CONTINUED: PART 3
No... that couldn't be possible. Surely they'd have been caught long ago. How could you just roast human sacrifices over a huge bonfire and not get caught. That's ridiculous. Gotta be an urban legend...
Gotta be...
Gotta be...
“FUCK!!!” I yelled, into the wall of my tent, and stood up and began pacing back and forth.
I started putting on my socks and pants.
“This can't actually be happening!” I reassured myself, not very reassuringly.
My boots were on now. I checked myself over, and touched the back of my head one more time. Yep, bloody as ever.
I took a deep breath, and then unzipped the tent and crawled outside.
It was freezing. The snow didn't seem to just be hitting me in the face, it seemed more like it was being NAILED into my face by some invisible hammer.
I couldn't see shit, so I decided to just start walking in the vague direction of what looked like might be the valley where this supposed cult-gathering was alleged to take place and began trudging along. What else was there to do?
The snow crunched nastily under my feet, and the snow continued to slash at my eyes.
There! Ever so faintly, I could see the what looked like the outline of the edge of the woods, in a slight dip between two hills, and rising above the treeline, from somewhere off behind, I could've sworn I saw a long, slender, winding wisp of smoke, trailing almost completely sideways off to the East, as it was being blown by the constant, howling winds.
I made straight for it, continuing to trudge through the thick pack of snow.
About two hours later, my feet felt like they might be frozen, and my nose was about as hard as an ice cube, but I could see it now. Sure enough, a gigantic bonfire, and some elaborate, expensive looking log cabins all set in an octagon-shape around it. There were huge fences lining all around it, and I could only just see it from the perch I was standing on. Anywhere else and it would've been hidden from view. I strained my eyes, and I could just make out the tiny figures of... people. They were... dacing? Maybe? Yes. Dancing around the bonfire.
Jesus FUCK! This shit was actually real!??? But that would mean...
I cupped my hands over my eyes and squinted even harder. Sure enough, I could just barely see the shapes of some people, in a huge vat of some sort, which was sitting in the enormous bonfire. I could see some tiny limbs flailing about, like the legs of some bug that capsized in a cup of water.
My knees went a little weak, and I puked into the snow.
I brushed the back of my glove against my mouth, and regained my bearings for a second or two, and then resumed onward, toward the compound. Toward bonfire.
There was a clearing in the woods, all around the perimeter fence, and there were guard-towers spaced every 200 feet or so.
In my red jacket and black pants, I stood out in the snow like a sore thumb.
I had to save my friends, though, so on I went.
Suddenly, I could see a little commotion up in the guard tower closest to me. One of the guards was nudging the guy next to him, and now he was pointing at me. Now the other one was pointing something at me, but it wasn't his finger.
“Thump.”
I looked down, and a little trickle of blood started spurting out of my torso, and it looked freakishly red as it hit the snow.
I looked back up, just in time to watch the world go black, and then felt the ground crash up into me, like that sensation when you're waking up from a dream where you fell off of something.
Next thing I knew, every inch of my body felt like it was on fire. I was bobbing up in down in... BOILING WATER!!! It was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt in my life. Some kind of siren was wailing in my ears, and it took a second or two for me to realize it was my own voice. Dave and Sophie were bobbling slowly, face down, in the water next to me. Out on the ground, I could see Brianna's body being flayed apart by some men with huge pairs of prongs and electric turkey-cutters. She was already dead, cooked through to the bone by the boiling water.
The man with the set of prongs lift a fillet off her thigh and held it up high into the air, and closed his free hand into a fist, and clenched it in celebratory fashion, letting out a primal shriek of some sort, and the dozens of others standing around him all shrieked back in similar tune.
The pain was too much to bear, and I could feel myself passing out again.
“Wow. What a way to die...” I muttered with my final breath, and then inhaled a huge scalding gulp of boiling water into my lungs, and watched the white turn to gray, and the gray turn to black, and the black turn to eternity.