I squeezed both eyes shut and forced myself to breathe slow, counting every second that went by. How long until I heard footsteps, voices, shouts? How long until we were dragged out of the ditch by our collars, surrounded by rough hands, maybe even—
“Hannah. Hannah, get the camera up. For pete’s sake, get the camera up.” Matt’s whisper blasted urgently at me from the shadows, and I bit back a terrified reply.
The camera. Maybe if I recorded everything, whoever was out there would be less likely to hurt us?
Propping the camera up on a clump of sod, I dared to peek through the tiny viewing screen, and clicked the button to toggle its night-vision mode.
Whoa.
A mud-spattered pickup truck sat idling on the gravel tarmac, painted a mix of tan and olive-drab green, with a strange rebar cage bolted over the windows, and a box of square metal plates welded around the bed. On the door, I could just make out a white-painted emblem that read New Wilderness Wildlife Reserve, the metal covered in an array of dents and scrapes. Angle-iron racks on the sides held long spear-like poles, some with sharpened points, others with green canisters that had little cotter pins in the tips, and several with round metal plates on the end that made them look like oversized toilet plungers. Long spikes had been welded in various places on the vehicle’s armored hide, many of them dented, rusty, or bent from some kind of impact. In the back, the upper torso of a man stood out the top of the plate armor, holding on to something long and shiny bolted to the rollbar. With the ambient light from the headlights reflecting off the linked brass cartridges, it didn’t take an expert to know what it was.
“What are they hunting, Godzilla?” Carla peeked from behind a small bush, her words laced with a tinge of surprise. We’d run into security plenty of times in the various places we’d traveled, but never anyone with a belt-fed .50 caliber machine gun in the back of their up-armored post-apocalyptic pickup truck. It almost looked like something out of an article on war-torn Syria, not sleepy rural Ohio.
In a flash, the bright white spotlight from earlier swept across the fence line right over our heads, panning wherever the gun was pointed. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and beside me, Carla swore under her breath, Matt lying as still as stone.
“Hilltop, this is Rhino 1.” A man’s voice floated over the air to me, somewhat faint from the distance, but still loud enough that I could hear the unease in his voice. “We’ve got a breach in the perimeter fence along Pasture D. It looks big, Sean, real big. How copy?”
Please don’t come this way.
My pulse roared in my temple, and I pressed myself to the cold, wet grass like it was the cute guy from 4th period biology who I’d never worked up the nerve to talk to. I wanted to go home, this had gone from harmless fun to serious trouble in the time it took to cook a pop tart, and I was already half-soaked from lying on the wet ground.
“Rhino 1 this is Hilltop, if you don’t see any resident animals in the immediate vicinity, report back here and we’ll send you out with a repair crew. How copy?”
The radio crackled back with a deeper voice, no doubt their leadership, and the truck engine revved once more.
“Roger that Hilltop, Rhino 1 copies all, we’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
Off down the road it went, the headlights gradually moving out of sight, and I caught the sound of Matt’s relieved sigh.
“Tell me you got all that on camera.”
I stayed hunkered down behind the weeds, too on edge to move yet. “Y-yeah. I got it.”
Carla giggled in the shadows, and a moment later, her red headlamp flickered on to reveal a delighted smile. “Spielberg strikes again. I can already hear the new subscribers begging for more. We’re so getting a plaque for this.”
Maybe a tombstone.
“Um,” I allowed myself the liberty of rising to my elbows, cautious as a gopher in hawk territory. “I think we should go. Seriously, they seem really wound up. What if they shoot at us with that thing?”
Matt combed a few blades of grass out of his shaggy chestnut hair and wrinkled his nose. “I doubt it. What court is gonna uphold a couple of dudes machine-gunning three kids in the night for the terrible crime of . . . drumroll please . . . trespassing, unarmed, with a camera and an old shoe?”
“Besides,” Carla sat back on her heels and fixed her lop-sided black watch cap. “It’s probably not even registered. They fire a shot, it goes to the ATF, and they’ll be in federal prison for twenty years, minimum. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”
They both beamed at me, as if we’d just discussed the odds of getting free ice cream after school, and I gritted my teeth. This happened every time I brought up a problem, every time I suggested an idea wasn’t safe, or legal. They always talked me into more, and whenever it did go wrong, they somehow managed to bait me into another misadventure the next time they found a desolate place to film.
I got to my feet along with them and picked at the burs already clogged in the cuffs of my pants. “Okay, but they said they’d be back soon, with a repair crew. They’re going to seal this fence, and if we go through . . .”
“Seriously, Hannah, it’ll take five minutes.” Carla narrowed her gray eyes at me in the way she always did when she didn’t want to be argued with. “Just pick up the camera, and let’s go.”
You’re lucky this thing is expensive.
Hefting the camera, I threw her a glare that she didn’t catch in the dark, and focused in on them, Carla in her typical all-black outfit with equally macabre makeup, and Matt with his Louisville Bats T-shirt, and faded blue jeans. They straightened up, preparing for me to give them another countdown, and I raised my three fingers.
Snap.
A small blur tumbled from the trees just beyond the fence, the object hitting a brush on the way down.
Both Matt and Carla whirled around, and I stared through the grainy night vision at the shadows.
“Something’s over there.” I gripped the camera with clammy fingers. “I saw something fall, out of the trees.”
Any other time, they both would have thrown me a dirty look for talking with the camera rolling, but instead they took off before I could begin to stop them, Matt doing his usual hyper-alert walk, and Carla with her oh-so-petite parody of her real personality. Just like that, they dove through the hole in the fence, leaving me no choice but to groan inwardly, and stumble after them.
My canvas hi-tops slid over a greasy clump of mud, and I almost went down, muttering with frustration under my breath. “We had to go camping. There’s a haunted mansion in Blennerhassett, or a deep reservoir near Morehead, but no, we drove to the middle of freaking nowhere Ohio to walk around in the woods and—”
“Hannah, come on, hurry up!” Matt waved at me with more than his typical performance excitement, and I pushed myself into a light jog for the last few yards.
Carla’s eyes glittered like she’d been given a chance to pick the school uniform colors and had chosen all black. “Look.”
Another shoe rested in her hand, muddy and in tatters, with the same kind of weird ebony stains, only in different places. This one however wasn’t a sneaker, but a brown leather dress shoe, the kind that some office-worker might wear to a meeting. That didn’t make sense. Why were there just random shoes out here? People threw garbage out in the city all the time, but to come way out here and dump . . . shoes?
I hid my disturbed frown behind the camera, still filming every second. “It’s not the same.”
“Which means . . .” Matt turned to Carla, who dropped the shoe and put up both hands for a double high-five.
“We’ve got two people.” They crowed in triumph, as if two shoeless people wandering the woods of God-forsaken Ohio was a good thing.
Another mosquito nipped at my ear, and I wished more than anything I could smack them both. I didn’t like this, the entire thing tightened in my chest like a winch, and I was already soaked to the point I started to feel cold. There were no people in these woods, some litterbug must have thrown his trash over the fence and sped off. Maybe a truck had crashed through the fence, and that explained the hole, as well as the shoes. Either way, I wanted to go back to our tents, to change into my warm, dry clothes, and drive back to civilization for a shower.
“That’s right fam, we’ve got two mysterious people in these woods.” Carla crooned for the camera and held up the discarded loafer. “Which means we just have to keep following the trail until—”
Thunk.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, my heart racing a million miles a minute. Matt lost his smile, and Carla screamed, not the faux, girly squeal she did for the camera, but a realistic, unnerved yelp of surprise.
Less than twenty yards away, imbedded among the thorns, dead leaves, and branches, lay a high-heeled sandal, its straps ripped, the cork on the heel coated in hateful black stains.
With the camera viewing screen between my face and the real world, I felt like I was looking at the scene from the comfort of my living room, distant, and detached. But my brain went into full alarm mode, everything about this situation giving me all the bad vibes in the world. We now had a third shoe, different from the others, and just like the last one, it had fallen.
Fallen, from somewhere up high.
Somewhere in the trees . . . right over our heads.
Thump-thump.
My heart drummed against my ribs, and I craned my neck back, lifting the camera to the tree branches overhead.
Thump-thump.
Terror coursed through me like a tide, a faint static buzzed in my ears, and crackled against the inside of my skull.
Thump-thump.
Both my eyes stretched wide at the sight of more shoes, dozens and dozens suspended from the trees. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, even little children’s shoes all dripped rainwater from their perches, like forgotten Christmas decorations left to rot. All of them bore black stains, and something in my head clicked at what the spatters, splashes, and dribbles resembled.
“Guys,” I took a step backward, and my entire body shook from head to toe. “We have to go, right . . .”
Crash.
A figure hurtled through the underbrush nearby and fell to the mud in a scrabble of flailing limbs.
Ragged clothes, a pale grayish foot missing a shoe, and matted, filthy hair the color of mold-encrusted tree bark glistened in the grainy light of my camera’s night-vision.
His head snapped up with a sickening crunch of stiff neck vertebrae, and the man locked eyes with me through the camera.
White filmy eyes, and a long Cheshire smile beamed from the man’s dirt-streaked face, exposing stubby, squared off teeth that almost seemed carved, as if from wood. Both his hands were grimy and scarred, the fingernails chipped with abuse, and he had scores of black scratches all over him, the crusty scabs similar in color to the stains on the shoes.
Oh my God.
For a moment, we both blinked at each other, and try as I might, I couldn’t command my muscles to move. Matt’s eyes were wide as saucers, and he made no move to intervene. None of us had any weapons since we didn’t expect to actually find anything.
Nothing real.
Nothing like this.
To my left, Carla let out a whimper, and bolted.
Like a gun had been fired to start a race, the forest exploded with high, piercing screams of animalistic glee.
Jumping from behind trees, scuttling under the bushes, and crawling out from the high grass, a dozen creatures closed in from all sides. Their moon white eyes flashed in the dark, grayish hands outstretched to snatch at my clothes in desperate hunger. It was as if they had been waiting for me, watching us since we’d crossed the road, and now I’d walked right into their trap.
I turned on my heel to run and caught the sight of Matt and Carla well ahead, sprinting as fast as they could go. Too late did I notice the wall of shrieking assailants seal around me, the bizarre figures crouched on all fours, clacking their wooden teeth in anticipation.
Screaming, I swung my camera like a club at the nearest one, but she just dodged the blow, her grin wicked and crusted with gore.
A hand grabbed my ponytail, and threw me to the mud, more cold fingers pinning my arms, shoulders, and legs. Mouths opened wide, cruel knobby teeth descended toward me, and I writhed in unthinking panic.
Whoosh.
Out of nowhere, all the shoes from the trees rained down, and thudded into a waist-high heap in the mud just outside the ring of attackers.
All of the moon-eyed people froze, their smiles vanishing, and they looked at the shoes like deer in the headlights.
One set of hands released its iron grip on my arm, and a wooden-toothed girl flew backwards, dragged by some unseen force to the pile of shoes. She wailed in a pitiful screech of fear and pain, before the pile sucked her in, with the horrible sound of bones being ground to dust.
Startled into action, the rest of the freaks abandoned their hold on me and tripped over each other to run away on all fours.
In a great spherical cloud, the shoes lifted from the ground, levitating as if held in the air by some invisible hand. Jolts of something black and thin shot out from between each shoe, moving too fast for me to see properly, and each time the darkness reeled another crying moon-eyed person to their doom. All that remained after the screaming, crunching of bones, and a spray of black blood was the shoes of the dead freak, freshly stained, and added to the cloud like satellites to a planet.
Run, you stupid moron.
Reality hit me, and I clawed at the mud, scrambled backwards to get away, the rest of the moon-eyed ones already well off into the distance. The levitating sphere now had only one thing left in the small clearing to consume, and a prickle rose on my skin, like thousands of tiny insect feelers.
Something brushed past my right leg, fast, and wriggling.
With a wild thrash, I faced it, ready to bite, claw, and scratch to the bitter end. The sphere hovered right over me, maybe six feet away at most, the shoes deathly still.
Static rang in my ears, whispers echoed in my mind, and all four of my limbs became heavy as lead. I could see it, just behind the curtain of lost footwear, horrifying enough to lock me in place.
An eye.
Surrounded by molten, greasy black sinews that curled around each other in perpetual motion, the orb watched me with an emotionless gaze. It was enormous, the size of a car tire, bloodshot, and with crimson irises that seethed like flames.
In my head, a disembodied voice chanted something over and over, a wordless, unintelligible mumble that rang deep into my subconscious like a cathedral bell. Black tendrils reached from between the shoes for me, and every time I tried to flee, pain flared in my limbs, like knives were burrowed into the folds of my brain, controlling my every move. It was all I could do to stay conscious, the horror and adrenaline keeping the shadows in my mind at bay.
Can’t fall asleep . . . I can’t let it take me, I can’t . . .
In the last second, my fingers twitched against my collarbone, and touched something smooth.
Gritting my teeth in pain, I forced my arm to jerk the chain from my neck.
In all our trips across the country, I’d been chased by countless stray dogs, and so my parents had gifted me an electric dog whistle for just such occasions. The whistle had saved me many a time, and I got to where I touched it on reflex whenever we got into trouble. It was less of a reasonable thought, and more on childish impulse that I pulled the whistle from my shirt front and clicked the tone button.
Furious howls tore through my skull, followed by searing, white-hot pain.
I clapped both palms to my ears, screaming in agony, as the whistle dangled from my fingers. My brain was being ripped apart it seemed, shredded by some bladed worm throwing a tantrum inside my cranium, and all my muscles spasmed in uncontrolled torment.
Above me, the world began to spin, the dark mass convulsed, and the sky rained with slimy, gore-covered shoes.
Zap.
Harsh and cold, a jolt of electricity sliced through my mind, clearing away all thought, and I tumbled down into unending darkness.