Survivors By Night

Part 1

You sprinted through the forest.

A sickening feeling in your gut had told you to run, that you were in grave danger.

You heard a roar.

It was hard to tell with all your fleeting senses and adrenaline, but that roar didn't sound like what you wanted to hear. You wanted to hear a growl or a howl.

Instead, you heard something even more monstrous. Something roaring and snapping against trees in its wake.

You made a sharp turn, leapt over a fallen log, and ran like you never had before.

The full moon provided almost enough light as the daytime. Without it, you were sure that you would be dead by now. You would have stumbled in the dark and been killed. Moving fast was your only lifeline on this freezing, deadly night.

Whatever was chasing you seemed to fade away. You stopped hearing it.

After running so far and so fast, you finally took a second to catch your breath.

After just a moment of being still, your body reawakened to all the growing concerns that it had been ignoring in favor of adrenaline: Your toes being icicles, your lost breath misting into the cruel night, your hunger, your exhaustion, the cut on your ankle that you had barely registered when you sprinted through sharp pine brush.

You checked your ankle and saw that it was bleeding.

"Shit, no..." You whispered and pressed the palm of your hand against the gash. You hissed at the pain that you caused.

Something crunched in the forest.

You straightened up and listened. Your heart pumped like crazy, getting you ready to run again as you waited, frozen in place like a terrified little rabbit. You didn't even move your head to look around, scanning only with your eyes. You didn't breathe.

There was another snap of a branch. Then a low, rumbling sound. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere in front of you. Like the beast had circled you.

You started shivering in fear.

More low rumbling, accompanied by inhuman, heavy breathing.

Closer now.

You swallowed thickly and tried a shaky whisper, "Jack?"

Silence.

You waited in frightened silence. Seconds felt like hours.

The horrifying waiting game was broken by a growl in a new direction.

A growl.

You let yourself take a breath. "Jack?" You called hopefully.

Nothing happened. More eerie silence.

"Please be you." You whispered more to yourself.

You scanned the forest.

A shadow sprinted from one tree trunk to another. You gasped.

You got ready to run for your life on a millisecond's notice. You whispered like a mantra, "Please be you, please be you, please be you. Fuck! Jack baby, come on!"

Something trampled through the forest and created a big, looming shadow in the moonlight. You thought you were ready to run, but you felt like your feet had frozen to the forest floor, as if frosty tendrils had crept up and latched around your boots.

The monster eclipsed the moon, and your heart sank.

That shape, that thing, was most definitely not your husband Jack Russell.