Chapter One:

Recovering Wounds

Ever since the traumatizing experience at the Washington Lodge on Blackwood Mountain, Sam never got in touch with her friends ever again. They just… drifted apart. The last time all of them stayed in one place is when the rescue team dropped them to the hospital then to the sheriff for questions. After the questioning sessions, they were given a chance to talk among themselves what transpired in the mountain.

None of them ever talked. They just stared at each other. Sam saw the chains though.

The room where they led Sam and the others is a vast white painted room with two couches facing each other and three stools. In the middle is a coffee table where Ashley's well, coffee is placed, untouched.

In the corner, Mike stood behind the couch where Jess is seated looking both protective for Jess and scared for her due to what just happened. His face is gaunt from the sleepless night. Bruises and wounds are visible. His bandaged hand covered the traces of the stumps of three fingers that were removed from a bear-trap back in the sanitarium.

Jess looked terrible with her bruises and cuts even with her new jeans and a shirt. She is silent most of the time now. Only Mike seems to be able to talk to her. Waking up wounded, almost naked in the mines, clueless who and how did they drag her there in the first place… changed her… especially when the things tried to rush in to kill her.

Emily's silence gave off the hint that her relationship with Matt is officially over. She is seated in the other end of the couch staring at the white wall. She had her jacket removed revealing her bandages. The bite must've been pretty painful but going through the near death thing with Mike in the basement made the wound nothing. And the part where Matt actually tried to abandon her in the wrecked tower snapped the line. She's now both mad with Mike and Matt.

Matt sat in a stool beside the couch where Sam is seated. He looks beaten and weak. The destruction of the radio tower got him pretty shaky and even more cautious in everything he does mainly because he tried to leave Emily to her death back there in the chasm. Still, his caring demeanor hasn't changed. But Sam can still see some change. And one of it is that he no longer loves nor even likes Emily.

Ashley, who is seated beside Sam, is silently sobbing. She got herself a cup of coffee earlier but Sam doesn't know if Ashley is intending to drink it since it's been in the coffee table ever since they got inside the room. After the rescue, Ashley removed her bonnet allowing her hair to fall and cover the black-eye she got from Josh. She also removed her blood stained jacket but on her neck and hands, specks of red are still noticeable. Sam guessed tissue won't totally wipe off blood without leaving small traces of it. But her stance could be caused by her own near death experiences starting with the saw-blade that 'killed' Josh up until to the burning of the lodge.

Beside Ashley and the third person in the same couch with Sam is Chris. Surely, Chris being silent is unnatural. The guy couldn't pass an hour without cracking a joke but ever since the thing in the mountains, he'd rather shut up. The explosion that burned the Washington lodge gave his glasses some cracks making him not to wear them anymore. He looked so drained; witnessing the Stranger's death by those things is one reason. Thinking he killed Josh, his best friend for Ashley and realizing Josh was just making fun of them as a Psychopath killer as revenge for his sisters' disappearance due to a prank pulled almost all of them and then losing Josh for real and feeling like he failed his own friend are some things that haunts Chris now. But clasped in his hand is Ashley's. Cold to the touch but Sam knows that it's all what Chris needs for now: Ashley and nothing more.

And last is of course, Samantha herself. Sam. The brave selfless hero that night who dived to the switch that caused the explosion and became the last of the survivors to escape the lodge before it erupted to flames. Her red jacket is now smudged with grime along with her hair. The hot bath she got left no hint at all. She is a mess and dirty like everyone else around her. Those things nearly killed her back in the lodge. If she made one wrong move then… she would've died. She's the last of the seven survivors to escape the lodge. During the interview, she was pretty much like a crazed person: smiling in front the officer telling them to go and see the mines and wanting to 'unsee' what she saw down there. They told her to talk to some of her friends but she just shook her head saying she's okay. But she isn't…

She looked at each of her friends one by one. There were ten of them the last winter before the lodge's destruction. Eight, in this year went to the annual winter reunion at the Washington Lodge and one didn't survive. Josh Washington himself, the brother of the twins who disappeared in the previous year. Sam knows the others may see Josh as a psycho—which he is—but still, Josh not being found makes Sam guilty that she didn't do anything to help him or search for him.

Who knows? Maybe the 'Wendigo' already got to him.

Sam smiled at the thought the Wendigo… savage monsters that were former men and women who succumbed to cannibalism in the mountain. Legends—is that even the fitting word now?—say that the spirit of the Wendigo enters the person who will begin to lose his or her humanity and crave for human flesh.

She saw it in person. All of them saw it. There were a lot of them. Sam believes the explosion didn't kill all of them. There are more in the mountain; stalking, waiting for a prey to be hunt down. And as far as Sam knows, Josh couldn't survive the Wendigo. He's probably dead by now…

By the time the officers got them out, Sam got one last look at her friends—no—her fellow survivors.