James Moore - The Haunted Forest Tour

To make matters worse, the sun was lowering, and the bright day had become twilight. Those creatures that preferred to avoid the daylight were more comfortable, and the people who lived in town were more vulnerable than ever before.

The Wellington family had just gathered together and found each other again when the ogre showed up to play. The Wellingtons lasted exactly seventeen seconds.

On Archer Street, where most of the municipal buildings were found, a giant wyrm sporting several nasty wounds came out of the ground and began knocking buildings aside with ease. It bled as it crushed the town hall, but it kept going, warbling out its distress as it thrashed and rolled over stone walls and the occasional vehicle.

It might have done better to leave the Dover’s Point Gas and Power building alone. The electricity hurt, but the natural gas storage tanks did much worse when they ruptured and their fumes made it to a burning car half a block away.

The wyrm and the buildings around it went up in a fireball that could be seen from the edge of the original forest, or would have been if the trees weren’t obstructing the view.

The trees that kept rising from the ground almost as fast as the eyes left in town could watch them.

They came from several bases, jets and helicopters that cut across the twilight and sought to put a stop to the cancerous growth of a nightmare forest that shouldn’t have existed.

The jets arrived first, moving over the forest and then to its growing edges, where incendiary missiles tried to remove the sickness. The missiles struck and exploded, igniting acres of fresh growth and lighting up the sky with fresh fires.

All for nothing. Like a phoenix, the trees came back, rising from the burning debris as if nothing had happened. Worse, in some cases they rose higher than before, as if the very fuel that should have destroyed them fed them instead. Hell’s little super-fertilizer.

The jets banked around for another run, instructed to stop the new growth and not to fire into the heart of the Haunted Forest. There were still over eighty people unaccounted for and no one was quite willing to be the first to risk using the term “collateral damage” just yet.

As they turned in the skies over the unnatural woods, the forest returned the volley of fire. The first wave came in the form of insects. Not your usual swarm of bees or even plague of locusts, but all new flying things that had never been seen outside of the forest before. They were heavily armored and defied rational physics with their ability to lift off of the ground.

The people who worked at the Haunted Forest Tour called them “Harpies,” a name granted by one of the early tourists who noticed that they had almost human faces and rather attractive ones at that. Their full, sensual lips did not move and their delicate noses seemed to serve no purpose, but their eyes—often a deep blue or green—were as complex as the ocular organs on any terrestrial insect. The fact that each of the bugs was almost five feet in length made it possible to see them very clearly.

The thick chitinous exoskeletons were sometimes found in the woods after molting season, and a few of the deeply adventurous types had managed to peel them off of trees and take them back for a careful examination. Said husks were not impervious, but a fair estimate was that they could withstand close range fire from a .22 caliber handgun using standard jacketed shells.

Two squadrons of ten jets each met up with several hundred harpies in the air. The first surprise for the pilots was that the harpies could keep up with them. The jets roared and the harpies screamed as they flew through the air, the movement of their wings giving off a sound “not unlike a young woman’s shrieks as she was stabbed to death,” at least according to Mark Harper, who many people said enjoyed his job just a bit too much.

The jet fighters were perfectly willing to fight anything that came their way. They were not prepared for the five-foot-long kamikazes that deliberately flew into their jet engine intakes.

Flaming metal and flesh rained down across the forest, scorching the trees and tinkling down to the mulch and dirt.

The remaining harpies flew back to their primary hive, annoyed by the death of one of their colonies, but only moderately so. They were not emotional creatures unless riled.

The Black Hawk helicopters that came in next were better suited for dealing with the harpies. Though the insects were actually faster, the seasoned combat crews on the Black Hawks were very capable with their .50 caliber machine guns, and despite their terrifying size and speed, the Harpies lacked any ranged method of attacking.

The fire spread, burning a hole in the center of the map of Dover’s Point. The trees stopped growing where the worst of the fire was, and the scorched earth and ruined asphalt collapsed in on itself.

Sparks rose high into the air, and smoke soon followed. More of the earth gave way, revealing a new challenge for the remaining people in town. Where there had been a town center, there was now a lava pit, filled to overflowing with molten figures that slid from their plasmic waters and walked the face of the earth.

No one was foolish enough to try speaking with the shambling creatures. Well, one guy was. Briefly.

The figures lovingly touched whatever they could. Everything they caressed burned beneath their eager grasp, and they relished the sensation.

It had been so very long since they’d had new things to play with.

The H.F. Enterprises building was designed to last. Reinforced walls and shatterproof windows that could withstand mortar fire held off the forest for longer than Dover’s Point managed to stay alive, but in the end, even the building designed to be as safe as Fort Knox gave way to the inevitable progression of the Haunted Forest.

The few people foolish enough to stay behind looked out through windows that should have survived anything short of a nuclear blast as the army of nightmares came their way. The first guards in their bunkers fought well, cutting down several ogres, a pack of Gigglers, and three heavily armored things that looked like bald mammoths with horns on the tops of their heads.

They never had a chance against the specters that floated through the air and shrieked out deafening cries of pain as they moved closer. Wavering, constantly shifting figures slid toward the guards through the air and ignored bullets and grenades alike.

What they touched died of fright or was frozen to death.

When the hail of heavy artillery stopped, the other creatures in the forest moved forward.

The doors of the H.F. Enterprises building were solidly reinforced. They were designed to sustain incredible damage and bounce back for more.

The big problem was simple enough, really. A minor oversight that, considering the situation, could be seen as forgivable: nobody locked the doors.

Walls that were meant to survive tremendous damage were left untouched. The reporters and remaining employees were not.

On the winning side of the argument, the William Partneau Construction Company had a ringing endorsement for how well they’d finished their contract. The windows were still unbroken and the floor did not let a single tree rise from below.

Sadly, no one directly involved in the contractual agreements between H.F. Enterprises and Partneau Construction was available to return the construction company’s requests for a quote.

Fire from below, nightmares on the surface, and death from above, Dover’s Point went into its final minutes with a series of screams that would have shamed the best heavy metal vocalists in history.