Threnody (003).

(This is a 300-word-a-day project.)

Where am I...Where am I...It was her own voice, doubled over until it was gibberish. She located where it was coming from: it was their cones hanging from the branches, the fiber hair wriggling from within the conifer humming in imitation, and each tree seemed to have its own record of its victims as cries of NO and HELP and OH GOD filled the valley air, and the yipes and yelps of small animals and the shrieks of birds caught mid-flight. Jesse covered her ears, and though this helped it could not drown them out completely.

The way past the trees turned out to be mostly safe; though they reached for her as hard as they could, wood creaking ominously as the pines bent in half in their attempts to catch her, she was well out of reach. Bones from previous kills were dropped in barely covered piles, and in one of them Jesse saw the remains of a thick sweater, which she lost no time snatching free and running backward, just missing the whiplash branches that came at her. It smelled horrible but it was dry, and in a few moments she was not exactly herself again, but much better. And the snow was beginning to weaken, widening her visibility so that she could see that the pines were being replaced with open fields and tall dead grasses that rustled in the wind, and the black ribbon of a river cutting through the snow in a nearly perfect straight line.

But even as she took in these details, hurrying faster now to get away from the trees, she suddenly drew up short: her eyes slowly widened and her mouth hung open in shock as the little creature stepped into view and began to feebly make its right at her.