Jake woke up to his alarm early the next morning. He checked his now fully charged phone, it was six fifteen in the morning. The sun was still down, and it was dead quiet around him. Sitting up and folding up the pudgy camping blanket he’d stolen last night, Jake stretched his back till he felt a satisfying popping sensation.
Back behind the store had not been a comfortable place to sleep, but by now he was used to sleeping in worse conditions. The addition of the blanket taken from the store had made last night practically heavenly, if not for his paranoid reactions to the random bumps in the night. Jake unwrapped his remaining breakfast sandwich, which was no longer warm and far less appetizing than yesterday, but still edible.
Enjoying his meal, Jake packed up his blanket and prepared for the rising sun by trying to organize his bag. There wasn’t much he could do in the way of organization; it was more an excuse to have something to distract himself and waste the remaining hour or so before the sun rose. When at last he saw the faint glimmer of sunlight begin to break as the sun prepared to rise, he gathered his things and stood. He decided it be best to walk out from behind the buildings around him so he’d have a less obscured view of the sunrise.
From there he waited with bated breath for it to rise, felt its early morning light hit his skin, and then felt the familiar sensation of falling through the sky. Jake was caught off guard but quickly recovered, managing to land with his feet beneath him. Unfortunately, his momentum carried him forward several uncertain steps till he crashed to the floor. This didn’t bother Jake in the slightest now, though, as he was too ecstatic at having been right about the correlation between the rising of the sun and his uncontrolled falls.
What it meant, he didn’t know, but it was something about this ordeal he understood for once and he felt for the first time that he was one step closer to getting home. Standing up from the dirt and dusting himself off, Jake surveyed where he’d fallen. It looked like plains stretching out for miles, yet there was no grass growing. Only brown mulch, squishy to walk on, and what was left in his hands felt warm to the touch.
Turning around, he could see a couple of massive solid grey protrusions jutting out of the mulch, stretching up into the sky past the clouds and up into the unknown. He couldn’t see any clear signs of foliage or water on the mountains, but he was too far away to see any concrete details. After deliberating for a bit Jake decided to walk towards the mountains.
He didn’t like the idea of making camp in the middle of a barren field, plus he didn’t know how well the mulch below would serve as a campsite. He hoped the mountains would offer some form of natural protection, along with steadier ground to make camp on.
The mulch was surprisingly easy to walk on, though it flexed as he moved across it, it wasn’t to a nauseating degree or to a degree where he felt like he would be easily toppled. The biggest issue with the mulch was the potholes. Occasionally while walking his foot would sink into the ground, revealing massive underground caverns below. He was always able to pull his foot out without much effort and keep walking. Once, though, he swore he felt something nuzzle past and rub against the bottom of his shoe which gave him pause.
With a shudder, he waited till the sensation was gone before quickly pulling his foot up. Hurrying away while trying his best to forget the sensation and ignore the creeping feeling the ground beneath him was crawling, he was infinitely more mindful of the potholes than before. He also moved infinitely slower, but after a few hours, he reached the mountain base.
He was disappointed to find, however, that the mountain became flatter the closer he got to it, becoming a gentler curve than when originally viewed at a distance. What he originally had hoped to be a sharp incline that could act as a natural wall was an incline of twenty to thirty degrees. Still a steep incline, but not what he’d been hoping for.
Perhaps if he continued up the mountain exploring up or around the mountain past its base, he could find the natural wall he was seeking, but by this point he was tired. Over the last week he’d grown used to large stretches of uninterrupted walking, but what he wasn’t used to was walking those same stretches while hauling luggage. While he in no way regretted the supplies he had stolen, he did find it made travel harder.
Especially the gallon jugs of water. They were uncomfortable to hold and difficult to drink out of. While he was thankful for them since he saw no sign of water even now he’d reached the base of the mountain, that didn’t make them any less annoying to carry.
After sitting down for a while to catch his breath and relax in general, he began setting up his camp for the night. There wasn’t anything around him to burn so he gave up on the thought of a fire and focused on setting up his newly found tent. The words “pop-up” on the label had made him think would set itself up on its own as soon as he removed it from its case, or at the very least it would be easy to set up.
Maybe it was easy to set up for someone who had actually set up a tent before, but for Jake, it took well over a constant hour of struggle before he’d managed to assemble the tent upright. The inside was compact, he barely fit inside on his own and with his luggage dragged inside it was claustrophobic, but it was still more relaxing than sleeping exposed the past week had been.
By now most of his day had passed, it was close to sunset and Jake was tired. He decided it best to turn in for the night and wake up early. He had no idea how long it would take to pack up tomorrow morning and would be waking early to leave himself time to deal with it. He knew he would need to get faster at making camp, he couldn’t afford to spend half his day making and breaking camp.
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Jake set an alarm for eight hours in the future, far enough off he should be able to get a decent amount of sleep and still have time to repack his campsite. Then he turned his attention to dinner. Grabbing a can of soup from his bag, Jake realized for the first time the soup didn’t have a pull tab on top and without a can opener he didn’t have a way to cleanly open the soup. Letting out an exhausted sigh, and a mutter of “It’s never easy, is it?” Jake removed all the cans of soup to check them but found none he could easily open.
Not wanting to deal with the soup issue today, Jake opted to just eat the jerky he bought instead. He’d never been a fan of jerky before, but now he doubted there was anything edible he wouldn’t eat. Opening a bag of jerky and releasing the pungent smell of dried beef into the air, he enjoyed about half the bag before closing it and tossing it to the side. Next, he removed a toothbrush and some floss from the bag and brushed his teeth. He felt a comforting sense of familiarity, doing something so normal after so long, and once he was done, he rolled himself up in his pudgy travel blanket and drifted off to sleep, feeling at peace for the first time in a while.
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Searing pain shot through Jake's back before he had time to react, followed by a piercing roar as the ground shook. He was awake, lying on his stomach, his vision blurry as he struggled to come to. Around him lay the tattered remains of his tent and the padded torn-up cloth of his blanket. Mixed amongst it was dried, splattered blotches of red he hadn’t remembered decorating either the tent's or blanket's surface before.
He was flat down in the mulch. Looking around confused; his vision locked onto a horrid shadow looming over where his campsite had existed just hours before. It moved silently, its fur black as night save for splotches of red around its paws. The paws themselves lay raised from the ground, supported by long vicious claws covered in bright viscous crimson and torn bits of cloth. Twin antlers jutted from the side of its head while its long, elongated snout busied itself digging through the scattered remains of the tent fangs barred as they continually chewed and tore through fabric and plastic and metal to devour the meat and soup Jake had stolen.
Around the beast, scattered, was everything else in the tent. The blanket and tent had been destroyed when it pounced and scattered about through the air, Jake's open bag landed next to him, within arm’s reach, and the water bottles lay yards away, one open draining into the ground the other nested beneath one of the creatures’ paws. Jake himself lay still after being attacked and flung through the air, forgotten as unimportant for the time being.
Jake felt his breath catch as he watched the beast move. There was no way he could hope to survive if that thing took notice of him again. Already he noticed his blood, scattered about freely all over the place in mass quantities. He slowly reached behind him and felt his back, bringing forth a horrid stinging sensation and causing a large inhale of air from Jake as he forced down a scream.
Looking at his shaky hand he found them coated in blood, and from what he felt it looked as if in the beast’s efforts to tear through Jakes camp it had lacerated the skin of his back completely. Moving would feel like a hell worse than anything he’d gone through this week. But laying here was not an option anymore, soon the creature would grow tired of the scraps of food it found in the destroyed camps and turn its attention to the prey it had left injured and waiting. He needed to escape, now, while that was still even a remote possibility.
He took a few slow, deep breaths to steady himself, knowing what would come next would hurt. Then in one motion grabbed his discarded bag and forced himself to his feet, running off across the mulch. He was unsteady and the sudden motion forced violent screams from his throat, but that didn’t matter. The second he’d moved to stand and grab the bag, the beast’s attention had snapped toward him, and its silent movements were interrupted by a loud, piercing, shriek as it began its hunt.
It was fast, much faster than Jake, it would be upon him in seconds eager to finish what it had started when first attacked the camp. Jake himself also moved sluggishly and off-balanced, dragging behind the open backpack. Grabbing the back had been a mistake, but now it was tangled up in his arms and wrapped around him, taking it off and leaving it would take longer than pressing forward with it, and every microsecond counted as the distance between himself and his pursuer shortened.
Panic welled up as blood flowed freely down his back, dying the ground behind him and staining the back of his legs. He didn’t know what to do, or where he was running to. It was all flat, open plain as far as the eye could see. Then as he was struggling to move his foot sunk, falling through a pothole into one of the caverns below. There were no other options left, forcing his leg out and his head inside Jake began wiggling his body into the darkness of the earth below.
It was slow going at first, but the softness of the mulch and his desperate struggle to force the earth aside eventually bore fruit and Jake was able to pull himself nearly completely into the hole. But, just as he was about to pull his left into safety below sharp pain rang out and Jake's screams grew even louder as the beast had at last caught up to its prey. The creature racked its claws, slashing through the back of Jake's leg desperate to try and drag its escaped prey out of the ground. Its claws proved too sharp, however, as they failed to properly grip Jake's leg and instead slashed the skin and muscle like butter.
Howling in pain, unable to even imagine putting weight on his leg, Jak crawled as far back as possible from the pothole above, pushing ever further into the dark staining the mulch around him a dark crimson. The beast above was enraged, slamming its head and claws into the ground, randomly slashing through the pothole in a furious display and snapping its jaws wildly in hopes of catching the slightest morsel of the prize below.
But though the ground gave slightly, it would not buckle to the creature above, and at last, all it could do was stare, turning one of its eyes to the hole till all light was blocked and all Jake could see was its horrid eye. No trace of reason was there, just the blind fury and instinct to hunt of a wild monster, enraged that its prey had evaded its grasp. It was horrifying to Jake, being face to face with a true monster.
He tried to focus on it, tried to stay awake for his safety. But he was faltering already. Already the intense pain was starting to fade away as all the sensation around him slipped, fading into darkness as his vision faltered. Swirling darkness surrounded him as he fell back against the mulch, staring forward into the beast’s unwavering gaze. He slipped away, falling into unconsciousness the last sight he’d see being the vicious gaze of the monster ahead.