The Forest
Rohan squinted his eyes as he tried to see what was beyond the thick fog. He could make out green plumages and the occasional rustling of leaves. “Huh,” he murmured, clutching the strap of his sling bag. He tried to look around the decontamination chamber for a security camera. Still, he managed to stop the instincts that told him to search for the slightest chance of safety, not primarily from a higher power that had no intention of treating him well. Reality seeped in, and it was then that he realized that he had no leverage.
Scrambling the contents of his sling bag in case it could have had anything else that could help, Rohan grunted in frustration when he realized he was irrationally clinging to the possibility of miraculously gaining something other than a dumb notebook and a pen. “We kindly ask you to step out of the door,” the voice said. Rohan grumbled even further, and he reluctantly moved. One way or another, they were going to push him out the door – and he didn’t want to find out what other things they were capable of.
Rohan looked out into the dark skies and stepped out of the door, slowly but steadily. As he placed his first step on the damp, dark soil, he cringed at the thought of dirt staining his shoes. He swatted his hand at the air around him in a measly attempt at clearing the fog. ‘I can’t do this,’ he thought, panic starting to seep in. ‘I can’t, I can’t do it.” He tried to look back to see if he could see a glimpse of the blinding white chamber he now missed, but saw a murky camouflage door instead. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the card that the researcher had given him previously. One word was written on it: ‘Survive.’ In a panic, he threw the card. Rohan punched and kicked the door with loud bangs, trying to pull it and push it, but nothing budged. He was truly locked inside.
Making noise was the first mistake. A few loud rustles came from the foliage in front of Rohan, and when he looked back, multiple plants were moving about. And that was when he ran. Rohan ran, ran, and ran. He didn’t know where he was running to. He didn’t think at the time; his mind focused solely on maneuvering around densely packed branches, trees, and mounds. At the end of his adrenaline rush, he managed to slump inside a small cave amid the foliage. He didn’t know if anything was inside this cave, but he didn’t dare find out.
It didn’t take long before he started to feel pain. Though he couldn’t properly see due to being in a dark cave, he could lightly brush his fingers along his face – stings meant a cut, puncture, or graze. He counted five stings, three punctures, and seven grazes. His glasses protected his eyes during his swift maneuver, and his long-sleeved clothing provided an extra layer of defense. He brushed his fingers against his exposed hands and counted the additional injuries. He sat still, eyes welling up with tears. It was at this moment that he felt like he wanted to die. Rohan felt an extreme sense of dread that he had never experienced before. Bile pooled in his stomach – he wanted to throw up, but he couldn’t. He removed his sling bag from his shoulder and set it down on the cold, rough ground. He lay down, resting his head on the sling bag and treating it as if it were a cheap pillow, his face looking up to avoid his cuts being in contact with anything other than formless air.
He suddenly jolted up and walked out of the cave to find something. What he had in mind was to find a leaf large enough to cover at least his entire body. After mindlessly walking, he managed to find three sizable leaves, ripping them off their stems and bringing them back to his cave. He sat down, putting the first leaf on his lower body, the second one on his midsection, and the third one between his midsection and neck. The leaves themselves were cold and damp, which did not solve his initial problem of lacking heat, but it was comforting enough to know that he tried.
This situation, Rohan admitted, is something that felt very sad. He wanted to toss and turn because he couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t want his face to sting, so Rohan spent most of his night alternating between staring at nothing and closing his eyes to see nothing. He was occasionally able to catch glimpses of random fractals of noise, shape, and color due to his brain filling in the blanks with random visuals from a lack of input. Still, it wasn’t enough, and instead, further terrorized Rohan by making him see things that hindered his attempts to sleep. He didn’t feel like doing anything else but count the seconds that passed, and so he counted until he was able to see the light show from outside the cave. His tally ended at five hours and thirty-nine seconds before he swatted the leaves away, slung his bag on his shoulder, and slumped out.
Rohan’s first instinct was to find the nearest source of clean water. As he stumbled out of the cave, he looked around the dense green foliage. The light, wherever it came from, had been searingly hot and bright. He wondered how ‘they’ were able to create such an area, but his thirst and desperate state consumed him, preventing him from asking questions. He did see some objects that resembled fruit hanging from the low of trees, but he didn’t want to take the fruit before seeing an animal eat them first or a good number of them gone from the branches. He grabbed a handful of pebbles, stones, and various other debris from the ground and tossed them inside his bag. As he walked away from the cave and onto a path that had the least amount of obstructing plants, he dropped the debris in the form of a trail behind him.
Luckily, Rohan spotted a nearby stream of water. He estimated the flow to be about forty meters away from the cave. He followed the stream and managed to stumble across a river after eight minutes. He bent down, dipped the edge of his fingers in the water, and felt a slight thrill over the sensation. He looked further to where the stream ended, and saw a deep river ahead. He walked to the deep river, taking in the sight.
As he bent down and stared at the abyss below, he saw something swim past. Puzzled, Rohan bent down to take a closer look and managed to see the exact odd figure lazily pacing around the water. Rohan couldn’t quite pinpoint what the animal was, as he couldn’t get a clear view. Rohan was puzzled at the creature’s sizable figure and rather odd features, but figured that it was probably just the water’s reflection playing tricks on his weary eyes.
Rohan snapped back to reality and ran back to the stream, wasting no time in his search for clean water. He sat still and thought for a moment before digging a large hole in the ground near the stream with some larger rocks he picked up from inside the river. After Rohan dug the hole, he walked around in search of large leaves and found ones similar to the crappy makeshift ‘blankets’ he used the night prior. He ripped many leaves from their stems and laced them inside the hole, lining them against the grimy walls. Then, he cupped water from the stream to the hole, and it slowly filled after ten minutes of painstaking work.
He looked up — the light was blazingly hot, but not enough to heat the water to a boiling point. He ran to the foliage and started to flip over dead leaves frantically. He didn’t question why he wasn’t seeing any small insects, as he was too focused on finding dry bark or pieces of dead trees. He was able to find a good amount of dry tinder and set it down a meter away from the hole. He grabbed some rocks from near the foliage as well. Holding onto the last pieces of hope he had, he knelt near the tinder, took off his glasses, and angled the lens at a three-inch distance from the ground. He couldn’t see what was forming near him, but was able to make out the shape of a bright, small hole. Rohan concentrated the heat, and it was working. As soon as Rohan spotted dark instances of smoke, he bent down and cupped his hand around where he thought the smoke was coming from, and gently blew.
It didn’t work the first time, and the third time, and the eleventh time. Rohan was on his twelfth attempt at angling his glasses just right — before he bent down, cupped around the area, and blew. This time, it worked. He was able to sense sparks of flame from the way his palms and inner fingers started to sting. He put his glasses on and looked at the growing flames in ecstasy. Rohan threw the rocks he had found previously on top of the fire, letting the stones heat up as he saw two thin branches. When the rocks charred, he used the branches to push them out of the fire and onto the water-filled hole, where a boil started to form.
Rohan felt like passing out from the heat, sweat, and lack of water, but held on. Once the water had thoroughly boiled and cooled, Rohan face-planted into the hole, hungrily drinking in the water and soothing his cuts. After he finished, the hole had been sapped dry. He knelt up and stared at nothing, feeling nothing but relief at the sensation of water molecules coursing throughout his sweating body. He stood up and prepared to leave when something moved in the river.
At first, it was just a subtle ripple. The surface of the water recoiled in slow motions, creating an unnatural flow. Then, the creature’s head rose slowly above the surface, breaking the calm with a deafening stillness. Its face was a grotesque fusion of human shape and insect anatomy: wide, flat, and glistening. Bulbous, compound eyes dominated its features, refracting fractured reflections of the trees and light. There’s a hole where its nose used to be, giving a window into the creature’s nasal passages which were dark and jagged like the mouth of a cave.
The exoskeleton on its face gleamed: a siena-colored, segmented, overlapping plate of armor, wet and ridged with grooves where the plates met. Beneath the surface, Rohan could see it paddling forward with water bug limbs: long, fleshy appendages sweeping backwards in wide, synchronized arcs. The creature retained its webbed fingers on the ends of its front legs, with sharp nails that fused to the bone. Its lower half was hidden, but the ripples it cast were strong.
The thing never blinked. It just stared at Rohan as it gently glided upstream, its buglike eyes locked on him with unnerving precision. When it opened its keratin mandibles, clicking softly – something primal kicked in.
Rohan ran.
Rohan ran, and ran. He followed the trail of pebbles and debris he had laid out previously and found his way back to the cave. Before leaping into the cave, he stumbled backwards and grabbed three large rocks nearby and threw one inside the cave, making sure that a monstrous vermin wasn’t in there. When he chucked another one and saw that there wasn’t a response, he ran inside.
Hyperventilating, Rohan dropped into a corner, his shoulders shaking. His right hand clung to his grimy blouse like it was the only thing holding him together. With his left hand, he tapped the floor in frantic, uneven bursts, like counting something only he could hear. ‘What was that?’ His hands wouldn’t stop moving, nails clawing at the stone until blood welled beneath them. He didn’t even feel it. He wiped his bloodied fingers on his shirt and dug inside his sling bag with trembling hands, pinching his way through brown satin linings. Frustrated, he flipped the bag upside down, shaking it — causing the notebook and pen to crash on the stone with a firm thud.
He grabbed the notebook with a strangling force, flipped two pages in, and vigorously began to sketch the behemoth he saw on paper. His crude, revolting depiction of the vomitous beast stained the pristine cellulose fibers. His pen jabbed the page, leaving tiny holes, his hand shaking from the effort of holding back the panic and revulsion clawing at his thoughts. The strokes of his pen glided across the paper, forming a mental image of the same beast — its monstrous yet human features, its beetle-like body, its fleshy limbs — bent and broken as they strained to contain its belostomatid anatomy.
Rohan dropped the notebook as he finished his nauseating craft, refusing even to take a single glance towards the book’s direction.