Storm of the End: Book One

Chapter XVI.VI: The Woods

I took Aaron's hand and I gazed ahead at the swaying trees, remembering there was dozens of skeletons not even thirty feet behind us, "Come on, the faster we find shelter, the better."

We started to move, "How far away are we from the city?" Aaron asked.

I shook my head, "I don't know... By now, we should be by some houses but..."

After what had just happened, I didn't know if avoiding the city would make any difference...

We started walking again. As the howling wind swayed the trees, they made a scratching noise as they scraped against each other. A soft crunch came from a few meters behind us.

Reflexively, I glanced to the source of the noise and saw... a deer standing in between the trees.

Huh? That's weird, this was the first animal I had seen since the beginning of the storm. It was a pretty big buck, with the largest antlers I had ever seen on a deer. Then again, I'd only seen a male deer in photos or illustrations, not in person, so I really couldn't be sure. It stared at us, eyes wide in surprise.

"Look at that Aaron," I said, pointing at the buck, "That's a deer."

Aaron turned around, and so did Jared, to see what I was pointing at. Hmm, maybe we could shoot the thing and use it for food... but it would be annoying lugging it around while we looked for a relatively safe shelter. Aaron looked at it in wonder, but then I was surprised to see his expression change into one of terror.

"What's that in its horns?" he asked.

I looked more closely, I couldn't see that well when I had first looked, but now I could make out the outline of something in its right antler.

It was a skeleton. One of the skeletons that had appeared after we killed the fairies.

And just when I made that realization, I made another that brought on a new wave of terror. There was something weird about the shape of its antlers... they didn't look like the pictures I had seen. They actually looked more like... hands. Huge human-like hands extending from its skull.

That is what they were. The damn thing had human hands coming from its head, and it was tightly gripping the skeleton in its right "hand" to the point where it was starting to crack. I noticed that the deer was also incredibly emaciated. It looked like it was beyond the point of starvation.

Aaron and I both screamed, the deer's eyes widened further and it threw the skeleton to the ground with violent force. I heard the bones crack and snap as they made impact with the ground.

The deer lowered its head and opened its mouth, revealing a set of sharpened teeth that looked completely out of place. Its mouth kept stretching... wider and wider... wider and wider. A sickening sloppy cracking noise filled the air as its mouth continued to grow to comical proportions. But there was nothing funny about it. It didn't stop stretching until it extended all the way to the ground. A slimy slithering thing, its tongue, emerged from the cavernous gap that was its mouth... and it swallowed all the bones whole. Its mouth slowly closed as the bones' outline made its way down its neck.

Jared no longer hesitated: he fired the gun and as he did a flash of light came from the deer's forehead. With an expression of absolute shock, I noticed that the pellets from the shotgun were suspended in the air in front of the deer, as if they had been frozen in place. A glow came from a third eye that had opened on its forehead, which glared at Jared with a menacing intelligence that its other passive eyes lacked. Then, so quickly that I barely even saw it happen, the deer's mouth snapped wide open and it ate all of the pellets whole.