Within a Forest Dark

Author's note: The Meche stories just keep on coming. I'm not sure if everyone's imagining of Meche's year in the Petrified Forest is as hard-boiled as mine, but any way you slice it, the strength of character it would have taken is incredible. In the film version of this fic, the role of Meche will be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I don't own Grim Fandango or its characters, nor the passage I've quoted from the Henry Wadsworth Longellow translation of the Inferno.

"Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more…"

--opening lines of Dante's Inferno

Hell if she knew how her arms were getting tired with no muscles, but the pains were going from dull to shooting and she knew she couldn't keep swinging much longer. Normally she'd've had it in a bloody heap in the dirt in a minute, but it had been a rough night. The fire had gone out after what felt like only an hour or two of sleep. They must have been on her in seconds. Now they were fearless, although they must have been able to sense the corpses of the others scattered around her. Maybe they just didn't care.

But now she was starting to get tired, and that only meant one thing around here.

The bat swooped again, wingspan as long as her height and fangs like steak knives, it was coming right as her skull and trying to knock her off balance. Meche ducked and turned around fast, thrusting upwards with her makeshift weapon. She felt the hit rather than seeing it—clipped the wing. Its scream was straight rage. She could hear it circle and come back for another pass, lower this time. Ready to plow right into her torso and fix its nasty little fangs into the base of her skull, where it sound suck out all the marrow from her bones and leave her like those deflated monstrosities she'd seen and—she sidestepped too slowly this time. The weapon went flying as she tumbled backwards. The bat had aimed a little too high to land and skimmed up past her prone body after she fell, but it was on its way back.

What a waste, Meche thought wildly. Getting killed by one of these little bastards after all this time.

The monster boomeranged back toward her, and all she could think was the claws sinking into her, turning her body over, and then those fangs—

And then, with an angry screech, it shot upward—flapped its wings furiously—disappeared into a dark line of trees—and was gone.

Meche opened her eyesockets cautiously and stared up into the twisted branches matted above her. Somewhere beyond them, she could pick out the faintest glimpse of color.

Dawn—oh, God, it was dawn.

Slowly, she stood and dusted herself off. Picked up her weapon—a long metal bar stolen from one of the bizarre machines attached to some of the trees. It had taken her two weeks (this had been before she'd lost count) to bash and pry and file it off the machine, and another week to sharpen the end into a stake. She also had torches, her fists, a little makeshift knife, and a small slingshot, and that was about it. In the beginning there had been a stock of round weights in a wheelbarrow that she'd been able to throw (with effort) at slower monsters, but a lot of them had mysteriously disappeared only a few hours after she'd arrived, and she'd gradually lost the others, one at a time, as she used them.

Not a lot to be grateful for. But at least the bats only came out at night.

Meche went back to the dead fire and got a new one started. Thank God her cigarette lighter still worked, or she'd've been bat (or spider, or beaver, or…) food on Day One. The fact that dry bones were her only kindling no longer fazed her. You did what you had to.

Now that she had a little illumination again, she got out her knife (just a smaller part of the machine worked up in the same way as the stake) and began skinning the nearest bat. The meat was disgusting and was always either raw or scorched, but eating still gave her a little more energy. She tossed the strips of bat meat on the edge of the fire and sat back to think.

"Well, Meche," she said to herself conversationally, "where are you going to go today?"

There was a time when the answer to that question would have been "an animal shelter, two orphanages, and a children's hospital," but not today. Today, what she came up with was "toward the big tree," which was (she thought) the way she'd been heading before she'd camped for the night.

That the sun was up was significant only in that it made the bats go into hiding until nightfall. She couldn't see much of it from down here, definitely not enough to figure out which way was east. For all the good in the world it would have done her to know—she must have been over every inch of this damn forest except the inches that led out.

Sometimes she fed ravenously, tearing chunks off the meat with her teeth before it was even cooked, and after the meal was over she made a point of never thinking about it again. Other things she didn't think about included battles (especially the bad ones) and the few people she'd stumbled across, because none of them had made it. Some things would drive you crazy if you let them. Today she ate the meat by cutting it delicately with her knife and eating one small bite at a time, making sure to chew it properly first.

She'd been a vegetarian when she was alive, but everybody has limits.

When she was finished, she dropped the bat's bones neatly back into the hollowed-out corpse, set one end of someone else's legbone on fire to use as a torch, and moved on.

"When I get out of here," Meche muttered to herself, "the first thing I'm going to do is buy some stockings."

She went back and forth on this one, the way she'd always imagined castaways on a deserted island doing—what's the thing you missed most about the "real world"? This place was a lot less romantic than a tropical island, but the question obviously translated. It kept her busy for at least a couple of hours every day.

"But you know," she replied aloud, "when's the last time I had a really killer slice of chocolate cake? Before I went into the hospital." She didn't even know if they had chocolate, or cake, in the Land of the Dead, but she kept coming back to it anyway. "I'm gonna buy an entire chocolate cake, and I'm gonna sit on the curb right outside the shop and eat the whole thing." She paused thoughtfully. "Or maybe I'll get lasagna first and save the cake for dessert."

She had passed the big tree and kept going, but after just a couple of hours she wound up in a suspiciously familiar clearing. Meche had never figured out whether the place was actually rearranging itself, or just managed to disorient her so severely that it only felt like it. For a while back in the beginning, she'd tried to develop some kind of methodical pattern to her explorations, but it worked about as well as the random wandering she collapsed into later.

Some days she wondered if she'd really screwed up somehow in life. She'd always tried to lead a good life, but you never knew. Maybe the Powers that Be thought she should have worked even harder. Or maybe one of the sick little children she'd helped nurse was going to grow up to be a serial killer, and she was getting pegged for interfering with Fate. At other times she was sure that the whole Department of Death thing was just a ruse, a setup to give you a little hope before plunging you into Hell. Just to add that extra little spice to eternal punishment.

So had the souls who made it been the ones who'd led better lives than she had? Maybe an early end to the torment was what you were supposed to be going for around here. Maybe this was just Purgatory, and once you kicked it a second time, you ended up…wherever. Hopefully somewhere better than the Petrified Forest. Anywhere would be better than the Petrified Forest.

But even if that were true, Meche knew she was never going to be able just to lie down and wait to find out.

She was dragging the sharp point of her weapon along the ground—partially from exhaustion and partially to try to mark her tracks, not that it was making much of an impression on the hard, root-covered soil. The torch had been abandoned as the day wore on and the thin light penetrated that little bit deeper into the forest. Hadn't made the place any warmer, though. A couple of times the winged spiders had started buzzing around, but since she didn't exactly have any meat to offer them, they eventually left her alone. There were bigger things to worry about.

"Or maybe," Meche mused aloud, "the first thing I'll do is lie on the beach with a really good book…"

There was nothing to do all day but keep walking. She rested only when she had to—safer to keep moving—and didn't stop to eat again. Not much chance of making progress at night.

She hid or just flat-out ran a dozen times for every time she fought. Meche wasn't all that confrontational at the best of times, and she really wasn't looking for a fight today. She couldn't remember ever having felt this exhausted before. Fantasizing about sinking into a leather chair, putting her feet up, and dozing off in front of a roaring fire, she slogged onward, praying she'd get through the day without meeting any more monsters.

Judging by how much the already-dim light had begun to fade, it must have been late afternoon when the snake slithered out of the underbrush behind her and tried to swallow her headfirst.

She was saved from certain devouring only because she happened to bend down at the last second to extract a stone that had wedged itself between two of the bones in her feet (her pumps had gone kaput after the first two weeks). The snake reared up, lunged and overshot, crashing into the dirt. It skidded several feet, hissing in pain. Immediately, Meche shifted her weapon to her left hand, leaving her right free to work.

Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes? she asked herself ruefully. The bats were nothing compared to these guys.

The big thing was that they were fast. And sharp didn't work well with them. The scales prevented stabbing or slashing; you had to try for blunt force trauma. Even that wasn't much better. And they were mean.

Oh, God in heaven, they were mean.

They were in a little clearing, maybe a ten-by-ten yard blank space on the face of the forest. She should have known. The open spaces were always prime targets for the biggest of the nasties.

The snake arced its body in a curve about as wide as a paper clip's and whipped back in her direction. At least she'd learned how to anticipate a straight shot. Three…two…one and she shot to one side, swinging out with the weapon as she did so. The metal bar glanced into the snake's midsection. No damage, as far as she could tell. Meche could have cried.

This time she charged it as it headed back around, bringing the weapon down hard just behind its skull. If she hit it just right—the bar was centered flat across its throat—she shifted her hand to the middle of it—so far, so good—okay, fine, now for the hard part. She shifted her weight hard to her left arm to pin the head to the ground. Stay out of the way of the tail and body, which were lashing around furiously. Meche didn't have enough strength to crush its throat or even keep it down for long, but that wasn't the point this time around. Just had to rough it up a little.

Still bearing down on the weapon, she brought her right fist hard into first the snake's right eye socket, then the left. The blows hit home; she didn't even want to look at her hand. Instead, she kept going, hitting its head at full force wherever she could reach. She'd never again have that kind of desperate adrenaline-charged strength, or everything that happened afterwards might have turned out differently.

And now the snake—eyes ruined and staining the bones of her hand—was really angry, and she was losing her grip. Just time for one last attempt this round. She brought the weapon up suddenly, fixed both hands at the base as though it were a baseball bat, and smashed it hard into the snake's jaw. The crack was loud, but the serpent was already darting out of reach and she couldn't tell whether she'd broken it or not.

So say she had wrecked its jaw. She knew from experience that that'd cut down on the chance that it was going to eat her whole, but it could easily still kill her out of pure angry instinct. Jaw or no jaw, it could still…

…constrict.

Meche couldn't see it clearly and it wouldn't be able to see her now, but she could feel the soft, almost tender brush of its scales against her leg. Like lightning, both ends of its body whipped improbably inwards; it circled around and began enclosing her from its tail upwards.

She scrambled upwards against it, nearly losing a leg as the coils tightened sharply around it. These guys could force souls apart limb from limb. She'd seen the results.

Meche fell over the mass of coils and scrambled away on hands and knees before making it to her feet several yards away. The snake was running blind, but it must have been able to sense her and now it was uncoiling, the mass of its body moving over itself in loops. In the almost-darkness it looked even worse than it would have in daylight. And then it was stretched out and moving toward her so fast that it was difficult to track it with her eyes, and her brain was screaming run, run, run run runrunrunrunrun.
She wasn't fast enough. It overtook her in the space of a second, wrapping her in itself layer by layer from the soles of her feet up. As it got halfway up her body it started to tighten again. Now that the creature's jaw seemed to be out of commission and she wasn't looking at having her arm bitten off, she did still have one chance to get out of this one. Just one. She knew that playing her cards wrong would mean death—or something like it—and it wouldn't be an easy one.

It all depended on where and when its head landed.

The snake was winding itself around her torso now, crushing inward on her chest. She'd meant to switch the weapon from her left hand to her right, but there hadn't been time. Too late now; the right arm was pinned by her side. But her left arm still had a free range of motion for a few more seconds, and as the snake circled in around her right shoulder, they were face to face for a second, and then—ohGodIcan'tbreathe—she struck hard.

The weapon thrust straight down the snake's throat and she heard the sickening tears as it lost contact with her hand and stabbed into the belly of the beast.

Right away there was blood all over her arm, a lot of it, and she knew she'd done it. The snake was done for. But it was still squeezing as it died, its body pulsing in wild jerks around her. Meche tried to scream, but the sound wouldn't come out. If she'd had time to think about it, she might have realized that she wasn't in danger of suffocating, but the pressure was still viselike on her bones and the pain was incredible. She waited for her ribs to snap.
Only when the snake was finally good and dead—when the furious hissing and thrashing had finally stopped—did the huge coils of its corpse relax enough to let her wriggle out.
She sprawled face-forward on the ground, feeling the cool packed dirt against the side of her skull. Alive. Or close enough to it, anyway.

But how much longer could she keep this up?
Adrenaline flooding away from her, Meche crawled to the treeline and clenched her fist tightly around the biggest stick she could find. Later she'd either have to work up the energy to cut the snake open or find a path back to those huge machines so she could make a new weapon. For now all she could do was pass out.

Something was moving.

The realization must have woken her up, because she found herself bolt upright with her fist already curled around the stick and with the thought already in her mind—but without any idea how she'd gotten there. She wished she'd bothered with a torch before collapsing earlier.

It was coming closer.

She staggered to her feet without much hope. Her limbs felt weighted down, stiff; there wasn't a lot of chance of her winning a fight in this shape. She couldn't even run.

And now she could see that something was wrong—it looked almost like light out there, moving toward her. Did I get eaten? Meche wondered dazedly. She felt so detached about it. It wasn't like dying at all—she'd never had this sensation of a white light coming for her in the hospital. Too bad her life wasn't flashing before her eyes this time either. She'd always kind of hoped.

She'd wanted to meet her fate standing tall, but it was too much effort. Meche pitched forward, and on her hands and knees she was suddenly afraid. There were noises now, loud and getting louder and growling like…like a car engine. What kind of monster was this? This wasn't how things were supposed to turn out at all.

The stick had landed out of her reach, and she couldn't get to it. "Pathetic, Colomar," she spat. The light was blinding her now, the growl imminent, and she'd been defeated by two feet of dead wood. Some afterlife this was. Oh, God, and here was—

"Ms. Colomar?"

She almost didn't recognize the scream as hers. Then her frantic eyesockets fixed on the monster and she almost laughed. A human, definitely a human. With—yes, it really was a car. A man. In a suit. God, it was so absurd. Another person. A car. In the middle of the Petrified Forest. For the first time in months, she looked down at herself and realized how she must look. Her clothes were shreds, shoes and hat and handbag all MIA, bones almost black with grime and God-knows-what. She must be a mess.

"How--?" she heard herself asking.

The man knelt down, knees in the dirt, no hesitation, took her hand. "Ms. Colomar, my name is Domino Hurley. I'm with the Department of Death in El Marrow. We've been looking for you for a long time."

Don't trust him. She brushed the thought hard out of her mind as soon as it surfaced. Absurd to trust the knight in the expensive suit and the shiny car who had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of nowhere. A lot more absurd not to trust him. To get out…

"This was all a mistake, just a horrible mistake," the man was saying as he pulled her to her feet. She stumbled; he was right there; she was in his arms. Meche laughed weakly. What a strange night. "And I can assure you that the agent responsible has been taken care of. I'm going to personally escort you to the final reward you so richly deserve."

"I—" So much to ask, so many things she needed to know. "I…how long have I been here?"

"Almost a year."

Her shock must have been obvious, because the man—Mr. Hurley—tightened his hold on her and said protectively, "There'll be plenty of time to ask questions later, Ms. Colomar. For now, why don't you hop in my car and I'll get you to a hot shower, a square meal and a warm bed. How's that sound?"

It sounded wonderful beyond anything she'd ever heard.

Still supporting her with one arm, he actually opened the car door for her. Actually helped her in. In the middle of the Petrified Forest. Ridiculous. She was still laughing when she fell asleep across the plush backseat. It had all been so easy.

It wouldn't be long before that changed again. But for now, absorbed in the first real rest she'd had since the day she died, Meche just slept.