Siren in the Woods [short story]

Siren in the Woods

The heart inside Briana's chest was beating powerfully as she gazed into the fog-infested forest. Nothing could be seen clearly twenty feet in front of her. There was only the wall of gray, obscuring fog and the thin, towering trees all around her. Blocking her in like she was a caged animal. Or maybe a timid mouse in a miniature maze. Except there wasn't a piece of cheese at the end.

If not for her yellow hoodie, thick sweatpants, and tough hiking boots, the cold would've permeated her skin long ago. She was only bothered by a slight shiver, which wasn't from the cool touch of the air. Briana had lost something. And she couldn't find it again.

The barrel was empty of all the positives, except for a small reassurance that needed to be scraped up from the bottom: Briana was still on the path.

Sculpted through the woods on uneven, earthy ground was a dirt trail. Briana had been following it with a couple friends. They had been walking for a while. It had only been about fifteen minutes but Briana wasn't an outdoorsy person, so the whole experience was just being dragged out longer and longer in her mind. She started to see things in the fog that weren't there. Her legs slowed down until she was no longer walking.

Her friends had kept going, unbeknownst that they had lost one of their party.

She was alone.

"Hello?" Briana said quietly.

The forest was silent. Briana thought someone might hear her, that her friends weren't so far that her voice would carry to them easily on the soft breeze. The leaves above her whispered faintly. She looked up, eyes wide. The branches looked like hands with long, thin claws instead of fingers, the leaves bunched together to create the body of a beast. Nothing really was there. Briana half knew and half didn't.

Anything could snatch her up. Anything.

Were there bears in this forest? Wolves? Something else?

Briana stood stationary, waiting. The only part of her that moved were her eyes. She was too frightened to even let her body tremble. The tips of her fingers pressed against her sweatpants.

A bead of sweat formed just above her right brow. It trickled down and passed her lashes, right into her eye. It stung. Her hand twitched. It kept stinging. She involuntarily wiped at her eye and realized her mistake too late.

Briana held her breath, closed her eyes. No new sounds occurred. The trees were still being played like an instrument by the wind. She couldn't believe she had moved. Even the slightest movement could alert nearby predators, and she didn't know the first thing about protecting herself from Mother Nature.

"Brianaaaa."

She heard it loud and clear. Her name. It made her jump at first but when she recognized the sound of her friend's voice she was relieved.

"I'm here! I'm here!" she said to the fog. "Where are you?"

There was a pause. "This way, Briaaana."

Directly in front of her. That's where she needed to go.

Briana began walking again. The first steps were like escaping from a shallow hole full of quicksand. The further she went, the easier it was.

"Come on," her friend said. "We're right here."

Briana could hear how much closer she was to her friends. Her boots moved along the dirt path unsteadily but at a quick pace. The more she thought about being reunited, the more she thought about the strange grainy sound of the voice that was speaking to her.

"You coming, Briiii?" it said.

Briana stopped. The words were being spoken right on top of her but there were no friends in sight.

"There you are."

Briana's mouth fell open with a scream as something big stepped onto the path in front of her. The vibration in the ground shook her off her feet. The air was knocked out of her when she hit the dirt. She tried to scream once more.

A siren, like that of a tornado warning, blared through the trees, that one continuous, obnoxious tone. Briana first thought she was the one making it, but as she turned over onto her back, she saw what was.

Towering just as tall as the trees was a gangly, horrifying monster. Briana stared up at its gaping, toothed sirens with her eyes nearly popping out of her skull, palms pressed over her ears helplessly. The thing, she thought, must've been forty feet tall with arms extended down most of the length of its body starting from its bony shoulders, a thin head and neck like that of a pole with two metallic sirens facing opposite directions attached to them. Wires connected to the sirens twisted around the neck and were fused with its abdomen, as if it were a piece of machinery instead of something living.

Was it even alive? It looked mummified and emaciated.

Briana had no time to deliberate. A hand like the ones she imagined in the branches came down upon her, smashing into the earth, creating an explosion of dirt and rocks. Some of the debris hit her in the shins and ankles as she took off in the opposite direction of the siren.

After merely seconds of the blaring tornado warning, Briana's left ear dream burst and her right was very near to rupturing when it abruptly stopped, but only for the thing to say in its artificial, stolen voice, "Where are you going, Briaaaana?"

The sound made her weak in the legs. What had happened to her friends?

Just as quickly as the siren had ended it was back, and it seemed louder than before. Briana kept running. Blood was trailing out of both her ears now. The path behind her was shaking with each thunderous step of the beast. The tornado siren switched to another noise she could barely interpret as police horns.

"Shut up!" Briana wailed. She couldn't hear her own voice. Tears were falling, lungs were burning, legs were cramping. And she had gone deaf. She felt as if her head was about to detonate like a bomb.

"Come out with your hands up!" it yelled in its grainy, stolen voice.

Another new sound came out of the monster. Briana could not hear how angry it was. The thing was furious, and it had a nightmarish noise to let its prey know. It sounded like an agitated animal, hungry and savage, snarling with its teeth bared. Briana glanced backward for a second and saw the thing barreling toward her at a rapid speed.

A tree root in the path took her by surprise. Briana was suddenly on the ground again, chest to the dirt, groaning. Something rough and scratchy wrapped around her legs and pulled her across the ground at an alarming speed. The bottom of her chin, her stomach, and her forearms scraped on the rocks and sticks, leaving a trail of spotty blood in her wake. She was screaming into the fog so hard that her throat felt shredded but there was no one there to help her. She didn't even know if she was loud enough.

In a matter of seconds she was face to face with a mouth thirty inches in diameter with a set of teeth—each a foot long—and a tongue like a thick snake that came to a point coiling toward her neck.

With a single snap and crunch, the forest went quiet once more, and the siren head lumbered back into the trees to await its next meal.