The Clearing
He staggered for an eternity then paused to rest. He glanced back.
Had he lost them?
He peered back between the gnarled limbs. He couldn’t see them.
He listened to the falling branches crunching to the coppery ground.
Sharpe picked himself up and kept going. Up ahead the pine trees began to thin a little. Further along he saw a clearing and burst out into it. He let out a strangled scream as a thick putrescence invaded his nostrils with terrible force. He gazed in disbelief at a meter-high pile of bodies–all adults, stacked in a crude tangle of arms and legs like discarded store mannequins, all in varying states of decay. It looked as if they had been prepared as part of some morbid, human bonfire. He bent over and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the spongy ground.
Then he heard the sound of crunching branches and whirled around. From every direction the mass of children emerged into the clearing, closing in, surrounding Sharpe again. This time there was no way out. None of them spoke a word. Sharpe looked helplessly into each face. They regarded him with unearthly stares with no trace of emotion. The children suddenly parted like the red sea. A little boy appeared through the gap. A sizable chunk was missing from his head. Blood was still oozing from the gaping wound.
What was meant to be a scream came out as high-pitched squeak as Sharpe’s voice cords failed him. This was the kid he had hit with the car.
The boy looked at his friends and then stepped back. A little girl suddenly moved in and swung her wicket stump with a force a small child simply shouldn’t possess. It connected squarely with Sharpe’s skull. The wicket exploded into splintery shards. Sharpe screamed and fell to his knees, holding his head.
Another child brought a hunting knife down, striking the soft middle-aged flesh between Sharpe’s shoulder blades. He screamed again. Another boy with a hatchet swung it like a pro baseball player, chopping into Sharpe’s rib cage with a spurt of crimson. He gurgled a strangled, agonized cry.
Now that the attack had begun, the children advanced on Sharpe in a swarm. They pounded, stabbed, chopped, hacked and sawed at his flailing limbs despite his pleading cries as his punctured lungs collapsed. All he could do was wheeze, hoping for oblivion.
Finally, he pitched forward and fell flat onto his face, dead long before the children had finished their merciless slaughter. A large pool of blood spread beneath Sharpe’s lumpy mass of broken bones and hacked limbs. Something that used to resemble his head was now smashed into pulpy lumps and splintered bone. The children finally began to disperse, most of them spattered with their victim’s blood, melting into the pine forest until they all disappeared. The remaining five children picked up what was left of Sharpe and tossed the pieces onto the growing mountain of rotten adult bodies.