I was gradually able to sift through the noise we made as we shuffled forward, and the sounds we were not generating ourselves. The occasional scream and clash of battle remained distant, but I had an increasing sense of wrongness. The silence around us was unnerving. Used to the constant background hum of the city, I thought initially that maybe this was normal. It hadn’t felt like this earlier, but now, when we stopped for a break, the only discernible sound was our own harsh and overly loud breathing. Not so much as a rustle was to be heard in our vicinity – no small animals, no birds. If there were worms in the ground, they were frozen in fear as we passed. I had been terrified many times in the last few days, but the very air seemed to be trying to warn me of our danger now. The sinister threat that seeped towards us was palpable, and yet nothing appeared.
We kept moving. I could feel Marcus flagging, his weight becoming heavier as he leaned on me more and more for support, and yet, by silent agreement, we pushed forward, unwilling to pause, desperate to get out the other side of this forest.
A flash of white slipped through the trees in front of us, causing us to stop still. Marcus looked down at me. I could barely make out his expression in the dark. I swallowed, a cold sweat breaking out on my face and back. We had to keep going. There was an increasingly foul smell; the forest no longer smelled of trees and fallen leaves but a gut-turning stench that had built up around us. Another pale streak snatched across the periphery of my vision as I looked at Marcus. I whipped round. There was nothing there, but whatever it was had allowed us to see it; it was coming for us, and it was fine with us knowing.
We stepped forward again. We had to keep moving. We continued in the direction we had been going, despite the glimpse of something we had seen. Whatever was out there, we couldn’t outrun it anyway so why let it divert us from our path? We took the old-fashioned guns from our packs. The metal felt solid in our hands, even if the weapons’ effectiveness against whatever was out there was questionable. Each step felt like it could be our last before the thing attacked. Dread built up in my gut like a stone until I thought it might paralyse me. When the thing did come for us, I was almost relieved.
Not entirely though… After all, who wants to meet a white hound the size of a small horse in a pitch-black wood, on a night when the dead can walk? We turned to face it as it slunk out of the night, its snarling visage dominated by teeth the size of my fingers. That was just what I needed, to put a visual of my delicate fingers and this otherworldly creature’s fangs together.
It emerged silently out of the night itself. Its large feet padded towards us, its strangely prescient eyes malevolently fixed on us. There was an aura of death about it. The smell that had been heavy over the forest had its source here. Rotting and alien, the foetid, noxious stench was overpowering. It had a physical presence. My eyes watered as I held the blood-red gaze of the massive white hound slipping out of the shadows. It weighted itself backwards, its massive haunches gathering power before it leapt directly at us. We raised our weapons and fired in the direction of the pale beast. The sound of the gunshots snapped through the night. We fired again and again, and by sheer luck or horrifying proximity managed to hit the giant hound. We struck it mid-leap and it crashed sideways into a tree and lay there, unmoving. Another ghostly shadow lurked in the trees beyond it but with its partner down, the second one chose not to attack and slunk back into the night.
“What was that?” Marcus’s hushed tones broke the returning normal quiet of the night.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I answered, shivering in reaction to the adrenaline still coursing through my veins. I had been sure we were about to die a truly horrible death under the teeth and claws of that feral beast. I glanced uneasily at it. Was it dead? Did anything remain dead out here in this bloody endless forest? “Let’s go before it decides to have another go.”
We stumbled on, our near miss giving us a new surge of energy.
“Look.”
I paused at Marcus’s command and raised my head in the direction he pointed. Lights… or rather the glow of a town. We were finally out the other side. Now that I was paying attention to more than where to place my next step, I noticed that the trees seemed to be thinning. The hairs on my arms stood on end as I realised that the awful silence had started to gather around us once more. The hounds were stalking us again.
“We need to move faster.” I urged Marcus on; whatever renewed strength he had shown after the attack had faded from him once again.
He sank to his knees, completely depleted.
“Go,” he said quietly. “You’ll have a better chance on your own.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I whispered back. It was too late anyway. The putrid stench seeped into the air around us. It was here.
We backed away from the approaching hound. Marcus was out of bullets. I raised my gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I tried again. Still nothing. Devyn told us that even the most basic mechanical technology was known to fail in the borderlands; little had I realised that fact was going to cost me my life.
It was the same one as before. It was still alive. A dark wound marred the white fur of one shoulder. The beast was warier this
