Original Fiction An incident on a forest road (Horror Story Fragment)

Crom's Black Blade

Well-known member
Not sure if this eligible to be posted here as the story is unfinished and I'm not a hundred percent sure I know exactly where I want to take it. Wrote it a couple of months ago mostly for fun and because I had this one scene playing in my head which formed the start of the story and anyway I thought rather than just collecting dust on my harddrive I'd up load it and maybe get some helpful advice on how to improve.

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Shafts of quicksilver moonlight seeped down to the forest floor through the dense canopy of branches illuminating the path for the cyclopean creature which squeezed between the trees. Sides of its immense body scraping and sloughing off crumbling flecks of rough bark as it followed the twisting scent of prey. Over seven feet tall, it would have been even larger if its body wasn’t slanted horizontal almost slouched supported by thick tree trunk rear legs which ended in razor sharp claws which tore at the spongy earth. Forward limbs rising up from either side of its narrow, laboring chest ending in steely, clawed tipped fingers. Angular, tapering head rising from a thick, yellow neck and ending in an uneven snout lined with a row of interlocking teeth jutting outward from between its pebbly skin. Behind, held low, a long sinewy tail lethargically swished scraping just above the moss-laden ground but should the creature need to sprint could rise serving as the perfect counter-balance to its ponderous bulk allowing it to run at tremendous speed. From the roof of its mouth, just behind the two ventral slits that were its nostrils, the jagged tip of horn sprouted out bleached as bone.

The creature’s skin, an earthen red the color of clay along its back which faded to a tawny yellow along its belly, scabrous and rough looking like crocodile scales yet almost seemed to glisten in the moonlight. The bark-like skin slick and looking slimy to the touch. The oily flesh flexing as the beast turned its long, tapered head in the confined space as it sniffed catching a new and more promising scent. The tangy, metallic odor of blood wafting across it as the huge monster shifted its gait in a new direction. Powerful body uprooting brush and smaller saplings in the process as the outcropping of trees began to thin and fade away from it. The narrow space opening up much to the beleaguered animal’s relief. Emerging from the thicket onto the side of the road it shook rolling it’s immense body from side to side dislodging twigs and clumps of leaves which had clung to its scraggily form before stepping forward onto the charcoal colored tarmac.

Long, dagger like claws of its feet loudly tapping against the black pavement as the reptilian followed the appetizing scent into the middle of the roadway. Stopping above the crumpled, stiffened body of a roadkill. The beast quizzically tilting its head to one side as it studied its potential meal looking down at its blood matted brown fur stained black as it congealed from the heat of the day. The lifeless milky-white eye staring up from beneath a snapped antler from a ruptured neck twisted sickenly around from the unfathomable gee forces its body had been accelerated by.

The creature’s sight and smell, slowly starting to be overpowered by the sickly sweet odor of decay, utterly as alien to the Reptilian as the strange environs it had awoken too. Finding the air far too thin and strained, the temperature too frigid to be comfortable. Its lean, muscular chest heaving like a bellow to breath while the night’s air caressed it’s armored skin leeching desperately needed heat and forcing the beast to burn precious calories to replenish.

Hunger making up the beast’s mind it let out a triumphant dirge which echoed through the tree tops as the monster hunched down. Back furrowing as it treated it’s snout like a shovel raking the dead deer from the pavement with a muted crunching of bone and flesh. The stiffened corpse dangling out one side of the monster’s trap like jaws just as an ever louder, metallic cry seemed to offer challenge to the Reptilian. A pair of blinding twin suns appearing from around the edge of the bend in the roar as a red corvette whipped around and barreled past towards the startled scaly demon.

Who reared twisting it’s head up from the ground still weighted with its meal hanging from its jaws peering upwards at the speeding lights and just having time to glimpse the red car behind before hard steel bumper and grill of something even larger and heavier than itself collided at eighty-eight miles per hour and rising. Deer flying through the air to vanish in the trees as the creature flipped up over onto the crushed in hood then slide across the side flopping off onto the roadside as the car skidded.

Red tail lights flashing on as tires squelched and the stricken vehicle swerved off the road skating across the grass and digging rough furrows through the dirt just narrowly avoiding running into the woods themselves before coasting to a stop.

Behind a second pair of headlights appeared along with a racing engine as a black T-bird swooped around the curve. Not even noticing the darken mass of the beast laying in the side of the road as it sped past only slowing enough as it passed the red car for the driver, a teen with bleached blonde hair gelled into spikes and too much facial jewelry, to extend his middle finger to the luckless occupant. Than continued on onward to win their race and his opponent’s car. Even if he’d need a tow truck to collect his winnings now.

As the boy’s taillights vanished into the distance of the gloomy night the corvette whined struggling to start. Each attempt becoming more sluggish and strained until it gave out entirely. Copious amounts of escaping steam was by then starting to appear curling out from beneath the totaled hood and buckled inward grill alerting the driver to further damage.

Admitting defeat the door to the cab creaked open the interior lightening weakly flashing on and off as the eight-track tape briefly played then came to an abrupt, mangled end. The distorted chords wafting among the pine trees as the car’s battery died completely plunging the man into night’s embrace as he rose.

Moving to tug his leather jacket tighter around his lean body against the cold chill of the wind. He held himself like a predator, his back stiffly arched and his broad shoulders level. Muscles tensed and coiled like a spring but not wound so tightly to impede a sudden needed motion or movement. His face flinty with cold, aloof eyes and a stone-like neutral expression. A messy shock of blonde hair falling into his face adding an almost boyish character to an otherwise stern demeanor. Once out of the car he winced feeling a red hot poker jab and twist underneath his tenderized ribs prompting him to reach his left hand underneath his leather motorcycle jacket gingerly, and not so gingerly in places, probing with his fingers to feel that everything was still where it was supposed to be.

His was a tall, slim build vaguely athletic with an unassuming face and a mess of short-cropped coppery red hair. Getting out of the car he winced feeling a red hot poker jab and twist underneath his tenderized ribs prompting him to reach his left hand underneath his jacket gingerly, and not so gingerly in places, probing with his fingers to feel that everything was still where it was supposed to be.

Out in the darkness something bellowed and through the pearly shafts of moonlight spilling down something shifted trying to rise back up only to collapse onto itself almost instantly. The cry turning reedy and more forlorn before strangling off entirely. The silence which replaced it somehow more ominous as the man took his hand out from his jacket and stared out at the mysterious lump in the road. Keenly aware of what he thought he remembered seeing even as he knew it to be impossible.

The race well and truly lost, he glanced one final time over to his hood with steam still bubbling out from underneath and then set out trudging back along the ruts dug into the torn grass until the hard shoes of his shoes clapped against asphalt. The sound of his footsteps echoing against the pines and the sound of his breath his only companions as he walked down along the edge of the road where the creature had been slung too. Shadows concealing all but the roughest outline of its true form.

Approaching, the Driver reached his hand back into his tenderized side feeling that poker renew its stabbing. Picking out the rust colored hump of the beast’s body, one tree like leg folded beneath it while the other stretched splayed outward. It’s curved talons unfurled and jutting upwards towards the starry sky. The monster’s tail curled protectively against its body bent around its thick, muscular thigh. The Driver following up along the creature’s contorted back in the other direction to its fleshy neck and head cradled just out of view behind its body.

Which was the moment the Ceratosaurus spurred its dying body into motion wheeling its spiked head around as its jaws unfurled towards the Driver lashing out with all its impotent fury and rage at the only thing within reach. Recoiling backwards from the beast the Driver’s mailed, right fist exploded forward connecting underneath the thing’s reptilian jaw catapulting the head away from him a split second before his handgun cleared out from beneath his jacket. Two shots splitting the night in quick succession as he fired into the dinosaur’s center of mass.

Only then did the Driver speak, shaking his throbbing hand in the air in front of him.

“Fuck.” The word coming out low and ominous.

Glancing at his injured fist, hard sinew and flesh meeting even harder scales and bone. Confirming there would be no lasting damage, certainly less than the twisting knot of pain in his ribs, he peered back down at the lizard lying at his feet. Both of his bullets piercing the animal through the side of its narrow chest splitting bone and puncturing through its lungs. A strangled, wheezing sound escaping from its throat as it fought to draw for each new breath. A battle it was quickly losing as it blood riddled chest shallowly inflated and contracted. Its amber-hued eye, glazed and unfocused, looking up at the Driver who stepped forward once again to press the muzzle of his gun right beside its skull and fired spraying chips of skull and brain fragments over the pavement.

“Couldn’t stay extinct, could you? Miserable, oversized handbag” He vented at the corpse.

Returning his gun to beneath his jacket, right above the pistol shaped bruise starting to clot on the side of his chest, the Driver turned on his heels content the beast was well and truly dead. Cunningly pragmatic at the best of times he did not overburden himself with thought as to how what had transpired had come about. Be it madness or horror. For the moment he accepted what his eyes saw and his hand had felt and still ached from and his steely mind focused on the long walk to the secluded community of King’s Lot which lay far in the distance.

Abandoning his corvette was a much more distressing task the Driver sparing it a longing look as he walked past where he’d driven off onto the road’s shoulder the grass splattered tires embedded into the churned up ground. Even with her front end and engine block mangled by the high speed collision it didn’t seem right to abandon her like this almost feeling like he was leaving a faithful steed for the vultures.

More practically it would damn near be dawn before he made it all the way down Cunningham road and reached King’s Lot. All while his laboring chest felt like someone was taking a piledriver to it. If there was a chance of patching his hot rod up enough to limp into town it would be the far more preferable option. Knowing that, along with a small spare canteen of gas and a half empty bottle of motor oil, there was a workman’s pouch of tools in the corvette’s trunk and a flashlight. It would take only a few moments to pry the roof and wedge it open and see if the damage was as bad as he thought it was-

From unseen in the woods a reptilian cry rose over the treetops long and drawn out answering the previous challenge made by the pile of roadkill the Driver had left. A haunting, loud howl which sounded like it sprung from a set of jaws with many, many sharp teeth. Making up his mind, the Driver quickened his pace hurrying away from his car and further down isolated wilderness road. He was a pragmatic man after all.

As he walked he strained his ears hoping to detect the whip-like snap of a breaking branch or the hard scrabble of talons scratching at the black top that would clue him in that he was being pursued. After a few terse minutes passed and he heard neither or the reptilian cry again he breathed a sigh of relief.

Not that one looking at his appearance could have realized for the same wary trepidation hung over his form like a shroud his eyes alert and watchful of the surrounding shadows. Eyeing the knotted branches of the trees as they encroached from either side the road pivoting around another bend in one of the jack-knife turns which made Cunningham road so popular for the teenage street racers.

He was perhaps halfway skimming the jagged turn, keeping a watchful eye on the claustrophobic shadows which surrounded him, when he caught the first whiff of it. That tangy, coppery odor he wished he was allowed to forget along with the briny taste it produced in the back of his throat. The fingers of the Driver’s hand moving mechanically and without conscious thought back beneath his jacket fingering the rough grip of his reliable German made pistol in its leather holster already knowing now what was waiting for him.

Finding it greeting him as he followed the serving road at the base of a rusted speed limit sign. The corroded metal face pockmarked with .22 caliber bullet holes the aforementioned teenagers, or their blue-collar fathers, riddled through it when they got drunk and decided to blow off a little steam with a squirrel gun. The pile of bloody meat and tattered coveralls scooped in a loose pile at the base of the sign likely belonged to the latter group. Almost as if in some cruel jest the banks of clouds chose that moment to draw back from across the shining moon’s face like a sliding curtain bathing the street in its milky illumination.

Potent stench as well as buzzing clouds of flies rising up off of the body, or what remained of it, as the Driver neared peering down at a messily ruptured chest with rib bones protruding from the torn flesh splayed outward and hollowed. The viscera it should contain, the heart and the lungs or other soft tissue, scooped out and removed. A few wisps of a mangy beard the color of bad rust resting against the figure’s mangled chest and about all that remained of the bloody, grinning skull’s face that had been stripped and pecked at. A blood splattered hand still clenched in a deathgrip around the base of the sign the man must had grabbed for support when he’d first been pounced upon and knocked down by his attacker.

A surprising small attacker judging from the obvious spoor leading from the corpse in the form of trampled grass still slick with the drying blood of its previous feast. The trail vanishing a few yard away into the underbrush of the woods which it and the other creatures clearly had made their home. Small but incredibly vicious and frighteningly ravenous not to mention if it could knock and pin a full grown man to the ground it had to be unbelievably strong.

An unsettling reminder the Driver hadn’t put as much distance between himself and danger as he would have preferred. Veering sharply from the gory trail of crimson was a line of very human muddy footprints sunk into the crushed earth leading further down along the bank of trees where the man had evidently emerged barreling through the overgrowth. A breadcrumb of bent and splintered branches heading backwards from the opening deeper into the forest’s interior.

In the shadowy light he couldn’t make out any other tracks emerging after the man from the woods but there was little doubt he’d been pursued. The spacing of the footprints as well as the depth of their impression showing he’d been running for his life before being gutted like a fish by the roadside. Where he’d been fleeing too was another matter there being scarcely a soul along Cunningham road especially at this time of night which was why the local teens had taken to using it for street racing.

He supposed the man had been hoping to reach one of the spacious and luxurious homes nestled along the rim of the placid, green-teal tinted waters of Forest Green Lake. A handyman perhaps, judging from the well-worn and faded strips of denim and plaid clinging to the devoured corpse, tending to one of the vacant summer homes during the off-season. Only he’d been running in the wrong direction for that to make much sense.

The Driver trying to recall from the map in his mind what, if anything, lay out the way the man had emerged from. Somewhere out there was the rotting, partial remains of a campsite closed since the 50’s and some ways beyond that, if you went far enough, you’d reach the outskirts of the old Sutter Kane’s farm out along Cobbs End. And of course acre after acre of unmolested woodlands not worth the time or effort to develop.

The Driver puckering the side of his cheek chewing on it pensively as he found himself looking at the trampled opening once again.

“Bad idea…bad idea.” He muttered to himself, his hand still resting firmly against the butt of his handgun inside his dark jacket.

Telling himself to ignore that nagging prickling sensation in the back of his head and just keep heading down the road. Maybe try to find one of the summer houses and see if they had a working phone or even better a car tucked away tight in the garage like a metallic mummy in its sarcophagus.

Instead he found himself stepping off from the street into the slick grass following along the muddy trails slipping his gun free with a smooth gesture and holding it out in front of him with both hands as if a talisman to ward off evil. Regretting his decision even as he stepped beneath the tenebrous fingers of the outstretched branches the pungent scent of death only becoming stronger the further he went only now it was comingled with the equally familiar smoky scent of ash and soot. His body breaking out in cold sweats from the heat of phantom fires long since extinguished everywhere but the dark corners of his mind.

He didn’t have to go far before finding the source the very forest itself shrinking away from it. The trees having been felled in a circle and hauled towards the center of the self-made clearing a rusty ax impaled through the center of one of the freshly cut tree stumps. In the center was the dormant hearth of a massive bonfire a rippling haze hanging over the broken, blacken lumps all that remained of all the logs.

Around it, highlighted by the silver beams which pierced through the milky skin of the passing clouds, lay the bodies as stripped and shredded as the one by the street. Their chests caved and hollowed out. A thick, black blanket of buzzing insects gnawing at the remains. All manner of inhuman claw prints surrounded the circle of bodies heading off into divergent directions far too many for the Driver to even guess at their number. All different types and sizes.

But what drew him in compelling him to ignore the sheets of rising, stinging flies that rose chokingly from the dead lay on a crude alter of rough-hewn and oblong stones messily piled in front of the bonfire. A sinister significance and purpose invested into it despite its simple construction the ground well-trod around it with multiple-different foot prints spiraling around in a festive energy and delight.

Resting on top in what appeared to be an example of simple “hill-folk art” was a figure of bundled, dried straw. The yellowed straw tethered into four stalks which supported the base of the crouching effigy its body stooped casting an arm out to either side of its stone alter and sprouting two more from where those arms joined to its body. A twisted knot forming its head with a wide bill giving it an almost shovel like appearance while its three eyes formed an inverted “V” across its forehead. The eyes themselves bits of blue tinted glass sunk deep into the brittle straw.

From its back rose two parallel ridges forming wings and the Driver got the uneasy impression that, if the creature was one of flesh instead of fibrous plant material, it would be quite agile and swift.

An unwholesome and malignant offshoot of some fey or forest spirit passed down from the earliest settlers who made these hill lands their home and too long fermented in isolation. The Driver finding himself drawn towards the figure and strongly repulsed at the same time. Hardly a spiritual man at the best of times even he couldn’t ignore the uncleanness which hovered over the foul thing. This grim specter which had silently watched as the men who had crafted it and prayed to it had been attacked and eaten.

The Driver unaware as he contemplated the effigy that he was being watched or of the shadowy figure which slowly crept into the clearing behind him. A sudden crack of a snapping twig alerting him too late as the other figure swept a large branch like a bat clubbing him across the back of his skull as he tried to turn.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Degenerated hill-folks and dinosaur?
GIVE ME MOAR!
And remember,deliver beatiful blond american girls molested by evil mutant,dinosaurs or both!

Becouse,if there is no beautiful molested american blond girl,it is not true horror !
Of course,when she would be almost raped,our american hero would save her!
And in next issue,too!
 

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