Chapter 2 #2
I catch it between the trees, matching the bike easily, dark and low and fast enough to make every sensible part of me question why the rest of me is already opening the throttle.
A wolf.
Probably.
I crack the throttle, waiting for it to fall behind, but it matches my speed without breaking stride. I lean lower over the tank and give the bike everything it’s got.
The bastard pulls ahead.
“Oh, fuck off!”
The trail turns sharply, and I brake late, shift my weight and let the rear tire step out before feeding the throttle back in. The bike pivots beneath me and straightens as I exit the turn.
The shape is still there—faster now.
I have no idea what I am racing, which is exactly the kind of thought that should arrive before a man starts racing it, but I have never claimed to make all my best decisions in the correct order.
The ground becomes rough, but I barely slow. I stand on the pegs, let the bike move beneath me and lift the front wheel over a deep rut without breaking momentum.
The shape disappears.
Finally.
I ride another hundred meters before stopping.
“Did you give up?”
The woman’s laughter echoes through the forest, making me laugh too.
“That’s what I thought.”
The trail beneath me shifts.
Mud ripples around my tires once, then twice, as though something is breathing beneath it. A hand punches through the ground, followed by another, then dozens more, fingers clawing at the earth as they reach for me.
Pale hands claw through the mud, wrapping around my wheels, my boots and the lower frame of the bike.
One of them clamps around my ankle. I glance down, my pulse stumbling for the first time since I entered this forest.
The fingers tighten.
“That is either a haunting or the worst massage I have ever received.”
Another hand reaches for my leg.
I lift my boot and stomp down, but my foot passes straight through it before sinking into the mud beneath. In the same instant, every hand disappears.
I let the bike idle, my gaze sweeping through the trees.
“You’re going to have to try harder than that.”
The forest answers with silence, the kind that somehow feels almost offended.
“Sorry,” I say, though I’m not, and she probably knows it.
I ease back onto the throttle and ride deeper into the forest.
She changes tactics. This time, the trees don’t move, but someone screams.
Not the shout of a person trying to get my attention, no. Instead its the scream of someone who thinks he’s about to die.
My hands tighten around the handlebars before I can stop them.
“COLT!”
The sound comes from my right. I turn the bike so fast the rear tire cuts through the mud.
“Mike?”
“HELP ME!” the voice screams back.
I accelerate toward the sound. Branches strike my jacket as I leave the trail, and I know Mike is not here. I know he would not come into this forest if I were being eaten alive by wolves and personally promised him my motorcycle collection. But his scream sounds real. Too real.
“COLT!”
I push the bike harder, chasing the sound until the screaming cuts off as abruptly as it started, and the second it does, a woman is standing in the middle of the trail making me slam on the brakes.
The bike slides sideways through the mud, and I control the skid until I stop less than a meter from her.
Red hair spills over a white dress, and bare feet sink into the mud as though she’s been standing there all along.
I lift my gaze.
She has no face.
Smooth skin stretches from her forehead to her chin, leaving nothing behind except an empty, featureless void.
I stare at her for a long second.
“Well… I can say with absolute confidence you’re not Mike. He’s never had tits.”
I crack the throttle, refusing to brake twice for the same hallucination. When I look again, she’s gone.
The bike passes through the place where she stood, and my heart beats harder now, not with panic exactly, but with the kind of thrilled irritation I usually get when someone pulls a knife and has the poor manners to be good with it.
The woman never comes back. Instead, a lone howl drifts through the trees. Another answers it. Then another.
Within seconds, the entire forest erupts. Wolves call from every direction while branches snap in the distance and dark shapes weave through the fog just beyond my headlight.
I keep riding.
The first one steps into the trail, massive and black, its eyes reflecting the beam like polished glass.
I lift the front wheel and the bike passes straight through it.
“Yeah… nice try.”
Another charges from my left. I don’t even flinch.
“Still fake.”
A third lunges for my boot.
“Getting repetitive.”
Then the fourth slams into the side of the bike. The impact knocks me off line hard enough to make the rear tire skid.
“Fucking hell, woman!”
I wrestle the bike back under control before the front wheel catches a root, then glance over my shoulder.
Nothing. Not a wolf. Not so much as a broken branch.
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
“Okay… I’ll give you that one. Bit of a dick move, though.”
The howling dies as suddenly as it began. The wolves vanish with it, and she doesn’t show herself again.
For what feels like hours, I ride through a forest that cannot decide what kind of nightmare it wants to be.