In an instant I had been dragged away. It was only a few minutes of being by myself. Just yesterday, I asked a girl I liked since the beginning of school to go on a date with me. I feel embarrassed since I asked her out in front of the whole school. The answer was an obvious no. The air was cold and humid in the spring morning. On my slow and agitating walk to college, rustling and a light growl came from the woods. I had a brain, but with little to lose, I decided to check out the source of it.

Deeper and deeper in the forest I went as fog started to roll in. The twigs that were once starting to unthaw from the winter had disappeared from my trail. I had stepped on quite a few and it puzzled me why the sound suddenly stopped. I had no time to think about it at that point in time as I spotted something in the distance that resembles a bonfire. The air had gone crisp as though summer just started. The sky once filled with brilliance and light grew dark and weary. A thick fog that covered everything but the bonfire and the logs around it settled into my vision, at least what was left of it as I sprinted straight to the bonfire with the feeling of something breathing down my back. It was less breathing as it was gargling.

The bonfire was empty before I had reached it. The fire was lit as if only seconds ago, but no one was in sight. Within seconds of me stepping into the safety of the light, a black and fiery orange shadow showed itself for a second after a fog thicker than the one surrounding the bonfire shot up from the floor, 2 more following within one second. A man with rugged clothing and a shaved mullet stepped out from the first burst of fog, and a woman stepped out from the next one. The woman looked athletic and had a double-braided hairstyle. The last man to come out was in an unkempt business suit that was missing the jacket. The last man looked scared out of his mind and the other two looked calm and composed, like this wasn’t their first time. To be honest, I felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest. 

In a few seconds, a few words were exchanged. “The name’s David,” exclaimed the man with a jacket and flat jogging pants that were covered in filth.

“My name is Megan,” the athletic woman wearing a red jogging suit accompanied by a white strip across the sides said with confidence.

“My name i-is Dwight,” the man with the unkept dress clothing.

David rushed to tell me, “You must be new here. You’ll learn the ropes soon.”

“Hope you have a high pain tolerance or at least can fix a generator,” Megan added

A timer appeared on one of the logs set down and began a one minute countdown. With four buttons next to the timer, all but my pressed their timer. The timer had 5 slashes on it, similar to tally marks but in a splatter type of font. Four across, one diagonal through the middle. All lit up except one, which I deducted was mine. As soon as I pressed my button, all the tally marks lit up in red and the timer went straight down to five seconds left. After it hit zero, the others threw some things in the fire. David threw a shroud, Meg tossed a small statue of a woman on her knees praying, and Dwight shyly dropped a Bog Laurel that smelled fragrant enough to pierce the crisp air of the dead night. Something or someone chucked a bowl that smelled horrible near the bonfire. Inside the bowl was a red bowl of thick, mushy pudding with eyes and fingers sticking out. David proceeded to pick up the bowl and said “Gotta respect their offerings.” I didn’t understand. What did they offer to the bonfire? What did these items mean? Who were they offering these mysterious items to? David dropped the bowl into the fire with the rest of the offerings and everything faded to black.

As I regained vision, a forest that had an opening appeared before me. The opening had a very small building in it that seemed like a small warehouse. Within my surroundings were an unfinished structure with open windows. A broken, rustic generator was set in a peculiar spot against the open wall of the brick structure. David had seemed to be placed only meters away from me. David instructed us to follow him. I only realised that he waved at “us” when Megan had seemed to materialize from the shadows of the wreckage. In mere seconds, we stumbled upon a rudimentary shack, with two doors adjacent to each other on either end and windows exactly across from each other. One of the windows was boarded up sloppily, the scratched boards placed so badly that it can easily be seen through with no effort.

Within the shack that is nearly in shambles was a set of wide, darkened stairs leading to what resembles a basement. As I trekk down the stairs, exposed to eyes that don’t exist. It was as if I was going mad. Even further down the steps, I can hear an ominous growling from all sides of me. At the bottom of the steps, there was a corner leading to the bottom of the basement. The basement had a cold concrete floor with a metal square attached to the middle of it. Atop the square, metal sheet was 4 wooden stands connected to each other in the middle. One iron meat hook each hung from each of the stands in a cardinal direction pattern. The basement was lit up by the cracks in the

thin, wooden structure that seemed to hold something behind them. These lights glow with an orange haze, and the closer to the wall, the louder the growls seemed to get.

After assessing the area and on the way back up, David yelled, “Stay down there and get in a locker!” with urgency.  As I did what I was told, my heartbeat quickened and I could feel it try to burst out of my chest. My heart got loader and loader, faster and faster as a song played in my ears that screamed danger. Up above, a third pair of footsteps similar to David’s and Meg’s faded in. The new rapid footsteps sped up for a second and in an instant, Meg screamed in agony as if an animal tore a chunk of flesh out of her. Her light footsteps vanished into the distance as I’m sure she had escaped. Only David and the other set of similar footsteps remained. David’s grunts could be heard for what felt like hours. He was struggling with the new pair of footsteps that had come recently. The new footsteps were now paired with the struggle grunts of a young man who sounded to be in his late teens. The voice was partially muffled by something covering his face. Within 10 seconds, two screams came from David who sounded like he was familiar with the pain he had been dealt.

David’s mass had hit the floor of the shack, the footsteps of the assaulter right next to him. David’s barely breathing body was lifted from the ground of the rickety shack and the footsteps that became heavy came to the top of the steps and froze, as if it was deciding to come down here with David upon his shoulder. His choice was to leave and find another place for David as the heavy creeks of the floorboards vanished in the opposite direction of where Meg had escaped to. The music that blared in my brain calmed down slowly as I exited the 4 lockers that had been placed in the basement.

With further inspection of the basement, a chest appeared in my sight from a concealed corner that I hadn't noticed until now. The chest was a flat rectangle made mostly of birch wood and shiny metal that protected the edges and the slit where the latch was placed. Attached to the latch was a rusty lock, worn out by time. Upon picking the lock on the chest with a hairpin left on the floor for 10 seconds, it opened in an instant with a moderately loud sound. Laid comfortably inside was a medical bag with pristine condition materials filled within it. “This would come in use later,” I said aloud to myself as I thought of Meg’s terrifying scream and David’s struggle that ended quickly. 

In haste, I bolted to where Meg had run off to. Wherever she was, she wasn’t gonna live for long if she didn’t receive medical attention. Following the bloodstains through the grass that reached my shins, I heard Meg’s cries of pain coming from near a conjunction of brick walls similar to the ones I first spawned in the middle of, except that this combination was built in a different way. There was an L-shaped wall with a clone asymmetrical to itself. The only noticeable difference was a window on the secondary L-shaped wall. The first wall had an opening in it where a pallet tied together with moldy rope leaned against the wall. The opening was just big enough to drop the pallet in a diagonal direction. Standing right under the pallet was Meg, holding her abdominal with enough pressure to stop the bleeding from knocking her out within seconds.

With the medkit in tow, I walked up behind her. I did so quietly, but just enough so she knew it was me. My medkit was set down next to her and opened slowly, as I didn’t want to mess up any of the medical supplies inside. Without any medical knowledge, this was going to be a hassle. There was a slash wound across her stomach that dug deep, so deep that I thought I would be able to see her organs if she moved even the slightest. The blood coming from the wound had to be stopped immediately or else she could fall over unconscious within a matter of seconds. From inside the medkit, I took a sewing needle and thin but sturdy string out of it. These items shouldn’t really be used for medical issues, but I had to do something fast. Stitching together arteries very crudely and doing the same for the muscle tissue, the process was over. Even though that bleeding had stopped, there was still more. These wounds seemed to have been done in a single swing of a small blade. The wound was separated at points and didn’t go nearly as deep as the previous wound. 

Luckily, I still had enough medical supplies to fix those injuries three times over, but I heard David’s scream in the distance. It was ear wrenching. In a hurry, Meg stood up and bolted off faster than I could ever go. Almost right after, the healing process was completed. I felt the sudden urge to scream at the top of my lungs, and I did so. Meg bolted off into the distance, knowing something or someone was going to come this way. Seconds after, rustling came from behind me. It was a young man with a leather jacket and a cloth hood. His breathing was heavy. He seemed to know that I was new here, evidence being that he signaled to me to follow him. In my head, I thought “He must live here in that mysterious shack of horror.” Without thinking deeper into something so obvious, I followed him into the small warehouse that seemed to be in the middle of the area.

From the middle of this confinement, I could see why it should be called so. There was a long brick wall separating the outside darkness from us. There were also two gates lined up in two different parts of the wall that surrounded us. They were on exact opposite sides on the wall. The gates had electrical boxes with large switches alongside them with three red bulbs across the top of each. I finally used my proper thought process to put together that the generators must be connected to the gate switches.

Inside the warehouse that seemed to be the size of the shack or smaller, electricity was running without a generator. Lightbulbs were stably on and there were four pistons in close proximity to each other. Between these were one of the generators that I speculate to be connected to the gates that would surely be our exit. Upon getting close to the generator to inspect the condition, I spot that some oil is leaking out of an exposed tube across the left side. The panel along the backside of the generator had been pried off, exposing some wires that were cut. The left side had 3 levers on the side of it. Both the left and right side of the generator had openings that exposed the contents in the middle, so open that you could see straight through it if not for the wires and gears partially stopping it. As I reached my hand inside from the right side of the generator to get to work on it, the teenager took a mask out of his back pocket and placed it on his face. Along with it came out a tanto tracker knife dripping with blood. The mask was an oval, white template with a simplistic smiling, energetic face. Without hesitation, he yanked me off the generator with incredible strength for his build and hoisted me on his shoulder. I tried wriggling and writhing around, but to no avail as I was taken outside and placed on a meat hook that was so crude that it shouldn’t even be standing. The instant the hook went through my shoulder, I blacked out from the pain.