Lunar Virus ✔️

Chapter Eleven: Elodie

A wonderful wetness pelts me from above, feeling truer than anything I’d ever felt before. It rarely ever rains like this anymore. So cool, so soothing. Like a massage with pinpricks of shattered water droplets. The ground below me has conformed to the shape of my body, water seeps from the ground and into my clothes, and water from above washes every fiber of my body clean. The warm breath of the ground rises up around me, filling my nose with an earthy sense of freedom. Chirps lilt and shift around me, and it’s then I realize what’s happened. The simulation has begun.

Suddenly, the water falling from the sky is drowning me, the vapor rising from the ground is choking me, and the coos of the birds are smothering. Water pulls at my clothes as I rise up off the forest floor, and mud sucks at my hair, compelling me to just fall away and mold myself into the earth. The white perfection that was once a blouse is now married with mud and a substance perhaps more sinister, and now hangs limply onto my skin. Out of the corner of my eye, in the shadows of the forest, another person rises. Just like clockwork, the process continues, and people start to catch on. The simulation has begun, the competition has commenced, and no one wants to finish last. The silhouettes of people begin to blend farther into the forest as they disperse and I start to panic; I need to find Elie and Sheila. I don’t call out, I just simply run with the power of fear fueling me. I can’t be left alone.

I spot a head of blonde hair ahead of me and start running harder, weaving through trees and jumping over roots like some damn olympian. Only because in this moment, I will to anything to not be alone in a forest that no doubt has fire breathing gnomes and carnivorous rocks.

I’m about only seven yards away when a weight tackles me from behind and wraps their arms around my neck. “Thank goodness I found you, Elodie! I’m pretty sure just I saw a gnome trying to eat someone. Not a pleasant sight, let me tell yo--”

“Sheila, dammit, you just scared two years of life out of me. In a forest with flesh-eating gnomes, you don’t just go tackling people from behind like a freaking murderer. You tap them on the shoulder with a stick. That way, if elbows fly, you’re at least two feet away. Gosh!” It all comes out in one breathy rant of sheer relief. And Elie, being alerted of our presence, has started trudging towards us with one hand shielding his eyes from the rain, and another out in front of him to push away foliage that’s grown much too long for its own good.

A flicker of movement draws my eyes to a tree slightly in front of him, half rotted, and engulfed in lush vines. It’s so fast . . . like a single flash of a strobe light . . . gone before it’s even processed. Sheila seems to have spotted it too, “Elie, stop. I think there’s something there.”

“There? And where’s that?” he asks sarcastically, seemingly not a single bit concerned.

I feel Sheila’s warmth against the rain disappear as she slowly unwraps her arms slung around my neck and reaches for one of the many sticks strewn about on the ground.

“What are you doing?” I whisper, as it only seems fit to do in the face of the intensity in her expression.

Her expression not wavering, she rumbles, loud enough for Elie to hear, “He brought a knife.” Elie recoils as realization hits him, and he freezes. Being a complete imbecile, he freezes right next to the tree. Moron. Absolute moron! Move! Run! We hear an almost surprised, but mostly victorious laugh coming from the tree as an arm snaps out and pulls Elie behind--no--into, the tree.

“What the hell just happened?” Sheila groans, spins the stick in her hand like a baton and coddiwomples towards the tree as if she knows where Elie has just disappeared to. I jog up next to her, and tug on her arm to slow her down.

“If you’re going to walk towards the scene of a crime, at least exercise a little bit of caution, you dingbat. At least then, you can say that you didn’t run into a dangerous situation. You simply walked into one.” She accepts my logic, and slows her pace as we reach the tree. The vastly large, elephantine tree, that could probably fit a good three to four middle-aged men. As we round the tree, we see that Elie couldn't, or shouldn’t, have been taken into the tree. There’s no opening. It’s as whole as a tree trunk could get. Moss fills the valleys in the bark, and a torrent of ants flows up the side with remarkable sense of direction. One which Sheila didn’t seem to have when faced with trees.