Chapter 5: You're Not Alone Anymore

Chapter 5: You're Not Alone Anymore

The scream, his scream, echoed in the silent chambers of Leo’s mind long after the dead walkie-talkie in his hand fell silent. He dropped it as if it were white-hot, scrambling back from the piece of plastic and chrome like it was a venomous snake. His breath came in shallow, useless gasps. The sunlit clearing, which moments ago had felt like a stage, now felt like an open grave.

This wasn't a memory. It was a prophecy. A recording of a future that the forest had already decided for him.

The instinct to flee, the one he had fought so hard against during his first night patrol, now took over with absolute authority. There was no room for logic, no space for skepticism. There was only the primal, lizard-brain command that had been whispered at him from his own radio: Run.

He turned and bolted, not caring where the trail was, only caring about putting distance between himself and the haunted campground. He crashed through ferns and ducked under low-hanging branches, the sound of his own ragged breathing and hammering heart the only percussion in the unnaturally silent woods. He ran until his lungs burned and his legs screamed, finally stumbling to a halt and leaning against the rough bark of a redwood, gasping for air.

He looked back. He could no longer see the clearing. Good. He took a moment, trying to get his bearings. The sun was high and to his left. The main trail should be west of here. He just had to push through the undergrowth and he’d find it. He was a ranger. He knew these woods.

But as he scanned the landscape, a cold, disorienting dread began to creep back in. The trees looked wrong. The familiar landmarks—a split-trunk cedar, a distinctive moss-covered boulder—were gone. Every direction looked the same: an impenetrable, repeating pattern of massive trunks and deep, featureless shadow. It was as if the forest was actively rearranging itself around him, erasing his path out.

He checked the compass on his wrist. The needle spun lazily, then faster, a frantic, dizzying pirouette. Useless. Silas's words about iron deposits had been a lie, a placid cover for a terrifying truth. The forest wasn't just a place; it was a mechanism. A trap.

Panic began to rise in his throat, hot and acidic. He forced it down. The sun was his ally. As long as there was daylight, he could navigate. He could find his way. He just had to keep moving west.

But the light was changing.

It wasn't the gentle, golden descent of a normal afternoon. The sunlight seemed to be thinning, losing its warmth and intensity as if being siphoned away by an unseen drain. The vibrant greens of the ferns faded to a sickly olive. The rich, red bark of the trees deepened to a bruised purple. He watched in stunned horror as the sun, which should have had hours left in the sky, plummeted toward the horizon with impossible speed. The shadows of the trees didn't lengthen; they bled outwards, consuming the remaining light in greedy gulps.

Within what felt like ten minutes, the sky had turned a deep, starless twilight. The temperature dropped so sharply he could see his own panicked breath misting in the air. The day hadn't ended. It had been murdered.

He was trapped. Lost in a hostile, living labyrinth, and the night was coming.

His hand flew to the walkie-talkie on his shoulder strap, his one and only link to a world where the sun behaved as it should. "Silas! Silas, come in! This is Leo! Does anyone copy? I'm in Sector 7 and I'm lost! Something's wrong!"

He released the button, his plea echoing into the oppressive quiet. For a moment, there was only the hiss of static. He was about to transmit again when the speaker crackled. It wasn't Silas’s voice.

It was his own.

"Just a few more hours and the shift is over. Can't wait."

It was from a conversation he’d had with another ranger last week, a casual, throwaway line. But the radio distorted it, stretching the words, imbuing them with a sinister, mocking quality.

The radio crackled again. This time it was a woman's voice. A girl’s.

"It's my favorite song, Leo. Can you turn it up?"

Lily.

His blood turned to ice. It was his sister’s voice, bright and full of life, from years ago. A memory he had buried under a mountain of guilt. It was from the day of the accident.

"No," Leo whispered, fumbling to turn the radio off. But the dial wouldn't move. It was fused in place.

The cheerful memory was ripped apart as the sound of screeching tires and shattering glass tore through the speaker, a high-fidelity recording of his worst nightmare. Lily’s voice, warped and metallic, began to scream—not in joy, but in pain. The sounds twisted together, a symphony of his failure, broadcast for an audience of one in the heart of the devouring dark.

He clawed at the radio, finally ripping it from its clip and hurling it into the woods. It landed with a thud, but it didn't go silent. Lily’s distorted screams continued to echo from the undergrowth, a beacon of his own personal hell.

He covered his ears, stumbling backwards, away from the sound, tears of terror and grief streaming down his face. He backed straight into the hard trunk of a redwood and slid down to the ground, pulling his knees to his chest. He was broken. The forest had found the cracks in his soul and was now prying them open with calculated cruelty.

The screaming from the discarded radio abruptly cut out.

The silence that followed was absolute. Complete. And then, from that perfect void, the voice returned. Not from the radio. It was the whisper from his first night, the intimate, genderless sound that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was calm. Patient. Victorious.

It spoke a final, horrifying message, a pronouncement of his new state of being.

"You're not alone anymore."

A twig snapped in the darkness in front of him.

Slowly, shakily, Leo lifted his head. He fumbled for the flashlight on his belt, his numb fingers barely able to work the switch. The beam flickered on, a pathetic cone of white against an ocean of black.

He swept the light across the woods in front of him. Trees. Bushes. More trees. Nothing.

Then he saw it.

It wasn’t solid. In a patch of darkness between two ancient redwoods, the air itself seemed to glitch. It shimmered, like heat haze off asphalt, but it was cold, a pocket of visual noise in the stillness of the forest. It was a patch of reality that had been replaced with television static.

As he watched, paralyzed, the static began to rise. It coalesced, pulling itself upwards from the ground like a column of dark smoke and corrupted data. It formed a shape. A tall, impossibly thin humanoid figure, its limbs too long, its proportions a mockery of the human form. Its edges were indistinct, constantly shifting and fizzing, a silhouette cut out of the fabric of the universe.

It had no face, no features, no substance.

Just a void in the shape of a man. And in the heart of the swirling static where its head should be, two faint, red embers ignited, fixing on him with an intelligence older than the trees themselves.

He was finally face-to-face with the silence.