Jessica Brewster tightens the strap on her oversized backpack, glancing sidelong at her steady boyfriend of nine months--Ted Devers. A warm smile turns up the corners of Jessica's mouth. She shuffles her eyebrows at Ted, who smiles in return.

  "Ready?" Jessica asks, looking Ted up and down.

  The city boy looks extremely out of place with his even larger backpack. He tugs on one of the straps, struggling to keep the material from biting into his shoulder. Jessica allows herself a teensie laugh. Then again, he is carrying all of the necessary gear for their tent.

  "Ready as I'll ever be, Jess. Point me in a direction. Let's get this party started."

  "Haha. Come on, Ted. This way."

  Jessica leads Ted away from her parked SUV and towards a nearly hidden path through the woods. Wild vines and tree limbs obscure the way in, and out. The couple disappears almost immediately after stepping into the treeline.

  -

  -

  An hour later, Jessica and Ted reach the top of a steep hill. Excitement causes Jessica to slap her exhausted boyfriend's left shoulder blade. Ted turns to her, a little less than thrilled.

  "Camp site is down there, Ted. Race you."

  Jessica takes off running without encouragement, or agreement, from Ted. With a low groan, Ted makes his way down the hill, adjusting his heavy pack. Jessica waits for him at the bottom, her face almost a beam of sunshine.

  "Come on, slowpoke. It's getting dark. Come on. We need to get set up."

  "Okay, okay," Ted hollers to be heard. "I'm coming Speedy Gonzales. Hold your horses. I'm not used to this camping crap. The most my father ever did was 'take your kid to work day'. Can you imagine how bored I was listening to my dad talk about refrigerator repairs for nine hours? And then, having to listen to all of his buddies too. My childhood sucked! Sure, I had a car before I was sixteen. But by then, my mom had already left his ass and I was...Well, me. Camping is not my thing."

  Jessica moves to stand in front of her brooding lover. She leans up and kisses him on the cheek. Ted offers her a faint smile, peering anxiously around at their surroundings. Jessica grabs his face, turning it back forward, and kisses him on the mouth.

  "Maybe...I can help change that."

  "Maybe," Ted says in a soft whisper.

  -

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  -

  Two hours later

  A small controlled campfire is burning a few meters from the tent entrance. Ted pokes the fire with a long stick, trying to coax it to grow even bigger. Jessica chuckles and takes the stick from Ted's right hand.

  "That's enough, Ted. We don't want to burn down the whole forest."

  "Why not? Then...We can go home. Watch a little TV...Eat a little popcorn...Do other things."

  "Oh ho. What other things?" Jessica says, tossing the stick away.

  Jessica plops down next to Ted, grinning like a birthday girl. The young man's smile grows crafty and he wraps one arm around Jessica's middle. He shuffles his eyebrows suggestively.

  "You know...Other...Things."

  "You're so ridiculous, Ted. We came out here to camp and enjoy nature."

  "I am enjoying nature. Making love to you is as natural to me as breathing."

  "Uh-huh," Jessica says, planting a firm kiss on Ted's lips.

  -

  -

  Moving their activities inside the tent, Jessica and Ted settle for making out. The sounds of the wilderness around them grow louder as darkness envelopes the forest. Crickets chirp shrilly, cicadas trill, and an owl hoots nearby. Ted and Jessica are oblivious to everything but each other. When the world suddenly grows silent, they are completely unaware.

  Jessica sits up beside Ted, running a hand down the front of his damp t-shirt. She smiles at him with slitted eyes.

  "You're so beautiful," Ted says.

  Jessica opens her mouth to reply. At that exact moment, a large pale appendage punches through her chest. The young woman's eyes widen and deep red blood pools at the corners of her mouth.

  Ted's face is now speckled with tiny dots of blood. He wipes at the spots of red fluid furiously, cleaning some from his eyes and lips. Disbelief transforms his handsome features as he takes in the gross thing extending out of Jessica's chest.

  Jessica's body convulses as the tentaclelike organ waves in the air. In one quick motion, the tentacle fans out, revealing itself to actually be a tightly packed system of smaller webbed appendages--similar to a hand. Ted sits up on the sleeping bag as the tentacle splays out and jerks backward, spreading itself across Jessica's chest.

  "What? What the hell? Jessica!"

  The unseen creature outside the tent draws in its appendage. Jessica, Ted, and the tent are dragged along with the pale slimy tentacle. Ted tumbles forward, landing atop Jessica. Her lifeless eyes stare up at him from her pale face. A tiny remnant of the smile which had been on her lips, at the moment of her death, remains.

  The tent bounces up and down for several meters, before getting caught on a tangle of branches. The creature does not relent. It pulls the tent in hard rough jerks. Ted cries out, realizing that Jessica's sideways body is the only thing keeping the tent from being pulled effortlessly. The creature aims to bend her nearly in half.

  Despite the fact that Jessica is clearly dead, Ted refuses to see his girlfriend's body mutilated. He roars and digs in his pants pocket for the small knife he used while setting up camp. Retrieving the pocketknife, Ted savagely slices at the tent's material. His only hope is to cut the tentacle anchoring itself to Jessica.

  Slashing the tent and tossing the loose material over his head, Ted roars a second time. His valiant cries stop when he spies the vile creature less than four feet away, on the other side of the tangled trees.

  "Oh sh..."

  Ted's words are only half out of his mouth when a second tentacle and webbed appendage shoots in his direction. Then, the world goes black and fades.