Wil shoved the fridge away from the front door and back into the kitchen and then stood before the door. It had a deadbolt and a simple lock in the doorknob to keep it sealed, but that was it. It was only an inch and a bit worth of wood. If somebody was really determined they could just kick it in. It wasn’t going to stop whatever was going on Out There.

Wil had spent most of his adult life depressed at where he had ended up: a dull, dead-end job, single, a shitty apartment, few——if any——friends. But he had never hated himself. Carroll told him some people with depression actively, aggressively hated themselves. Wil did not. He just didn’t see the point.

But if he stayed In Here——the bathroom, the cabin, his own head——while Naomi was Out There, he would most definitely hate himself. He wouldn’t just kill himself then, he would absolutely murder himself if he let that happen.

So there might as well have not been any door at all.

Naomi was Out There and if he was going to do one good thing with his life, this would be it.

Wil opened the door and stepped out onto the small front porch.

Aside from the continuing and eerie stillness in the woods around him, the outside of the cabin looked just as normal as it always had: a short dirt drive leading away from the cabin and down to the main paved road. The drive was flanked by sturdy pines and thick oak trees, the latter of which were now turning yellow and red with the onset of autumn. It smelled heavily of damp earth, pine needles, and woodsmoke. The last was likely coming from the ranger’s station a ten minute drive down the road, or possibly one of the neighbors making their own cabin cozy.

Wil hadn’t even thought about the neighbors. Granted, Oak Rest was more of a vacation retreat and not a livable neighborhood. It was Friday, sure, but people usually came up for the weekend after work, not in the middle of the afternoon.

Wil’s car, a 2012 Toyota Corolla whose once proud and regal sapphire paint had long ago faded to the chalky blue of a dead man’s frozen lips, sat in the middle of the drive. It had several dings, dents, and scratches that Wil had never cared enough to get fixed. It worked, and that was what mattered. He made sure he had his phone, then realized he needed something else: a weapon. He’d told Naomi to use one, and she was (hopefully) secure in her home. If Wil was going to go driving Out There, he definitely needed something.

He was reluctant to take any of the kitchen knives. They were all on the dull side and he didn’t think he would be able to do much with one even if they were razor sharp. There was an old wood-axe behind the cabin though. If nothing else, it was heavy. Wil grabbed it and rested it on the floor of the Corolla’s passenger side.

The car started up without coaxing, which was the norm. Still, given everything else that was going on, Wil wouldn’t have been surprised to find the car had suddenly died or something. He immediately locked the doors, then turned on the radio.

Static as he backed down the drive towards the main road. He tried another station as he slowly crawled up the asphalt road toward the neighbor’s cabin and the ranger’s station beyond. More static. A third station yielded a voice, but the signal was weak, distorted, and came through in unintelligible bursts. Wil tried a few more, but it was either static, or garbling nonsense. He shut it off just as he arrived at the next dirt driveway and pulled up to the neighbor’s cabin.

There was no car in their drive, no lights or sign of movement inside, so he backed out and left. The next neighbor’s house was similarly deserted, and the third. Wil decided to just ignore the other houses and head right for the Ranger’s station. He was wasting valuable time.

He pressed his foot down gently on the gas and accelerated down the smooth but narrow road as it wound down the gently sloping mountain. The lake from which Oak Rest took its name was on his left. A single small boat was out in the middle of the lake, but it was vacant. Wil squinted to make sure there was no occupant leaning down, and saw there wasn’t one. It was just an abandoned boat sitting in the middle of the lake.

He turned back to the road, wondering how an empty boat had gotten into the lake without any strong winds or storms, and saw something huge and dark standing in front of the car. Wil gasped, his muscles tensed, and he slammed on the brakes, too late. His car rammed into the thing in the road, knocked it down, and the Corolla’s front tires thumped mightily as they plowed over the thing like an organic speedbump.

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The car swerved to the side and Wil shouted in pain as his neck was whipped to one side, and then it was over.

His car was stopped in the middle of the road, the hood bent upwards, but the engine was still puttering. There was a definite hitch to it now and Wil thumped his head on the wheel.

“Fucking stupid. Not watching the god damn road during an emergency,” he berated himself. He took a breath and pressed his head against the driver’s side window to look out as best he could.

A pair of deer’s legs poked out from under the car.

Wil sighed and cursed again.

A deer.

Normally he would have gotten out of the car, checked the deer, and at least pulled it off the road so other drivers wouldn’t hit it. But he was in a rush, and he suspected that if the deer wasn’t dead already, finishing it off would be a mercy.

“Sorry buddy,” Wil said and began to roll forward. He braced himself for the bump of his back tires running over the deer, but it never came. Wil blinked and glanced out the closed driver’s window again, and in the rearview mirror.

The deer was up.

He saw a pair of proud antlers in the rearview mirror. Not a deer then, a buck. Its wet, black eyes blinked at him. There was some blood on a white patch of hair across the buck’s chest, but no other sign of injury.

“Tough guy,” Wil said, glad despite the emergency that he hadn’t killed an animal. He gave the buck a last quick look and started to pull away when the animal opened its mouth.

Its mouth kept opening, impossibly huge, until the opening spread to its neck, and that continued to open as well. The buck’s obscene mouth was lined with crooked, stubby fangs going all the way down its throat. That was when Wil also saw some sort of viscous dark fluid leaking from its eyes.

“What the hell,” Wil asked in a monotone. His mind didn’t understand what he was seeing, but his body didn’t give a damn. His foot was on autopilot and it slammed on the gas pedal. Wil snapped his eyes off the rearview mirror, determined not to make the same mistake twice, and sped forward.

The buck followed, and at speed. The sides of it split outward, exposing more teeth and the raw, red tissue of the buck’s musculature. Wil heard himself screaming and wondered how long he had been doing it.

The buck lowered its head and slammed into the back of the Toyota, sending the back end fish-tailing to the side, the front turning back towards the buck. Wil continued to scream, and then grunted in pain as the buck slammed into the side of the car. The windows shattered and Wil was peppered with a glittering hail of safety glass. He leaned away from the window and the sharp points of the horns that threatened to gouge his face. He kept his foot on the gas, tried to get the Toyota under control and point it back toward the ranger’s station, but the buck was relentless.

It slammed the side of the car again and dented the driver’s door in. Wil grunted in pain as the door crumpled inward and struck him in the side. The car tilted, rose up, then landed on the passenger side. There was another hard bang as the buck struck the underside of the Toyota and finally sent it tipping over onto the roof.

How the hell is that thing so strong? Wil thought somewhere amidst the shrieking alarm claxons blaring in his head. The buck hit the car again and it screeched as the roof rotated along the asphalt and the car turned in a wobbling circle. Wil shook his head and had a moment to wonder why the airbag hadn’t deployed in his shitty car before movement caught his eye.

The buck lowered its head and Wil saw its obscene, elongated mouth inches away from his shattered window. By rights the buck should be dead. Its throat had been effectively torn open from the back of its jaw to the bottom of its neck. It should have bled out in seconds, not had the strength to chase down and knock over a speeding car.

All those teeth, Wil thought. They looked like shark teeth: triangular, stumpy, serrated, and lined up in militant rows, ready to march to the fore at a moment’s notice. No deer on the planet had teeth like that in its mouth, let alone down in its throat.

But evidence to the contrary was slobbering and snarling inches away from Wil’s face as the buck leaned its snout down and towards the broken window. Wil fumbled with his seatbelt and leaned away from the window as the buck snapped its lethal jaws at him. It missed his shoulder by the width of a fingernail, its slobber sprinkling onto his shirt. It reared back and lunged forward again for his neck, just as Wil found the seatbelt buckle, but too late.

And the airbag deployed.

It burst out of the steering column with an almost comical pffft! sound and slapped the buck's mouth back and away. The buck snarled at this assault and snapped at the bag, popping and ripping it open with ease, but giving Wil enough time to unbuckle and scramble away.

His arm bumped against the wood-axe, which somehow hadn’t struck him during the wreck. He grabbed it as the buck lunged at him again, and Wil forced his shoulder against the passenger door. He rolled out of the car more than crawled, then sprang to his feet in a wobbly jump, axe in hand. With a very un-deer-like bellow, the buck opened its huge maw and charged at Wil.