They passed through the treeline.

Marcus felt a palpable sense of relief wash through him, it was like slipping into a cool bath at the end of a particularly brutal workout. Was he really this tense? He glanced back behind him and finally chalked it up to being 'out of the woods', that old, old holdover from when man was not man but caveman. The forest was a dangerous place and it was easy to get your hackles raised. Plus, well, there were some weird things going on. The silence, those mysterious gunshots earlier, and that smell...he meant to start walking again, (both he and Ed had stopped once they passed the perimeter of the forest, as if reaching some unspoken agreement,) but now he hesitated further.

That smell...

It was back.

"Oh, god," Ed moaned. "I can smell it now. Damn, that is one nasty stink," he muttered. "We're going to have to tell someone. It's like a meat factory is dumping month old rotten corpses or something around here."

"Real nice, Ed," Marcus replied.

The sense of subtle dread, a quiet tension working its way into his gut and sapping it of heat, had returned with the stink. Their conversation fell flat in the still air. No breeze blew. The sun burned high overhead. Despite the heat, Marcus felt a chill ripple through him. Was he just being paranoid? He looked over at Ed, who was looking around anxiously. Did Ed pick up on the subtle apprehension, too, or was Marcus' own fear just infecting his friend? Ed was prone to flights of fancy and rash decisions from time to time...

"Where the hell is that coming from?" Ed moaned. "Let's get out of here."

"Yeah," Marcus replied uneasily.

They began to move forward. Then they stopped once more, making it only five paces. The smell was getting worse. Marcus looked around. To his left was the lake and a small dock. Someone had stored a handful of bright blue canoes in a small gazebo-like storage area. Their plastic noses peeked out from beneath a dull gray canvas, tied down with rope. Behind them and slanting off to the right were the woods.

Directly ahead, however, was a small rest area and the trail that led up to the ranger station at the top of the hill. That way lay civilization. Also, apparently, a man. Marcus hadn't noticed him before, but now both he and Ed were staring at the man who sat at one of the wooden tables, facing away from them. He appeared to be wearing a tarnished, dark blue business suit.

"Who's that?" Ed muttered, more, Marcus imagined, for something to say than anything else. Ed shifted uneasily.

Marcus looked around. He heard the buzzing of flies, but could see no collection of them. Not by the trash, not at the treeline, not on the ground.

Except...

He focused and realized, with a sudden sense of revulsion, that the flies were clustered around the man seated at the table. He felt another wave of fear smash through him. Was the man dead? His hands went cold and he lost his grip on the cooler, dropping both it and the tent.

"Hey, man..." Ed complained, but his heart wasn't in it, he sounded distracted and afraid. "Is..." he swallowed. "Is that guy dead?"

"I don't..."

Abruptly, the man shifted, began getting up.

"I guess not," Marcus whispered. "Could the smell be coming from him?" he asked, his voice even lower.

"I don't think so, man," Ed whispered back.

"He could be homeless..."

"There's no homeless that smells that horrible."

The man was standing now, and here, he began to turn. The fear was back, worse than ever. Marcus felt ready to bolt. Something was definitely wrong here. The man turned to face them now. He began to walk towards them, out from beneath the protection of the shelter he'd been sitting under. Marcus started to get a really good look at him as he stumbled into the sunshine. His dark blue business suit was more than tarnished, it was torn and stained with something dark. It was very stained. But that wasn't what bothered him.

It wasn't the way his skin was very, very pallid in the sunlight, or how disheveled his black hair was. It was the stuff on his face, on his hands. Something dark red stained his mouth...no, not just his mouth, but all of his lower face. And his hands, his hands were covered in the stuff that might have been red jelly.

Or...

"Hey, I don't like this," Ed murmured suddenly.

The man had definitely seen them, and he was definitely walking towards them. Worse than the stuff (blood?) smeared on his hands and face was the way he walked. It wasn't exactly limping, like he was injured, or staggering, like he was drunk. It was more the gait of a man who had forgotten how to walk and only now was the act beginning to come back to him. Then his mouth opened wide and he let loose a loud moan that carried across the still air between them.

"Holy shit," Marcus heard himself whisper.

Real terror had taken root in him now and he felt frozen with indecision. What to do? What to do? Marcus was not a violent man by nature. He'd been in exactly two fights, one in high school, one in college, and they had both been halfhearted.

"Marcus..." Ed said softly.

The man had now crossed half the distance between them.

Suddenly, Marcus felt something switch on in his head, what must have been none other than his human survival instincts.

"Ed, drop your pack and run for the ranger station," he said quickly and quietly.

"What?" Ed managed.

"Drop your pack! Go for the ranger station! Run!" Marcus screamed.

They both dropped their packs and took off. The man didn't look like he had anything in his hands, no knife, no gun, no weapon of any kind, but that didn't matter, because he was clearly insane. Now that he was closer, Marcus could see his eyes. There was something wrong them with, too much black, not enough color.

And...

"Run!" Marcus shouted again.

They ran across the dirt courtyard, past the wooden shelter and the tables, towards the hill and the trail that would take them to safety. He hoped. As he bolted, he couldn't stop seeing the man's eyes. It wasn't the color, or the lack thereof, that truly bothered him. It was the way the eyes caught the sun...or had they? They seemed to be glowing, actually glowing from within, the way a cat's looked sometimes in the darkness when a light was shined on them just the right way.

Up ahead, he could see more people. Three more people.

"Run!" Marcus shouted, blowing past Ed, who didn't have a gym membership. "Run! There's a psycho on the loose!" he shouted with reckless abandon.

Marcus suddenly tripped on something in the tall grass. He grunted and crashed to the ground. Ed stopped, breathing heavily, and turned to offer him a hand up. Marcus took a moment to see what the hell it was he'd tripped on.

"Oh...oh god," he moaned as he saw it.

"What the f...oh shit!" he cried as he laid eyes on it as well.

It was an arm. A human arm. Ragged shreds of meat and bleached white bone stuck out of the shoulder. It had been torn directly from a human body. There was even some black cloth of what must have been a t-shirt attached to it.

It lay nestled in its own little pool of old blood.

"What is happening!?" Marcus heard himself scream as he scrambled to his feet.

The man in the business suit was gaining on them, he saw as he threw a terrified glance over his shoulder. He had reached the base of the hill and was working his way up it. He was not slowing, if anything, he was gaining speed.

"Uh, Marcus..." Ed said, raw fear dripping from his voice.

Marcus swung his head around and spied the three people he'd shouted the warning to. They were no longer standing at the top of the embankment. They were coming down towards them. One of them was a skinny teenager, another two were men in oil-stained overalls with baseballs caps and flannel shirts. With a growing horror, he realized that they, too, had blood-smeared mouths and hands. Ed moaned sickly.

"They're fucking cannibals, man!" he cried wildly. "What the hell happened!? Did civilization just go nuts while were gone?!"

"Go! Now! My car isn't far!" Marcus replied, shoving Ed forward.

As they began wheeling left, away from both the new trio and the business man behind them, Marcus found himself thinking ridiculously of water buffalo running from a pack of lions. He heard an uneven chorus of demented sounds that only vaguely represented human language as they continued running up the hill, trying to avoid now four of the insane people.

Marcus made it up first. He crested the rise, his thoughts honed down to a narrow tunnel of focus: get to his car.

But then he stopped, so stupefied by what he saw before him: not one, but two fresh horrors. Ed bumped into him.

"Why'd you stop!?" he demanded.

"Look," Marcus whispered.

He pointed to the ground ahead of them. The trail connected with a blacktop road the ran to the left and right, they'd have to cross it to get to the ranger station, which was about a hundred feet away, built on a rise so that it overlooked the area.

"Oh...oh shit," Ed moaned.

It looked like a slaughterhouse truck had dropped its load on the street and the dirt around it. Thick pools of blood had gathered on the ground and the blacktop. Mixed in were pieces of what had once been people: fingers, hands, limbs, random bits of torn flesh. As visceral and disgusting as this was, the revelation that lay behind it, in the parking lot of the ranger station, was even more terrifying. Marcus heard Ed suck in a lungful of air.

"Your car!" he cried. "It's gone! They're all gone!"

No escape. Behind him, the growls were getting louder, the deranged closer. In a sudden resolute gesture, Marcus turned around and faced the four insane people coming up the rise towards him. The man in the torn business suit had joined the other three and they were close now, very close. He could smell them, could smell his own, raw-edged fear.

"What are you doing!?" Ed yelled. "We need to go!"

"Wait," Marcus said simply, and stepped forward.

The nearest person, one of the men in overalls, was large, middle-aged. Perfect for what Marcus needed. Reacting fast, letting his body do the talking while his mind cowered in fear, he reached out, grabbed the man by his overall straps, yanked sharply forward, then pushed the man back with all of his strength.

Today was the day going to the gym would save his life, he decided.

The man let out a surprised grunt that still managed to sound somehow inhuman and stumbled backwards, losing his fight with gravity. He crashed into the other three, who all went flying, bowled over like ninepins. All four of them began to roll back down the hill. For a second, Marcus felt triumph shoot through him. Then he heard a branch break somewhere nearby and his head snapped around. He settled his gaze on a shifting, uncertain figure deeper in the woods to his left. And...no, not just one figure, but two, three.

He spun around, looked out over the grounds. He could see more people stumbling, lurching around at varying distances.

"Come on," Ed said, "we have to get to the ranger station."

Marcus nodded numbly. They hurried across the street, moving around the blood-soaked portion of the blacktop, and passed the dirt shoulder that separated the parking lot from the road. A waist-high brick wall served as a perimeter for the empty lot. They hopped the wall and ran across the parking lot, towards a wooden staircase and a wheelchair ramp that wound up and around to a deck that served as the main entrance for the station.

Marcus thought he could see people moving around up there, beyond the windows. What if they were more insane people? He looked closer, harder, as he began pounding up the stairs. They didn't seem insane, didn't move the way the others did.

No time for that now.

"Hurry up!" he called.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Ed replied between heavy breaths.

Marcus came to the door and opened it up.

He froze as he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.