Chapter 2: The Beginning

I woke up for the second time that day, this time in complete darkness. It felt like something was being pressed into my face, trying to smother me. Pushing my arms outward in a panic and thereby lifting my torso up, it became apparent that I was face-down on the ground, which would explain the feeling of something pressing against me. I looked up, and after my eyes adjusted slightly to the darkness I saw that I was in a forest, in the middle of the night.

I sat bolt upright. The events of that morning started to come back. After minutes of racking my brain, I had no explanation for how I had wound up here, let alone what the hell had happened earlier. I was completely alone out here, absolutely terrified, and started hyperventilating again. After a few minutes of not dying or being attacked, however, my breathing slowed down and I started to think rationally. As much as it was terrifying, being alone was probably for the best: the alternative was being mauled by a wild animal, or something equally horrendous.

Finally fully-acclimated to the miserably low light of the moon breaking through the forest canopy, I took a long look around me. I was sitting in an oddly-circular patch of dirt in the dead-center of a small clearing. The trees around me were the worst possible density, leaving me no visibility beyond the tree-line but plenty of room for something else to maneuver between them. But I could manage, I supposed. I stood up to look at my strange dirt-patch. It really was a perfect circle. Around it was luscious grass, populated with flowers, though I wasn't sure what kind. It was honestly quite pretty.

Perfectly in the center of my little dirt-patch, right next to where I'd been sitting, was a small, dark shape. I bent down and picked it up. It was a small rectangular device with inwardly bevelled corners, a tiny display in the middle with a raised circle bordering it, and three buttons, two on the right and one on the left. It had an antenna on the top-left corner, and around the display were symbols I couldn't recognize, laid out in a circle. I pressed one of the two adjacent buttons and the display lit up, but showed nothing. I pressed the other, and nothing happened. I pressed the larger button on the other side and the screen got even brighter and the device started beeping at me.

"Ssssh! Ssssssshhh!" I hissed at it, but it didn't stop its beeping. The screen kept getting brighter and for a second I thought I'd be knocked out and transported again. But instead, a shape appeared on the screen. It was just a circle. Dark gray, like a shadow. I didn't understand, but I didn't really care about that; I just wanted it to stop beeping. I was about to keep desperately buttons until I heard rustling beyond the trees.

The panic from earlier hit me again, full-force. I jumped to my feet and then froze, standing completely still, listening and hoping whatever it was in the bushes wasn't listening to me. But of course it was, I thought, because of this horrible machine's incessant noise!

For a while, I heard nothing, and almost relaxed. Then, a very soft sobbing. A child? Or possibly, a predatory animal mimicking a child to lure me in. I could swear I'd heard of animals that do that... Regardless, it kept weeping. It made little wuffling sounds between each sob. My mind began to race, wondering if I should move toward or away. I didn't want to fall for a trap, but I certainly didn't want to abandon a child either. Frozen with fear and indecision, I went back and forth on the issue over and over until, before I knew what was happening, I took a step forward.

Immediately second-guessing myself, I decided it must be some kind of animal and that I was making an enormous mistake. Another step. I couldn't believe what I was doing. Was I really going to die on the off-chance that this was a child I didn't even know? Another step. At this point, I gave up. I was clearly going to investigate the sobbing. I don't even like kids that much, but apparently I felt some kind of moral imperative to help them. I stuffed the strange device into the pocket of my pajama pants as I got closer. Then, the voice finally spoke: "Mom?! Dad?!" So it was a kid, after all.

I stepped into the trees, causing plenty of rustling as I looked for the child. "Hey, w-"

An earsplitting scream assaulted my ears, and a little girl poked her head out from behind a bush. She paused briefly, seeming to try to make out the details of my face. Then she continued to scream, and ran away.

"Wait!" I shouted, and began to run after her. "Hold on! I'm not trying to hurt you!"

But she'd have none of that, it appeared, as she kept running and shouting and crying. She kept running between trees and turning abruptly, causing me to lose her for brief periods before I heard where she was running and could follow again. She was surprisingly fast for a little kid. Granted, she had an advantage: she was small, so she could fit in small spaces, and I was pretty sure she had shoes, which I did not. Right as I realized I wasn't wearing shoes, I started to feel that fact in full force. Thorns, twigs and rocks stabbed into my feet with every rushed, heavy step.

I chased her for what must have been a full minute, calling after her as much as I could in between grunting in pain and gasping for air, before she finally tripped. As she started falling, I realized she might hit her head on a rock in the dark. I had ten feet to go and was more or less blind, so obviously the only sensible thing was to try and catch her. Couldn't be any worse for me than anything else that had happened that day, at least. So I put on a burst of speed, and didn't make it far before I followed her lead and tripped, flying forward. I reached forward and tried to grab her on my way down, and was honestly surprised when I secured my hands around her waist. I pulled her in toward my chest and curled my legs in to shield her from the impact with the ground, and my shoulder slammed into a tree root. I guess I was right to grab her; better my shoulder than her head. Besides my shoulder, I don't think there was a single part of my legs left un-bloodied between our fall and all of the thorns and branches.

She yelled, and cried, and kicked, and screamed for me to let her go, and cried, and kicked, and yelled, and cried, kicked. I held her to make sure she didn't run off again and attempted, in vain, to convince her that she was safe and I wasn't going to hurt her. Of course, as is somewhat likely to happen when you scream and cry in the woods at night, we heard howling. It was far away, but close enough to hear us. We both finally shut the hell up, and in that blessed silence, I found that the little gadget in my pocket was still beeping.

I whispered, "You don't have to trust me, but I hope you trust me more than a wolf or whatever that was." She seemed to finally be listening to me, so I continued quietly, "I'm scared too. I don't know where we are, and I can't find my parents either. I'm going to put you on my back and carry you up into this tree, you're going to stay quiet, and we're going to survive. Okay?"

She nodded.

I stood up and pulled her to my feet, before lifting her onto my back. I could tell by her voice she couldn't be older than five, and her practically feather weight confirmed it. Once she had her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck, I grabbed a branch and felt around for a foothold. My shoulder was throbbing, but it hadn't started to lock up yet. Climbing like this was going to make it much worse in the morning, but we didn't exactly have a lot of options, so up we went. Once I located a good foothold, I stepped onto it and pushed, and started to climb further up. I stumbled because of the darkness and my injuries quite a few times, but I made sure to keep careful footing so I didn't fall, and thankfully – or not-so-thankfully for my throat – she kept a tight grip. After a minute or so, we found a couple of thick, stable branches high enough up to stop and rest. I positioned myself sitting on the higher one with my legs bent and my feet against the other. I kept one arm around the tree, and the other around her.

"So, now that we're a bit safer," I whispered, "What's your name?"

"Susie," she whispered back, "What's yours?"

"Lucy. How old are you?" She lifted her hand, but it was too dark to tell how many fingers she was holding up. "I can't see your hand, Susie."

"I'm four. Almost five." Jesus christ, I thought, as she started crying again. "I don't know where I am... I don't know where my mom and dad are..."

I sighed. "Me either. I woke up and my parents were gone and my house was empty— Like, of everything. Food, books. And no one was around in my neighborhood."

"They were gone... I walked around looking for them and then the computer started glowing. And then I woke up here and you scared me. And I found this..." She produced another of those devices. This was getting freakier by the minute. Trying to just accept the absolute insanity of it all, I didn't stop her as she started to mess around with the buttons. Eventually, the screen began glowing just like mine had, and soon it too showed a little circle.

She marveled for a while, and I pulled out mine. It wasn't a perfect circle anymore, more of an oval. "I turned it on just before I heard you, I guess it's changed since then?"

After a bit more staring, she put the machine back in the pocket of her dress.

I got her talking about her life before this happened, to get her mind off it all. She'd gone fishing a week ago with her parents and loved it. She'd had a playdate two days ago, and it went really well until she and her friend got in a fight over a toy. Her life was so normal. So was mine, for the most part. Why was this happening?

We kept talking until she fell asleep, leaning her head on my shoulder. I wanted to sleep, but I couldn't without risking falling out of the tree. I sat there for an hour, the branch digging into my thighs, my arm getting tired from supporting us, entertaining myself with my thoughts and a loose twig I'd found. After that hour, though, I started to drift off. I kept forcing myself awake, because I'd be damned if the thing that killed me today was me, but I was getting tired. Really tired.

Really tired...