Are we out of the woods yet? (The GC)

Chapter 15

After finding a road a mile or so away from where Jess and Lisa were sitting in the forest, Gemma managed to find a road. It wasn't a very busy road, not at all, so that left her standing there for a good half hour covered in blood and dirt as she tried to flag down a car. 

She eventually found one and asked them if they could use their phone to call an ambulance, luckily it was a kind old couple who allowed her to do so. However, they were in a rush and couldn't stick around for long which Gemma assured them was okay and headed back into the forest to find her friends. 

Only a few hours later all three girls were laying in hospital beds with their injuries patched up.

Jess and Lisa both had to get stitches to cure their gash wounds on their stomachs which would leave them with very similar scars, a reminder of this horrific experience which they both would rather forget about. 

Only now under the heavy florescent lights of the hospital room did it really hit them how much they had lost. Gemma for a start had lost her girlfriend, the person she loved in such a horrific and terrible way. To find someone close to you lying in a pool of their own blood after being killed by one of your closest friends wasn't something that anyone would like to experience and Gemma would never recover.

All three of them had witnessed Sam having her head ripped from her body, a sight they couldn't get rid of whenever they closed their eyes. Not to mention finding Luna's severed head in the middle of the dark woods. 

And Caitlin's death, the first one to go, had broken all their hearts. Lisa could still see the image of Caitlin's lifeless body in their makeshift grave that they had made for her, the penguin she had tossed on top of her laying on the girls bloody stomach.

But all three of the girls, for better or for worse, had survived. They couldn't quite figure out why or how but they were all here in the hospital, sporting their scars from this experience with a sense of guilt that they had made it but their friends hadn't.

Jess had awoken from her short nap to hear the muffled noise of some kind of sports game coming from the hospital television. Good, she thought to herself, thank god i'm out of that forest.

She pressed herself upwards, balancing on her elbows before reaching over to her bedside table and placing her glasses onto her face and making the room less of a blurry haze.

"Change the channel, will you?" She heard Lisa say to Gemma over the ambience of the hospital, the loud voice sounding in stark contrast with the muffled squeaks of trolleys and beds from the corridor.

Gemma wordlessly obliged and pointed the little black remote control at the television to flick through the channels. All three girls shared the same expression of shock mixed with a faint anxiety as she passed the news channel. 

There stood the news reporter, Soph, in front of the forest they had been in a mere few hours ago. 

"Turn it up" Jess said, her voice sounding a little stale because of her nap. Gemma once again did as she was told and increased the volume.

"So here we are, in front of this forest where it has been reported that 4 teenagers and 3 adults have been killed by an unidentified monster. One teenager named Henrik has been reported missing and is presumed dead. Experts say to keep away from these woods at all costs as no one knows just how many of these creatures lurk behind the trees." She spoke into the large black microphone.

The three girls shared a look with each other. They all knew what the others were thinking, Lisa was just the one to voice it. "What the fuck!" She exclaimed. "That bastard can't get away with this, no one even knows it was him."

Jess nodded in agreement. It wasn't fair. Whilst Jess was asleep, Gemma and Lisa had spoken with the police about everything that had happened in the forest but they hadn't bought the part about Henrik being the monster. And since Jess had killed him in his monster form, there was no way to proof it was true.

"He won't get away with it, you told the police the whole story right?" Jess spoke up.

Gemma nodded. "Yeah, we did but they didn't believe that Henrik was the monster, they said it was a collective hallucination or something but we all know what we saw."

"This is fucking bullshit!" Lisa said, crossing her arms and slouching down on her bed against the pillows. 

"We need to do something about this" Jess said and right as she spoke, in walked Soph the presenter from the news. 

"You!" Lisa yelled at her. "You lied on the fucking news! We know what we saw, the hyde was Henrik, we saw it with our own two eyes- well, four eyes in Jess' case" Jess rolled her eyes and stuck her middle finger up at Lisa who was too infuriated with Soph and the police to even laugh.

"Wait" Soph said and Jess could practically hear the cogs turning in her head. "You're saying this wasn't a monster?" She was most likely thinking about how she could turn this into a way to make her more money but the girls didn't care that much at this point, they just wanted the truth to come out. 

A few weeks later, after all the girls had been released out of hospital and had been to see several counsellors, was when the book came out. 

They had all worked hand in hand with Soph to write this novel about their time in the forest, telling her how the events really happened. Of course, they didn't know everything so some things that the girls weren't present for (notably Raven's death) had to be made up. 

It was a gruelling experience for them to have to dig up such traumatic events but they did it in the name of justice since the police still hadn't released the information that the monster was in fact Henrik.

But the book was a hit, it made people see the girls in a new light. Less as victims of this story and more as heroes. And Henrik was the villian.