[h2][color=pink]DWYNWYN CHAPTER 1[/color][/h2] (I'm assuming this is ok, if not, please ignore me and/or delete this)
[img]http://i4.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/article1990156.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/welsh-womens-footballers-like-gwennan-davies-have-been-snubbed-by-team-gb-for-the-olympics-image-1-905355081.jpg[/img]

[I][h3]Ugh,[/h3] please just shut up![/I] Dwyn sighed loudly from the comfort of her tent and reluctantly sat up. Her regret for camping close to the trailhead out of laziness was beginning to steadily increase. She had known Americans were loud, but the campers who had set up not far from her had been shouting continuously for almost a minute now.

Deciding to make the most of the moment, she reached into her hiking backpack, sitting safely inside the tent with her, and pulled out a granola bar to take a bite, snickering at the memory of how she had accidentally taken an entire box of the things through customs at the Dulles International Airport and nobody had noticed. Taking a second bite, Dwyn noted that the screaming hadn't died down, and she subsequently realized that the two females were not merely having some argument. 

[I]It could be a bear...[/I] the tourist realized, having forgotten that the Appalachian Trail was home to significantly more dangerous wildlife than Snowdonia. The nineteen year old forgot eating for the moment as she fished out her pepper spray and one of her cooking knives. A brief moment passed as Dwyn sat in silence listening to the screams, before wondering if leaving them to die - to what she was now sure was a bear - would make her a sociopath.

"Stupid fucking Americans can't take care of themselves," she muttered, unzipping her small single tent and stepping outside into the twilight. 

The screaming girls were downhill from her, and Dwyn started to creep forward in that general direction, wanting to remain unheard. As she did so, the screaming dwindled down from two girls to one, making the Welsh girl feel uneasy enough to start jogging down the path at a faster rate. Off to her right was the faint glimmer of a dying fire, and as Dwyn approached, once again slowly and stealthily, she knew it was the correct campsite by the increasing volume of the girl's mixture of crying and shouting. 

Wielding her pepper spray and knife and suddenly concerned that it wasn't enough, Dwyn walked up to the edge of the campsite carefully, cringing at the crunching sound of the leaves with every misstep. She found a tent similar to hers, and peeked around the side of it, only to discover a site she immediately regretted looking at.

There was the mangled corpse of a girl like her, its chest ripped open and some of the internal organs missing. Not far away the other girl lay on the ground screaming as something progressively tore her open and ate her alive. Dwyn did a double take upon realizing that it was not in fact a bear attack. Her heart felt like it dropped completely out of her chest as she saw it was two human figures instead. 

The girl's body closest to her then began to twitch, and in the same moment the remaining color drained from Dwyn's already-pale face in utter fear. 

[I][H3]Fuckfuckfuckfuck[/H3][/I] was the only thought in the Welsh girl's head as she promptly turned around and ran, tripping over rocks and twigs and making quite a bit of noise but managing to scramble her way back to her own campsite quickly enough. At that point she realized that at some point during her panicked return the other girl had died, presumably leaving the predators' attention to focus solely on the other human making lots of noise in the forest.

"Jesus fucking christ..." she took a look around, and then suddenly ran to the bushes to vomit out of fear. Knowing it was essential to her survival to get over herself quickly, Dwyn threw her cooking gear into her hiking backpack, forcibly stuffed her winter coat she was going to use as a pillow on top of it, and strapped the backpack on before throwing herself to the ground pulling out the four tent stakes. As the tent halfway collapsed, Dwyn resorted to running off dragging it behind her by one of its corners.

"Jesus fucking christ..." she repeated to herself once more, jogging up the trail toward higher ground. She couldn't even think properly, only move, but was reassured by the fact that she was pretty sure she was doing everything she could to survive at the moment.

After a few minutes when she came up upon a part of the trail that was a steeper incline than previously, Dwyn slowed slightly to a powerwalk, hooking one of the plastic bars of the tent with her elbow and putting the winter coat on her head as she organized the cooking gear in her bag. Then, still moving forward at a steady but reduced pace, she carefully squeezed as much air out of her coat as she could before setting it in the 60 liter hiking backpack as well, which was now strapped backwards to her chest so she could access it.

As a final move, she pulled the tent bag out of the outside pocket and carefully walked backwards while dragging the tent and pulling the bars out of it to fold them up, too terrified to stop moving even if she could have done the job more quickly that way. At last she managed to roll up the tent fabric itself and put it in the backpack, and then began powerwalking forward again up the trail.

Without the total disorganization, Dwyn found herself able to think more clearly. [I]Either they're stalking me or not actually chasing me, because I haven't heard anything for a while now,[/I] she reasoned. [I]But what are they? Cannibals? Zombies?[/I]

She tried to think back to her high school biology class. Were zombies even possible? It seemed unlikely, but those two humans tore into those girls like they were animals, not in the way anyone with half a brain would do so. These thoughts plagued her, continuing cyclically in her head with no resolution as she hiked further and further into the wilderness.  

An hour later, Dwyn finally got up the courage to sit down for a second to take her water bottle out and come up with a plan. She didn't dare speak to herself out loud for fear of not hearing a crucial rustling sound in the bushes.

[I]I guess it doesn't particularly matter if they're zombies or just cannibals,[/I] she decided. [I]I'll just find a vantage point using the elevation and make sure nothing approaches me. And if it's zombies maybe they wouldn't even be able to climb to reach me anyway[/I].

It wasn't a full plan, but it was better than running off further into unknown territory at night panicked and with no plan at all. So Dwyn promptly took a sharp turn away from the established trail and forged her way straight uphill, eventually settling on a rock ledge that appeared to only have one direction of uphill approach. 

Now at least safe for the time being, the Welsh girl, tears streaming down her face, sat with her back against the rock wall and stared down at the small cliff that led up to her position, afraid to look away for even a split second.