Horror 100 Volume 1

Wendigo

'We were done making our rounds and heading home, walking, we'd cut through the woods. Then there was an opening and we come on it.'

'Blood, everywhere. Splattered on the trees, the grass, the creek, everywhere. At first, we figured it was a pack of wolves. We'd seen it sometimes, they can't scavenge and start hunting deer. The worst was when they breed with feral dogs. But this wasn't like that.'

'Something had run up on a den of deer. Wolves won't attack a den, Coyotes neither, because they'd get too much of a fight. There were three, I think, three bodies. Just torn apart. You'd see a head here, a leg here, and a torso there. Predators don't do that. They don't leave behind scraps. What had done this hadn't done it for food. It had done it for fun.'

'But we didn't know that. We saw a bunch of carcasses and we think it's something we gotta take care of. I remember my brother telling me to go home; he thought it was a pack of feral dogs.'

'But I wasn't leaving him, and I damn sure wasn't walking through two miles of woods alone, with nothing but a knife and my flintlock. Jeb had the musket, and it was cocked and full up ready, and I wasn't going without it.'

'Took me a while, to convince him, but finally we began tracking whatever did that. Wasn't hard, we just followed the blood. The thing bleed a deer before it got away or it dragged one for a mile. I don't know. I know that I'd never seen Jeb that scared before that night.'

'We started hearing noises. Like trees snapping and things running cold fast. I've been in a lot of woods, in my life, I've been all over this world, and ain't never heard noises like I heard that night. I heard things, I heard animals screaming.'

'Heard deer, and heard fox, and rabbits and raccoons and birds, just scared. This is maybe twelve, or one o' clock at night, except the fox and some birds, nothing was supposed to even be awake. But they weren't just awake they were moving. I saw flocks of birds that night fly straight into trees just trying to get out of there. We came up on a pack of coyotes, nearly shot a couple thinking it was what we were looking for us, but then we saw they were running towards us. They ran right passed us, didn't even notice.'

'Then some deer did the same. Some rabbits, and squirrels, foxes, even a couple wild hogs. These things were supposed to be eating each other and the only thing they cared about was getting away from there.'

'What we were tracking, it wasn't something we were supposed to see, it wasn't something old, and something we couldn't kill. I don't know why we didn't just go home. I think that was his nature, to go toward trouble, to fight.'

'We finally get into an open valley. It was normally a corn field, but it wasn't in season, so it was just flat dirt. We saw the tracks, then. A lot of the animals fleeing the forest had paved over the land. But where that deer blood was, nothing had taken a single step. Like they were leaving it for us to find.'

'The tracks were shallow. Whatever it was couldn't have weighed more than one hundred pounds, but that didn't mean much. A bobcat weighing forty pounds nearly tore out my damn throat, once. All that means is that it's quick and hard to hit.'

'So we follow the tracks, and it doesn't take us long to find where it is. There's this old church that sits on the top of a hill.

'We get within fifty yards, and we hear this noise. A screeching kinda sound. It was sort of made up of two different sounds. One was a high pitched screech, another was a low pitched growl. It was making both, at the same time.'

'We get within twenty yards, and we hear this sound. I can remember thinking that it sounded like paper being torn apart, while someone was swinging water in a bucket, back and forth.'