The kids gathered around the pumpkin patch
anticipating another fun event and eager to pick out and take home the biggest,
brightest pumpkins, as the orchard staff had promised them. You couldn’t ask
for a more wonderful fall day. The sun,
leaves, cornfields, and clouds conspired to give a magnificent golden glow
across Harvest Valley. Tucked inside
this arboreal paradise is Jensen’s Apple Orchard, a favorite weekend site just
three miles off the Interstate; once its doors open in September, families,
school children, and lovers of autumn come to enjoy the delicious fruit and foliage
of the season. Fifth graders from
Allenby Christ Lutheran Elementary School had enjoyed the last couple of hours
running through the corn maze, moving cautiously through the Haunted Barn, taking
a wagon tour of the apple orchard, eating honey crisp apples, and drinking Momma
Jensen’s apple cider. What these
youngsters couldn’t know, of course, as they reached for their orange gourds,
was that their teachers, a teacher’s aide, and the bus driver lie dead in the
back of a shed. After the proprietors of
Jensen’s Apple Orchard had drugged them with free samples of pumpkin spice
coffee, they strangled them to death, ever so careful not to shed any blood. Now they were about to grab these hapless
children and offer them as burnt sacrifices to appease their pagan ancestors,
who, they fervently believed, had suffered for centuries at the rapacious hands
of Christian marauders.
