It seemed like every other fairy tale Wil ever heard growing up involved stupid children getting lost in the woods, and that this was the scariest thing ever. Wil’s only experience with forests had been as national parks and that sort of thing: calm, preserved places of natural beauty that offered a break from the concrete jungle of the city.

Now, he got it.

Some long-buried instinct rose up inside of him and told him that this was A Very Bad Place. It was a part of him that hadn’t gotten much use in the city, but no less vital. It had been a part of daily life for his distant ancestors, that little inner voice that told them to watch their backs for things with fangs and claws.

Every step he took seemed too loud: the crackle of pine needles an auditory GPS letting every horror that could be in the shadows know his exact location. It wasn’t so dark that they needed a flashlight to see the ground in front of them, but it was getting close. Wil dreaded the coming dark, not only for how it would plunge the woods into total blackness, but how it would necessitate the need for flashlights. They would become a beacon for anything out there.

“How long have we been walking?” Wil whispered. The pack was heavy, and his feet were starting to ache a bit as he trod over stones and roots.

“Thirty minutes,” Gutierrez whispered behind him. “A little over a mile, maybe more.”

“Oh my god,” Wil sighed. “That’s it?”

“We’re on uneven terrain carrying at least twenty pounds of gear and supplies each,” Matsuda said.

“And we got an old man and a lazy civilian slowing the rangers down,” Gutierrez said. All of them kept their voices low, barely audible, but Wil knew it wouldn’t be wise to carry on a conversation for long. He only nodded at Gutierrez’s jab and kept walking.

Matsuda appeared to be doing fine.

They all trudged in silence for a while, only stopping briefly for O’Donnell to check his map and compass by the dim light that barely filtered through the trees. Wil gripped his axe tightly while he leaned back against a tree. Gutierrez and Matsuda did the same, and everybody took the brief respite to have some water.

“Looks like we’re going in the right direction,” O’Donnell said. “Hopefully another two or three hours and we’ll clear the forest and hit the highway, and then we can try our luck getting a car. Worst case, there’s a gas station another mile up the road and we can take a longer break there and restock if we need to.”

“You’re sure this is the fast way?” Wil asked.

“It would’ve taken us two or three hours just to reach the highway on the south end of the park,” Gutierrez said. “Then maybe another three or more to get halfway around to Portland. And again, that’s if there were no more road hazards. Even if we can’t find a car right away, we’ll still be going in the right direction.”

“Assuming all of your loved ones are fine, what then?” Matsuda asked. “Before power went out, the news was saying to stay out of cities. Do you just plan to hole up with your family?”

“No. Get them out,” Gutierrez said. “Do what you suggested earlier and head for that army base.”

“Air National Guard,” Matsuda corrected.

“Whatever,” Gutierrez said. “I’m going there, with my folks and my brothers and sister.”

“Same,” Wil said. “If…when I get to Naomi, I’m getting out of the city.”

“Getting into Portland is one hurdle. Getting out the other side is another entirely,” Matsuda said.

“First step to getting out is getting in,” O’Donnell said as he folded his map up and pointed further ahead into the murk. “About four more miles that way.”

Everybody took another moment to collect themselves, then shouldered their packs and continued on.

----------------------------------------

It was another hour before they took a break again. During that time, the woods had continued their eerie and unnatural stillness. Not even insects stirred. There was noise, but it was distant, and none of it was comforting: helicopters, explosions, what might have been the roar of fighter jets, an air raid siren. All of it was muted with distance, barely audible or recognizable until they had all paused to take a minute.

Whenever they did hear a noise, or thought they heard one, they all froze and waited. O’Donnell was usually the first to identify it, then wave them forward.

Wil fell into lock-step behind Matsuda, his body edging past being tired and moving towards worn out. The edges of his rattled nerves had begun to smooth out from fatigue rather than actually feeling better. Naomi still needed him, and there might still be any number of horrible things waiting for them in the woods. But his brain was starting to care less about those things, and his body was taking over: it was tired from adrenaline pumping and being constantly terrified. It needed another rest.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“Stop,” O’Donnell said, his voice quiet, but tense.

Wil’s body tensed at once. He longer cared how much his feet hurt or how heavy the pack was, only how quickly he could run and in which direction. There was a rustle behind him as Gutierrez put the shotgun stock against her shoulder.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“Ahead. Trees,” O’Donnell said and for a moment, Wil wanted to laugh. If O’Donnell only noticed that there were trees ahead of them now, perhaps he wasn’t the one to be leading.

Then he looked up from his aching feet and saw the trees.

The pines all around them were normal, save for a small copse about twenty yards ahead. There, in a rough circle about as wide as a city bus, they had changed. It was as if the trees had been turned to rubber, pulled outward, then turned back into hard wood. All the pines curved away from a point in the middle of the circle as if repelled by it, but they hadn’t bent or broken or splintered in the slightest. They were all smoothly curved away, branches, needles, and all.

The center of the circle was nothing but bare earth, void even of the countless dead pine needles that provided a soft carpet for the rest of the forest. Well, not quite bare. There was a dark puddle in the center, and Wil noticed a single ripple spread across its surface at regular intervals.

“There’s something new,” Matsuda said.

“What the hell is it?” Wil asked.

“Definitely not anything normal,” Gutierrez said.

The small party edged closer, but not too close. Gutierrez’s observation was obvious, but correct, Wil suspected. Whatever it was had probably happened around the same time as every other crazy thing. Which, as far as Wil was concerned, made it Bad News.

As he came closer he saw a very subtle waver in the air, like a heat mirage. It was several feet above the dark, rhythmically rippling puddle, and the size of a beach ball. It was easy to miss in the darkness of the forest, but if he focused, he could definitely see the air shimmering.

“It’s blood,” Gutierrez whispered beside him.

“What?” he asked.

“That puddle. It’s blood,” she repeated. Wil squinted and then nodded. It had been hard to tell in the dim light of the woods, but now that she had mentioned it, he saw the puddle had a tell-tale reddish hue.

“I’m not going near…whatever that is,” Gutierrez added.

“Lucky for us, we don’t have to,” Matsuda said.

“I wanna try something,” O’Donnell said and picked up a pine cone. Before anybody could protest, he lobbed it underhand at the center of the distorted area. It thumped to the ground, inches from the blood puddle.

Nothing.

“Well——” O’Donnell started to say. Wil was still staring at the puddle and noticed a ripple cross its surface.

The pine cone moved, pulled into the air by an invisible force and accompanied by a sucking sound. It began to spin around as if in an invisible tornado, faster and faster. It spun violently, each rotation bringing it closer to the circle’s center.

Then, faster than Wil could blink, some force crushed it into the size of a penny. The sucking sound grew louder, and the crushed pine cone vanished into the center of the invisible vortex.

“Holy hell,” O’Donnell said. The vortex had picked up some dust and pine needles from the forest floor, and they drifted down and toward the center of the circle and the pool of blood.

“Guess we know how the blood got there,” Matsuda said. “Some poor critter walked right into it, and smoosh.”

Wil stared, open-mouthed at the distortion. It didn’t move, it didn’t change, it just stayed where it was, at the center of some Dali-esque partially-melted looking trees, over a puddle of blood that had a single ripple move through it every five seconds.

“Lucky the trees are a dead giveaway,” O’Donnell said. “If this thing was in an open field somewhere…”

“Worry about that if we’re in an open field,” Gutierrez said. “C’mon.”

Wil cast a final look over his shoulder at the distortion of the air and forest, and followed Matsuda and O’Donnell. The temporary jolt of confusion and surprise started to fade, and his body’s demands for rest continued.

They had walked about ten minutes when the steady thumping of Gutierrez’s boots stopped behind him. Wil paused and turned around to find the ranger looking off to the side.

“What is it?” he hissed. Gutierrez snapped her fingers once, then held a finger to her mouth. Matsuda and O’Donnell halted and turned, both bringing their guns up. Wil had to look down and fumble with the strap of his holster before he got his gun out. Then he had to turn it to the side and locate the safety and switch it off before he was ready to actually shoot.

He kept the gun pointed down at the dirt, mindful of Gutierrez casting a disparaging look at him while he had fumbled with the Sig Sauer.

Nobody moved.

The woods were still.

Snap.

The sound of a branch cracking under pressure, somewhere to the group’s right. All of them turned to face the sound, guns raised.

“Do not fire until you’re sure you want it dead,” Gutierrez whispered, barely audible, at Wil. He nodded and took a deep breath. The sweat he had accumulated during their hike turned cold on his skin and he shivered.

“Raagh,” something moaned/growled from the darkness. The sound was deep, echoing among the trees, a primal dirge. It definitely wasn’t made by anything human.

“Oh fuck,” Wil said.

“Easy,” O’Donnell whispered.

Something moved from behind a tree thirty yards away. At first Wil thought it was a mossy boulder rolling aside, but then its features began to sharpen as it moved forward.

It was a bear.

Or it had been.

It had the tell-tale black, wet eyes, thick black mucus running down its cheeks like a mourner’s tears, and an unnaturally misshapen body. Sandoval had been stretched out, taller but thinner. The bear had broadened. Its muscles had fully torn through its shaggy brown fur in bulging red hills. Thick, obsidian black thorns protruded from the folds of the muscle, some as long as Wil’s forearm. Its mouth split open into three tooth-lined segments and allowed five long, barbed tongues tipped with bone drills to slide out and lash at the ground.

Its claws were vicious, each one thicker than Wil’s hand and gouging deep furrows into the earth as te bear plodded forward. The thick black veins——worms, or whatever they were——pulsed visibly, and some of them detached and waved in the air like tentacles, as big around as two fingers and several feet long. The bear reared up on its hind legs and exposed that its stomach had been torn open at some point. Its intestines were visible, thick, slick ropes of gore, but they moved with their own vile life. One end of the intestines reared up, cobra-like, and displayed a toothy, sucking mouth like a lamprey.

Wil thought he might actually piss himself.

The black-eyed bear was over twelve feet tall standing, and wider across than three grown men standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

“Fire!” Matsuda said, breaking the horrified spell of silence that had befallen the group. The bear roared, its lamprey-intestines squealed, and then the forest was full of gunfire and snarling as the bear charged.