August 18th, 2020. [Part II]

I was sure of it then. Something felt… different.

The bear didn’t move at first. They didn’t tend to act quickly in this kind of situation, not until provoked. As far as he was concerned, I was just another creature in the woods. A very hairless creature, at that.

My first priority was calming my nerves. I’d grown up a Scout, I knew exactly what to do here. I just… well, I’d only seen one once before, so it was a bit of an unwelcome shock.

I took a deep breath, holding back my fear, and scanned the scene. The bear, mostly unbothered, returned to rummaging through my bag. Backy the Backpack had probably not seen worse days, to be honest—I could see the straps had been torn off and cast aside.

It was clearly headed for my snacks—my fault for opening a beef stick and only eating it halfway—but clearly it hadn’t been here long. My water pail (Bucky the Bucket) hadn’t been knocked over, and considering it was still digging, the bear hadn’t gotten everything just yet.

If I wanted to keep my stash, I needed to scare off this bear. The phrase went ‘if it’s black, fight back’, and this was indeed a black bear. Odd, because they didn’t usually come this far west, but it wasn’t unheard of. Specifically, there’d been a black bear attack around this area a few years ago. I would know; it was my Scout troop that saw it.

Not to dive too deep into my childhood, but I clearly didn’t have a very good history with these guys. So my immediate next thought was simply, How do I kill it?

I spotted an answer lying on the mossy tiles. My machete’s edge gleamed with sunlight, just a little out of reach. If I made a break for it, I’d probably reach it before I got mauled, but I definitely wouldn’t have enough time to fight back.

My body ended up moving on its own. Not in a mad dash, but in a slow, steady shuffle. As quietly as I could, always facing the bear, I walked into the lobby and approached the machete. It didn’t notice at first, but my shaky breath eventually clued it in. A shiver shot up my spine when I saw its face again.

It still hadn’t registered me as a threat, but it did turn to face me. It had stuffed its maw with a couple meat sticks, and a granola bar wrapper was stuck to its lip; it would have looked cute outside of a life-or-death scenario. It stared me down, trying to figure out what I was.

The blade was only a couple feet from my boots. If I reached for it now, I’d be able to fight back against the beast—but there was a chance it’d just go away on its own. Easier to not get fucked up by a bear attack, to be honest. I held myself steady and raised a call.

“Hey bear!” I shouted. The bear winced, so I kept going: “Heeey bear! Get out! Go!”

It twitched and began to lumber away from the bag. That would have been great news if it hadn’t set its sights on me. It walked slowly at first, but I knew it would only gain speed, and I had very little time to think of a thorough game plan. I instead relied on instincts, dropping to snatch the machete and preparing to defend myself.

Before I knew it, the bear was ramming into my legs. One snap of its jaws tore my pant leg but missed my skin by a hair. I bashed the machete into its face—blood splattered as it grunted in pain. It went for another strike, but it caught its teeth on my blade and staggered back.

After a few lazy claw swipes, it turned and wandered off, its snout still cut open and bleeding. I breathed heavily; air grated against my trachea like sandpaper. I felt my heart pounding so hard it could have broken my ribs. Another set of shivers ran through me as I dropped the machete with a clang.

“...Fuck,” I gasped, looking down. In the rush of adrenaline, I hadn’t noticed a pretty significant gash on my forearm from the initial attack. Blood sputtered out slowly, and even though I couldn’t feel the pain yet, I had a feeling it would take a while to recover from.

In a panic, I rushed over to the remains of my backpack. I had gauze and a medical stapler in my first aid kit, and no bear would ever touch something like that, especially buried deep inside the pockets. If I could just find it before the adrenaline wore off, I could probably get it stitched up—

“No! Fuck! God-damn it! Nononono… oh God, oh no, what do I do? What do I do?!”

My first aid kit was still holding a door open eight floors below me. Why did I do that? It seemed like such an obvious mistake now. With a wound like this, an infection could be deadly. I needed to get it patched up as soon as I could, but…

I glanced around in horror. The fire exit would be my best bet, but that tree was sturdy. We’d already tried busting it open before, but maybe the adrenaline could work its magic. I had to get through there. So I lowered my shoulder and began to run full-force at the blocked door, no self-preservation instinct at all.

BAM! The door broke off its hinges and fell back, toppling right on top of me. I scrambled out of the way before it landed, more than ecstatic that my plan had worked for once. I was starting to feel the sting in my forearm—and also in my shoulder from ramming into broken glass. Not my brightest idea, but I really didn’t care then.

I sped down the stairs, spiraling around and around. Thank God for the guard rails being mostly intact—I might have fallen straight down the center if not for them. I tripped over too many stairs to count and racked up at least a dozen bruises on the way down, but I made it to B7 relatively quickly.

Taking off through the darkness, I tried not to step on the corpses as I bolted to the hatch. I yanked it open and slid down the ladder with my good arm, rushing into the locker room.

I spotted my kit wedged in the door, and thinking fast, took off one of my boots to pry the contraption open while I nabbed the prize. Unzipping it, I dumped the contents onto the floor and snatched up the stapler.

The angle of the injury made it hard to staple, but I held it up to my skin anyways. I’d never had to do anything like this before, apart from in training, and I figured it wouldn’t be too bad. I pinched the two sides of the wound together and pushed down.

“GAAH!” That area did not need any more pain. Unfortunately, it did need more staples, so in what was possibly the most grueling few moments of my life then, I repeatedly, and sloppily, stabbed myself back together.

I wish I could put into words how it felt. I mean, I could try, but it wouldn’t do the experience justice. You see cool survivalist characters and action heroes do this stuff all the time. Hell, it’s a trope in apocalypse movies—stitching your wounds in some cool, metal way so they don’t get infected. The most unrealistic part is actually the lack of screaming and crying.

It was almost embarrassing how much I cried through the whole experience. I’m not talking ‘agh, it hurts’ through clenched teeth, tears flowing down my face. I’m talking ugly crying. I’m talking horror movie screams. If you heard me from the other room, you’d think I was being tortured. And damn, it sure felt like it.

After the tough part came the slightly less tough part—ointment and gauze. With my good arm, I took a tube of neosporin and ran it along my newly stapled gash, rubbing it in afterwards with a cotton pad. I then realized I was supposed to clean out the wound first, so in an attempt to correct for this, I poured a bit of peroxide over the wound.

That was the ‘clenched teeth, tears flowing’ moment for me. Soap and water is always better than peroxide—way less painful—but clearly I didn’t have access to those things, so I worked with what I had. In the immediate shock, though, I dropped the bottle and ended up getting even more on my arm. The liquid bubbled up along the skin fold, sizzling like it was burning me alive. For good measure, I dabbed a little more neosporin on top, smearing it around the cut.

I began to wrap the wound with a thick, white gauze, around and around until it stopped turning pink. Holding the cloth in place with my teeth, I grabbed a piece of tape and stuck it down, finally covering the wound for good. By now it hurt bad, mostly because of the stapling. My body could only produce so much adrenaline—I was in a crash.

“Holy fuck. Oh my God,” I grumbled, leaning against the lockers. My own blood stained my socks and pants, still seeping a bit through the gauze. I stared up at the ceiling in total shock. “I’m fine. I’m okay. I… fuck.”

My cheeks felt flush and my eyes were dry. I took deep breaths to relax, hoping I’d regain just enough strength to make it back upstairs… but my body had different plans. Completely exhausted and in the midst of the hardest adrenaline crash I’d ever had, I faded in and out of consciousness before finally dozing off, laying in a puddle of blood, tears, and hydrogen peroxide.