You wake up in a forest in the middle of the night. You get up from the ground and brush off your clothes. Your neck is stiff, your legs are slightly weaker than usual, and other than those two factors nothing seems too out of the ordinary with your physical body.
“Hello? Is anyone out there?” you call out into the dark forest around you. You listen for a moment, hoping to hear something but minutes pass and you hear nothing, no one is in the forest at night. You try to think back to what initially led you here and placed you in this very predicament but you’re unable to recall what happened earlier in the evening, or even what happened earlier during the day.
You dismiss your inability to remember what happened to you as nothing, thinking that the memories will return to you when the time is right and you’re back in your safe and warm home with your family. The thought of your family bring a small smile to your face. The thought of your family reminds you that you’re alone in a forest at night and you need to get out.
You get down on your hands and knees and feel around for something, anything, on the ground to use as a light source. Perhaps you brought your cell phone and it fell out of your pocket when you blacked out here? After a few moments of searching, you feel something within your grasp. You feel a button on the side of it and press it and suddenly a light illuminates a small portion of the forest before you; you found a flash light.
You shine the light around you but due to some fog, you can’t really see farther than a few yards ahead of you. You then focus the beam on the ground and see that there is a black 9mm pistol next to your wallet and cell phone. You pick up the gun and see if it’s loaded; it is, but there are no bullets in the magazine. You then turn your attention to your wallet and cell phone.
“With this, I can call for help!” you exclaim happily as you pick up your cell phone and turn it on. The screen lights up quickly as you press down on the power button and the phone comes to life. You look at the symbols and icons on the screen carefully and notice that you’re at five percent battery life with no service.
“Yeah… I knew it was too good to be true…” you say as you roll your eyes, putting your phone in your pocket and picking up your wallet. You go through your wallet and find that everything is still in order, apart from your ID, that seems to be missing. Upon further observation, you realize that there’s nothing else on the ground that could be of any use to you and you decide to leave your current location in search of a road to follow. If you can find a road, you can find civilization.
You begin walking through the forest, your flashlight providing you just enough light to see in front of you past some of the fog. You seem to be on some sort of dirt trail, or at least some trail that has a good amount of trafficking on it, enough to wear down any grass over the years anyway. You stop for a moment and listen; still nothing to be heard. Out of curiosity to see if any humans have walked down this very trail, you look down and examine a set of tracks. The tracks are from a dog, but there are others like this set all over the trail around me, must be from wolves.
The thought of wild animals hunting you down and ripping out your throat send shivers of pure fear down your spine. The worst part is, they’d probably smell you before you could see them. They could be watching your every move from the shadows of the forest right now and you’d never know until it was too late.
You continue walking through the forest, the moon is now high above your head in the sky; it must be about midnight and dawn is still several hours away. You’ve been walking for what seems like hours but you know you can’t stop if you want to get out safely by morning. So, you begin to think about how you might have gotten yourself in this situation.
“Hmm…” you say quietly to yourself as you begin to think back. “I remember going to work… everything seemed okay. I was ahead on my current project and I had two meetings this morning; both of which went very well. After work… hmm…” That’s where your memory starts getting fuzzy.
