Toxic: a short, twisted horror tale

I first made this 1700-word short story available to my wonderful Patreon supporters back in March this year. Now, the time feels right to share the terrible tale more widely.

Hope you enjoy! If 'enjoy' is quite the right word...

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THE SUN holds its head high, amid a pale blue wash and scattered wisps of white. As you press on across the dry forest floor, your boots smash leaves to dust.

The September climate feels warm but not hot enough to overheat you. This feels like the best of both worlds: the tail-end of summer heat, tempered by autumnal cool.

All things considered, you feel delighted with yourself for having chosen the best time of year to tackle the Appalachian Trail.

Not the whole trail, of course. That would be crazy, given that it’s well over two thousand miles long and would take between five and seven months to cross.

As far as you’re concerned, this seventy-six mile stretch of rural Georgia will provide enough of a challenge without threatening to break you. You’re here for a good time, after all, and to de-stress the hell out of yourself. Having vowed to unplug yourself from social media for these two weeks of vacation, you feel no need to impress anyone with your stats.

None of your contacts will receive notifications as to how far you’ve walked, or the route, or how long you’ve taken. To help enforce this, your phone has been stowed away at the very bottom of your pack and switched off. The only selfies you’ll take at any stage of your journey will be strictly for you and captured with an old-fangled, battery-powered camera complete with SD card.

This hike is for you, and you alone, and that feels good.

You’re mindful of the dangers. That’s why there’s a big fat can of bear spray in your bulky but not stupid-heavy backpack.

Your Google research has indicated that black bears on this trail tend to be shy. The worst thing you can do is surprise them. The most perilous times of day tend to be dawn, dusk and of course night, although you’ve yet to see or hear a single bear during your two days on the trail.

When a yearning in your belly signals snack-time, you heave the pack off your shoulder, settle it down and fish a protein bar out from a side pocket.

You picked your favourite flavour: honey and raisin. You love the way these bars contain only the real thing. Not an e-number in sight on the wrapper.

Jiggling up and down to centre your pack on your back again, you take your first bite and move on.

Thus far, most of the forest terrain has been flat, but now your calves face their first workout. The hill before you offers a significant upward gradient, but old tree boughs have been embedded into the dirt at close intervals to form makeshift steps. 

Munching honey and raisins, you take your first step up and are content with how solid this natural staircase feels.

Thousands of people walk up and down every month, you tell yourself, and so of course the damn thing feels sturdy.

Emboldened, you climb faster, revelling in the spike of your pulse. Soon you’re almost halfway up the hill. You feel fit, capable and ready for anything.

Having placed the sole of your boot on the next step up, you see too late that you’ve trodden in a dollop of something soft, bright green and all too slippy.

As you totter backwards and fight to regain your balance, the weight of your pack conspires against you.

Your boots leave the stairs. The next time you glimpse your feet, they’re above your head.

The whole forest makes like a washing machine on spin.

You bounce off one stair, then another, until you crash down onto your side at the foot of the hill with a nauseous crunch.

Your heart pounds as you wait, like a fallen child, to see how bad the pain will be.

You try to move your legs, to no avail.

Neither will your arms play ball. All you can do is flex your fingers.

Fear wraps ice-cold tendrils around your brain.

Hard, sharp, smooth objects rattle around in your mouth. You mistake these for stone chips, until the probing of your tongue reveals them to be shards of teeth. Your mouth now feels lined with tiny, vandalised tombstones.

Your throat contains a ball of something much softer, wedged in the pipe. You dimly recognise this to be a half-chewed ball of protein bar.

For the last few seconds, adrenaline has smothered the loud testimony of your pain receptors, but now they scream. So do you, as your shattered limbs light up.

When you try to roll onto your front, or move in any way, your wrecked legs, arms and pelvis roar their protest. Forced to lie still, you goggle terrified back along the trail.

Having buried your phone at the bottom of your pack doesn’t seem so damn smart now. Even if you had placed the handset right at the top, you realise, you’ve have no means of unshouldering the pack anyway.

You turn your screams into deeper yells, in the hope of attracting a fellow hiker. There’s no way you can be the only human being in these woods today.

Never mind the fact that I haven’t seen another soul since dawn. Yes, best to shove that thought all the way to the back of my panicked thoughts.

Even over your plaintive cries, you detect a low buzz.

The sound of an insect. A bee, perhaps?

You don’t think of the sound as any kind of threat until the bee lands on the ground beside you.

This is no ordinary bee. This looks like some kind of fucked-up bee mutation, born of a toxic spill.

Two inches long and plump as a peach, the creature oozes neon-green slime and quivers with some kind of angst.

Hatred, says a doomy voice in your head. This bee hates every other form of life.

Without even so much as a buzz to announce its next move, the bee flies straight into your mouth with such accuracy that it doesn’t touch the sides.

The honey. It smelled the honey. All that real fucking honey I loved so much.

The bee’s slime-basted body tastes like bile. Even as you gag, you try to wedge the creature between your teeth, through concern that it may try to reach the ball of honey and raisins jammed in your throat.

The bee’s buzz goes up a couple of octaves as your teeth hold it firm. Feelers and wings tickle your palate.

The nerve-endings in your mouth report a major violation as the bee jams its stinger through the pink meat of your tongue.  

You roar, more through outrage than anything else, because the pain cannot compete with the molten hell of your broken limbs.

Will the bee die? Knowing this is no ordinary bee, you decide to hasten its departure by biting down through its body.

When the bee collapses into halves, your mouth fills with diseased hemolymph fluid that burns your mouth like acid and the tiny, inflamed organs that had been packed inside the insect’s warped body. The tubules. The salivary gland. The intestines.

You spit out as much as you can, but the bee’s stinger ensures that the back half of its body stays tethered to your tongue.

Somehow, despite lying on the ground in its own guts, the bee’s front half continues to buzz.

This buzz sounds different. Higher in pitch. Almost like a…

Almost like a clarion call.

Sure enough, the hum of bees grows all around. Your heart sinks as half a dozen blurred shapes float down towards you.

One hideous green goo-drenched bee forces its way into your mouth, as the next ripples with impatience.

The first bee scurries into your throat. The second deftly avoids your gnashing teeth and follows the first one down, thirsty for both honey and revenge. The slime on both creatures burns the lining of your gullet.

Another of the insects makes a bee-line for your left eye.  

No matter how much you screw the eyelid shut and shake your head around, its stinger pierces the thin flesh to puncture your eyeball.

Aqueous juice squirts out down over your cheek.

Excruciating pain makes you thrash around until the shock catches up to crumple your mind.

Now you simply lie here, a resigned and broken host as one bee after another wins the fight to enter your neck, like rowdy teens filing into a new and happening nightclub.

Your hope is that these fuckers will soon choke you to death. Instead, they slime-scorch their way down through your oesophagus to your stomach. Here, they locate and feast upon your first few bites of protein bar and sting every surface in sight.

When will this end?

Please let this end.

A new, heavy, musky smell arises. You hear a powerful chomp and growl.

Upon prising open your one good eye, you’re greeted by the sight of four huge black paws on the ground beside you.

This particular example of a black bear looks far less shy than you’d hoped. Neon-green drool hangs in stalactites from the beast’s furry chin and its crazed eyes are the same unnatural hue.

One great paw clamps down over your face. The other roughly cups the back of your head.

With a deafening crack, the bear twists off your skull like a honey pot lid.

The creature settles back on its hind paws, then hinges upright.

For how long does a severed head retain consciousness? You never did gain clarity on that disturbing fact, probably because you never dreamt you’d need to know.

The bear’s deranged face seems to grow in size as the creature raises your head towards its own. Driven insane, but so relieved that your torment will soon end, you want to say thank you to the bear, but your hopelessly slack jaw refuses to co-operate. Besides, speech would require lungs and vocal cords. You briefly picture your body lying headless below as bastard bees swarm into the neck stump.

The darkening of your vision suggests that your brain holds mere seconds’ worth of oxygen. Just long enough, then, for you to picture the faces of the people you love most, while a seven-foot radioactive bear rams its long, sticky, agile tongue down what remains of your throat, howls with fury over getting stung and bowls your head at the nearest tree.
 
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For some reason, I really enjoyed writing this thing. Toxic acted as a kind of palate cleanser - a bit of fun to get me back into writing again. 

Did you gain some kind of twisted enjoyment from the preposterous tale? Let me know in comments - and please share the link to this page. 

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