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Brooksview Lake

Your friends invited you down for a weekend hike and camping trip. Just some time to drink booze and swim in the lake and relax after a week of strenuous final exams. College was exhausting and you'd take any break you can at this point.

So the amount of disappointment you felt when you saw the yellow caution tape cutting off the little dirt road that leads down to the lake campgrounds was immeasurable. You're getting ready to suggest a different spot dejectedly when Miguel suggests ditching the car somewhere close by and just walking the rest of the way. The camping gear wasn't super heavy and everyone brought decent-sized packs. A sick feeling boils in your gut but you nod slowly right alongside everyone else.

As your little ragtag group of five make their way down the heavily worn dirt road, past the yellow caution tape, you start to see what's wrong.

The lake... Or what's left of it... is an ill sort of sickly blackish green, muckish and thick. Bubbling in the nearing summer heat. And the smell...

It was putrid. A hot sweltering stench of rotting carcass meat and mold and sludge. It was like the worst stew imaginable. It filled every crevice of your nose. You couldn't escape it. It was in your hair, your clothes, your eyes. It burned. You can't help but cover your nose with a gag and stare out at the waste before you. 

But Miguel keeps walking, and so do the others. They appear unperturbed by what's laid out in front of them. Miguel even walks right up to the edge, sinking calf-deep into the sludge and slime of what used to be the lake floor. Dead and dying fish lay splayed out, bones bared. They had been rotting before the lake had dried up. 

You stare in horror as your eyes slowly register the growing scene of the catastrophe. Dead animals who had drank from the sludge, predators who had eaten the fish, birds who had attempted to bathe. You call out to Miguel, but he turns, smearing himself in the muck with a devilish grin.

As if in a trance, the others follow suit and you begin to back up. They call out to you, a chorus of mindless voices summoning you, drawing you forward, begging you to join them, to join the earth. Your retch, emptying trail mix onto the dirt as you stagger back, doubled over. The stench, their voices, the hot blistering sun boiling your skin...

You hurl yourself to your feet and stumble up the path away from their growing screeching. Their voices were raised to inhuman levels and your stomach turns and twists as you claw your way back toward the yellow tape. You feel something warm trickle down the sides of your face and will later learn that the volume of their screams had caused your ears to bleed.

You run down the road, back into town, tears leaving dirty tracks down your cheeks. You aren't sure what those things were, but you're positive it wasn't your friends. You know this because as soon as you made it back into town limits, you got a barrage of messages from your friends asking to hang out at the cafe.