When people ask me why I left my job as a park ranger and replaced nature, working outdoors and wonderful sights for a boring office job, it takes all my self restraint and will to come up with some excuse, instead of telling them that no wonderful sights can make up for a sight of a rotting, half eaten corpse of a child.
Nothing.
It’s not that I wouldn’t want my old job back, it’s that I simply… Can’t. I begin crying when I see a god damned tree on my drive home from work. I can’t get myself to even look at the pictures of forests ever since that search that happened during the last month of my employment.
It all started one warm, uneventful summer day. The first day of August, actually. My partner Holly and I were doing some general maintenance on well established trails when we heard hurried footsteps accompanied by frantic panting and cries for help. Swiftly facing the source of the sound, we saw a clearly distressed woman running towards us, shouting and flailing her arms.
We shouted back to get her attention, but she showed no sign of stopping. She only stopped when she ran headfirst into me, still wailing and begging for help.
“My son isn’t here anymore. He disappeared. He’s…gone. Help me.” She screamed, inches from my face. Her face was red and her mascara combined with tears and spread all over it. I tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t have any of it. That poor mother just kept on ranting and raving. If Holly wasn’t there, I do not know how I would have calmed her down.
Holly pulled her away from me and forced her to sit and drink some water. Around five minutes had passed until she was composed enough to construct coherent sentences.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Tell us what happened. We will find him. We always do. He can’t be far, Ma’m.” Holly said, placing her hand on the woman’s shoulder assuredly. I’ve always envied her for that voice, honestly. I had seen her stop a fight between two drunk men just by talking. We would always joke around that she was a fae in disguise.
“We were walking and Chester was right beside me… He was holding my hand”, she said, showing us a picture on her phone of a small boy with short blonde hair smiling and holding a cat.
“My phone rang. I looked down to my purse and released my hand from his to grab my phone…He was gone.” She started wailing again. “I looked down for… A second.”
“What do you mean by gone?” I interjected. The damn kid couldn’t have glitched out of existence, I thought to myself.
“It was like…A sharp gust of wind flew by and snatched him. I felt something, and he just wasn’t where was a second earlier.” She replied through continuous sobs.
“Do not worry, miss. He probably saw something he liked off the trail and wandered into the forest. It happens all the time. Be at peace, we will find him. I promise you.” Holly assured her as we led her out of the park and at the reception. We gave her some tea to calm her down and, deciding to not waste any more time, called for a search. We distributed the picture she showed us to all active rangers and went on the search ourselves.
We entered the forest and walked the length of the trail where the boy disappeared. We kept our mouth shut and our eyes peeled for any indication of what might have happened with the boy. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so we decided to return to the place where she told us she stopped, by the great oak tree.
Now you see, the path I’m talking about is very narrow and surrounded by trees stretching miles into the park from both sides, still it was very close to the entrance to the park, so we were fairly certain we would find the boy before he wandered any further. There were a handful of other experienced rangers searching.
Holly and I decided to split up to cover more ground. I stepped outside of the trail and began a slow and meticulous scan of my surroundings.
Half an hour of walking later, I had nothing to show for it. I contacted Holly and other rangers, praying that they might have some good news, even though I knew that if they had any they would have already relayed them to me. My worst suspicions were true. No sign of the boy.
I remember thinking about how this was turning out to be a serious issue and that law enforcement will have to get involved. Just as I was about to turn around and walk back, I spotted something peculiar amongst the knee high grass.
It was a speck of something red. A small, almost unnoticeable speck, red in color. That was probably the only reason why I spotted it. It provided a stark contrast in the sea of green that stretched between the trees.
Cautiously, I walked towards a small rectangular red shape resting on grass. The words on it spelled out “Baseball legends”. I turned it around to be met face to face with a smiling face of a bald, black man. Beneath the portrait stood the name “Barry Bonds”. Evidently, this was a baseball card, and judging by its condition, it was brand new. It had no creases or any kind of damage that a piece of paper could sustain prancing around to the whim of the wind in the wilderness.
After relaying to others information about my finding, I decided to delve deeper and continue my search. Dusk came and my further investigation turned out to be fruitless. I returned to the reception and met with others. Unfortunately, they had even less luck than me. The baseball card I found to my colleagues before me brought them to the grieving mother.
I almost regretted showing the card to her. Her eyes widened and seemingly dry rivers of tears ran anew.
“That’s Chester’s.” She concluded. “He never goes anywhere without them. He lugs them around in the breast pocket of his vest.” She continued, “Where did you find it?”.
“On the grass.” I replied truthfully, not knowing what else I should do.”
Before the mother could yet again fall into full blown frantic wailing, Holly intercepted her with a calming suggestion. “It’s just one card, though. It probably fell out of his pocket while he was walking.
“NO! You DO NOT understand!”, the mother screamed, accentuating certain words. “He guards them like treasure. He keeps the pocket zipped and he constantly checks if they are safe. Someone took him. Someone took him. Someone took him. SOMEONE TOOK HIM FROM ME!” She screeched.
There was no consoling her this time, so Holly drove her home, assuring that she will personally keep her up to date with our search.
We thought that this was going to be an easy search, so the police weren’t involved from the very beginning. Now, the ugly seriousness of this disappearance was beginning to manifest itself.
The cops arrived just as Holly was parking her jeep after driving the mother home. We continued the search through the night through ours and their combined efforts.
We found nothing that night. And we found nothing for the next twenty six days and nights. All rangers on working neglected their usual duties in favor of this search. We combined our forces with the cops and the numerous volunteers, yet each and every day brought nothing but further disappointment. Each and every day Holly and I would venture deeper and deeper with a search dog, yet we returned empty handed.
Dogs failed to pick up any scent. Aerial searches of the forest revealed nothing. It was like little Chester stopped existing. His mother didn’t remain at home, like we advised her. She would wait on the edge of the forest until deep into the night, when we would return to offer her nothing but more disappointment. She even wanted to go look for him herself but we could not allow her to do so. She was already a mess to begin with, and we had to leave an employee of the reception to be with her so she wouldn’t do something to herself.
Each time I saw her, my heart hurt more and more, because every time I saw her I could not offer her anything more than disappointment. Holly was acting like she wasn’t affected by this at all, but her eyes displayed her immense distress more than words ever could.
It was on the twenty-seventh of August that we finally found…What was left of Chester.
This whole ordeal is the reason I cannot sleep without the lights on and a hefty dose of pills. It is the reason I still wake up screaming night after night, reliving those horrible moments.
Holly and I spent that entire day searching, and as the night fell, we unanimously decided that we should not return or rest, but rather make haste. We were deep into the forest and the trees and their branches were growing denser every step we took.
Our search dog, Jester, was already a senior dog awaiting retirement, yet he was one of the keenest canines we had. He had a long track record of finding teenagers that have wandered off path in their drunken stupor, so we were sure that anything that we missed, he would pick up on.
It was around two AM when we came across a clearing with a small mound of earth at the center. I recognized this place from a map I studied, yet I had to admit both to Holly and myself that I had never been here before.
We walked towards the mound and leaned on it, taking deep breaths and enjoying this moment of relaxation.
Suddenly, Jester rose up and violently sniffed the air around him before breaking out in a frenzy of barks. We rose up and scanned the area around us with our flashlights, yet nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That’s when we took a closer look at Jester, who was still going wild. Jester was barking at the mound.
We decided to walk around it and see what was the cause of Jester’s concern. I unleashed him and he ran to the other side of the mound. Holly and I walked across it and joined him.
He was now deathly silent, unflinchingly focused on one particular spot.
Holly and I shined our flashlights to where Jester was pointing. I immediately noticed something peculiar with the spot. Whereas the grass all across the mount was growing and flourishing from the land, here it seemed like it was… Stuffed.
I grabbed a handful of the grass and pulled it back, revealing a hard wooden surface beneath it. Holly and I began hastily removing the grass to remove whatever was secluded by it.
Our efforts weren’t in vain. It was a dry, heavy log, standing upright and blocking passage. Shining through the patches that the log failed to obscure, We uncovered that there was definitely some kind of a room in there. A foul smell emanated from there. In hindsight, we should have known what it was.
“Should we… go inside?” Holly asked, holding one hand over her nose and asking for my approval.
I wish I was more of a craven that day. I wish we had called backup. I wish we never came across that damn mound.
“Yes. Help me pull this damn thing out.” I replied, commanding Jester to step back and wait. He obeyed.
We grasped the log and pulled it back, revealing an entrance.
I will never stop regretting the moment I shone my flashlight inside.
On a pile of dry, dirt stained bones there was a small, frail body. Maggots already found their home inside of him. He had flesh missing from his limbs and face, yet the most terrifying thing was the fact that his ribcage was ripped open by brute force, and still fresh entrails and blood were splattered all across the dirt floor.
I could bear the sight no longer and my arm instinctively rose the flashlight upwards.
My sudden movement revealed three pairs of bloodied, dirty feet. I could hear Holly’s shallow breaths behind me.
Almost against my will, I pointed the flashlight up and screamed in horror at the abomination that was revealed to me. Jester’s menacing growls filled the screaming silence surrounding us, keeping us captive with these.. things.
There were three of them. They were naked and covered in blood all the way from the tips of their long fingernails to their rotting teeth. Their teeths were revealed by their unsettling grins which almost conveyed pride in their actions. All three of them growled in unison. They let out a raspy, disgusting sound that I fear will never leave my ears.
Quick as a bolt of lighting, they stood up and lunged towards me. Jester rushed in and grabbed the leg of the closest one yet he paid him no mind. I drew my gun out, yet I managed to fire only a single well placed shot in the stomach of the thing Jester attacked before they overwhelmed me and my consciousness failed me.
It was Holly that saved my life, as I would later come to know when she and my other colleagues visited me in the hospital.
As those things tried to devour me right then and there, Holly emptied a full magazine in them, and then another one, for good measure, yet she herself was unconsolable due to the fact that she accidentally shot Jester, who leaped into the air to snatch the neck of one of those monsters.
So there you have it. That’s why I quit being a park ranger. That’s why I cry when I see a fucking tree. My heart shattered to a million pieces when I heard that Chester’s mother shot herself.
But do you know when I cried the hardest?
This morning, while drinking coffee and watching the news on TV. I screamed at the TV and threw the remote with all my might, shattering the display when the fucking news anchor reported that a teenage girl was reported missing in the national park.