning faces she’d ever seen. And she started to laugh.

Tucker looked at Dale. Dale looked at Tucker.

Chad, screaming, ran backward—straight into a pile of old two-by-fours. A board flipped up, smacked him in the face, and he tumbled headfirst into a discarded fishing net, which then got caught on a hook, which then swung him into a tree. From a distance, it looked exactly like Tucker had launched a college kid out of the wood chipper.

“It was room temperature,” Dale admitted. “The fridge is broken.”