The Not Deer’s legs crumpled underneath him just in time for the bullet to whistle past his head and collide with a rock behind him. Pebbles and dust rained down and covered the cavern in a haze of smoke, and Woodrow took the opportunity to slide down into the hole where his friend’s body laid.

  “We shoulda never made a deal with them damn cats, Woodrow!” cried the Not Buck from above, still immitating Sal’s voice. Its head slowly appeared over the hole and it stared down at Woodrow with its cold, black eyes. “We shoulda kept our asses home where we belong!”

  It reared its head back and made a coarse gurgling sound that the rest of the Not Deer seemed to understand as a signal to attack. Woodrow was surrounded on all sides. The Not Deer hastily staggered towards him with something resembling smiles on their faces and descended into the pit. Woodrow dropped one with a squeeze of the trigger and it thudded on the pit’s floor. But if the sight of one of their comrades falling to the ground dead bothered them at all, they didn’t show it.

  Woodrow shot again and hit one in its chest; it flew backwards and slammed against the stone wall, and a spatter of blood spurted from its mouth and sprayed Woodrow’s face. Pretty soon, he’d painted the entire pit red with the blood of the Not Deer, but there were just too many of them. A dozen twitched and sighed at his feet, but a dozen more were still closing in on him, still had those strange smiles on their faces.

  He felt the syringe in his pocket. Every fiber of his being told him not to take… whatever the hell it was. Emperor sludge? God gunk? His body warned, begged him not to inject the strange liquid into his neck — but Woodrow Brown was not the type of man to be pushed around by his own intuition. These sons of bitches had killed one of his best friends. If that sludge would give him the power to kill them, he was going to take it, even if it killed him after.

  And it might do just that.

  He pulled the syringe out of his pocket and removed the protective cap on the needle’s end. But it was too late — a Not Deer rammed him in the back and knocked the wind from his lungs and the syringe from his hands. He scrambled on his hands and knees towards it, but another Not Deer snatched it up well before he could get to it, and they tossed it up to the Buck.

  In total, it took five of them to finally restrain Woodrow. Four of them slithered their serpentine legs around each of Woodrow’s limbs, and a fifth wrapped itself around his chest. They each stuck out a free leg that folded and unfolded like caterpillars and inched their hostage up and out of the blood-soaked pit.

  Woodrow struggled under the grip of the Not Deer until he thought he might pass out, and then he struggled some more. But it was pointless; their limbs bent and bowed, but never seemed like breaking away from his body. They pinned him to the cavern wall, right beside the waterfall so that he was misted and became damp.

  The Twelve Point Buck approached.

  Woodrow had no choice but to look at the creature. Even on all fours, it was tall enough to look him straight in the eye.

  “Where are the Cats, Woodrow?” The Buck asked in Sal’s voice. Woodrow’s arm had gotten nice and wet, and the Not Deer had gotten nice and complacent; he slipped his arms out of their grasp and walloped the Buck right on its nose. It reared back and howled, but it seemed to flare his temper more than anything else. The Not Deer at Woodrow’s feet tightened their grip, and the ones he’d slipped away from slithered back around his arms. In a swift, coordinated movement, they each snapped the limb they clung to.

  A sickening crunch rang through the cavern, and Woodrow’s screams quickly followed. He wanted to fall over, curl into a ball, properly writhe in pain, but they wouldn’t let him. They held him up by his broken limbs and made him meet the gaze of the Twelve Point Buck. The syringe rested on its hoof, and it held it up to Woodrow’s face.

  “Where are the Cats, Woodrow?” the Buck repeated. He waved the syringe back and forth. “You’re interfering in things you don’t understand.”

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  “Eat shit,” Woodrow spat in response.

  “No, you eat shit!” The Buck shouted in Woodrow’s own voice. Then it changed to a deep, snide baritone. “You have no idea what’s going on in these woods, and still you come out here to hunt us down. And for what? The chance to kill more of us? To turn yourself into a monster?” It pointed the needle at Woodrow’s Wampus eye. “Tell us where the Cats are, and we’ll let you live. We’ll tear off your arms and legs, yes, but not your head.” The Buck said this like it was a perfectly reasonable deal that Woodrow would be insane to pass up.

  Woodrow was barely able to listen. Searing pain shot down from his arms and up from his legs and ignited every nerve in his body. Darkness crept around the edges of his vision. He was sure he was going to die and tossed in the hole with his friend, until he saw something that breathed life into him: a shadow. A faint shadow shifted near the cavern’s entrance.

  “Alright, I’ll tell you where the Cats are,” Woodrow moaned. “Just let me lie down.”

  The Not Deer looked to the Buck, who nodded, and they lowered Woodrow to the ground. His limbs still pulsated with pain, but compared to the position he was in a moment before, the cold ground felt like a cloud made of feathers.

  He looked at the shadow. It was growing.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s how you get to the Cats. First, you gotta go to the park out on Bellevue Road. There’s a walkin’ trail there, over near the basketball courts. Right off, take a left and —”

  “Why is nobody writing this down?!?” the Buck yelled. The Not Deer scrambled around for a pen and paper before they remembered that they don’t carry writing materials around. They looked at the Buck and shrugged.

  “Slugfoot always kept a pad and pen in his shirt pocket,” Woodrow said. The Buck eyed him for a moment, and then turned and hopped into the hole.

  The shadow continued to move.

  “Hey, you guys see somethin’ over there?” Woodrow asked the Not Deer. Their necks craned downwards to look at him, and snapped back up to look at the entrance. The five of them approached the entrance to get a closer look at the moving shadow. Not a moment later, a beam of light shined onto their faces, and not too long after that, a burst of bullets ripped through their heads.

  Bill Jones and Chuck strode into the cavern with flashlights attached to their rifles.

  “Shit, you look even worse than usual,” Chuck said, looking down at his broken-boned friend.

  “Where’s Sal?” Bill Jones asked.

  “I’m in here, boys!” Sal’s voice came from the pit. Chuck and Bill Jones approached the pit without a second thought.

  “That’s not Sal!” Woodrow croaked. They stopped in their tracks. “You didn’t get ‘em all. And this one can talk.”

  “Really?” Bill Jones inquired. “This one can talk? And he can mimic other’s voices, and is intelligent enough to try and trick us? Fascinating…”

  “Uhhhh, nope. It’s just me, Sal. Come here and get me out of this hole, will ya?” Sal’s voice insisted. There was an awkward silence — they were well past the point of falling for the Buck’s antics.

  Its voice changed back to the snide baritone.

  “Fine. You leave me no choice.” It leapt out of the pit with a single hop and stuck the syringe into its neck.

  “What the fuck?” Chuck said.

  “Woody…” Bill Jones said.

  The Buck pressed down on the syringe and the black sludge slowly flowed into its body. The effect was immediate, judging by the way its eyes twitched and its lips pressed together as it took it in.

  “Run! Get the hell out of here while you still got a chance!” Woodrow said. It was hopeless. The Buck was mean enough already — they didn’t have a chance now that he was all juiced up. Woodrow was going to die, but that didn’t mean they had to die with him.

  “Go on, get!” he said. But Bill Jones just looked at him like he was holding back a laughing fit.

  “Nah, I think we’ll stay right here.”

  “Boys, just what in the god damned shit is going on?” Chuck asked politely. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  “Just watch,” Bill Jones replied.

  The Twelve Point Buck’s eyes grew wide, and its legs started to shake. Its mouth opened and wet, gurgling sounds came from its throat until a wad of clotted blood launched from his mouth. More blood followed and ran down his mouth, eyes, and nose. Over and over, it sneezed bursts of dark red gunk. Woodrow looked on in awe and wondered how the creature still had any blood left in him. Still, more came out. The Twelve Point Buck fell to its wobbly knees and swayed back and forth as it coughed and sneezed out its insides. Finally, it fell on its back and sprayed blood from its orifices like a geyser.

  “Well boys,” Bill Jones said as the creature died slowly, horribly in front of them, “I think it’s about time we head out. Chuck, help me get Sal out of that hole.”

  The two of them hoisted Sal’s body out of the pit, and Chuck flung the old man’s limp figure over his shoulder. Bill Jones helped Woodrow up off the ground helped him hop along to the narrow tunnel.

  The four of them stumbled out of the cave and left the Twelve Point Buck to die whenever he felt like getting around to it.