Wolf in the Fold

Naked, alone, and afraid, Stephanie stumbles through the forest in a race against time. The howling wind and the driving rain accost her already battered and abused body. Struggling through a drug-induced haze, Stephanie desperately clings to each semblance of reality, attempting to remember who she is, how long she's been away, and the particulars of her escape...the details of which elude her like a phantom. The fear of being alone, inching closer to hypothermia in her own personal Hell, produces only a numbing anxiety and a gut-wrenching certainty- that she is not in fact alone. Memories begin to penetrate the shroud of confusion: A man- shouting that he was trying to save her; claiming to be- her brother?With her mind racing to piece everything together, the only thing she can trust is her own uncertainty of everything, that there is nothing of which she can be sure- and that there is no one she can trust. From somewhere in the dark recesses of the forest, from which direction she cannot be sure, she is being stalked- hunted. Someone- something draws ever closer. Clinging to her final moments of life, Stephanie prays that she can make it out of the forest, back to civilization, alive- and that if she cannot, that she can simply lay down and die, here and now, not at the hands of the masked, maniacal monster now haunting the darkest corridors of her mind. Death is preferable to what awaits if he finds her