THE HUNTED

Worn Stories: The Nightfall Chronicles — Chronicle 002

I knew it wasn’t a wolf because wolves don’t knock.

The first time, it came from the other side of the cabin door.

Three slow taps.

Not claws dragging across wood.

Knuckles.

Something standing upright on the porch, asking to be let in.

Then it spoke in the voice of the man I had been sent into the woods to find.

“Please,” it said.

“It’s me.”

Three days earlier, Eli Mercer walked into the woods behind his father’s farm and disappeared.

He was twenty-two. Six feet tall. Experienced outdoorsman. The kind of person who could walk a trail once and remember every turn years later.

His father said the goats had started screaming around midnight.

Eli took his rifle and went outside.

One shot was fired near the back fence.

By the time his father reached the pasture, Eli was gone.

They found the rifle in the mud.

The barrel had been bent nearly in half.

There was blood on the stock, but none of it belonged to Eli.

The sheriff organized a search the next morning. Twenty volunteers went into the woods.

They came back before sundown.

Not because they found him.

Because something followed them.

Sheriff Nolan called me that night.

I made most of my money tracking wounded game and removing nuisance animals from farms around Briar County. I knew those woods better than most people knew their own neighborhoods.

That didn’t make me fearless.

It made me harder to fool.

Nolan showed me a photograph taken near the Mercer fence.

The print in the mud had four toes, a wide pad, and claws long enough to cut trenches through the soil.

It looked like a wolf track enlarged three times.

“Coyote?” he asked.

He already knew the answer.

“No.”

“Bear?”

“No.”

“Then what made it?”

I looked at the trees beyond the pasture.

“I’ll tell you when I find Eli.”

I entered the woods the following afternoon.

I stopped for fuel at the last gas station before the county road ended.

The place had one pump, a flickering OPEN sign, and a bulletin board beside the register covered with church flyers, business cards, and faded advertisements.

One sheet of paper was newer than everything around it.

MISSING PERSON

A photograph showed a man smiling at the camera.

MICHAEL JAMES

The notice said he had last been seen driving alone along Highway 33.

Someone had written CHECK THE WOODS across the bottom in red ink.

“How long has that been up?” I asked.

The cashier glanced at the poster.

“Long enough.”

“Did they search out here?”

She looked toward the dark tree line across the road.

“People go looking in those woods all the time.”

“Do they find anything?”

“Sometimes.”

She handed me my change.

“Sometimes the woods find them first.”

I left without asking anything else.

At the time, I thought she was trying to scare me.

By morning, I understood she had been trying to warn me.

The trail began beyond the Mercer pasture.

Whatever had taken Eli wasn’t hiding its path.

It had torn through the undergrowth in a straight line, breaking branches shoulder-high and leaving coarse black hair caught in the bark.

Every few hundred yards, I found blood.

Not drops.

Handprints.

Human handprints smeared against the trees as if somebody had been dragged while trying to hold on.

All of them were made with the left hand.

Just before sunset, I found Eli’s jacket folded neatly on a fallen log.

His phone rested on top of it.

The screen was cracked, but it still worked.

There was one file in the voice recorder.

It had been created at 3:33 that morning.

I pressed play.

Footsteps crunched through dead leaves.

Eli was breathing hard.

“It keeps circling me,” he whispered. “Every time I turn around, it moves.”

A branch snapped somewhere behind him.

Static broke across the recording.

Not interference from the phone.

A radio signal.

A man’s voice pushed through it, faint and distorted.

“If you can hear me, turn it off.”

Eli stopped moving.

The voice continued beneath the static.

“It can hear the signal.”

Something growled near the phone.

Eli ran.

The final sound was a howl.

It began low and animal, then climbed until it sounded almost human.

The recording ended.

My handheld radio clicked on inside my pack.

I hadn’t touched it.

The display showed a frequency my radio couldn’t receive.

66.6 FM

Breathing came through the speaker.

Slow.

Deep.

I switched the radio off.

The breathing continued from somewhere among the trees.

Night fell before I reached the old hunting cabin marked on my map.

The door had been raked by three long cuts, but the lock still worked. I went inside, pushed a table against the entrance, and covered the only window with a cabinet.

The cabin smelled like wet wood and something sour.

There were names carved into the walls.

Some were followed by dates.

Others had been scratched out so deeply that the wood had splintered.

One message had been cut above the cot.

IT USES THE LAST VOICE YOU TRUST.

I read it twice.

Then somebody knocked.

Three slow taps.

I raised my rifle.

“Who’s there?”

For several seconds, there was no answer.

Then Eli spoke from the porch.

“Please.”

His voice trembled.

“It’s me.”

I moved toward the door.

The warning above the cot stopped me.

“Tell me your father’s name,” I said.

Silence.

Something shifted its weight outside.

“Eli?”

“Please,” it repeated.

Exactly the same way.

Same pitch.

Same pause.

Like a recording being played again.

The doorknob turned.

“Tell me your father’s name.”

The thing on the porch scratched lightly against the wood.

Then it answered in my voice.

“Tell me your father’s name.”

The lantern went out.

The first strike nearly tore the door from its frame.

The table slid across the floor.

I fired through the wood.

The blast lit the cabin for a fraction of a second.

Through the new hole in the door, I saw black hair and pale skin.

The creature screamed.

Then everything went quiet.

I waited with the rifle against my shoulder.

One minute.

Two.

Five.

Something whispered beneath the floorboards.

“Help me.”

This voice was different.

Weak.

Human.

I pulled the cot aside and found an iron ring set into the floor. Beneath it was a narrow storage cellar.

Eli lay at the bottom.

He was covered in blood. Three deep cuts crossed his chest, and one ankle bent in the wrong direction.

He raised his left hand toward me.

The palm was raw and red.

The handprints on the trees.

“Don’t open the door,” he whispered.

I climbed down and cut the rope around his legs.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long has it kept you here?”

He looked toward the floor above us.

“It doesn’t keep me here.”

The cabin roof creaked under something heavy.

“It puts me back whenever it wants to hunt me again.”

Eli told me the creature could copy any voice it heard through the radio.

The first night, it used his father.

The second, it used one of the search volunteers.

Now it had mine.

“Why hasn’t it killed you?” I asked.

Eli’s eyes filled with tears.

“Because it likes the chase.”

Above us, claws moved slowly across the floorboards.

The radio in my pack switched on again.

Static filled the cellar.

The man’s voice returned.

“It isn’t hunting for food.”

I grabbed the radio.

“Who are you?”

The frequency flashed.

66.6.

“No time,” the voice said. “When the clock changes, run east.”

Eli’s phone lit beside him.

3:32 a.m.

The numbers changed.

3:33.

Every sound in the forest stopped.

No insects.

No wind.

No movement above us.

The radio whispered one word.

“Now.”

We climbed out.

The cabin door stood open.

The porch was empty.

I put Eli’s arm across my shoulders and carried him east.

Behind us, something began to laugh in my voice.

We made it half a mile before the creature caught up.

It moved between the trees without breaking stride, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four. Moonlight flashed across a long muzzle, black fur, and arms that reached almost to the ground.

I fired once.

The bullet hit its shoulder.

It stumbled, then kept coming.

I fired again.

The second shot struck its chest.

The creature dropped.

For one hopeful second, it stayed down.

Then its body twisted.

Bones shifted beneath its skin.

It stood again.

The wounds were already closing.

Eli and I ran.

The woods changed around us.

Trails curved back on themselves. Trees I had marked appeared three times. My compass spun until the needle broke.

Every few minutes, the radio spat out fragments of the stranger’s voice.

“Left.”

“Down.”

“Don’t answer it.”

The creature answered every warning with another stolen voice.

My mother called my name from somewhere behind us.

She had been dead for nine years.

I didn’t turn around.

Then Eli’s father begged us to wait.

Eli nearly stopped.

I dragged him forward.

At the top of a ravine, we found a rusted trail marker nailed to a tree.

Someone had carved an arrow beneath it.

HIGHWAY 33 — 1 MILE

Below that, in fresher cuts:

DON’T FOLLOW THE LIGHTS.

We heard traffic beyond the trees.

We also saw a red glow moving between them.

A neon sign.

Too far inside the forest to belong to any road.

VACANCY

The letters blinked once and vanished.

We ignored the light and followed the sound of the highway.

The creature howled behind us.

This time, dozens of voices howled with it.

We reached the road just before sunrise.

Eli collapsed against the guardrail.

I stepped into the lane and waved both arms, but the highway was empty in both directions.

Behind us, the creature crashed through the undergrowth.

I dropped beside Eli and raised my rifle.

The branches at the tree line parted.

It stepped into view.

Black hair hung wet around its shoulders. Blood marked the two places where I had shot it, but the wounds had already closed.

It lowered itself onto all fours.

Ready to run.

Then an engine sounded in the distance.

Not close enough to help us.

Somewhere farther west, beyond the bend.

The creature lifted its head.

For the first time, it looked away from us.

The radio inside my pack clicked on.

Static spilled through the speaker.

I heard a man muttering to himself.

His voice was tired and unfocused.

“Just need somewhere to sleep.”

The Broadcaster answered beneath the static.

“Keep driving.”

The creature’s ears turned toward the highway.

Another voice entered the transmission.

Calm.

Welcoming.

“Vacancy.”

A red glow appeared beyond the trees.

Not beside us.

Farther down the highway, following the sound of that unseen engine.

The creature backed into the forest.

Then it turned west and ran toward the glow.

It had stopped hunting us.

Something else had called it away.

Sheriff Nolan found us twenty minutes later.

He had been searching the county road since midnight. Eli’s father was in the passenger seat.

Neither of them spoke when they saw the blood.

They pulled Eli into the truck, and Nolan drove us back toward the Mercer farm.

I kept watching the woods through the rear window.

Nothing followed.

When we passed the last gas station, the OPEN sign was dark.

The bulletin board was still visible through the front window.

The missing-person poster for Michael James was gone.

In its place hung a small card I hadn’t seen before.

Black paper.

Red lettering.

MIDNIGHT MOTEL

ROOMS AVAILABLE

Beneath it, someone had written a room number by hand.

6

My radio came alive one final time.

I heard tires crossing seams in the pavement.

The tired man was still driving.

He had no idea something was moving through the woods beside him.

No idea a red sign was waiting around the next bend.

No idea that the road ahead had already chosen where he would stop.

Then the signal vanished.

I didn’t know who the driver was.

I didn’t know where the motel would take him.

I only knew the hunt wasn’t over.

It had found someone new.