In the Woods #mysteryfriday

Death in the Woods

Mae was just another teen. She was 15, hanging out with her friends. Her drunk friends.
Mae's friends had gone to a club, inviting Mae with them, but by the time she had gotten there, the boys were throwing around bottles a block from the club, using words that Mae was sure they didn't know before.
Mae tried everything to get them home. She tried asking, she tried threatening, she tried dangling a beer bottle in front of their faces. The latter got them as far as the woods, by which time the gang was too tired to take another step.
Carsen and Patrick fell faceforward into a pile of leaves together. Harry curled up at the base of a tree, and Tyson ran circles around that tree until he faceplanted into the dirt and didn't wake up. David just crumpled where he stood.
Mae looked around for a road that she could call a taxi down, but unfortunately the short-cut she had hoped the boys would last through did not go anywhere near the roads.
She saw a small shape a little way away. She thought it could be another drunkard, and she slowly crept up on the shape.
As she neared, a horrible smell hit her face like a sack of rotten tomatoes. It stung at her eyes and mouth, and left a sticky feeling on her face.
Mae checked behind her that all the boys were still asleep, and then edged closer to the shape, turning on the torch on the phone.
Mae's breath caught in her throat, where it silently squealed and tried to go back down to her lungs and hide. She forced herself to breathe again, trying to ignore the ghastly smell.
It was a body. It was very rotten, cuts and gashes all over the place like the person--man perhaps--had run through a wood chipper. His face bad been reduced to sunken pits, the gooey eyes eaten long ago by the beetles that swarmed in the desecrated sockets. The teeth showed through ragged lips and ripped cheeks, spiders and cockroaches skittering across the open mouth like they were playing dodgeball.
The torso looked like it had been ripped open, like someone had taken a chainsaw and used it to scrape the intestines out, causing the lot to splatter everywhere. Inside was a convulsing mess of invertebrates, all feasting on the slime, foul leftovers and eachother.
The fingers had been hastily chopped off, like someone had an afterthought and had a blunt axe at hand. The arms were pulled open by all the feasting animals, probably crows, and pus covered the blackened bone like vasiline.
Mae swallowed a scream and dialed 111 on her phone. The line sounded close to snapping.
"Hello?"
"This is Mae Dansen. I have found a body." She held down a sob. "My friends have been drinking and have passed out, and we are in the middle of the woods."
"I am sending police now. Where are you? They will find you."
Mae realized that she had never learned this area's name.
"The Woods," she said, getting more and more panicked.
"Which one?"
"The Woods."
There was a rustle behind her.