Red Blaze

by Jason Kucharik

  Landon part 2

  I push a branch aside to see Rufus in the middle of the trail. He’s stopped cold and is staring off into the distance. We spend a great deal of time up here, and he knows this area well. He’s good around hikers and pays no mind to smaller wildlife, so the fact that he’s playing statue right now has me on edge.

  Rufus emits a low, almost imperceptible growl. “What is it, boy?” I whisper. The growl continues. “Rufus,” I say slightly louder. The growling stops, but he doesn’t move an inch.

  I take a moment to let the wind die down on the ridge, then scan the area in front of us while listening for any sounds of movement. My right hand silently creeps down to the holster inside my jeans near my hip. I grasp the cold rubber grip of my trusty .44 revolver and slide it out of the holster. The pistol stays at my side as I raise the night vision up to my eye.

  The trail curves to the right ahead, then back across the original path. I scan the area directly in front of Rufus, then sidestep to the left to get a better view through the trees. Some fifty yards away is a campsite, the low fire hidden by high rocks and a thick tree that previously obscured my view. There looks to be at least one person sitting behind the fire pit.

  “Rufus, it’s just a campsite, come on,” I drop the monocle and try to move forward, but Rufus remains firm. The low growl starts again and he refuses to let me pass.

  “Buddy,” I raise the monocle again and this time zoom in to the campsite. “It’s just a...” Before I have a chance to finish my sentence, I see why Rufus stopped. “Dear God...” I exhale. My heart starts racing at the sight of the camper in the chair. His throat is slit wide open and the front of his shirt is covered in blood.

  There’s something blocking the small amount of light flickering in the fire pit to his left. My hand starts shaking, the horrific scene blurs as I try to steady my nerves. This clearly wasn't an animal. I hold my breath in an attempt to calm my hands and get a clear enough view of the scene in front of him to see another body, torn to shreds, laid out over a camping chair. There’s movement that breaks the light of the fire, it looks as if something is gnawing at the remains.

  I get lightheaded and quickly notice that I’m not breathing. For a second I don’t know how. I manage to continue looking through the monocle as I force air back into my lungs much louder than I want to. Rufus’s growling increases and he can no longer control the impulses quelled by his training. He breaks form and lets out an aggressive snarl. The movement near the second corpse stops.

  I stare for what seems like hours, my hands frozen and tensed around the monocle and the grip of my pistol. My hands shake as I press the rubber eyepiece harder and harder against my socket. The skin around my eye is in pain, then goes numb. My fingers wrapped around the grip of the gun start to ache.

  Everyone’s heard the stories of hikers getting murdered on the Appalachian Trail, but it’s extremely rare with less than fifteen recorded instances over the twenty-two hundred mile stretch in the last forty years. My mind is racing as I try to assess the situation and focus on my next move. I have to call this in immediately, the killer could still be in the area.

  I keep my eye on the campsite and the monocle where it is. Slowly slipping my revolver back into its holster, I unzip my pack’s waist strap pocket for my phone. Just as I’m about to take my eye off the campsite to call for help, a human head raises up from behind the corpse. Staring directly at me is a young woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, blood all over her face and a bit of flesh hanging from her lips. Her pupils are wide and her glare burns through the monocle, there’s no question she sees us as her head cocks to the right like a chicken.

  Shock takes over, I lose all control as my phone falls to the ground and cracks against a rock. Rufus barks and bolts toward the campsite. “No!” I shout uncontrollably. Reason is violently shoved aside as fear and patriarchal instincts take over. Without thinking, I toss the night vision to the ground and surge forward after Rufus.

  After a few seconds of running, I try to gain my bearings. The light from the dying fire comes into view through the trees and I run toward it. I can no longer see Rufus, but I hone in on the sound of his legs careening through the dried leaves that cover the ground. The fire pit dims as a plume of smoke appears from the stacked stones, a site that quickly disappears as the embers are fully extinguished by that abomination I saw. I reach down deep and propel myself forward as fast as possible while trying to keep my balance on the rocky trail. Rufus barks several times and each time that he does, the sound pulls farther and farther away from me.

  No Rufus, no! “NO!” The last one escapes my lips just as the front of my boot catches an overgrown root. I go down hard. Luckily, it’s happened enough times that muscle memory kicks in and I prevent from shoving my hands forward to stop the fall. The last thing I need is a broken arm.

  Miraculously, my head misses every one of the dozens of rocks scattered in front of me and slams into the hard-packed dirt. It hurts, but at least I’m still conscious. I scramble to my feet, and the night seems infinitely darker as my vision blurs and my head spins.

  Stay conscious!

  I push forward at the sound of Rufus growling in the distance and finally gain enough clarity to rip my pistol from its holster.

  There’s a yelp, then silence.

  Through no choice of my own, I stop dead in my tracks. The silence causes a chill to run down my spine. Even the wind has died down. A pit forms in my belly, like the nauseous pain you get after a long night of drinking on an empty stomach. The reality of the situation is eating at me from the inside, pushing me forward to understand what happened, but it has also seized up my legs, crippling me with fear.

  “Ruf…” I try to squeeze out his name, but my throat is dry, causing me to cough. I clench my eyes shut, shake my head. and open them again. My vision has cleared since the fall and my eyes have readjusted to the pitch-black night. I can see outlines of trees before me, the stone fire pit some ten yards in the distance. My chest heaves up and down as my breathing slowly decreases from the run. It’s the only thing that I can hear despite the fact that I can see trees moving to a new gust of wind that swirls dead leaves around my legs.

  One step. Come on , I yell at myself. What was that...eating or...chewing at the corpse? It looked like a woman, but it can’t be. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath, then look down at my legs firmly planted in place. My right hand is clenched around the grip of the pistol. My left slowly moves toward its associated hamstring. The forest can play tricks on you, your eyes can play tricks on you at night, you know that. There’s no strength in my arms, so I rotate my whole upper body. At first there’s no movement, but then my mind starts to reboot. My left hand tightens against my leg and pulls it forward. My muscles begin to tense and my hand forces my leg forward a few inches. Unsure of my own physical viability at the moment, I try to move my right leg on its own, for fear of holstering the gun and needing it, or accidently shooting myself as I try to use it to force motion behind my knee. The leg tingles, then moves forward six inches.

  That’s it , I tell myself, trying to focus on the sheer act of doing something and not what I know to be true a mere ten yards ahead of me. My left leg moves, this time without the help of my hand. The right takes a step, then back to the left. I’m moving and the grisly scene at the campsite is only a few feet away. Even in the dark, with smoke still pouring out of the fire pit, I get my first good, up-close look at what happened. I flick on my headlamp, then double over, retching into the thin dirt and stone path under my feet.

  I don’t know how, maybe through subconscious instinct, but I manage not to vomit all over my shoes. Normally, given the brutal circumstance before me and the fact that whatever did this could still be in the area, my shoes would be the last thing from my mind. However, if it’s an animal attack, then I’d rather not have my lower half drenched in an easily discoverable smell. You know what did this. You saw it.

  “No,” I whisper ou
t loud. “There’s no…” There’s no way that was a woman. The mind can distort facts, it can change details especially under duress. Animals don’t slit throats.

  Still staring at my lunch on the ground lying in acidic bile, I try to replay what happened. I saw the campsite, I saw the camper with the...I swallow…“Slit throat.” Then I saw the other corpse across the chair.

  “That explains it, I was freaked out by the discovery. My mind, it, it didn’t know what to make of the situation, so I started seeing things.” For some reason, saying this out loud makes me believe it just slightly more than if I tried to convince myself in my head.

  But what made me...Rufus. Convinced that this was an animal attack and I didn’t see what I thought I saw, and the throat was just a freak chance encounter with a claw or the like, I shout his name into the dirt, “Rufus!” I lift my head, purposefully averting my eyes from the death before me and scan the forest in all directions. “Ruuuuuuufussssssss!” I shout again.

  The sounds of the forest are back, the leaves shuffle around the ground, the trees creaking in the wind, and crickets chirp all around me. Rufus is nowhere to be seen or heard and there’s only one thing left for me to do. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, preparing myself for what I’m about to see. Opening my eyes, I turn to the campers.

  The urge to vomit again is overwhelming, but somehow I manage to keep it together. Just in front of me is the stone fire pit still pouring smoke into the air. To the left, between me and the fire pit, is the body of a male hiker, slung over a camping chair. His face is… mangled. It’s covered in blood and there are what look like dozens of clean lacerations from his hair down to his collar. My heart begins to race. I take a moment to blink for several seconds and swallow before surveying the rest of his corpse.

  His abdomen is torn open, the insides are a mess and strewn about near the foot of his chair. Something rummaged through his body. I take a step closer and inspect the gaping hole in his stomach. I’ve seen animal attacks before, cougars, bobcats, scared deer mauling people with their antlers, alligators, bears...I’ve never seen anything like this. There doesn’t appear to be enough missing to make me think that the body was being eaten and the cuts on the face, they weren’t made by a claw or talon. They’re precise, clean...these cuts were made with a blade.

  No, no, no.

  I turn to the other camper, another male, roughly twenty, maybe twenty-one. He’s sitting upright in his chair, head resting on his shoulder and his throat sliced from ear to ear. That wasn’t done by an animal. “This can’t be happening.” That’s when I see it.

  A dark mass on the ground behind the camper with the slit throat. “No,” I plead audibly, knowing full well what it is. I inhale through my nose, fighting back the surge of tears just beneath my eyes. “No.” I lick my lips and move a step closer. “No.” I shake my head and take another step. “No,” I squeeze out, barely through my throat closing and the tears that now fill my eyes.

  I can see Rufus’s hind legs as I round the chair. He’s immobile, lying on his side on the ground. Hand shaking, I take another step. His upper half comes into view. There’s a pool of blood on the ground and as my light wraps around the camper’s corpse in front of me, I start shaking my head.

  “Rufus,” I squeeze out through hurried breaths. I can see his neck now and my chest starts heaving up and down. The tears are making it difficult to see. One more step before I let out a wail of pain; the tears no longer held back, stream down my face. My vision is obscured, but Rufus’s fate is clear nonetheless. There’s a trail of blood leading away from his collapsed skull, several feet away, a large rock glistens red as my headlamp brings it into view. The sight is too much for me to bear. First my legs give out and I fall to my knees, then my head careens toward Rufus, landing just above his back thigh. My soul pours forth through my eyes in the form of salty bits of agony, soaking his lifeless skin.

  I don’t know how long I lay this way. It could have been ten minutes, it could have been three hours. Time has lost all meaning as my mind refuses to accept everything that’s happened since Rufus stopped on the trail. I don’t care about the killer. I don’t care about the fact that I could be next, and I certainly don’t care about the fact that the temperatures have dropped and the cold is eating through my gloves and jacket. My face is numb, frozen by wind, shock, and fear. Fear of continuing life without the only light left in my heart.

  “You should have done more to protect him,” a voice says from behind me. I muster up whatever strength I have left and turn to face the camper in the chair. His head is still slumped against his neck, but his eyes are alive and rotate slightly to look at me.

  “You told him you would, do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember!” I snap.

  “I’ll love you, I’ll keep you safe. That’s what you said, Landon, it’s the same thing you told Tara...and we all know how that turned out.”

  “Ah!” I wail and shove the corpse out of the chair and onto the ground.

  “Not a good sign,” a soft female voice says, rolling off the most recent gust of wind. The voice speaks again, coming from a completely different direction. “Talking to dead guys, that’s never a good sign. Your mental faculties are severely compromised. Here I was hoping this would be more fun.”

  I leap up to my feet, mind racing, my heart pounding against the inside of my ribcage, trying to break through my chest. I feel something warm run down my otherwise numb face. It turns cold as I reach up and touch it, then look to see blood on my fingers. A cut from the fall maybe? I frantically scan the woods, allowing my headlamp to sweep all around me, looking for any indication of where she may be. There’s nothing.

  In a moment of clarity, I switch the headlamp off and bathe in the darkness. Whoever this woman is, she knows the woods, she knows how to move undetected, and all the headlamp does is broadcast my own location.

  “That’s a good move,” she says from behind me. I turn in place as quietly as possible. “It won’t help, but it’s smarter than anything else you’ve done since discovering me.” That time she came from my right.

  “I feel bad about Rufus...well to be honest I really don’t but...I can acknowledge how painful it was for you.” My hair stands on edge, it sounds as if she’s standing right behind me, whispering into my ear. A sharp pain shoots across the back of my neck. I turn to face her only to be greeted by another gust of blistery wind and darkness. Touching the back of my neck with my clean hand, I can feel a thin, long cut just above my shoulders. That did not come from the fall. She did that, and I can’t even get eyes on her. My hand slinks toward my waist.

  “How about I give you some help. That revolver won’t do much if you can’t see me. But where’s your phone?” Her voice comes from a different direction every time she talks, and I can’t zero in on a location. I’m used to tracking animals through woods at night, but this woman...I can’t even hear her move.

  I whip around, half expecting to see that beautifully disturbing face behind me, covered in thick red blood. Alas there’s no sign of her and I take off running back to where Rufus stopped in the trail. I don’t know if it’s the cold air sweeping over my face, the blood pumping through my veins due to the hurried movement, or the feeling of solid ground under my feet, but my mind starts to regain critical thinking skills. I remember that after dropping my phone, I tossed my night vision to the side as well. I still have the gun, but she’s right, it’s little comfort if I can’t see her. If I’m going to survive this, I need to call for help and I need to be able to see her.

  Reaching the location where Rufus froze, l quickly scan the ground for my phone. I keep it in an orange camo case for this exact reason. All of sudden, something slams into me from the right and I lose my balance. I played football in high school, the feeling is unmistakable. Someone just ran into me. The placement was perfect too, with a shoulder hitting just above my elbow, crushing my arm against my side and knocking me off balance. I tumble to the ground sideway
s, my shoulder hitting dirt and a large rock bashing into my side. I can feel one of my ribs crack.

  Regaining my senses, I get back on my feet as quickly as I can, but stay in a low, crouched stance to prevent from being thrown off balance again. My head is ringing. I take a second to shake the sensation away then try to take a deep breath. Pain stabs my side, radiating through my back and chest, the broken rib making itself known.

  “Was that a rib I heard crack?” the female asks from my right. In pain, and frustrated, I angrily rip the revolver from my holster and fire a shot in the direction of her voice.

  “Oh come on now,” she says from behind me. “Let’s not lose our cool just yet.”

  I unintelligibly shout into the woods, then turn my attention back to the trail. She’s playing with me, getting some sadistic kick out of hunting me in the dark. I need to focus. Something tells me if she wanted me dead already I would be.

  I spot my orange phone case several feet in front of me and carefully kneel down, keeping the movement in my abdomen to a minimum. The broken rib causes me to wince as I reach out for the phone. As I’m turning it over, something unnatural catches my eye on the ground to the right. The case is empty, my phone is lying on the ground is pieces.

  “That’s unfortunate,” she whispers, it sounds as if she’s hovering above me. I’ve heard of people being able to throw their voice before, even seen a few ventriloquists do it pretty well, but this is something else, something unnatural.

  As desperation washes over me, I notice a clean cut in my jacket near my forearm. I pull the sleeve back to see a six inch incision across my base layer, starting near the outside of my elbow, going down towards my hand. Even in the dark, I can see the blood seeping out of my arm, soaking the light gray thermal. That was also not from the fall.

  Eve part 2

  Rahhhh! Howl loud and fierce like creatures from myths of old. It will do no good.

  So animalistic. Base humanistic instincts used to fascinate me, now though, truth be told, they disgust me. He’s scared, his heart is racing, and the idea of fight or flight kicks in. Unfortunately, it may have gone beyond that, into the dark recesses of the human mind, into the black.