Sighting at the Orchard Pt.1
Apple pie. Of all the things that the young woman could remember from her fairly-average childhood, it was the smell of her maternal grandmother’s homemade apple pies as they sat upon the kitchen windowsill and slowly began to cool. That smell had always greeted her as the family’s slightly-battered station wagon choked and sputtered its way up the steep gravel driveway on the way to grandmother’s house, and much like Grandma herself, those pies had always been a highlight of her weekends and vacations throughout her child and pre-teen years. The woman who had crafted the edible works of art had been one of the warmest, most welcoming people the girl had ever known, therefore also holding a very important place close to her heart. As such, it wasn’t a massive surprise then that the sudden aroma of those same pies from what seemed like centuries ago suddenly gracing her unsuspecting nostrils caused her to freeze instantly, her mind reeling slightly as it tried to process what her nose was telling her.
At first she was tempted to dismiss the smell as merely a figment of her imagination, a sign of her growing insanity mixing with the unwelcomed sense of homesickness that had oh so recently begun to corrupt both her mind and her soul. However, as she stood there, surrounded by trees that choked out the sun and hid creatures the likes of which she had only ever dreamed of existing, she suddenly became absolutely certain that she had smelled something, and that something was most certainly her grandmother’s pies. Quite simply, her instincts had seemed to say, there can be no other alternative explanation. But, she had thought in an attempt at a rationalized response, that shouldn’t be possible. I’m in the middle of nowhere, isolated from literally everything that once made sense to me, and besides, Grandma’s been dead for twelve years. Dead women don’t make pies. Wait, do they?
Thankfully for what remained of her sanity, before her continually slipping brain could delve deeper into the unsettling prospect of little zombie grandma ladies baking brain-pies, that train of thought was violently blasted off of its rails and quickly sealed away for the rest of eternity by the rest of her body (namely her stomach), which quite adamantly screamed at her that an apple pie was an apple pie no matter who or what created it, and as such consisted of a fairly significant upgrade in taste over the smaller mythical animals and regular critters that she had been hunting for the past few days. And besides, she reasoned (the rational thought centers of her brain having jumped fully on board the apple-pie band wagon as it departed the station), not only does pie taste good, but it also means that someone had to bake said pie, which in turn means there’s at least some semblance of civilization out here, and if I can smell the pie, that civilization as got to be close by.
Having sufficiently convinced herself that it would be marginally beneficial for her to at least try to find the source of the heavenly odor, she picked up her walking staff and hobbled in the general direction of the smell, relieved to find that the farther she went the stronger the scent became. Indeed, her mood had even begun to improve a bit as she went along, delighting in the fact that it seemed as if she had stumbled across a decently-trodden path snaking its way through the otherwise unyielding underbrush. Additionally, she soon discovered that the delicious smell of pie appeared to be originating from a point down that same path, meaning that she could make her way toward it without having to stress over vines with thorns the size of her pinky and crazy blue pants that had caused her hair to stand on end for nearly three weeks. However, this improved mood of hers began to ever-so-slightly diminish as her practiced eyes took note of the path she had started following.
At first there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with it, just a simple little hiking trail running through the middle of the woodlands. She had seen dozens, if not hundreds of others like it over the years as her passion for hiking and wild, untamed places had continued to grow in leaps and bounds. However, the farther she went, the more she began to think that something around here wasn’t adding up, and before long her instincts had shifted from zombie-grandma and her pies to the fact something was most certainly wrong. A few moments after this realization it dawned on her that the answer to the suddenly proposed question was quite literally right below her feet; the path, or, well, more like the tracks that had trampled said path into existence, had something very suspicious going on about them. Slowing her pace to a near-crawl in order to investigate further, she proceeded to put what survival and tracking training she had to the test.
There was a wide variety of tracks covering the dirt surface, several of which she recognized as belonging to one of the first creatures she had encountered in this heavenly hellish place: a manticore. Judging by the size and depth of the prints she was seeing, she calculated that this particular specimen wasn’t even half the size of the one that had so ferociously mauled her over three weeks ago, but just the thought of those razor-sharp claws and scorpion tail caused the only-recently healed scars on the right side of her face and left upper thigh to itch. Even if she knew nothing else about this world, she was damn certain that she didn’t want to meet another one of the apex predators anytime soon and decided that she would start paying a lot more attention to any suspicious-looking bushes she might so happen to come across.
However, the manticore track wasn’t the thing that drew her attention the most, but rather it was the fact that, by an extremely large margin, the most dominate track on the path was that of a horse. Or, rather, that of a pony, but even then it must have been some kind of breed of midget pony, as these horseshoe imprints were actually slightly smaller than those of her dog, Andy, who was a medium-sized Alaskan Huskie. Whatever equine had made the track couldn’t have been much taller than her shins, if that, although some of the tracks had fairly notable depth and suggested that at least some of the mini ponies had some serious muscle density on them. At first the hiker-turned-survivalist theorized that the pony tracks (upon her brain’s creation of that term a small part of her mind instantly imagined some kind of ice-cream, comparable to moose tracks) belonged to someone’s pet, maybe even pack animals, but as she continued her investigation she found that contingency more and more unlikely.
The tracks of both pets and working animals were usually accompanied by the tracks of their owners, and she wasn’t seeing even the faintest sign of human activity here, either in the form of fresh tracks or old. But, that shouldn’t be……, alright, you know what, I should have learned by now that nothing is this fucking shitty excuse of a world is impossible. Might as well go with it for now. Finally finished with her musing, she concluded that there were two distinct possibilities in regards to the oddities within the tracks; either someone had suffered a massive pet break out wherein all of the little ponies spent their new-found freedom going back and forth between the forest and their old holding pen, or their were pets here with absolutely no owners.
Either way, she was left almost completely dumbfounded by each conclusion, and finally electing to follow her own advice she shoved both from her mind and elected to simply resume her previous course, deciding once and for all that, logically, the answers would have to reveal themselves eventually. Thankfully for her, the scent was just as strong as it had been before she took her momentary investigatory break, and before long the tracks and what possibilities they implied were pushed to the very back of her mind, the pie (and hopefully some accompanying civilized beings) now her sole driving force. Her little quest ended up taking her through a part of the forest that she was fairly certain she had never seen before, and as she ventured forth she realized that there was something different about this particular area of the woods.
It wasn’t necessarily a very noticeable difference, much like those tracks, but it was still there regardless, as if something in the very air itself had shifted, become, heavier, she supposed for lack of a better word. Of this change she found that she wasn’t entirely certain if that was a good or bad thing. Given my current track record around here, it’s probably not good…… came an unbidden and highly pessimistic thought. Subconsciously she could fell the muscles in her body beginning to tense ever-so-slightly, her breath hitching every other inhale as her mind started to take on the more primal state that she had developed in response to the various external threats she had been exposed to ever since she had found herself stranded within this expansive forest. Her eyes suddenly started scouring the area for even the smallest of discrepancies, a few drops of a nervous sweat appearing on her brow as, once more, her pace slowed considerably. Unbeknownst to her, a presence only a mere ten paces away was watching her every move with a hungry eye, although this hunger wasn’t that of a hulking beast, or really even of the odd creature it currently observed. Ah, so you did notice me after all, young one, it said unto itself (or, it would have it weren’t for the fact that everything aside from its eyes had been turned into a thick cloud of menacing black smoke) as it slunk further back into the brush, not willing to risk discovery until it was ready. Yes, it seems I was right about you after all. You’ll do nicely when the time comes, very nicely indeed………. .
