Chapter 4: Skeletons and Tallbirds
Behind me, there was a terrifying amount of hissing, spitting noises, and I didn't even dare to look back. I simply continued to run, my boots stumbling and slipping in the snow, my lungs feeling like they were being impaled with each step. The light of the day was draining fast, and it was getting harder and harder to see where I was going. Once or twice, I fell, banging my knees and elbows on the hard ground, but I hardly felt it in my panic.
There was one thing I did notice clearly, even with most of the sunlight gone; there were three of those giant spider nest things, relatively close together. They weren't that big, I'd seen bigger, but with three of them all in the same area? There was a ridiculous amount of spiders crawling around. And now there was a ridiculous amount chasing me. Brilliant. Just... brilliant.
I wasn't sure how far I ran before I finally slowed to the stop, bending over and panting. I finally chanced a glance over my shoulder, and thank God, I didn't see any massive spider hoards coming for me. They must have gotten bored. I hadn't been sure if they were gone or not, since the ringing in my ears had overpowered the noise of their hissing. I was not in any shape to be running like this. Again: I was a goddamn scientist, not an adventurer.
Still struggling to catch my breath, I looked up - and immediately, my eye caught something that lifted my mood greatly. Berry bushes. Okay, I still would have preferred not getting chased by spiders to finding berries, but... small victories.
I brushed dirt and snow from my clothes as I trotted over to the bushes, frowning down at my soiled garments. I'd been wearing them for about, oh, five days now, perhaps? Counting the day I'd finished building Maxwell's Godforsaken machine. They weren't filthy, exactly, but I still felt extremely unclean in them. Maybe when spring came (assuming there were normal seasons in this world...), I could wash them in a pond or river.
Quietly I surveyed the area, as I pulled berries into my half-numbed fingers. There was another den of those penguin hybrids, as well as another (shudder) spider nest, off a little further away. Luckily, those spiders weren't wandering too close to me, yet, and I did not intend to go anywhere near them.
"Just keep moving, Wilson, just keep moving," I grumbled. There was still a painful stitch in my side.
I did find it a tad strange, how the bushes still had berries on them during the winter. The shrubs still had all of their leaves, looking just as healthy as they had in the previous world. Even if the bushes were evergreen, I couldn't think of any evergreen that bore fruit in wintertime. Not any edible fruit, anyway.
Stowing the berries away in my pocket, I continued gathering for a few minutes more, casting nervous glances up at the sky ever so often. I would need a torch or campfire soon. My fire would still be burning, the one I made back near the chest, but with all of those spiders, I wasn't keen on bunking there for the night.
"Maybe I should go ahead and make a torch now," I said with a frown. "Better safe than sorry, with It out there."
A nearby penguin seemed to be looking at me strangely as I spoke to myself, as if questioning my sanity. I glared at it, offended, mostly because I was questioning my own sanity as well. As if in response, it turned and waddled back to its group.
I sighed, and reached into my other pocket, grabbing a handful of twigs and grass. I knelt down, intending to start rubbing the twigs together to start a flame - and then abruptly dropped the twigs as I caught sight of something else. This time, it was a considerably less pleasant sight than berry bushes.
It was a skeleton.
A full, human skeleton, just lying there on the ground, on its back. I took a step away on instict. A deep chill ran down my spine, and in spite of the frigid air, I still swore I could feel my blood turn to ice.
I probably wouldn't have approached it at all, but then I noticed something sitting next to it, something with a very odd shape. I chewed on my lower lip for a long-held moment, but finally, my scientist's curiosity won out over my fear. Slowly, cautiously, I crept towards the corpse, and knelt beside it, trying to ignore the incredible skin-crawling feeling I was getting.
It was... a vest of some kind. It had a black-and-white checkered pattern, and (as I hesitantly reached out to touch it), it was quite soft. Though there were no sleeves, it looked like it would be warm. If this were the real world, I would not, under any circumstances, take a random piece of clothing that, presumably, belonged to a long-dead skeleton on the ground. But it was winter, and I was freezing, and there was a perfectly good vest, and I was not an idiot.
Wincing, I slowly picked up the vest, shaking a bit of snow off of it. I took a couple large steps away from the corpse, tucking the shirt under one arm. I gave the skeleton one last, long, nervous look, then hurried back over to where I'd dropped the twigs. It would be dark in a few minutes. I couldn't waste any more time.
I tried my best to concentrate on making the torch, but my mind was whirling, and I could still see the skeleton in my mind's eye. There were two possibilities about where that could have came from. Either there had been people here before me... long, long before me... or, Maxwell was simply screwing with my head. I wasn't sure which option was worse. I didn't like to think of what could have possibly killed that person - starvation, the cold, a monster, or God knows what else. But on the other hand, the idea that Maxwell was just casually dropping skeletons about the place, and who knows how he was getting those skeletons...
The end of the tuft of grass I was holding suddenly burst aflame, and my shaking fingers nearly dropped it. I swore and gritted my teeth, struggling to clear my thoughts. I had only been here for a day, in this new, wintry world. I couldn't start going crazy already.
"Wilson, I'm starting to think you've been crazy all along," I sighed.
oXoXoXoXoXo
I blinked against the blinding sunlight in my face, jerking myself suddenly upright. I shook snow from my sleeves, flexed my numb fingers. When had I fallen asleep? I just remembered setting my torch aside and taking a brief rest, and now I was waking up. It seemed running from those spiders had exhausted me. Not to mention the mental exhaustion that came after seeing that skeleton.
Groaning, I got to my feet, shivering from head to toe. Sleeping in a pile of snow was not fun. I grabbed up the vest and pulled it over my head, trying very hard to pretend I wasn't creeped out by it. It did help block out the cold, so that cheered me a bit.
I pulled out a few berries to start munching on, and as I did so, I suddenly heard a high-pitched squawk, sounding vaguely like a... bird. But it was very, very different from the squawks of the penguins. Frowning, I turned my head in the direction of the odd noise, and abruptly choked on my mouthful of fruit.
You'd think by this point, I'd be used to seeing weird mutated animals. But you have to understand; all of the incredible strangeness that I'd seen prior to this, every surreal moment of it... none of it could even begin to compare to what I was seeing now.
It... was vaguely bird-like in appearance, yes. But only vaguely. It wasn't like any bird I'd ever seen before, that was for damn sure. The first thing I noticed were the legs, of course, considering that they were over twice the length of my entire body. It was like you took giraffe legs, dyed them black and stuck them on a giant bird head. Except, get this, the bird only had one eye. One huge eye. The eye actually took up about ninety percent of its head. On both sides of that large, round head, were a pair of comically small wings. I'm not sure what purpose they served, because the monstrous thing clearly could not fly. There was no way those wings were getting that enormous body off of the ground, not in this century. I might not have recognized it as being bird-like at all if it hadn't had a large beak underneath its single eye, dull purple in color.
I couldn't help but just stare at it. Just... stood there, and stared. The creature was a frightening sight by itself. But that wasn't really the most frightening thing.
No, the frightening thing was when I realized there were four of them.
"Well." I straightened the collar of my newly-acquired vest. "That's something you don't see every day."
(A/N: And here's Chapter 4. I hope you all are enjoying, my lovelies. I was considerably more pleased with this than with Chapter 3. Again, pleeeeease leave comments and criticism! Good or bad, anything you have to say!)