A Fire snaps. Light footfalls over the loose earth near my feet. A pungent smoke mingles with the acrid smell of clotted blood. I wiggle my nose. Little movement. Something cakes both nostrils. Tree bark digs into my back. A wave of stinging walks up both arms. My hands are bound on the far side. I lull my throbbing head back to the center. A gentle humming from the guy near the fire. Metal and iron clang together, then a sizzle. 

I open my eyes. The left feels warm and swollen. A kneeling silhouette comes into focus in my right one. What the hell happened? Chris and I had been hiking through the foothills. God, my fucking head’s throbbing. 

“Comin’ ‘round, are ya?” The stranger’s voice is soft, mousey. He spits into the coals and laughs. “Just in time for supper.” 

The smell of bacon fills the air. I try to call out to Chris, but my lips have clotted shut on one side. 

The man pushes the meat in his iron skillet around with a bowie knife. “I warned you.” He raises his head of thinning blond hair to the setting sun. “Tried to warn you all.” He picks up his blue mug in a hand coated in dried gore and takes a swig. He nods toward an old Ranger parked over his shoulder. “A little dinner, and then back on the road.”

I move my legs closer to my torso and shift my weight onto my side. “Kuh-Chris?” 

Another cackle from our captor. “You might wanna tell him what’s really been on your mind.” He jabbed the meat in the skillet with the tip of his knife and gnaws off a morsel. “He ain’t got long.”

Chris is tied to a neighboring trunk. Beaten, cut, and unconscious. 

“What I do,” the man finishes the meat in the pan and strides toward Chris, “I do out of mercy.” He kicks one of my fiancé’s blue sneakers. “Hey! Prince Charming.” Another of his paint-stained steel-toes slugs Chris’s shin. “Ain’t that right?”

Chris’s eyes roll back around. A couple of gasps through his bearded mouth. “Puh-Please, no more.”

The man bends his weak frame over my guy and throws his pleas back in his puffy face. “Please, no more! Please, no more! Fuckin’ pussy.” He straddles Chris’s far leg, bends closer to the thigh, and hacks off a filet. 

Chris’s body convulses as he slips back under a veil of emptiness. This maniac wags his prize en route to his perch and flops it into his frying pan. 

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Shut up, bitch. In a few minutes, you’ll be singin’ my praises.” A loud snap from down in the valley forces him from his seat. He grabs the aluminum ball bat and takes a brief survey of the forest, then settles back down. “They’re coming, all right.”

“What do you want from us?” I move my right foot as far as I can reach, but it’s not enough to jar Chris. 

He hums through another bite from my partner’s leg. “A distraction.” He turns his beady eyes on mine. “And a meal.” His grin bears yellow-stained teeth from years of tobacco use and coffee. 

More branches snap in the woods over the ledge. Several pairs of feet advance. 

“Who’s coming?”

He washes down his bite with more coffee. 

The fog clouding my mind clears a bit. The cabin. We’d come up here to his family’s cabin, but why?

“Infection mostly,” he says. He pushes the meat around in the pan. “Took out a lot of us. Rushed out a cure that became worse than the virus.” His head shook. “That’s where our trouble started.” 

Something groans within a stone’s throw. I slide back against the trunk. “What’s out there?”

A chortle as he rises from his stump and tosses the dregs of his mug onto the fire. “Time for me to go.” He disappears behind my tree. 

“Wait! You can’t leave us here like this.”

The rope binding my hands falls slack. He strides around to my side, stabbing the knife in the grass at my elbow. “You’re gonna need that.”

A row of dark forms crawls over the lip of the hill. Mouths frothing. Wild lifeless eyes. Some wear scrubs. Some, hospital gowns. Others don street clothes. 

“Chris?” 

Nothing. The truck fires up and peels out. 

“Chris! You’ve gotta wake up.” 

Forms stomp toward the fire. Blood-stained teeth. The reek of decay and body odor. 

“Baby, please. Wake up.” I grab the knife and shimmy up the trunk’s girth. I shake some of the feeling into my arms and kick Chris in the hip. “They’re here. You’ve got to move.” 

One of them walks straight through the flames, knocking over the skillet. A pair of women lunge for his mangled leg. 

“Shit!” I tug on his armpit, but it’s no good. They drag Chris toward the growing shadows. “I’m so sorry. I love you.” I turn and bolt into the woods along the uneven ruts away from a nightmare and into the unknown. 

WV-based author Joshua Dyer writes in several different genres and styles including horror, fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream fiction. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, where some of his fiction won their “Reader’s Choice Award” for best story of the year. When he’s not writing, Dyer likes to read, study languages, play video games, and bake stuff.

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