Nolan woke up with an alarming sense of wrongness nestled in his heart. He wasn’t sure what had happened to him but the last thing he remembered was an absolutely bizarre and uncomfortable break in his perception, like what he imagined it’d be like to take too many hallucinogenic drugs. Clearly his mind had suffered some sort of mental affliction and now the lasting effects of whatever it was that’d just happened had left his head ringing like no migraine he’d ever experienced.

Pushing himself up and looking around for the first time, his breath caught in his throat. How did he wind up in the forest?

Hardly any light bled through the thick upper canopy, which cast the woods in a gloomy shadow that left an uneasy sensation stirring in his gut. The air was heavy and warm, a claustrophobic element to the backdrop. This was a lot deeper into the woods than he and Thomas had ever braved as kids. He didn’t even know that undergrowth could get this dense, nor the trees so tall and broad.

Nolan grew exceedingly disturbed as he continued to gather his wits about him. Why was he here? Was it related to that indescribable feeling from earlier?

Before he could invest too much thought into it, he began to hear a rustle in a nearby thicket that soon showed signs of movement. Normally he wouldn’t have to worry about encountering some dangerous animal due to the fact that there was pretty much nothing in these woods that could pose a threat to him. Even though this was a known fact, he froze on the spot as adrenaline began to pump through his veins and sharp warnings started to echo within the haze of his muddled mind.

While he was deliberating on whether or not he should run away, the wall of bushes parted and an exhausted middle-aged man staggered out ahead of him. His clothes and short gelled hair were in disarray, eyes wide in evident panic. Catching sight of Nolan, his expression lit up and he hurried over.

As he regarded Nolan’s troubled frown, the man gestured at their surroundings and asked, “Hey, kid. Do you know where this is?”

“On the edge of Collinsville, in southern Ontario.”

The man blinked a few times. “Ontario? Remind me where that is.”

“It’s in Canada. What, you hit your head or something?”

“Canada? Do you think I’m slow? I was just in Chicago! I was getting groceries!”

“Chicago?” He gave the man a wary look. “I don’t know what you’re going on about man, but I was just at the park near my house and passed out near the edge of the forest. After that I woke up out here and ran into you.” Nolan knew how his own account of things sounded, but the park was tucked right up against the forest wall, whereas a grocery store in Chicago was at least eight hours away from where he lived. He fought off his delirium and struggled to give the surroundings a thorough inspection, a cold feeling in his stomach as it registered in his mind that this was an entirely different place than the forest by his house.

Even though he’d never been too far into the woods, he wasn’t so naïve as to believe that the trees grew to such heights. The smaller ones within his line of sight topped out at over a hundred metres. His head was still groggy from whatever had just happened, so he was having a hard time absorbing this sudden predicament.

“Quiet!” As Nolan was running the facts through his mind, the man suddenly loosed a harsh whisper and held up a hand. A rare breeze filtered through the forest, rocking the smaller trees and making a few older branches creak with decay.

Nolan was about to break the silence when the man turned his head and caught sight of something that made his eyes jut out of their sockets as if he were a poorly drawn caricature of himself. Following his gaze, Nolan was astounded to see a gigantic centipede winding its way down the impressively wide trunk of one of the bigger trees in the area. It would take a ring of at least eight people linking hands to wrap around the tree’s circumference, and the centipede’s body had already been fully looped around it five times, a portion of it’s frightening length still hidden in the upper confines of thick foliage.

“Canada, my ass!” The man sprinted off into the forest.

Nolan was right behind him. What was with this situation? Even a centipede that was three centimetres long made him uncomfortable. How could that gigantic creature be real? What kind of lucid nightmare was this?

The forest floor was so grown over with plant life that every step he took was a battle against waist-high grasses and clawing shrubs, an endeavour made all the more difficult by a web of fat, gnarled roots that surrounded the base of every tree like an army of wooden limbs. Under such conditions Nolan quickly lost sight of the middle-aged man, and after persisting for some time he stopped to catch his breath. Where the hell was he?

It was a struggle to keep calm, but somehow he managed. Since any random tree might have been hiding a monstrous centipede, he figured that no place in this overgrown forest would be safer than the next, so he decided to keep moving in the hopes that he might somehow salvage this situation.

He didn’t get far before he saw someone lying on the ground in a clearing up ahead, half submerged in a looming bush. He hurried over to check up on them, praying to God that they were just sleeping. This man was slightly older than the last one he’d run into, with specks of grey dotting his otherwise dark hair.

His first move was to pull the guy out of the bushes, since he had no way of knowing what other crazy insects might be lurking about. He knelt down and checked for a pulse. If he was dead then it would be best to leave here quickly. Nolan confirmed that he was still alive when, to his surprise, the man’s eyes opened and unleashed a flood of silent tears.

“Are you okay?”

The man could only whimper. He found it strange how he wasn’t moving despite having just woken up. The pained mumbles began to grow more frequent. Was he injured?

“A—Ayú…”

What’s this guy saying?

“Hold on just a sec, I’ll get you out of there.” Nolan got his hands underneath the man’s arms and used all of his strength to haul him out of the bushes, though he was met with heavy resistance.

“Ayú—ayúda…”

He gave a strong tug and dragged him out of the leafy confines, along with two dark and furry masses.

The horrifying spiders were bigger than small dogs, and furrier than most breeds. They didn’t seem to pay any attention to Nolan and continued to focus on eating each of the man’s respective legs, which were already lacking feet. Their blood-soaked mandibles looked like demonic little arms as they slowly stripped the flesh from the increasingly exposed bones of his mutilated stumps. It became clear that this man was paralyzed, and that Nolan would have to leave him to his fate lest he risk drawing the attention of the two abominations that feasted on his legs.

“Ayúdame, por favor,” the man croaked, voice warped by the cruelty of his demise.

With the knowledge that at any moment he might be barrelled into by one of those spiders and made into a living meal like the poor man by the bushes, Nolan frantically fled the scene with tortured steps.

There was no telling how long he sprinted for, but he made sure to stop before he ran out of breath. Although every part of him screamed that he should keep pushing himself onward, he couldn’t help but imagine what else might be dwelling in this unpredictable woodland. With the forest floor so helplessly cluttered the thought of how much noise he made as he plunged into thickets and tore through bush after bush caused him to realize how foolish he’d been while blinded by fear.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? How else should he react to giant centipedes, giant man-eating spiders, and giant trees? He looked around at the imposing wilderness and suddenly felt as if he’d woken up in some sort of hell. Could it be that everything in this forest was oversized?

He found a jagged branch that was a bit longer than he was tall and then set off with cautious footfalls. He tried to keep to the open areas as best he could, but there were many times when the only way forward was to sack up and force his way through a patch of foreboding undergrowth that may or may not have been housing some horrifying creature.

After an hour of anxious hiking, Nolan stumbled upon what appeared to be an old road. It was about half as wide as a standard suburban street and had nearly been swallowed up by the surrounding forest, an occasional eroded cobblestone visible amid the patches of the mercifully shorter grasses that carpeted the dirt path. Since he had no clue where he was it didn’t matter which direction he chose to keep to, so he decided to head right.

It was hard to tell through the distant ceiling of broad leaves and thick branches, but it seemed to be around midday. After a terrifying, hour-long hike, Nolan spotted two figures off in the distance that were heading in his direction. Sweet Jesus—people! Normally he was skeptical of just about everyone, but he couldn’t afford to be a cynic in his current situation. There were two men up ahead, and they seemed just as invigorated by his appearance as he by theirs.

He held off on speaking until they were close enough to talk without having to raise their voices, but it soon became apparent that he was the only one of the three who spoke fluent English.

Both of the men were in their mid-to-late twenties. Nolan was able to guess their occupations with a quick glance at their clothes. The man dressed as a construction worker introduced himself as Jacques, and from what Nolan could gather he was from some small town in France. The soccer player’s name was Takeshi and he was from a city called Kyoto in Japan.

Nolan knew a bit of French from school, but only enough to entertain a broken conversation. Takeshi also knew a bit of English from his high school days, but it was just as difficult to decipher as Nolan’s French. Still, the loose understandings helped the three of them to communicate through exaggerated gestures, as if they were playing an intense game of charades. After ten minutes of attempted communications, they were somewhat able to convey their own experiences, albeit vaguely.

Jacques had been laying cement at work when he suddenly blacked out and then woke up sprawled about the forest floor. Takeshi had blacked out in the middle of a soccer game, and woke up to see Jacques wandering aimlessly through the forest. They’d only just found the path when Nolan had come into view.

After deliberating for a while, they decided to follow the direction that Nolan had been heading in. Without the proper language skills they could only walk on in silence, each lost in his own thoughts.

What the hell’s going on? First there was that American, now I’m bumping into a Frenchman and a Japanese guy? Am I really supposed to buy that we were all just minding our own business thousands of kilometres away from each other and then poof, we’re all waking up in Satan’s backyard?

After persisting along the path for a few hours, they stopped to rest. Jacques had a chocolate bar in his work belt, which he split evenly between the three of them. After sitting around for a bit, they stood up and prepared to continue on with their hapless march when a shrill scream pierced through the silence and rooted them in place. The three of them exchanged troubled glances before surveying their surroundings.

Nolan shifted nervously, knowing full well what sort of creatures inhabited this forest. That sounded like a little girl. A second scream confirmed his suspicions, this one sick with anguish. Takeshi and Jacques shared a hard stare before cautiously rushing away from the main path.

“Wait, it’s dangerous in there!”

Nolan tried to stop them, but Takeshi pointed into the unknown. “Little girl. We go!”

They have no idea what’s out there! He shot a pleading look at Jacques, but caved under the Frenchman’s judgemental glare. Nolan had no choice but to follow. Only once they were past the treeline did he realize that he’d forgotten to take his jagged branch along.

They found her a minute later with the aid of her dying screams. She was lying on the ground, wisps of blonde hair plastered to the tears and snot that dribbled down her terror-stricken face. She couldn’t have been older than ten-years-old. Hunched over her were three vicious-looking foxes that were making quick work of what was left of her body. Each was the size of a full-grown deer.

Takeshi and Jacques shared the same look of grotesque disbelief, clearly unprepared to stumble upon such a sight. Nolan almost vomited. This is why I didn’t want to come out here! He grasped at the two men and tried tugging them away, but they were too overwhelmed by the horrible sight before them to heed his words of warning.

The sound of breaking twigs sent a shiver down Nolan’s back and he looked over to see the big, fluffy head of a fourth fox poking out from behind a large tree only a metre away from Jacques. Its razor sharp teeth firmly clamped themselves down over the Frenchman’s throat before Nolan could spit out a sound, the strength of its jaw separating head from shoulders with sickening ease. Seeing Jacques killed so gruesomely in an instant, Takeshi was spurred into motion and he took off in the direction of the road while screaming at the top of his lungs.

Fuck! Nolan glanced back at the two corpses, horrified to see three more foxes emerging from a large thicket. Why didn’t you listen to me?

They’d almost made it back to the path when Takeshi tripped on a hidden tree root and tumbled to the ground. Nolan stopped to help him up but had to lunge to the side in order to barely avoid the snapping jaws of one of the deranged foxes. Three of them had caught up in an instant and descended upon Takeshi, who connected eyes with Nolan at the exact moment that they began to tear into him. Nolan sprinted for the path without looking back.