APOCALYPSE
ROCK

By Nate Budzinski

CHAPTER 01: Thirty Years Back

The weather’s fine for late September. Two kids are playing out in the woods. They’re classmates at school, and they’re neighbors. Or what counts as neighbors out here. They run among the tall trees that separate their homes, jumping over ferns, scrambling across mossy logs and crawling through the undergrowth. Their laughter and shouting echo in the woods.

The island they live on is off the west coast of North America, in the Pacific Northwest. It’s just one in a multitude of islands that break off from the jagged mountains, the fragmented edges of the vast continent plunging into the sea.

People have lived out here for millennia. And, apart from the infrequent bear or mountain lion swimming over from the mainland, there are no real predators.

Running, jumping, scrambling, the two friends stray further into the woods. They egg each other on. They climb and climb as the light starts to dim.

There are stories about people who live in these woods. Hermits, hippies and other zealots who want to leave civilization behind. Criminals, escapees and other fugitives evading the law.

The kids come to a halt at the edge of a clearing. An old garbage dump, overgrown with ferns and bushes. It looks like it hasn’t been disturbed in years. Parts of rusted vehicles, refrigerators, the skeletons of spring mattresses, and other refuse jut up from the undergrowth. Further in, a large mound of rocks rises from all the junk. In the darkening sky, up above the forest canopy, a bright star has already emerged, soon to be joined by millions more.

Both kids stare at the mound as half-remembered legends float to the surface of their minds. They look at each other. Their breath steams in the cooling air. Without needing to speak, they both know that they’re feeling the same thing. A presence. The less you think, the better your instinct works.

The taller of the two, a skinny, gangly kid with a mop of messy brown hair, remembers a story his mother told him. It was about a boy who claimed he could speak with animals. He was put in a special hospital on the north side of the island, but escaped into the woods. He was never seen again. That’s where the local saying came from. If you ever lost something, you’d say the boy in the woods had taken it.

The shorter of the two, a stocky kid with bowl-cut black hair remembers a legend his mother told him. It was about a creature who lurks in the ground and the sea. It has a head and fore-quarters of a deer, and a tail like a snake. When the creature decides to visit the surface world, it shakes the earth, and storms follow: rushes of turbid water decimate everything close to shore, landslides wipe out entire valleys, the trees become warped, twisted in half-death. The earth is torn open.

Above the boys, the trees gently sway in a mild wind, the low-level whisper of white noise, punctuated by the distant squawking of seagulls.

Whatever truth might be found among all the legends, myths, and rumors that inhabit these forests, the two kids are sure that this is a terrible place.

They stare into the mound.

The tall, gangly kid walks closer to it, his curiosity tempering his fear. “There’s something inside.”

The shorter, stocky kid stays put. “Doug, don’t… you dunno what’s in there.”

“Can you hear that?” Doug, the gangly kid, goes right up to it, peering into the dark cracks between the moss-covered rocks.

The evenings here can play tricks. Things go dark blue and green as if they’re underwater. The forest’s details darken toward black and so the mind tries to compensate, making images out of the formless mass. Details that might not really be there. Like the tiny crack of a twig in the dead silent night that sets off primordial nerves.

“Doug, stop being an idiot…”

“Stop being a pussy…” Doug tries to sound grown-up. But his voice gulps on his friend’s name, “Bear…” And then Doug hears it, again, now more clearly. A child’s voice whispering to him from deep in the mound. Bear can’t hear it.

“Shame…”

Doug thinks he sees a dim, dirty green light glowing from between a gap in the stones. He reaches his hand into it, his fingers pushing past moist, dirty roots and into the clammy cold mound. Right up to his elbow. Then slowly, he pushes further in.