Chapter 6: Forest of Lost Innocence
Taylor:
Taylor forced her breathing down to a few deep, laborious, mostly silent inhales. Her knees had begun prickling about thirty minutes ago; now they were a constant ache, to the point she had to sink her teeth into her lower lip until she drew blood just to stop them from trembling. Still, she didn't dare shift a muscle, lest the muddy and torn edges of her clothes rustle as they brushed through the tall glass currently obscuring her. At this moment, the only things occupying her mind were the roughness of the rope and the small gey silhouette making its way through the meadow.
The rabbit's soft fur seemed to gain a different shine under the sun's gentle rays, but her rumbling stomach didn't let her appreciate its beauty. All she could do was try to contain her excitement as the small rodent wandered ever so closer to her lurking spot, under the shadows of a sturdy oak tree whose branches she used in order to spring her trap. Those seeds she had randomly stumbled upon two days ago had seemed like a godsend, a small reprieve from her usual streak of misfortunes. Even if it had used her entire life's worth of luck, as long as there was something to hang above her fire tonight, Taylor had no regrets.
The rabbit stopped just shy of a few paces away from the bait, sniffing around suspiciously as if sensing that something was amiss. Taylor stopped breathing entirely by this point, her eyes boring into the wild animal like she could devour him where it stood. It took more self-control than she would like to admit to stop herself from clutching the dagger from her hip and charging her prey just as she did dozens of times the night before. Unfortunately, she was more used to killing things that ran towards her, not away. Instead, she kept waiting, her arm a coiled spring ready to be released.
A gust of wind blew through the grassland, a soft whisper taking with it a few lone leaves. Her rational mind understood the origin of that sound, but her hand couldn't help but twitch ever so slightly. In the next moment, a jolt of pain struck her left shoulder and her body succumbed to reflex. A few feet away, the rabbit's ears fluttered and for a moment its dark, beady eyes met the brown of her own.
Then it hopped away, its form quickly vanishing from view as it retreated back into the heart of the forest.
Taylor screamed. Her fist struck against the oak's tree bark. The pain barely registered.
Raising her head into a ponytail behind her head, she sunk her face into the river's surface, drinking greedily to sate away the hunger. The shimmering flow rushing past her felt cool and refreshing, banishing away the day's fatigue and frustrations, if only for a moment. She had stuck by following the downstream for almost a week now, but tomorrow she was gonna have to change direction. The access to an endless supply of drinking water and the opportunity to wash away some of the day's grime and dirt off her skin was going to be hard to part with, but she couldn't afford to deviate any more from her original direction. The thought of losing the last bit of her sense of direction and getting truly lost terrified her.
After her stomach began protesting against all the liquid she stuffed in herself, Taylor took a moment to roll up her sleeve and splash some water on her wound. The pale bite marks across her shoulder had not faded at all since the night she got them, and that worried her. She had done her best to disinfect the wound and stitch up her flesh together, but all she had had to rely on were one or two of already blurry first aid demonstrations back at camp and her own intuition. The first aid kit did not come with instructions.
She was fortunate the coyote hadn't bitten into her dominant hand; she doubted she'd have been able to wield her knife otherwise. Just the act of cutting the rope and tying it together into a net for her trap was an excruciating ordeal, any sudden movement had brought along a deep throbbing. During the fighting, the pain was more manageable, if only because she was too preoccupied to notice it. Twice now she plopped down onto the ground after an excruciating night, only to realize her wound reopened and was bleeding through the bandages.
After she finished freshening up, she returned to her makeshift campsite to check if everything was stashed away properly. It was already way into the afternoon by this time, she wouldn't be making any more progress today. The best she could do was get one or two more hours of rest, though she doubted she would be getting any sleep. She had quickly gotten over her fear of oversleeping, even if the alarm clock didn't manage to wake her, the Brand's throbbing would do so without fail. Still, there was no getting over the jitteriness in her arms and legs, the way the darkness that greeted her every time she closed her eyes morphed into deformed faces and fanged beasts. When she actually fell asleep, it was when exhaustion gave way to dreamless respites. She was too tired for nightmares when sleeping, so they usually came when she was awake.
The nights hadn't gotten any easier. Her body still moved awkwardly and her stamina barely improved. She wanted to tell herself she managed to fall into some sort of routine, but the fear she felt when those demonic beings came for her never diminished. Every time those faded, repulsive hands reached for her, every time they mournfully cursed her existence, she was once again the clueless girl at the campfire, who could do nothing but stare in horror as everybody around her got taken away one by one.
She found that the only way she could deal with that was to focus on the things that she could control. Every day, just before sunset, she would carefully stash away her precious equipment and find an open field. She would plant torches in a circle along the area so that by any chance she'd lose the knife, she'd at least have something that could stall any possessed animals aiming for her. For that same reason, she repurposed her makeshift hunting traps into certified Hebert-approved monster repellents. They weren't anything fancy, just the result of her fidgeting with the rope and some tree branches, but they would buy her a couple of seconds. Unless she ran into some sort of bear monster abomination (or even a regular bear for that matter) it would be good enough.
Taylor didn't want to think about any of that. Letting her mind wander always took her to dark places, sapping away at her resolve. She found it most efficient to to anchor herself in the moment, to the next task at hand, the next step of her disturbing schedule. Survive the night, sleep for a couple of hours then try to cover as much ground as she can before nightfall comes again. Rinse and repeat, until hopefully she could make it back home. There was one pressing problem, however, one that could not go unaddressed for much longer. Food.
She had ploughed through her pathetic rations with almost comical speed. She still sometimes found herself rummaging through her backpack without thinking, as if hoping that some elusive granola bar had cleverly eluded her searches until now. Since then Taylor has survived on mostly water and tree bark. The occasional wild berries she happened upon from time to time were such a delicacy she could feel her mouth and eyes water at the mere thought of their sweet, deliciously sour flavour.
In the beginning, when the pangs of hunger had proved downright unbearable, she had tried cooking the corpses of the coyotes. They proved inedible. Their meat was rotten and decayed, the pungent aroma of death seeped into every pound of flesh. As much as she struggled with herself, she could not keep down even a single bite.
The sound of ruffling leaves echoed along with the growling of her stomach. Taylor jumped, knife already in hand before she had any time to calm herself. The sun, while sporting a slightly reddish hue, was still some ways off from disappearing into the horizon. Probably just the wind, then.
The girl looked down at the slender form of the deer before her. Aside from the way her teeth slowly bit into her lower lip, her face was an impassive mask. The scratch on her right cheek she got last night from scraping against a tree branch had been disinfected and was already fading away, soon to be forever forgotten along with the hundreds of its brethren that came before. Her eyes gazed intently from behind her stained glasses. She idly remembered that she had forgotten to wipe away the blood.
Cast In the pale and gentle light of dawn, the animal before her was a thing of beauty. Its reddish-brown fur should've been blending among the wood's ensemble of browns and greys; it stood in great contrast with the verdant green it hovered over. The creamy underbelly shouldn't have been plopped forward towards the armed human, as if offering itself to her. Its strong hooves should've been galloping away at speeds she could never hope to match, yet the rotten hind legs told a different story.
Dawn must have come before the spirits could wholly possess it, Taylor decided. There was a good chance that if she could cut away the affected parts, the rest of the meat could be salvaged. Yet she made no moves to slash away at its jugular, to secure her much-awaited next meal. All she could do was stand around uncertainly, unable to muster up any strength. She felt like a little girl once more, afraid and alone on her first day of primary school, hoping for an adult to come along and tell her what to do. Here, however, there was no Emma to eagerly grab her hand and pull her forward. Just her.
The animal let out a guttural wheezing sound. It was so pathetic she almost felt sorry for it. Just as it happened with the rabbit, those dark, large pupils seemed to stare directly at her. They held no human emotion, but for a second Taylor thought the animal looked in pain.
The knife whose purpose was to burn away the dead was plunged into the flesh of the living. For the week and a half that followed, Taylor knew the meaning of hunger no more.
She woke up with a fever.
Sleep laboriously came that morning: she tossed and turned and froze as she burnt. The modest confines of her tent seemed suffocating all of a sudden, she couldn't stand it anymore. Taylor scrambled her body forward, her movements sluggish and weak as she missed the zipper three times before managing to get out. She hoped a breath of fresh air would clear her head; instead, the slight breeze blew through her sweat-drenched clothes and left her trembling. She put on a cardigan, the only thing in her measly wardrobe that had remained untouched so far. As soon as she put it on, immediately she felt too hot. She took it off again. Her body shivered once more.
By the time she packed everything up, she felt so nauseous she could barely put one foot in front of the other. She clenched her teeth, refusing to let any drop of precious food go to rest, especially the one in her body. The foul smell permeating her nostrils certainly didn't help. At first, she thought something had died near her camp. Something that hadn't been already dead, at least. It was only after a few minutes of walking and the stench stubbornly refusing to disperse that she figured out the true culprit. Taking off her bandage she could see a discoloured brown having overtaken the wound on her shoulder.
Any other day that would've raised alarm bells in her head. Right now, Taylor's mind was too foggy to properly process it.
The view in front of her seemed to blend together as contours and outlines vanished from her sight the more she looked ahead, leaving behind patches of colour, dripping away like fresh paint on a canvas. She tried to put more weight in her steps against the ground, to give tangible proof to her feet so that they could carry her forward. The thought of stopping to take a rest sometimes broke through that hazy stupor she lived in, but she couldn't afford to stop. She'd already wasted enough time today. She was already behind schedule.
She couldn't properly recall the current date, but she knew she'd written it down yesterday on a piece of paper she found in her jacket. It was to make sure she didn't lose track of the days, didn't let time fly by her and leave her behind. It was still summer right now, but the days were soon going to get shorter, and that meant less time she could spend on getting back home. It was more time for the spirits to try and take hold of her.
There was no telling how much time passed before she stumbled onto a house. At first, Taylor assumed she was simply hallucinating, but the more she stepped closer the more detail the building seemed to gain, until there was no denying the reality of the situation. It was a rather large cabin, even sporting a second floor, surprisingly well-maintained despite being situated in the middle of seemingly nowhere. There were no other signs of civilization present, no power lines to connect to anywhere, no road for where a car might pass through. It was odd. 'Did nobody tell this house that it doesn't belong here? Just because it was made of wood, that didn't mean it can pretend to be a tree!'
Feeling slightly pissed off for some reason, Taylor slowly crept towards the back entrance. There were no signs of human presence, but she didn't want to risk it. Best case scenario, she goes in, takes anything that looks useful and scrams before anybody can catch her. Maybe she could find out where she was, or even a map of the area. There had to be a way for the owner to find this place after all, it was unlikely there was any cell service so deep in the woods.
The door in the back was, unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, locked. Taylor contemplated simply finding a rock and bashing into a nearby window to get in. A second later she had a better idea.
Taking out her knife came naturally to her by now. She barely had to think about it and she found herself holding it in her hand. Focusing on it was harder, she felt like trying to pass a thread through the needle's eye, but the flames eventually came, along with the familiar warmth. She couldn't make out the small lizards perched on its flat at the moment, but they knew they were there, eternal guardians of her fire. She brought it towards the doorknob and the metal melted without resistance.
'Ha! Take that, door! You're no match for me and...ahh... me and...' She realized she hadn't given her weapon a name yet. 'Knify? Nope, too on the nose. Fire Tongue? Maybe. Salamander Tooth? Do salamanders even have teeth? Eh, I can workshop that later.' Taylor made her way inside, unperturbed by the door's slight creaking.
She barely managed to take two steps into the kitchen before the world started tilting and spinning. Taylor breathed heavily as she rested her hand on a nearby wall for balance. The wood was surprisingly pleasant to the touch, not like the harsh bark she had become accustomed to. She tried to take a step forward, only to suddenly find herself sprawled on the floor. She groaned slightly trying and failing to get back up. Her face felt hot, her entire body felt hot. It was a numbing sensation and soon enough she could feel herself start losing coherence.
A white carpet.
A couch.
The sound of footsteps. Her imagination?
Her own tongue in her mouth.
She couldn't feel her glasses anymore.
She had to get back up.
She had to get home.
What if evening came?
The break was over Taylor, time to rise.
A slight buzzing in the ears, like a person speaking to her.
Did she forget anything at the camp?
She was pretty sure she didn't. Emma would've told her.
Wait.
Where was Emma? No, not here.
Somewhere? She had to get to her, didn't she?
No.
Yes.
That's right.
She had to... she had to know if...
Soon enough everything faded and she stepped into a world of pure black.
AN: I'm glad I made Taylor sick in this chapter. Wait, that came out wrong. I'm happy that I could write a more goofy side of Taylor, if only sprinkled here and there, since at this point in the story she'd never act like this under normal circumstances. Hope it conveyed how close she is to the end of her rope.