The Haunted Forest Tour

CHAPTER TEN

Lee moved quietly and slowly, fully aware of the man staggering along beside him. He didn’t know his name and didn’t want to take the time to ask it in case there might be something listening for human voices.

Not far away, he heard the deep groan of a tree falling. The impact was enough to shake the ground under his feet.

He should have been petrified, and certainly he was very scared, but he was also remarkably calm, all things considered. Despite the death and violence, he still felt exhilarated. Every few minutes he would pause to reassess where they were, and every time he did so the thrill came back into him. A lifetime of skepticism had been dispelled in a minute, and the wonders around him, deadly as they obviously were, still made him punch drunk.

Or, maybe he’d just gone mad.

The man behind him groaned again and stumbled. Lee caught him by the chest and eased him to the ground as best he could.

“Can you keep walking?” he whispered, hoping that the other sounds around him would keep anything from actually hearing him.

Brad nodded his head. “Brad. My name is Brad. Yeah, I think so, just give me a minute.”

“Well, Brad, I’m Lee.” He looked Brad over and shook his head. “Listen, your arms are dislocated, and I think I can get them back where they belong. I might need to, because if we have to climb over any obstacles, I’m just not strong enough to carry you. Do you understand?”

Brad’s eyes rolled in his head for a moment and then closed. Lee thought the man might have passed out, but finally he nodded his head and opened his eyes again.

“Yeah. I understand.”

“Okay, now for the tough part. This is going to hurt, probably a lot. And I need you to be quiet and suck it up. Can you do that?”

Brad worried his bottom lip and shrugged. “Is there something I can bite down on?”

Lee thought about it for a few seconds and then pulled his wallet from his right rear pocket. “It’s leather,” he explained. “Soft enough that you won’t break your teeth.”

He helped Brad wedge the old, battered billfold in between his teeth, and then considered the best way to proceed. After a moment’s debate with himself, he moved over to Brad’s right side and gently worked his fingers around the gap between the man’s heavy arm and his shoulder. He moved Brad’s arm and heard the man groan.

There had been a time, when he was much younger, that Lee had managed to do similar damage to his left arm. A medic in Vietnam had placed his shoulder back into its socket by pulling on the arm and wiggling it around until the joint reconnected itself. Lee had let out several loud screams before the pain made him pass out. He couldn’t afford screams right now.

Not far off, something let out a wail that would have shamed an air raid siren, and Lee took advantage of the noise, roughly pulling Brad’s arm with as much strength as he could manage and twisting the limb at the same time. Brad bit down hard enough on the wallet that his teeth suddenly seemed to vanish within the leather, and howled in agony. His body thrashed as he tried to get away from the pain. The sound was muted but still loud. Fortunately, the thing in the distance was much louder.

A moment later, Brad’s fits calmed down and left the poor bastard whimpering around the spittle-drenched wallet in his mouth.

Lee ran his hands delicately around the swollen joint and felt the lack of a gap between the bones. It was the best he could do for Brad, and it was definitely better than nothing.

Before the man could recover enough to protest, Lee went to work on his other shoulder, once again wrenching the arm around until it finally slipped back into its socket with a meaty popping noise. Brad let out one high-pitched grunt and then slumped back loosely, unconscious.

“Damn!” Lee looked around and shook his head. The last thing he could afford to do right now was watch over an unconscious man. The best thing he could do to keep his sorry ass alive would be to leave the man where he was and head on his way.

He sighed and settled down next to Brad, because he didn’t have it in him to leave the stranger defenseless in a forest filled with monsters.

Shit.

Mindy looked around for her son and failed to see him. That put an immediate end to the idea of following everyone else. The woman with her, Tina, had no intention of going anywhere without her, so they both doubled back to see if they could find Christopher.

Having nobody else to turn to now that her husband was dead, Tina had apparently decided that Mindy was her life support. Mindy thought she could’ve made a much better choice of a protector, since Mindy’s only weapon was her patented “Stern Mom Look.” That only worked on Christopher, and one man who’d been trying to slide closer to her on one of the rare occasions she went to a movie by herself. Stern Mom Looks, scary as they might be, were nothing compared to the faces of a few of the things she’d already seen in the last hour.

There were several monsters lurking nearby, which was an obvious source of concern. The good news seemed to be that most of them were already engaged in eating their latest meals. If she didn’t dwell on what they were eating, it was possible she’d get through the search for her son without breaking into hysterical laughter and awaiting the arrival of a tour tram with padded walls.

She heard Christopher before she saw him. He was currently pinned under what looked for all the world like a four-eyed, scaly chicken of epic proportions.

“Honey, are you okay?”

“Mom, I can’t really breathe here.”

Tina reached down and grabbed one of the thick, muscular legs on the chicken-thing and pulled with all of her might. Mindy joined in and a few seconds later they’d managed to move the thing enough for Christopher to climb out from under it.

Mindy looked him over from head to toe the same way she had whenever he’d come home from school when he was younger. Everything that was supposed to be attached to him was there and mostly intact. His eyes were wide and a little wild, but that was perfectly understandable under the current circumstances.

“Thanks for coming back for me.” He managed a quick smile and gave his mother a one-armed hug.

Tina looked at them both blankly for a moment and then said, “Maybe we should go now? Before we lose everyone else?”

“Yeah, or before anything else comes along to eat our faces.” Mindy looked down at the remains of the chicken-thing and shook her head.

“It looked a lot scarier when it was alive.” Christopher sounded embarrassed, as if being pinned under a monster that he’d killed instead of being swallowed by the same thing was somehow a reason to feel ashamed.

“Honey, believe me, it’s plenty scary right now, too.”

“It looks like a scaly chicken now. It looked more like a Chinese Dragon when it was coming for me.”

“Either way, it’s a giant scaly chicken and more than scary enough. I’ve seen some mean chickens in my time.”

Tina started walking again but called over her shoulders, “Geese are worse. And swans. They may be cute, but they’re mean as all hell.”

Mindy and Christopher—now once again carrying his empty rifle, because any weapon was better than none—followed her. Tina plodded along, her eyes mostly focused on her feet. Her new friends watched for the things in the woods, several of which had almost finished their meals.

After almost five minutes of walking through the dark woods, Mindy heard the sound of a boy crying. Not a man, but a boy. It was a sound she and countless other mothers knew very well, and she stopped the other two in their tracks and told them to wait a moment.

She looked around the area carefully. There was a tree down, and she could tell just by looking at the path of destruction from where it dropped that it was newly felled. In front of it the ground was blackened and the air smelled of blood and worse. Behind it, she could hear the sounds of the child crying.

“Wait right here and keep a look out,” said Mindy. It wasn’t a request. Where the safety of children was involved, there were no requests.

There was just that one little obstacle, the tree. She had to climb it if she wanted to get to the other side, or she had to go around it. She thought briefly of going under it, but she’d have to dig to find a spot big enough and didn’t really like the idea of being trapped under the tree if something came along to devour her. Climbing would probably be safer. Anything could be hiding on the other side.

Mindy climbed carefully. It wasn’t the biggest tree she’d ever seen, or even large in comparison to some of its neighbors, but scaling the thing wasn’t easy with all of the tall, thick branches in the way. It was nice that the branches gave her plenty to hold on to, but pushing through them was nearly impossible, so she was doing more climbing than walking. Once at the highest point, she saw a lot more than she expected to. First, she saw the little boy, maybe five years old, maybe a little older. She also spotted Lee and Brad a short distance away.

Lee spotted her, too. He waved carefully, looking around first to make sure he didn’t get any unwanted attention.

She waved back just as carefully and then held up a finger, telling him silently to give her one minute. He nodded and maneuvered around again, his rifle held close to his body.

Off in the distance, Mindy saw a shape that didn’t belong in a forest. She couldn’t make it out clearly, but it looked like a building. Real walls, and solid if they had lasted the last few years.

She started the task of climbing down the other side of the tree. After only a couple of missteps, she was next to the tyke who was curled up into a fetal position and crying to himself.

“Hey, come on, let’s get you out of here, okay?”

The boy looked at her with frightened, tear-stained eyes and nodded silently. He didn’t protest when she picked him up, and his arms instinctively wrapped around her neck. She started moving almost immediately, climbing over the branches and marveling at how little the boy seemed to weigh. She’d seen him with the group earlier, firmly attached to a redhead who was nowhere to be seen.

He didn’t weigh much, but having him wrapped around her neck and waist made the already-difficult climb a lot harder. When she finally reached the highest point a second time, she waved Christopher and Tina over. They were both looking everywhere around them, and it took a few seconds to get their attention.

“Where did you find him?” Christopher started climbing and stopped halfway up the tree.

“Well, my other son is starting to get too old for spoiling properly…”

“Ha ha.” He smiled.

Mindy’s expression turned serious. “There are two more people on the other side of the tree. One of them looked unconscious. Why don’t we get together with them and see if we can find our way out of here?”

“What about all of the other survivors.”

“Christopher, I don’t know if there are any other survivors.”

He looked at her and nodded, his brow drawing in like a gathering storm. “Okay, good point. Lead on, Mom.”

Christopher helped Tina after he was done climbing over the branches of the felled tree, and all four of them maneuvered around carefully. They looked first at the stone structure Mindy had discovered, and then let out a few startled screams as the demon-spider dropped down from above them.

It wasn’t really a spider. Mindy could have probably handled one of those; she’d squashed quite a few of them in her time. No, this had more legs and a longer body. Also, it had twelve glossy green eyes in a perfect circle, just above the mandibles that tried to cut the kid wrapped around her body in half. Tommy was now wide awake and let out a few screams worthy of a rhesus monkey as he started scrambling over Mindy’s head in an effort to get away from the thing.

Mindy lost her footing and fell backward. Christopher caught her and let out a few monkey screams of his own as the mandibles chopped through the air where she had been standing a second before. The spider let out a low growl that sounded like a few thousand pissed-off bees, and as Mindy finally cleared the kid out of her view, it let out another scream.

It lunged forward, the thick claws on its feet grabbing at Mindy’s legs and slicing into her socks with ease.

It would have been less painful if she had actually been wearing socks. Mindy cried and, without even thinking about it, threw the scrambling kid toward Christopher, who caught him. If she was going down, she wasn’t taking the kid with her. That was all there was to it.

Mindy kicked hard with her left leg, taking a few layers of skin away as she wrestled free of the claw. She cocked her right leg back to land another kick, and then the spider-thing’s face exploded.

Rather than continuing to attack her, the spider shuddered and twitched and drooled a lot of purplish goo out of the stump where its head had been.

Christopher let out a muffled curse as the kid his mother had thrown him started climbing over his head. Tina caught the kid before he could fall and hurt himself, and just to make sure he didn’t go anywhere else, she wrapped her arms around his trembling body.

Down on the ground, she saw the old man from the tram, Lee, slowly lowering his rifle.

“Weren’t we going to go down to save him?” Christopher wondered aloud.

Lee took two steps forward, and Tina dropped the kid she’d been holding as she got truly lively for the first time since they’d met her.

“Brad!” Her shout was loud enough to guarantee that every monster hiding in the trees around them would hear, but she was too busy scrambling down the fallen tree to even notice. Somehow she managed to keep her footing. She ran right past Lee and charged over to the man on the ground, stopping only when she could see him clearly and then hug his unconscious form.

Lee looked back at Tina with a combination of surprise and severe annoyance on his face, while Mindy scooped up the kid who was once again curling in on himself. He latched on to her and she climbed down without any incidents.

Christopher made it almost all the way down before he tripped, but he managed to land on his feet.

“You folks all right?” Lee came over to them, moving with the particular stride that seemed to be reserved for old men.

“Yes we are,” said Mindy. “Thank you!”

“Well, it was the last bullet, I think, but that thing was looking uglier than most.”

“Damn.” Christopher looked at the top of the tree. “I dropped my rifle.”

“Honey, the rifle is broken.”

“Yeah, Mom, but it’s a rifle.”

“Let’s just get Tina and her not-so-dead Brad and find that building, okay? Maybe there’s something there that can help us.”

Christopher looked less than thrilled about the idea. “Maybe there’s something there that can eat us.”

“If it’s got walls, it’s a start.” Lee smiled as he spoke. “Except for the ghosts, not too much around here that seems to come through the walls. That means we can at least get a little protection.”

“Brilliant plan,” said Eddie, suddenly stepping into view. Barbara the tour guide was with him. Eddie waved his rifle at Tina. “You. What’s your name?”

“Tina.”

“Pleased to meet you, Tina. Don’t ever scream like that again, okay?”

“I—I won’t.”

“Good. Let’s get moving.”