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The freezing air around us was thick with the scent of death. Surrounded by a ring of hanging bodies, I could hear the whistle of wind and the creak of tree branches as they struggled to hold the weight of the swaying corpses. Their faces, some fixed in a permanent scream of terror, shined in the glow of my flashlight with a milk-white stare. We couldn’t save the rangers. We couldn’t save our friend.

“Something got them…a-all of them.” Daniel whimpered quietly. In the moonlight, I could see his dark eyes welling up with tears as we both realized the horrible truth: we were too late.

My chest was tight, filled with a mixture of despair and pure rage - even after our best attempts, we didn’t do enough. The blood was still fresh, dripping into the snow. If we had been just a little bit quicker, then maybe …

I grabbed my backpack, holding it tightly in both hands, and threw it down into the snow with a frustrated yell. Furious, I stomped back and forth with tears running down my face until I couldn’t hold the anger in anymore - I kicked the pack at my feet again and again, picking it up and tossing it away from me just to have something to hit. Daniel tried his best to calm me down, attempting to put his arms around me, but I only pushed him away. I didn’t want a hug, I wanted to fucking shoot something.

As I tried to hold back the urge to scream, Daniel brought up something even more sickening - even more sad.

“Wh-which one is Finn?” he asked. He sniffled, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “...We can’t leave him here. I-I don’t want to see him become one of them. H-his family should be able to bury him, don’t you think?”

I paused, letting out a shaking breath and watching it form a cloud of fog in the cold air. He was right. Of all the people lost to this godforsaken chunk of land, Finn didn’t deserve to be stuck here forever…like Jenny. Like dad.

“I’ll…I’ll look on this side.” I said, wiping my face. I marched around the clearing, shining my light up at the stinking corpses that surrounded us. Some were impossible to recognize, their faces mangled or heads completely removed. Others still wore expressions of terror, frozen in time. But none of them, neither in face or in body, reminded me of him.

Daniel must have noticed the same thing. “I don’t see him.” He said shakily, stepping around the burn pile. “Maybe he’s not here. M-maybe he ran?”

“Maybe…” I whispered, too quiet for Dan to hear. “Maybe not.”

The ground was loose at the edge of the treeline. I could see the bend in the pines as they began to sink into the ground, dipping into another one of those holes that led into the tunnel systems beneath the forest floor. I shined my light downward, following the debris from a recent cave-in.

I saw something down there…A pair of dirty, black boots. They were connected to a body, sitting slumped against the roots and half-hidden by the shadow of the cave’s entrance. The body was shivering, breathing, alive. A very quiet voice was calling my name, struggling to speak louder than a whisper.

“Finn?” I called out, beginning to climb down the fallen logs and roots that formed a slope into the tunnel. I caught a bit of wet mud, my foot slipping. “Ah, shit…Finn, it’s us. We’re here. We-we saw your signal.”

I heard a cough from down below and a shaky, wheezing breath. As I approached, I shined my light on Finn’s face. Dear lord. He was burned, one half of his jaw, neck, and one shoulder melted all the way down to the elbow. The skin was bloody and twisted, steam still rising from his wounds. He was recognizable - still had both eyes, a nose, most of his lips - but I could hardly imagine how much it must have hurt. He looked at me, blinking wearily and forcing a tiny smirk on the one unaffected side of his face.

“T…took you l-long enough.” He forced the words out, slowly extending his uninjured arm so that I could help him stand. It took a couple of tries, but finally he got to his feet, shivering and curling his half-burned arm up against his chest. Every move he made was tender and careful.

I went ahead of him, stepping onto the dirt piles and roots so that I could help drag him up with me. Daniel was already reaching into his pack to grab a length of rope, tossing it down so that I could tie it around Finn’s waist and keep him steady. Between the two of us, we managed to get him up to the surface, where he staggered and pressed his back into the trunk of a tree.

“Take a break.” Daniel told him softly, searching my pack for bandages. It wouldn’t do much, but we could at least cover the worst of the burns. His hands were shaking the whole time - he never was very good around blood. “Shit, man…what the hell happened to you?”

Finn was still catching his breath, voice dry and pained. I handed him a bottle of water, then opened it for him after he struggled to get the cap off. He took a small sip, hissing in pain and putting his hand up to his neck to touch the raw, burned muscle.

“W-we … we managed to capture a dozen of them, m-maybe more. Figured the only way to get rid of ‘em for good was to b…burn them. So we made a pile.” He looked over at the stinking mass of dead, charred flesh while Dan got busy wrapping up his arm. “Something else f-found us, though…It was huge. N-not the elk, something else. Something new. It c-came from underground.”

My heart sank, my stomach churning with a wave of nausea. That thing I heard below us, those heavy motions in the earth as we circled the cave-in…Whatever killed the rangers was right below us that whole time and Daniel and I never even knew.

“It killed them, one by one.” Finn continued, trembling like a leaf in the wind. “It ate some parts, threw some in the fire…It tossed me in too. I doused m-myself in the snow and m-managed to hide, but the others didn’t make it. N-no one made it.”

We all went silent, the three of us. Then, Daniel asked a question that was on both of our minds, only I was too scared to ask.

“...What was ‘it’?”

Finn’s eyes were wide and fearful, reflecting the moon’s light. He swallowed, speaking up in a hoarse whisper. “Something we’ve been studying for a while now. Th-they’ve been calling it ‘The Hydra’. I-if you saw it…you’d know why.”

A chill ran up my spine, separate from the winter cold. I put a hand on Finn’s good arm and pulled him away from the tree, gently coaxing him to follow. “Let’s hope we don’t see it then. Come on, we have to get out of here, something is going to smell all this blood. Finn, can you walk?”

Our friend was staggering clumsily along, but he nodded his head once he got his feet under him and began to march beside me. “Yeah, I think so.”

We followed the direction of Finn’s compass, taking a route different from the one that had brought us here. If there was anything we had learned during our time in the forest, it was not to tempt anything that may have already been tracking our steps.

But as the night grew darker and the trees grew thicker, we noticed something that wasn’t there before: a light. Ahead of us, emanating from the ground in a giant, pulsating glow, was that magenta-colored light we had all seen from a distance. Only now, we were close enough to hear the ear-stinging hum that it made. It was like a low drone or the sound of an undersea giant, deep but steady. We were all silent as he walked towards it, feeling some magnetism that I still can’t quite explain.

It didn’t take long before we figured out where that light was coming from. Trees began to thin, soil began to crack. Ahead of us was an enormous split in the earth, forming a pit that went on and on and on. The glow was coming from its depths, so far down into the earth that we couldn’t see the bottom.

An old memory came back to me then…a phone call Daniel and I had listened to years ago. I still remembered the way she said it, the exact words she used.

“...I had a dream in which the forest split in two.” I whispered Rose’s immortal words out into the cold night air. Daniel and I exchanged glances, something more than fear between us. It was dread - the real, tangible dread of something utterly unknown. We both remembered the rest of the old woman’s dream.

“It covered everything,” Daniel repeated. “The town and the sun - all that my eyes could see. And the sound it made … a fearsome bellow that shook the whole earth.”

“Hey, Danny Boy?” I asked softly. “...Do you think God lives in the woods?”

The three of us stood there in silence, looking at one another and then into the enormous pit that was swallowing the forest. All of these quakes, all of these storms…it was getting bigger every day. Something was down there, something that had been waiting for the right time to emerge.

I feel as if that time is coming. And when it happens, I…I don’t know what we’ll do.

Finn and I managed to break our eyes away from the glow, but Daniel did not. I could see it cast a pink light on his face, as if the black of his eyes were beginning to change colors, shining on their own. He was staring, unblinking, into the endlessness. And as he started to lean, as if ready to let himself fall in, Finn and I both rushed to push him back and into the snow. He fell on his back, stiff as a board, eyes still glazed over with an ice-cold expression.

I pinned him down with one of my knees, snapping my fingers in his face. “Dan!” I hissed, tapping him on the cheek until he finally blinked and took a sharp inhale of breath. “Come on! Wake up!”

He blinked and looked up at me finally, confused and lost. His eyes darted around the forest as if those memories were flooding back to him, reminding him of where he was and how he got here. It took a moment before his breathing settled and he began to touch his own face, making sure he was inside his own body.

“I-I think…we should go.” He said shakily. Now, that was an idea I could get behind. I let him up, slowly helping him to his feet and brushing the snow off his shoulders. Finn and I looked at one another, making the silent agreement that linking our arms would be the best possible way to stick together.

We walked, and we walked, and we walked. Our pace was slow, keeping up with Finn’s exhausted and injured body. At first, we were lucky. We didn’t see much in our path other than a few small, timid creatures and more evidence of the collapsing ground.

Our luck had to run out eventually. When the moon was high above us and the forest grew eerily silent, we felt that rumble in the ground again. Only, it wasn’t a quake. It didn’t shake the trees, it didn’t split the ground. It was just movement, tunneling beneath us in a straight line through the frozen soil. Finn’s bloodied face became paler, wet with fever as his eyes turned startlingly wide. He knew that tremble in the ground - we all did. Something was moving under our feet. Something had been following us.

“Move.” Finn said, voice shaking. He pushed me in the back to hurry me along. “Stay quiet. Move fast, but not too fast. W-watch your feet.”

My hands were gripping the shotgun tightly as I marched forward, my jaw clenched and eye fixed on the trees ahead of me. My breathing was shallow, my heart racing. Under our feet, we felt the rumble weaving back and forth, back and forth, as if a great beast was patrolling the caverns. I couldn’t tell if it was looking for us or if it had already found us and was just toying with our minds before making a move. All I knew was that I had never seen Finn so scared. And if he was scared, Dan and I sure as hell should be terrified.

We saw more holes in the ground, more open caverns where the forest split open. There was no telling how far these tunnels went or how many there were, snaking through the ground beneath our feet. For all we knew, this thing could have burrowed its way through every inch of land between here and Pinehaven. I hated the idea that there was a new way for the amalgamate beasts of the woods to get to us.

The ground rumbled again, more violently than before. I grabbed onto a tree for support while Finn stumbled and fell over, his hands in the snow. He was looking down, feeling the tremble in the earth through his palms. We all heard it - the shriek of many voices, human and animal, muffled through a layer of soil. It was angry.

Finn looked up at both of us, his face pale. In the dark, his lips formed a single word: “Run.”

Daniel grabbed his arm and pulled him up in one swift motion, both of them staggering before getting to their feet again. The three of us abandoned all subtlety and began to race through the trees, my shotgun in hand the whole time. Every few steps, it seemed as though we were faltered by another quake in the ground; something was right below us, trying to dig its way through.

Its screams were bloodcurdling, like the tormented yell of human voices mixed with the howl of wolves and the deep bellow of a cow. I didn’t want to know what kind of vision went with the sound. To my right, I could see a mound of dirt and leaning trees - another hole in the earth. And from its depth, I saw the brief hint of rotten, fleshy limbs trying to claw their way out.

Something was coming out of the ground, something huge. I felt Daniel’s hand grip my arm as he pulled me away from the shifting earth. The screams got louder - more furious - as something heavy fell into the snow and began to run behind us with the footfalls of over a dozen different limbs.

I made the mistake of looking back at the Hydra only once…It was a horrendous mass of dead flesh, piled up on top of a blob-like body with hooves, arms, and legs sticking out in each direction as if they had been melted together. It was covered in veins, pustules, and gaping mouths full of human and animal teeth - all were dripping with bits of flesh and blood from its recent meal. Atop the body were human torsos, stacked with one coming out of the other in a tall spire that reached up into the trees, like branches. They were all screaming, mouths impossibly wide, ghostly white eyes shining in the darkness, arms flailing. I think I recognized some of them…Those missing people, the ones who floated into the woods when the fog rolled in. Dear god. They had all fuzed together like some sort of grotesque centipede.

Big Boy was bad to look at, sure. But Flesh Centipede? I had decided, right there and then, that Flesh Centipede was way fucking worse.

“Don’t look! Just go!” Finn was screaming, noticing the way my fear distracted me. He wasn’t faring much better, however, holding his arm up to his chest as he struggled to keep running. I watched his feet falter. He was stumbling, falling to his knees and failing to get himself back up.

Daniel let go of my arm and ran back, pulling Finn back to his feet. The Hydra was gaining on us, its many legs pushing it along and breaking trees that were in its way. It snapped them like toothpicks.

I stopped and took up my shotgun, pointing it at one of the torsos near the top. A single shot rang out, hitting dead flesh with a disgusting burst of dark, rotten blood. But the beast didn’t even slow.

“Up! Get up!” I screamed, trying to help Dan get Finn to his feet. We had come all this way out for him, I was not going to just leave his ass behind. But the new amalgamate was gaining - I had to do something, and it had to be done real fuckin’ quick. Then I remembered what the rangers were coming out to do - to set the beasts on fire.

“Finn! Where’s your flare gun?” I yelled in a panic.

“I-I don’t know, I think–”

“Finn, where the fuck is it?!!”

“It-it’s in my pack! Left side!”

I didn’t think. I just moved. I tore the pack off Finn’s shoulders and dug through it as quickly as I could, pulling out the flare gun and pointing it up at the beast. I didn’t know if this would work, I didn’t know if it would hurt it or just make it angry. But we were about to die if we didn’t buy a few more seconds.

I shot at the base of its body, an explosion of red and gold light hitting it full-force and igniting the cold, dead flesh. Those legs stopped moving, flailing in an attempt to put out the flame. The shriek it made was ear-shattering and sickening to hear.

We left the pack behind. It didn’t matter anymore. Once Finn was on his feet, the three of us just ran as far away as we could get, leaving that beast and the flames behind. It was running again, stomping through the trees with more fury than ever before, but we had a chance - we could see the tower now. Motivated by pure terror and adrenaline while those pounding footsteps grew louder behind us, we finally broke the treeline and fell into the snow one after another in a pile of exhausted bodies.

I looked back just in time to see the Hydra stop at the treeline, pushed back as if hitting an invisible wall. It shrieked and roared from every mouth, reaching its arms out to grab us. We were just far enough away to avoid its grasp.

Somehow, even with the reliability of the radio signal to protect us, I didn’t feel very safe.

We filed into the building as quickly as we could, making distance between ourselves and that creature. When we got upstairs, I did the only thing that felt right - I hit The Bell, sounding out a painful frequency that made that grotesque monster curl its limbs in agony before retreating to the woods to find a hole to crawl back into. Within minutes, it was gone, no doubt returning to the bodies it had been saving for later. I had a feeling that the next time we saw it, the Hydra would be gaining a few more heads.

“What…in the fuck was that?!” I yelled.

“The Hydra.” Finn answered, sitting on the floor and holding a hand against his bleeding face. “We’ve been watching it for a while now, it’s–”

“Not that!” I laughed hysterically, pacing back and forth. “That big fucking hole in the ground! Where did that come from? How long has that been there?!”

Finn just shook his head. I could tell he was just as perplexed as I was, wishing he knew. Monsters, we could handle. Weird, surreal bullshit in the radio station, we could handle. But a goddamn glowing hole to the center of the earth? I had no idea where to even start with that!

“...That’s the same glow.” Daniel said softly, leaning against the wall and trying to catch his breath. “The one I keep seeing when I sleepwalk at night…The one we’re all walking towards. Me and the others.”

I recalled the look on Dan’s face when he saw the pit for the first time: mesmerized, entranced. He was ready to fall in. Whatever was ‘calling’ him to the woods along with those other missing people from the village - it was down there. Was it going to swallow us all?

“You’re hurt.” I gestured to Daniel’s hand, where a trail of blood was dripping through his fingers. He rolled up his sleeve gingerly, revealing a long gash he had gotten while running through the trees.

“Shit…” He sighed. “It’s fine. I-I’ve got bandages.”

He was rooting around in his first aid kit by the time I crossed the room, pulling out my car keys and dropping them into his palm. “You and Finn both need to go get checked out. There’s a hospital an hour out of town, you know the one.” I curled his fingers in, closing his fist. “Take my truck. Get Finn to the ER. I’ll watch the treeline tonight.”

Dan looked at me for a long, hesitant moment. Then, his eyes left my face to peer out the window, looking into that dark and snowy sky. It was quiet out there. But just because it was quiet didn’t mean something wasn’t watching us, waiting for another chance.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?” He asked.

“Yes,” I nodded, already pushing him toward the door. “Now go. Both of you. Finn’s burns could get infected if you wait.” Our ranger friend was already on his way down the stairs, grumbling quietly at me. Dan glanced back at him, then at me, that worrisome look in his eyes again. “It’ll be fine, Dan. It won’t come back tonight.”

I seemed to convince him, even if his expression lacked confidence. We both knew someone had to stay. He took a deep breath, then wrapped me up in a tight hug and let the air out of his lungs. “Be safe,” he said, letting me go at last. “Keep the doors locked. Keep your phone with you, and–”

“--and keep the radio on. I know. Get outta’ here, Danny Boy.”

One last second of hesitation, and both of them were gone. I watched Daniel help Finn into the truck, closing the door behind him and looking up at the watchtower one last time before driving away. I gave them a little wave as they went, the lights of the vehicle disappearing down the dark and lonely road. The snow was falling heavier now. The lights of the village looked dim and far away, hidden behind a layer of frost spreading across the lookout window. I could feel a draft from the crack in the glass - the first sign that our only safe haven was beginning to crumble.

It was deep into the night. The new amalgamate from the woods has been silent ever since, only a subtle rumble in the ground signifying its movements beneath the treeline. I think it’s stalking the tower, going back and forth through the tunnels and looking for a way to pass the boundary…Maybe that’s what those earthquakes were all along.

But the most upsetting thing is the line of alcohol bottles stacked up in the kitchenette. I don’t know when they got there, but every time I pour one down the drain, two more appear in its place, like the heads of the Hydra.

This is Evelyn McKinnon at 104.6 F.M. And I don’t think I like being alone here anymore.

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