The Haunted Forest Tour

by Jeff Strand

  Nothing.

  He resumed walking. He was moving at a fast pace but resisted the temptation to run. Running would make it difficult to remain totally aware of his surroundings, and the last thing he needed was for something with lots of teeth to jump out at him when he wasn't paying attention.

  Okay, okay, he would feel bad if something happened to Barbara. She was a nice girl. He'd definitely do her, if the opportunity presented itself. In theory, the opportunity could present itself back at the water plant, if he tried the old "Gosh, we could die at any time, I wonder what we could do to make our last hours on Earth more enjoyable?" trick, but that would greatly increase the chances of something with lots of teeth getting him while he was distracted.

  She probably didn't put out on the first date anyway, regardless of impending doom.

  A monster stepped out from behind a tree, maybe a hundred feet away. It kind of looked like the traditional descriptions of aliens, the "grays" or whatever the hell they were called, except that it was sort of a sickly yellow color. But it did have that weirdly-shaped head with the big eyes.

  Eddie stopped and pointed his rifle at it. He wouldn't waste the bullet if he didn't have to, but he'd sure blow that yellow alien away if it took a step toward him.

  The alien-thing looked at him and tilted its head, as if trying to figure out what sort of creature Eddie was. It regarded him for a few moments, then turned and walked away.

  Good. That's what he wanted the forest creatures to do. Walk away. If he could keep that tradition going for the rest of his little stroll, they'd all get along just fine.

  He wondered if Barbara was okay.

  Sure she was. She had that old guy to protect her. Larry or something. Lee? Yeah, Lee. Cool guy.

  Something moved to his right. Another yellow alien-thing stepped out from behind a tree, about the same distance away as the other one had been. That probably wasn't good. Eddie pointed his rifle at that one as well, ready to put a bullet right between its oversized eyes if it tried anything.

  It stared at him for a long moment.

  Better move your yellow ass if you want to live long and prosper, Eddie thought. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  The alien-thing turned and walked away.

  Eddie resumed his brisk pace, feeling extremely uncomfortable. What if there was a whole bunch more of these things, setting up an ambush?

  Well, then they'd be very unhappy to see his grenade.

  He wiped some sweat off his forehead. What a horrible way this would be to die. Alone out in the woods. His body probably never to be found. Nobody to mourn him at home.

  Eddie's parents had died when he was ten, in car accidents. Separate car accidents, within a week of each other. On a Thursday, Eddie was pulled out of class so that the school nurse could tearfully tell him that his mother had been struck by a drunk driver. The son of a bitch was on the road drunk at ten in the goddamn morning. His mother died instantly. The drunk guy lived out his last few years as a vegetable.

  Eddie's father had cried a lot (he'd never before seen his father shed a single tear) and promised Eddie that they'd be okay, that they'd get through this. He barely even remembered the funeral, except that a whole bunch of people had told him how brave he was being, as if he were just the most precious little thing for not bawling his eyes out.

  The following Thursday, his father died. Not a suicide drive, where he decided that he just couldn't live without his wife and did eighty in the wrong direction on the freeway. Nope, he was on his way to the grocery store, three blocks away, to pick up some charcoal so they could grill some burgers to distract themselves from their loss. Stopped at a red light. Guy in a truck behind him lost his brakes. Slammed into the back of Eddie's father's car. Smashed him against the steering wheel. Severe internal bleeding. He'd died three hours later.

  Cruel goddamn joke.

  He went to live with his grandparents. They weren't mean people, but they'd already raised their children and they had no interest in starting the process over again. Eddie got a roof over his head and food in his belly, but that was about it. They didn't care about his grades, so neither did he. He finally flunked out his sophomore year in high school, moved into his own apartment, and got a crap job washing dishes. Eventually he worked his way up to a crap job waiting tables.

  He had some beer-drinking buddies and a few short-term girlfriends, but that was about it. On his thirtieth birthday, he did a rough estimate of all of the tables he'd waited on in his life, cursed several times, and then quit his job the next day, giving the finger to every person he walked past on his way out of the restaurant.

  He spent a couple of years moving from one crap job to another, hating them all. Then he got a job washing tour buses. This job sucked. A few weeks later, he was driving the bus with a license that wasn't necessarily 100% legal. This job sucked substantially less. He didn't much care for listening to the exact same spiel from the tour guide every single day, but he did enjoy driving the bus.

  This led to a job driving a bus with a much better company, and an actual legal license.

  Which led to him meeting Cindy, who was extremely impressed with Eddie's bedroom skills, and who was in charge of hiring drivers for this top-secret project.

  And so, after weeks of intense training, Eddie found himself driving a tram on the Haunted Forest Tour. Cindy took another job and moved out of the country shortly after that, but Eddie didn't mind. He was finally sort of content. It was easy work (there wasn't actual "driving" involved, since of course the tram just moved along the track) with lots of cool, new stuff to see every day. The training was only in case everything went to shit.

  He wondered what he was going to do for a job after this.

  Assuming he didn't die out here.

  Alone.

  Something moved behind him. Way too close. He spun around, expecting to see another one of those yellow alien-things.

  He did.

  Then there was movement on all sides of him.

  Several more alien-things stepped out from behind trees. At least six or seven of them...no, make that eleven or twelve. Not good. Not good at all. And he particularly didn't like that they were smart enough to hide themselves. Eddie much preferred the "dumb animal" variety of creature opponent, thank you very much.

  One of the aliens spoke in what sort of sounded like a series of clicks. Other aliens responded with more clicks.

  Eddie didn't have enough bullets to take them all out. He could use his last grenade to clear a nice path, but he wanted to save that for an absolute I'm-totally-screwed situation, and he wasn't quite there yet. The alien-things were kind of skinny. Maybe he could beat them in a fistfight.

  The first alien who'd clicked began to click again, much louder. It raised its arms in the air. This had the potential to be very, very uncool.

  The aliens—and now there had to be at least twenty—all ran toward him at once. Their mouths were open wide, and all of them were clicking.

  Eddie fired twice in front of him. Two aliens took chest hits and fell. He sprinted in that direction as fast as he could, leaping over their bodies, which were still very much alive, and—

  —immediately collided with another alien as it stepped into view.

  The alien dropped to the ground as Eddie bounced off it and slammed into a tree. His entire right arm went numb as his shoulder hit, and the rifle fell out of his hand.

  The clicking was becoming almost maddening.

  Eddie reached down for the rifle with his other hand, grabbing it by the barrel. Another alien-thing collided with him and slammed its mouth against his lower arm.

  The pain was incredible, as if his flesh were being twisted to the breaking point, like the mother of all hickeys. He punched the alien in the face, hard enough that it felt like the bones in his hand had been shattered into splinters. It let go of his arm, leaving a ghastly red and purple welt.

  Eddie spun around in a quick circle. He was completely surrounded by a
liens.

  He adjusted his grip on the rifle and opened fire. One alien's face exploded at close range, spraying yellow gook all over the weapon. He fired again, right through that alien's destroyed head, and got the one behind it.

  He pulled the trigger again. He couldn't hear it over the other clicks, but the rifle had made a clicking sound of its own.

  Another alien latched its mouth onto his arm, getting him in almost the same spot. The pain was even worse this time, and as Eddie screamed he dropped the rifle once again.

  He kicked an alien out of the way. Two more took its place. Where the hell had all of them come from? The bastards were everywhere now.

  He frantically kicked, threw punches, and even tried a head-butt, but it was only seconds before the aliens pulled him to the ground.

  One of them latched its mouth onto his ankle. As Eddie screamed, he pulled out the grenade. This was definitely an I'm-totally-screwed situation.

  If he had to die, he was going to take out a shitload of these aliens with him.

  But he really, really didn't want to die.

  An alien reached for the grenade. Eddie yanked it out of the way just as another alien pressed its open mouth against Eddie's cheek.

  Another alien grabbed the grenade and tugged on it.

  The pin popped out.

  The sudden pain in Eddie's face was so incredible that it provided a split-second distraction from the fact that he was now holding a live grenade with nowhere to throw it.

  He really should've offered to help Tina follow the giant bird.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Christopher sailed about five feet above the treetops, the bird's talons digging painfully into his shoulders, which already hurt from being shot by that prick Eddie. This was definitely a "lose-lose" situation for him, or even what his mother would call (in one of her rare bad moods) a "You are in infinite trouble!" situation. He was pretty sure that the giant bird was not carrying him off to a sunny beach populated by nubile nymphomaniacs; more likely, it was going to drop him into a nest of giant baby birds that would peck him to death. Of course, lots of birds ate their prey and then regurgitated the remains into the mouths of their young, so he might even have that to look forward to.

  That was the "lose" part.

  Unfortunately, though his destination was unlikely to be pleasurable, he also couldn't try to free himself from this bird, because otherwise he was going to enjoy a nice plummet to the forest floor and go splat. Sure, maybe he could grab a branch and save himself, but more likely he'd find himself impaled from rectum to cranium. Not good.

  So, basically, he had to let the bird finish up its flight pattern and hope that wherever his travels took him, it wasn't immediately fatal.

  You know, you did pay for this vacation, he thought. It's a beautiful view, and despite the agony of the whole business with the bird talons puncturing your skin, maybe you should just try to enjoy the moment. Let out an excited whoop or something. After all, how many people have ever been flown around by a giant bird? If you're lucky, maybe somebody will snap a picture.

  Christopher did not let out an excited whoop, since he knew quite well that his line of thinking was strictly intended to keep him from going completely insane. It didn't feel like it was working.

  At least I'm not airsick.

  As if reading his thoughts (hell, maybe it had) the bird swooped down so that Christopher's feet scraped the tops of several trees, then swooped up high again, making his stomach lurch.

  So much for that positive element.

  Just up ahead was a small clearing in the forest. Though he wasn't high enough to get a true sense of exactly where they were, he was pretty sure that this clearing was somewhere in the middle.

  A couple of minutes after the flight-o-terror began, the bird swooped down into the clearing. Instead of the dirt floor Christopher was expecting, he saw...ice.

  The bird set him down, much more gently than anticipated, and then flew away.

  Christopher stood there for a moment, trying to process the fact that he was now standing on a makeshift ice rink in the middle of the forest. Then he slipped and fell on his ass.

  The ice floor was circular and just a little smaller than a hockey rink. The edges sloped up about eight feet into the air, effectively putting him inside a giant ice bowl. The ice had a blue tint, like the Alaskan glaciers he'd seen on television.

  He placed his palm on the ice to push himself up, then quickly winced and pulled away. It was cold, much colder than standard-issue ice.

  He managed to get himself back up to a standing position. In theory, the ice bowl should not have weirded him out this much. After all, an entire freakin' forest had sprouted in the middle of a desert, and was filled with dozens (Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?) of bizarre creatures, many of whom had killed his fellow tourists. In the grand scheme of things, the ice was a minor oddity, barely worth a raised eyebrow and the word "Hmmmm." But for some reason the ice creeped him out. It was just...unnerving somehow.

  He took a step forward and ended up on his ass again. As a child, he could just barely ice-skate successfully when he was wearing regulation skates and his mother was holding his hand, and there was no reason to believe that his skills had improved.

  Instead of getting up again, he scooted along the ice on his knees. His jeans didn't do much to keep the cold out and his knees immediately went numb, but that was better than breaking his neck after falling another sixty-seven times. It wasn't like there was anybody around to see him.

  He reached the edge of the ice and stood up. Though the top of the ice bowl was low enough that he could reach it, he definitely couldn't do it with bare hands, unless he wanted his fingers to instantly freeze and snap off, which he didn't. He wished he'd worn long sleeves, so he could just tug down his sleeves to cover his hands, but he hadn't expected cool weather in the New Mexico desert.

  Christopher let out a small cry as he pulled off his shirt. Though his shoulders weren't bleeding much, nor was his admittedly superficial bullet grazing, they hurt like hell. If merely removing his shirt was a painful process, pulling himself up over the edge of the ice bowl was going to really, really suck. But it was either that or stand here and freeze and/or starve to death.

  He folded his shirt in half, then draped it over the top of the bowl. He reached up, letting out another cry, grabbed the edge of the ice, and tried to pull himself up.

  Two seconds later, he was back on his butt.

  He cursed and stood up again. After all he'd been through, he was most assuredly not going to die trapped in a giant ice bowl. Just not gonna happen. No matter how much his shoulder hurt, he was going to pull himself over the top.

  He reached up and got as solid of a grip on the top of the ice as possible. He took a deep, cleansing breath, and focused all of his energy on the task at hand. Ignore the pain and pull yourself up. Don't die here just because you have an ouchie on your shoulder. That would be stupid.

  Christopher closed his eyes, exhaled, and then used every ounce of his strength to pull himself up.

  So much pain ripped through his shoulders that he thought the skin might split open.

  His feet slipped uselessly against the ice wall.

  He pulled himself up so that he could almost see over the wall...and then he fell again, this time taking his shirt with him. Instead of landing on his ass, he landed on his back, which hurt a lot more.

  He lay there for a while, thinking that dying here might not be so bad. It might even be relaxing. He could just close his eyes, start snoring, and wake up on the other side, greeted by his father and thirty-seven virgins.

  Or not.

  He wondered why the bird had dropped him off here. Why pluck him off the top of a tree and drop him in an ice bowl? There certainly weren't any baby birds around. Was this a nest of some sort? Was the bird coming back, possibly with a whole flock of buddies?

  Or was he trapped here awaiting something else?

  Something much worse. />
  Christopher thought about that. Considering the way things were going in his life, "something much worse" was the most credible answer.

  He got back up.

  "I'm not gonna die here," he said out loud, as if it were more convincing spoken than thought. "I'm gonna give it one more try, and even if my goddamn arms rip right out of their sockets, I'm going to get over that wall."

  He looked at the wall more carefully. Though it was a different type of skating, he'd seen kids on skateboards ride something similar to this. They'd skate along the floor, go right up the side, and then come back down. Perhaps if he got a good running start, he could slide up the wall and leap to the other side...?

  Um, no. Not even if he had a skateboard.

  Christopher cursed again.

  Then his feet crossed beneath him and he fell yet again.

  Now death was definitely starting to look like the more appealing option. Even if he went below instead of above, how bad could Hell really be? If nothing else, it would certainly be warmer.

  He turned his head to the side and sighed.

  Then he frowned.

  "What the hell...?"

  He got onto his knees and peered closely at the ice floor. It looked like there was something etched into it. He couldn't quite make it out, but it looked like a face. A screaming face.

  He rubbed his shirt on the ice as if polishing the surface, then looked again. Definitely a face, with a hand on each side, palms-up, as if somebody were trying to push through the ice.

  Creepy.

  Christopher looked at the ice to his right. If he got down close enough...yes, another screaming face. And another. He scooted around, looking carefully, and it appeared that the ice was filled with images of screaming faces.

  At least he hoped they were just images.

  He reached into his pocket and took out his car keys. It suddenly occurred to him that he could probably use the keys to chip a foothold into the ice wall, which would get him over the side. Excellent. He was saved. But first he had to see what the story was with those faces.

  He gathered the keys into one unit, then struck the ice. Though he'd somehow thought it might be magic ice that was impervious to key-related damage, the ice chipped away with no more difficulty than breaking through typical frozen water.