The Dead Scout's Handbook of Afterlife Survival

Chapter Eight: Nobody has Friends Out Here

Rustling grass jolted Cayden awake as the campfire chewed away at the dark sky. Across the pit, Rebecca and Charlie curled together into an amorphous ball. Everywhere, blackness covered save for a faint glow over the northern horizon. The rustling scratched at the night again as Cayden shot up.

"Charlie! Rebecca! Wake up!"

Someone groaned from the opposite side of the now glowing coals as the grasslands stirred a hundred yards away.

"What is it, Cayden?"

"Something's here!"

The blob across from Cayden sprouted two heads. "Do you think it's a person?" Rebecca whispered.

Behind them, footsteps scuffled away then stopped.

"Why don't we each grab a stick? We got some vines we didn't burn, we can bundle up some twigs and use them as torches," Cayden suggested, knowing survival well enough, but not knowing how to assert that.

"Yeah, and if we come across any troublemakers, Charlie can throw them too."

Listening for any further movement below, they gathered supplies and assembled their torches. Charlie wrapped Rebecca's arms around his neck and Cayden tied her ankles around Charlie's waist with some leftover fiber. A sphere of dim, orange light surrounded them as they trudged out, stumbling over rocks and tree roots. The torches glowed and flickered as the occasional wind blew smoke and cinders into Cayden's hair. A quick check on the campfire confirmed their position and also revealed that Charlie had swapped his torch for an enormous branch. He strode comfortably, holding it over his shoulder while shooting menacing glances all about. The three kept wary darting eyes on their campsite, glowing an ever increasing distance from them.

If the impenetrable blackness failed to frighten them enough, and neither did the emptiness, then the vine buildings offered all the eeriness needed to elevate Cayden's concerns to true terror. As they slogged through the hushed ghost land, occasional walls of twisting and coiling plant matter stretched one or two stories up. They crept in geometric patterns, some taking on the shape of the angular roofs of houses, some curled up in short posts like gates. But despite the appearance of vine-covered buildings, there was nothing underneath. The torches chased the shadows from under the towering but bizarrely empty shapes. Only the vegetation held its own weight up. And to make matters worse, their color didn't pop in the late hours as they had in the day. The plants draped down from above as if ink had been thrown on the sides of invisible shacks, their black forms resembling tentacles curling among each other. There was a sparse collection of them, clambering up from the forever reaching grass that cut between the buildings like roads.

A half mile away from where they began, they stopped at the inky outline of a cowboy atop a bucking bronco, ghoulish and spectral as the vines left an impression of smoke rising in wisps. Charlie grunted in frustration, stomped his feet and cupped his hands over his lips.

"HELLO!"

Rebecca shot him a concerned glance and Cayden's heart raced. Silence choked the world as Cayden gawked at Rebecca and Charlie's shaking silhouettes. They shouldn't have strayed out here. The terrifying tranquility sank beneath Charlie's hyperventilation and while poor for stealth, Cayden was elated to hear anything at all.

A sharp gust whistled as they whipped around and Charlie cursed. Behind them was absolute nothingness. The campfire was suddenly gone and the darkness enveloped their delicate bubble of firelight, the sole beacon in an overcast starless sky, making the universe both small and incomprehensibly enormous.

"The wind blew it out," Charlie remarked with a trembling voice.

"There isn't any wind, Charlie," Cayden corrected, but he understood this only as he spoke it. The silence hadn't been present for long. Solely for the last minute or two had the air calmed to an eerie placidity, marking the first time since Cayden's arrival that the fields lay motionless.