There’s A Rural Town Where The Animals Have Had Enough

My parents live up North, and so every Christmas my drive to their house is defined by a lot of grey, brown and white, as well as bitter cold.

Never liked the cold. I spent the first 18 years of my life in it, so I think I definitely have an educated opinion on it.

I don’t like the passionless white-skied coldness, or the stark freeze of the deep dark night where you can see your breath billowing out from you like a smokestack, and I especially don’t like when the sky is a deceptive bright blue and all sunny, the rippled clouds all golden and hazy purple, and you go outside thinking it’ll be warm and it’s still fucking cold. I’m not a fan.

This year, I was alone driving up. My girlfriend of one year left me for some skier shithead a month ago and I thought better than to take my dog all that way with me, I didn’t want to clean my brand new car of dog crap or piss.

It wasn’t that bad really. I mostly just listened to this podcast I like, or when I got bored of that, turned on the radio and endured whatever shit people like nowadays.

Come to think about it, it was probably the first of these Christmas drives in years where I’d been alone. I always had ‘the new girl’, as my Dad called them, with me. Even though looking back he was right to call them that, it was always good company, at least.

Though this time, I was all alone with my thoughts. You must have heard that horribly recycled thing about being alone with your thoughts?

I thought a lot about what I’d done to deserve everything I currently have. Don’t get me wrong, I could have a worse life, I could be on the streets or live in some exotic place where they blow up kids, but I could certainly have a better life.

A lot of people talk about ‘seasonal depression’, but I like to think that the specific depression I was feeling on the way there was a bit more circumstantial, even if I do hate the winter. At some point, I guess the crappy music just got to me, and I resorted instead to just seething in my car, hands gripping the wheel with my jaw wired shut like a bear trap.

Point is, I was feeling shitty, and what happened on the way to my parents did the antithesis of helping.

Around four fifths of the way to my parent’s house, I killed something.

The bump I felt when I hit it was terrifying. I literally felt myself bouncing an inch off my seat when it happened, and I hit my knees real hard on the steering wheel. If it had felt smaller, I probably would’ve kept going, but considering how wracking it felt, I thought I should probably check it out. Initially it even crossed my mind that I might have hit a human being. I’m sure that when it wasn’t a mound of vaguely grey woolly flesh horrifically croaking for a clean death I would have been able to tell what it was.

However, when I disembarked, cursing, from my nice AC-warmed car out into the bitter shittyness of rural buttfuck nowhere, I thought at first I’d run down some kind of alien.

I never got too close to it (I was probably going faster than I had any business going) but I’d estimate it was around the size of some kind of deer.

As you may have guessed from my likely annoying amount of complaining about God’s Green Earth, I’m not too much of an outdoors person, so I’m not 100% clear on all the beasts of the wild. I don’t think it was a deer, anyway. I couldn’t see any antlers or horns or anything.

I’d like to say that I went over and gave it a humane, clean shot to the head like I was Davy Crockett or something, but instead I just sort of…watched it. I did have a gun, but I just couldn’t be bothered.

I should have, I guess. I hit it, I could have at least apologised by blowing its brains out.

I realised how morbid it was for me to just be watching whatever it was die so I went back to the car.

Like I said, it looked like a deer, and since in most places you’re meant to report hitting that kind of stuff, I phoned 911.

As you can imagine, the connection in some frosty rural road is pretty shaky, so the quality and the swiftness of the call wasn’t incredible.

The sheriff of the nearest town (which was actually pretty far away) got on the call after a bit, and I told him what happened.

I initially thought that he sounded a bit too concerned for the circumstances, though I guessed this may have just been the effect of the crappy connection out there messing with the audio.

“Any idea what it might have been?” He asked. He had a very warm, firm voice, the sort of male you might refer to as a ‘feller’, or address as ‘sir’, or describe as a ‘bloke’ if you had the misfortune of being British.

“No, I’ve not gotten a look at it up close. Don’t really want to, y’know, get all personal with it.” In comparison, my voice was small and weedy. The sort of male you’d call a ‘boy’, or ‘son’.

“Perfectly understandable son.” I could tell right off the bat he didn’t respect me. He said this with that sort of professional amusement that has just a hitch of sarcasm in it. “You see how big it was?”

“Yeah, around the size of a deer.”

“Shit.” He said. Now there was a kind of fear in his voice, I thought, an extremely sudden switch. “Alright. Goddamn it. Alright, you gotta stay right where you are right now, son. I’ll be there in about an hour…it’ll be dark by then.”

“What? What do you mean you can come and get me? I have a car-”

“No, listen, you gotta stay there son, okay?” He said. “I can’t really explain it, alright, you just gotta stay put. You can stay in the car, but you can’t drive anywhere. Christ. Roundabout where are you?”

I told him. The car was feeling quite cold at this point.

“Fuck.” He said. The car got colder. “That’s close. Listen, you see any signs for a town called Orwell?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that where you are?”

“I’m from Maypool.” He said. “Listen, don’t move and definitely don’t get any closer to whatever the signs say is Orwell, alright? I’m coming, son.”

“I don’t understand, you said that I’m close to something, what did you-?” The call cut off before my timid little voice could protest.

Well great. I thought. Stuck with the rotting corpse of some thing in the middle of nowhere near some town that doesn’t exist. And to cap that all off it’s also fucking freezing.

I lasted about ten frigid minutes waiting for him before I gave up. I bet he was probably just trying to mess with me, I don’t need to ‘stay put’. Anyway, I have somewhere to be!

But when I tried to move the car, nothing happened but the car crawling a few inches, then making a sorrowful gasping noise.

I got out, and before I could look at what happened, I was struck by how silent the forests were now. Not only had the animal I’d hit stopped groaning, but I also noticed that there were no more birds singing in the trees.

It was dusk now, the reddish sky making the snow capped trees look like the shadows of giant slender creatures.

My tires had been scratched out. Not popped, but clawed, with clear scratch marks on them.

Now this, combined with the sudden deathly silence, had me understandably scared shitless.

At this point, I was pretty damn certain that I wasn’t waiting around with that rotting thing and my broken down car, so I set off running down the road, heart beating faster than the speed at which my feet hit the gravel.

I was also pretty certain that the sheriff was, for whatever reason, trying to trick me somehow, so I ignored his orders and headed straight for Orwell.

The woods were all silent, not a single sound but the hollow wind between the nearby trees.

At one point, I spotted a small creature, what I assumed was a wolverine or a beaver or something, skitter across the road, followed by several other small creatures, which I assumed it would usually hunt.

There was something so orderly, so official about the way they pounced before me one after the other, that gave me the impression that this was a show of some sort of power, meant to intimidate me.

All in single file, like an army or something.

A few moments later of standing, paralysed, in the road, unsure whether I should continue, I could suddenly hear the birds, just about as the sun began to go down. I got out my revolver, which I’d taken from the car, and clutched it into myself.

Soon it was nearly pitch black, the road before me almost as dark as the thickness of the forest.

All the time, I’d been following the signs to Orwell, and as I passed one, I noticed a little brown bird sitting on it, staring at me.

I looked at it too for a while. The little beast didn’t do anything for a moment, just continued to look back at me with its beady, dead little eyes. Then it spoke to me, spoke broken English in a high pitched, hushed voice.

“Your leaving this place. It does not belong to yours anymore.”

I did not respond, only looked at it dumbfounded, my eyes and mouth wide open.

“What?” I squeaked.

“Leaving. Your did to brother. Splat! Him vengeanced if your stay.”

Then it took flight, flapping rapidly away from me.

“Risk by talking to your. Take it as bless.” It said as it disappeared into the woods.

The sun had gone down.

Refusing to think about what just happened, I immediately got my phone back out, going back the direction I went. Fuck this. The cop was right.

“Maypool Police Department, who-” The sheriff answered. His voice was properly distorted now, however I could faintly hear the sounds of the landscape whipping past outside his car, as well as what I thought were several more people with him.

“I-its me, the guy who called you earlier?” I stammered.

“Right. I’m still on my way.” He said, gargled slightly by the shitty connection. “You’re still in the car, right?”

I was tentative to answer. “No, I got out.”

“What!? Why-fuck. Never mind. Get back to the car right now dumbass! Shit, have they seen you yet?!”

“Have who-”

I stopped in my tracks.

On the road before me were three figures.

Each was upright, like humans, and held large poles with sharp tips. It was apparent, however, that they were far from human.

The things on the road were too long, too lithe and strangely proportioned to be human, and even in the dark I could see that all over them they had fur.

Two had great antlers, sprouting from their heads, which made them appear almost regal, alongside their great slender bodies.

The third, who was shorter and squatter, had the curved horns of a ram.

The anthropomorphic nature of the creatures was not, however, the most disturbing part of what I had been faced with. All three were mounted on wretched creatures much smaller than them.

The three beasts which the bipedal animals sat on, shivering and dribbling on the road, were humans.

Naked humans, with their tongues gormlessly lulling from their mouths and their bleeding, hardened knees and hands on the gravel of the road.

The antlered rider at the front called something to me, and the men on all fours began to trudge forwards.

I immediately turned and ran back up the road, still clinging to the sinking hope that Orwell was in fact a real town.

I heard the things behind me give chase, whooping and bleating in what sounded like excitement as their ‘steeds’ cried out in pain, hands and knees slapping across the gravel.

I turned left, stumbling through the thick tangle of the snow carpeted woods. I had dropped my phone somewhere along the road, and now all I held was my gun.

I dared not look back, even as I heard them crying out mockingly for me in the distance.

Distracted by the need to move from my pursuers and quickly as possible, my foot caught on a tree root and I tripped, hitting the ground hard. I then fell down a short crop of hill, tumbling into the underbrush and ripping my coat beyond repair in more roots and underbrush.

When I got to the bottom, I felt a pang of sharp pain reverberate around my skull as my forehead struck another rock.

While I rolled, I attempted to curl up into a ball, still clutching the pistol. I also bit my lip to the point of drawing blood, as to not cry out from the pain and doom myself.

Hearing the beasts who pursued me in the distance, suddenly sounding slightly irritated and lost, I decided to simply lay there in the snow, curled up tight into a whimpering ball, hoping none found me.

I lay there for about four minutes before I heard the sound of the poor human steed’s hands crunching around in the snow nearby.

What I heard first, however, was the panting sound of the rider. He sounded smug, speaking in a similar mangled version of English that the bird had spoken.

“Found your!” It exclaimed gleefully. The thing smacked the man it rode on the head, urging him forward. “Is dead already? Or maybe…is pretend?”

The thing chuckled horribly and leaned down to the steed, talking to him in a patronising, childish tone. “What your think? Hm? Is pretend? Hm?”

Wordlessly, while still gritting my teeth with desperation, I rolled over onto my back, my gun out at the ready.

The ram, who barely even had time to sit back up to take a good look at me, caught the bullet directly in his head. Giving out one last, short and surprised ‘maahhh’, it gracelessly flopped off of the human’s back.

The gunshot rang out like a gong in the empty forest, and I could hear cries of panic, and thankfully, retreat from the other two.

The man who the goat had been riding, terrified by the gunshot, reared up like a scared horse, snarling at me, and began to prance around on his hind legs, but standing with an inhumanely bent posture.

“Chill out!” I said in a harsh whisper, pointing the gun at him. “You’re free!”

The man looked at me with frenzied eyes as I spoke, frothing at the mouth. Up close he looked like a fucking caveman, clearly hadn’t washed, shaved or eaten properly in ages. He had shaggy hair hanging from his armpits and crotch, his hairy skin stretched tightly over his jagged bones, all of which were perfectly visible from outside.

The man snarled at me, his mouth frothing with frenzied eyes like that of a feral junkie. He then turned around, bounding on all fours once more, and disappeared into the darkness of the woods.

I began to cry from the shock. What the fuck was this? Why the hell did I leave my car?

After a few more moments of weeping I decided to take a look at the thing I’d killed.

The fact I landed that good of a hit on it was incredible, I hadn’t shot a gun since five years prior when I went to a range with my dad. The animal had taken the bullet directly in the left eye, and it had probably gone all the way into the brain.

I noticed that the thing’s cloven front feet had mutated somehow, one part of the hoof elongating and splitting into several small, toothlike claws that looked like fingers, with one large one that served as the thumb.

However, apart from being able to stand upright, the dead animal looked like any normal bighorn sheep.

Stumbling away from it, I tried to decide what to do, head still spinning from the encounter. I was certain that those other riders wouldn’t stay away for too long.

However, before I could think more, I was interrupted, once again hearing the calls of birds.

Looking up, I saw what must have been at least twenty birds, all sitting on the branches of the trees.

They were of various kinds, however the one which caught my eye was the huge eagle that seemed to be in the centre, the leader of the ambush. His largeness and the wickedness of his talons seemed to command a form of majesty and intimidation.

Before I could even turn to run, they descended on me, shrieking and clacking their beaks, an orchestra of winged terror.

First, a small robin smashed into my head, tearing into my neck and pecking my ear savagely. As I stumbled to the ground, crying in pain, more birds came for me, ripping me apart with their claws and reducing my clothes to tatters, exposing my skin to the cold.

After a few seconds of enduring this pain, I felt myself slip into unconsciousness.

When I woke up, I was being pulled across the gravel of the road by my feet.

I was still bleeding from what felt like hundreds of claw and beak marks all over my skin and I was half naked, most of what remained of my clothes hanging from me like reptilian skin in the process of being shed.

It was still bitterly cold, and I still appeared to be in the woods

The moon in the black, misty sky shined down on me, almost too bright for my bloodshot eyes, which had also been damaged by the assault.

I painfully craned my head up to see two more of the bipedal animals dragging me.

Both were deer, like the beasts which had pursued me before, however they were now both standing on their hind legs, walking with a jittery, jolting gait, like their knees had been damaged.

One of them turned around and saw me, its typically expressionless face curling into something that somehow resembled malice.

It grunted something to its companion that was either in some language they shared, or too quiet for me to hear in my disorientated state.

Both dropped my feet, turning to me with sneers beneath their snouts.

“Stand.” One of them said, in a guttural voice which made it hard to recognise it as a word, not a simple grunt.

I hastily did as it asked, noticing that with one of its strange hands the deer who had spoken was holding my pistol. Stumbling to my feet and shivering with fear, I looked at them for further instruction.

However, as soon as I was standing, the other deer’s thin leg flashed out, its heavy hooves catching me right between the legs.

The thing howled in amusement as I fell back onto my knees, gasping with pain.

After they’d roughly hoisted me back to my feet, I was commanded to walk with them, and so continued down the road between them, still hunched from the pain in my dick.

I thought several times of making a break from them, maybe running back into the woods, but then I reminded myself how the small army of birds had ripped into me.

All the while, the deer who kicked me stole many glances at me. The looks it gave me were horribly amused, as if it was looking forwards to doing something to me. Somehow, this made it seem both monstrous and humanoid at the same time.

I have no clue how long the journey was, but to me it felt like the longest walk of my life.

While I knew my situation was dire initially, I knew it had gotten even worse when we finally arrived in Orwell.

I suppose the small town would have usually looked quite idyllic, with mountains visible in the distance with quaint little shops and houses spreading from where I stood over to a lake nearby, a windmill at the very edge of the town with a farm next to it.

However, currently, the whole area looked as if it had been struck by the apocalypse. The buildings were smashed up, windows shattered and most cars had been left to decay, rust infecting them.

In the middle of the street, there was a bonfire where all sorts of furniture blazed, more being flung onto it by a wide variety of bipedal animals, deer, wolves, raccoons, sheep and a moose, who moved in the flickering firelight like well-oiled soldiers.

The worst part was the people. A bear, who wore leaves on his shoulders like pauldrons, stood on top of a house, shouting and throwing rocks down at more of the slathering slave-humans, all naked and hairy, that moved in a lobotomised congregation below him, bearing large logs.

They were all moving in the same direction, I noticed, and I wondered if they were being forced to make some kind of massive den for the animals.

I was urged forwards.

“You-you’re going to turn me into one of them, aren’t you?” The answer was stupidly obvious, what else would they have wanted with me? But the absolute bizarre situation I had found myself in meant that my mind was not working at its usual calibre.

The deer simply smirked.

The smell was awful, like how certain enclosures in zoos smell, the sort of tightly-packed, humid smell which makes you think of mouldy animal droppings. It sounded like a slaughterhouse, with all the things around me whooping and screeching in delight, while my degenerate human brothers moaned in their mindless despair. A slaughterhouse run by animals where humans were butchered and processed.

As I went further into the centre of this area, where the bonfire was, I noticed the figures hanging from the trees.

Dogs of all sizes and breeds had been hung with nooses from the branches of trees. All had the same mutations to their bodies that my captors had, upright bodies that swung slowly in the wind with those bizarre hands, morphed from what were their paws.

“Your see the traitors?” One of the deers chuckled. “Too loyal. Had to go.”

I felt sick. It was the first time on the trip I’d been glad I hadn’t brought my dog along with me.

“You fucking animals.” I whispered.

The pair cackled like hyenas.

Spotting me, the bear on the roof stopped hurling rocks and lumbered off of the roof, then stomped over to us.

The thing was terrifying, looming over even the deer by at least four feet, his huge brown body was similar in build and general gait to some horrible, fat drunk you might see somewhere. There was an expression of permanent fury on the bear’s savage face.

He spoke to the other two in a rumbling, half-pained, half-threatening grunt. Halfway through whatever he was saying he motioned to me with one of his gargantuan claw-tipped paws, and I could not help but cringe back in fear, certain that it was going to grab and devour me.

When this happened, he turned his black eyes on me and let out an amused growl.

“Have you ever been to a farm before, child?” Even though it was much deeper than a human’s voice could ever be, the bear’s English was much better than that of any of the other animals.

Before I had time to answer, I was pulled away by my captors.

Content with whatever he had ordered my fate to be, the bear plodded back over to the house.

As we passed the bonfire, I heard jeering calls from the animals, like the sort you hear in a movie when new inmates arrive in prison, and even felt claws caressing me, teeth nipping at my exposed skin. Attempting to curl up away from the torment as best I could, I began to weep again.

I was then pulled around the town for at least half an hour. The whole way the two deer were speaking in their language about things I dread to learn, occasionally trying to scare me with smug remarks in their malformed version of English.

I saw many strange, horrible sights on my journey there. The entire town had been overrun, the monsters wrecking every man made structure and filling it with their nests.

The troglodytes who were what I suppose used to be the population of Orwell did most of the work for them, and as I mentioned before, were all carrying logs to the town’s park, piling them up into dens which I guess were for hibernation or something similar.

The worst part is, that as far as I understand, these aren’t even the optimum conditions for these animals to live in. It seemed to me like they were just doing this to be cruel to the humans.

I saw a large moose, who was at the head of a noisy circular crowd of beasts, calling for all to be silent as they watched something in the centre.

As I passed, I saw a pair of naked old women fighting each other, savagely ripping into each other with their nails and teeth, wrestling on the ground. Every time a substantial amount of damage was done, the crowd would begin to holler in excitement.

Neither woman looked at all embarrassed or horrified, their eyes betrayed only pure primal eagerness for violence, and fox-like cunning.

Finally, the smaller of the women got the other on the ground, greedily chomping at the forehead with rotted teeth while she choked her opponent out in a desperate headlock.

When her opponent went limp, the small woman began to leap excitedly around the circle, cheered on by the animals, her tongue lulling from her mouth and her eyes wide. She was petted on the head by the moose, who then snatched a large, juicy apple from the paws of a disappointed looking bobcat, who proceeded to go to the dead woman’s side, and sadly whimper and nuzzle her saggy flesh on all fours.

The other animals, seeing this, laughed at the bobcat, and kicked him until he ran off on all fours, snarling back into the woods.

I also saw they had set up a shooting range in another part of the park. Despite their growth of seemingly functional hands, the monsters had difficulty shooting guns.

Many seemed unable to position their bodies properly to aim at the straw figures they had set up.

I saw a fox, standing around the size of a toddler, attempt to hoist up a pistol and fire it. He did manage to pull the trigger, the impact sent him flying backwards.

I may have laughed in other circumstances. Instaid, I began to have dark thoughts of how perhaps this was not the last stage of their evolution.

Perhaps someday, they would be able to use these weapons we had left for them, and as they were already seemingly building an army out here. I began to imagine the woods around my parent’s house, thick with cunning, shiny black eyes.

I recalled hearing something on the news recently about how animals in this region had been recorded displaying unusual migration patterns, including a large pack of bison from another state, who were heading to some location around where Orwell was.

Remembering this made my stomach turn cold as the black water of a river, though I had no other choice but to keep walking.

The worst thing I saw, by far, however, was the farm.

Humans roamed the pens on all fours, fighting in the mud for scraps of food thrown to them by the ‘farmers’.

I was able to get a glance inside one of the cheerful red barns as we went past and saw what must have been dozens of people packed in there, men and women, all squeezed into the racks of wooden planks on the walls, furnished with sharp, matted hay.

What made this image worse was that it looked almost identical to those pictures of the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps from World War Two, all those poor emaciated people forced to squeeze in those tiny draw-like bunks.

I saw one male human with a female, having a feral sexual intercorse against a fence pole.

Watching like some kind of monstrous cuckold, a wild pig with black fur and a disgustingly bloated stomach stood inches from them on his scrawny trotters. Under his long, double-barrel shotgun snout he was grinning widely, like a child sitting and watching his favorite cartoon.

In one hand, he held a brutal-looking electric cattle prod, which, after a few moments of greedily watching, he jabbed into the man. Over the short electric crackle of the cattle prod, I could hear both the man and the pig howling. The woman screamed too, as her partner’s body was wracked by the electricity.

Noticing my slack face upon seeing this, the deer stopped.

“Your like, hm?” Grinning, one of them pointed at a large, grey building in the near distance that looked like an overgrown brick.

“Kill house.” He said, “Meat house.”

He pointed at the barn, then back at the building.

“We take yours like your took us’. Soon as it pop out of your. Usually needs to wrestle them from the girls.”

It suddenly struck me that through all the village, in the square, the streets and the pens, I had not seen a single child.

Not even in the barn. I had only seen what I’d estimated to be a few teenagers, but no children whatsoever.

I looked back at two humans having sex. They seemed to have finished, now simply lying together in the mud, embracing and crying into each other’s shoulders. The pig stood over them, his head rolled back in gruesome, guttural laughter, with his inflated hand on his belly.

“And us’ do not eat them, even.”

I looked back at the deer, my jaw set like a boulder and with what I hoped was a burning fury in my eyes.

“Us just let them grind. Grind up into bone and guts and blood. All the little ones.”

They finally took me to a little cantankerous hut just outside the village and up a short hill. Above the door was a human skull, washed red with what blood, antlers tied to the sides of it.

“Goat! Goat!” They screamed, pounding on the door.

There was a short, tired noise from within and they entered.

The Greeks and other ancient civilisations had imagined hell as a material, subterranean location that was like a kind of underground network of caves in which the dead were tormented. This was what the inside of the hut was like.

The interior smelled of coppery blood and sopping wet gore, both of which I spotted boiling and bubbling and rolling around in the gelatinous collective goop contained in a massive black cauldron in the centre of the room.

On the floor, stretched out as a rug like you would with the pelt of an animal, was the skin of a man, the wide-eyed head still attached.

All over the walls were the severed body parts of humans, strung up a primitive shrine-like mockery of a hunting lodge, even with a large hunting rifle mounted on the wall.

An old, hunch-backed female goat who held a malformed, twisted staff, sat on a cartoonishly large and rickety rocking chair in the corner.

She had the first human child I’d seen in Orwell, looking to be only a few months old, curled up in her lap like a cat. The child had some sort of physical disability, I could tell, however not something like the mindlessness of those in the village or the steeds, something more natural, Down’s Syndrome perhaps.

A rare breed of pet, I thought.

The goat’s horns were cracked, as was her skin, and her milky white eyes stared right at me. In one ear, I saw she had a yellow tag, bolted into the skin as many goats owned at farms do.

After petting it a few times, she placed the baby down, letting it skitter off into the dark recesses of the demonic place, and got up, limping over to the cauldron.

My heart began to beat faster as I was forced down to my knees, firm hands placed on my shoulders by the deers. I felt as if I was dropping down a bottomless pit, as I began to realise I had been brought here for some kind of ritual.

The goat came forwards. “Did you fight, man? Did you kill any of my soldiers?”

I was too tired to respond, simply slinking forwards. Though suddenly, I remembered the rage I felt upon seeing the pig torture those people, felt it resurging and cursing through my veins.

My head shot up and I spat a great, spiteful glob of spit right onto the end of her long face.

Her bovine brows curled into offence and she curtly ordered one of the deer to hit me, which he gleefully did, striking my cheek hard with his cloven hand and knocking more spit from my mouth.

She then brought out a strange artifact, a ball, which produced red mist that wisped around the floor. It swung from a golden chain which she held in one hand, and the ball itself was embroidered with strange markings, spears and horns and leaves.

She slowly approached me as the deer continued to hold me down, croaking out strange words.

These words did not resemble the language that I had heard the animals speaking to each other before. They were deeper, more ancient, and instilled the stirring of something primal within me.

As she came closer, I breathed in the smoke that came from the ball. The smoke smelled like rage, pain, and thousands of years of development, of evolution and advancement.

Then, it was as if my head was plunged into a barrel of thick water, my stinging eyes staring down at the mystery fish which stirred in the black fathoms.

I was hypnotised. I felt like tearing through the woods with my bare hands, killing animals with my teeth and striking rocks together until a flame sparked. I felt like sleeping in the darkness every night, knowing that especially under the cover of the stars, I was always in danger.

I felt those who had come before me melding into my mind, the temporal sludge of memory melding around me.

Then, suddenly, I heard faint gunshots.

The goat stopped chanting, gasped, and dropped the ball, which smashed on the floor, filling the small room with the red mist.

Then it was as if my head had been released, and I came back to the surface, greedily gulping in air.

The deer shouted, and I heard more gunshots.

The one which held my gun rushed out of the cottage, the other going to comfort the goat, who had started cowering in the corner.

I do not know if the strange rage the ritual had imbued in me fuelled what I did next, or if it was simply the anger I felt at the atrocities I had witnessed, but I leaped up and dived for the deer.

Surprised, he was unable to throw me off of him before I was digging my fingers into his eyes, screaming in anger as I did.

After he had gone limp, I stood, red and white ichor still dripping from my fingers, and turned to the goat.

She was huddled in the corner, clutching the baby, who cried with her. I picked up her staff and prised the baby from her hands. I then quickly sat it down in the next room, coming back to find her attempting to crawl out of the door.

I took her staff, and slammed it down onto her head until one of her horns crumbled from her head.

Then, while she was limp, though still raggedly breathing, I pulled her by the remaining horn to the cauldron, and opened her maw.

I slammed her open mouth down onto the cauldron’s cold rim until I found myself holding only the top of her head, still clinging onto the horn.

As her half-headed body crumpled to the floor, I dropped the part of the head I held into the mass of gore in the cauldron, and watched as it floated above it all, eyes still lulling lazily in their sockets.

Sometimes I look back at the brutality with which I treated the deer and the goat, and feel a pang of guilt.

I tried to imagine if she had ever felt guilty for all the pain she had caused, if the screams of the devolved men and women who suffered because of her haunted her at night.

I often find it difficult to convince myself they did not.

After taking the hunting rifle from the wall, I placed the crying child safely in a ravaged bed in the hut’s unused bedroom, vowing that I’d come back for him.

I ran from the hut, down the hill, to find that Orwell had descended into even more chaos.

I could see the invasive lights of police cars in the distance, within the village, where I could hear more gunshots.

Around me, in the farm, the humans, looking confused and scared, had rushed inside the barn, while some of the animals had started back for the woods, running in fear on all four legs.

Suddenly, I spotted the wild pig I had seen before, peeking around the side of the barn nearest to me, shivering with fear and trying to see if the coast was clear for him to run.

“No way.” I said between gritted teeth.

Aiming the rifle, I put the monstrosity in the sights before firing, sending him down with a satisfying squeal. As I mentioned before, I’m not the best shot, so while I had been aiming for his heart, I ended up hitting his left shoulder.

While he was still on the floor, snorting in pain, I rushed over, and shot him in the leg. Now demobilised, he screamed louder, rolling over on the ground.

Picking up his cattle prod, which he had dropped, I advanced, turning the prod on and letting it crackle, a warning.

After he was done crying in pain, the pig’s black eyes went wide at the sight of what I had in my hand.

“NO! NO, PLEASE!” He garbled.

But it was too late. I shoved the stick into his mouth, jamming his stinking maw open with my foot as I electrocuted the roof of his mouth.

Digging the stick’s prongs in further, I cried in rage as the beast spasmed and jerked below me, eyes rolling around in their sockets like a rider being bucked on a bull. Finally, the eyes popped, dribbling down the thing’s fat cheeks as his body let out a few final jerks, the brain finally fried.

I sank back onto my ass in the mud, gasping with content.

“Jesus Christ, son.” I recognised the sheriffs’ voice immediately from over the phone, and suddenly jolted upright. “I was supposed to be saving you.”

He was a tall blonde man with a mustache, about as much as I’d expected, and he was accompanied by another man who wore a wide-brimmed hat. Both were armed with some form of assault rifle.

I suddenly felt like I had been caught with my pants down, shame rising within me.

“I-I saw him before, he was-” I began.

“Sh. We gotta get out of here kid, alright? We’ve already lost an officer to those monsters.”

All because I got out of the car. I thought, looking back shamefully at the pig. I picked up the hunting rifle and ran to the sheriff.

“You knew about all this?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up.” Said the other officer. The sheriff said nothing.

I motioned from the barn, from which whimpers of terror could still be heard. “Aren’t you going to help the people too?”

“People?” Asked the sheriff, looking at me sadly. “Those ain’t people no more, kid. If we were gonna save them, we’d burn that barn to the ground with them in it. That’d be the most humane thing to do, but we don’t have time. C’mon!”

The three of us snuck around the houses until we finally reached where the cops had parked, near the bonfire at the entrance to town.

There must have been about five cars, each of which had seemed to have brought at least three officers, the majority of whom I could see spraying lead into the houses, where the creatures were cowering.

The bodies of the new citizens of Orwell were scattered everywhere, including the other deer who had captured me, who had been shot in the back, sprawled face down on the ground.

As I watched, hiding between the houses like a coward, I saw the bear with his leaf pauldrons leap onto one of the cops, shredding him in half with his teeth, before roaring at the others.

“REMEMBER ME WHEN YOU ARE RAPING THE FORESTS YOU HAIRLESS MONKEYS!”

They took this opportunity to fire at him, one officer with a shotgun firing right into the bear’s face. The colossal beast collapsed, a gaping hole in his head.

We ran into the square, most of the cops having stopped firing.

“Alright folks, let’s go!” Ordered the sheriff, getting into his car. “No time to get Jacobs and Anderson!”

Before I was hurried into a car, I saw one last body. It was one of the humans the animals had enslaved, a young, pretty girl who had caught a bullet right between her eyes. She was propped up with her head against a wall, dead eyes staring right at me.

I don’t remember much of the drive to Maypool. I felt like the president, with the other police cars speeding alongside ours away from the town.

I felt like one particular president, in fact when they started shooting at us, shots going waywire everywhere. While I was cowering in the backseat, the window smashing and spraying glass all over me, the image of the fox firing the gun came back into my head, and I began to laugh unstoppably and didn’t stop until we got to Maypool.

Nobody got hit, thankfully.

When we got to Maypool, they gave me fresh new clothes and some shitty food.

Everything felt so surreal after all that time in the dark town, the lights in the police station made my head hurt and my ears felt horribly heavy and warm, like all the blood had rushed to them.

I hadn’t really processed what had happened yet. It kind of felt as if I was trying to figure out what the worst thing I saw was. I still can’t really decide. Hell, I can’t decide what the worst thing I did was.

The sheriff told me everything I was legally allowed to know, which wasn’t much, and most of which I’d already pieced together from my experiences.

I’m sure you have as well, but essentially what he said was that at some point in the past year, the town of Orwell went dark, any contact with them was cut off, and nobody ever saw anyone who went to see what happened again. At one point, he said, a whole hunting party of a dozen who went into the woods all disappeared, their camp left in the woods.

He told me everyone had their own theories about what happened to the animals, but didn’t give me any solid evidence, only said that they’d been acting strange for months leading up to the takeover.

“What about the government?” I asked him after he’d told me everything. My voice was hoarse.

He sighed, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “Hell, even I don’t know, kid. I know they know, that’s about all I can say.”

He then asked me what I’d seen. I told him everything up to when he found me.

He seemed pretty interested about the goat, got me to record what I heard and everything.

I can’t exactly remember the exchange, I was preoccupied.

See, as I was explaining what happened, I suddenly remember the child.

I’d left him there. I’d left that defenceless baby in Orwell.

Soon after that, they let me go. I got given some kind of NDA, a lift to my parents house and some bullshit story about my car breaking down.

My parents have noticed something’s up, I’m finding it hard to talk, or to do anything really. I guess I’m not feeling very jolly.

Jesus Christ, I hate the winter.

I’d like to end this on a good note or something. Maybe tell you that the government is going to send in the marines or bomb the town to hell, but I just don’t know. All I know that might relate to the subject are all the news reports I’ve seen about animals acting weird and the rapidly ascending numbers of disappearances in the area, and even those might be something different.

I’m just stuck here, in the dark, with no way to help, no way to do anything about all the suffering going on in Orwell, and no idea whether anyone is going to do anything about it.

I’m writing this at my parent’s house right now, in their living room. It has this big window through which you can see over the land, even the hills a little while away.

I don’t know why I chose to sit here, with all the wildlife you could see in this spot I’m basically asking to freak myself out.

I keep seeing animals and thinking that they’re looking at me, or that they move too strangely, too uncannily. The problem is, I can’t even figure out if I’m paranoid or I have reason to be concerned.

But that’s not what’s got me so freaked out.

See, an hour ago, my dad came up to me and told me to come with him to see something.

We went just up to the edge of his land, where you could see the hills. My mom was there already, recording something on her phone.

“Have you seen this? It’s crazy!” My mom said, turning around to look at me with a bewildered smile.

“Been on the news I think.” My dad said, his brow furrowed. “Didn’t think there’d be so many though, goddamn unbelievable.”

Dreading what I would see, I looked at what they were so intrigued by.

Just as I had thought, it was a herd of bison, congregating across the hills. That wasn’t the worst part, however.

“S’an odd way they’re moving, too.” My dad said, bemused. “All in single file, like…like an army or something.”