The ranger station for Oak Rest was a quaint two-story log cabin with a pale blue roof and a stone chimney poking out of the side. Gentle puffs of white smoke floated out of the chimney, and the scent of woodsmoke hovered over the area. A tan jeep with a yellow emblem on the side that read “OAK REST STATE PARK RANGER,” was parked in front on a short dirt driveway. A black and yellow generator sat on the side of the cabin in a small, locked, enclosed metal box with grating along the sides. A sign hung in the window of the front door displaying who was stationed at the cabin and when, along with a paper of phone numbers of local and federal parks and recreation-related services.
An expansive dirt parking lot with spaces marked by thick wooden logs sat next to the station. The lot marked the boundary where the Oak Rest recreational housing development gave way to Oak Rest National Park. Wooden signs with bright, friendly letters carved into them and maps as big as refrigerators pointed and outlined the numerous hiking trails and points of interest. Wil almost leapt onto the station’s wooden porch, seized the front door’s handle and tugged.
The door thunked in place.
Locked.
The door had a large window in its center, and Wil peered through it while cupping his hands around his eyes to shield from the gray glare of the overcast October sky. The interior of the ranger station was dark, with most of the curtains drawn tight. The cabin wasn’t very big, and the second floor was actually more of a loft with a ladder/narrow staircase leading up to it. There were two desks, a locked metal cabinet, some wooden chairs, and what looked like bunk beds up in the loft. There was probably more but that was all Wil could see through the window.
He rapped on the glass once. Twice.
“Hello?” he called and checked the timetable on the door.
According to the table, Rangers O’Donnell and Gutierrez should be on duty and at least one of them should be present in the station. Wil banged on the door and shook the handle.
“Hello? Hey!” he said and banged again. Their jeep was here. One of them should be inside. Even if they had panicked during all the news and left, they wouldn’t leave without their jeep. Or at least if they did, they wouldn’t have gone far.
The buck hadn’t been far from his cabin though.
Were there more like it? Maybe the woods were full of obscenely strong, black-eyed animals with worms under their skin who wouldn’t die.
Wil stopped banging on the door. He turned and put it to his back as he raised his axe to his chest and faced the road and the woods beyond.
The woods loomed on the other side of the road, a cathedral of needles and leaves held aloft by its endless wooden columns. Wil had always liked the woods. It was why he had come out here, to have a final communion with nature, in a place he had fond family memories (and not a few with Naomi). But now, as silent as the woods were, and knowing that things like the black-eyed buck might be out there, they were more like a tomb than anything else.
Something bumped behind Wil and he nearly screamed as he whirled around, axe held over his chest in a weak attempt at defense.
A short Latina woman stood on the other side of the door. Her wavy black hair was a prime example of disheveled bedhead, matched by her narrow, irritable squint. She was fully dressed in dark green pants and a light olive-green shirt with a shiny badge on the ffront and patches on the sleeves that marked her as one of Oak Rest’s assigned rangers. She filled the uniform out well enough, her build diminutive but stocky, like a boxer or wrestler. Though her face was tight with irritation and lined from her squinting, she couldn’t have been much older than Wil. Early-thirties at most.
She cracked one eye fully open as she put her hand on the doorknob, then stopped when she noticed the axe Wil was holding. He saw a reflection of himself in the dark glass, overlaid atop the woman behind it as a grim phantasm.
The axe still slightly splattered with black gunk and bright red blood. Wil’s chest rose and fell as if he had just run a marathon. His hair was a wild nest, made even more so by the twigs, needles, and leaves in it. He was bleeding from his side, his shoulder, and multiple smaller cuts and scrapes. His eyes had the wide and wild look of a paranoid lunatic and his mouth wavered open and closed as he sucked in deep breaths.
Wil saw her mouth the words “What the fuck?” and backed away from the door, both eyes very wide now.
“Wait!” Wil said and dropped the axe on the station porch. “There’s an emergency! Please, I’ve been attacked and my car was wrecked and we have to call…somebody!”
Wil had been about to say “My ex-girlfriend,” but realized at the last second that doing so wouldn’t do much to assuage the ranger that he wasn’t a stark raving psycho. A panicked man wielding a bloody axe and shouting about his ex-girlfriend was probably one of the worst things to see on one’s front porch.
It could be worse, Wil thought, I could also be selling insurance or something.
He felt a mad giggle rise up in him and bit his lip to cut it off. Giggling wasn’t going to do him any favors either.
The ranger paused in her retreat at the mention of “emergency,” and “attacked.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Are you serious?” Wil replied. But if she had been asleep, she might not know. Wil hadn’t known until a few hours ago, and by then whatever had been happening had already been happening for several hours before that. Wil didn’t stop to think too much about why a forest ranger was asleep in the middle of the day and shook his head.
“Look, I was attacked by a—a wild animal. A deer. Buck. It almost gored me and I hit it with my axe and ran away. It was, I don’t know, rabid or something,” he said. He didn’t want to scare the ranger off with tales of a super-buck flipping his car over and then extending its eyeballs out of its skull to glare at him, post-decapitation.
“A rabid deer,” the ranger repeated.
“Please, my phone can’t get a signal and I need help. I’m not a threat I just—I need to make some calls and maybe get patched up.”
The ranger eyed him again, her dark eyes giving him a once over up-and-down.
“Where are you coming from?” she asked.
“106 Pine Hill. Wilfred Davis. I…shit I left my ID in the cabin,” he said.
“Mm. I recognize you. Been up here about a week, right? You checked in last Friday,” the ranger asked and yawned. Her casual, sleepy demeanor was making Wil want to pick up his axe and hack the door in. Go full Here’s-Johnny if she wasn’t going to let him in.
“Yes, that’s me,” he said instead after he took a deep breath. “Please, will you help me? I’m serious. Some bad shit has happened out here.”
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“Gimme a sec,” she said and walked away. Wil looked down and noticed she wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks and her shirt wasn’t fully tucked in, and that one of her shirt buttons was misaligned. She must have really been sacked out. Where was the other ranger then? This was (probably) Gutierrez, so where was O’Donnell?
Gutierrez came back into view strapping a belt around her waist. Wil spotted a pistol in a holster on the right side. Gutierrez saw him looking and gave it a pat. There was also a can of bear mace, a radio, some utility pouches, and a couple extra clips alongside a pair of cuffs.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she said as she reached for the doorknob again. “And leave your axe out there.”
“Sure,” Wil nodded. She glared at him for a moment, unlocked and opened the door, then stepped aside. There wasn’t much more to the ranger station than what Wil had glimpsed from the window apart from a stone fireplace, a sofa, an old TV, and a huge map of the park stuck to a corkboard up on the wall.
Wil pulled out his phone and tried to find a WiFi signal, but there was nothing. Made sense if the power was still out, but that’s what the generator was for.
“You have to start the generator,” Wil told Gutierrez.
“What? No,” she said as she sat at one of the two desks and put her socks on.
“Yes, you do. The power’s out here, maybe in Portland, maybe in the whole state.”
Gutierrez grimaced and hit a button on the computer atop her desk. She pushed it again, frowned, and a third time.
“All right, power’s out. That’s probably why O’Donnell’s gone. Guy coulda left a note though, geez,” Gutierrez said and then took the radio out of her belt. “O’Donnell this is Gutierrez, do you copy? Over.”
Static. She adjusted a knob on the side of the radio and tried again.
“O’Donnell this is Gutierrez. Repeat: do you copy? Over.”
Static.
Gutierrez tried a few other frequencies and repeated herself, cursed, and put the radio back in her belt.
"Mayba a radio antennae got broken somewhere?" Wil asked.
“Possible, but that wouldn't affect two-way radios like this. They're set to trasmit and receive to each other, independent of any outside systems. O'Donnell either isn't listening or something else might be screwy,” she said. Wil sighed.
“Please, just start the generator and—”
“Look, Mr. Davis, you need to calm down. My fellow ranger is probably sorting the power issue out as we speak. Probably a tree fell over and hit some lines. I’m more concerned about this attack and rabid deer you were talking about. You look a little roughed up too. You need medical attention?”
“No, it’s just scratches mostly. But the power, it’s not just—” Wil said and then cut himself off. She didn’t know. He couldn’t prove it to her without power, short of driving down to Portland, which he didn’t think she would help him with. At least not without some more convincing.
“Fine. You might need that though,” he said and pointed at her pistol.
“I’ll keep it handy,” Gutierrez said. “Now you gonna show me where this thing attacked you or do I need to go over the whole park myself?”
“It’s just up the road,” Wil said as Gutierrez finished lacing up her boots.
“C’mon, we’ll take the jeep,” she said and strode outside, back Out There. Wil tried to keep his impatience in check and followed her into the car. Gutierrez adjusted the misaligned buttons on her shirt as she drove with one hand and Wil caught a glimpse of a black sports bra beneath before he looked away.
Had she been sleeping in her underwear? In a cabin she shared with another…
Ooooooh, Wil thought. She and Ranger O’Donnell had probably been getting up to some frisky business earlier and she’d fallen asleep after. He wondered if it was normal for rangers to be getting laid instead of on patrol or something. Then again, the parking lot outside the station had been mostly empty, save for the jeep.
His internal examination of what the rangers had been doing was interrupted as Gutierrez brought the jeep to a halt in front of Wil’s upside-down Toyota.
“That yours?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Wil said.
“How in the hell’d you get it to flip over like that?”
“Deer.”
“Excuse me? A deer did that? A whole mess of deer just came up and trampled your car over onto its roof?”
“Well, a buck. And just one,” Wil said. Gutierrez looked at him sin silence, then she snorted and chuckled.
“This would be the rabid buck?”
“Yes. Look, I can show you where I killed it,” Wil said as he got out of the car. He was desperate to hurry this along, convince her to fire up the generator so the WiFi would work and then maybe get a signal. It was still no guarantee, but it was something. If that didn’t work, maybe he could convince her to drive him into Portland or at least help push his car over with the jeep.
“Gimme a sec,” Gutierrez said and reached for something in the back. She exited the vehicle a moment later wielding a pump-action shotgun, which she pumped once with an ominous chik-chik! “Show me where you were attacked.”
“Well it started here, and then it chased me down the hill,” Wil said as he walked forward.
“If you killed a rabid buck on your own with just an axe I’ll be pretty impressed,” Gutierrez said.
“Uh-huh,” Wil said, half hoping the head was still alive, half not. If it was, that was even more proof. If not, well, he’d be spared having to look at the thing again. His blood from the attack had dried to brown splotches on the forest floor but it was still easy enough to follow. He rounded the side of an oak and saw the place where he had killed the buck.
Except that it was gone. Head and body both, just gone. There were still thick splotches of that black blood or custard or whatever it was. The pine tree the buck had embedded itself into still bore a number of deep holes in its bark. But the creature itself, or its remains, were nowhere to be seen.
“What the hell?” Wil asked.
“What?” Gutierrez asked.
“It’s gone,” Wil said and gestured at the ground.
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, it was here! That’s where its antlers almost impaled me! This is where the body was sort of bleeding out!” Wil pointed at the tree and the ground respectively.
“That black shit?” Gutierrez said and stepped forward. She leaned down and sniffed, then gagged and stepped back. “Christ, that reeks. Well, if you did kill it, maybe something else took it. Bear or something.”
Wil hadn’t even thought of a bear. If a buck with those black worms in it had done this to him and his car, a bear would be an absolute terror.
“We’ll get back to the station, file a report, get you patched up. Call a truck for your car. You definitely hit something, dunno about a buck flipping it over, though. I’m gonna ask you to take a breathalyzer test when we get back, maybe a urine sample.”
“I’m not drunk or on drugs!” Wil said.
“Sir—” Gutierrez said and then the buck burst out from behind a grouping a oaks and charged. Wil grabbed Gutierrez by her forearms and yanked back hard enough to pitch himself backward and onto his ass. Gutierrez was pulled off her feet as the buck rushed past where she had been standing a second before, but not without one of its antlers gouging her leg.
Gutierrez screamed in pain and surprise as she fell onto the ground next to Wil. Wil rolled to the side and hobbled to his feet as he tried to pull Gutierrez up. The buck seemed more aware of its surroundings this time, and hadn’t charged with full force. It avoided getting its head stuck in a tree again, but still skidded forward on its hooves for several feet before it turned around to face them again.
“That’s it! Holy shit it put its head back on?” Wil babbled. The place he had cut into could still be seen: the hair around the neck was uneven, and several of those wormy black veins had gone out of and back through the skin, like living thread. There was dried blood around the wound as well, and the buck no longer had full use of its long, hanging mouth. What it did have was still full of wicked little teeth though.
Wil noticed something else as it began to turn back to face them: its legs were wobbly. Its entire body below the cut twitched and jittered and tilted. It movements were no longer strong and precise, but slower, more awkward, at least when it came to turning. It had run in a straight line without much difficulty.
“What the fuck is wrong with it?” Gutierrez said as she finally focused on the buck.
“Shoot the god damn thing!” Wil shouted. The buck bellowed, spitting up chunks of its own internal organs out of its maw. Gutierrez raised the shotgun and the buck charged.
The shotgun roared and the buck's head vanished off its neck. Its antlers stayed attached, but fell to either side as the central skull and all connective tissue was decimated by the tight cloud of buckshot. The buck fell forward onto what remained of its upper neck and skidded to an almost comical stop against an oak.
“Shoot it again!” Wil said.
Gutierrez shot it again, straight down that massive gullet, then a third time in the chest. The buck's body twitched from the impacts, but made no other movements. Wil kept his back against the pine behind him, looking between a splattered chunk of meat several yards away that had been the buck’s head, and its still body.
There was movement from a large chunk of skull. Wil gasped and pointed. Scattered among the shards of bone and brain were leathery black chunks of something. They throbbed and wiggled. Some of them had pieces of the vein-worms attached to them and extended back for a few inches. These lashed and slapped at the ground briefly, and then flopped, and then stilled.
The body of the buck seemed to deflate, and a thick puddle of dark fluid seeped out of its wounds and orifices. The smell was repulsive, and covered the area in a thick cloud of stench.
“I’m going back to the station and finding O’Donnell,” Gutierrez said. “And you’re going to tell me just what the hell is happening.”