skin walkers: the awakening

the red eyed stranger in the forest

(this isnt really a horror story but it was freaky). It was just after school. My male friend and I were walking back to our house's. Our bus was late. It was getting dark. We decided to stop for a few seconds to catch our breath since we were running, having a lot of heavy books, making it difficult to carry. We had most of our classes together so we knew each other pretty well. We played the same games as each other, had the same lunch, b lunch after 4th period, we sat at the same table all the time, though we never talked. We had stopped to rearrange our books and items so we didn't drop them. I was talking to him about math class and english and some gossip I heard from my friends during lunch. We stayed there for about 10 seconds before we heard cracking and pounding coming from the woods next to us. We quickly finished and started walking faster than before. We heard a louder thump like someone has  started pounding on the trees with a hammer. At this time, we were running as fast as we could with all our heavy books. A rock was chucked in front of us, than another, and another till there were 5 rocks on the ground, all missed luckily.  We looked in the forest where the rocks came from. We couldn't see anything from where we were standing. My friend and I decided to get closer to try to see better. Being the crazy stupid person I am, I went first. I saw this dark red pair of eyes looking at us. My friend froze in fear. I tried pulling him along, but he didn't budge. The red eyed monster approached slowly, having some kind of item in its hands. It seemed like a long item, like a sledge hammer. At this point we were freaking out. 5 seconds later the monster was out of the woods in slight daylight. We huff in relief as the monster is my friends next door neighbor. My friend had recognized him because he always used to stand outside, watching him go to school. He wasn't normal. He stood there starring at us for about 1 minute. He walked away like a zombie holding his sledge hammer like a weapon. I could swear I saw a symbol on his neck and arm. A circle with an x through it. My friend said his wife died  in a car accident. He was never seen after that day. I still don't understand the red eyes and the symbol. We found out he died a weak before that happened.