Chris slammed the stake home with a rock, the clang of metal on stone echoing through the trees. Three to go. He pulled out the next stake and got to work.
Hadn’t planned on an impromptu trek through the New Mexican wilderness, but damn glad his gear was still unpacked in the truck. The pine air, the whisper of wind through leaves. Just the escape he needed to unwind, cool his jets. Slow the blood hammering double-time behind his eyes.
Tarp down, Chris got to work on the frame. Then the canopy. With the skill of his calloused, practiced hands, the tent was up. From homeless to sheltered in less than twenty.
Now what?
He threw open the pack, fished out one of the three remaining Coors. The hiss of condensed foam and the promise of the sweet taste of the Rockies. Turned out the Rockies were thin and lukewarm.
He chugged the can in a couple of tremendous gulps. Let out a belch that sundered the stillness. He rotated the empty can in his hand, studied the snowcapped peak logo in the fading forest gloom. Wilson Mountain, just outside Telluride. Itself, a half-day ride to Durango — where he had found him.
His father, Thomas Wooten, was a bum of the highest order. Confident, brash, the kind of guy who’d shove you to the ground if you bumped shoulders. He met Chris’s mother right out of high school and was quick to knock her up. Quicker still on skipping town.
Jessica Wooten raised him as best she could while juggling her job at the kindergarten, but the pressure took a toll. She smoked. Drank. Delivered the occasional belt upside Chris’s head. Not that Chris blamed her or anything — she was doing the best she could with the cards she was dealt — but he could blame his father.
And so he did. For forty-two years, he blamed Thomas Wooten for all his failures. Arrested for possession? Thomas Wooten wasn’t there to teach him any better. Fired for throwing produce at a customer? Dad never showed him the value of hard work. Being a dutiful son? Ha. Fuck that noise.
He crushed the beer can in his meaty hand, tossed it into the wilderness. It hit a stone and clattered into the undergrowth. Chris sighed, leaned his head back. The trees towered above, arching skyward, converging on a single point in the distance. They creaked as they swayed in the breeze, sounding like the deck of a ship on the sea.
Chris sat up, strained his ears.
A sound — high and far off but still distinct — drifted through the leaves.
A voice?
He turned, scanned the forest. Nothing but limbs and shadows.
“Hello?”
The sounds, whatever it was, didn’t answer back. It rose into the air like the whine of a distant plane.
He sat up, grabbed for his belt knife. He was used to the sounds of the forest, a lifetime of living in the mountains did that to a boy, but whatever this was…it wasn’t natural.
With uncanny slowness, like an orchestra hitting a final note, the sound faded into the deepening twilight.
“Bullshit.”
He shook his head, unable to believe his ears, but when he clamored into his tent and unfurled his sleeping bag, he made damn sure the knife was by his side. No such thing as too careful, he thought as he popped open another brew.

At the top of the ridge, the land opened up. Blue skies with a touch of gray on the horizon. Pine trees blanketing the hills as they rolled into the distant haze. Endless miles of green.
Chris groaned, stomach rumbling.
Dinner was a gourmet feast: a pack of jerky and a couple of tall boys. Breakfast, nothing but pine needles. Not exactly the escape he envisioned since now he needed an escape from the escape. Back to the car. Back to Pagosa Springs. So, how to get out of this wilderness?
Panting from the exercise, he fished the empty Coors — recently refilled with cold stream water and probably chock-full of giardia. Boy Scouts had taught him never to drink from streams, to use iodine tablets, which were always on hand since a scout was prepared.
Piss poor scout he turned out to be. But the water looked clean enough, tasted okay. Least he hoped so.
He surveyed the land, not willing to admit he was lost. No such thing as lost, not for Chris Wooten. Reckless, maybe. Impulsive, damn sure. But lost? Never. Wherever he was, that was where he meant to be.
Wasn’t it?
The wind picked up, shaking the leaves of the trees above, whistling through the valley below.
Again, there it was. A high-pitched whine. Louder and closer, like it was tracking him. Chris turned his head, trying to find the source, but, like the wind in the trees, it seemed all around him.
Then the sound changed, took on an almost human-like quality. Words perhaps? A scream?
Whatever it was, Chris wanted nothing with it. He already heard enough screams over the past twenty-four to satisfy him for the year. That kid — his half-sister perhaps — screaming from the front porch after Chris pulled the trigger, toppling the old man to the ground like a rotten tree. The kid’s wide-eyed fear etched into Chris’s brain. Same as seeing a mountain cat leap the fence and disembowel the family dog. Shock and horror at the unfettered savagery.
It wasn’t from his old man that Chris ran. Nor from the cops who would’ve showed up five minutes later. It was from her. That look in her eye. The primal fear. Mixed, perhaps, with a hint of deep, deep disappointment.
The scream grew louder. Pulsating in the wind.
Chris drew in a deep breath and let out a primal scream of his own. He screamed into the sky. Into the trees. Into the vast, rolling wilderness.

This certifiably sucked.
Chris slogged his way along the ridge, tried to get a sense of where he was, but the hillside just wouldn’t end. It was like nature herself conspired against him, spiraling him deeper into the woods.
He paused, breath ragged, looked around. Every tree was the same twisting shape, every rock the same dull hue. Had he even crossed this ridge before? Maybe the truck was on the other side of the ravine. Or maybe he was just shit out of luck.
Wouldn’t doubt it.
He pulled out the makeshift canteen, shook out the last few drops on his parched tongue. Needed more. Even if it were teeming with the ol’ Beaver Fever.
The sun filtered though the trees at a low angle. Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the edge of his sight through this unending labyrinth, the low rolling boom of thunder shook the ground.
He cursed and shot the finger at the gathering stormclouds.
Useless of course. Needed to find a place to bed down for another restless, hungry — and wet — night. Maybe at the bottom of the ridge. The land seemed to flatten out there. Might be water. Or maybe a trail to get out of this hell.
Chris took in a deep breath, readying to put thought into action. But there was something else in the air other than pine needles. An image of wriggling things at the surface of a stagnant pool swam to his mind. His empty stomach roiled, but he pressed forward against the stench.
He was about halfway down the ride when a glint of metal caught his eye. A sign of civilization at last.
Wading into the undergrowth, he found, propped against the side of a tree, a couple of trekking poles. Trekking poles and…
“Thank Christ.”
A trail. A clear trail. Not some animal path or the leftovers of an old stream, but a genuine, man-made trail. Maybe another night in this shithole wasn’t needed. The trail was clear enough. He could high-tail it out of this hell before the storm ever hit.
He grabbed one of the poles, turned it over in his hands. Seemed like a good set, though one side was faded. Bleached from the sun.
“Anyone out there?”
His voice fell dead in the forest.
He froze, trekking poles clutched in his hand, ears trained into the ravine below. There it was again. That awful noise, but louder now and clearer. And definitely not just the chirping of sparrows or the knocking of woodpeckers.
A kind of high pitched howling, like the yelping of a dog that couldn’t find its voice.
Or a baby.
Chris looked up and down the trail, but beyond the abandoned poles, he was utterly alone. The cry swelled again, louder this time. Now it really sounded like a baby, albeit a sickly one. One that didn’t quite know how to baby just yet.
“Hello?” Chris called down into the ravine. “Everything okay out there?”
The only reply was more shrieking.
“The hell with it.”
He tossed the poles to the ground and headed down the trail in (hopefully) the right direction. The baby screaming followed him. Seemed over his shoulder with every step, mixed with the look of that young girl on the porch — eyes wide, mouth ready to scream.
He covered his ears.
Just keep going. Keep going damn you.
The screaming echoed in his ears.
“The parents are down there,” he said, raising his voice over the din. “Down there with it. Got to be, right? I mean, who brings a baby here?”
With a scream of his own, he leaned over the edge of the trail, peered into the ravine.
And just what was he supposed to do? Chris’s idea of interacting with a baby was an unfriendly smile at a good social distance (babies were like llamas in a way—eerily precise projectile vomiters).
The odd baby-cry rose up again, stronger still, along with those baby hiccups that drove little daggers into Chris’s ears.
Chris raised his head to the sky at low rumble of thunder. He screamed, grabbed his hair, before taking a couple of calming breaths.
“All right, all right. I’m coming.”
At the base of the ravine, the land flattened out. The trees and bushes thinned, opening up into a clearing of thin, sickly looking grass. Mosquitoes chewed his legs in thick clouds.
“Hello?”
No answer except more wails coming from the center of the clearing. Chris took a stepped forward into the soft grass, his boot squelching in the mud. A rank odor of rotting meat and bad eggs came out to greet him from underfoot. What kind of idiot comes hiking out here, and with a damn baby?
Chris eased his way through the meadow toward the source of the wails.
He snagged his boot on a hidden snarl of root, pitched face first into the bog. He gagged, thrashed as mud and warm, putrid water filled his nostrils. With a curse, he scrambled to his feet.
He was supposed to be escaping, getting away from everything, not trudging through snake-infested swamps picking up abandoned kids. Now he was soaked the to bone, swallowed a lungful of who-knew-what, and that baby-thing was still going full tilt.
When he got back to his apartment, he was going to chill with a bowl and forget it all.
The cries rose to a fever pitch, scratching the back of Chris’s brain like fingernails on a slate board.
“Yeah yeah. Shut the hell up will you? I’m here.”
Finally, he saw it. Laying in the center of the mosquito plagued bog — probably rife with parasites — the baby howled and twitched. It was small and pale and naked in the hot sun. Looked like some kind of sacrifice for ancient forest gods.
Chris swallowed.
“Anybody out here? You forgot your damn baby!”
With no reply other than the baby’s screams, Chris continued his slow way through the squelching mud. As he got closer, the baby’s features sharpened—or didn’t sharpen since there were few features to note. It had human-ish shape, with fat arms and legs hugging close to the body, but it looked more like a huge kidney bean than a child. Standing over it now, he saw that there were no hands, just pale stumps at the end of its arm-like protrusions. Its face, if he could call it a face, was just shallow pits in the otherwise smooth body where shadows pooled. Kind of like that human face on the surface of Mars.
For all the world, it could have been an aborted baby that somehow managed to survive and grow.
“Yeah, right,” Chris told himself. A fetus surviving on its own at the bottom of a ravine in the New Mexican wilderness exposed to all the elements nature could throw at it? Chris doubted if he could do it, let alone this undeveloped child—but what else could explain it?
Whatever it was, it was moving, rocking back-and-forth in place, making that ungodly baby noise. But from where? Where was its mouth?
He bent down and rubbed his hand along the baby-thing’s smooth head, but his face screwed up with revulsion as his hands came away sticky, covered in some thick, syrupy sap.
“The fuck are you…?”
The baby cried again. With a resigned sigh, Chris took the baby-thing in his hands, supporting the neck on instinct, and began to lift. But the child didn’t budge, like it was tethered to the ground. The baby cried and wailed in his arms.
Chris glanced up into the sky. The tops of thunderheads began to tower over the hills. He clicked his tongue. “I have to hang with you and these damn mosquitoes.”
Chris tugged on the child again, hard, trying to break whatever tied it to the ground, which was the last thing he ever did.
He did not notice the sharp teeth spring out of the wet ground until they snapped through the meat in his calf and the bones in his arm. Pain exploded in his limbs as warm blood poured out from the gaping wounds and down the hard, sharp spikes.
Wide-eyed with shock and surprise, Chris cradled the baby in the ruins of his arms, which was at the center of this thing like bait in a bear trap. He struggled to free himself, squirming in the trap, which only ripped and tore the muscles in his arms and legs the more, loosing a fresh wave of pain through his body.
He screamed. Screamed in pain and for help, but the memory of that empty trail loomed large in his mind.
Maybe someone was on the trail now. If he could just keep from bleeding out, he might still make it. Just needed to hold on, keep shouting.
Then the second set of jaws started to close. Chris watched with uncomprehending certainty as the ground began to rise, spilling out the stagnant water and sending out a cloud of biting flies. The spikes that came from the ground, wet with ancient gristle, made their slow but steady way toward him, the points trained at his eyes.
As the spikes pierced the soft flesh of his sockets, his mind inexplicably turned away from the horror. There was Thomas Wooten, mowing his yard. There was Chris, stepping out of the truck, gun in hand. There was the girl. She stared at him, dumbfounded as he raised the pistol.
Baby secured in his arms, Chris writhed as the spikes worked their slow way into his frontal lobe. His life winked out along with the sunshine above as the jaws closed around him.
Silence fell over the Chamisa Trail. Woodpeckers went back to work in the trees. A gentle westerly breeze swayed their branches. A flash of distant lightning promised a cleansing of the land. Down in the marsh, mosquitos buzzed with mad fury as they tried to pierce through the living trap that had encased Chris Wooten.
Over the next several weeks, Chris’s bones and sinew would be subjected to primitive enzymes oozing over his rotting flesh, breaking him down into a digestible paste fit for any living creature, even a carnivorous plant. After which, when the New Mexican sun baked the marsh on a hot summer day, the great trap would reset.
Up on the trail, high above the marsh, a pair of hikers are getting away for the weekend. Stopping for a water break, they find a pair of trekking poles, a worn Osprey backpack, and an empty Coors can. As they look around for the owner, they hear, high in the still air, the cry of a baby.