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By the time I realized I was not on the seventh floor of the Weston and Sons offices, as I'd expected the elevator doors had already closed firmly behind me... and there were definitely no call buttons in the bark next to them. Yes, bark. I looked around in total stupefaction; somehow, the elevator had dropped me off in the middle of a freaking forest. I had been so distracted that I hadn't noticed this... sheesh.
"Um... hello?" I called out at last, and got absolute silence in reply. Not an echo, not even a twittering of birds... just a faint sigh of wind through the trees. This was starting to seriously creeped me out; the silence was far from natural. No forest I'd ever been in had lacked the sounds of wildlife so totally.
I didn't wander off into the woods. That would have been stupid. I tried to pry the elevator doors back open, pounded on them with my fists, and finally shattered a large rock against them. I scraped the paint up pretty good, dented the metal, but they gave no sign of budging. I spent a full hour at it until I started to get too tired, my hands worn and my psyche frayed.
Just where the hell was I? Some sort of weird Twilight Zone parallel dimension? The afterlife? Hell, perhaps? It seemed too nice for Hell, at first glance; the air smelled great, the plant life was lush and abundant... but where were the animals? I hadn't seen so much as a single insect or worm.
Seriously creepy, indeed. I had to find some way to get those doors open, to get out of this place, and I just didn't have the tools for it; I needed a prying rod with a sharp enough point to get between the door's edges. The branches I'd broken from the trees are weren't strong enough or thin enough, not by a long shot.
I hated the idea of venturing even ten or twenty meters away from the door that was the only way out I knew of, but I wasn't accomplishing much here. I could camp out and wait for it to open on its own, perhaps to deliver another arrival, but who knew how long that would take? If it would ever happen? It would get dark soon, and animals or no the idea was quite frightening. Being trapped out here in the dark...
Okay, I'm a city slicker. I haven't spent more than a full day in 'real' wilderness in my life, and I wasn't really good at adapting to new situations. Sue me. I picked up the largest and most club-like stick, made sure I hadn't left any personal possessions behind that I might need later, and began walking down what seemed most likely to be a path through the tress.
Even with my inexperience, it soon started to become apparent to me that this wasn't 'real' wilderness, either. The lack of creepy-crawlies and other animals aside, the trees were all of very similar size and species, and there were no obvious saplings anywhere; the underbrush seemed almost as uniform at first glance too. Oh, there were patches of flowers and irregular bushes and vines scattered around, and it all looked pretty chaotic and untended at first glance, but there was a subtle sense about it that seemed to suggest all this had been planted intentionally. Like I was in some sort of park, meant to look wild but somewhat tame underneath.
I walked for quite a while, hunting in vain for some sort of change in the environment to suggest I was actually getting somewhere. But other than the irregularly spaced meadows and streams I passed once in a while, everything was the gently rolling hills and comfortably spacious forest seeming to stretch off to infinity. I hadn't got a clear look at any horizons, not even on the low hilltops; the canopy was too dense. I only saw the sky once and a while, in small patches or over the grassy meadows, filled with boring white puffball clouds that were just as uniform in their random distribution as the trees were.
I eventually gave up, sitting by the edge of a small pond to rest my aching feet and think for a bit. My shoes weren't designed with hiking in mind, naturally; I'd expected to be in an office building all day, just like every other day. My suit was totally disheveled by this point, too, of course. I'd taken off the tie a while back and unbuttoned my shirt halfway down. The climate was mild, but the activity of hiking was unaccustomed and I was quite sweaty at this point.
So, what to do now? The sun was obviously going to set within the hour, and I didn't think I'd make it back to the elevator door by then even if I ran all the way back. And I certainly didn't want to try to follow the trail of broken branches I'd left for myself as I'd traveled in the dark, if I missed just one waypoint I could wind up hopelessly lost. It all looked so the same.
Sighing, I decided the best thing I could do was try to set up some sort of camp with what I had. I didn't have a clue how to make a fire without matches or a lighter, so the only thing I could think of to protect myself from the monsters of the dark was to climb a tree and see if I could manage to sleep in it. That'd stop wolves and grizzlies, I hoped, but I hoped even more that I wouldn't have to deal with mountain lions or anything similar. They could climb too.
It was a scary thing to contemplate, being eaten by some wild predator in the wilderness, nobody even knowing where to find my bones... I didn't fall asleep easily. The gentle wind kept stirring rustles in the foliage, and when there wasn't that the silence was so deep that it almost brought forth auditory hallucinations to fill the void. I was just glad that there was a nearly-full moon, and the stars were bright; the night was not nearly as dark as I'd feared. Eventually the fatigue began to overcome the fear, and the rustling of wind in the trees gradually changed from fearful to soothing; I slowly drifted off into a light slumber. It all seemed so relaxing now, once I had forgotten to be afraid...
The next morning, I woke up hungry and terribly sore from sleeping wedged between tree branches like that. I groaned and carefully managed to climb back down to the ground, stretching each muscle to try to work the innumerable kinks out. I felt terrible. But at least I also felt rested; I'd somehow managed to pull off a full night's sleep. Amazing.
Time to head back to the elevator, I thought to myself, hoping that perhaps by some miracle it would have sprouted a call button or even a nice technical services person to explain this strange malfunction. I looked around for the broken tree branch I had rammed into the ground as a signpost last night, indicating the direction I had come from. I could not find it. Puzzled, I circled around the immediate vicinity of the tree; there were several paths that were broad and grassy enough to match the one I remember following to get here, but none of them had any sign of passage down it. I began to get nervous.
"East," I muttered to myself, as much to break the silence as to organize my thoughts. "I was walking pretty much towards the sunset, so I need to go east. That's where the sun should have risen, now." Carefully getting my bearings, the canopy's leafy green filter making the simple job of finding the sun somewhat more tricky than would be expected, I headed off down the path I figured I'd come from. I soon began to recognize some of the shapes and patterns as I went, glancing behind myself regularly to check what things would have looked like to me on the way out; I seemed to have chosen correctly. But where were my signposts? I couldn't remember every detail of the route I'd taken, if I didn't find one soon I would no doubt begin to drift off course. I was starting to get scared again. And my feet still ached from yesterday, and my muscles were still sore, I was thirsty, and I was hungry...
Orders of priorities, I thought to myself. "Have to deal with the most important things first." The soundlessness of the world worked to my advantage, now; stopping to listen carefully, holding myself as motionless as possible and stilling even my breathing, I pricked my ears and listened... ah. There was the sound of one of the innumerable tiny babbling brooks that I'd passed; I'd drank some of the water on the day before, and it was perfectly pure and mountain-cold despite the seeming lack of any nearby mountains. Making another signpost for myself, being extra-careful to bury the end of a broken tree limb deep in the soil this time so it couldn't just fall over or otherwise be obscured, I followed the sound and came to the brook.
((((to be con.)))))
Kiki_kittygirl · Sat Oct 15, 2005 @ 07:29pm · 3 Comments |
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