Lost in the Woods

“Let us in!” Rochelle threw a rock at the gate as she yelled. It made a loud electric pop as it landed. “We need help damnit!”

“That’s your problem,” came the muffled voice from the other side of the walls. “The gates aren’t opening, move along.”

“You’re sentencing us to death! We need food, water, and shelter from the zombies.”

“Yeah, you and everyone else who comes to Greensburg.”

Rochelle looked at me with a quizzical look on her face. “Greensburg?” she mouthed to me. I shrugged. I never understood why, but these small settlements loved to name themselves.

“You gone?” the man asked after a bit of silence had passed.

“No, you asshole. We’re still here. If we can’t come in, where else can we go?”

“I don’t know, and not my problem.” Rochelle picked up another rock, bigger this time, and threw it at the electrified gate. “If you do that again I’ll get the rifles on you. Go away!”

Rochelle turned away sharply and began to storm off. “Prick!” she yelled, not making any effort to hide her anger and disgust.

“Well,” I spoke up, “you did use some harsh language to describe his mother.”

Rochelle stopped walking and slowly turned back to me. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying,” I fidgeted a little, knowing full well where this would lead, “you get more flies with honey?”

“Really? Really, Patrick? Really? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Well it didn’t make the situation any better.” I muttered.

“It didn’t make it any worse either!” Rochelle stomped off down the path, and I followed until she turned towards the hills and trees. “Come on, we at least need to find some kind of shelter.”

“I know…” I paused as I looked towards the forest. I used to love nature and the woods, but weird stuff started happening with the wilderness about the time people started becoming zombies.

“Do you see any other places we can take shelter?”

My pause continued for a few more seconds before I answered. “It’s just… I don’t think heading into the woods is a good idea.”

“I’m not saying it’s a good option Patrick,” Rochelle readjusted her pack with a heave for emphasis. “But we’re out in the open and it has only been sheer luck that we haven’t come across a horde of rotters out here yet. Our luck won’t hold out forever, and being out here is paramount to a death sentence. At this point it looks like the forest is the only option we have.”

She was right, of course. Not that I hated it when she was right. It was usually a really good thing when she was right. I just hated her being right THIS time. “Fine,” I let out with an exasperated sigh before jogging to catch up with her, “but I’m not happy about it.”

“You’re never happy about anything.”

“I was happy about seeing a secure settlement.”

“Right,” Rochelle chuckled, “and look how well that turned out.”

***

I had grown up camping, and I was familiar with what to expect in the woods because I spent a lot of time backpacking and practicing survival in the wilderness. But since the world went to crap, the woods were something different, and altogether disturbing.

A lot of the trees still appeared to be normal… more or less, but every once in a while there would be a tree that appeared to be covered in skin rather than bark. If you looked carefully enough you could make out faces in the trees. I know, it’s not uncommon to be able to see faces in trees to begin with. Pattern recognition and the imagination make it possible to see faces in just about anything. But this wasn’t pattern recognition and imagination. There were places on the skin-covered trees where faces would begin to show through, like the skin of the tree was a membrane and the face was pressing against it trying to get out. I don’t know if those faces actually moved under the skin of those trees. If they did it was so slow that it was imperceptible. But it would seem like those faces weren’t there at first, and then suddenly appeared, frozen in the skin of the tree, after you looked away.

That was the last time I had ventured into any forest, a couple of years ago. And although normal looking trees still made up the gross majority of the large flora, the sheer number of skin trees was frightening. The skin trees had been relatively uncommon before, and you almost had to go looking for them. Now you could see multiple skin trees within line of sight of one another. There was also an eerie quiet in the air that I recognized. There were no birds chirping, no squirrels chattering, there were no sounds of wildlife at all. It was the quiet that happened when a predator was hunting nearby.

At first we stayed at the outskirts of the woods. We had our reasons. We figured it would give us a better opportunity to run into the woods or away from the woods as the situation dictated. It also allowed us to have a wider range of view to better see an incoming horde from outside the forest. Mostly, we both were put on edge by the quiet of the forest. As the day wore on, we continued to grind away at our already dwindling supplies. Our spirits elated when we found a stream where we could replenish our water, and then plummeted again when I spotted some zombies off in the distance.

“Shit,” I muttered as I ducked behind a rock. Rochelle had a pretty good understanding of what I saw based upon my actions. She followed suit, taking cover behind an old downed log.

“How many did you see?”

“Maybe a couple, they were pretty far off.” I reached into my pocked and pulled out an old plastic toy periscope. I never thought something like a cheap plastic toy would come in handy so often before the world went to crap, but I was lucky enough to come across some at an abandoned tourist trap a few weeks into the apocalypse, and it had saved our butt more than once. Right now was one of those times. “Scratch that… looks like a small horde, maybe three to four dozen. I think they’re about a mile and a half, maybe two miles out.”

Rochelle dipped her finger in the stream and lifted it into the air. “We’re downwind, for now. We can’t purify the water here Patrick. The wind could shift at any moment, and wind or no, a fire in the open might as well be a dinner bell for them.” I kept my eye glued to the periscope, not saying a word. After a moment, Rochelle let out a cough. Not the kind of cough that is really a cough, but the kind of subtle and quite cough you do to get someone’s attention without actually asking them aside. I looked over at her, and she motioned towards the forest with her eyes.

“Are you serious Rochelle?”

“Am I serious Patrick? Our water is nearly gone. We have water here that we need to purify, but we can’t do that without a fire. With no good cover, a fire will attract that horde. And unless something gets that horde’s attention, it could hang around in the area for days. That’s assuming it doesn’t catch our scent and just rush us.”

Rochelle was right again, and I liked it even less than the last time she was right. “Fine, screw it. Let’s go get lost in the woods.” Rochelle didn’t smile, smirk, or react in any way that indicated that she had won the argument. Her own reaction was very similar to my own, somber and pissed. Apparently, at this time, she didn’t like that she was right anymore than I did.

We hadn’t even gotten to adjust to our packs being off and we were already putting them back on then crawling into the forest. We followed the stream into the woods, and Rochelle led the way while I kept an eye on the activity of the horde in the distance. It was slow going, and we refused to stand until the trees completely blocked our view from the horde, and visa versa.

We continued to hike upstream, I think for a good half a mile, before we felt comfortable enough to begin purifying water. I unpacked my solo stove and collected twigs and branches to feed it while Rochelle started digging out empty water containers. Within a few minutes, I had a little fire going on in the stove, and a pot with about two liters of water heating up. Waiting for a pot to boil is neither fun nor a relief, even during a zombie apocalypse. As the water came to a simmer, the only noises in the woods were the occasional crack of the small fire in the solo stove and the burbling of the stream. These were eventually joined by the gentle sound of a rolling boil. We waited a little more than ten minutes before we took the water off and filled two of our containers with it.

“Hey Rochelle, remember when we had the water filters?”

“You mean the ones that went bad after three months?”

“They didn’t go bad,” I said in protest. “The filter parts were meant to be replaced and we didn’t have replacements.”

“Yeah,” Rochelle carefully poured the scalding water into a nalgene.” What about it?”

“Well they sure made getting water easier.”

“And faster…” Rochelle agreed, “until they went bad.”

“We could have grabbed up more replacement filters.”

“We also could have packed a microwave.” There was a big grin on Rochelle’s face.

“Wait, are you making a joke, or mocking me?”

“Yes.” Rochelle’s grin diminished a little. I shrugged, refilled the now empty pot, and put some more twigs in the stove. “At least this little camping stove burns wood. There’s still plenty of that around.”

“You did tease me when I grabbed it.”

“I was wrong, sue me.” I let out a content sigh. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just savoring those words.”

Rochelle lobbed a pebble at me. “Piss off,” she laughed. I laughed. For a moment we forgot that the world had become such a shitty place.

Then we heard a noise. It wasn’t the fire, the stream, or the sound of water boiling. Our heads snapped in the direction the noise came from. It had been a sharp, muted sound, kind of like a branch breaking, but it hadn’t been dry. It sounded wet, like a living bone being snapped in two. Rochelle unstrapped the wood axe from her pack, and I grabbed the aluminum bat from mine.

We waited.

The woods were silent. Dead silent. There’s a point after a scare like that where the body wants to calm back down and relax. We pushed past that. Our experience over the last two years had taught us that relaxing too soon could be fatal.

“I swear to God,” Rochelle whispered, “if zombie squirrels are a thing then I quit right fucking now.”

It wasn’t a squirrel. It was bigger than a squirrel… quite a bit bigger than a squirrel.

“Shit on a shingle,” I muttered. Off in the distance we saw a large furred mass move from tree to tree. “On the bright side, it isn’t a squirrel.”

Rochelle and eye both had our eyes locked on the animal. “That isn’t fucking funny.” She whispered through her teeth. “Is that a damn bear?”

I let a small sigh of relief “I think it’s a mountain lion.”

“How is that better?” The creature moved towards us slowly, seeming to use the trees to stay partially hidden.

“Well it isn’t any worse.” The animal peeked around a tree, giving it us the first look at its face.

It’s very dead, partially decomposed, face.

“I take it back Rochelle! Zombie mountain lion is definitely worse than a bear” The large dead cat continued to advance, stalking through the trees. “What is it doing?”

“I don’t believe it… it’s stalking us.”

“That’s good right? I mean, it’s not running at us to eat our faces off, right?”

“No Patrick, I think that’s bad… very, very bad. It’s stalking us to hunt us. It’s still going to eat our faces off. It not just running us down does means it is still running on some kind of predatory hunting instinct.”

“So it’ll run if we run.”

“Probably.”

The mountain lion kept stalking closer.

“And we can’t outrun it.

“Probably not.”

At this point it was well within twenty yards of us.

“We need to back against a defendable position.”

“Agreed Patrick.”

We slowly backed away from the mountain lion and our now boiling water. The mountain lion continued to follow us, stalking us in a way that reminded me of a cat slowly creeping up on a toy. We kept stealing glances away from the predator, but there was nothing around us that would offer a decent defense. The only things around us were trees.

“Behind us, nine’o clock.” Rochelle said. I took a glance.

“The big tree? Can’t mountain lions climb trees?”

“Not to climb jackass. We can put our backs to it, give the zombie fewer places to attack from.” I didn’t want to point out that the big cat seemed perfectly okay with attacking us head on, despite stalking us. At the very least, it offered us something to do, and didn’t think it could hurt. We started backing away towards the tree, the big cat slowly closing the gap between it and us. When we were about fifteen feet from the tree the mountain lion let out a gentle sound that was somewhere between a zombie’s groan and a purr. A split tongue parted its rotting lips, and licked its maw much as a house cat would. Then it lunged.

Before the zombie apocalypse, a normal response to such an event would include screaming. We had long since learned that screaming tends to bring more zombies, and other unwanted things. We steeled ourselves.

The mountain lion rushed me, its movements deceptively graceful for a creature covered with so much rotting flesh. I swung with my bat as it was midair to leap onto me, connecting with the cat’s neck. The force of the blow knocked the lion off its course, but it wasn’t enough to for the big cat to clear me. It’s claws already extended, one of its paws caught me on my arm, and it drug me down onto the ground as it passed by me. I didn’t feel the sharp pain I expected, but I wasn’t sure if that was because the claws didn’t make it through my shirt or if I was hopped up on adrenaline. Before I could regain my footing, I felt something grab my shoulder roughly and pull me back. I almost swung before I realized it was Rochelle. She got me back on my feet and rushed, axe first, towards the mountain lion. The undead beast stumbled back up quickly, and moved out of the way as Rochelle swung for its head. The axe came down and sank into zombie cat’s shoulder. Without missing a beat, the mountain lion slammed into Rochelle, knocking her flat onto her back.

Still off balance, I ran forward, but not fast enough. The mountain lion perched on top of Rochelle and reared back to take a deep bite. I knew I wasn’t going to make it, but I ran forward all the same.

And then everything froze.

The Rochelle froze; her rapid shallow breathes of fear the only movement with the mountain lion on top of her. I froze; the bat in my hands slipping out of my grip. The mountain lion froze; with some kind of spikes protruding from it’s body.

Then everything started moving again. The big cat was lifted off of Rochelle, and born apart by something we couldn’t see. I raced up to Rochelle, grabbed her arm, and pulled her away from the eviscerated zombie cat and tree that we were seeking cover from.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I was hyperventilating as pulled Rochelle away. “What the hell did that?”

“The tree…” Rochelle whispered after I stopped pulling her back. I looked back in the dim light of the forest and saw a macabre scene. The branches of the tree moved, jerkily, slowly tearing apart the carcass of the zombie mountain lion and dropping pieces of it’s flesh onto its roots. Its skin covered roots. There was a face in the trunk of the tree, pressing out against the skin.

“Rochelle,” I whispered, “we need to go get our crap, and get out of this forest.” She nodded her head in response, and slowly got up. We made our way back to the stream, and I swear, as we walked away from the tree, the face in the tree smiled a sickening smile at me.