A Wilder Woods
It was the cold that she noticed first.
A cold so deep her lungs alerted her when it felt as though frost was tickling her rib cage. She gasped, poorly, throat not quite remembering how. Startled when that breath wasn't enough. When her chest was heaving faster than her heart was beating - when her blood flushed to the surface of her skin. And when her eyes burst open. Those wide pupils were met by a scene so abstract she couldn't even begin to interpret it.
Or maybe that was because she was hanging upside down. Held up - barely - by a thin and fraying cord.
Panic set in quicker than a fox tearing up a henhouse. When she raised her hands to begin freeing herself from the unknown trap - she paused to look at them. Red and blue with the cold. Stiff beyond any mobility. She couldn't even feel the little buggers. Her mind began to wander, looking at the lopsided scenery below. She knew she had to have been there for hours.
Freeing herself was easy enough. Or, as easy as cutting yourself from a parachute sixteen feet in the air can be. Dull knives and cold paracord are not an agreeable pairing. In the heated passion of simply wanting to get down from the tree, she hadn't thought it through all the way. Not until she was face down in a bed of moss and hearty sword fern that she realized quite how high she was.
She stood. Slowly. A headache dawning the base of her skull and dizziness clouding already blurry vision. There was this sore tender pain coating the entirety of her body, and yet it didn't hold a candle to the sight laid out before her eyes. She couldn't believe it.
It was like a twisted painting. Bold colors, harsh shadows, an envious sky so blue in the face of the peril. It seemed wrong how still the evergreens stood. How softly the breeze whistled through its needles and how green the grass looked amid the sheer chaos. It was a beautiful meadow nestled in the heart of towering pines and fir trees. Some real-life laptop screensaver. But at its center, right in front of her terrified eyes, was something ugly and wrong. Heaps of twisted metal were simply strewn about. Some burned and charred to crisps others torn clean apart. Pieces of the machine sprayed across the meadow with no rhyme or reason. Tufts of sawgrass ablaze and smoke curling from everything on site.
The girl inched towards the first large chunk of metal. Convinced this was some messed up dream. The slab was smashed a few feet into the earth, as though it had been thrown from the sky with quite some force. She reached out to touch it. Strange textured metal with patches of fine welding. Words and letters stamped in blues and blacks but completely incomprehensible. Her lips drew in a thin line, eyes narrowing. She did not even bother to entertain the theories and worries already creeping into her mind. Instead, she mounted the thing, climbing like a child overexposed wired and tubing and ashy grey edges. She stood on top. And simply looked. At least, she was looking. For about two whole seconds. Surveying her awful new reality when a flare of pain erupted from her calf.
She snapped her attention down to her feet, eyes wide. She was bleeding. Trickles of her blood plopped down onto the cool metal. Puzzled, she thought her skin had merely snagged on some sort of edge climbing up - until of course some animal paw lashed over the edge. Until a roar filled the still silent air. The sound of it seemed to activate something primitive. Something no teenage girl would ever expect to feel. But there she was. Leaping from the scrap of metal and lurching towards the tree line. Part of her screamed not to. Part of her conscience strangled every muscle in her body to stop her from careening into the dark abyss of the forest. Trees so large and shadows so deep it seemed as though they could swallow her whole. It was like running from one terror straight into the belly of the next.