Fear

Shocked by the sudden gusting winds and overwhelming cacophony, Pedro stumbled back three steps and fell on his back, unintentionally pulling Elise down on top of him. He closed his eyes and opened them, hoping that doing so would return the world to its quiet state. It was unsuccessful.

Trying to get up, Elise placed her hand in the snow, and pulled it back up just as quickly, reacting to the shock of the cold. In her sudden flailing, she placed her free hand on the Western Monolith. She must have touched the shimmering spot on the stone since it was warm and wet, but for some reason, also kind of sticky. She couldn’t see clearly in the dark, as the moon illuminated a path about thirty paces due south of the stone. Despite this, she got back to her feet without releasing Pedro’s hand.

“Pedro, I’m going to pull in a second. Once you feel it, please use the momentum to get up.”

“Sure.”

She planted her legs firmly into the snow and pulled into her chest. With one good push from his legs, Pedro stood beside her once again.

“Let’s follow the moonlight into the treeline. Then, we can get our bearings.” Elise started walking, not giving Pedro a chance to argue.

While Elise kept her head up, and kept them on course, Pedro scanned the snow, or the tracks in the snow. “Those were definitely wolves we heard earlier, not coyotes.”

“How do you figure?” Elise asked, not breaking from her objective.

“The prints in the snow are way too big for coyotes…but there are other prints out here too…they’re bipedal, but they’re flat.”

“Barefeet or sandals? In this terrain?” Elise wondered aloud.

Before they were able to muse about it further, they made it to the treeline, and after another ten paces, they huddled behind a tree that was just outside the moonlight. Pedro reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He scanned the lock screen quickly to find it was in SOS mode, but with a more ominous message than usual. “No Network Discovered - Emergency Mode Unavailable.”

“Okay, I don’t like that,” he said, showing the message to Elise. The light briefly illuminated her face.

“Can you turn on the flashlight? I just saw something I didn’t like on my left hand, and I need to know I’m not crazy,” Elise asked.

Pedro turned on the flashlight and cupped his hand around it to limit how much light leaked out. Both of them shuddered as the light revealed a thin layer of blood on her hand.

Elise quickly wiped it into the snow, and used her jacket to scrub away any blood that had dried. “Well, I guess it could be worse.” She leaned her face closer to the hand to inspect it and let out a sigh of relief. “At least I didn’t cut myself.”

“Do you think it was—” Pedro started.

“I don’t want to think about it. I don’t know what’s going on right now, but I don’t care who or what it belonged to. We should be more concerned that it’s still warm,” Elise said.

The sound of a stick snapping shot through the treeline. Elise detected a human-shaped object in the moonlight. “Quick, quick, Pedro, turn off the flashlight,” she whispered in a panic.

Pedro turned sharply and saw the figure the instant before he turned the light off. He tucked the phone back into his coat pocket. The sound of the human-shaped being’s footsteps gradually increased in volume, but not frequency.

Elise and Pedro slowed their breathing, trying to exhale as infrequently and as quietly as possible. They unconsciously hoped that if it couldn’t hear their breathing, it would assume it had imagined them.

The sound of footsteps stopped at what Elise believed to be eight to ten paces away from them. A deep, scratchy voice cut through the silence, but they couldn’t discern meaning from the sounds.

“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell us,” Pedro said, a cold sweat pouring down his back. “Please, don’t kill us, we don’t know what’s going on.”

The wind rustled the trees. Elise was ready to run, but Pedro was closer to blacking out from fear than anything else. The sound of its voice came through once again, but their understanding was the same.

Pedro reached into his pocket and turned the flashlight on once again, but didn’t remove the phone from the pocket. The bright light barely illuminated their faces, but it was enough that all three figures could see each other.

“What are you doing?” Elise snapped. “You’re going to get us both killed!”

“I don’t know,” Pedro said while he hyperventilated. “I think it would have already done that if it wanted to.”

The figure stared coldly at Pedro. It gestured with its hands. First, it pointed to the south, further into the tree line, then placed its hands and arms together, opening and closing the hands like a mouth. It pointed with three fingers to the Northeast.

Pedro nodded along like he understood.

“Do you actually understand him?” Elise asked.

“Not in the slightest, but I think that there’s something in this part of the reserve that’s dangerous.”

“That might explain the blood on the stone…and the tracks we saw on the way over here.”

As soon as the switch flipped in Elise’s brain, it was too late to do anything with the information.

The human-shaped pulled a finely shaped stick with a sharpened stone affixed to it out of its clothing and spread the base of their legs into an athletic position.

“We’re in danger, aren’t we?” Pedro panicked. “It was so calm before, what did we do to make it angry?”