This one had f*ck-all to do with the Pacific Northwest -- heck, it didn't have much to do with headhunters, either -- but it was still a good bit of fun.

I particularly liked the deaths -- and the ending that was totally absurd in the way that absurd does not really need to explain anything that went before -- and that is fine.

Monkeys.  Robots.  Aliens.  Whatever.  The writing and pacing were such that I could just roll with it.

"Spears are better."  A very good bit.

Very few comments for this author.  Well-written, with no real problems for me.

This is a solid shot at the classic group of people in the woods thing where they get taken out one by one. I like the mythology of it and it’s cool to push it into a technological side.

The early mystery of Aliya’s disappearance gets this going well, although I was surprised they found her again so quickly. In a few places I thought the characters made some forced choices to fit with your story, but of course it’s a genre staple to have characters split up or stay in a dangerous place for spurious reasons.

Quite a lot of the real fun of this comes in the last few pages and for me it would have been nice to see a bit more made of those various story elements.

This was good - had a cheesy 80s movie vibe going for it.  The ape robot was not only surprising but pretty awesome in the way it swallowed up Aliya like Ironman and you get extra points for some gruesome deaths, all delivered to the head.

In saying that, I didn't like the ending and Kate's last line - felt it could be more intense rather than have her sitting there defeated. There's a big plot hole - why didn't they get the fuck out of there after the death of Hernandez? I guess they have a truck or something, as they were about to take Aliya to hospital but they decide to stay, split up and get firewood with the inevitable happening. No big deal really, big budget movies have plot holes and you did this in a week so who cares, just could have been better explained I thought.

The opening sentence is horrible but otherwise, this was well written.

Congrats on completing the OWC.

Steve

All right, first off, good title. Made me want to read this.

...But your opening line gave me doubts. "Three large heavy tents in a Pacific Northwest rainforest
around a large campfire." Are you serious?

But the rest of it seems to be written better, even if you have some awkward lines here and there. Overall I don't have any complaints.

This was slightly corny, in a good way. I agree with Coop, this has a bit of an 80s feel to it. I don't know if that's intentional, but regardless, it works, IMO.

So yeah, I actually really liked this one. It was a fun read, definitely pretty absurd and one of the more entertaining entries.

Great job completing an OWC entry. Can't wait to find out who wrote this...

Will

This is the first time I've attempted a straight-up slasher horror, sci-fi angle notwithstanding. I tossed around a few ideas based on the Wendigo legend at first, and then I came across some pictures from Mexico and thought it would be a neat "what if?" to have a Mayan temple in the Pacific Northwest. And that led to the idea of aliens.

The back story (which I failed to make clear enough) is the natives worshipped these aliens thousands of years ago, but they eventually rose up and killed the aliens. They couldn't destroy the alien technology, which was still a danger, so they sealed it away. Aliya is the first person to find the room because of the crack in the rock, a back way into the chamber created by time and seismic activity. She was in the right place while it was dark enough to see the glow coming from inside. The room itself serves a few purposes but primarily it makes the ape-bots. The aliens modeled the robots after apes since that's how they saw humans, which was ultimately their downfall since humans had evolved well beyond that stage. When a human steps on the metal disc, an ape-bot is created specifically for them, linked to their mind and built to house the human inside them. These robot-human integrations are the ultimate workers and warriors. When Aliya creates the ape-bot, it defaults to the last set of instructions from the uprising, to escape and report back to their alien planet. Aliya's child mind can't handle the link at first, which is why she loses consciousness, and the ape-bot views all other humans as a threat (again from its last set of instructions), so it kills them while trying to get to Aliya.

Much of that back story isn't important to this short but some if it should have been made clearer, such as Aliya being the first to find the alien chamber and maybe a mention from her about what happened millennia ago.

I'm in total agreement with many of the comments. There needs to be a stronger feel for the locale, a bigger reveal that this is a Mayan-like temple in the PacNorWest. The opening line is a groaner, I wrote that just as a way in but neglected to return to it later. A bit more explanation for clarity, and certainly a better description of the ape-bot, it is kind of cheesy and deserves to be better.

I like the concept I came up with, and I'm really pleased with how well I followed the slasher horror tropes and vibe since that was the goal. It's a shame I didn't have more time to polish this up but I'm happy some of you enjoyed it well enough. I'm a semifinalist in the Industry Insider Television Writing Contest, and in the middle of writing this I found out I had less time than expected to complete the next stage, so I had to drop this pretty quickly. I'm glad I got to write this first though, it's something I'll be able to pick up again to polish up, maybe even lengthen. There's a lot to mine in that back story.