Lost in Translation - Preview

>Five days.
>You’ve been lost in this god-forsaken forest for five days now.
>Welcome to your new life, Anonymous. You’re going to be stuck in this forest until you’re eventually eaten by wolves.
>Or… whatever the hell was in the forest now. It had been a while; you thought you were hallucinating when the wolves seemed to be made out of tree branches…
>But that was beside the point at this time. Right now you were on the move, stalking your next prey.
>You saw tracks made in the soil of the forest, and you had been following them for the past day.
>You were starving, and you’d eat just about anything at this point. Berries, mushrooms, even leaves on occasion. You’d managed to trap two bunnies over the past few days as well. One was the best damn thing you had eaten in days, but the other had hints of rabies. You didn’t want to deal with that happening to you, so you simply left it there.
>But these tracks… these were different. Larger than bunnies, and yet didn’t have the same markings that the wolves had.
>These… were hooves.
>And from what you can remember from school, hooves only came from a few different animals.
>Giraffes, zebras… and horses. All of which would have ample amounts of meat to last you for however long you needed.
>You could already taste it.
>As you sprinted through the underbrush of the forest, you recalled vaguely different survival tips you had learned in boy scouts as a child.
>Which berries to eat, for example. “Leaves of three, leave it be! Berries white, danger in sight! Berries of blue will do harm to you!” All of these silly mantras that had been buried deep in your subconscious had suddenly come out after years of never having to use them.
>And you couldn’t be more thankful; they had saved you on more than one occasion.
>Suddenly, as you follow the tracks, they come to an abrupt stop.
>…
>Where’d it go?
>You look around, your ears hypersensitive now to any sort of sounds of the forest. Anything moves, anything BREATHES, and you can hear it.
>You take one, cautious step forward.
>And then you are falling.
>Falling down.
>You slam your head and back against a muddy surface as you hit the bottom of the hole. Someone dug a pitfall trap.
>Looks like you weren’t alone in here after all.
>You quickly manage to get to your feet, only to see that you were a good twelve or thirteen feet underground. Damn… and the walls were too far apart for you to scale it on your own.
>Wait, what’s that up there?
>You see, in the corner of the light coming from the hole above you, the silhouette of an animal’s head peek over the edge.
>As the features come into view, you can finally make out what kind of creature it is.
>A zebra, with… were those rings that it was wearing…?
>Did it just snicker at you?!
>Oh, Anonymous… you’re going to have yourself a FEAST when you get out of this hole…