For a long time, the world was nothing but darkness and pain. Gradually, Thornton regained consciousness. He could taste blood in his mouth. He smelled smoke, felt heat. The kodiak groaned as he opened his eyes, his head thrumming with pain. For a while he had no memory of what had happened. He lay on his back, with trees looming over him. Smoke billowed across his vision, it’s acrid stench burning Thornton’s eyes and throat. 

	The bear sat up slowly, feeling his body protesting with pain as he moved. The large bear looked around. Pieces of debris were scattered all around him. Huge chunks of twisted metal, scattered seats and bodies were everywhere. Thornton remembered. 

The plane had gone down. 

	The bear couldn’t remember how he had managed to avoid getting killed. It seemed he had gotten thrown clear of the fiery inferno that was the bulk of the plane’s wreckage. It had ploughed a huge furrow into the ground and was still burning. No one else seemed to have survived. 

	“Hello?” Thornton bellowed, hoping that he wasn’t the only one alive. He knew, somehow that he was from the lack of screaming. All the other passengers were dead and Thornton was alone. 

	Groaning, Thornton got to his feet. Blood trickled in his eye from a cut above his brow. His shirt and pants were torn in several places, his flesh scraped and bruised. The bear touched his head, wincing as pain shot through it even from the gentle touch. He knew he was concussed, but he couldn’t stay in all the smoke that was coming from the plane. It was a miracle he hadn’t succumbed to it already. 

	Panting with effort and pain, the bear staggered away from the wreckage of the plane. He pushed his way through the trees, hoping that he would come out of them soon to civilization. Surely someone had seen the plane go down and would be calling for help. 

	The afternoon sunlight filtered through the thick foliage of the trees enough to see by, but it was clear that it was getting later in the day. After nearly dying, the bear wanted to get out of the forest. It made him feel trapped and claustrophobic. He pushed ahead faster, fear and pain and adrenaline making his heart race as he felt the trees starting to thin out around him. He knew civilization was so close, and he was desperate for help and contact with another living person after the trauma he had just endured. 

	At last the trees gave way and Thornton burst out of them expecting a road or the edge of a city. Anything but the sight that greeted him instead. 

	The bear stood on the edge of a cliff on a rocky protrusion. In front of him, as far as the eye could see, was nothing but a carpet of trees and hills, with the rocky slopes of mountains rising in the distance. He was in the wilderness, alone, wounded. No one was coming to help him. No one even knew if he was alive or dead. 

	A feeling of despair and dread washed over the bear from head to toe. He stood on the edge of that cliff for a long time just staring at the enormity of the expanse of wilderness before him. He couldn’t see a hint of civilized life anywhere. 

	Dejectedly, Thornton sank down upon a nearby rock and covered his face with his hands. The large bear shook, his body near its breaking point from the ordeal that he had suffered, and now the pressing realization that he was alone in the deep woods without any supplies to help him. He wished that he had never gotten on that plane. What had started as a pleasant trip to the bahamas for a vacation had ended in disaster and ruin. 

	Thornton sat on the rock at the edge of the cliff so long that afternoon faded into evening as the sun started to set ahead of him. He watched it going down, and the thought of being trapped alone in the woods with no light, no food and no shelter made him want to just step over the edge of the cliff and end it all himself. As much as the idea appealed to him, however, after nearly dying and surviving the crash, Thornton couldn’t bring himself to do it. His survival instinct was kicking in and it prevented him from making that choice. 

	The bear stood up slowly and looked back at the woods. He didn’t want to go back toward the plane wreckage. He could see the smoke still billowing up from the trees. He decided instead to walk along the edge of the cliff outside of the tree line until he found a less densely wooded area. He was hoping that in a different direction there’d be some way to get help. Some cabin or campsite that he could call for help from. 
	
	It was a long walk before the cliff started to slope downward toward a valley floor. It took Thornton almost until nightfall to reach the bottom of it. By the time he had skidded down the last leaf strewn slope, it was almost dark and he could barely see what he was doing at all. The bear flopped down onto a nearby fallen log, too exhausted to continue. He was sweaty, bloody, woozy and tired after everything he had been through. He stared into the gathering darkness with a growing sense of doom looming over him. His head spun, reminding him that he was still concussed after being knocked out during the crash. The fact that he was able to travel at all spoke to the bear’s strength and determination. 

	Thornton had no idea what he was going to do. He was facing nightfall in unfamiliar woodland with nothing to protect him from the elements or any sort of shelter at all. He didn’t have any training for this. He was a desk jockey for god’s sake, he wasn’t built for this. He had the typical build of a large bear, strong and broad, with a gut from his time spent at a computer at work and from eating quick and convenient fast food on his way home. 

	Thornton was just about to stand up and push on when suddenly the log he was sitting on shifted. It slid beneath him, making him jump up in surprise. In the growing gloom, it was hard to tell if he was just hallucinating from the concussion or if the log was suddenly sliding along the ground. 

	All at once, Thornton realized what he was looking at. What he had thought was a rough log was actually the scally flanks of a huge snake. It was mottled brown and black and in the darkness it had been indistinguishable from the leaf litter around it. The serpent, however, was impossibly large. It didn’t just look like a fallen tree trunk, it was as thick as one at least. The bear felt fear bloom in his chest as he realized that he was in the presence of something that could make a meal out of him. He didn’t even know where the snake’s head was. 

	Thornton’s legs wouldn’t respond. He was rooted to the spot in terror as the snake’s huge form became more and more apparent to the bear’s eyes. It was sprawled out between the trees, impossibly large, larger than any snake that Thornton had ever seen or heard of. Suddenly he saw the head. It was slithering toward him, wider than the rock he had been sitting on earlier. It was collared by a ring of brown and black feathers and had a bright red crest of the atop its head. It’s eyes were larger than serving platters, deep emotionless yellow pits. 

	The bear turned to run but it was too late. The huge snake lunged at him faster than his eye could follow. It curled around him, looping several massive coils of its scaly body around Thornton. The bear struggled, screaming in terror as the coils clamped down on him, pinning his arms to his sides and his legs together. He couldn’t move. It was like being compressed by loops of solid stone that was cool and covered with rough edged scales that tore at his flesh as they scraped over him. 

	The coils tightened more and more and Thornton began to find it hard to breathe as well as move. He kept screaming, but his eyes bulged as his ribs creaked from the pressure. He tried to push, tried to squirm free, tried to scream for help, but he could do none of those things. He was trapped and the snake’s coils just got tighter and tighter around him. 

	“Gggghkkk...” Thornton gurgled as the breath was forcibly squeezed out of his lungs. He felt a ripple of agony crawl up his body as his legs broke into pieces from the squeezing. He couldn’t scream even though he wanted to. He felt like a sponge being wrung out. The pain only increased as the squeezing got tighter and tighter, slowly compressing the big bear more and more. He couldn’t even wriggle. His lungs were aflame, desperate for air they couldn’t suck in. Every time he tried to draw a breath the coils got tighter. A soft, pathetic whimper escaped Thornton with the last of his air as he felt his testicles burst between his broken legs from the pressure. It twisted his stomach in knots of agony, making him want to vomit even as his head spun from lack of air. 
	
	Blood trickled from between Thornton’s parted lips. His organs were bursting one by one from the strain that the huge snake was putting on his body. His heart was fluttering from the constriction, hardly able to beat now as his chest walls compressed around it. The bear’s ribs started to crack like the timbers of a boat thrown against a reef, one by one snapping and stabbing his lungs with their shards. The bear could feel death rising up to claim him, but the huge snake got there first. 

	Thornton watched in horror as the snake’s head loomed over him, its massive mouth parting wide to reveal rows of hooked teeth and a flickering forked tongue. He wanted to scream. He wanted to beg for mercy, he wanted to do anything to save himself from the fate he now saw starting back at him. He could do nothing as the snake’s mouth closed over his head and shoulders and those hooked teeth pierced his skin. 

	The cold slime of the snake’s saliva coated the bear’s fur as the huge serpent swallowed for the first time. Thornton was near death, but by some cruel twist of fate he hadn’t died. Instead he was treated to the death scented darkness of the snake’s gullet as the huge monster started to swallow him head first. The cold, puffy tissues of the serpent’s throat squeezed at him, sucking him down further and further. His entire body was ruined at this point, his organs crushed, his bones snapped, even his testicles turned to so much mush between his legs. But the bear was subjected to still more horror as the huge snake swallowed him whole. 
	
	Thornton felt himself lifted upwards as the snake tilted its head back. He felt the muscles pulling at him, sucking him deeper into the darkness like going down a slimey wet tunnel. He felt his legs pass over those teeth, his feet engulfed by that same swallowing throat that he had just passed through. The bear shivered as he fell face first into the serpent’s stomach with a sickening squelch. 

	Outside of the serpent’s body, a huge bulge had formed where Thornton’s trapped body lay within. The snake curled up after swallowing its huge meal, working his dislocated jaws back into place after gulping down the bear. It took Thornton far longer to die than he would have ever thought possible, a mix of suffocation, internal bleeding and digestion eventually claiming the bear’s life. 

	The huge snake would take a few weeks to digest the meal it had just taken. It would serve it well over the coming winter, the bear’s fat and protein helping keep the massive undiscovered snake alive during the snow and the cold. It slithered back to its lair, dragging the bulge that had once been the bear who had been lucky enough to survive a plane crash, only to die as a meal for a monster... 

To be continued...