by S.J. Finch
Chapter 2
Ryan awoke with a start. The moonlight diffused through the wall of the tent cast a dull glow on his backpack and sleeping bag. He didn’t have a clue what time it was, or how long he had been asleep. He hadn’t wanted to worry about losing or breaking a wristwatch, so he hadn’t worn one, and his phone was where he had forgotten it in the car at the trail head.
He knew that at least a few hours had passed, since his father was now snoring soundly in the bag next to him. What Ryan wanted more than anything was to fall back to sleep. The sooner he fell asleep, the sooner it would be morning and the sooner he could leave; get back to civilized life and the real world.
Trying to get more comfortable, Ryan shifted and squirmed in his sleeping bag and discovered why he had woken up: a large rock was positioned directly beneath his bag. All night long it had been digging into the exact same spot on his back as the cross bar on his cheap backpack. No matter which way he turned, the rock was still there and his back was still sore.
After a few more futile minutes of tossing and turning, Ryan gave up. He sat up in his sleeping bag and stretched out his back as best he could in the small tent. He remained that way for a long time: awake and bored.
As quietly as he could, Ryan unzipped his sleeping bag and threw it off his lower half. He lifted his injured foot and gently unraveled the bandage. When it was off, Ryan was surprised by how much mobility he had. It no longer hurt so much to move. He decided to work it a bit, to put some weight on it and see how it felt. Ryan pulled on his shoes and awkwardly crawled over his father. He unzipped the door, slowly as to not make too much noise, and clambered out.
The night was cold, much colder than Ryan had expected. His shivering breath came out in dense white clouds and he clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. This made his warm sleeping bag, rock or no rock, seem all the more inviting. Still, he knew sleep was a lost cause for the moment, so first he zipped up the tent and then he zipped up his sweatshirt.
His foot seemed to be fine to stand on, so he took a few cautious steps. At first it was painful and stiff, but the more he walked, the easier it became.
Ryan looked up and once again peered into the woods. The blue light of the big round moon illuminated the entire meadow, but the light couldn’t penetrate the murky blackness of the trees. Even so, as Ryan peered into the forest, he no longer felt any fear. He felt at home in the meadow now, as though he had been here long enough that he was no longer so out of place.
By extension, the forest also seemed less intimidating. Ryan felt at peace with his surroundings and he was sure that in a place as beautiful and serene as this, nothing was going to harm him. A few hours in a nylon tent made Ryan feel as if Nature had accepted him as one of her own, and she didn’t harm her own.
As if to prove this point to himself, Ryan began to walk towards the forest. He had no clear indication of where to go, or why for that matter, so he chose to travel directly away from the highway and off to one side of the lake: the largest patch of the densest forest he could find.
It took Ryan long enough to reach the edge of the meadow that by the time he got there, he was already questioning his decision. The peaceful feeling was fading fast. Perhaps it was because he was waking up, and reason was quickly returning to his brain, or perhaps because looking at the forest from the middle of a clear, safe meadow was a much different experience than standing four feet from its gaping maw. Still, Ryan hadn’t forgotten the sense of peace and isolation he had experienced earlier that afternoon, and it was such an uncommon feeling in suburban life that he wanted to feel it at least once more before he left in the morning.
As he crossed the dark threshold into the woods, Ryan was all too aware of how ironic it would be if he did run into a hatchet-wielding killer. He had seen the movies: it was always the teenager who can’t run and wanders off alone that gets killed first. He smiled in the darkness.
Though the moonlight had served him well this far, the thick forest canopy now darkened his path considerably. Ryan fished into his sweatshirt pocket and produced his dying flashlight. He clicked it on and swept the weak beam in front of him. He picked his way through the brush, carefully but steadily.
Ryan didn’t know how far into the woods he needed to go, or even how he would know when he was far enough, but he did know that getting out of sight of the meadow and especially the highway was the first step.
Another breeze wound its way through the trees and pushed all the branches into a single, unified swaying motion. Everything in the forest, save Ryan, was moving in the same pattern. The familiar feeling began to creep back into his gut: that he shouldn’t be here, that he wasn’t welcome. Camping for one night in a tent didn’t mean he now belonged here, it meant he was still an outsider who had no right to stomp through this world.
As he moved through the forest, Ryan once or twice thought he saw something else that moved against the swaying pattern of the foliage. It was on the very periphery of his vision however, and the movement was so quick that Ryan could not be sure he had seen anything at all. As he continued on, he thought he saw the movement again, but without any sound of twigs snapping or underbrush being pushed aside, Ryan was sure it was nothing more than the breeze.
He continued on, making sure to keep the highway behind him so he would know how to get back. Soon he came to a small clearing in the trees, no more than twenty feet across. He looked over his shoulder and happily realized that the only thing he could see was the forest, with no sign of the meadow or the camp. He walked to the middle of the clearing and took a long look around as he inhaled deeply. Ryan sat down on a fallen log and closed his eyes. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, the wind rustling the leaves, the swishing noises of his clothes when he made even the tiniest movement. The smells of wet soil and fresh pine came to him on the chilly night air. The silence was so deep, so engulfing, the chill so constant, Ryan may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean or the vast expanse of space. He took another long breath through his nose and held it for a moment before letting it slowly out through his mouth. The white mist of exhaled breath hung in the air then dispersed in a thousand different directions. So focused was Ryan on his breathing, on the smells that each breath brought him, and on the sound that the cool air made as it rushed through his nostrils, that he didn’t notice at first when all the other sounds around him faded away into an uneasy nothingness.
It was as though someone had turned down the volume on a television and all sound had seeped out of the clearing at the same moment. Everything seemed to stop. There were no chirps of insects, no rustling of birds or squirrels, not even the wind made a sound. Instead the breeze swirled around Ryan and slid silently through the underbrush like a ghost.
His breathing was shallow, his heartbeat had quickened, and Ryan didn’t know why. Nothing seemed to have changed, but still he knew that everything was very, very different.
Suddenly, on some primal level in a way he had never felt before, the answer came to him: he was no longer alone. It was as though he was aware of his presence in this place, and in the next instant, he was aware of another presence as well. On the same primal level, where millions of years of evolution and animal instinct were contained, a conclusion was formed. This change in environment pointed his animal mind in one direction: with a chill shuddering through him colder than anything the night air could ever muster, Ryan realized he wasn’t the only outsider in these woods.
His reaction was not what he expected. He didn’t immediately run for the camp, in fact he didn’t do anything at all. Ryan was afraid, that much was certain, but the instincts that screamed at him to run were being beaten back by his own, very human curiosity. The animal in him was ready to fight or flee, but Ryan knew he couldn’t make that decision until he had more information. In the back of his mind, far from his conscious brain, Ryan knew that neither option was going to help him. His ankle wouldn’t let him run anywhere fast enough to escap
e, and he certainly wasn’t going to be able to fight any creature of these woods that was big enough to consider him prey. Elsewhere in his brain, he was inwardly chuckling at himself; a defeated, masochistic laugh as that tiny part of him realized the irony of it all. The injured teenager in the middle of the woods. Can’t run. Can’t fight. First to die.
In the next instant, contrary to what Ryan had often heard, time did not slow down. Rather, his brain sped up. Things happened in the blink of an eye, but Ryan’s brain was alert and ready to process all of it. Without warning, without any sound, Ryan felt something huge crash into him from behind.
He didn’t just feel the impact however. Ryan’s adrenaline-drenched brain fed him more data than he could process: the body heat of his attacker, the sinewy muscles rippling beneath coarse fur, the hot, musty breath on the back of his neck, and the large claws that ripped through his sweatshirt and raked searing pain into his side. It all happened in an instant, in less time than it took for a bolt of lightning to streak through the sky, then it was all gone. Gone, except for the blinding pain in his side and the feeling of hot blood pumping out of the wound.
Ryan pushed the pain out of his mind long enough to realize that he was on the ground, and that the wind had been knocked out of him. As he gulped for air that never seemed to reach his lungs, his eyes fell to the four identical slashes on his right side: each one at least six inches in length. He lifted his head as high as he could and looked around at his blurring landscape. He saw nothing. The animal in him had come to the same decision as his human mind: this was not a fight he could win. His lungs returned to normal and he inhaled noisy gulps of air. His breathing steadied, though still quick and shallow from the terror. Ryan lay there waiting for a second attack that he knew would come at any moment, the attack that he knew would likely be the last thing he’d ever feel.
The hushed seconds ticked by…no attack came. Ryan strained, over the sound of the blood pounding in his ears, to hear any sort of noise that might signal his attacker’s return. He knew of course, that whatever it was didn’t make noise. The first attack had come in utter silence, and the next one would be the same way. With another gasp of breath, Ryan blinked the tears out of his eyes and summoned all the strength he could to roll himself onto his stomach. The twigs and fallen pine needles poked into his skin as he forced himself up on all fours. He took a few more deep breaths and pushed away from the ground, shakily clambering to his feet. As he clutched his side with one hand and his aching stomach with the other, Ryan stumbled off into the woods in a direction he could only pray was the right one. His internal sense of direction had been erased by terror, and he had no way of knowing which way he had come.
Now that he was on his feet, Ryan’s adrenaline pumped faster than it ever had before. It dulled the pain in his side to a distant roar, and the protests of his ankle were drowned out completely. Even so, the foot was still injured. Ryan hadn’t made it more than ten feet outside the clearing when he buckled again. His ankle pitched him forward and Ryan landed on his hands and knees in the wet underbrush. His hands stung from the impact and Ryan felt as though he had used the last of his strength getting to his feet the first time. He doubted he had it in him to get back upright. Then the second attack came.
Just as suddenly as before, Ryan was hit again. It was the same freight train impact slamming into his left side, opposite the slash wounds. He heard two of his ribs break a split-second before he felt them. Then he felt them.
The impact sent Ryan sprawling with his arms and legs twisted about and forced at odd angles. He landed with a sickening thump in the dirt nearly six feet from where he had been hit. His eyes instinctively shot open to brace for another attack, but there wasn’t one. He saw nothing. There was no sign of his attacker: no hulking figure emerging from the shadows, no rustle of underbrush. Ryan couldn’t even spot a single branch that had been disturbed or even one dead, fallen leaf that had been kicked up and misplaced. It was as though the shadows themselves were rising up to attack him, then fading away just as quickly. The only evidence that anything had happened at all was Ryan’s own, broken body. That and the stillness.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, crumpled in dirt that was becoming soaked with his blood. The pain made time meaningless. The pain was all he knew, as if it was all he had ever known. He couldn’t think of a time in his life that he hadn’t been lying in this forest in excruciating pain.
Then something strange began to creep back from the recesses of his mind, some last spark of human will or instinctual self-preservation. Something gave him the idea that he could get up, that he could keep going. Ryan would have preferred to stay there and die.
He tried to, in fact. He wept silently into the damp earth and begged his mind, his body, to let him die. However, that same spark would not comply and after a moment Ryan felt as though his body were being run by remote. He hadn’t told his body to push itself up against a fallen tree. He hadn’t told it to inch up, little by little, until he was lying across the large log, almost standing. He hadn’t told his body to gingerly put weight on both feet, then stagger away from the support of the log. He certainly hadn’t told his body to take off at a slow, hobbling run. Ryan’s body however, had taken over. His mind and body had flipped on the autopilot and started feeding even more adrenaline into his system to give Ryan a will he never knew he had.
He was bent nearly double and both arms clutched his sides, but he was moving. He was breathing. He was living.
Low-hanging branches scraped his exposed face and arms and left shallow cuts all over him, but he didn’t feel them. In fact, Ryan couldn’t feel much of anything. His every thought, every action, was consumed by one goal: to keep moving. There was no room for pain, no room for fear. The forest floor was just as treacherous as it had always been; exposed roots and large rocks were everywhere, but Ryan was moving in a way he never had before. Every step in front of him was immediately analyzed: where best to step, what needed to be avoided, where it would make the next step fall. Just as immediately, he took the step and analyzed the next one. He knew, mind and body, that the only way he was going to stand a chance of escaping with his life was to keep running. And so he did.
Ryan was discovering the energy and reflexes that only manifested to those whose lives hung in the balance; he was discovering the very limits of human potential. His pursuer however, was not human. Ryan leapt over a mossy log and, just as he landed, he was hit a third time. This time the attack came from behind, and it was more than a collision.
As it hit, the thing sunk its teeth into Ryan’s arm directly between the elbow and the shoulder. Twin rows of white-hot knives were driven into his arm with searing pain and he felt the hot breath and sticky saliva.
Just as suddenly as the teeth had stabbed into flesh, they were ripped out and Ryan was again alone. He lay there, driven into the ground for a third time. While his arm burned with pain, something else occurred to Ryan: whatever this thing was, it could have killed him at any time. This creature was faster, stronger, and more at home in the forest than Ryan could ever be. He couldn’t help but wonder why he was still alive. If he was being hunted for food, why hadn’t he been eaten? If he was being hunted for sport, what kind of animal would do such a thing? Ryan was being toyed with, but he didn’t know why. The number of minutes that made up the rest of his life, the number of breaths he would ever breathe, were now up to some wild animal that Ryan knew he would probably never even see, let alone stop. Panting on the ground, his breath unsteady and ragged, all strength was gone from him. Ryan gave up.
The pain in his ankle had returned with a vengeance and was shooting up and down the length of his leg. The blood seeping from the gashes in his side had slowed not because it was clotting, but because Ryan didn’t have much blood left in him to bleed. Every time he inhaled, he wasn’t sure if he would live long enough to exhale. He could pass out at any time, a broken rib could puncture a lung at any moment, and the searing ho
t pain from the bite in his arm made it feel as if the giant teeth were still in there.
His strength had left him long ago, but the residual adrenaline and that tiny spark of will had not. Standing was out of the question, so Ryan began to crawl.
He began to squirm through the underbrush even though he didn’t have a clue where he was going. Even if he had, Ryan knew it wouldn’t matter. Even if the campsite was ten feet away and even if his shadowy murderer didn’t return, he’d never make it out alive. Ten feet might as well have been ten miles, and he knew that any minute the thing was going to drop down onto him and finish him off. It had had its fun, Ryan was beaten, dying. All that was left was the killing blow, and Ryan found himself relishing the thought of a quick death.
Still, he kept pushing, kept crawling. Dirt worked its way into his nose and mouth, into his open wounds. He pushed and pushed, slithering between trees and rocks until suddenly the forest opened up and there were no more trees in front of him. He had reached the blacktop of the highway and for the briefest of moments Ryan allowed a faint glimmer of hope to worm its way back into his mind. He’d be found here, rescued. A truck driver who used to work as an army medic would find him here on the road and pull him into his cab. He’d give Ryan a shot of morphine and rush him to the hospital. They’d save his life and Ryan would wake up warm in freshly-laundered sheets. He’d see college, he’d see a wife, kids, grandkids. The truck driver was just around that next corner, he was sure of it. Ryan could almost hear the rumbling of the engine.
The treetops no longer obscured the moon and it shone brightly on Ryan and reflected dully off the pavement. He squinted at it through tear-soaked, mud-stained eyes until his surroundings suddenly darkened. An impossibly large shadow had fallen over him. It had come between Ryan and the moon, smothering him in darkness.
The creature approached slowly; it had won and it knew it. The hunt was over, the prey was beaten. Ryan opened his eyes a fraction more as the thing stepped fully onto the highway, and Ryan got his first look at his killer.
It was not, as he had first thought, a grizzly. It was not, for that matter, like anything Ryan had ever seen before. It was covered from head to toe in coarse brown fur, and it walked on four legs, but it looked as if it had been designed to walk on two. All four of its limbs seemed to be the same length, but the hind legs looked as though they were perpetually bent at the knees. Its forelegs, now that Ryan really looked at them, weren’t legs at all, but arms. In fact, its entire upper body was strangely humanoid, with a near-human torso and long muscular arms that ended in five-fingered hands. Each long, powerful finger, however, ended in a wicked claw that Ryan knew firsthand was razor sharp. Strange as it seemed, even to Ryan, the head was the least bizarre: it was that of a wolf.
The creature sauntered closer. Its brown fur rippled in the breeze as it padded onto the blacktop in complete silence. The moon shone into the creature’s terrifying yellow eyes and Ryan saw something, despite everything else he had seen tonight, that he was not expecting: intelligence. In a way he couldn’t explain and didn’t understand, Ryan knew these were not the eyes of some savage beast. These eyes were thinking, calculating, feeling. Feeling perhaps a murderous bloodlust or uncontrollable, carnivorous excitement, but feeling nonetheless.
It had closed the final gap and stopped, looming over his frozen form. It lowered its long snout and inhaled the dying boy’s scent. Ryan smelled the beast's wet fur and felt its hot, putrid breath. It reared back onto two legs and rose to its full height of at least seven feet. The thing flattened its ears and opened its jaws wide, ready to close them around Ryan’s neck. It savored the moment as its lips drew back to reveal long yellow fangs that glinted in the pale light. The head hung there for a moment, as if frozen, but in a split second more, with the same blinding speed, it plunged its head down upon him.
As Ryan’s conscious mind braced for impact and the inevitable end, his instincts once again took over. His hand closed around a large rock that sat on the side of the road, just within his reach. Weak fingers closed around the rock and with all the strength he had left, Ryan wrenched his arm upward and brought the stone smashing into the creature’s skull. The rock made contact with a dull thud and the creature’s head snapped to one side. It emitted a low snarl of surprise, but Ryan’s last hope had proven fatally ineffective. The beast was stunned for only a moment, and then it let out another fierce snarl as it lunged down upon him once again.
Ryan closed his eyes and waited for the final bite to come. He waited to feel the jaws around his neck, waited for the dozens of tiny puncture wounds that would be followed closely by his jugular being ripped from his throat.
Through his closed eyelids, Ryan saw a spreading redness that he knew was a light. The redness grew and intensified but Ryan refused to open his eyes. He didn’t want to watch the creature kill him, not if he had a choice.
Blood continued to pour from his wounds and stain the asphalt beneath him. Ryan knew that after this thing was done with his corpse, those stains would be all that was left of him; the only physical evidence that Ryan Fisher had ever existed. He felt himself losing consciousness. He welcomed it. The pain was nearly over. Even brighter redness, then, blackness.