Pt 1- https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/158u6wy/dont_run_fromt_he_foresters/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
So, some of you have asked why it took me two years to take up the family business.
Dad had been a member of the Camber and Sons logging outfit since before I was born, and it should have been easy to get a job with them. Dad would have likely been overjoyed to have me come work with him, but I had other ideas.
I, like many others before me, had tried to escape Rayffered as soon as I was able.
After three years of ROTC, and nearly constant pushing to get the credits I needed, I was eligible for early graduation. I would turn eighteen in May, a few weeks after school ended for the year, and I took the opportunity and moved on to the next stage of life. With my grades, ASVAB scores, and participation in ROTC, I was also offered an invitation to join the Army and left on a two-year tour of duty. This was during a time when the armed forces were still heavily entrenched in the Middle East, and I took up my rifle and had soon forgotten about Foresters and Rayffered and the concerns of my childhood. I was going out with my unit every day, patrolling and securing sites, but it appeared that my childhood hadn’t forgotten about me.
About a week after I turned twenty, the dreams started.
I was back in Rayffered, standing amidst the fog. I was ten years old, sitting on the pavement and shuddering in fear. This time there wasn’t just one Forester, there were a hundred. They came shambling out of the fog, scrapping the pavement and groaning as their bodies twisted and writhed. They surrounded me, ringing me in as they pushed closer and closer. One of them shambled his way to the front, his form obscured by the fog, but I felt like I knew who it was.
There was only one person it could be for me, and as they leered at me from the depths of the miasma, I would come awake fitfully and sometimes wake up my fellow bunkmates.
It would take a week of inadequate sleep before the strain finally got to me, and it ended up saving my life.
I was driving through the pitted streets of Fallujah, my unit heading to investigate a couple of suspected gathering places of rebel rousers when something ran across the road. What I saw was a gangling kid in blue shorts and a backward cap, a kid who looked a lot like my brother had before being drug off, and when I turned the wheel to avoid him, everything went white before going black for a little bit. We had hit an incendiary device buried by insurgents, but we hadn’t hit square. We had clipped it in our haste and it had flipped the humvee we’d been riding in and rolled it into a nearby ditch. Briggs, the medic on board, had called for support, and only me and a couple of others had been injured at all. I had taken a hit to the head when it slammed into the side of the door, and the docs thought I might have brain damage. That and the explosion left me in the hospital for a few weeks, and when someone from HR came to speak with me, I knew it wasn’t good.
“The medics say you have something going on after the crash. It isn’t life-threatening, but they don’t know how a combat situation will affect it. Your quick thinking back there probably saved your life and your squad, and the Brass is willing to reward that. They want to offer you a medical discharge with full compensation. This will get you your service benefits and the same care as a four-year enlisted. They also want to offer you a medal of valor for what you did out there. I don’t know how you feel about your service career, but I think you’d be a fool not to accept it.”
So, they offered me a medal of valor for nearly falling asleep at the wheel and swerving to avoid a hallucination.
My squad thought I had seen something in the road, but they all thought it had been a lump or a divet that didn’t look right. None of them had seen anyone dart across the road, and when I suggested it, they told me to stop being modest. The other two injured soldiers were discharged pretty quickly, and I packed my stuff and prepared to head home. After the dreams, and seeing my older brother in a foreign land, I was pretty sure I could take these things as a sign that something wanted me back in Rayffered.
Given my dreams, I wasn’t sure it was an invitation I wanted to accept.
But I returned to Rayffered anyway, and the town rolled out the red carpet for me.
Rayffered is a town of about fifty-five thousand, and they don’t have a lot of heroes.
Well, other than the brave loggers who head into the forest every day knowing what lives there.
It was weird to come back to a place I had thought I’d left behind, especially as a hero of sorts. I had looked at the statue of the two guys who’d died in Korea about a hundred times as a kid, and it was weird to think that I might be on their level. Rayffered had mostly been immune to wars, ever since the Civil War, and the few who had enlisted hadn’t really made much of an impression.
Then the Talbert Twins had enlisted and gone to Korea. They had died heroically, holding a hill in an unpronounceable providence for six days. They nearly lasted until reinforcements arrived, but the chopper found them both dead in their gun nest. The town had memorialized them in granite, and it was strange to be counted among them.
I spent my first week walking around like a celebrity. My old high school friends who still lived in town invited me to parties. People paid for my meals at restaurants. I was treated better than I had been in years, but just because I was home didn’t mean the dreams stopped.
If anything, they got worse.
I was no longer sitting on the hot top and waiting for the Foresters. Now I was hoofing it through a war zone. My gun was heavy, my undershirt sticking to me beneath my flak jacket, but the enemies that reared up were the creaking shades of the Foresters. The wooded bits of them seemed to writhe behind the standing smog that permeated everything. No matter how many times I shot them, they always seemed to pop back up. I would always wake up just as a familiar shape rose up behind the smog, the barrel shaking as I came awake.
I didn’t know what to make of them until Friday night found me at a party.
My friend, Frank, was throwing a house party and he couldn’t think of anyone better to have there than a genuine war hero.
“You’ll be there, right?” he said, and it was pretty clear that he had told people I would be.
Friday night saw me sitting at his parent’s kitchen table, drinking a lukewarm beer and talking with people I hadn’t seen in nearly three years. Most of them had either never left or had never been farther from the city limits than a few hours, and I was honestly finding it hard to relate to them. The more people I talked to, the more I questioned why I was here at all. Was this my life now, living with my parents and working some dead-end job in a town that was shrinking yearly as the forest threatened to reclaim it?
I smiled at my old friends and laughed at their stories or commiserated with their losses, but I was honestly debating taking my housing budget and going anywhere but Rayffered.
Then someone put a hand on my shoulder and I looked up to see the last person I had expected.
“Haven’t seen you in a while, Rambo. Glad you made it back alive.”
It was Tyler, and his smile looked as hollow as my own.
We sat around and talked a lot that night as the bottles piled and we both shared a little more than we meant to.
Tyler had been struggling since Highschool. His dad’s grocery store was doing well, but Tyler wasn’t ready to take it from him. The decision, however, seemed to be out of his hands. The doctors had told his dad he had cancer a few months ago, the kind that creeps in fast and doesn’t leave a lot of time for goodbyes. His Dad was stage three now, practically sprinting for the finish line, and Doctor John had given him weeks instead of months.
“The shit of it is that Dad never smoked, never did any of the things that usually lead to cancer. So when he started looking into how he had contracted such an aggressive type, they found that it was the chemicals on the vegetables that he stocked from local farmers. They had been spraying their produce with something to get rid of the wood beetles, the local pests we are trying to stop from eating the crops in the fields, and Dad had been coming into contact with it for years. The business literally killed him, and now he wants me to take it up. How do I tell my old man, as he lies dying, that I don’t want to take up a mantle that put him in an early grave?”
I didn’t have an answer for him, and we both just sat in silence as people milled about us.
“Times like this make me think about Simon.”
I looked away, not sure when we were going to come to the topic of my brother.
“I still feel guilty about that day. I keep wondering what I could have done to,”
“Nothing,” I cut in, “There was nothing you could have done. I’ve told you for years it was a FLUKE. There isn’t anything anyone could have done.”
Suddenly it was all too much. The crowd, the music, the sea of familiar faces that suddenly swam together in a sea of booze, it was all too much. I had planned to crash at Frank’s after the party, the rules of the town still applying to “heroes”, but I just couldn’t. I got up, heading for the door, when Tyler called my name and told me the Foresters would get me if I went out.
“I’ve spent three years in an active warzone, Tyler. I think I can make it home in the place I grew up in.”
No one seemed to notice as I walked out the door, and it wasn’t until I started walking through the night that I began to think better of it. The night was quiet, not a bat or a night bird making a single noise, and it felt a little claustrophobic. Even in the desert there had been noise, but this almost felt like truly foreign territory. The wind pushed at the trees, the sudden intrusion of the skeletal brush across the concrete as unwelcome as the silence.
I was about halfway home when the overwhelming urge to empty my bladder hit, and I was forced to find a bush along the side of the road. I was beginning to sober up, starting to worry that maybe I had been too brash when I noticed the fog rolling in around my ankles. I tried to hurry, wanting to hurry up so I could keep moving, but I had drank about a ten-pack all by myself and when I zipped up and turned around, I was back in the fog bank.
The thick mist swirled around me, leaving me alone in the haze.
As I watched, something shadowy moved amidst the fog and I tried my best to stand completely still. I wasn’t ten anymore, and I meant to fight if this thing wanted me. I wouldn’t be the first adult to go missing thanks to the Foresters. It wasn’t the huge group I’d expected though, but a single Forester, like the dreams I’d been having recently. As it moved, I got none of the usual apprehension I had when I was younger. This Forester wasn’t as old, wasn’t as degraded, as the others, and its gate was unmarred by haste or hunger.
The soft clomp of wood on the road, however, was enough to tell me that some parts of it were less than natural.
I stayed completely still as it came closer and closer, the mist obscuring all but its dark outline. Would it lunge and take me in a tackle? Would it disappear at the last minute and leave me trembling in the mist as it had when I was younger? Was it distracting me so another could creep up behind me and get me?
I didn’t dare take my eyes off it to look, I just watched as it came within five easy feet of me, knowing who it was before it uttered a single word.
“Old Grove.” it creaked.
Its voice was like pines bending in the wind.
“Simon?” I half-whispered, and the thing stiffened as if it had heard something from a life a million years ago.
“Old grove. Seek the heart at the Old Grove.”
Then it disappeared into the mist, a phantom that moved amidst the vapor, and I was left standing there with my fly down to think about my next move.
Dad was overjoyed when I asked if Camber and Son were hiring the next day at breakfast.
“Would you really want to work in the woods with your old man?” he said hopefully, “You don’t think the chainsaws and the falling trees would mess with your….whatever it is you have going on?”
“Na, Dad. I don’t think it will. Besides, I need some income if I’m going to get my own place. Can’t live at Mommy and Daddy’s house forever.”
I hadn’t told them about the housing bonus the Army sent me every month.
The money was not my objective nor the reason I wanted to go into the woods.
Camber and Son cut the woods back from the town itself, but they also went the deepest and sometimes went as far as the borders to the Old Grove, the spot where the Foresters were said to make their home.
Camber and Sons were my best chance of finding out what had happened to Simon.
They were my best chance of seeing my brother again, in whatever form he might have taken now.