The Ocala Forest Shrike: Ocala National Forest FL, February 2017

The Ocala Forest Shrike : Ocala National Forest FL, February 2017

Characters: Genevieve Browning, Robert Hemming Dashwood, Doctor Karl "Oprah" Birkin, Redick Saladin, Doctor Joseph "Shrike" Lusiak, & Steve's character (insert name here)

Wildlife marshals were the first to discover the gruesome remains of the victims in the northeastern area of the Ocala National Forest. The remains of a family of three were discovered positioned in the trees, impaled upon high reaching branches. Another four victims, we're discovered elsewhere in the forest over the next days, some in advanced stages of decomposition. Police attempts to identify a link between the victims has little success, according to sources cited in the press, and authorities did not announce that they were perusing any specific suspects.

While photographs of the crime scenes were deemed too graphic to post in the media, a report was printed in the Orlando Sentinel which stated there was some confusion among the crime scene investigators about how much of the bodies was missing. While a source in the Forestry service did go on record with the journalist that no predatory or scavenging animals native to the area would account for the state of the remains, the police did not comment on the matter.

**Story Part 1**:

Getting to the scene where the bodies were first found isn't easy for most of the characters; the bodies of the family of 3 were found inside the Juniper Creek Wilderness, just over a three mile hike from the nearest roads or parking in the forest. Those bodies have been removed before any of the cha arrive at the park, of course, but the scene left behind is grizzly enough without them. A broken branch of a sand pine is stained in dark red, with a dark smear down the trunk of the tree for several feet beneath. The branch is fairly high up, and the body would have been dangling 8 or 9 feet off the ground. Several paces away, another tree has a pair of branches broken stained dark with gore. The rainy season has not yet begun in Florida, so the scene has yet to be really washed clean of the ichor from the mangled remains, and the stench of caked blood, emptied bowels, and rotting meat fill the area.

The first characters to make it to the forest arrive at this scene the day before any other victims are discovered. Doctors Lusiak and Motta tramp through the rough underbrush in the late afternoon air, each with a duffel bag and a forged set of crime scene tech laminated IDs. They passed the police tape with a quick story about an earlier technician's photos getting corrupted and being sent to get backups, and proceeded to cataloging everything left in the crime scene.

Even though he's nearly fifty yards off, Robert Dashwood noted the new arrivals. He had gotten behind the police tape a few hours before to look around, and had been approaching as the first photographers were leaving. He went on to look over the scene, before moving further out. What he had scene, and what the doctors were seeing then, was confusing. While there was some scratched or scraped bark higher up in the trees, they did not have signs of tool marks or climbing equipment, and there were no immediate track marks around the trees themselves. Whatever had put those people up in those trees, there were no immediate clues as to how.

However, Dashwood had also noted the roots around the bases of both trees had been drawn up through the earth, as can happen with a tree during a strong storm or after an impact. They were the only two trees in that areas, however, so it didn't take much intuition for him to realize something heavy had struck the trees high up. Robert started putting the clues together in his mind, and widened his search.

The doctors and Robert don't speak that day, but as they were leaving they did notice him- they are moving away from the scene to get some privacy so that they can talk and discuss what might have done this, but pause when they noticed him climbing a tree some thirty yards away. He moved smoothly and quickly, clearing a good twenty feet off the ground in a few moments. Lusiak and Motta regard him for a minute in silence- watching as he examined the trunk of the tree for something.

Robert sensed he was being watched, and started to climb down suddenly as they started to approach. Surprisingly, before they'd cleared even half the distance, Dashwood had made it to the grown and started away. Ducking and weaving in the underbrush, he vanished into the scrub marsh before they even make it to the tree.

**Story Part 2**:

The next time any of the characters cross paths in this case is a day later. The Forestry service, working with police agencies, had begun setting up groups to sweep through the area to try and identify what animal was responsible (and, though no one says it out loud, look for any sign of other victims). The park is closed to visitors, but there's no shortage of foot traffic as all manner of officials from the Park Rangers and Wildlife Marshals, as well as some volunteers, are moving in and out of the area.

Inspector Isaac Graham was in a group of volunteers getting some instructions from a wildlife marshal. The marshal had a map laid out showing what grid of the park their group would be searching that afternoon and was discussing what kind of signs they were looking for. The marshal's theory was that they were dealing with a diseased panther, since they are known to drag prey up into trees. They don't typically attack humans of course, and no panthers were known to live in this forest, so he suspected it must have a disease causing it to act aggressively. Each group of volunteers was made up of law enforcement officers and licenced big game hunters, most armed with tranquilizer guns or bear mace, though Graham had a little bit more fire power stowed away in his pack than most.

Just as they were finishing preparations, another was coming back in. A young woman peeled off away to join his group in going back out. Genevieve Browning moved smoothly and confidently through the brush, and while the fact that she was a young woman was the first thing that caught Graham's attention (most of the volunteers were men, and not young ones), what really got his interest was the taser she had in a holster at her side. He recognized the model- very expensive, and actually rated for use on large animals like bears.

Just over two hours into the patrol, the group pauses at a clutch of trees while the marshal is on his radio. Isaac hadn't seen a thing that stood out to him, but he suddenly registered that Genevieve was no longer with them- she'd slipped away and was climbing a tree about ten yards off. She made very good time climbing with a rope lanyard, and was perched twenty feet up and surveying the next tree line with a monocular by the time he got to the tree.

They hadn't spoken yet, so he introduced himself and asked what she saw. The small talk didn't last long- after a minute or so she went rigid and quiet. A few more passes along the tree line, and then she was descending fast. He asked what she saw, and the answer was short and sweet- "Another body". She blew past him to get the marshal's attention, and was all hushed tones and sharp hand motions. Isaac noticed her expression at that point by the contrast; where the marshal was horrified, she was just intense, almost professional.

Ten minutes later the group was slowly approaching the fourth victim. A caucasian man, lean, early thirties. The body was upside down, impaled just above the pelvis on the sharpened point of a branch broken off after a foot and a half, dangling about ten feet in the air. Flesh was missing from both of the legs; the meat of the right calf was gone clear down to the bone from just above his boot up to the knee, and all the way up to the mid-thigh of the left. With all the sinew gone, the left leg had fallen apart- a tibia and fibula stuck out of a gory boot lying at the base of the tree. The body had a few smaller puncture wounds on the torso, and the distended angle of the neck gave the impression that the man may have had a relatively quick death, regardless of what was done to him.

While none of them could actually approach the body, the Marshal made sure of that, they had all gotten close enough to see some details. Graham listened to the other volunteers bandying guesses around about what could have done that while they scanned the ground around them for tracks or clues. The only thing they could agree on was that none of them knew what left feeding marks like that. It was her silence that caught his attention that time, and Isaac realized why Genevieve wasn't going in the guess work- she wasn't looking at the ground for tracks. She was watching the trees.

Less than an hour later, emergency vehicles with more Rangers pulled up to secure the scene and the body. Night was falling, and the volunteers were being shepherded back out of the park. Not that they noticed, but both of them had snuck away from the group to continue searching in the growing shadows. It was forty minutes later and half a mile way that they stumbled upon one another, suddenly spotting each other across twenty yards of dark woods, each sporting night vision gear, him with a heavy shotgun, and her a large hunting rifle.

**Story Part 3**:

Night had just fallen when Inspector Graham and Genevieve stumbled across each other. It doesn't take long for each to realize that the other is acting alone and outside of the law, and Graham is the first to acknowledge that they are there for the same reason- that whatever had killed those people wasn't as simple as a sick panther. They tacitly agreed to continue hunting together, and she informed him that the animal was moving higher up, from tree to tree, which was why they weren't seeing tracks. The night grew darker as they continued on, sharing theories about what the creature might be.

\* \* \*

A two miles away and a couple hours later, Redick Saladin trudged through the scrub brush of Juniper Creek Wilderness grunting and cussing under his breath every few steps. Coming to the park and sneaking past the authorities to get into the wilderness had seemed like an easy plan, but the wet cold of this swamp at night was an exercise in misery. His boots were already ruined and the sweater he'd worn was so wet with dew and mud that it made him colder. He'd come thinking that, if he got ahead of the search perimeter, he might find a lead, but had found nothing so far.

He doesn't find much until, close to eleven that night, he catches the sound of a pair of men talking in the distance. He approached cautiously and quietly to discover who they were and whether he had wandered too close to the Marshals, and discovered Doctors Motta and Lusiak talking as they passed a water bottle back and forth. They were having a light hearted argument about whether a vampire would leave it's victims posed and impaled like they had seen at the site the day before. Red quickly realized that they are Hunters not unlike himself and, judging from their clothing, they were as unaccustomed to the outdoors as him too. He approached and introduced himself, and the three agreed to work together for the time being.

\* \* \*

When Robert Dashwood caught the scent of offal and blood, he followed it to a clump of trees and found another corpse- a man in his thirties pinned up on a tree with a shaft of a branch just under his shoulder blade. Robert guessed that it had only been there a day or so, due to the color of the body and that the only tissue missing was some of the meat on a forearm. He debated what to do for a moment before withdrawing. He moved back to a thicket of trees far off and climbed up to a spot he could spy from, and settled in with a scope. He reasoned that the beast had stashed its victims for later consumption and, with the other bodies found and removed, the creature would be back once it got hungry.

It was just after midnight that he heard the first signs of movement; a soft 'thump' of impact from the dark, and a shiver as all the branches of a tree about thirty yards off rattled. Robert hadn't seen movement, and wasn't fast enough at aligning his scope to see what hit the tree before he heard an impact on another tree. He heard it without seeing it as it moved from tree to tree, closing in on where the corpse was hung up. Through his scope, Robert caught flashes of movement among the branches of the tree, but had trouble picking out a distinct shape in the dark. The creature moved in spasms of fast, jerking motion broken by eerie stillness.

It wasn't until the creature actually moved over the body of the man that Robert could make it out at all, but he wasn't sure he was seeing it correctly at first. It was smaller than he expected, maybe the size of a large dog. He thought he could make out thin limbs, and more than four of them, from the flicker of movements around its body. It was hard to be sure in the dark, but he guessed its coloring to be dark greens and greys. He watched as it fed upon the exposed meat of the corpse's arm, trying to see more detail, until a sound from the distance caught both of their attention.

In the quiet of the night, Robert could make out the sounds of people moving through the scrub brush even far off, and the creature apparently recognized it too. The thing skittered up the tree and disappeared before his eyes could follow. Blurs of movement and shaking branches were all he saw of the creature fleeing through the trees. Annoyed, he turned his attention to the newcomers, and was equally surprised and angered to see Red leading Dr. Motta and Dr. Lusiak straight toward him.

He climbed down and waited for them at the base of the tree. They approached with weapons drawn, but lowered them almost immediately. The confrontation was awkward for all of them for a few moments, as Robert failed to hide his annoyance at being interrupted, and Red stumbled through deflecting questions about how he had been able to tell where Robert was hidden. Eventually, though, they acknowledged that they were all there for the same reason.

Dr. Lusiak and Red revealed that they thought the creature might be a werewolf or a wendigo of some kind, and Robert explained wat he saw while he led them to the body he had found. The four of them compared what they knew (that it was a predator that would flee groups rather than fight, smaller than an average person, and cold-blood according to Red) and agreed none of them knew what they were dealing with.

While they talked, Robert forwarded the gps coordinates of the man's body to the wildlife marshals with a sat-phone, thinking that the beast wouldn't likely return to a compromised nest. He then realized that, with its food caches lost and on the run, the beast would likely start to get hungry and desperate and, considering how fast he'd seen it move, he was having second thoughts about being out there alone. As the four of them moved away from the scene, they took stock of what they each had brought and came up with a new plan.

After hours of hiking, Genevieve and Isaac had gotten good at spotting the claw marks in the bark of trees that showed where the creature had been, but hadn't seen much else. However, at about half past midnight, Isaac caught some radio chatter from the wildlife services that there was a report of another victim. The pair of them listened as a dispatcher read out GPS coordinates of the sighting, and Genevieve took out a map of the area to plot it.

She convinced him that they wouldn't learn anything trying to get there before the marshals, but that it might give them a place to start looking for a central nest or den. She marked out the triangle of the three sites found so far, started disqualifying certain areas for lack of tree cover, and circled a few areas that she thought would be best candidates. Isaac followed her lead, and she lead the way.

\* \* \*

Robert and Red lead the doctors through the woods for over two hours, resting occasionally to find their bearings and stay hydrated. At one stop, Red applied an ointment to his eyelids. Several minutes later he moved close to Robert and quietly informed him that they were being watched. Robert nodded, turning back to the doctors, and calmly told them that it was time.

The four of them huddled up and laid down their packs, pulling out food and water, and proceeded to warm up some soup over a sterno set. After a bit, Doctor Motta gave a nod, rose, and walked away from the group, saying that he needed to relieve himself. Motta went further away than most would feel the need to, his hands in his coat pockets. He walked away from the trees, into a clear patch, and was about twenty yards from the others when the creature plowed into him, hitting like a pile-driver. He'd been expecting it, but the force sent him sprawling. The impact knocked the wind out of him lungs, and the one of the syringes he was holding out of his grip- it was only the extreme adrenaline running through him that kept him clear headed enough to bring the other out.

The beast was like nothing he'd seen before; insectine, but its body was almost three feet long with a wide, rigid head at its front, all of it patchy greens and greys. Six segmented legs branched out from the trunk, the back pair were powerful looking, while the front pairs seemed covered in barbs. The head was dominated by large compound eyes and a set of mandibles practically gushing with a viscous ooze.

It had landed a few feet away from him after the impact; it had tried to dig the barbs of its front legs into his back on impact, but had only managed to shred his overcoat and fly free as they tumbled. He had barely had a chance to look it over before the creature righted itself, flung off the shreds of coat from its legs, and lunged over to him. It landed on his chest and wrestled one of it's barbed forelimbs to each of his arms, trying to get him pinned down and exposed. It was surprisingly light for its size, and shockingly strong. Fortunately for Motta, so was he at the moment, and he managed to put up quite a struggle.

He tried to stab the syringe, a hefty dosage of potent animal tranquilizers, into the creature, but the shell of the beast kept deflecting the needle in the struggle. After a long struggle, it clamped down on his arm, raking the flesh with a pair of legs. He howled in pain, surely enough, but this just resulted in another little surprise for the creature...

It skittered away from him, retreating at last as he put up too much of a fight, and leapt back to the tree-line. And this was when the real trap sprang.

The four men had been marching for two hours with a purpose- to get to a point with few enough large trees that they could trap the beast at ground level. It had followed them, and followed Motta out into a clearing. While it had stalked him, the others had followed, spraying bear mace that Motta and Lusiak had brought up into all the nearest trees- sure enough, as soon as the beast landed on one of the trees, it went berserk and fell to the ground, limbs flailing.

**Story Part 4**:

At that, the others closed in. Robert, wielding a bullwhip, drove the stunned creature away from the trees with terrifying cracks whenever it managed to get its frantic legs beneath it. Red and Lusiak, armed with pistols, took shots when they could. The creature was hard to hit, but was also half-crippled with poisons, and eventually they managed to clip it a few times. From there, the drove the wounded creature on and on until exhaustion set in, and a final shot to the center mass sent guts and fluids spraying.

The four men converged on the dying creature, tried and failed to identify it, and proceeded to debate the fairest way to deal with the remains. Red and the doctors came to an understanding that he would be compensated financially for the assistance, while they took the majority of the remains. Robert just took the shell pieces of the thing's head, after the doctors collected all the tissues within, and parted their company. He walked off with a little spring in his step, pulling out his sat-phone to make a call with a grin on his face.

\* \* \*

Isaac and Genevieve found what they were looking for fairly quickly once they got to the new part of the forest; the claw marks in the trees got more frequent and easier to follow. Less than an hour of looking, and they started seeing the signs all around them and knew the beast made its nest nearby. They found it among a pair of downed trees, one of which had been hollowed out.

The earth between them was a mush of mud and rotting plants, with a variety of twigs and dozens of small animal bones embedded in the muck. Isaac was inspecting the area while Genevieve took pictures of the scene, and he walked around the log and found himself face to face with what looked like a bug the size of a bulldog: startled, the only reason he stopped himself from shooting was that it never moved. After getting closer, he and Genevieve realized that it was an empty carapace, left over from molting.

While they didn't find the beast itself, they did find something that neither of them expected. In the hollow log, Genevieve spotted a bit of color and found two little bundles wrapped up in waxy tarpaulin. She drew one out, unfolded the wrapping tentatively, and revealed a round, brass-framed mirror about six inches wide. Isaac drew out the other. It was folded over several times, but clumsily, as though it had been almost rolled up.

He opened it up and about a dozen slips of paper fell out. Picking them up, he found that they were photos. There were five men, a woman, and a teen boy depicted, and each had a few photos that had obviously been taken without their knowledge- one was a shot of a man getting out of his car, another showed him on a couch, shot through a window, one showed a woman at a table in a restaurant, seemingly taken from a few tables away.

Neither of them knew what to make of this, except that they both recognized one of the men- Caucasian, lean, early thirties. They'd seen him earlier that day, hanging upside down on a tree. They didn't know it then, but they later learned that woman and the teenager were in the family that was found first, and another of the men shown was at the coordinates that had been reported earlier that night.

They were both thrown by these discoveries, and bandied theories about what it meant for several minutes. They broke off and went silent when they started hearing faint gunfire in the distance. The pair started to move cautiously in the direction of the shots, but from the sound it was over a mile away, and they lost the direction when it ended.

Shortly after, Genevieve received a call on a sat-phone stowed in her pack. She answered but didn't say much. She hung up, clearly angry, and turned around. Isaac was confused, and she informed him that the threat had been dealt with, and she was going home. Isaac collected everything he could from the nest they'd found, but never caught another trace of the creature that lived in it.