He moves stealthily behind her, careful not to step on any branches or brush against any foliage that could give him away. It’s not weird to follow her like this, he tries to convince himself. I’m worried about her, that’s all. Given her last forest excursion, it’s in her best interests to have someone watching out for her. But he still feels guilty for slinking around behind her back.

Anna continues to walk briskly down the forest trail, oblivious to his presence. Just as he begins to think he and Tucker were mistaken, that nothing out of the ordinary was going on with Anna, and that this is just a normal evening walk, she stiffens and turns her head sharply. Thankfully, he still isn’t in her line of sight.

She cocks her head to the side, as if homing in on a nearby sound. His heart stops, thinking she somehow heard him even though he had been so careful. Then, in a burst of speed he didn’t think possible from someone with such short legs, she sprints away from the trail and into the trees. Startled, he pauses a moment to process what just happened. Then, cursing himself for being so slow to react, he dashes after her. Her trail of trampled foliage is easy to follow, but no matter how hard he runs, he can’t seem to catch up to her. When did she get so fast?

He makes his way through the forest, panting as he ducks and weaves through the trees, trying not to trip on the dense underbrush. After a minute, he hears a thump somewhere nearby, accompanied by the cacophony of a flock of crows taking flight. Out of breath, he slows his pace to a walk. Straining his ears, he can just make out faint squelching and ripping noises that remind him of gory horror movie scenes. The sounds of flesh being torn from bone. At first, he thinks his mind is playing tricks on him, that watching too many slasher flicks as a kid has made him paranoid. But as he follows the path left in Anna’s wake, the noises grow louder.

He draws closer and closer to the source of the unsettling sounds, his dread and apprehension growing with every step. He knows he’s being stupid, that you should always run away from weird noises when you’re alone in the woods, but his concern for Anna trumps his sense of self-preservation. Finally, he reaches a small clearing, finding Anna several feet away, hunched over what looks like a dead deer. Despite the rustling of bushes as he makes his way into the clearing, she doesn’t seem to notice him. He can see now that the disturbing noises are coming from the deer. Or rather, what’s left of it. A pit forms in his stomach that threatens to swallow him whole. Something is very wrong here.

“A-Anna?!” Wally’s voice cracks as panic rises in his chest. His mind is racing, trying to find some logical explanation for why Anna would be out in the woods at night, hunched over a deer carcass doing… whatever that is.

This is probably just a huge misunderstanding, right? Any moment now, she’ll turn around and explain whatever weird prank this is supposed to be and laugh at me for falling for it. She probably has a camera rigged up somewhere…

But when she turns around, there’s a horrifying mess of flesh and blood and teeth—so many teeth—where Anna’s face should be. It gurgles something incomprehensible at him. Wally is so petrified he can’t even bring himself to scream.

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***

“A-Anna?!” Wally’s panicked voice snapped me out of my ravenous haze. Without thinking, I turned to face him, my monstrous form on full display. Blood and drool dripped from my many rows of teeth, spilling onto the forest floor.

“Wahl-egh?” I gurgled, startled by how alien my own voice sounded. Only then did it dawn on me that I was still transformed. My altered anatomy was clearly not suitable for human speech.

Wally stood there, completely paralyzed. His face, which had always been kind or sympathetic or worried for my sake, was now twisted in terror and disgust. It felt as if the ground had dropped out from under me. I wished the forest floor really could swallow me up so I wouldn’t have to deal with the awful aftermath of my own carelessness.

I took a slow step toward Wally, struggling to restore my human appearance. I tried to recall Anna’s face, but my addled brain was drawing a blank. All I could picture was Wally’s look of wide-eyed horror. In response to my movement, Wally attempted to take a step back, but his legs were shaking so badly that they gave out from under him, sending him tumbling to the ground. Even as he fell, his frantic eyes remained locked onto me.

Folding up the edges of my face, I was finally able to reform Anna’s visage. Now, the only evidence of my gruesome meal were a few small flecks of blood on the collar of my shirt. And, of course, the half-eaten deer carcass behind me. Seeing a terrifying monster adopt the face of his closest friend, Wally’s jaw dropped.

I took several more steps forward. Unable to stand, Wally tried to crawl backwards to get away from me, unwilling to let me out of his sight. Finally able to speak, I said softly, “I promise I’m not going to hurt you.” With my arms still splayed out in the form of fleshy tentacles, it wasn’t very convincing.

While he clearly didn’t believe me, he seemed to gather enough courage to stand. As soon as he was on his feet, he made a break for it. He didn’t get very far before I caught him and gently constrained his arms and legs with my tentacles. Before he could scream, I covered his mouth, too.

“Mmmmf,” he grunted, trying to wriggle his way out of my grip. When I moved a free tentacle to retrieve Anna’s phone from my pocket, he flinched and squeezed his eyes shut, as if he expected me to kill him then and there. I knew he had no reason to trust me, no reason to believe I wouldn’t murder and devour him without leaving a trace, but it still stung. As nonsensical as it was, I was starting to believe we were friends. But I was never Wally’s friend. Anna was, and she was the only one who could convince him that I wasn’t a threat.

“Wally, I know you’re terrified right now, and that none of this makes sense, but you have to trust me.”

He shot me a derisive glare, as if to say yeah right, not in a million years.

I manipulated the cells at the tip of my free arm to form a vaguely human hand, with which I could operate Anna’s phone. I pulled up her final video, held it up to Wally’s eyes, and pressed play. He stopped struggling and watched the entire video without so much as a blink. When Anna’s desperate cries cut off and the video ended, he turned to me with a scowl, waiting for an explanation.

If I wanted to win him over, this was my chance. I took a deep breath, then began to explain everything. How I came to Earth in a meteorite, how I landed in this forest and found Anna’s strangled corpse as soon as I emerged, how I assimilated with her body and tried to live in her place, and, above all, how fervently I wanted to catch her killer. By the end of my story, the fear in Wally’s eyes had somewhat given way to deep thought.

“I’ll let you go if you promise not to scream or run,” I said, under the impression that he would at least consider what I’d told him. He vigorously nodded, so I carefully released him and merged my tentacles back into two human arms. Stiff from having been restrained for so long, Wally rotated his shoulders and stretched his arms. Now that my appearance was indistinguishable from Anna’s, he couldn’t bring himself to look at me.