Page 2 of Foxin' Around

It did not quite compare to the grandeur of his old forest, but that was to be expected. His old forest was one he had nurtured for many hundreds of years. The plants in this forest were stillyoung, but given time, it would reach the same magnificence—perhaps even more with the free flow of energy now moving unrestricted since the Ravening.

At least one good thing had come from that devastation, he reflected.

But this was a good home. Outside of the occasional presence of humans passing through along the edges of his territory, it was peaceful. The humans, after all, were ridiculously easy to frighten away.

But to gain a mate, he would need to change tactics. This time he needed to snare one.

Chapter

One

Krystal squinted from her hidden vantage pointed as she glared down at the group of men bumbling below her. What idiots. At least that proved they were not ravagers. Rumor held that some sort of god or monstrosity—people were generally unclear as to which—had driven ravagers from the world, but she took precautions regardless. But these idiots were definitely human.

“Come on out, girl,” one of the men shouted. “We saw you come this way. It’s no use hiding. We don’t mean you any harm.”

She snorted quietly in disdain. They obviously thought she was as big a fool as they were. There wasn’t a chance in hell she was coming out of hiding. Maybe if she was a naïve teenager, she might have hoped for some chance of safety in this fucked-up world the few survivors of the Ravening were left with, especially with some of the monsters that seemed to have come out of nowhere to share this world with them, but she was nearing thirty and didn’t trust a single one of those motherfuckers.

Trusting men always posed a certain amount of risk, but in the world that it was now, it was potentially suicidal. A memory welled up unbidden from the back of her mind and she thrustit away, not wishing to remember the way her mother looked when she, among several other women, chose to leave the world on their own terms with the aid of a drug cocktail administered by a nurse among them, rather than face the high potential of intolerable and brutal fates. Krystal tried not to be angry with them but failed. Now she tried to just not think of them at all in an attempt to protect herself from the pain.

But she understood. Looking down at the men who had pursued her from the house she had lived in all her life—the place she had clung to her family through the devastation of the ravagers and after the creatures finally departed—she understood.

She had been too confident that, having gone months without seeing another human in town, she would be left alone and the fears of her family and friends had been unfounded. She had even started to believe that perhaps there were fewer survivors than anyone had believed. Stumbling across ragtag group of three men scavenging in her neighborhood had been so shocking that she hadn’t even thought to stick around and find out who or what they were. In a way, she was relieved they were just other humans, but her skin prickled warily all the same. A human would better anticipate her actions. It was only a matter of time before they decided to double back and make a more thorough sweep of the small businesses that lined both sides of the street of their town’s modest downtown area.

“Fuckers,” she whispered as she watched them gradually disappear down the road.

Once they were no longer in sight, she turned away from the window to inch her way down from the small apartment on the upper floor through the charred ruins of the shop she’d been hiding in. Instead of heading toward the entrance, she turned toward the rear of the building. It was better to not pop out onto the main road, just in case anyone was still watching.

She had no idea who had set the little shop on fire—didn’t even really have a clear idea on what exactly it sold—but the heavy smell of soot still clung to everything, and she tried not to gag as she made her way toward the rear exit. She was just glad that no one had died in the little upstairs apartment in the fire. She didn’t think she could’ve handled the smell of charred human flesh, much less encountering any grisly remains. She’d already had enough of accidentally coming across dead people, regardless of whether they died during the Ravening and were currently in a state of decay or freshly dead. It didn’t really matter either way. People were dying everywhere in the wake of the Ravening it seemed.

The alley stank of rotting refuse filling the waste bins. Her stomach lurched violently, and she brought a hand up over her mouth and nose as she made a concentrated effort to just breathe through her mouth, praying all the while that she didn’t puke everywhere as she hurried down the alley. Perhaps keeping to the town was a mistake. She had decided to remain put due to familiarity of her home and neighborhood and the opportunities to search for supplies as needed for at least a little while. And yet now, with the stench of garbage all around her, she was beginning to reconsider. Not only was it putting a huge target on her back, but the stench within the residential and business areas was only going to get worse once summer arrived. It was spring and it was already intolerable.

Shouldering the weight of her backpack, Krystal began to pick her way along the streets, following the general direction of the highway heading out of town. She would be a fool, of course, to travel along the highway itself, but at least she had an idea of what direction to go to head out of town. From there, she didn’t know where she would go. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully. Her uncle had a cabin in the northern part of the state. She used to go fishing there every summer with cousins when they were kids.

While the cabin took several hours by car to get to from town, it would likely take her roughly three weeks to get there on foot. Of course, that depended on how quickly she walked and how often she needed a break to rest. Krystal bit her bottom lip nervously. Walking out in the open for several days on end made her nervous. At least a good portion of the distance was relatively thickly covered with trees. But what about predators? And food?

Her stomach dropped and for a moment she considered backtracking and returning home. Maybe her pursuers wouldn’t look there for her. Yeah, right. For all she knew, they had returned to her neighborhood and were currently waiting for her to come back. That’s what she would do in their position. Groaning, she pinched the bridge of her nose. She would be foolish to even consider returning home for any of her personal belongings. It pained her to leave everything behind, but at least she knew some places to hit in town to grab supplies. Going back was the sort of dimwitted move that she always disdained in movies—the heroine just walking into a trap because she was deluded enough to think she’d escaped the enemy.

Either way, there was no returning home. Her choices were to suck it up and to spend the rest of her life anxiously attempting to keep hidden just in case someone else decided to try their chances looting the town, or to deal with danger for a short time to go someplace she knew she would be safe. Not only that, but she recalled her uncle saying that the cabin was quite secluded. There wasn’t another cabin for miles, and with everything changing following the Ravening, it was likely wilder than ever. That made it a good place to lie low, as the likelihood of anyone even finding her out there was minimal. The seclusion would make replenishing supplies a pain in the ass, but the lake was chock full of fish and there should still be plenty of nonperishables stored. Then again, out on the road she wouldbe exposed to all other travelers—human and nonhuman alike. That wasn’t exactly a safe option either, even if her destination was ultimately a much better choice than remaining in town.

She paused, debating it, but a vibration of some strange energy made her shiver, and the scent of unfamiliar flowers filled her nose. She tipped her head as she breathed it in, trying to identify the perfume, but it disappeared far too quickly. Was it merely coincidence? Did it matter? It seemed better to take it as a sign. The town didn’t smell of flowers and was unlikely to smell pleasant for quite some time to come. If she wished to smell flowers again, then she needed to venture out into the unknown.

Maybe someone else in her family had a similar idea? The possibility of not being alone put an extra pep in her step as she picked up her pace and headed out of town, striking out away from the roads into the open landscape beyond. But not before making one very necessary pit stop. Harry’s Tackle and Camping Supplies was a gold mine for everything she could need.

Chapter

Two

As nerve racking as it was to walk across open fields and through the dense forests, Krystal found it less difficult to carry out than she was initially worried about. The nights alone made her uneasy, however, especially with the odd sounds that carried through the dark. Thankfully, so many years of camping and hiking in her youth paid off, so that she made sure she was well equipped. The compass and a decent map of the area alone proved to be lifesavers. As someone who was accustomed to having a GPS telling her every turn to make in recent years, her map-reading skills were rusty but gradually kicked back in.

She didn’t know if it was her imagination, but it also seemed that every time she had doubts as to the direction she was to travel, the scent of flowers would return, calming her and drawing her down the right path. Sometimes it even came unexpectedly, drawing her aside just far enough to evade a roving group of orcs or some other creature that happened to be making their way across the land as if they had always been there. But now, finally, she was at last arriving at her destination.

“Not too much farther, now,” she panted, her eyes falling on a crooked, worn sign at the edge of the property line.

It was half collapsed and sitting at an angle, nearly buried in the bushes just a short distance from the overgrown dirt road that led up to the cabin. The road itself was practically invisible. She might have missed it if not for the fact that she knew the distance between the sign and the road like the back of her hand, and could still see the tattered ribbon in the tree at the side of the entrance and the scars that marked the wood where she and her cousins had carved their names.

Krystal stopped beside the tree and ran her fingers over each name. Makayla, Nicholas, Andrew, Timothy… Krystal. She swallowed thickly and blinked back her tears. Was there a chance that any of them made it to the cabin to escape the marauding that had wiped out families and small populations following the Ravening? The chances were slim, she knew that. But some part of her held on to hope that she would have someone waiting for her there.

Glancing once more back toward the sign, she walked into the bushes, pushing her way through onto the dirt road. The overgrowth was annoying as it snagged on her bag, her hair, and her clothes, but she continued to make her way along it despite the sinking feeling that grew heavier in the pit of her stomach. No one had come this way for a long time… perhaps not even for years, long before the Ravening. She still clung to hope that just maybe they had walked through like she was now, and the undisturbed appearance of the growth was more an illusion than anything else. Would she really even know if one of her cousins had similarly fought their way down the road months before her?

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