Chapter 1
Time lapse of the trap, bears walking past, a thick branch falling on it and somehow not setting it off, leaves covering it. And then while I’m sitting there, munching on afterlife Sour Patch Kids and butter-flavored popcorn, thinking to myself where the hell is this going?, my dumb ass saunters on-screen and I step in the bear trap. Oh, that’s right. I remember I spent almost three hours screaming and crying, trying to figure out how to open the trap. Finally I ended up tying down the metal catches with T-shirts from my pack, and used the branch the universe foreshadowed—the one that kept the trap from cutting my leg clean off—to pry the rusted jaws open. Now I’m just hopping around the forest with a yellow T-shirt tied over my wounded leg. At least watching this in the afterlife I’ll have the tongue-burning delights of Sour Patch Kids. Unlike now, where all I have to eat in my pack is the canned food I grabbed in Jersey before I had the silly idea to get off the main roads. I shift my weight on the crutch beneath my armpit, wincing. It’s actually just a big tree branch I found. Last night I wrapped a sweater around the Y-shaped fork to pad it, but it’s not working and now it feels like my armpit is just a massive bruise. The pain in my leg is worse. Every step I take with my good leg creates a pull in the bad one that shoots fire up my calf. I tried resting last night after I found the crutch branch, shivering while my leg went numb with damp cold. I nodded off a few times, half expecting to die like that, but when the sun came up this morning, my eyes still opened. Now here I am, hobbling through the woods with absolutely no idea where the closest road is. I just hope that if I keep walking straight it will lead me to something. A road, a town, a stream to clean my wounds. Anything before infection sets in. And of course now I’m on the lookout for more bear traps, so that slows me down, too. Because of the low cloud cover I have no idea what time it is when I stumble upon not a road but a cabin. It’s cute. Modest. From what I can tell from the outside, it’s maybe two bedrooms. There’s a small front porch with two chairs under a wide picture window. The shades are drawn and leaves litter the front gravel drive and pile against the stairs. No car in the driveway. Maybe it’s empty. Abandoned—the owner dead in their condo in some city or in a mass grave. Or shot dead on the side of the road by another survivor. I take a few tentative steps out of the woods onto the gravel. It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in a while. A small, chunky garden gnome sits at the bottom of the steps, a fluffy sheep in her lap. She sits on a toadstool, smiling at the drive as if she’s waiting for someone. Kinda creepy. Especially since the leaves aren’t covering her. Like she just shook them off herself.
