“You guys don’t want anything? Snacks? Drinks? They have a restroom here.”
“I’m good, thanks. Is this really the last gas station before we get there?”
“Yup. Hey, not sure if you need to pee? Trust me, it's better to have no regrets.”
“No, it’s just we’re so far out from you know. Civilization. But it’s fine.”
***
After a while, the howls fade. They loop in her head, however, and she can’t stop thinking about the origins of those sounds. She imagines that’s how a wolf might sound, if a wolf’s pitch wavered from a deep, throaty rumble to a whistle’s sharp note.
Maybe, like the stream, they don’t deserve to be called howls.
But it’s the best description she has. If only because it helps keep her from panicking. Comfort in the familiar.
Then her eyelids are like leaden weights. She jerks her head up more than once, bashing the back of her head on the rough bark. Even the cold can’t stop her from drifting off.
Yawning, Cora rubs her eyes with thumb and index finger. The mountains… She has to reach the mountains. But slumber is tantalizingly close. How long since she’s felt truly sleepy? Countless nights staying awake back home exacted their toll on her. She’s run on nothing but caffeine and adrenaline for so long that she’s forgotten what being awake even feels like.
The abyss calls to her. She listens.
And she responds.
Cora blinks, and the shadows are all wrong. What shadows? There is so little light to go by. She groans, stretching her arms out. A horrible, rending pain in her wrist bursts through her foggy awareness. Cora cries out, shaking her wrist, but the pain follows, spearing through tissue and bone alike.
Her wrist is swollen. Hot to the touch. Painful. Broken? She tries to stand, but her legs protest, so she stays still. Thinks. Digs through her memories, up to the moment everything changed.
Of why she isn’t in her room, tucked deep into her blankets. Why the air is so cold and dry. Why so many trees surround her, and there is no sign of civilization.
How did I forget?
Cora wants it to be nothing but a bad dream. A nightmare she’ll snap out of and shake, then laugh about it with Mari at school. Yet, the pain is too real. A blocky outline presses through the fabric of her backpack. She stares at the thing that doomed her.
It all happened.
Somehow, she keeps herself from breaking down, though her stomach tightens and she can’t stop staring at the box. Cora cried and sobbed and punched trees. Nothing is left within her. This world knows who she is, and she knows what this world is.
Too much. Trees, leaves, and needles take root inside her mind. They leech off her memories of home, already degrading by the second. She can’t remember what she last ate.
Her eyes widen. Cora produces images of her parents, her friends, her home, her stuff. They float up to the surface, better than 4k. She can still picture her dad’s wrinkles, or her mom’s frown. Mari’s smiles, her house’s rickety porch, her dog’s diamond crest of white fur on his chest, the dead outlet by her bed.
She sighs. Her breath billows in a cloud before her. Good.
The last memory that returns is her dozing off after the howls disappeared. She closes her eyes and listens. At first, she hears the familiar rustling of the forest and the burbling stream. The breezes that blow through are fickle, but the current breeze must be blowing high above her, because she doesn’t feel the biting chill blowing on her skin.
Then the howls appear. Not appear, but materialize, like they split off from the two dominant sounds and formed an echo of each. They’re faint, easy to chalk up to her head, if the howls didn’t vary in frequency and pitch.
Closer. Farther. Higher. Lower. Each howl sounds distinctly different, and it raises the hairs on her arms more than the cold does. After a few minutes, the howls fade away.
Whatever those things are, Cora does not want to meet them. The closest thing she has to a weapon are scissors, and she’s no fighter. Even landing the punch on Mari happened because she was caught unaware.
Mari. Cora clenches her jaw. It’s amazing how much blood comes out of a broken nose. Cora had stood there in shock as her best friend cried.
Enough. I can’t keep thinking about what happened.
Easier said than done, when Cora digs into her backpack for her scissors and finds the blood-soaked cloth. The blood long since dried, leaving the cloth crusty to the touch.
She can’t stay, not while the howling creatures are out there. But she can’t let this sick trophy of her actions ride inside her backpack, either. She pulls it out gently, thumb and index finger pinching the hem of the material, where the fabric is still a light gray.
The stream is an arm’s reach away. She can’t stand just yet, but she stretches toward the stream, paying close attention that her injured wrist stays put.
Cora dips the cloth into the running water. Her fingers submerge, and the shock of the icy temperature sends her reeling. She wrings out the wet cloth, which amounts to little more than tightening her fist. In the gloom, the blood looks nearly black. The water takes on a red tint, swirling on the surface and being carried further downstream.
It doesn’t take long until the cloth takes on a lighter gray color. The stream itself returns to its lilac hues not long after.
If nature can go back to normal, why can’t she?
It gives her that stupid, annoying feeling that clears some of her doubts. Hope. Hope kept her running when nights grew long and she struggled to sleep, so she focused on researching different biomes or browsing shopping sites or planning what to bring over with her to another world.
And all for this? She had a plan. Even if the incident with Mari–Cora sighs. Her shoulders sag. There’s no point blaming her. There’s no point blaming herself. Stewing in her self-hatred won’t help Cora survive and return home.
Just like her hope won’t do a damn thing.
She drapes the dripping wet cloth on a low-lying branch. Colored a grayish brown, she carefully notes. If the howls return, Cora will snatch the cloth, her backpack, and leave. Simple as that. Otherwise, she needs more rest. Everything hurts.
Except–Cora wiggles her fingers. She can’t feel them. When she presses her hand to her ankle, the shock of her icy touch steals her breath away.
Her fingertips are pale. A blue hue travels down the length of fingers, bleeding into her palm. Cora stares at her hand. Back home, she never dealt with anything colder than the 50s. Low 40s, maybe once or twice a year.
She scours her memories for those countless hours researching. Did her searches cover frostbite? Does she have frostbite?
The answer is sudden, clear, as if she’s sitting in front of her laptop. Heat. She needs to warm up her fingers. Frostbite develops through several stages, but Cora’s sure she has the first stage: frostnip.
Careful to keep her wrist from bending, she lifts her arm and stuffs her frozen hand into her armpit. She bites down on her lip as the cold air attacks her from all sides. Only her hand is spared the onslaught, warming up too slowly for her liking.
Eventually, the aches spread through her hand again. She wiggles her fingers and feels her fingertips graze the cotton fabric of her shirt. Cora pulls her hand out, examining it. The blue is receding, but the color of her skin is far too pale.
Howls break out somewhere on the other side of the stream. They’re loud enough to leave her trembling.
She’s running out of time. With her wrist and leg injured, though… Cora shakes her head.
I’m gonna make it out. Easy to think, hard to believe. The howls keep approaching. They rip through however many trees stand between the mysterious creatures and her.
With one hand, stuffing the cloth into her backpack is a slow, painful task, her fingers still stiff, while her wounded leg supports half of her crouched weight and her injured wrist hurts.
By the time the howls sound close enough that the creatures are probably right across the stream, Cora zips up the front pocket and wears her backpack.
The scissors’s plastic bites into her palm. She pictures herself as a seasoned soldier prowling through wilderness. Hacking away at shrubs, beating down beasts, laying quiet where necessary.
Her hope is feeble. It gives her just enough strength to swallow her terror and step away from the stream.
A shadow flits by at the edge of her peripheral vision.
Adrenaline spikes in her veins. She whirls around, scissors outstretched. Another shadow flits by, beyond the stream. The woods are eerily silent. As if they’re waiting with bated breath, afraid of attracting unwanted attention.
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Her hand shakes, scissors starting to slip out of her numb fingers. She tightens her grip, the coil of anxiety growing in her stomach. More shadows move between trees, beyond the stream, between the trees there.
Leaves crunch nearby. She presses herself against the tree she’d slept against, holding her breath. The crunching continues in a wide circle on her side of the stream. Each crunch sounds just a little closer.
Then a howl breaks out right next to her. Cora shrieks, slamming into the tree. The impact jars her muscles, bruises lighting up on her back, pain exploding at the back of her head. She clenches the scissors, plastic bending under her tight grip.
A shadow stalks out of the adjacent bushes.
Even in the gloom, even with her vision swimming from the impact, she trembles at the sheer monstrosity of the creature.
Four lithe legs support a long, muscular body. A rope-like tail curls over its back. The creature’s head is bulbous, yellow eyes set deep into its skull. Horns curve out of its brow bone. The creature’s skin is pockmarked with scars or pores or whatever the jagged circular markings are, and the color is a deep gray, almost bordering on black.
Razor-sharp teeth snap open within the mounds of flesh hanging from its lower face. A wet black tongue shoots out of its mouth, tracing over the mounds of flesh. They quiver like a plate of gelatin. Saliva dribbles down its deformed face.
All the horrid details, Cora commits to memory in a split second. The next, the monster rushes forward.
She throws herself aside.
The creature flies past her. Its gelatinous mass bounces on the dirt once, twice, before claws burrow into the dirt and the creature lunges at her. Again, she leaps sideways, her backpack straining against her sore shoulders as she lands, crouching, and shoots onto her feet.
She feels a root under her foot and adjusts her position so she won’t trip when the creature lunges again.
The creature’s momentum carries it forward like its last attempt, but its tail lashes out at her. Like a whip, it snaps over her thigh and retracts.
Cora screams, jumping away from both the creature and the purple trees. The strike didn’t break through her jeans, but the underlying skin and muscle throbs, a tight band of pain.
The creature lunges again.
Her thoughts are too fast, body too slow. A projectile of hardened muscle slams into her. She crashes to the ground. The corner of the box stabs into her shoulder blade as she rolls, tumbles through a bush, then stops, sprawled on her back.
Cora hisses through her clenched teeth. The creature opens its mouth, bristling with jagged teeth. Spittle flies on her face and neck. They burn, like the spittle is acid eating away at her flesh.
She shrieks and throws as much force as she can behind the scissors. Her hand sinks until her knuckles brush against leathery skin.
The creature howls, so loud Cora’s eardrums are left ringing. She rips out the scissors, coated in a dark blue liquid. Blood. The creature crashes into a purple tree, and immediately she hears a faint sizzle.
Howling, quaking, the creature slams into several trees before its stumpy legs collapse beneath itself. A ragged hole spews out a steady torrent of blood from its side.
It takes a minute for the blood to stop pouring. It takes two for the creature to stop moving. It takes three until Cora breaks out of her dazed stupor, getting onto her feet, staring at the bloodied scissors.
“I did that?”
There’s nobody left to answer, of course. Cora clenches and unclenches her good hand. She’s not sure if the cold is why her hand is shaking so much.
“It’s a monster. It was going to kill me.”
Her words sound hollow to her own ringing ears. Because the moment she drove the scissors through the creature, she remembered what she had wanted to do to Mari the moment she punched back.
“Fuck,” Cora sobs. She crouches, staring at the bloodied corpse. More howls echo in the distance. Too many. Make it stop! She touches her cheek, the area where some of the creature’s saliva dripped on her. The resulting pain feels like a knee scrape.
At least it isn’t worse. She half-sobs, half-laughs, the result a choking noise that leaves her face flushed for air. The howls are closing in. She can’t fight in this state, not when she’s broken, not when she doesn’t have Mari at her side.
Cora clutches at her chest, the pressure intensifying. She grimaces as her insides threaten to tear apart.
Never did she think what being alone, truly alone, feels like. Or how unforgiving the real wilderness is, without parking lots, park rangers, and the occasional facility. There’s a stark difference between imagining the cold and actually experiencing it.
What little cold Cora felt back home is nothing. Nothing compares to how the cold air numbs her skin, prickles the back of her neck, or hurts her joints.
Without walking, she can’t generate more warmth. The cold digs its talons into her and doesn’t let go. Cora shakes, wrapping her arm around herself. It does little to ward off the chill.
Howls erupt close enough to hear the different vocals. Three creatures, minimum. Bushes rustle beyond the gloom. She tenses, holding her breath.
“Mom,” Cora gasps. Speaking hurts. Her throat is tight. “Dad.” The creatures are coming. More bushes rustle. She glimpses a shadow dart past several trees. She rises, clutching the scissors, trembling violently.
Bushes rustle behind her. She glimpses a sickly gray creature, head tossing back and forth, loose folds of skin flapping wildly. Another creature emerges, stockier than the first, gnashing its teeth.
She’s going to die.
Cora shrieks. She stumbles forward, her vision blurred and her limbs heavy like lead. Maybe if–she doesn’t make it past a few feet before a sinewy mass leaps on her back.
She sprawls, landing on her forearms and legs. Cora draws out a long, ragged scream as a spike of pain shoots through her left wrist.
Howls deafen her ears. The creature’s claws stab through her legs. It bites at her side, tearing through her t-shirt and grazing her ribs. Cora screams again, thrashing violently, gritting her teeth from the pain until the weight disappears off her back.
At the moment the creature is airborne, she swings her good arm out and stabs it where its leg connects to its body. The cut isn’t as deep as she wants, but the creature howls and rushes at her.
There’s little she can do to stop its charge. She’s knocked down to the ground again, the creature biting her shoulder first, then the side where it’d bit her.
She drives her elbow into its side, but the creature howls and snaps at her arm. She jerks it back and drives a knee into its abdomen. It pauses, enough hesitation for Cora to drag the scissors across its meaty neck.
Like a popped balloon, blood spurts everywhere. Cora turns away and scampers back to her feet. The moment she steadies her balance, the creature lunges at her again.
She’s able to sidestep it this time, but another sinewy mass barrels into her side. She goes flying, crashing on the ground with a loud thud that lights up every injury at once and shakes her to her core.
Two more creatures stalk behind the injured one. It limps to the side and collapses, where it doesn’t move after. In Cora’s peripheral vision, she spots at least three more striding toward her. They’re bigger than the first and second she fought off.
Too many. Get up! Cora gasps and shuts her eyes, bracing herself against a fresh wave of fiery pain. Too much. Howls give the forest life where the breeze is lacking. The footfalls of the grotesque creatures thunder in her ears.
“No!” Cora shouts as the first breaks into a sprint.
Everything happens in slow motion. Cora never gets a full recap of her life. No life flashing before her eyes, no final memories unfurling before her.
Instead, she pees herself out of sheer terror. Her heart seizes. She wheezes, shaking violently. She raises her arm. The creature leaps high, about to rip her apart.
She screams.
The bushes rustle. Suddenly, a blur of colorful motion erupts out of the gloom, slamming into the creature. Bright blue showers the forest. The sharp glint of metal drags down its hide, the wielder clinging to the knife as the creature bucks and writhes, spraying blood everywhere. The wielder jumps back, knife in one hand, other hand free, a human hand.
It’s a boy. He’s not much older than her, and to her shock he’s wearing an ultramarine blanket like a cape, the cloth stitched with white stars. Darkening as he lunges into the bloody spray and stabs his knife through the creature’s head.
He barely straightens his posture when two creatures barrel into him. He’s thrown onto the ground, but rolls into a crouch and slashes through the first creature. The second shoves the body aside and howls. The boy punches the creature and slams it onto the ground. He stomps on its stomach, snarling. She hears the soft cracking of bones.
The rest is drowned out in a wet gurgle when the boy stabs the creature.
She stares at him. He lifts his head and makes eye contact with her. Shadows hang beneath his eyes. He looks like she used to, on those restless nights where a few hours of sleep was a luxury. Yet, his eyes glimmer a brilliant gray, piercing through the gloom, determined.
He’s panting, clutching his knife tightly. Cora can’t stop staring at him. Where did he come from? Who is he?
Then more creatures stalk towards him. Their howls are deafening. They flock toward the chaos, swelling in numbers, tails lashing at the air and serrated teeth snapping together. Despite that, despite fighting alone against alien horrors, he stands like his body is carved out of steel. As if the planet could shatter beneath his feet and he’d keep standing, untouchable.
Cora holds her breath. He’s only one person. Armed with one knife, and nothing else. She can’t tear her eyes away. Can’t stand and help him fight back, even if she’s wounded.
Howling, the first mutants leap at him.
Like a coiled spring, he bolts forward, cleaving apart the closest mutants. She gasps. They tumble on the ground, bleeding, dead. More creatures drop wherever he goes, left as bleeding heaps of monstrous flesh. He whirls and targets their sagging lower faces or backs of their heads. Mutants lash at him, and he severs tails and limbs in return, his face a mask of fury that strikes a chord of fear inside her.
The knife captures the little light there is and magnifies it tenfold. She loses track of him, but not the knife, gleaming and dulling and spraying blue blood with every gleam that appears. The gleam twists and turns and pivots around whenever the boy jumps out of a creature’s way.
Soon, blood dulls the polished metal. By some miracle, none of the creatures target her. They bound past her at the maelstrom of furious kinetic energy, fists and knife and a few well-timed kicks.
Bodies heap on one another. He’s so busy striking down the mutants that he fails to notice a mutant raising its tail behind him, prepared to strike. Cora’s thigh throbs painfully in reminder.
She grits her teeth and shoves herself on her feet. Its tail starts to swing at the boy when she brings her scissors down on the fleshy portion. The creature howls, retracting its tail, just enough time for the boy to kick a creature mid-air and whirl around.
He stabs the creature instead, his fury ebbing. The final creature pauses at the center of the mounds of bodies, gnashing its teeth. It uses its tail like a third leg to push itself backward, but he rushes forward and stomps it down. He tears into the creature moments after, silencing its high-pitched howls.
His breathing is heavy, forehead slick with sweat, clothes bloody. His blanket sports dark splotches, drowning the stars. His hands shake as he sheathes the knife into a leather pouch strapped to his belt. Several long scratches trail down his arms.
Suddenly, his statuesque image breaks, and he's just a boy–human–who looks… worried. Scared, like her.
“Holy shit,” he says, clenching his fists. He looks around him, at the carnage made by his hand. Cora can’t stop staring at him. Her eyes are tearing up.
“Are you okay?” His voice comes out in a tremble. He coughs, and smiles weakly, raising his hand as if to comfort her. Then he retracts it, probably realizing both arms are coated in blue blood. “Stupid question, sorry.”
“N-No. Not a stupid question. Yeah, I’m okay.” Her teeth chatter. She'd forgotten about the cold. As her adrenaline ebbs away, the cold nips at her. “Wh-who are you? I’m C-Cora.”
The boy frowns, raising his hand again. He pauses, but keeps his hand raised, grimacing. “Liam. I… I thought this was a nightmare.” Liam screws his eyes shut. “I heard your screams and didn’t want to check. I thought it was all part of the nightmare. But if I hadn’t come… fuck, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You saved me,” she whispers, her throat closing up. She lets the scissors drop and clenches and unclenches her hand. She’s alive. Horribly injured, but alive. “You saved me.”
His hesitance breaks. He wordlessly hugs her. She sinks into his shoulder, wrapping her good arm around him. Some blood smears on her cheek, but she presses tighter, sobbing.
She weeps for the world she gave up and the life she stole from the boy who saved hers.