The hours bled into each other, and I couldn't tell if I had been running for three hours… or thirty. My lungs were carved raw from how hard I had been gasping, and my legs had gone numb long ago. The rain hadn't stopped, and the forest still shook like it was breathing. Every few minutes, the ground would tremble with another quake, some deeper than others. The kind that felt like something massive, ancient, was shifting below us all.
I couldn't run anymore.
I dove under a massive buttress root, its curved base like the protective arch of a ribcage. I curled there, trembling and drenched, clutching my side. The pain was duller now. It wasn't gone but numb. That was probably worse.
Everything in me begged for silence, for stillness. Even my heartbeat sounded like gunfire in this cursed place.
And then I saw them.
A couple.
They were maybe thirty meters ahead, barely silhouettes at first through the rainfall. A man and a woman—young, from the look of them—clutching each other's hands so tightly it was like they were trying to fuse their souls together.
They were whispering to each other, but their whispers were too loud. Giggling, muttering about how "love would get them through." Delusional, so sure they were the exception in a place made to punish exceptions. The woman was crying, but she laughed between tears. And the man kept kissing the top of her head.
I wanted to shout at them. I wanted to scream, "Shut up! Shut up! Please, for your own sake!"
But I didn't move. No way I'm risking my life over a couple who wouldn't give a shit about me.
I watched.
They walked forward, weaving between the massive trunks with no grace. No stealth. Just hopeful idiocy. And somehow—miraculously—no creature came.
For five agonizing minutes, they walked without incident.
A howl rose from somewhere behind them. It shook the leaves on the ground. It made the trees groan.
The man froze. The woman clutched his hand tighter. And then, he looked back.
His head fell off his body like a broken toy.
It plopped onto the root next to my hiding spot, staring at me with frozen horror, blood still spilling from the neck like a faulty faucet. The body didn't even realize it was dead. It stood there for a second longer, twitching… and then collapsed forward in a heap.
I shoved my fist into my mouth to stop myself from screaming.
The woman screamed, the sound rippling through the quiet forest like a knife. She started to run but it was too late.
A long, hairy limb, dark as tar and thin as a wire, but the length of a car, shot out from the canopy above, pierced her straight through the chest, and lifted her off the ground like she was nothing. She kicked, spasming in the air, her scream trailing off into a sickening wet gurgle.
Blood poured down like red ribbons onto the moss.
Then she looked up. Maybe she thought salvation was there. Maybe she wanted to know what took her.
She shouldn't have looked.
A second later, her head was gone just like that.
The limb snapped upward, dragging the lifeless body into the canopy.
I thought that was it. I prayed that was it.
But then… the trees moved.
The branches themselves started shifting and twitching and bending in unnatural ways. I realized the forest ceiling above me wasn't made of just branches.
It was legs. Hundreds of them.
Black, glistening, twitching legs that stretched across the treetops like a net of death.
They were spiders, at least two dozen of them. Each the size of a truck, with long, segmented limbs like barbed wire and eyes that glowed faintly violet in the dark. They weren't crawling. They were hanging, motionless, their bodies upside-down like ornaments from hell. Just… watching.
They hadn't moved for the couple. They hadn't even flinched. But now?
They were… waiting, watching for anyone else dumb enough to look up.
I was shaking as I reached out and picked up their fallen backpacks. My mind screamed at me that this was so wrong, that I should be running, sobbing, panicking. But survival had a different voice.
You need supplies. They don't anymore.
I adjusted the weight, slipped them onto my shoulders, and moved forward like a sleepwalker through a graveyard.
And then the silence shattered. The groaning started. It wasn't loud. Not at first. But I could hear it now. Not in my head. Not in my imagination.
The zombies were back and they were moaning in sounds that made my skin crawl. I knew what that meant.
The spiders heard them too.
Above me, the branches exploded in movement. Chitinous legs, glistening black, cracked through bark and curled around trunks like demonic fingers. The spiders began to descend with terrifying precision, their spindly bodies stretching the length of small cars. Their heads twitched, fangs flexing as they dropped like death itself.
I turned and ran. The backpacks thudded against me like anchors. My legs were on fire. My lungs were howling. But I ran.
Behind me, I heard the crunch of zombies getting impaled and the wet snap of bones breaking.
One of the undead let out a distorted, choking sound before it was flung sideways like garbage into a tree. Another was split in half down the middle, its intestines hitting the forest floor with a splatter I felt in my teeth.
And they were still chasing me.
How? How were they still running? Seriously, am I that tasty to them? I didn't look back. I didn't need to. I could hear their groaning, smell the rot, feel the damn tremors they made in the ground with every deformed footstep. And worse? The spiders were chasing them and anything in their path was fair game.
Including me.
A spider's limb slammed into the dirt next to my face as I ducked. It twitched once, twice, then snapped back into the canopy like a harpoon attached to something with a sadistic sense of humor.
My foot caught a root.
I crashed into the ground hard. The air whooshed out of me as my injured ribs hit something solid. My fingers curled into the moss for balance and I coughed, nearly vomiting from the stench and the impact. I tried to get up and a zombie was already diving toward me.
I rolled and swung my pickaxe—pure instinct—and felt the impact all the way up my shoulder. It sank through the zombie's lower jaw, bursting out through the top of its head. It gargled once. Blood—a mixture of black, green, and god-knows-what—splashed onto my face as the body fell limp on top of me.
It was so heavy.
I screamed again, this time out loud and shoved the corpse off me. It landed with a flop next to the gnarled tree roots, its half-shattered skull caving in with a final, sickening crack.
But there wasn't time to process.
Another limb, longer than the last, stabbed into the ground right where my neck had been a moment ago. I scrambled, my knees bloody, my palms shredded from crawling. The thorns sliced open my thighs as I fled. My vision blurred and something hot was dripping into my eyes. Blood or tears, I couldn't tell.
All I knew was that I couldn't stop. I couldn't look back. I couldn't even blink.
Because every time I did, someone died. And I was not going to be next.
Little did I know that I subconsciously killed a spider and actually died.