rewrite:the woods-ch5

Chapter 5

I ran from the murder I had just committed. I wanted to keep going in the direction that I had started in. maybe there was something good out there. Something I could take advantage of. There might be something useful.

Something was. Something very good. There was a road sign. Another one.

It was getting fairly dark by this point, although I could see the sign, I couldn’t see the road. However, after going to sleep that night, I found myself at a road sign that had no road at all. Yet again, there was just a walkie-talkie attached to the sign itself. Or was there one attached to the one before this one? I can’t remember, but there was one attached to the road sign this time. I grabbed it with numb fingers, and I pressed down the talk button. “Goddamn, man, what the fuck is going on?”

“Well, it looks like you have killed one of my brothers. No matter-” he continued as I started looking around for a building- “natural selection, right?”

“I guess, man, but you really shouldn’t do that again, man.”

“Well, I think that we should do that again. You see, you keep killing people, and we can pick off all the weak ones. You just keep killing and living. We’ll keep sending them out to you.”

“No, man. I won’t do that crazy shit.”

“Oh, well suit yourself. We’re still sending them in, and you can choose then whether you want to die or not.”

He blew a goddamn airhorn into the walkie, and I covered my ear again.

I shouldn’t be surprised by any of the bad shit that guy does. He is one huge, gaping, dickhole.

Back to the road that doesn’t exist. I walked in the same direction, which gave me time to think.

This was pretty similar to one time when I was really little. I was cold, and I was walking home from one of my friend’s houses. He was a dick to me, so I threw a rock at him. His mom kicked me out. I was only 12. I was walking, when this old fucking guy offered me a drug. It smelled like shit, but it filled my lungs and make me feel like a fucking king. That drug was marijuana.

Although it wasn’t very popular where I lived, I was still able to get it. San Francisco was a big city. There was always some spic I could get the shit from.

You know how in school, they tell you not do smoke weed or cigarettes because they were gateway drugs. Well that was true, for me at least. One or two joints a day turned into 6 or 7. That turned into my friends giving me harder shit. When crack hit the scene, and I was already homeless in Denver, I was able to get it. Sure it was expensive, but I could get my hands on it. It wasn’t too hard.

I encountered two men, each stupid, and unable to kill me. Each too stupid to be quiet. Each to stupid to know what underestimation was. At least 12 stab wounds one them total.

More and more. Men after men. At one point I came to another sign. “Okay, man, you have to stop this shit.”

“I guess I do, you’ve killed the reserves. If a cop came, we wouldn’t be able to take him on. You bested us. We can’t take you on.”

“Where do I go, man?”

“Just about a mile forward, you’ll hit a road. You can find us there.”

Sure enough I did. But they weren’t there to pick me up. They were there to kill me. A large gun was perched atop the jeep sitting in front of me. A man was behind the gun, and he was wearing a marathon t-shirt. There were two men sitting inside of the jeep. They were wearing jean jackets, and plaid pants. There was one man sitting outside the car with his hands on his head.

I took a bit of a run. Backward. Then to the left. If these men came from anywhere, they came from a highway. And sure enough, there was one. Another two miles out. There was a nice, large highway, with plenty of cars. One had to pick me up.

I started hitchhiking back to Denver. It was decently hard, but I got to see the sunrise. I contacted the police, and told them everything. The murders. The cult. Being thrown in the woods. They didn’t stop.

The cult was relentless. I didn’t have any money. Somehow, the criminal case against them turned into a criminal case against me. I was forced to keep telling the truth, while they had the entire cult sitting there on the stand lying through their teeth. First their story was that I came in and killed a few of their people.

I was in this case for a whole goddamn month. The second week, they changed their story and tried to make it seem like I was their ruler. Then I was a person who tried to kill them all when they gave me a home. Eventually, they got a court order to search their property. They found just about anything that you can find that’s wrong and illegal. Drugs. Alcohol. Child porn. Everything. They had pictures of every person that they killed. They would grab them by the hair and hold their heads up like they were some kind of a fucking deer.

This all could have been explained. They could have been shooting a horror movie. This could have used to be a place that a serial killer lived and operated in. there were a hundred ways that they could pin this on me too. Maybe I was the one behind the camera. Maybe I was forcing them to take these picture. Maybe I was the one that was in front of the camera in some of these. Maybe I was their god.

They couldn’t pin it on me once they went into the basement though. It was full of dead body parts. And skin. Lots of skin. I couldn’t believe it myself. I was sitting there in the courtroom while people were vomiting. They had never seen anything so grotesque. I’m not sure if the jury had to sign a waver, but I know that there were no children in the audience that day.

The court case ended with me leaving Denver and coming to Albuquerque. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m pretty sure it can’t be as bad as that.

And I guess that’s it.