The Cabin: Alternative

Chapter 2: Seek

(this chapter is shorter than I planned and not really what I wanted but I did want to establish Seek and Bri's friendship because we never get that and I feel like it's a really interesting relationship)

Cartoon was a very...springy cat, Seek admitted. Agile and speedy constantly, too much for staying inside the cabin for hours on end. Even with the porch to explore and Bri's room to bounce around. So with the sun nearing the horizon, plenty of daylight left for a cat, he left the confounds and sped right into the forest for a walk.

Seek fully believed Cartoon was capable of handling himself, but something in him kept urging him to go after him, like a very pointy stick poking a dead body. Like a proper pet owner. But no way was he going out into the woods by himself.

Colin wanted some perfect video and of course he asked Austin for help. So he brought the next best thing to a weapon: Bri. A sentiment he voiced out loud and that she, thankfully, took as a compliment.

Entering the forest still felt as calm as ever, with the looming consciousness that something was out there with them. A nagging shadow in waning daylight. Seek shoved it down and simply shook it off. Bri wasn't bothered just yet, so he didn't need to be either.

It was also well-kept compared to the woods near their homes. No leaves were strewn on the grassy floor, no fallen branches to crack under their feet and give away their position, all the leaves were high enough above them to act as a shady canopy rather than an obstacle in their walk.

Which also made it fairly easy to catch up to Cartoon and walk by his side.

Bri leaned down as she strolled, patting his back. "For such a feral cat, he seems pretty well behaved."

"'Well behaved'? He was going crazy in the cabin! He was jumping on the counters, knocking into walls, running on the railing outside. I'm surprised he didn't fall into Austin's grill, he kept leaping over it like it was a mouse toy."

Bri shrugged. "Maybe he just likes being outside more. Like the forest is his home," she said tauntingly, grinning.

Something Seek both loved and hated about being Bri's friend was her frequency to not let the elephant in the room go unsaid. If the other guys also felt the unnerving notion that Cartoon, somehow, belonged to the forest, they didn't say so. Saying it out loud made it more likely and Seek felt like he was crazy thinking it, but hearing Bri think the same made it sound less like a horror movie plotline.

"I'm just saying," Seek said, "if we come across a pet cemetery, I'm out of here! Austin made me watch that movie and I couldn't look at my cat for weeks!"

Bri rolled her eyes. "Austin made all of us watch that, and what are you talking about? You don't have a cat."

"Tch, what do you mean? Of course I-"

A screech rippled through the air. Dead, cold silence immediately followed, something they quickly realized wasn't new. They hadn't even noticed it had been quiet their entire walk, void their own voices. No birds singing, no leaves rustling, nothing. They looked at each other in daunted horror before another, more distinct, shrill scream rang out again.

"That must be Cartoon!" Seek took off into the trees, Bri right on his heels.

The forest grew quieter for their chase, calming itself even more like a child quieting themself while their parent was on the phone. Seek didn't know where he was going, he couldn't even tell which direction the feline screech had come from. But something was pulling him through the trees; it wasn't his own legs but something else entirely.

An invisible rope yanked at his chest while non-existent hands pushed him along. Hands he secretly hoped were Bri's, despite being able to hear her footsteps several paces behind him. There were times exactly like now when he wished he didn't have object permanence.

They broke through the trees and stopped in their tracks. A metal tower appeared seemingly out of nowhere in front of them, tall enough that they should have seen it the moment they entered the forest. Seek's heart skipped but as he gazed up, he breathed out a sigh of relief. It wasn't the telephone pole monster.

After sharing an understood look of 'let's tell no one we got freaked out by another tower', Seek and Bri stepped closer and tried to look up the metal beams. He'd seen these structures before, but they were always in long stretches of overgrown grass but in a line with others and plenty of yards away from trees. Never one lone in the middle of a forest.

"A phone tower? I thought we didn't get any reception out here?"

Bri simply shrugged it off. "Maybe it just doesn't work anymore. Too much of a hassle for them to take down or something." She stepped back and craned her neck back a whole 90 degrees to blink at a small speck. With a grating thought, her eyes widened in surprise. "There he is!"

"Who?" Seek yelped.

"Cartoon!" She pointed up and he followed her line of sight up the tower. Half-way up, sitting idly on a metal beam, was the black cat. It licked its paw and pointedly ignored their dilemma. "Think we can call him down?"

"He never responds to calls when in trees, I doubt he will when on a tower." Seek said knowingly and gained a confused look from Bri. He scratched his head and kicked the bottom beam. "Seems sturdy enough."

"Wait." Bri blinked and her face contorted, even more so confused. "You're going to climb this thing just to get a strange cat down?"

"He's not just a 'strange cat', Bri, you know that! He's been my pet for nearly 11 years." Oblivious to her bafflement, Seek tentatively placed a foot on the bottom beam and tested his weight on it.

It held. For now. Seek put both feet up and waited a moment, listening for any signs of wear. Grabbing hold of the supporting beam, he finally noticed something. The tower wasn't rusted over. It almost looked new.

As fast as the thought came, it was wiped away as Cartoon meowed high above him. "I'm coming, Ubaste!"

"Ubaste?" Bri asked, but Seek didn't answer instead starting to climb.

Using the supporting metal, Seek pulled himself up and around the beams, holding tight to the polished metal with nimble fingers. His legs strained as he swung them to barely scrape against the next beam to help push himself up, occasionally banging his knee in the process. Shoving with his toes and knees upwards to free-grab the metal above his head, with a brief moment of touching nothing but air above a story high drop, Seek wished he had taken up at least one of Bri's offers to join her rock climbing.

His heart beat faster the higher he went, but at least the space between the beams lessened. His wrists started to burn from the weight of dragging himself along the metal to reach; fingers sore from primarily gripping to the tower and cutting on the nuts and bolts holding it together. Even the wind began to hurt to breathe in, tight against the inside of his throat and almost void of actual oxygen.

Seek leaned his head back as far as he could and blinked through the sun. Only a few feet above him, Cartoon stared back down at him. He tucked his paws underneath him and nestled down on the tower, swishing his tail while waiting to be rescued.

Summoning what little strength he had left, Seek planted his foot against the supporting beam and kicked off to leap up, reaching for the platform his cat rested on. He stretched his hand out and wildly grabbed for it...

...only to miss and just graze the metal with the pads of his fingers. Seek's eyes widened and everything went slow-motion: Ubaste watching as they got smaller, the top of the tower growing smaller while the sun glistened behind it, bathing the structure in blinding light.

He could vaguely hear Bri screaming his name, but it was muffled in the deafening wind whipping past his ears as he fell to the ground. It wasn't until he hit something solid and warm and everything went dark that he realized the sun he was seeing was hanging right above the tower.

Despite it being sunset.