Ten Zero

My head is pounding.

Flashes of memory stutter and spark in my mind, as I try to pull together a recollection of the night before. "_Ouch, owie, my bones_", I think sardonically, as I let my brain mentally pull itself out of it's fog. I can feel something small and hard underneath me, and I go to reach for it, assuming one of headphones fell out of my ear during the night.

The thing I grab doesn't feel like a headphone.

"Is this a pen from work?", I wonder, as I try to open my crusted shut eyes. I do my best to feel it out using just my touch. It's cold and hard and small, like a rock. "Is this a rock? Why's there a rock in my bed?", I throw the rock at where I assume the waste basket is.

I don't hear it land in the basket.

My arms feel sore; not like a good workout sore, but like I had a charlie horse in multiple places at once. They feel unresponsive, like I had slept on them funny, and they were still in that stage before pins and needles where you can technically move them around, and you can feel some level of pressure, but they're unwieldy like they don't belong to you. I go to wipe the sleep from my eyes, and as I open my eyes, I get flashbanged by the sun. "Damn it! Did I fall asleep with the window open?", I think, as I flail for the blanket.

There is no blanket.

"This sucks, I kicked the damn thing off the bed," I think, as I try to reach over the side of the bed. But as I reach over to the left, I don't find the edge. I reach a little father, and my jacket gets caught on something sharp.

Where is the edge of my bed?

Acknowledgment. I'm not in my bed. Every nerve in my body lights on fire as adrenaline floods my system. My eyes go to shoot open, but they're still blurry, and the sun is still beaming down. I rub my eyes and try to focus on the room around me, but nothing is focusing. All I can see is green, and brown, and blue and gray, and nothing is forming into shapes that I would expect to see in my room, or any room that I would logically be in. "This isn't my room", I think to myself, as I do my best to force my way into a standing position. The same issue I had with my arms affects every limb, every muscle of my body, and I struggle to stay standing. Impulses of strength shoot down to my legs, and I wobble as I try to balance. I try to lower my center of gravity, but my legs are unionizing, and won't listen to my demands until I let them rest. I stumble crouch around, trying to lean up against something, anything, and finally make my way over to a brown, which feels sturdy enough to sit up against. It feels tough, and wet? Slimy? Almost oily, maybe? It's dry, but it feel like the dry of clothes that still have soap on them from the wash, or conditioner that didn't wash all the way out. Not quite dry or wet, but something in between that the human brain doesn't quite know how to categorize. The texture under the texture feels crumbly but fibrous, almost like the redwoods from back home in California.

My eyes are focusing now, but my brain is not. I'm seeing objects that aren't activating neurons correctly. Gray, rough, angular object on a brown multitude, with greens of different shapes, all cardstock thick, like...

"Am I outside?" I wonder. It looks like outside, but I don't understand how there could be outside here, where I am. I'm inside. Or, I was inside? Am I no longer inside? My head is still pounding, and trying to recollect isn't working. I can remember leaving work, and getting home. Then... something happened at home. I fell asleep? I remember laying my head down on my desk. I remember closing my eyes. I remember sadness. I remember fear. I remember the words on my lips that I couldn't spit out no matter how much I tried to force them.

"I'm sorry," said the words.

"I don't want to leave, I love you, I want to stay here," the words cried out in silence.

"Please don't take me," whispered the words. "I'm not done."

"Let me live."

I throw up.

I sit there for about thirty minutes, bawling my eyes out. The logical part of my brain wants to immediately deal with the situation; stop, observe, assess, react. To be fair, I am doing a lot of reacting right now, just not the kind that that part of my brain was hoping for. My brain is getting flooded with emotions, however, and I can't form a coherent thought. The only thing that I'm thinking, the only thing I CAN think, is that I may have died.

A shudder goes through me as the thought passes through my mind again. But how could I be dead? I feel pretty miserable right now, sure, but I don't feel dead. I mostly feel sore, and pins and needle-y. I feel sad, and I feel confused, and none of those are what I would associate with 'dead'. I was raised some variation of Christian, although the specifics I couldn't tell you. I was young, and it was all very 'modern', and since we moved a lot we also changed churches a lot, and by the time I was old enough to seriously start examining the faith that had been forced upon me as a child, I stopped participating, which meant that I never bothered to get an answer from my mom about it. But nearly all Christianity has the whole heaven/hell thing going on, and this felt like neither heaven nor hell. I was much too miserable for it to be heaven, but not nearly enough for it to be otherwise. Also, there was a stunning lack of fire, although I did always think that if there was a hell, it would be a lot more customized than just 'everything is on fire', so there was still room for that to be the case. But other than the smell of the vomit wafting over from the opposite side of the tree I sat on, and the soreness of my ass, I didn't feel particularly bad. I just felt... like I was sitting against a tree. The same way I would if I was alive. I hiccup.

"Okay, so... maybe not dead then," I croak. My throat feels like it's sore, like I haven't spoken in a while, and dry like I had fallen asleep with my mouth open in the Sahara. "Ahhhhhhpppbbbllltttt." I do my best to get feeling back into my mouth and throat and lungs, and try to generate a bit of spit so my tongue can stop doing it's impression of sandpaper. Using the tree I'm sat up against, I slowly make my way to my feet, still doing my best to keep a lower center of gravity, until I'm confident I won't fall over. Then, once I feel as steady as I can be on the roots of the tree, I take a deep breath, and really look around at the space I'm in.

At first, it just looks like a forest. But, the more I look, the less... correct it looks. Broadly speaking, all the stuff you'd expect to be there is there. Stones, dirt, trees, bushes, the works. Very forest chic. But then then you realize the dirt is dark. Like really dark, almost like loam dark. The sort of dirt you'd see in a planter box, not out in the wild. And the trees sort of look like redwoods, but the color isn't redwood color. And when you look at the plants, there's not a single recognizable one. They all look like plants that are the cousins of plants you would know. Like a fern's brother's sister's aunt. Obviously, since I'm only a security guard and am not also moonlighting as a secret phytologist, I can't really be sure that the plants and the trees are wrong. But there's just something... off putting about them. Not in the 'Hi, my name is Audrey II' way, but more like they had all been created from memory or something. Familiar, but different.

But I figure I can't keep mean mugging the wish.com fern forever. For some inexplicable reason, I've found myself in the forest, and while the exact reasoning behind how or why is currently beyond me, I still need to find a way to be... not... in the forest. If I'm going with the assumption that I'm still alive...

I can feel just the hint of the idea of my death trying to drag me down into an emotional spiral again. I take another deep breath, doing my best to center myself; to not let my emotions run ragged on me. Based on the assumption that I was, in fact, among the living, then I had to have gotten from my room to here. And to get from there to here means I physically moved. So all I would have to do is move the opposite way, and I would be right back home. Now, I'm not entirely sure where either place is in relation to each other, but journey of a thousand steps blah blah blah. I take my first step in a direction I have ceremoniously decided is 'my north', and immediately stumble on the branch of the off-brand redwood. The green-brownwood, as it were, although that doesn't really roll off the tongue like redwood does. I carefully kneel down on the brownwood, and touch the large root beneath me. It has the same semi oily touch to it that the rest of the tree does. "*Is this tree sap or something?"*, I wonder, as I try to determine where the material came from. It feels weird, like oil, or velvet, or mold, and I would assume that something was wrong with the tree if the sap didn't cover every inch of it with seemingly no issue. I pause for a moment, then slowly bring my fingers up to my nose to smell the substance.

"Well that can't be right", I think, as the sharp pungent odor of old machine grease and pinesol assault my noise. I look at the brownwood again, but there's no sign that anything is wrong with it. It's huge, and it's leaves are vibrant, if a bit more yellow than expected. I look around, and the leaves of every brownwood have the same yellow tinge to them. "Either every tree here is sick with the same thing or it's just normal", I think, as I stand back up. "I just have to be careful on the roots". I inch my way down towards the forest floor, making sure to always face 'my north', and make it down with any further incident. "Up was easier," I murmur, looking up at the tree. If the branches started lower, I would have climbed them to get a lay of the land, but as it is, I don't have a 30 foot leap in me, so boots on the ground for me it is. As I scan the area, I keep my ear open for the sound of cars, or people, or water, or animals, but I don't hear anything but the wind whistling through the branches and leaves of the greenery around me.

I open my mouth to shout for help, but then reluctantly close it again. The current theory percolating on the back burner of my mind is that I was poisoned and kidnapped, and then... something happened and I ended up in the forest. Whether on accident or purpose, I hadn't quite decided, but in both cases, I could imagine that whoever orchestrated the situation would be looking for me, and so giving out my position might not be the best play. As to why someone would kidnap me from my own bedroom, that part is still unclear, but I didn't really have any other great theories as to how I ended up in a forest yet, so, I was working with what I had. I began making my way forward, making sure to leave a clear and visible trail behind me for reference.

It's easy to get lost in a forest, and find yourself walking in circles. Someone might think, "oh, just walk in a straight line! How hard could it be?", but what ends up happening is all the little course corrections around trees, and rocks, and obstacles leads them to turning left, and right, and then they over correct when they try to straighten out, and eventually their path is just a spaghetti noodle in a 2 mile radius and they make no progress anywhere. The best thing to do is have a visible marker on the horizon that you can follow. Not the sun, or anything that can be reached, but something huge and static, like a mountain or something. Unfortunately, there were no sight-lines like that in this forest. So I had to make do with making a very clear and obvious trail behind me; broken bushes, furrows in the dirt, rocks kicked out of the way, etc. When I would look behind me, I could get a rough idea of how straight I was moving, and if I needed to course correct, it was easy to tell which direction I was originally moving. Realistically I could still end up noodling around the forest, but if I did so, my radius would be 50 miles wide, not 2, and really, what is a straight line but one big circle around the planet? Anyways, it was the best I could do under the circumstances, so I made sure to stick to it as best I could.

As I walked, I kept my ear out for any sounds. Preferably, sounds of civilization, and secondarily, the sounds of running water. If I couldn't find a road anywhere nearby, then a going downstream would eventually have me connect with something or someone, and worst comes to worst, I'd hit the ocean. At that point, there's only so many oceans on the planet, and realistically there could only be one ocean I would be near. If I were kidnapped, there's no way they could've flown me across the country without me regaining consciousness at least once during the trip. So, with the catharsis from my moment near the tree, I felt... maybe not happy, or excited, but at least confident that I could sort this situation out. I've always felt confident in my self sufficiency skills, even if they did develop from a somewhat tumultuous childhood.

Unfortunately, after walking for what felt like roughly an hour, I still hadn't heard anything like running water or cars. I did occasionally hear birds though, and as I looked in the sky, I could see that the sun was lowering. I still had maybe 4 hours of sunlight? I pulled my phone out to check the- "MY PHONE?" I shouted, all thoughts of keeping quiet having immediately fled from my mind. I had just assumed I didn't have it! If I was kidnapped, then why would they leave my phone on me?! I didn't even think to look for it, but when I was thinking about what time it was, muscle memory slipped my hand into my coat, and lo and behold, there it was. My fingers went through their usual movements to unlock the phone, but the treesap from the brownwoods was causing my finger to not be recognized. I swiped up so I could enter the PIN backup, and was met with my home screen. "Oh thank god!" I exclaimed, before my eyes flicked up to the top bar; no signal. "Yea, that figures", before I punch in 911. I've heard that even when you don't have signal, you might still be able to reach emergency services, because 911 uses any and all towers around you, but as I put the phone up to my ear, I just heard the automated voice telling me that no connection could be found. As I hung up the call, I looked at the battery on my phone, before turning it off. Even though I still had 83%, I knew that my phone's battery would start dropping aggressively the moment I started trying to use it for anything at all. While keeping it on meant that there was a chance that I'd catch incoming calls, it was more likely that my phone would just die before the day was out.

Speaking of the day coming to a close, I decided to refocus my attention on my immediate situation. With only a few hours of sunlight left, I knew I'd need to find or build a shelter. You didn't want to wait until the last moment and then be stuck trying to sort it out in the dark. It would better, and easier, to build one in the daylight, if at all possible. I hadn't really planned on sheltering in the forest, because I was previously pretty confident that I'd find something or someone, but it looked like I was going to be stuck here for at least the night. "Ugh, this sucks," I grumbled, as I started looking around for leaf-y tree limbs that may have fallen, or were within tearing-off range. I hadn't seen any cliffs that might have a cave for me to shelter in, and rather than continue to wander, I figured I'd just stack as many branches and leaves up against the side of a brownwood to create a sort of lean-to. It wasn't going to be the best, but with the lean-to over my head, along with my security jacket that I was currently wearing, I figured I'd be warm enough. Also, I still had my flint and steel on my carabiner, since I had never had a situation where I actually needed to use it. I also had all my car keys, which I didn't think would be useful, but I did find odd. "Why did they leave me with all my stuff?", I think, as I pat down my pockets. Headphones, phone, wallet, keys, pen, and my work ID was everything I had on me. "How could this have happened?" I think, for probably the 100th time.

"How screwed am I?"