Blearily, his vision congealed as he sat up. There was little to be seen; the moon was only half full, and the trees around the clearing reduced even that pale light. The tarp was still up over his head; what could have woken him? Then he heard it. The faint skittering, squeaking sound of chitin rapidly sliding on chitin. It was quite distant, but his senses had been honed by closer experiences, and fear. Suddenly he was wide awake. Moving with feverish intensity, he ripped up the tarp stakes and began to pack his meager gear. A white mouse was huddled in the toe of his left boot. Moving to cast it out, he paused, pitying the poor animal. It was fleeing too. He grabbed a small empty pouch from his backpack and dropped the tiny animal in. It didn’t struggle. Nothing had much energy left for struggling these days; good thing too, for he didn’t have the energy to fight off predators. And he was a lucky one.

He might be the only one left who had seen it all start. Even seeing it didn’t make it seem any more reasonable, or possible for that matter. It was just a routine job, defending an excavation at the old tomb. Didn’t even seem particularly spooky. He had been in plenty of worse-feeling places, and with a lot less firepower. There was never any premonition this time of anything going wrong, and he had a good danger sense. His instincts had saved his life many times, and his fellow mercenaries started watching him to get a feel for the danger level. “Weathervane,” they called him. But those instincts had failed him this time. True, he was alive, but that was just luck.

His gear was packed, roped into a tight bundle in and on his backpack. He strapped it on. The extra crisscrossing ropes he had attached made putting it on a bit more difficult, but after a sharp protrusion of rock cut through the right strap, he had decided the security was worth the trouble and the discomfort. He couldn’t afford to waste precious minutes repairing a ripped strap. His gear settled, he took a drink from his second canteen, now half empty. If he remembered right, he would run across a stream sometime that day. He was confident at least that he wasn’t lost; he had sighted on the huge rock spire in the distance every time he had found high ground, and he had some amount of natural direction sense, another potentially life-saving gift.

The mouse was tucked into his bedroll, the best cushioning his stripped-down gear could offer; he didn’t want to kill the animal while trying to save it. He was ready to set out. He found the two blazes he had made and started off.

As he jogged, his thoughts drifted back to the day it began. It was all he could think about, really. He was literally being pursued by it night and day, so little wonder that it haunted his waking hours and sleep alike. Every night, he relived the horror, and woke up only to hear them coming. If he ever got his body out of this alive, he feared his mind might never escape. Mercenaries aren’t supposed to have feelings, but then, this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen, either.