The Edison’s household kitchen was almost uniformly painted in the worst shade of yellow imaginable, hovering somewhere in the no-man’s land between sickly and grotesque. At this moment Chris was too busy glaring into the bottom of the sink into which he was emptying the contents of several half digested bags of chips and a 2-liter of soda to bother hating it with the intensity it deserved. But it should be noted that even in the midst of the greatest physical and mental stress Chris had ever faced, a portion of his mind still found the time to hate it, so odious was the color. Or perhaps it was simply an attempt to run away from what he had seen. What he had done. For the first time in his life however Chris had found something too large to run away from.

Perhaps it was the gaping wound in his shoulder that was bleeding suspiciously little. It could be the weight of the gun where it leaned against his leg. More likely it was the ghostly feeling of dead eyes staring at him through the floorboards. “I-i killed her, I killed my mom.” Chris blubbered, his voice still raw from the abuse of his throat. “Shit my mom just tried to kill me.” He’d been mulling over these two points for the better part of an hour, covered in his own vomit and his mother’s blood. But it was all in some kind of hazy stupor, the human part of his mind, the part in charge of doing all the thinking, having fucked off to some mental equivalent of Tahiti leaving the body to deal with the fallout. But now the plane had turned round and every sight, smell and sound that had been left blessedly unprocessed was hitting him like a sledgehammer to the gut sending him slowly to his knees.

The world moved forward before he was ready, as it always had. There was no second voice from the sky, no congratulations. One moment Chris was inside the hateful yellow, but at least familiar kitchen, the next he was down to his neck in a thick, thorny undergrowth. The pain roused him out of his stupor as he flailed wildly forward, stomping his feet and windmilling his working arm to the freedom of a mossy floor.

After a panicked scramble to grab the gun he’d forgotten in his surprise, Chris looked upon his new world with a wonder that blew clean through the dark thoughts of his small mind. The light that came from above the trees was cut into ribbons by their leaves, painting the bark below in the pattern of young deer hide. The forest floor was covered in a red lichen that was soft and cool against his bare feet. Chris leaned the shotgun against his leg, the barrel burying its nose in the ground next to him. Then he brought his one hand to his mouth and did quite possibly the dumbest thing possible “HELLO?!” he shouted with every bit of force he could muster. The silence of the forest resumed for a scant few moments, and then the sound of clicking metal came from behind him. He turned, his ungainly form threatening to fall at the force of the motion and knocking the gun over in the process.

A masked figure, known to their people as the Raksha, winded its way around another of the thick trunked trees, a clawed gauntlet scraping along the bark the source of the warning. Chris believed them to be female based on the lithe, attractive sway to their motions and in this as most things he was wrong. The figures’s waist was inhumanly narrow in a blood red dress and the mask they wore was a latticework of metal in floral pattern that flared out around their head like the hood of a cobra. Having learned absolutely nothing of the nature of predators and prey Chris felt only relief at the evidence that life still existed, “Hi, do you know where we are? Can you help me?”

The figure simply glared, silent and imperious, as they continued to make their way around the tree. A low growling took up behind the Raksha as the deep shadows seemed to split into the form of pitch black wolves that bounded to stand at the flanks of their master. It was now that some idea that this was perhaps not a friendly face began to trickle into Chris’ rotten mind. He kneeled quickly to pick up his gun, shaky fingers grubbing into the dirt and moss to get a stable grip. The problem of course was that, for all its merits, the Remington 870 was not designed for use with one hand, and the small amount of cunning Chris possessed allowed him to see how poorly a straight fire fight would end for him. So he simply leveled it at the Raksha and hoped that he could bluff his way through. “Back off or I’ll shoot you, I’m serious!” Chris shouted with a pathetic crack in his voice.

The clawed hand simply waved with a nonchalant arrogance, the Raksha not even understanding what the gun in Chris’ hands was. The wolves charged and Chris turned and ran as fast as his feet could take him. Which was of course no where near fast enough. The wolves would be upon him in seconds, their footfalls becoming louder and louder with every harsh stinging breath that Chris sucked through cracked lips. Teeth sank down to their gums in the soft, fatty meat of his thigh sending him crashing to the ground. A swing of the gun caused the wolf to jump back but the damage was done and were it not for the soft rattle of M16 fire that dug a parabola of small holes into the ground around Chris the pack would have had him. Chris flubbed his way to his feet and continued to run, his body ready to break down with every heavy foot fall. The waving of an old tanned hand beckoned him forward and then pushed him down into a ditch ringed by thick gray roots.

Chris breathed deep from the dirt, his vision growing dim as his body and mind hit their limit as the whining of wolves was met with the swiftly softening rat-at-tat-tat of the M16 above him.

A rough hand slapped him awake what felt like seconds later. “We have to move, kid, “ a rough manly voice whispered in his ear.

“I-I can’t move,” Chris whined. “Can’t I just sleep here? Just for a little while?”

“If you sleep here you’ll wake up to a wolf's teeth and nothing else. I can tell you’re hurting, especially that leg is going to smart. But all that pain? It’s going to mean nothing if you don’t get up and get moving.”

It would all be meaningless. That phrase struck Chris to his core, everything he had seen, what he had done. He had killed his own mother to survive, and if he didn’t get up that would have meant nothing at all. And from the hole in his arm to the vomit and blood he was still caked in, all of it would have been worth nothing to anyone. In that moment Chris’ neurons fired in his first semblance of a real thought when he learned what it meant to die. And from that moment there was nothing Chris would fear more for the rest of his pathetic life.