Jack’s heavy footsteps crash across the muddy ground of the forest. His breath is heavy and ragged, having been running for what felt like hours. He was properly lost, having been totally turned around in the ambush. His father had warned him not to stray into the forest at night. However, after Dad had stumbled home from the bar looking for a fight; anything felt better than taking another beating. Jack clutches at his abdomen where his white t-shirt hangs in tattered ribbons. The shirt was badly stained with blood which was trickling out of the deep gashes cut into his side. He swears under his breath. That thing had really messed him up.
A large thicket of brambles fades through the cloak of darkness and into view. Jak digs in his heels but it’s too little too late. He crashes into the bush and is dragged to the ground in its stinging clutches. The jolt of the impact forces a great gust of air from his tired lungs with a whoosh! For a moment he just lays there, awkwardly strung up in its snaking vines like a living marionette. However, fear drives him forward; tentatively untying his limbs from the thorns.
After much effort he bursts forth from the bush and into a small clearing where four knotted oaks hold back the unruly forest. Great swaths of moss spill from the branches creating a furled curtain of crocodile green. The thin sliver of a crescent moon bathes the clearing in elegant silver light. Jack stands there, utterly enchanted by the beauty of the Oregon outback. The entropic symphony of the vegetation weaving together to create a picture much like one you’d find on a postcard.
The profound moment helps his mind to shift from purely instinctual into one of reason. The adrenaline of his initial encounter with the beast in the woods had begun to wear off and now the pain was coming in rolling waves up his torso. He stifles a cry of agony, dropping to his knees and gritting his teeth. He kneels there, mud soaking into his jeans and gasping for air. He had pushed himself too hard. His lungs were burning and every choking breath was getting more and more strained as his asthma flared.
He removes his inhaler from his back pocket and gives it a quick shake. The sky blue can of medication turns freezing cold in his shaking fist before he brings it to his lips. He compresses the device and inhales, easing the aching of his lungs if only for a moment.
He perks his ears, scanning the forest for the sounds of its massive, squelching paws beating against the ground. But he hears nothing. The forest is utterly and completely silent other than the gentle melody of crickets and hooting owls.
Jack gives a sigh of relief, which turns into a laugh, and ends with a soft yelp of pain as his ribs flex against his wound. Nobody was going to believe him. Even Shane, his best friend since the first grade. He would just assume he took a bunch of shrooms and wandered off into the woods only to be scared by some forest animal turned nightmarish by the psychedelic haze. But he was stone cold sober. Maybe after a year of drowning his worries in booze and weed he had finally lost it. “The monster of the woods” surely couldn’t be real. It was far more likely he got a little too close to a mamma bear and her cubs than whatever he thought he saw.