GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: Three Days to Animal

God Hates Heavy Metal: Three Days to Animal, story and art by Hal Hefner for Nerd Horror

THREE DAYS TO ANIMAL

Three days without food or water. That’s how long it takes for a person to regress—mind, body, and soul—into a state of pure, animal survival. Three days, and morality starts to rot. Compassion peels away. You’re not human anymore. You’re a creature that will do anything to live—even kill.

That’s what they say, anyway.

But what I saw… he didn’t turn into an animal.
He became something hungrier. Something crueler. Something worse.

And the truth that haunts me most?
There are parts of me that never came back from those woods. But something else survived with me. I didn’t walk away the same. Something woke up inside me—something that willed me to live—and it never went back to sleep. Whatever I had to become to survive him... it’s still alive inside me, growing.

Trauma doesn’t just change you—it reprograms you. Your thoughts, your instincts, even your senses. It twists everything you were into something new. After enough of it, the world becomes a different place. Your eyes open. Your mind awakens to view everything from a different perspective. 

The kind of trauma that never lets go and rewires your soul, sank its claws into me when I was nine. Now, I see danger in the leaves, hear whispers in the wind and can feel an Earthen energy indescribable in words. 

I don’t just remember, the Earth remembers through me. Breathing beneath my feet, the Earth stirs when I walk. The wind carries warnings only I can hear—and when it blows, it hums through my blood. The trees listen when I dream. I can feel it, it’s energy—woven through me like roots in soil.

I’m part of it now—whether I want to be or not.

Ten years ago, I survived something that never made the news. A private plane went down somewhere in the Adirondacks. No one knew we were even out there. But we were. Me, my dad Holden, his old high school friend Cosimo, and my aunt Michelle—my mom’s twin sister. What happened in those woods lives in me still. I carry it in my breath when the wind runs through trees. I still taste the fire when meat cooks too long.

We went to Mohawk, New York to retrieve a Herkimer diamond. Not the kind you put in a necklace. This was something else. Something old, sharp, and worth a lot of money to a lot of people. I didn’t like it. I could feel it pulsing with a strange hum, like a machine trying to speak.

My dad said it was important, that it could do great things if we could understand it better. He could understand it better. It was important that no one knew we had it. There were whispers of secret societies, of occult collectors, of consequences.

So he called Cosimo, a childhood friend built like a lineman and just as gentle—at first. Though he and Dad were obviously different, he was still one of Dad’s trusted friends, and a superintendent of the local school. I had known him since I could remember.

Cosimo was to fly us to a private field in Oklahoma, and from there we’d drive west. No questions. No trails. A ghost route across the country. My mother stayed behind in Los Angeles, nearly nine months pregnant with my little brother.

The crash came suddenly through the wrath of a storm. A jagged line of purple lightning split the sky, and I swear it didn’t hit the plane—it hit the crystal. I watched it from my seat.

Panic crept in. I could feel the air change, bristling with static electricity. The hum in the stone swelled until it was a roar in my head. Then the engine died in a crackling electric funeral of silence.

The plane dropped, careening in a tailspin of rain, thunder and lightning—right into the arms of ancient pine trees. They saved us.

When I opened my eyes, I was hanging from my seatbelt, blood in my mouth. I got my belt off and crawled to my dad. His leg was shattered and bent at a sick angle. His eyes were barely open. Cosimo pulled him free while I searched for Aunt Michelle.

I found her thirty feet away, half-buried in the brush and pine needles. Her arm was gone. A jagged stump steamed in the moist air. She was murmuring in gurgles of blood that splattered onto my face as I drew nearer.

“Melissa...”

That was my mom’s name.

I touched her cheek and she grabbed my hand. A jolt of energy exploded from her into me. I wasn’t in the forest anymore.

I saw my aunt and mother as little girls sitting beneath a massive tree, silent but speaking through thought. Teenagers meditating in a ring of candles. Then: my mother, screaming in labor, blood on the floor, doctors shouting, a baby's cry. A boy looked up at me and opened his mouth—and then silence.

Michelle exhaled for the last time into my soul. I dropped beside her, sobbing, and passed out.

Day 2

When I woke up, there was a fire crackling nearby. My dad was propped against a tree, his face gray and sunken. Cosimo sat across from him, watching the flames like they might tell him a secret. I could already see it in his eyes—the way hunger was changing him. His jaw was tighter. His eyes, darker.

There was no food. A quarter bottle of water. I offered it to Dad, but he waved me off. Cosimo stared at it like it was gold.

I went back to the plane to salvage what I could. I found a single protein bar, torn and soaked in blood, and the crystal. It lay in the wreckage, untouched, humming. I didn’t want to touch it again. But Cosimo did. He scooped it up, held it like a newborn, whispering things to it under his breath. It was unsettling how it instantly snared him in.

That night, I sat with my head against a tree and heard something beneath the bark. Not words, or even a sound exactly. Just a sense. A warning. A low pulse like the Earth itself was trying to reach me.

Day 3

Dad was worse. Barely speaking now. Cosimo had gone quiet, too, except when he mumbled to the crystal. I told him we had to go find help. He said fine. But he was bringing the crystal.

We walked for hours. The terrain got steeper, rockier. I reached for a branch and when I touched it, I felt something inside it. Like the tree was guiding me to go left. I tried to tell Cosimo. He snapped.

“You spoiled little bitch,” he spat. “You think you know these woods? Like you're some goddamn fairy princess from the left coast? Well lemme tell ya, you’re a fuckin’ fish outta water here. So just shut your fuckin’ mouth and do what I say or you can sit your ass right here and let the bears eat your ass. At this point I don’t care what you fuckin’ do.”

I stepped back. His face was red, jaw clenched. For a second I thought he might hit me. But he didn’t. He stormed ahead, cursing.

I stayed behind, crying, holding onto a piece of moss that felt warm, comforting. Like a pillow made of a memory that was kind.

When we finally stopped, he claimed he saw fire in the distance. I saw nothing. But I followed him anyway into the night and headed for dawn.

Day 4

At sunrise, we reached the fire. It was our fire. We’d gone in a circle.

Cosimo screamed, picked up a branch, and slammed it against a tree over and over until the bark cracked and bloodied his hands. He stomped and howled like a madman and it was clear now that he was unhinged and dangerous.

Dad tried to sit up to talk to him, to calm him, but soon after collapsed back down in pain. I covered him with the emergency blanket. He was shivering, eyes unfocused.

That night, I heard whispers in the wind. Not words or sounds. Just knowing, vibrations, again communicating with me, through me beyond my senses. I crept away from the fire.

Cosimo was sitting in the dark, cradling the crystal and talking to it like it was a lover.

“I understand now,” he whispered. “You have to eat the soul to become. That’s how I will become more than a man. Something better. With you, by my side. In me.”

Then I saw him chewing something. Strips of flesh. A hand. Michelle’s wedding ring caught the moonlight. I stood up and saw her corpse, staring at me as a goblin tore away her skin.

I screamed. He chased me down, tackled me, and slammed my head into a tree. That was the last I remember.

Day 5

I woke up tied to a tree, mouth dry, lips cracked. Rain fell silently. My head throbbed.

I was terrified and started to panic. As I breathed heavily the wind danced around me, caressing my fear and closing my eyes. The trees were waiting.

They showed me Cosimo crouched by the fire, roasting flesh over a spit. Holding the crystal close to his chest. I saw my father trying to crawl, weak as a ghost. I could hear the voices now, not as sound, but vibration. The trees were listening. And responding.

Then I slept. I think they made me.

When I awoke, Cosimo was standing over me.

“Wakey wakey,” he sang. “Time for the main course.”

He slapped me so hard my ears rang.

“You’re gonna be delicious,” he said. “So juicy. So full of spirit. Better than your aunt. Better than your dad. And after I eat you, I’ll gut him like a deer and suck the soul out of his spine. Then I’ll be full. Complete. And I’ll make the journey home. Full, with the Wendigo's heart beating in my chest.”

He began singing to the crystal. A lullaby. His voice cracked and wept as he danced around the fire, licking the knife he planned to kill me with.

I screamed. Not words. Just soul. The forest heard me.

I called to my dad, through the trees, through the wind and through the earth. He awoke. The trees led him. Branches pointed the way. Roots cleared the path.

He found a heavy limb. Then he found Cosimo. And he focused all of his energy into one mighty blow.

Cosimo turned too late. The wood struck his skull with a wet crack. Blood poured.

But he didn’t fall. His hunger would not let him falter.

“You can’t stop what I’ve become,” Cosimo growled. “Wendigo don’t die easy.”

He tackled Dad. Raised the knife.

And the trees responded.

A root lifted from the ground and curled around Cosimo’s ankle. He stumbled. The blade twisted in his hand.

He fell into the fire. The blade drove into his chest. The flames took his hair and his flannel. His skin blistered, bubbled. He screamed, thrashed, tried to crawl out but the fire refused his dismissal.

The roots held him down and he burned. His flesh sizzled while his screams exploded into echoes.

Day 6

When I woke, the ropes had been cut and pulled away. The fire was smoldering now. Cosimo’s body was black and curled like a dead spider. The smell of his flesh was pungent and bitter.

I found my dad. Lifted him to his feet. We limped to the wreckage and set it ablaze.

The smoke reached the sky in a dark black cloud that traveled miles away. Signaling to the world that someone was here. Hours later, the helicopter came.

No one asked questions. Not really. Not the ones that mattered.

Today

Now I’m nineteen. My little brother Harrison is ten today. Just like I saw, Aunt Michelle saw, and Mom saw in the brush.

My dad walks with a limp. In spite of all he endured, he managed to bring home the crystal. The suffering endured for his research has paid off and he’s now on the verge of something monumental because of it—but that’s a story for another time.  

He never talks about the woods. I don’t either. But I haven’t forgotten it. 

I found out a lot about myself in those six days. Some things break your mind so slowly, you don’t even notice until you’ve changed.

You adapt to survive. You lose pieces of yourself to stay alive.

And if you’re lucky… only the worst part dies.

I still listen to the trees.

Because they still speak—and I still answer.

Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio