The certain knowledge that they weren’t yet in front of him, as far as he could tell, spurred the young student on to redouble his efforts. That logging camp had to be close now. Please God…It had to be! Please let it be!
The path suddenly took an unexpectedly sharp turn to the right, then started up a gentle incline. The trail frustratingly seemed to get steeper with each passing second, considerably slowing McKinney down. The trees on either side of the trail now crowded in, filtering out what little ambient light there had been. Darkness was nearly upon him - metaphorically and literally. The young student knew he was almost at the limits of his endurance. He just couldn’t physically go on much farther. His heart was now pounding so hard he thought it might burst from his exertions. The air that McKinney was forcing in and out of his lungs felt like it had a consistency of a molten liquid - heavy and scalding, it tortured the abused tissues within. It was beginning to be an agony to pull it in and out of his wheezing chest. He noticed dully that he could now taste the rusty flavor of his own blood at the back of his throat.
With a suddenness of a switched-on bulb in a dark room he realized he had reached the apex of the path. Through hazy, blurred vision he was looking down into a small but steep valley. There were signs of humanity down there! Bright shining fixed points of light that meant a chance of help – the Dinan logging camp – a sight as beautiful to him as the most majestic stars in the Creator’s black velvet heavens! He’d found it, thank the Lord! He could still actually make it!
With only the briefest of hesitations he stumbled forward, willing his leaden legs and numbed body into one final, last ditch effort. He was beyond pain - an automaton - a flawed being of torn muscles and bloodied flesh that could only limp and crab along. McKinney had become a creature with one single abiding thought - just one purpose to his whole existence… to reach the safety of the Dinan Bay camp.
Then suddenly he was on the ground.
He realized he could taste the rich earth of the worn trail in his mouth because he was face down on it. He collapsed when the wrenched muscles and pulled ligaments of his abused body no longer obeyed his insistent brain’s instructions to move. McKinney just lay there. The spirit was no longer willing, and the flesh was very, very weak.
He smelt them. He heard them. They were all around him. He closed his eyes in terror of what he knew would come but a part of him was strangely relieved. God would have him soon enough. The growls were soft, almost human. Almost.
He felt an enormous elemental strength lift him up high by just his left arm - the shoulder joint instantly dislocated - McKinney was too much in shock to even scream. He dangled for a few seconds being shaken like a rag doll, then he was on the ground again. His face was planted back firmly in the earth of the trail. Now that soil had a muddy, nauseating consistency. Warm and gluey against his cold skin.
He weakly opened his eyes to look. With horror he understood the reason he now lay in a thick sludge, - even in this light he could see that his own blood had provided the medium to make it that way. His left arm had been torn away, ragged and ripped at the socket and lay just a few feet away from him.
Before he could fully take in that entire gruesome discovery, something was already yanking at his wet denim jeans, moving his torn-away limb from his line of sight, tearing and stripping away the last vestiges of the material from his numb legs. The strength used to achieve that was such that his thick leather belt snapped like rotten twine. He couldn’t even resist as his underpants were torn away from him, the force of that cruel action lifted his whole body off the ground for a second and then slammed it back onto the wet trail floor as his drawers were ripped off. Dizzy, sick and unresisting, McKinney dimly accepted that the same something was tugging hard now at his genitals, pulling, twisting at them eagerly with a vicious animal force; their efforts were sliding him bodily along the rough ground. He lifted himself up weakly on his remaining arm just in time to see a huge, misshapen hand reach in, twist and completely tear away his scrotum and penis from his body in a shower of hot, stinking fluids.
Then he did scream. McKinney’s high-pitched screech was a signal to the others.
They were upon him at once in a writhing frenzy, greedily tearing out greasy loops of wet intestine and warm succulent organs that they gained access to by simply ripping open his soft belly. They were eating him alive. And he knew it.
And as McKinney slipped into final oblivion; traveling unresistingly to that darkness from which there can be no return - with an odd sense of wonderment he heard an awfully strange last thing….
“Jesus loves the little children…”
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Cryptid Frontier (Cryptid Zoo Book 7) Page 17
