Ghost Towns

One

Rye crashed through the undergrowth, racked with sobs. Tears streamed down her puffy face, and her hand shook where she held a flickering lantern. Behind her, the southern sky was charred, the sunset blotted out by smoke.

An entire village, with a hundred years of history, burned to ash in a single night. She slowed, trying to catch her breath, dragging her reluctant feet further and further.

There could be no stopping, not yet. She could still feel the heat of the fire against her skin.

On and on she went, falling from grief to numbness, even as twilight dimmed to night.

Her bare legs were scratched and bleeding, her nightdress torn nearly to shreds. She felt so little, moving almost mechanically. It was as though a vacancy opened up in her chest, a great, numb hole.

At last, after eighteen years, the harrowing and whimsical pull of the forest had succeeded in drawing her in. She laughed to herself, and the hollow sound glanced off the leaves. This time, she had not the strength to resist it. The lull of the woods led her on.

Her heart filled with the usual strange sense of longing, a yearning for something she didn't know. It drove her; a stern and steady push into the unknown.

She did not stop and was not able to. When she fell at last, sometime past midnight, it was because the sheer exhaustion had made her body too flimsy to move. In a haze, she dropped to her knees in an aspen grove, the candle in her lamp just a little more than dead.

She blinked, slowly. Once and then again. She did not know where she was, and she did not remember how she got there. It was all a fuzzy spot in her mind, a lapse in awareness. A breeze snaked its way through the forest, sending the leaves into an trembling frenzy.

Her senses come back to her gradually, like ink blooming through water.

There were eyes in the trees. Four pairs, glowing the way predators' eyes do in the dark.

The sensation of pain stalled in favour of fear.

She stood, though she didn't know how she had the strength to do so, and held her pathetic lantern high, turning in circles, her inferior human gaze meeting each one of those pairs of eyes.

Appear big and frightening.

Difficult for a girl of her size and stature, mostly on the small side, of only average height. She raised her arms and glared, though, unwilling to let death find her submissive.

A growl shook the long grass beneath her feet.

"You brought me here," she whispered upwards at the moon. And indeed it had - dragging Rye along like a tide. "Now get me out," she said, louder.

The beasts stepped into the clearing, oddly synchronized. One of them, with fur so dark it bled into the night, licks its muzzle in anticipation.

She turned, around and around, as the four wolves began to close in around her, silent on their padded paws.

Another one snarled, baring its pointed teeth, and Rue could almost imagine the feeling of them lodging into her skin. Involuntarily, she shuddered, a motion that shakes her entire body.

"Get back!" She shouted, but it sounded so feeble and inconsequential and too useless to dissuade them.

Between themselves, the beasts huffed in a way that makes it seem like they were laughing, mocking her.

The clearing went still, then. For a moment, all was silent except for the thundering beat of Rye's heart against her ribcage.

Suddenly, in a mess of claws, teeth, and haggard fur, the biggest of the beasts pounced upon her, launching off its hind legs, aiming for her head.