When I was confident it wasn’t William Tell’s missing arrow, I pulled my hand back down to find it was covered with a fair amount of my life fluid. I looked hard to make sure there wasn’t any brain intermingled within. I used a tree as a support as I rose unsteadily to my feet. I leaned against the thick bark, taking in some breaths. I might have stayed that way for a few more minutes, hours, until daylight, or the end of times, but the fucking howlers had a different idea as they began their incessant wailing.
“Night runners,” I hushed out softly, not even realizing I’d remembered something.
I pushed away from the tree. My first steps looked like I’d just left a bar at closing time with draft beers having only been a penny. I staggered and weaved, then found some semblance of stability as I departed the area. My flight did not go unnoticed. Something was coming my way, but it wasn’t a night runner. It was as pale as death and a large gash oozed blood from the side of its head. A chunk of muscle the size of my fist was flapping on its thigh, part of it having been severed; most likely during the toppling of the tower. That didn’t stop him, though. The anger in his eyes was enough to let me know that if he got within striking distance, he meant to do me bodily harm. I was lucky his attempt at fast locomotion was thwarted by his damaged leg. He groaned as he dragged his useless appendage. His arms came up; his spatial abilities were pretty terrible if he thought he was in range of grasping me.
It was sort of humorous in a dark way, right up until his buddies heard his groan for help. Yeah, then it wasn’t quite so comical. All eyes turned toward me, like I was the office intern and I just returned with the boxes of bagels the boss had ordered.
“Uh-oh.”
Yeah I’m pretty sure I said that, and then, I turned and ran. I had completely forgotten about the M-16 I had hanging down on the middle of my chest, held on by my tactical strap. Even as the thing kept repeatedly hitting my sternum, I ran. If I’d had the misfortune of running between two trees too close to each other, the rifle would have bridged the gap and I would have slammed into it like it was a crossbeam. My head ached; every beat of my heart was agony as it sent a pulse of blood into the area. The pain was nearly debilitating. The lack of light and the canopy of the trees made any kind of vision nearly impossible. I was running blind with no direction in mind. I did not know of any sanctuary, no safe haven, no help…nothing. I was running to not die; it was the pursuit of the damned. I stumbled over a root and nearly went down.
Don’t trip, don’t trip, don’t trip. This became my mantra.
The word ‘trip’ seemed important, but given the circumstances I was in, it held up to its own merits without me having to look for a deeper meaning. I could hear night runners off in the distance. They were a threat, but not as immediate as the one I found myself in now. The thick woods were slowing down those that followed, but it was having the same effect on me. Plus, they didn’t seem to give a shit that they couldn’t see anything. Either they were scent driven, or they could see in the dark. I didn’t know which and it didn’t really matter. They were closing and if I didn’t do something soon, I would die a violent death.
It was a branch that saved my life. At some point in my existence, I must have been a tree-hugger, because the woody plant life was helping out whenever it could. The growth caught the apparatus on top of my head and threatened to yank it clean from my skull. I don’t know why I cared; I didn’t even know what it was, but it was mine dammit, and I was going to do whatever I could to hold onto it. I yanked the thing back onto my head with a little more force than necessary, and it crossed over the top part of my field of vision.
I damn near stopped running when I realized, for a brief second, that I could see. Clearly I mean. Sure, it was this ghostly green, but I could see a patch of poison ivy to my left, a small outcropping of scrub brush I was about to get entangled with straight ahead and, yup, the ugly green-ass zombie coming up on my right. I lost a fair amount of peripheral vision as I dropped the wonder glasses into place, but I could see the hazards directly in front of me, and for right now, that was going to have to suffice.
I quickly weighted my options: Itching for a week, ripped to shreds from thorns and possibly hung up and then ripped to shreds from a man-eating monster or, I could avoid the step of getting shredded by thorns and go right for gruesome death by ingestion. I took avenue number one. At least in this one, I’d be alive to suffer through the insufferable scratching. Odds were I had to know someone that owned enough oatmeal for a bath. Right?
I was getting a bruise on my chest from the object that kept slamming into me. I looked down, but due to the length of the optics, I could only make out a piece of the gear as it swung away from my body.
Stick, was my initial thought, although I couldn’t figure out why I would have attached it to myself in such a way as that it would not come off. Then, the word ‘fire’ began to resonate.
Wonderful, I thought, what a bunch of useless, random thoughts I was having as I struggled to hold on to my life.
‘Fires’ and ‘sticks’ were pretty much one of the earliest thoughts of man. Well, that and bopping a cave-woman over the head with a club and dragging her to their cave. Upon where she would chastise him mercilessly for having a pig-sty for a home and why couldn’t he bring her home a mammoth fur like Ubrach next door? Yeah, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. I was going to die tonight. Then, something wonderful happened as I thought about Nugla and Ubrach’s dysfunctional cave life. I circled back around to ‘fire’ and ‘stick’, only this time I stuck the two words together. At first this meant nothing.
What the hell is a ‘firestick’?
Then an internal light shone brightly. Firestick equated to rifle. I didn’t know what a rifle was per se. I wouldn’t be able to give anyone a definition, but I started to see pictures of me handling one; of me breaking one down into its individual components and putting it back together, of pulling back on a charging handle, of watching rounds enter the chamber, of rounds coming out of the barrel.
“Holy shit!”
I wasn’t quite sure what I had, but I was positive that it could do damage. I was still running for all I was worth. The things behind and to the sides of me had not dropped off. I had to find a place to make a stand, and these woods weren’t going to be that place. I could see and I had the means to defend myself. I still had no clue who I was or why I was here, but I had hope, and right now, that was the only fuel I needed to spur me on. I found another gear. I was emboldened by my ability to see and not be impaled on the very branches that were doing their best to keep me alive. I ran. My legs were ablaze, my head throbbed, my chest heaved, my lungs burned, and yet…still I ran. At times I shouldered into a tree, always losing that particular confrontation. My momentum would slow for a mere moment before I would press on.
My feet felt like bricks. My knees were protesting the uneven terrain and my back begged for a seat, but still, I ran. Hope is a wonderful thing. It can make seemingly unattainable goals possible. But it is not an infinite well into which you can dip an over-sized ladle whenever you want. Even hope demands fuel of some sort to keep burning. It can be a drop, even a mist of fine spray, but it does need something. My reservoir of hope was beginning to consume itself like the malnourished dream that it was. Then, like that, there was an opening. At first I thought I was having a hard time processing the information being supplied through the green lens, but the farther I ran, the wider the gap became. I was close to getting out of the woods. Open ground wasn’t necessarily advantageous, though. The trees were the only thing keeping those chasing me from dragging me down. At least I’d be able to better see where I was going and potentially increase my speed. I may even be able to tell which direction my enemy was attacking from, although, odds were that would be easy enough to figure out as ‘being surrounded’ came to mind.