Wil had never been particularly athletic. He kept in reasonable shape, but nothing really stood out about him physically. He was six-feet tall on the nose, about 160 pounds, and had taken a self-defense course in college for the hell of it. He could have defended himself well enough in a fight with another average person, maybe a little better-than-average, but he’d never had any direct experience with violence.

Though even if he had, he didn’t think it would have prepared him for the monstrous, black-eyed buck charging at him. Wil had his axe, but didn’t even bother to swing. He dove aside, around the edge of his upside-down Toyota. The buck slammed into the front of the car with its legs and chest, its antlers just above it, and the car spun to the side. It slammed into Wil and he lost his footing, stumbled, and turned it into a roll.

The buck trotted to a stop and then turned its head to glare at Wil. Except it wasn’t an actual turn. It snapped its neck to the side, audibly cracking with the sound of a dry branch.

“Holy shit,” Wil breathed. Since it wasn’t limited to a flash out the windshield or the narrow strip of the rearview, or obscured behind the car, Wil finally got a good look at the deer. Its mouth extended almost down to its chest, and when it fully gaped open Wil could see its ribcage. He could also see the organs inside: lungs, heart, a peek of others.

The heart wasn’t beating.

Wil had to stare for a precious extra couple of seconds but the fist-sized organ was dead still. The lungs didn’t inflate either, and the bucks sides were still, despite what should have been very exhausting activity. A normal buck could just slam a full-sized car over like that. Damage it, sure but completely flip it over?

The buck turned to fully face Wil and its muscles flexed. Wil saw veins throbbing beneath its fur, and wondered how that were possible if its heart wasn’t beating. Then he realized the veins weren’t pulsing, they were squirming. They moved beneath the buck’s skin, subcutaneous worms that stretched from the buck's head to its hooves. The skin split in several places and more black fluid oozed out. It had the consistency of custard, and splatted onto the asphalt with audible plops.

The buck opened its mouth and bellowed at Wil, another curiosity given the stillness of its lungs and inability to take in air, let alone expel it. But nothing else about the monstrosity before Wil made any sense, and it seemed suicidal (Haha, Wil thought to himself) to focus on such details when the buck was clearly readying to gore him.

Wil jumped to the side and grunted in pain as one of the buck’s antlers managed to snag him on the side, just above his right hip. His shirt and the skin beneath tore open in a shallow but painful gash and blood welled out of it and stained his shirt and jeans.

Wil hit the ground again, harder this time, and rolled away. He scrambled to his feet and ducked as the buck snapped its head to the side to take another swipe at him. It pierced the back of his shoulder with the farthest prong of its antlers, and this time it really got into him. Wil screamed as the antler went into him, then out as he took a staggering leap away.

The buck had turned around, and Wil saw his own blood highlighted on the prong.

If Wil stayed here, he would die. And not quick and relatively painless like with the noose. The buck, or whatever it was now, would gore him, trample him beneath its sharp hooves, rip him into tiny Wilfred chunks.

And then Naomi would be alone.

Wil gripped the axe tightly and ran off the road, into the trees, and down the hill toward the ranger station. The buck bellowed again behind him but Wil didn’t look back. He could hear it crashing and thumping after him. He darted between oaks and zigzagged through the pines. The buck had managed to keep pace with his Toyota for a little while. No way was he going to outrun the thing in a straight line.

But even his erratic flight through the woods didn’t buy him much time. It was gaining, it would be on him in seconds and then that would be it. The ranger station was still at least a half-mile away.

Something nipped at the back Wil’s hair, tugged on it, and then yanked a bit of it away. He was out of time, out of space.

And then he tripped.

His foot caught a root and he fell forward and slammed into the pine needle-strewn ground just as the buck leaped forward, antlers down for the final charge. It flew over him at speed, its rear hoof scraping the same shoulder it had pierced earlier. Wil shouted in pain and surprise, quickly turning into a gasp as the wind was knocked out of him. The buck soared over, snapping its head down and to the side to look at Wil as it sailed past, an then slammed hard into a thick pine in front of it.

If Wil hadn’t tripped, he would have been gored and pinned like a bug in a box.

The buck rasped with its huge mouth and snapped its head again, but didn’t move.

It’s stuck, Wil thought. The creature had slammed itself forward with such tremendous force that it had fully buried several of its prongs into the welcoming body of the pine. It struggled with impossible strength, its neck, spine, and legs cracking and snapping with the buck’s efforts to free itself. Those worm-like veins thrashed beneath its skin, making the muscles bulge.

Wil had seconds, maybe less, before it freed itself. He still hadn’t caught his breath, his breathing coming in hitched gasps, but he didn’t have time to lose. He had dropped the axe when he fell, but spotted it, inches from his hand.

The buck lashed at him with its hind legs as it bellowed again. Wil rolled under them, grabbed the axe, and leapt to his feet. He was on the buck’s left flank now, slightly behind it. It rolled one pitch-black eye back at him, more of that custard-like dark ooze seeping from it in thick gobs. Wil didn’t think about it. He wasn’t thinking about much of anything. His arms moved, he took a step back like he was at home-plate (like he had been many times with the bat he had left with Naomi), shoulders flexed, winding up for a homerun.

And he swung the wood-axe, hard, fast, true, at the back of the deer’s neck.

The heavy old axe blade hit with a weighty thunk!, a sound that was both satisfying and grotesque. It severed the buck’s spine, wedging between the gaps of the spinal column and severing it as it cleaved through the flesh and muscle around it, and then it stopped.

The buck thrashed wildly, contorting itself into painful angles. Wil screamed and yanked the axe back, then swung again. Again. Again.

Thunk!

Thunk!

Thunk!

The buck’s neck, made thinner by the huge gaping maw that had already split it, finally separated from the body. The body thrashed once more and then fell to the ground with a heavy thud and a rustle of needles. Those ropey veins twitched, spasmed, and became still.

The buck’s head, however, did not.

Its tongue lashed, its eyes rolled, and a wet slurping noise came from the back of what remained of its throat. Its hundreds of tiny teeth rattled against one another in a way that reminded Wil of a rattlesnake.

The axe blade was coated in the black custard gunk. Wil held the weapon up to look at it as he stepped away from the buck, and winced at the smell. It was a deep, earthy smell: rot and potent mushrooms with a side of shit.

Wil wiped the axe blade on an oak nearby, now focused on the buck’s head and separated body.

Those vein-worms in the body had gone still. A few of them poked out of the severed neck. The thinnest of them was similar to the width of a single human hair, while the thickest was as big around as a thick noodle. They were as black as squid ink, and Wil noticed that the all radiated outward from the spinal column. The buck's body fell to the side, and the vein-worms slid out onto the ground, twitched, and then went still.

Wil didn’t get near the damn things. He stayed a few feet away and studied the buck’s head, still lodged into the side of the pine tree by the prongs of its antlers.

It was still very animated.

A thick rasping noise emitted from its convulsing throat, its teeth clicked together and actually moved, vibrated, an organic chainsaw eager to carve into something. The nose twitched and the ears flapped, and what remained of the neck whipped back and forth. More of those black vein-worms dangled from the end of the roughly hewn neck amid the raw, red meat and muscle, and these lashed wildly at the air, as if searching for something to snag on to.

One of the buck’s eyes actually emerged from its socket and Wil let out a cry of alarm and backed away further. The eye, solid black, extended several inches out of the socket, held by a writhing mass of those black veins all knotted together in a loathsome braid.

The eye waved around on its writhing stalk of veins, stretching, stretching, then drooped and pulled back into the socket with a wet squish.

“Oh my god,” Wil said and felt what he’d thought was his last meal rise in the back of his throat. He turned and vomited onto the ground while using a tree for support. Adrenaline had left him shaking, his head light, his legs still humming with the need to sprint. He looked at the buck’s head as it continued to rasp breathlessly and glare at him. He considered taking another lop at it with the axe, but it was just a head. Maybe it was only still functioning like that out of reflex. Corpses still blinked their eyes and occasionally twitched.

Even if it was still somehow alive, or consciously animate, or whatever, Wil didn’t want to smash the thing for fear of getting that black slop on him. The eyes and mouth were practically leaking with it. It smelled awful, and it could be infected, contagious, god knew what. He’d been lucky with his chops: the neck wound had bled, but only a little had actually gotten on his collared shirt.

Wil decided he didn’t want to take any chances and removed his shirt right there, leaving him with his black t-shirt underneath. He threw his overshirt away, then studied the head of the buck again. It was still moving. It wasn’t just a reflex. It wasn’t dead.

Wil backed slowly away from it, hands still on the axe, and only turned when he had several trees between himself and the buck. He took off back toward the road at a quick jog and glanced over his shoulder every couple of seconds. The buck didn’t follow, and it was behind him and out of sight soon enough.

It only took him a few short moments to return to his car. The run from the buck had felt like hours: a result of adrenaline and his winding path. His car was still upside-down, and he didn’t have anything to right it back. Wil retrieved his phone and its cord from the ceiling of the car where it had fallen, then hurried toward the ranger’s station.