The Back of The Mind: A Collection of Eerie Short Stories

Walk to Salvation: Part 3 of 8

The scream of an owl interrupted his sleeping thoughts. Erik stared up at the waving branches above him. The darkness of night finally enveloped the camp without the life of the fire. A frog down in the valley seemed to be the only being awake with him. He looked down to where Berk had laid down earlier, now empty save for a pile of dirty clothes. His shivering body forced him to get up and stoke the fire again. The bare ground beneath his feet sent goosebumps up his back as he shuffled to the woodpile, now running low. He stacked the thinnest branches on the still-warm coal first and blew the flames alight within a few seconds. As the trail of smoke raced toward the top of the trees, he retrieved larger pieces of wood from the pile to add to the growing fire, just as he noticed Berk had done.

He sat down close to the fire and absorbed the heat thrown his way. A crack between the trees disturbed the peace of the wafting flames, and his focus snapped toward the origin. Bloodstained from head to toe, Berk came marching through the tree trunks. His eyes were staring into Erik's soul.

"Fire. Good." He came to stand on the opposite side of the camp and spat on the ground. "Cook meat."

Erik stood up, confused by the words. "I thought you said to save the rest of the deer. What happened to you?" He swore that there was a shade of red in the reflection of Berk's eyes as if they intensified the colour of the flames between them.

"Not deer." Berk furrowed his eyebrows. "You."

With Berk's next step toward him, Erik spun around without hesitation and ran into the dark through the thick trunks. The light of the fire had robbed him of his night vision, which made it much harder to dodge any obstacles in his path. Each time he stumbled, the thunder of footsteps behind him grew louder.

When he finally escaped into the grass, the whole landscaping started laughing at him. Humiliating him for being the idiot to trust a stranger to get him to safety.

Caught up in his thoughts, Erik tripped over a rock that obstructed his clear path through the grass. Before he could get to his feet again, the force of the running brute hit him with the power of a bus.

Defeated, he gazed at the stars above him as the red-eyed figure hovered over him.

As Berk lowered himself over his prey, the last thing Erik heard was the familiar sound of bones grinding as the hunter's jaws unhinged from his skull, and it swallowed his vision.