This book is the submission for the contest of Write to Rank 2021 in which every chapter represents different themes given by the contest's admins with the main genre of action.
Every chapter would be a different story thus this is a book of mini st...
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Black tar blanketed his whole body. Someone killed Malakai brutally, tearing his flesh open and exposing the inside of his throat.
It was the second person who died that afternoon. And trapped in a vast wilderness of a Southeast Asian jungle, the four expeditioners had to find out a way to escape.
Rhea, kneeling upon his dead boyfriend’s newly dug grave, wept stupendously while her friends watched.
“Who could actually do this?” Kidd asked. “Black liquids and bitemarks? They aren’t natural, I tell you!”
“Whatever it is, it’s very urgent for us to stay together,” Val insisted. Being the leader of the team, the deaths frustrated the blond girl entirely. It infuriated her also.
“We lost our native guide and now one of us is too. I think we’re all going to die.” Lenny, the big kid from Nigeria, certainly couldn’t handle a panicking situation.
Their native guide, a scrawny teen boy with almost nothing to wear, showed them the untouched area of the deeper forest. They found him with a deep wound an hour before Malakai’s death. Black tar was all over him too.
But the clouds above their heads crumpled. Gray and massive they looked.
“We’re not going to die, Lenny,” Val said with a courageous voice. “We will find whoever did−“
“Where’s Rhea?” Kidd intruded.
The shadow of the sky shaded the grave. Rhea disappeared into thin air.
“This is not good.” Lenny’s two hands clamoured his head while he frowned with panic. His ironic skin trembled while his legs gave in. “They took Rhea and she will die too!”
Val clenched both her fists. Her stomach churned and her madness unhinged. She kneeled on Malakai’s grave and scanned the ground, but the sudden splashes of water falling from the sky gave her the desperation.
Still, Val was a great tracker. “This way.”
She found some footprints, but by the seconds, they started vanishing because of the tears of the weeping sky. Despite that, the two followed her deeper into the woods, knowing not of what to do but to grasp their hunting knives strongly.
The rain drenched their clothes, and Lenny and Kidd shivered with the intensity of the bitter air.
“Rhea is gone forever,” Lenny commented.
But they found her eventually. Or rather, they found pieces of her scattered in a small area of the rainforest. Lenny broke down. Kidd tried to stabilize the traumatized boy by making him look away, but instead, she was the target for his spiteful puke.
“Jesus, Lenny!”
“Shhh!” Val heard something, rustling and watching them from the thick bushes of the woods. She leered left and right, and upon her clutch was the machete she brought to cut brambles.
