The Woods: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I woke up cold. There was a deer to the right. A squirrel to the left. I had no idea where I was. I sat up, quickly. I was in a forest, and it was cold as fuck.

“What the fuck?”

I was totally confused. It was bright, despite the overcast sky. I tried to remember what had happened the night before. They gave me absolutely no indication that they were going to do this to me. At least I slept well the night before. I stood up out of the unnaturally cold bed. It was even more cold as I stood. My new and old jackets had been stripped from me. The outer layers of my pants were gone as well. I was barefooted. There was an inch of snow on the ground.

One time I had a trip like this. Except it was much warmer. I was standing in a tropical forest, and I had a nudey mag in one hand and my dick in the other. I stood there in the middle of the forest and jacked myself off. I thought it would be a good trip, but it turned south when a cougar jumped out at me. Except it was actually a mountain lion since I had no idea what a cougar looked like. When I woke up, it was just some chick trying to have sex with me. It was strange.

I walked around aimlessly. I was confused as fuck. It was somewhere I had never been. I was standing there in the middle of a cold forest, I think near Denver.

I started walking in one direction, hoping that that would help me to find civilization faster. The faster I got there, the faster I could tell the police. I started walking away from the mountain, because I knew I would have to somehow get over it if I had ever made it there.

This gave me ample time to think. I started thinking about why I had started to live in Denver in the first place. I was stranded. Me and some of my friends were on tour with The Grateful Dead and when we stopped here, our van ran out of gas, or oil, or something. None of us knew too much about cars. But one of us knew a guy that lived in Denver, so we went to their house. They were willing to give us a home for the next few nights before we found a way to get back to San Francisco. I guess he didn’t like me though. He was eyeing me down trying to see if I was doing anything that was wrong. I tried to do everything I could right. I used coasters. I made sure the bathroom was clean after I used it. I didn’t even jerk off the whole time we were there.

He still kicked me out.

I found a sign that had a walkie talkie on it. It was staticky. I talked into it. “Hey man, is there anyone there?”

“Yeah, how’s it going John?” said Ferrero.

“Okay, but why am I out here in the cold, man?”

“Well, we’re going to play a game.”

“Yeah, well what’s it called, man.”

“Natural selection.”

He fell silent after I didn’t respond to this. I sat down next to the sign. The sign of which, of course, had a skull and crossbones on it. Natural selection.

In my life I had never been very religious. After I left the house, I started to learn more and more about the way that we had come back to being humans. I was taught everything, from evolution, to intelligent design. I decided myself that Darwin’s theory of natural selection and common ancestry made plenty of sense to me. We all came from a single ancestor who multiplied, and multiplied. This was one of the things that came to mind.

The other was the columbine shooting. The fact that in my state, saying “natural selection” could mean that you want to shoot up a school. I was pretty sure he was going to choose doing the second to me.

I finally decided to respond to him. “What do you mean by that, man?”

“Well, see, this is how this game is going to work. You’ve woken up in the forest here, and you don’t have anything. No food, no water, nothing. You have to survive.”

Survive. Survival. One of the things that humans are best at. We have overcome survival. We have gotten to the point in survival, that survival as a concept could be seen as easy. Like, all you have to do in order to survive was just eat a little, drink some water, and go for a walk with your dog every night.

That isn’t what this man meant. He didn’t mean he wanted me to just go out and find food for myself.

“Are you active in the media, John?”

“Not very.”

“Well, if you were, you might have heard of us. We’re a cult, out here. We believe that we have to keep natural selection going, otherwise the earth will become overpopulated. We can’t let the earth to become overpopulated. Now, we have taken you to play this game of natural selection for a good reason.”

“What kind of reason could you have?”

“What else? If you live, then it will be obvious that you are one step further in human evolution. Then we will pamper you. If you don’t, then it will be obvious that you weren’t fit to our agenda. You weren’t good enough to live.”

I was never the most active person. When I was younger, I stayed with my friends. We would buy liquor from an old man who didn’t give a shit anymore about his life. He didn’t care if he got caught. Once I got older, I was homeless. Me and my friends would beg and spend all the money on gas so we could get to the next LSD test. We would follow bands, hitchhike, and do your typical 70’s hippie shit. Smoke weed. Drink. Not have enough money for food.

As I got even older, I spent most of my time just sitting around. I knew I couldn’t get a job. How would I get a life I was a drunk old man who hadn’t had a job since 1966.

Even that job wasn’t physically demanding. I would stand there, selling people burgers at a diner. Ym only job was to collect cash and set food down on the counter. I wasn’t a strong person, and I knew that if it came down to it, I wouldn’t be able to live in a hand-on-hand combat situation.

I had never shot a gun. Not even when I was supposed to the day before. I wasn’t the best in a survival situation. But I had to do it.

“If you win, you get food, water, and most anything you want for a few months. If not, we just get to keep it.”

“So, I have to live, or die”

“Good luck.”

He blew an air horn into the walkie-talkie, and I covered my ear. It was loud as fuck.

I once again looked around. I saw no roads. No other signs. Nothing. There was no place in the entire forest that was signalling human life.

The last time I was in a situation like this in the wilderness was back in the 80’s I had been stranded in Denver for a few years already and I was getting used to the cold that followed every day. At night it would usually drop below zero. The winter was cold. And I was trying to cope. I got high off of LSD. I was walking around the woods, and I was trying to find my way back out.  When I finally found a road, I was almost hit by a car. It wasn’t his fault. It was dark and I just wandered onto the road.  I was hoping that maybe the same thing could happen here. I just wander onto a road. Then this would all be over.

I assumed that the game had started. I just started wandering around. There was a hill. I thought, what do you do for water. You find a lake. I need to find a lake. I climbed the hill with ease. It wasn’t the hardest thing to do. I’d say it was only about 7 feet high at the top. Once I scaled it, I got a decent look at my surroundings, due to the cliff on the other side. First there were trees, then a lake, then, far off in the distance, there was the city of Denver. Only 50 miles away.

The lake was my best bet for being able to live. If I got there. I could drink water. I could find food. I could live.

My first obstacle would be the cliff. I had to slide my way down, otherwise I would fall, and probably not get up. This was easier said than done, though. I was barefooted. I started thinking again. What would happen once I got out of here? I would get what I wanted, and then I would just be finished with it. I wouldn’t be like that for the rest of my life. They would eventually throw me back onto the streets of  Denver. Plus, how much longer do I have to live?

I was cut short, when I hit the ground. I had fallen about 4 feet, and I hit my leg on a stick. I could feel a gash on it. I looked down at it. “Ah, fuck.”

I lied on the ground, holding the leg in both of my hands. Dirt started to seep into the cut from my hands. It felt horrible. I could feel my pulse as I put my hands farther up my leg to try and stop the bleeding as much as I could. I knew it had to stop at some point. I was hoping sooner than later. A small bit of cloth I found next to me wrapped nicely around it. Despite the fact it was dirty and most likely had a disease riddled onto it, it stayed on my leg for a decent amount of time, and it carried and soaked up any blood that came out of the wound.

I limped to the nearest tree and looked for the sun while I leaned against it, trying to get to a point where I wouldn’t have as much pain in my leg. I propped it up on some rocks. If this sent one  message to me, it was that I probably wouldn’t make it through this ordeal. I would probably die. I would probably just curl up in the cold or bleed out, and that would be it. But, I could at least try.

I stood up, and got a branch off the ground. I had to stay mobile. No matter how bad I got hurt. If I kept moving, I could make it.

I had a general sense of direction. I knew pretty much where the lake was. I could find it if I walked long enough. It was downhill, I was going the opposite direction of the mountain. I had already figured out that I couldn’t scale that shit. And it would be pointless to try now.

The lake was maybe another two kilometers from where I was. I limped, and it ended up taking about two more hours than I wanted it too. When I got there, I immediately stuck my leg in the water. It was cold. That would help me out plenty. I let it sit there while I drank the water straight out of the lake. Since I hadn’t had any water yet that day, I was grateful as fuck.

I was hungry, but I didn’t know how to make a fire. I mean, back in my day, I burned down plenty government buildings and lit plenty of crosses on fire in protest of religion, but I had never learned how to do it without a lighter, or matches at the very least. I had seen all the movies, and I knew that they would always do some stupid shit like rub two pieces of wood together, or already have wood to burn and a good way to use it.