The Festival: A Psychological Thriller Novella

Prologue

Saturday, August 17th

As I awoke, face down in the mud, I noticed the aroma of dirt and grass filling my senses. I blinked my eyes a few times and rose to my feet slowly, ensuring that I could keep my balance. As I stood, my head began to pound like a drum and I noticed that my sight was blurring at the edges. Needing to take a moment, I sat back down on the ground and the overwhelming urge to vomit started to consume my entire being. My body lurched and I gagged and retched a few times, spitting up nothing but stomach acid with a tinge of the Tito's I was drinking last night, still in my system.

I observed the forest. A light humming sound was still coming from the speakers on the stage and fog filled the air, but I'm unsure if it was natural mist or if it was coming from the artificial machines on the stage. The lighting rails mounted to the top of the platform were hanging precariously along with once meticulously placed streamers and banners wafting in the breeze. The morning sun was peeking through the trees and as I looked up, the pounding in my head intensified as I stared directly at the bright ball of light in the sky.

Reaching up, I touched my head to try to steady myself and reduce the pain I was feeling, squeezing each side of it in an attempt to feel better. I could feel that my hair was in shambles in the back; a tangled mess that would take a lot of brushing to get it back to normal, but a single piece of my pink highlights hung straight in front of my eyes. I peered down at myself, observing blood stains on my white tank top; unsure of whose blood it was, which made me wince at the thought.

I'm uncertain about the reason, but I covered my face with the palms of my hands and cried silently. I leaned backward and let my body fall to the ground, landing the back of my head on something soft. What it was didn't particularly concern me. It was a relief to have something to rest my banging head on. Closing my eyes, I turned my head to my right, placing pressure on the source of the headache, and as I did, I re-opened my eyes to discover that I was using someone's body as a makeshift pillow. Upon the realization, vomit crawled up my throat again, and I spewed the rest of my stomach's contents on to the ground and quickly scrambled to my feet.

I scanned around the area and examined the remains of what was a high-energy music festival; luckily, most of the attendees could flee, but, unfortunately for my friends and myself, we were not. We found ourselves trapped here with a sadistic killer, and it appears that they successfully achieved their objective of killing as many people as they could without being caught. I should have felt lucky that I survived with nothing more than a migraine, but I couldn't help but feel sorry for everyone else's families; my friends and the other seven bodies that I counted that were still lying on the ground.

I bend down next to Mackenzie, my best friend since elementary school, and run my hand through her long, blonde locks, and sorrow fills my mind. After today I'll never see her again, never speak to her again and never hear her laugh again.

"Oh, Mack," I say out loud with no one around to hear me, "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

How will I explain this to anyone?

Standing back up, I examined the area again, looking for any way out, but until that point, I couldn't even remember how we managed to get here through the winding, twisted trails of the woods. The throbbing in my head was making it even harder to think. I must have been unconscious for hours, which made me wonder why I had heard no sirens and why no one had arrived yet.

My feet carried me to the stage, albeit, I was stumbling and limping, trying to remember what may have happened to my leg and I guessed I had twisted my ankle running at some point, but most of the night was a broken mess of memories. It was hard to tell whether it was the alcohol consumption or the speed at which everything unfolded. I pulled myself up and surveyed my surroundings from a better vantage point.

Acknowledging the humming from the speakers again, I realized just how much the high-pitched sound was bothering my head. Annoyed, I walked over to the speakers and unplugged anything I could find to keep it from making anymore noise. As I pulled the cables out of the sound system, they crackled with the half of a connection they were making and I continued making my way through them until the area was nothing but silence.

The quietness of the forest was both welcome and eerie; even though the sun was coming up, the atmosphere held undertones of unease and I kept feeling like I was being watched. It was almost like I could feel someone's eyes were trained on me and I looked out into where the crowd stood last night, looking for anything that might point me to why I was feeling the way I was.

There wasn't much around me; nothing but trees, dense brush and fog, which was slowly dissipating as the air warmed up around me. Sitting down on the edge of the stage, I swung my legs, examining the bodies on the ground, wondering still how the hell I was going to escape the nightmare. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. A new crack ran across the screen, and I remembered that I didn't have any signal, which should have been the first sign that something wasn't right when we arrived.

Out of desperation, I unlocked my phone and attempted to dial nine-one-one. As a surprise to me, the other end of the phone began ringing, but just as it did, my phone screen went black and the battery gave out, leaving me on my own to figure out how to get out of the hellish landscape that contained my friend's bodies. Without communication with the outside world, I didn't have much of a choice but to start wandering around the forest.

As I hopped down off the stage and landed on the ground, my ankle twisted again, sending a sharp pain through my leg. I winced and my eyes pricked with tears, but I leveled myself and regained my bearings. Looking around, I began walking to the first path I could see, stepping over the tattered remains of the concertgoers who weren't so lucky.

The first path I found was dark and winding, shaded by trees on either side, almost completely from the sunlight that was getting brighter by the minute. It only took about five minutes of walking before I was stopped dead in my tracks. In the distance, I heard a twig snap in front of me and I stared down the trail. In and effort to hear anything and everything that was going on around me, I attempted to slow my breathing, but hearing my heart beat inside my own head made it difficult.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a rustling sound grabbed my attention in the direction of the twig breaking and a figure stepped out of the woods onto the path in front of me, a little way ahead, but still directly in front of me. They were dressed from head to toe in black and were seemingly staring at me, holding a knife in one of their hands. My heart began pounding out of my chest and I darted my eyes from side to side, looking for some sort of hiding place. My breathing could no longer be controlled and I started to hyperventilate. In an attempt to quiet myself down, I threw my hands over my mouth and breathed through my nose in as controlled of a fashion as I could.

There was no escape and there was no way I could maneuver myself without making noise and grabbing even more of their attention. With how things were left at the festival grounds, I assumed that they didn't intend to leave any survivors. Just when I thought all was lost, and I was done for, the figure turned on their heels and walked back in to the woods.