That morning I got a text from Dormi.
Skipping school to hang out at the fairground. U in?
I was. That morning, she came to my house to let me carpool to school, and us and Munchkin drove on. But we didn't go to school, we went to the abandoned fairground instead. It was a common sight. A big flat area made to host carnivals, fairs, circuses, whatever. As time had moved on, so had the population, and the grounds had become redundant. One day, a carnival came to town, put up their tents, went out of business, and just left. The entertainers, the staff, they all sold everything that could be sold and they went home. The hollowed-out buildings remained.
Me and my friends got together one day. We all grabbed baseball bats and chains and a crossbow and we made a ruckus. After the first vagrant got clobbered, the rest decided to move along. We cleared out the rats and rabbits and mice and bunnies and turned it into our own den. In the far distance, war with Zagrostan is inevitable. Everyone can see it coming. With war comes refugees, many of them deer. Not all of them will be able to adapt. They'll need a place where they can be themselves without constantly being weighed up by how well they're integrating. Or so my friends say. I just like being able to do whatever I want to myself and not have someone complain it's against the law.
"Is it about last night?" I ask as we get onto the open road.
"Yeah," Dormi admits.
I don't blame her.
She keeps going. "It's just... why do people like her think that just because something's legal, that it's right? That you can just be as much of an asshole as you want just because some piece of paper says you had good intentions? I didn't choose to be born a non-deer." The MUSK deer complains. I'm a DAMA deer. How long until species start being separated, rather than clades? How long until my species gets its own little corner of Appalachia that I'm obligated to live in?
"We can't do anything." Munchkin thinks aloud. "We're just kids."
My cell phone beeps. I check it. "Hey, girls. Apparently Marigold didn't come home last night. Think she got too drunk to stand?"
"With our luck, she finally got a guy." Dormi complains.
"Well, we can hope she got a bag over her head and a spot in a basement." Munchkin says. We all mutter in agreement.
When we arrive at the fairground, another car is there. It's another group of our friends. "You called the whole gang in, didn't you?"
"I ain't expect so many to answer." Dormi admits. "Let's make this a day to remember. Away from the school's brainwashing."
"Hell yeah," I grin. "Who needs a house party when you have friends?"
I am tromping through the woods, trying to keep up with dad. My AR has a 4x power optic, and I randomly look through it. It's not a microscope and can't get a good level of detail at the plants and rocks I point it at, and I don't care, it's a novelty and I love it. A cool, scoped rifle. A full camouflage getup. A scenic walk through abandoned woods and tall grasses. "I'm just like Captain Price," I mutter to myself.
"What did you say?" Dad asks. I'm scrawny and short-haired, and I get that from him. He's got a more weathered face than I do and the lucky bastard even has facial hair, but besides that we could be twins.
"I said, 'I'm just like Captain Price'."
Dad looks back at me. "Who's that?"
"It's from a video game."
"Oh." He shrugs and gets back to hiking. He doesn't care about video games, or art in general. It makes him hard to talk to sometimes.
Something that isn't one of us makes a noise in the undergrowth. He whips his Kar98k into his hands. It hasn't been passed down to me yet, so while it bears runes and sigils all across the wooden furniture from his own parents, it's otherwise factory-style, no night-vision scope or bolted-on tactical rails. A squirrel leaps overhead and we both relax.
"What's it like being a military sniper?" I ask.
He doesn't answer at first. He wasn't a marksman. He was a radio operator in the mountaineers. "What makes you think I know?"
I untangle my boot from some weeds. "I know you."
He chuckles under his breath. "Damn. Well, I really can't tell you a whole lot, but there's a few things I can say."
"Called it."
"Yeah, yeah." He waves his hand at me ineffectually. "When I was about your age, I worked in a canning plant. One of my coworkers was an older guy, a former Scout Sniper for the Marines, slotted a dozen Charlies in 'Nam. I would have liked to talk to him, but, well, we ain't get along so well for other reasons. I did sometimes overhear him talking to some of his own friends about his service, though. Part of why he didn't like me is because I was a hunter back then, too. He couldn't stand that. Somehow his time in the Marines messed him up, or something. I don't get it." He waves his hand at me again, but much more sternly. I crouch down. His rifle goes up to his shoulders. I follow suit.
A hundred meters away is an elk grazing on a bush. "Your shot." I whisper.
Dad keeps going. He squints down the ironsights. "You track your prey. You get an angle. You find a firing position. You aim. You shoot. You leave. As far as that guy was concerned, sniping is everything you do when hunting, you just do it a lot faster."
During a car trip with my dad, we once passed a big hill and he told me about how, if you only went a few hundred feet into the woods, you'd see the remains of a once-bustling theme park that was nearly invisible to the town around it. I wondered if it was just as abandoned now. It was. It was also a lot bigger than I expected, taking up the entire miniature mountain. I found a place to stash my Wagoneer so that it was at least a little hidden, then grabbed some of my hunting gear, found an appropriate shack, and passed out.
I got only a little sleep before I was woken up by the sun. It would take more than six hours to undo three straight days of being awake, but it was far better than nothing. I watched from a rickety observation tower high in the trees as last night's clouds dissipated. The wood was relatively new, even if the stability left a bit to be desired. I was tired, but I wasn't under any pressure, and I could try and figure out what to do. At first I thought that it was all a dream, a hallucination. Then I saw that I still had some sort of monster in the trunk of my car and realized that it was all real. A bit of walking up and down the slopes of the grounds told me that it wasn't a dream and that it was not built for humans. The inhabitants of this land have similar proportions to us, sometimes eerily, but they ain't quite the same. So what do I do?
The obvious answer is "go home". The reason why I can't do that is that I don't know how, I don't even know how I got here. I was there, then I wasn't. The only strange things I saw all night were because I was in the animal world. My best bet was to retrace my steps and hope that I wound up back where I came from - a good start but not particularly clever. If that didn't work, then I could live in the woods with no supplies for at least a few weeks, maybe a few months. That's not a long-term plan. However, I have committed two murders and can't read and might be from a race that's completely unknown to this society, so it would be hard for me to get a job or move freely. If I'm still here in a few days, I won't have a lot of options.
Thinking back, I can't recall hearing about anyone in my predicament. Not in the old stories, nor the new. At least, not any that were supposed to be real. There were plenty of fictional stories and those rarely ended with our hero getting back home safe and sound. Of course, the fictional ones usually started with the hero being hit with a car, rather than being the driver.
I wonder if that dead deer-thing I have in my trunk is currently running around my home country.
Whatever they might be called here, the Appalachian Mountains remain a sight for sore eyes. From a cliff, I can watch the clouds swirl along the peaks and ridges, and the rolling hills mix with the blue haze of distance to keep them from being monocolor brown lumps. It never gets old and I'm glad that it's still here. Although suddenly there's something I desperately wish hadn't followed me - hitting deer with my car. I laugh to myself as I realize how complicated that process has become.
I don't have a good idea for what to do next. I have some options, but none of them obviously get me anywhere useful. At most, they change the nature of my problem into something else, something that will boil over sooner or later or in a different way. Maybe I need a way to sneak into polite society (or whatever passes for it) to try and get info. The creatures here speak English even if they don't read it. Their alphabet looks like the Latin one, kind of, but I haven't been able to figure out how the letters translate to each other. The flip-phone I took from the deer girl has been sporadically going off all morning with what I assume to be worried texts I can't understand and calls I don't pick up. If I want to dig myself deeper, maybe I can kidnap one of these creatures and have them explain things?
Cell signal comes back for a second and another message comes, making the device beep at me. I find the power button and hold it down. On smartphones that's usually how you turn it completely off and it works for this more primitive model. Now I ain't got to hear it anymore.
I still hear an odd noise. There's something coming, a vehicle that doesn't belong to me. This hill is thickly-wooded and ultra-vertical except for roads, buildings, and concrete surfaces that used to be buildings. I'm still sitting in a dilapidated wooden watchtower overlooking the town only a few hundred feet away, placed where Gatlinburg used to be. I clamber down the ladder and start going back to the maintenance shed where I left my things. I don't know what they're here for, but even though this park is a lot bigger than I remember, they might find my stuff by coincidence. I stalk through the dead brush.
When I get there, I'm not the first. There's an animal monster, not a deer-person, but some sort of pronghorn-derived thing. They're trying to sneak around too but they ain't as good. I see them without them seeing me. The maintenance closet had a cheap welcome mat someone placed as a joke and underneath was the key to the front door. That key being in my pocket is part of my insurance against being robbed. The thin-waisted pronghorn-thing looks under the mat. Voices approach through the trees. She gets frantic. Then she throws herself against the steel door. "That won't work," I whisper to myself. A group of deer-people run through the woods and appear around her. Well, three are deer, the other three look more like antelope-human hybrids. They're a mix of shapes and sizes and colors but they all look like more girls, even if some are taller than me and others ain't even chest high. They surround the pronghorn and jeer, bats and clubs held out.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The pronghorn flattens her back against the door and whimpers something. One of the deer strikes the concrete of the doorframe with a baton. Another grabs her by the hair and pulls her from the structure. An antelope runs up and punches her in the face and she hits the ground hard. I cringe. She gets kicked in the shoulder, knocking her face-up. The largest antelope tackles the door, knocking it inwards with a crash. A fourth of them, this one with an extraordinarily long and thin neck, comes out of the woods with a pitchfork with a battery attached to it. It's not secured with screws or welds, but with tape. It's not a fighting weapon. It's a torture device.
I hate these things already.
She jokes with her friends for a bit and they shove the pronghorn over and kick her one or two more times when she tries to stand up. She's begging them to stop. I don't know what words she's using, but that's the gist of it. A monster in a world of monsters, but one can be used and abused without consequence by another as long as they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm starting to wonder how much about this world is different.
I skulk over and grab a device of wires and iron plates off the ground. It's an animal snare, a modernist interpretation of the iconic bear trap but with steel cable instead of spikes. No so well-suited to bears, but able to catch anything smaller, and far easier to carry. I put it up to try and grab anyone who came too close in the night and no one did. The new arrivals took a different path and missed it. In the haze of exhaustion and desperation, what I am about to do seems like a good idea.
I pull it off the ground and start carrying it carefully to avoid having it snap in my hands. I sit myself behind a bush and watch the poorly-dressed thugs interrogate their victim as I think about what I know about the area and what to do about what's happening in front of me. The largest antelope-girl has torn the shirt from the pronghorn, and her lanky comrade puts the electrified pitchfork and against her the bare chest. She screams and shudders, helpless, wondering when it will end. She doesn't know it will end soon.
What I feared is what happens next. I didn't keep everything on my person after I woke up, and left a good amount of it behind. A mid-sized antelope holds up my car keys and yells, "Come out, you fucker! This is our turf! We're going to teach your little friend a lesson in trespassing!"
"I don't know who's it is!" The pronghorn protests tearfully as she rolls in the dead leaves. A deer puts her shoe heel to her mouth and grinds her into the dirt.
I pull my bayonet knife from my coat pocket. No, too much. I put it back in its sheath and grab a utility knife. Holding it delicately by the blade, I throw it at the crowd. It tumbles inarticulately through the air and impacts against the concrete shed. "Let her go!" I shout in the whiniest voice I can muster. It's a pathetic gesture that's sure to invite a similar torture down on me. Not all traps are mechanical.
The animals all laugh. They start walking towards me lazily. I grab my snare and run away, not caring that they'll hear me for sure.
Nearby is a former arcade. The machines, like everything else valuable, were all sold except for a scant few that were already scrap, so now it's just some raised and lowered floors of star-speckled carpet separated by guard rails and a few counters that once dispensed prizes or food. It was the centerpiece of this section of the theme park and the road to the front door is the most open part of the whole grounds. In other words, it's the best place to catch a bunch of thugs in a sniper ambush. I hurriedly place the wire deer trap down and kick a few fallen leaves over it before I sprint into the building and lay down on the ground, partially-obscured by some ancient game cabinet. I point my rifle out at the entryway and watch.
The gangsters come up the path calmly. The large antelope says something and the three deer break off and go around. They're taking a side entrance. I don't know where that is. Worrying. I try to steady my breathing as I take aim at one of the mid-sized ones. The largest one is on track to take a step she'll regret.
There's a loud mechanical snap and she doubles over with a steel jaw biting into her leg painfully. I pull the trigger and another one collapses into a heap, its limbs splaying out. One of the remaining ones ducks down and starts fiddling with the trap attached to the howling alpha female. The long-necked one freezes and stares in my direction. "Gerenuk! Help me!" The other yells at the long-necked antelope as the latter clutches her electric pitchfork fearfully. I pull the bolt back and push it forwards. I aim and pull the trigger on the frantic antelope helping her friend. It falls dead. I didn't cycle it right. I didn't FUCKING- I hold my breath for a second to force my brain to stop. Calm down. Think. Pull it back, twist, turn, push. Re-aim at her since she's the bigger fighter. Pull the trigger.
She too falls down, clutching her neck and making the most unholy gurgling noises I've ever heard. The remaining one screams manically and runs away from me. Pull, twist, turn, push, aim, fire. She slows to a trot as she grabs her chest and tumbles to the ground, rolling weakly in the leaves. The large antelope realizes she's already the last of her group and pants heavily as she realizes screaming won't help. Breathe normally, don't panic. That went perfectly.
I jump to my feet and vault over one of the guard rails and run and jump behind a counter. I cycle the bolt from there, out of sight. Still going good. Should I reload? I peek above the shelf of metal and broken glass and see the deer, one looking right at me. I take aim and her head jerks back as she points and calls out to me. The room thunders and I nearly fall over backwards. She collapses to the ground.
Her two friends pause for just a second before they run at me in unison. The smaller one is so tiny that I bet I can beat her in a melee. I pull the sawed-off from my coat and pull the trigger while pointing it at the bigger one. The room is splattered with a blood-red glare. The flare missed entirely. WHAT THE F- THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LOADED WITH FLARES. Christ, this is a fucking problem. I aim and fire again. This time the flare hits the second deer. She clutches at the scorch marks in her clothes. I can't see a damn thing anymore through all this light but at least I can mostly hear. They were around halfway to me, right? Right?
I grab my rifle by the barrel and try and get it through my head that this is about to become a hand-to-hand fight. A dark blur flies at me. I swing the weapon like a baseball bat with all my strength and nearly bowl myself over backwards as I crack open the skull of the smaller deer, who splays out on top of the metal frame of the counter. Fuck. The bigger one is still coming. She doesn't try to jump over, she goes around and tackles me from the side as I'm reeling. My back is on the dirt-caked carpet and my rifle is somewhere nearby but I'm no longer grasping it. I hold my hands up and the deer smashes into them with a baseball bat. My arms feel like they nearly break from the force of the impact and pain shoots up and down them. I reach into the pocket and grab my bayonet knife and stick it into the stomach of my attacker. She grunts through gritted teeth and brings the bat down again, this time feeling even more powerful because I only have one bone to stop it. My left hand seizes up. I stab her again and start trying to saw across her belly with all the force my wrist can manage. It's not working. Her pelt is as tough as a real deer's.
Her next blow buckles my guarding arm and part of the force goes into my brain. The world around me becomes a nonsensical haze of pain and the color red. I focus on moving my knife into and out of the enemy who I can barely register as still sitting on top of me. A blur shifts above me and she coughs up a great gob of something warm and sticky and hot and burning onto my face. Her bat comes down again and again I don't block all of the force. Just keep the knife moving. In and out, in and out. For some reason she drops the bat and grabs my throat and starts choking me. She's dripping on me even harder now. Then her fingers become weak. Something heavy and convulsive falls on me.
My vision reorients itself over a few seconds. I put all the power I can into pushing the body off of me. I clumsily stagger upright and nearly fall against the back wall. The deer is spasming and vomiting a prodigious amount of blood onto the ground. I feel myself. I am covered in slime. I reek of stomach acid and iron. I try to avoid throwing up. The room dims as the flares burn out. I grab my rifle and shuffle outside on unsteady legs. I nearly slip and fall on a perforated intestine from my last attacker. The micro-sized deer lays with her eyes glassy and unfocused.
The large antelope is still outside, trying to hobble away with such a massive weight attached to her leg. She turns and sees me staggering towards her and puts her foot down, reaching and forcing the jaws apart with sheer strength. Her leg free, she takes a step and collapses again from how mangled her ankle has gotten. I stand over her.
She rolls over and looks at me. "Wait, wait! No! Please don't!" She cries, her eyes watering.
I throw my rifle over my shoulder and pull out my sawed-off one more time. I break it open and eject the spent flare shells. The hollow plastic rattles across the ground. Reaching on my pocket, I fish out different kinds of load. Red, red, white, red... orange. I load one orange shell. I point the barrel at her torso. "Which came first, ranch or cool ranch?" I slur through the exhaustion and possible concussion.
"W... wha-... what?" She stammers.
"Ranch or cool ranch, which came first!?" I repeat.
"R... Ran-"
I pull the trigger. A wave of burning magnesium pellets washes over her chest, incinerating her from inside and out. She screams. "Fucking idiot." I mutter to myself as I trudge along for a few more steps. Then my legs fail me and I sit in the dirt. She crawls around frantically, kicking up dust and rolling and trying to put the fire out, but it won't be put out. She glows with white sparks as the pellets fall out of her. Then her lungs melt and she can no longer scream. Then her heart melts and she can no longer bleed. At least, I assume that's why she stops moving.
I force myself upright and walk to my car, grabbing trees to keep from falling up or down the slopes. I have to get out of here. It's invisible through the trees, but there is a town less than a hundred meters away and I just fired a lot of bullets. On the way, I pull my balaclava off to try and get the smell of vomit and gore at least a few inches away from my face. The pronghorn is still there. She's been tied to a pipe in the maintenance shed. She begins to shake when she sees me.
I try to be comforting by lightly grabbing her shoulder but then I realize her fur is actually really soft. It doesn't make her feel any better but I like it. I brush my fingers up and down her arm, enjoying the softness and warmth. It's so nice. She starts to cry. I look at her and she turns her eyes away and tries to ignore me. "Sorry," I say. "I couldn't resist."
I pick up my utility knife from where it landed and saw the rope around her wrists. She doesn't move even as it falls around her. I grab her by the collar and pick her up, then shove her out the door. She looks at me and runs. I don't chase her.
The car keys jangled in my hands when I finally found which pocket on which body they were hidden in. Desperately, I wanted to sit down and let the excitement once again filter out of me, and to wait for the head blows to work themselves out, but my business wasn't done. There was a lot of shooting and the fight left a lot of bodies. This park was only a few hundred meters from a town of thousands. If the authorities weren't on their way already, they would be soon. The fact I couldn't hear the sirens that moment meant nothing. At most, I had a few hours until someone was reported missing, if I was very very lucky and nobody noticed the screaming and shooting.
I wasn't going to risk it.
I kept my things in only a few places and had barely unpacked. It took only minutes before my property was all back together. I stepped over the dirt where the pronghorn had been tortured only minutes ago, put the keys into the ignition, and navigated out of the theme park. A shame. It had been a great place to hide out. Still, I was getting as clean a getaway as I could, and I had learned valuable lessons, including about the laws in this land. The kids I had come across had a type that I was familiar with. They had drugs in their pockets, they were hanging out at an obscure complex to do and deal them, and they walked around armed with clubs and knives.
In other words, they were the kinds of people who would have had guns... if they were available.
The bitter taste of stomach acid floods my mouth and a new wave of acrid fluid spills out onto the musty ground. Sulfur and iron hang heavy in the once-still air and blood still trickles down the side of my head. The sound of a car engine brought a new wave of terrors, but it's just him leaving. I shakily stand up and am pleased to discover that my wet pants ain't caused my legs to freeze together. In my pocket, I grab my phone and nervously dial 0900. The dispatcher answers within seconds. "0-900, what's your emergency?"
It's uncanny to call the emergency number. I've never done it before. It's been years since I thought a cop's presence would make me feel better. I stammer and stutter between the strange feelings coming over me and the remaining panic. "I-I--I- I'm at the Greenways T-T-Theme P-Park, and, and, and there's a, there's a monster, and he killed all my friends, and-" A trail of cold blood touches my foot and I freeze up.
"Please calm down, ma'am. A squad car is on the way."
I've never been religious, but I thank God. I try to get my bearings but my gaze accidentally passes over Gerenuka's eviscerated and burnt remains and I stagger outside and collapse once more. I can't make sense of the pure noise in my ears and eyes except for the intense beating of my heart and I snatch at tufts of brown grass in the vain hopes that it will somehow right my senses. It doesn't happen.
The only things I know for real are corpses and a masked figure.