[SWAMP 3 – STRUGGLE]

By reflex the two set back to back.

“Only two ways it can come in, right?” Masaru coughs out as he looks along the driftwood path cutting through the large pond.

Valerie nods as her eyes scan along the swamps, her focus bends along the cypress trees and their jagged roots. It never occurred to them just how many places something could hide in a place like this.

“Let’s go,” she says. “Keep the light on the path and we can-” she stops, thrusting her elbow into Masaru, who jolts around to look at her.

“What is-”

He stops too.

Down from the bank where they started, they can just make out a set of red, blood-starved eyes staring back at them. It’s not a “pair” of eyeballs, but a group of them, some high where one might expect a person to have eyes, but others low or the side, as if poking out from a neck… at the edge of a hand… some sticking out from shins or even feet.

“Cut the flashlight,” Valorie says.

He does as he’s told, and puts it back into his briefcase. “Shoot, and let’s go,” Masaru whispers as he starts skimming over to the next log.

Valerie lines up a quick shot, and her rifle cackles with its first round.

The two watch as the formation of red eyes flicks from the bullet— it doesn’t fall.

“Nice, now come on!” Masaru says.

Valerie says nothing, but turns to join him as she cycles her bolt.

The two rush in the dark as their weight splashes the mats of logs and bracken down into the water. They hear a similar splashing sound behind them, causing them to go even faster.

It’s slick, nervous movement with multiple near-slips, but minute by minute their confidence lifts with their distance.

“Probably too big to move across!” Masaru exclaims. “Moron probably used a boat or something to hang the wire.”

Valerie’s quiet a moment as she weighs the possibility. “Why would it make a path like this, then?”

Masaru scoffs. “I mean… it’s probably a natural formation.”

“…Here?” Valerie asks.

He feels like an idiot from the mere concept. If The Stranger lives here, wouldn’t it make sense it would have the time to craft its home into a perfect hunting turf?

“I… I don’t know,” Masaru says, “but it’s not chasing us by the looks of it,” he says, peering back down behind them.

She sighs wearily as she wipes her blond bangs out from her face. “Probably waiting for us at the other side.”

“Do you think it could move that fast?” Masaru asks, now looking down their direction of travel for any waiting red eyes in the mist.

Valerie stifles a nervous groan. “I mean, it did get to the side of the pond right when we hit the wire.”

Masaru clenches his core muscles as he turns the thought through his mind. “Maybe it hunts before we hit the wire?”

She shrugs. “I guess all we can do is go forward.”

He nods, and they carry on through the thick-scented night.

The maddening forms of the noise drip slow through their minds like a hundred little bites from some hideous venomous insect.

They reach something unexpected as they head deeper into the unexpectedly large pond: a crossroads of driftwood.

The duo stops in the X, looking down the different paths.

Masaru takes in a breath to suggest they move along their original direction, but then he hears something to the left path… the very moment Valerie whips her head to the right.

“This way, kid,” Kenji’s voice calls to Masaru.

Masaru’s dumbstruck as behind him, Valerie gasps.

“What is it?” he asks.

It takes her a moment to respond, her gaze locked down on the right-side path. “That was… that was Jane.”

Masaru scans the misted horizons of the water for any clue at all. “That’s… the one who had the flash-”

“Yes… but that’s not possible,” she whimpers.

The two slowly turn to look at each other.

“I just heard Kenji down that way,” he says, nodding to the left.

It’s not simply a chill, it’s an overbearing feeling of hopelessness.

“…It’s all around us, isn’t it?” she asks, her adrenaline leading to tremors.

Masaru gulps down stress as he tries to come up with a comforting explanation.

“It’s… we don’t know that.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Kenji could be real,” Masaru says. “He has this place as part of his loops, right?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not him, Masaru. Don’t be an idiot.”

The two just stand there, paralyzed with indecision.

“We can’t stay here,” Masaru says.

“Then where?!” Valorie asks. “How do we get away?”

Masaru fails to compose himself, and reaches for Valerie. What was initially supposed to be a “shake” turns into a clinging embrace.

“Not again, Masaru. Don’t let it get me.”

I can’t even feel her warmth, Masaru thinks. This whole thing is made to disconnect us, isn’t it?

“We’re going to be okay,” Masaru says who, despite his words, is now also trembling. Their lack of movement allows the cold of the night to set in, the mist reducing them to a pair of anxious children.

“Where do we go!” she sobs, her tone devolving into panic.

Just like when he first got here, the looming feeling, the images of The Stranger paint over the useful thoughts of Masaru’s mind with wild visions of clamping teeth and rusty tools smashing into flesh.

The words of Lunaire the Wanderer don’t feel the same way.

Am I really taking inspiration from some fictional dork? Masaru asks himself as his spirit dwindles into reaction mode. How the hell does any of that apply to this?

The two wait, and that is its own killer.

Valerie spots something in the water’s reflection, and abruptly shoves to get Masaru’s attention as she swings around with her rifle.

“Wha-” Masaru cuts his words when he sees it in the water: the hulking form of The Stranger behind them on the one path they hadn’t scanned over from the last five seconds.

They reel around, stumbling for footing, only to see that there’s no one behind them.

The two pause as they double take between the reflection in the water, and the empty mists in front of them.

Masaru, his eyes wide in shock, heart beating a hole in his chest, slowly shakes his head.

“…It can turn invisib-”

And then the reflection leans down, and reaches.

A massive, bandaged hand surges up from the water, grasping Masaru’s ankle.

Valorie fires into the water, but the force below ignores the bullet as it wrenches its shoulder back with a single, horrific feat of athleticism.

Masaru goes under, and fails to defend against the bash from The Stranger’s free hand as the drowning sensation overtakes him.

Bracing for a quick death in the blackened water, Masaru fights up amidst the ring of gunshots to the surface, only to find that The Stranger’s not focused on him.

“Masaru!” Valorie shrieks as The Stranger easily arrests her and turns her body to face the drowning man.

The salaryman thrashes in the pond uselessly as Valorie, struggling to free herself from The Stranger, stretches like putty in its grasp.

Masaru can hardly see what’s happening, but he can make out the unmistakable glint of a length of wire wrapping around her as The Stranger reduces her to a position of complete mercy.

Her screams become cries as the wires tighten more around her body across multiple places. Valorie’s set her hands up to her neck to try and let off the pressure of the glistening wire, but as The Stranger pulls her by the wire deeper into its solid chest, blood traces along the lines of her capture.

“M-Masaru,” she whimpers, waiting for death as the dense wire peels into her skin, her body lifted, doll-like, by the sheer strength of the being preying on her terror.

“Let her go!” Masaru roars out between water-blocked coughs.

The Stranger, who Masaru finally realizes was watching him the entire time, turns its head to clearly address him. Its eyes flash with glowing crimson.

“Okay.”

Masaru’s spirit freezes at the tone of its voice: the words are clear, but the accent, the guttural form of its speech is like that from a hell that Masaru never thought he believed in— until now.

Silencing her final sigh, The Stranger pulls hard at both ends of the wire, and pieces of Valorie scatter down into the water. The noise is horrible beyond description.

Masaru screams, curses, and struggles with all he has at the sight of her head floating with that look of hopeless, distant defeat.

Why?! Why didn’t it kill me yet?! Masaru shouts into his mind as his body becomes weaker and weaker with each thrash to stay afloat.

He gets his answer as The Stranger, relishing in the kill for only a second, steadily crouches down to simply watch him drown.

Everything Masaru has left is spent on staying afloat, but his body erupts with pain with every misplaced stroke.

“Stop running,” The Stranger commands with its winter voice as it watches Masaru’s head poke up from the water less and less.

Valorie’s look of vacant horror staring back on him as it floats next to him, his spirit breaks with his body, and he finally submerges for the final time.

The drowning sensation takes over everything in his physiology, suffocating his spirit and destroying every useful thought he has.

All that’s left is defeat, agony, and death.

It’s a brutalizing demise, taking him several minutes to finally succumb to the loss of air in the abyss, only the red eyes of The Stranger peering from below the moonlight keeping him company as he pulls in his final breath of water.