“Alright, let’s head out” Doug motions his hand forward for us to follow. We began to pick up camp around twenty minutes after Alexia woke up. Finally leaving ten minutes afterwards. Our mission today is to get as close as we can to the river and also get some water to fill our bottles.

We continue to walk through the trees being careful to watch out for unexpected things. We make some small talk, but for the most part we save our breath. We walk in quiet only to hear the leaves and grass crunch beneath our feet. We stop every two hours to take a break and grab a snack until we finally come up to lunchtime.

“Wow, it’s a lot slower to hike in the woods than the road. Though in saying that, it’s a lot more comfortable than the road” I say chuckling. “Yeah, all the dirt tend to cushion your feet as you walk in here” Doug replies to my comment.

I take a handful of trail mix and stuff it into my mouth. I made sure to stuff a bunch of food into the packs in case of anything like this were to happen. But it won’t last for long, I hope the Rangers know how to hunt when the time comes. We finish up a little after that and get back on the way.

Sometime in the mid-afternoon we came up to a certain scene. “There’s our water we need” I smile. “Are you sure it’s safe to drink?” Helen asks, “What is that thing?” Alexia asks after Helen.

We have come up to a stream but something was drinking out of it. There was a very deformed creature with four long legs, a long neck, with a small head. It is craning down to lap up the water into its mouth. We’re hiding behind some trees a good distance away as to not provoke or scare it.

“No, it can’t be” Doug says in disbelief. “What’s up?” I look to him.

“Is that a deer? But how’s it infected” He says in wonder. “What? You’ve never seen animals infected with it” I state in shock.

“Not really, we’ve only seen people infected by it” Helen speaks up. “Well that’s news to me. I’ve seen quite a variety of animals that were infected by the parasite. As long as it’s capable of mutating properly to the host; there have been some cases, rare as it is, that the parasite couldn’t properly mutate in the given time and it just died out” I start giving a short speech.

“But if it’s drinking there, it can’t be safe to take the water then, right?” Helen asks again. “I do see where you’re coming from, but we’ve tested this quite a lot. The highest risk we’ll have from drinking that water is getting sick from the normal bacteria that lives in it. The parasite dies basically instantly after it leaves the host body if it is not direct put into contact with another host. That and it needs a lot of heat to survive, and with all of this. The water is not a proper host nor is it hot, quite frankly I bet it’s going to be very cold. Also it’s not going to be revived when we boil the water, once it’s dead it doesn’t come back” short speech again.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Now it’ll be best to kill it so that it doesn’t try to attack us. But let’s do that farther away from the water, wouldn’t be too healthy to have blood spilling into the water we want to drink” I stop and ponder for a second “Doug, you should take point. You probably have more experience at this than I”. He chuckles, “Will do”.

He pulls out his pistol, I raise my hand up. “Hold up, do you plan on waking up the whole forest with that?” I ask confused. “Ha ha, don’t worry, I know better than that” he laughs.

He then pulls out a cylinder from his pack, (Oh, I never knew he had a silencer). Silencers don’t automatically make it to where you can’t hear the gun shoot, but it does make it considerably quieter. It shouldn’t alarm anything past 20-30 yards away, which we can see there’s nothing living near besides the mutated deer.

“Here I go” He states and walks past the trees we’re at. I look at Alexia and press my lips together. If I must watch I can, but it’s not like I enjoy watching things die. I’ll look away when I can, and right now I don’t have to watch.

I hear a kind of moaning growl come from the deer, then two quick shots fire out, then one more a few moments later. “Well that should do it” Doug calls out and we all come out into the open.

Sure enough, the deer is ten feet away from the stream lying motionless. Doug unscrews the cylinder and puts it back into his pack and shoves the gun into its holster. “Let’s see, we’re going to want to refill all of our bottle, though most of them are plastic. We do have a pot for boiling, and I’d rather not risk contaminating our bottles until we have clean water.” I let out a mmm. “We do have those waterproof bags inside our packs” Helen speaks up.

“Ha… I see, instead of preventing water from trying to enter the bag. We reverse it and make it to where water can’t escape. Ha Ha. Great plan, everyone take out your bags, we’ll each carry our own amount of water” I start commanding. We each take out our own waterproof bag and unroll it. They’re really only meant for traveling on water so there’s nothing inside the bag at this point.

I open up the bag and walk up the hill a few feet, I put the bag onto its side and let the water run into it. “Yikes, it’s freezing. Best not to get unnecessarily wet ourselves” I state. I let the water run in a good bit until it seems a bit heavy, I pick it up and it’s close to half full. Mind the bag is around five gallons. Everyone else does the same, we roll the tops closed and pick them up. We’ll be carrying them hung around our shoulders the rest of the way, don’t want to accidentally make everything inside our packs wet.

We stop an hour earlier than what we usually would. Doug and I collect some firewood, and Helen prepares for the fire. We put the pot on the fire to get heated up and start to boil all the water. While it’s preparing to boil, we setup our tents, including mine but not the couple’s this time. We fill the bottles and dry out the bags. We eat some food, Alexia and I head to our own tents. “Good night, love ya” I whisper over to her and enter my tent for some sleep. We should be at the river by at least lunchtime tomorrow.