Her eyelids slowly opened, from darkness to yet more darkness. She could barely notice the trees above her, but could certainly feel the stinging, bloody wound that penetrated the right side of her head. She could also feel the soft, somewhat moist ground under her. It must have rained. Her clothes, she noticed, were also soaked in rain water, and felt gross on the dirt ground. Her cracked and dry lips begged for a drink, and her accelerated heart pumps yelled out in discomfort. Still fuzzy and semi-blind, the girl lay on the ground. Sharp noises of owls pierced her ears and echoed in the distance. The predators around her, lurking at night, were obvious in the bushes.

Not bothering to notice much of this, due to the wincing pain coming directly from her injury, the girl reached her fragile right arm to feel it. To feel just how bad it was. Right when her touch reached the wound, she winced in pain and screamed. Now she was entirely awake, and suddenly noticed everything. The frightening noises, the feeling of being lost, the darkness, and the pain haunted her still confused brain. Her eyes bolted open, blinking away tears of fright.

The young girl sat up quickly, causing her to fall back down again, with even greater pain from her injury. As she lay there, afraid and vulnerable, the girl felt she could do nothing more than scream. Risking attracting predators and more dangers to her, the girl hollered with all of her might.
“Help!” she began screaming, her voice shaky and tears forming in her eyes. “Help me! Please! Someone! I’m here! Please help me, come my way! I’m injured, I’m lost! Please! Someone…”
Her screams died in the darkness, not even forming significant echoes. She had no idea where she was, or who she was. She couldn’t remember anything with such immense pain. Hopeless, the girl began weeping. She began to cry in pain and fear, not even bothering to try screaming for help again.
Her flushed cheeks, not visible in the dark, were poured on with tears. She was lost, scared, confused, fuzzy, and in such great pain. Crying hysterically, the girl sat up, buried her face in her hands and continued sobbing.
After what seemed like hours of releasing tears, the girl let down her hands to her sides. As soon as she did so, not only could she feel the cool, soft, dirt against her dirty hands, but she could also feel, what seemed like a piece of metal. She quickly grabbed it, wondering what it was. Perhaps it was her cell phone! Perhaps she had simply gotten accidentally hit on the head, passed out, and her cell phone had fallen out of her pocket!
“Thank God! It must be my phone! I’ll call for help and get treated, and then I’ll remember. I’m okay, I’ll be okay,” she exclaimed with a face of joy, sniffing and wiping away tears with the back of her pale hands.
Unfortunately, it was not so. After inspecting her discovery, she was able to at least visualize what it looked like.
She began, “A cylinder bottom, but as I go up it becomes more bowl shaped. It has two buttons in the front and something that clinks when I tap it…” Then with a sad moment of realization yet still some happiness in her voice she muttered to herself, “It’s a flashlight…”
Disappointed but still slightly glad for some light, the teenage girl pressed the top bottom. She dropped the flashlight in reaction to such bright light after hours of darkness that was pointined directly at her face. The flashlight fell to the ground. The girl quickly blinked and rubbed her eyes, and picked up the flashlight, brushing dirt off of it with her cold hands.
Suddenly, she noticed it. The strange smell of rotten meat, along with a metallic smell in the air suddenly struck her nostrils, right when the feeling of something watching her began sending chills down her spine. She looked around with the flashlight, panting hard in the cold, showing up like dragon breathe. The humidity frizzed up her boy-short dark brown hair, and the dirt on her face stung. The girl then took a step into a pile of mud, and noticed how easily she could feel it in her toes through her tennis shoes.
She at last looked at herself, and noticed the little she had on for such low temperatures. Her short shorts went up to above the middle of her upper thigh, slightly ripped and the white stained with mud and rain. Her black converses were torn, one with the front decoration almost entirely open. She had on a turquoise spaghetti strap with a simple, opened gray jacket over it, and a band bracelet decorating her right wrist that read, “Bring Me the Horizon.” The girl then looked up at the sky and notes began pouring back into her head.
Songs from the band she still remembered, despite her injury, began making her smile. She grinned and chuckled slightly, then missing this exhaled, fighting away tears.
“I have to get out of here,” she thought to herself. “But I don’t know where I am, I don’t remember where to go.”
Deciding she was confused, the girl sat down on a large, fallen branch surrounded with leaves on the ground. She looked around with her flashlight, her heart still uneasy, and closed her eyes once more.
Trying to remember, she inhaled and exhaled calmly. Blurry images began to replenish her mind. A vision of her and a group of girls, of her and two older people, a vision of the girls and her in the woods, in a bright blue car, laughing and chuckling, but she was obviously afraid and worried. Many thoughts, feelings, and memories began to return to her, to the point where her head began hurting again.
She opened her eyes slowly, and breathed in the cold, humid air of the woods, now remembering significantly what had been going on.
The girl now remembered the bright blue car, her seemingly friends and her had drove in it to skip the dreadful place they called school. However, she herself was not like that. Nonetheless, she tagged along to seem fun and make a good impression on her friends. Her friends had known these woods, and she had come here before, but she felt guilty of lying to her parents. They must’ve been worried by then. Her friends and she had traveled through a familiar path in the woods that led to a small pond where they swam and had a really fun time. The girl also remembered their names, Shay, Holly, Joe, Peyton, and her, Hailey. Not only that, but she remembered how uncomfortable she was. Her germaphobia forced her to want to puke simply by thinking of going into the dirty pond, and infested forest, full of insects and germs. She had wanted to go home. So after having enough of her friends’ so called “fun”, she had asked them to leave, since it was starting to get dark.
Refusing, her friend Joe had replied, “But we’re having a great time. If you want to leave Hailey, then g o ahead, but stop trying to ruin our fun. You obviously aren’t even enjoying this, so why don’t you go home and play with your ten-year-old computer games, loser.”
Remembering this word for word, the last thing Hailey remembered were these cruel words that her other friends seemed to agree with, and being filled with such anger that she had been forced to clench her fists and grit her teeth. For after that, she could only remember an awful pain on her head, falling to the disgustingly infested ground, and a lot of screaming as she slowly closed her eyelids, passing out from the injury.
With all of these memories in mind, Hailey got up from the branch, wiped her eyes with her dirt-filled hands, not bothering to clean them, and filled with anger, and began wandering around for anything that could help her get back home.
Confused to what direction to take, Hailey decided to examine the trees around her. Usually, she learned, the drier trees or those with less leaves lead more into the forest, and moister trees as well as those with many leaves on them lead back to civilization. As she examined the trees with her flashlight, she found that the trees that seemed to lead back home were stained. Not stained with mud, clay, or animals, but blood. As Hailey ran her hands up and down the blood stains, she also noticed scratch marks that showed signs of struggle.
“What is this? It must be an animal’s….” whispered Hailey, panting slightly, trying to reassure herself.
However, as she examined the trees around it, she noticed there was at least a trickle of blood in all of them. As she looked around in the flashlight, Hailey noticed a path marks by stench and blood. A noticeable path marked with blood and scratches around the trees lead deep into the bushes.
Hailey took a giant gulp and licked her thirsty lips/ She blinked away tears, and began walking through the path, her heart beating out of her chest. She walked slowly and carefully, taking in all details that could be important. She looked around at the trees around her with her flashlight, the canopy of leaves above her, and even the dirty ground, filled with mud, dirt, and cracking mulch.
The path suddenly came to an end, where feet of dirt came in between Hailey and a high and thick dry tree. Her small, gentle nose was then violently smacked by a raw stench coming from the tree that smelled like expired milk and rotten raw meat. Determined with bravery to find her friends and go back home, Hailey clenched her fists and grit her teeth like she always did, though she was scared half to death, and slowly walked towards the tree.
Pieces of mulch and dry leaves crackled under her torn shoes, fooling her into sometimes thinking it was someone else closing in on her. Hailey let out small cries of fear, and made a run towards the tree. She bolted and stopped herself with her hands grasping the dry trunk of the tree. She felt a stinging pain in her hands, but kept her eyes closed and hugged the tree until her heartbeat slowed down enough for her to breathe.
Still scared, Hailey turned her flashlight on, which had been stored to the side of her shorts, to the tree and looked over it suspiciously. She noticed about 20 more scratches in this tree than she did the others, but strangely enough, no blood. Confused, Hailey took a step away from the tree. She stared at it up and down, as if she was looking for something specific. As she moved her head towards the top of the tree, she noticed a piece of paper nailed to the tree, splattered blood staining the bottom right corner.
Her eyes wide open, Hailey reached for the note, stretching her feet to the tip, and her hand and arm as hard as she could, despite the pain of the scratches and holes cracking like the dry mulch under her feet. She at last reached the note with her the tip of her fingers and ripped it quickly off with determination and sudden courage of Hercules.
Hailey relaxed her muscles, but still shook a bit in fear of the note she now held.
“What is this?” whispered Hailey in the dark night, lighting the note with her bright flashlight.
She looked around, but saw no one, and read the note.

Her eyes widened to an extreme. Tears welled up in her eyes from not blinking and fear. Her body shook, causing her to drop the note, written on thin yellow paper, to the ground. As the note fell to the dirt ground like a feather, swaying left and right, Hailey saw it. Her flashlight had fallen to the ground, conveniently pointing next to the tree’s direction. Now Hailey understood it all; the loss of memory, the hit to the head, the screaming, the waking up in an unknown part of the woods.

Hailey looked ahead, her eyes still widely opened, pouring tears, at the four dead bodies carelessly thrown one above the other. The top body, which had once belonged to her friend Holly, the only one in the group who had truly treated her well, had a lifeless expression, her eyes dead, and dry blood staining the tip of her slightly parted mouth.
The girls under her were covered in blood and clear stab wounds, Peyton missing her right hand, which had been connected to her oddly broken arm that stuck out like a boomerang.

Hailey blinked slowly, and with a vision of darkness, she felt a strong grasp to her neck, a thin slice around the front of her neck from ear to ear, and suddenly, nothing at all.
Tears that had welled up in her lifeless eyes ran down her now bloody cheeks and reached her still thirsty, opened mouth, as the note reached the ground and read; “Game Over.”