Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

They ran.

Branches whipped their faces. Roots clawed at their boots. Every step forward felt like retreat, as if the trees twisted behind them, sealing every path they'd taken. There were four hunters when they entered the Moonwood—now only two remained.

Reller, the youngest, blood on his cheek and panic in his breath, stumbled beside Old Finric, the grizzled trapper who swore he'd mapped this place decades ago. But now even Finric's compass spun in circles. The forest had changed.

Or perhaps it had always been like this—awake, and they'd simply never noticed.

Behind them, the cries of Callen still echoed—though they'd seen him die. A silver jaw, six feet wide, snapping from the brush and dragging him into the green. No beast they knew left such a clean wound.

"They hunt us now," Finric whispered.

"Who?" Reller asked, though he didn't want the answer.

Finric stopped. His face pale. He pointed ahead—"There."

A clearing. Perfectly round. At its center: antlers. Dozens of them. Skulls nailed to trees, hooves arranged like windchimes, creaking in the hush. A shrine, perhaps. Or a warning.

Something shifted beyond the antlers.

Not a sound.

Just movement—subtle, wrong, wrong in how it didn't disturb a single leaf. A shape—tall, lean, crowned with antlers that branched like lightning, body wrapped in strips of hide stitched with sinew.

Its eyes were hollow. Yet Reller felt them in his spine.

"The Hunted returns," Finric muttered.

"What does that mean?"

Finric didn't answer. He just raised his rifle, hands shaking.

The creature didn't charge.

It tilted its head.

Mocking. Studying.

Then it vanished.

Leaves exploded around them. The sound of breathless hooves, pounding from every direction. Shadows weaving through trees—wolf-shaped, man-tall. Not beasts, not men. The Taken—those who hunted the forest and were never seen again.

Now they hunted for it.

Finric fired blindly. The shot lit the forest for a blink—and in that flash, Reller saw a hundred pale figures watching from the trees. Some missing jaws. Some with arrow shafts still jutting from their ribs.

All wearing antlers.

All smiling.

Finric screamed. The shadows fell upon him in silence.

Reller ran.

No direction. No thought. Just instinct. Until his feet found a path—narrow, overgrown, but deliberate. Stones lined its edges. It led deeper, but it led somewhere.

As the forest thinned, he stumbled into a glade filled with white flowers. No wind. No birdsong. Just stillness.

And at its center stood a statue—ancient, cracked, with a stag's skull for a head and human ribs sprouting from its back like wings.

A voice whispered behind him:

"Those who chase for sport must learn the terror of being prey."

Reller turned.

Nothing there.

Only the wind rising—and antlers in the trees.

They say the Moonwood still hunts. That for every trap set within its borders, another hunter is taken in kind. And sometimes, under the full moon, a boy with wild eyes and shaking hands wanders the glades, whispering one word again and again:

"Run."