Sara Reinke - Backwoods

At least, his first dimly aware thought was that they were raindrops. When he blinked dazedly skyward, bleary and bewildered, he watched something small, white and pellet-like, plop down from above, falling straight at his head.

What the…? he thought as it hit his mouth, bouncing off his lips into the leaves.

His head swam as he sat up and he closed his eyes against a momentary swell of vertigo. He felt something bounce of his head and frowned, glancing up again. What the hell is that?

Looking down at the ground beside him, he realized.

“Oh, Jesus,” he gulped, knocking the maggot that lay twitching in the leaves near his hip away. They were falling from the corpse that dangled almost directly above him, tumbling one by one like lemmings off a cliff through the hole he’d accidentally punched in the body’s midriff.

He felt another one hit him on the crown of his head, then slip down through his hair, sliding beneath the collar of his shirt. With a disgusted yowl, he scrambled to his feet, dancing in a clumsy circle while he yanked the hem loose from his pants and shook the grub out. Next, he swatted at his hair, his face, anyplace he’d felt the maggots landing as he’d roused from unconsciousness, then everyplace else just for good measure.

Jesus, they were falling on me. One of them almost landed in my mouth! And then, in his mind, he could picture what would have happened had his mouth been open—the maggot hitting not the closed seam of his lips, but his tongue instead, falling straight down the back of his throat. He felt his stomach heave at this and gulped, clapping his hand to his mouth. Turning in a stumbling pirouette, he grabbed hold of a nearby sapling for support and threw up into the weeds.

“That is fucking gross,” he wheezed, spitting violently once he’d spewed the contents of his gut. He wiped his lips on his sleeve, then wiped them again just to be sure.

Since finding himself dangling upside down in a tree next to a rotting corpse, he hadn’t given much thought to the people in the forest who had chased him. In fact, up to that moment, he’d pretty much reprioritized and forgotten them—that is, until he heard a rustling from the underbrush behind him. Startled, he whirled, eyes wide as he stared out into the ambiguously quiet, shadow-draped woods.

He heard another crunch, then a grey squirrel scampered between the trunks of two pines. With a shaky sigh and even less certain laugh, Andrew relaxed, shoving his hair back from his face.

“You little bastard,” he told the squirrel. For its part, it blinked at him for a moment, cheeks distended with an acorn, then it turned and hopped away.

Ducking to avoid any more kamikaze maggots, Andrew retrieved his fallen rifle. Opting to leave it in hand rather than sling it out of reach over his shoulder, he spared a last look at the sorry bastard still strung up in the tree. If his iPhone had still worked, with its built-in GPS and mapping applications, he could have marked the spot—literally—where he now stood so he could find it again. As it was, he squatted and shrugged his way out of his backpack, opening the front compartment and fishing out the maps Dani had given him. He didn’t have a pencil, but a quick glance around revealed a poke plant nearby, its thick stalks laden with ripened, purple berries. He picked one, crushed it between his index finger and thumb, then marked approximately on Dani’s map where he’d found the snare. Or, more accurately, it had found him.

Because I’ll have to bring her back here, he thought, stuffing the map back into the bag, then slipping his arms through the straps, shouldering it once more. And probably Prendick, too. They’ll know who this guy is. Maybe they can figure out what happened to him, how he wound up out here.

Another rustle drew his gaze again to the shadows. This time, he didn’t see any woodland creatures scurrying about to ease that sudden, anxious dread knotting in his stomach. Time to get the hell out of Dodge, he thought, stuffing the map back into the bag, then slipping his arms through the straps, shouldering it once more.

The hike back to the compound wasn’t the fastest he’d ever completed, but it came pretty damn close, especially considering he kept whipping around to look behind him, or to either side whenever he’d hear—or think he heard—a suspicious sound. Thankfully, however, whatever footsteps had pursued him off the trail and into the woods didn’t follow him out again, and with the help of his compass, he was able to retrace his path accurately enough to reach the facility’s perimeter yard once more.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dani said when she caught sight of him at the garage door.

“They found O’Malley,” he tried.

“He wasn’t even missing,” she said. “He’d been asleep in his room. Said he wasn’t feeling good. Oh, well.” She laughed. “At least you got some exercise out of the…” Her voice and smile withered when she drew close enough to get a good look at him. His clothes were dirty and mud-spattered, and a rather putrescent stink lingered around him thanks to his trussed up neighbor in the woods. Her nose wrinkled slightly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you smell.”

He told her what had happened, the foot pursuit through the forest, the snare trap he’d stumbled upon, the decaying soldier left hanging upside down in the tree.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped when he finished. “He was a soldier? You’re sure of that?”

Andrew nodded. “I couldn’t see a name patch, but he was definitely wearing a uniform. And he had an officer’s insignia on him, one of those little silver pins. A first lieutenant’s bar.”

At this, Dani frowned, puzzled. “That doesn’t make any sense. There aren’t any lieutenants here. Not anymore, not since they sent Carter home to Arkansas.” Heading for the door, she said, “Come on. We need to go find Major Prendick.” She cut him a glance and a wry smirk. “You keep downwind, okay?”

He frowned. “Ha, ha.”

“Well, now, that’s quite the story you’ve come up with, Mister Braddock.” Prendick seemed completely blithe, even dubious about Andrew’s account of what had happened.

Which, needless to say, pissed Andrew off. “It’s not a story and I didn’t come up with it. It happened. I told you. Someone or something chased me through the forest.”

“Or something,” Prendick repeated pointedly.

Andrew nodded. “At least four of them. I was following the footpath Dani told me you use for patrols, then they forced me off it, into the trees. They followed me for at least a quarter of a mile.”

Crossing his arms, but not losing his bemused, aloof expression, Prendick regarded him. “Why would anyone do that?”

“Because they knew where the snare trap was. They were herding me toward it.”

Prendick rolled his eyes.

“I saw them,” Andrew snapped. “Moving through the trees, just for a second, but they looked a lot like the thing I told you I saw the night I wrecked my Jeep.”

“Mister Braddock,” Prendick began.

“I’m telling the truth, goddamn it,” Andrew snapped, planting his foot on the edge of Prendick’s desk and yanking up his pant cuff. “Look at my leg. You think I did this to myself?” He wrenched down his sock, revealing an angry red welt line encircling his ankle, the painful imprint left by the snare line.

Prendick frowned. “What I think, Mister Braddock, is that you hit your head pretty hard when you fell. And what I know for a fact is that in this forest, it’s easy to get turned around, mixed up. If you wander off the path, don’t recognize your surroundings, it’s easy to jump at shadows, every unfamiliar sound.”