PANTHERS

prologue

I CAN HEAR IT moving in the distance, within the dark shrouded abyss of the endless forest.

They do, too, but unlike them I cannot run and hide. My bloodied wrists and ankles are bound to an eight-foot wooden stake jutting out of the ground in the center of a snow-covered clearing. My body trembles as adrenaline courses through my veins. The biting cold rips into me.

The rustling in the brush, and the snapping of branches in the darkness gets closer and closer by the second -- it moves quickly, quicker than anything I have ever seen move before. I can imagine it's elongated, slender black figure that melts into the black canvas of the night. I can feel it's eyes on me. I scan the treeline, my heart pounding, my eyes bloodshot and wide open in terror, a primal terror I've never felt in my life before. Like prey being stalked by predator. The deer before she feeds the wolves.

I can't tell where it is, but I know it is near. Watching me, contemplating me as I writhe and as tears soak my cheeks. My throat has become raw and I can taste blood in my mouth from how much screaming I'd done in the hour leading up to this moment, trying to fend off the animalistic mob of people I used to consider friends. Teammates, who have turned against me, fed me to the beast that plagues our nights since we became trapped, by doing of fate, some might argue, in these inescapable hills. I cannot scream any more. 

I lift my chin and gaze up at the night sky, hoping that this serene, familiar sight is the last thing I see and not it's gaunt, sullen black face, the face that has no eyes, no mouth. I want to think that as I look up at the moon, and she looks down at me. I want to think that my parents watch the moon, too, so that for one last time we are connected.

I can hear something, now. Close. A slow, steady movement in the snow on the clearing, coming towards me. I fix my eyes on the moon as my body tenses and I am frozen. I refuse to look at it. I refuse to die indignantly, like the countless others before me who faced the same sacrificial end I am about to. 

It's frigid touch lands on my bare skin , wrapping long, pencil-thin fingers around my legs. I, like the frigid touch, go cold. It is so close to being human, it's almost familiar, like a lucid nightmare you might have when you're down with a fever, but it is not a man, not an animal. It is your fear of the dark as a child, afraid of the things your wild imagination tells you is lurking within the unseen depths of your hallway at night; personified.

As it begins to clamber up my body, slowly, like a spider finding insects caught in it's web, I close my eyes and release a final tear.