We entered the trees in the dark, in the rain. I tasted grass in my mouth, blown in by the wind, and I spat it out on the slippy ground. The mud squelched under my shoes. Leanna stuck to my side while the other men who had come along with us went off with their flashlights in different directions in search of the boy.
The albino woman stayed with us, leading the way. "I think he would have gone straight," she said, taking us deeper toward the center of the woods.
By then, we had lost sight of the other men. The rain made hearing anything difficult. Even when Leanna got up on her toes to whisper into my ear, I couldn't quite make out what she was saying.
But the albino woman spoke loud enough that I could understand her through the pummeling water droplets. Leanna's flashlight shined forward, where the woman stood, and less than twenty feet away we saw the deep stream, which had turned violent in this nasty weather.
The woman fell to her knees. At first, I thought she collapsed because she felt exhausted in the search for her baby. Her back was turned toward us, a flashlight illuminating her hunched form as she dipped her hands into the turbulent water.
"What are you doing?" I asked, hoping she would hear me over the storm.
However, she didn't respond with any words. Shining like the moon, the woman lifted her hands from the water and began to dig her fingers into the slick ground. I took a cautious step closer, and vaguely made out the strange symbols she was drawing ... They looked like letters in an old English manuscript, using that straight font that's almost impossible to read ... Then again, from what I could recall seeing in fantasy books back when I was little, the letters looked fairly close to runes.
Leanna whispered to me, and this time I heard her words: "I don't like this, Kev."
Thunder growled nearby, joined by the hooting of an owl.
One owl followed the first, then another, until a whole chorus of hoots echoed around us. Leanna and I turned our eyes toward the waving treetops in an attempt to see the birds of prey, but the rain blinded me.
I rubbed at my eyes, unable to see a damn thing. Somehow, maybe as a consequence of the bombardment of sound and a sudden hailstorm, I lost my balance on the faintly sloped ground and tumbled over onto my side. My eyes squinted open, as I attempted to see where I had fallen and where everyone was. All I could make out were my hands soaked in mud and my face near the protruding roots of a wide tree.
There came a clipped scream from nearby—a man. Then another, and another, and what sounded like Leanna, but may have been some sort of cat. My heart pounded, as my right leg felt weaker by the second until it turned numb.
Pushing up onto my butt, my back against the tree, I saw the ground gently sloping down into the stream, and as my eyes rose from the black-looking water, I came face-to-face with the albino woman. She no longer appeared to be in mourning for her tragically missing toddler, but instead, her pink eyes glowed and she had stripped herself bare.
Before I could get out a scream, her jaw unhinged and revealed a doubled row of razor teeth. Her hands reached for my shoulders and her nails dug into my skin. I howled in pain, punching at her chest in an attempt to make her let go. I kicked her with my left leg, which still possessed plenty of strength.
I managed to knock one of her legs straight back behind her, but at that point, her hands moved to my neck, her thumbs pressing into my Adam's apple.
I couldn't breathe.
Leaning over me, she smelled my head, like she was getting an idea about how I would taste before ripping off a chunk to eat. But a gunshot blasted beside my head, making my ears ring. And the gun thankfully put a hole clean through the ghastly woman's chest.
The force of the shot threw her backward, and she rolled into the raging stream, which swiftly swept her corpse away.
Terrified now that I would be shot next, I looked back and saw the barrel of a shotgun.
But that barrel lowered, revealing the shooter. At once, all felt right again.
She stood five inches short of six feet tall, wearing long pants tucked into a pair of brown boots. My gaze rose to meet the low rim of a silver raincoat, and the higher I looked, the more I made out of her curves, and the fierce manner in which she carried her weapon.
Finally, I saw the tail end of a blonde braid, and when I got to her face, the identity was unmistakable.
"Kev," Liza said, sober as any man could ever be, her black eyes staring down at me with a mix of sympathy, passion, and determination, "get up if you can. Everyone else here is dead."