Samuel Wellstone stumbled through the flood clutching the spear he’d made out of long-handled gardening shears, a crude plastic pole with a dull metal bit on the end. The water that washed through the streets was so cold he kept losing track of his feet as the tide grasped at his boots, turning each step into a slow drag against the currents, threatening to force a stumble and drench him in bone-cold water at any moment.

The sky was gone. Huge, storm-cloud grey walls of light stood on all sides, rising up endlessly, cutting them off from the world. The barriers rippled with concentric rings of oily, dull colors. Birds made brief, sharp flashes as they flew into the new walls on their horizon, panicked, and were set alight by some kind of backlash.

Every time Sam saw a burst of light against those walls, he winced, wondering if he was going to his own death.

Ahead of him, a white rabbit walked on water. It was brilliant white, half-transparent, its see-through body shedding light through the hazy drizzle. A spirit animal. Sam had known to follow from the moment he saw it. It brought him out of his little den, armed with only a jacket too thin to keep the rain off his back and his makeshift spear.

There were monsters out here. It wasn’t safe. Sam knew that. He wasn’t an idiot, although he felt like one as he waded on, chasing that damn rabbit.

By his calculations, he had enough food to last for a week if he stayed inside, but after that, he’d be out here anyway, trying to scavenge up scraps from supermarkets that better scavengers had stripped clean days ago. The best thing to do would be find others and make a group, watch each other’s backs. All good in theory, but Sam’s only friends were on the Internet, a world apart.

By his own calculations, by the hours he’d spent lying in bed unable to sleep as his mind raced and his imagination provided gruesome ways he could die-- well, Sam figured he was pretty much a goner.

So how could he not follow the rabbit? Shining as it moved through the streets, the little creature was a ray of hope.

When he spotted it through his window, he was just happy to see another living creature. To think that if a rabbit could survive this, so could a pudgy, hapless dork. Then it lifted its head just in time to meet him eye to eye. In that moment, like a voice had spoken into his head, Sam knew he was being asked to follow.

Ahead, the city parked loomed. The trees were bending and swaying in the storm, the earth a soggy mire of wet, rotten leaves. The rabbit shot ahead, vanishing among the roots and trunks of ancient oaks.

“Hey, wait up!” He was so cold and soaked through to the bone that he could hardly feel his mouth as he shouted, his voice swallowed up by the wind. The storm was shaping the raindrops as they fell, rolling them into long, cold needles of water that stung against his face, glasses foggy and obscured by clinging droplets.

Pausing under the canopy of a tree, he hurriedly pulled his glasses off and wiped them against his jacket, doing little more than spreading the water thinner.

As he shoved them back onto his face, he realized he couldn’t see the rabbit. The night was dark and lightless. Fumbling in his pocket, he drew out a pocket flashlight and shone it across the park. Nothing but rain glistening on leaves.

“No no no…” From the moment he’d seen the spirit animal, a sense of hope had filled Sam’s being. Now it was suddenly withdrawn, and he was cold and wet and terrified, going stumbling forward, in too deep to listen to the voice at the back of his head saying turn back.

A mist coiled around his legs.

As Sam roamed through the park, sweeping his flashlight beam over slimy black bark and abandoned benches, he was acutely aware that every second was eating away at the flashlight’s battery, a second of light spent that he might not get back.

But he couldn’t bring himself to turn it off. “Heeeere rabbit..!” He shouted above the wind. The longer he wandered, the higher the trees seemed to loom above him, their branches spiderwebbing across the sky.

And then his flashlight landed on a face. It could’ve been human if not for the bright horns jutting out from the forehead; other than that, it was the face of an old, old man, sagging with wrinkles piled atop wrinkles. He wore antiquated yellow robes, mysteriously dry even as the rain sloshed down around them, and held a jar in his hands. Mist spilled from the mouth.

Sam, to his credit, didn’t hesitate for even a second before stabbing out with his spear. The old man’s stick-thin hand shot forward, catching the clumsy thrust and twisting the spear’s plastic handle in an iron grasp until it cracked. That wrinkled face cracked open around a yellow smile.

“Food for my jar-” He pronounced, as Sam turned and ran. “Food for the gu.”

With every step Sam took, the trees seemed to loom higher above him. In just a few feet, it was undeniable. Sam was shrinking. As he ran, stumbling and screaming, his footsteps grew shorter and shorter, and before he could even accept that this was real, that he wouldn’t just wake up, he was so small the grass of the park towered above him, pillars of green. The water came up to his chest, sweeping him back as he tried to fight his way away from the old imp and the jar.

A pair of wrinkled fingers shot down and plucked him up. With a cruel, dusty little laugh, the imp dropped Sam into his jar.

Sam screamed for all he was worth, his eyes closed, feeling himself plunge through the air and crash into cold, wet dirt. When he finally opened his eyes, he was among trees and green grass, no taller than they should be- and for a second he dared to hope that it was all an illusion, and he was back in the park.

But when he looked up it was the imp’s hideous grin, and not the moon, that loomed in the sky. He was trapped in a miniature world inside a jar.

Sam stared about him. Emptiness, green life, a tiny jungle. He should have been looking down. Underfoot, the loose dirt began to shift, as below, slimy crawling things felt his footsteps on the earth. Felt the presence of prey above.

Crawling monstrosities erupted up from the dark earth. Thousands of legs, and pincered mouths, and bright red heads atop black, shiny armored bodies.