Right so, lots of weird shit happened, not sure why the fuck I'm writing this up, I've got a million other things to do, one of which is to try and find a fucking way out of here.
But Hannah insisted on me typing this up, mainly because she wans to keep Ghost posted on what's happening over here, which I don't get at all, dude just abandoned her, no reaction to her predicament, nothing.
Hell I don't even know how useful this will be since time here is all sorts of fucked up, I can publish this and this shit might get posted years from now... Fuck that's an wful thought, being stuck here for years, kind of a relevant thought though.
If anything it's nice to have this moment of peace and quiet. Don't get me wrong, this place still makes me jump at every little sound, every little moving shadow out of the corner of my eye, hell even when it's quiet that usually doesn't calm me down at all, it just means that the place is prepping some real fucky shit to hit you with.
Instantly reminded of the days when me and a bunch of other Proxies were selected to be trained on how to use The Path, now there's a PTSD inducing flashback I don't mind re-living and yet, every time I would step into this place, fuck man... So many blogs out there that describe this place, none of them do it any justice, this place fucking eats away at you, slowly breaks you, you truly feel like you're walking through hell, imagine fucking living here for years, fuck that.
Right, so I think she left off with the sound of church bells in the previous post.
Yeah that wasn't fun, shortly after publishing the previous post we did indeed hear church bells in the distance, which for this place made no sense. I mean, I know that I just spent the last few paragraphs moaning about how the whole "not making any sense" was the main schtick of this place, but travel through here long enough and you learn to pick up the different varieties of "not making any sense", including the ones that don't belong.
Church bells was one of those. Hannah definitely did not pick up on it, it's her first time in the Path, didn't expect her to. But I instantly noted how... natural the Church Bells sounded, they weren't distorted, warped and didn't feel like the sound was coming from any direction The Path chose. They legitimately sounded like they were coming from one specific place within The Path. Now some might consider this a bad idea, but fuck you, I was outright lost in there, we were running on fumes, had nowhere to go and this was the first thing that emitted a sound that didn't mean an immediate threat of being ripped apart by the Denizens.
So I told her to close up the laptop and start following me as I tried my best to follow the sound of the fading church bells. We ran past the dilapidated houses that filled this massive field we were on, keeping my ears open for any whispers around us, stopping dead in our tracks right in front of a deep forest of black, tall, naked trees. The idea of climbing through that wasn't something both of us relished, it almost made me want to reconsider my plan at the time, but again, running on fumes and no idea on where to go made me press on.
I'll tell you now, shit fucking SUCKED.
Before we could get proper deep into the forest, we had to crawl, climb and break through a row of thick and sharp as fuck brambles. Bramble bushes were as black as the trees in the forest, the tips of the thorns on them were slightly white, but that was the only color on top of the thick blackness that we were crawling through, apart from our blood of course. There was only two things I was worried about, losing Hannah behind and poking my eyes out, but luckily neither happened and when we finally crawled our way out of the brambles, I had experienced the greatest relief I could, laying there, on my stomach, catching my breath as my muscles burned, same with Hannah.
Our rest was short-lived as I began to hear whispers all around us, increasing in volume, meaning that the Denizens found us and were getting closer, we had to run, so we did. Looking out for black branches whilst you're running from an unseen assailant is very hard, a few of them nearly took my head off but luckily my experience in this hellhole long since adjusted my eyes to the fucky environment. Guiding Hannah through the whole ordeal as we ran was the hardest part, normally I would have already been able to find a hiding place and wait out the Denizens, but with Hannah struggling to navigate through the forest, we were significantly slowed down, whispers began to grow into snarls which mean that we were out of time.
I grabbed Hannah's hand, pulled her behind me putting myself between her and what I assumed was an approaching Denizen, pulled the fucking sword out and prepared myself to suffer through a scuffle that would leave my with sever scratch and bite marks. I caught a glimpse of it's shining orbs that were it's eyes only for a second as they were approaching us with great speed and as I braced myself, I heard the same crackling noise that we've been hearing along with the church bells erupt through the air around us. The next second I could feel thick liquid splashing over my face as the Denizen's body fell limp to the ground with a loud thud, dead. It took me a minute to register that the crackling sound was that of a gunshot and somehow, from somewhere said gunshot delivered a death blow to our stalker.
I tried to look around in order to tell where the gunshot came from, but saw nothing. Then this pained and loud shrieking began to erupt from deeper inside the forest and I could see a warm light appear which stood out drastically among the thick black trees of the forest. So we headed towards it, albeit very slowly now that we knew that there was a gunslinger around. The further we walked, the less thicker the forest became but not because it was ending, the black stumps in the ground told the story, somebody was chopping the trees down in here. A little bit more walking revealed a gallery of Denizen bodies impaled onto the trees by what appeared to be some kind of traps made out of the same trees, somebody was Rambo'ing it up in here. The pained shrieking became louder and at this point we could clearly see a Denizen walking towards us slowly, it was on fire, waving it's arms around, clearly trying to put itself out. Hannah wanted to shoot it then and there but I told her to stay quiet because the Denizen was still walking towards us, still shrieking in pain, fire engulfing it further and further. Any Denizen that would see it's prey wouldn't slowly walk towards it, meaning that whether it registered our presence or not, it was clearly transfixed on staying alive first and foremost, so instead of wasting a bullet, we would begin to walk past it.
We kept walking, still transfixed on the gruesome fate the creature was dealt, which is when we heard something different to all the shrieking that was filling up the forest, someone's voice echoed from somewhere in the forest urging us to stop.
"Stop brother, unless you want to share the evil spawn's fate." A raspy, elderly voice shouted out from somewhere within the forest. Looking around I saw that if I had stepped any further I would have fallen into a hole in the ground, joining an impaled on sharp wooden spikes Denizen down there. Properly confused, I was about to shout out and try to get a response, but I was interrupted by the rampant growth of the whispers around us, the Denizens were yet again gathering around us in full force, that's when I heard the voice again. "Follow the sound of salvation brother, quickly!"
Then the church bells began to ring out again and we immediately bolted in the direction of their source, as we ran through the forest, swatting away and ducking under branches I could hear the Whispers continue to grow, the church bells kept on ringing, the gun shots rang out through the air, I could hear bullets wheezing past us, sometimes hitting flesh and sometimes hitting the trees, an explosion in the distance followed up by an all too familiar shrieking and all of this cacophony accompanied by the insane laughter of the elderly voice.
We made it out into a small, open field and were greeted by an insane sight. Massive log fence, outside of it were various body parts that looked like they belonged to Denizen's impaled onto wooden stakes that were stuck into the ground, some on fire. From behind the log fence peeked out a top of a wooden church the massive, rusty bells ringing loudly from said top, right next to them a shadowy figure yanking the rope of the bells, whilst holding some kind of rifle in the other hand. "Inside brother and sister!"
With that welcoming statement we ran in through the massive open gates and while the figure fired off his gun at the few Denizens that were still hot on our trail, we quickly pushed the massive gates, closing them. It was few minutes before the shots went silent and the bells stopped, we just waited by the church entrance, still not sure of who this lunatic was. Hence when the doors of the church began to open, I prepared myself, whoever this guy was, it is obvious that he's been here for a while, this place can fuck with you mentally in a few minutes, fuck knows how crazy this guy was.
"Thou are not the savior I prayed for, yet I shall not forswear companionship of untainted souls." Yes that's how he spoke. To match his weird ass style of speech, his looks weren't any less weirder. He looked like he was 50 years old, but he was fucking jacked and moved quite nimbly, so I'm assuming the reason he looked so old is because he's been inside The Path for fuck knows how long. He greeted us without a shirt on, revealing numerous scars and stitch marks all over his body, big metal cross hanging from his neck down to his chest, messy grey beard on his face. His legs were covered by what looked like the bottom half of a priest robe, underneath it I could see messy, camo cargo pants and black military boots.
"Father Garrick, the Lord's humble servant."
Yup, a crazy religious nut, who somehow managed to survive within The Path for "many years" according to him. As nutty as he was, he did offer us to stay with him and with little to no options, that's where we've been for the past couple of... fuck knows how long.
Obviously not planning on staying here forever, just need time to come up with a plan.
