Baked Scribe Flashback : In The Dark
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The sound of the cry cut through the woods and he sat up in his sleeping bag, looking out over the clearing. He looked across the dying embers of the fire at his friend, who seemed unfazed.
“I told you the locals around here called them Howler Woods, I guess it was for a reason,” Zeke said.
“I just figured it was just passing stories around,” Don said, “I didn’t take it so literally. What do you think that was?”
“What do you mean, you don’t think it’s the dead?” Zeke rolled his eyes, “I can’t remember what they call the effect, something that has to do with the way the woods are situated and air drafts coming through and causing weird sounds.”
Don stared him down for several moments before responding. “Yeah, I think I’ll still with the cries of the dammed, thanks.” He stabbed his long metal fork through another hot dog and held it out over the fire, sitting in the silence and watching the skin of the meat blister and pop. Zeke cracked open another beer, the popping of compressed air followed close by the smell of hops. They looked back over their shoulders at the sound of wood snapping somewhere off in the darkness, as if under the weight of a footstep.
“Animal,” Zeke said, shrugging again as he returned his attention to the beer.
“Big animal,” Don said, squinting into the shadows beyond the tree line. There was no sign of movement or further noise that he could detect.
“Told you,” Zeke said as Don turned back towards the warmth of what was left of their fire. He didn’t know why he had let himself get talked into this absurd trip in the first place, other than the fact that he had really wanted to get out of town and away from things. He didn’t even like camping but sometimes it was good enough to simply not be doing anything else. Zeke threw some more wood on the fire and it flared up again.
He felt himself starting to drift off, soothed by the popping from the fire and the heat flowing over him, the cries from the birds overhead. His brain had gotten so foggy that it was several minutes before it occurred to him that it was too late for birds to be out.
Don’s head snapped up at the realization as at least a dozen black colored birds descended down out of the trees and began circling them, shrieking loudly and shattering the silence. They looked like ravens but several times larger and continued to pour down on them from the trees until they were surrounded by a cyclone of birds, obscuring anything else around them.
He could hear Zeke screaming, could see the fear in his eyes that had to mirror his own. Don grabbed at the sides of his head as the birds took up the sound of a train bearing down on them, the pressure in his head increasing with the wind. The fire blinked out and the birds swarmed in on them, blacking out whatever light was left and shrouding them in darkness.
Don blinked and looked around, no longer feeling the forest around him and not knowing where he even was anymore. He saw a cloaked figure striding towards them, face obscured by a dark, crimson hood. He thought he could hear the sound of branches blowing against each other and in the shrieking howl of the wind, he thought he heard a voice, whispering in his ear, so high pitched and abrasive that he felt like something was being jabbed into his head. He felt warm fluid coming out of his ears that had to be blood. The cloaked figure raised a hand to point and Don soon felt searing heat ripping through his temples.
He woke up on the ground. To the left, nearly fifty yards away he could make out their campsite. Zeke was nowhere to be seen and there were no sounds of anything out of the ordinary, just the normal night life of the forest.
“Hello?” he called out as he struggled to his feet, hoping Zeke would answer, jump out from behind a tree but there was no sign. He was about to call out again when a par of hands grabbed him from behind and threw him against one of the trees. He cried out as something cut into his back and he fell to his knees.
Zeke was looking over him, reaching down with one hand to grab at his shirt, the other already balled into a fist, drawn back to strike.
“Wait, stop!” Don called out to try and talk some sense into his friend but the only answer he received was the fist, driving down onto his nose, cutting through skin and breaking bone underneath, causing blood to spray out in all directions.
The image of Zeke crouched over him began to blister and smoke, the forest around him trembling, like film that was starting to tear in a movie. Instead of his friend that
he was looking up at, he now saw a large mass of some kind of black substance, oily and slick but still bearing some vague human form as it reached down for him. Electricity sparked off of it, burning him wherever it touched and he struggled to get free.
When he came to, whatever was left of Zeke was strewn around him in pieces, on the ground. The only way he could even identify the remains was by Zeke’s plaid shirt, still plastered to the severed torso that was lying near him. Don looked at his hands, now coated in blood that he somehow knew wasn’t his. He leapt to his feet and began to run, trying to out-distance whatever was happening here. A cacophony of snarling cries rose up all around, sounds of movement from the underbrush around him.
The world went dark and silent, the feel of the ground underneath him now absent. He felt weightless, as suspended in midair, seeing nothing but darkness. He was about to speak when searing pain lanced down his back, a blade of some kind piercing the skin and making its way down. The words he was about to speak was drowned out in a sudden outpouring of sound, a scream of inarticulate pain and rage. He wasn’t even sure if the scream was his own.
The sound caught in his throat as he began to cough up blood. He could see more of his surroundings now. The large trees of the forest stood all around him. He was tied to one of the massive branches, hanging upside down, swinging from side to side on the back of a stiff breeze that brought pain up and down his body like a thousand pin pricks.
On the branches of the other trees, Don could see the bodies of others, also hanging and fighting against their bonds. They seemed to blink in and out of existence, like a bad television signal. Despite this, he still heard the constant sound of their cries, eerily similar to what he had heard earlier, sitting next to the fire. He was starting to struggle against the force holding him to the tree when he felt the cutting begin again.
He began to howl.
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