The mist crawls over the elk's corpse, kindly hiding its half melted-brain from my view, as I strap bandages around my chest. The pain's sharp and my skin's red and purple and swollen. I pull the dressings tight and then clamber back to my feet.

What the fuck had happened to that elk?

It had died. Then, sometime later, I'd killed it again. But it's the middle bit that's concerning me. There's something in this plague-cloud-shit that brought the animal back to life again.

Back. To. Life.

And what the fuck had happened to me, for that matter? My hands are still half-numb from the... fire? Acid? Whatever it was that had leaked out of me, I hadn't meant for it to happen. I rack my brain, trying to think if I'd ever, maybe as a kid, cast my poison out of somewhere other than my mouth.

My ass, occasionally, especially after a curry -- but that was usually a less harmful gas.

I stare at my hands and want to ask them what they did, but I doubt they'd give me an answer.

The rucksack is violently uncomfortable strapped around my chest and belly. Feels like knives stabbing into me. Maybe I should set up my tent, camp around here for the night.

No.

I just want to get as far away from those putrid animal remains as I can. Don't fancy rolling over onto an eyeball.

Compass in one hand, map -- scrawled with pen marks during my briefing -- in the other, I get back to the hike.

Ok. Long walk ahead. Seems a good time to reassess my situation. I'll make a mental list of how I'm doing, to cheer myself up a little. A good list and a bad list.

Bad: I'm in cloud of plague gas that kills anything that enters.

Good: It doesn't kill me. Or at least, it hasn't yet.

Good: And like any other poison, I seem to be able to ingest it, to concentrate it.

Bad: I'm not so sure I can control how the concentrated plague poison escapes me.

Bad: Something in this cloud can bring dead animals back to life. And one-out-of-one of those animals wanted me dead along with it. It's not a huge sample size to go off, I'll admit, but it's still a worrying result.

Good: Most animals seem to have had the sense to leave the forest before the poison killed them.

Good: My rucksack's straps aren't like knives diggin' into me no more.

Bad: Now they're like fucking sanders carving away at me with each step.

Okay, that's enough listing. It's not doing me any favors -- I'm clearly not in a positive place right now. Mind is sabotaging me, just like how it tried to get me killed by the Elk, by making me think of Susie and her boyfriend -- husband -- to distract me.

Rum. Whores. Snooker. Cubans.

Rum. Whores. Snooker. Cubans.

I keep my mind busy with thoughts of the dirty nights and drunken days ahead, of that big paycheck I'll be getting for all this. Of the fame, too. If I can find out what's causing this. Hell, if I can stop it, then maybe California will vote me in for fucking president. Might be a shithole, but I'd be a big shit in a small hole, if I stuck around.

Couple hours later, body still protesting each step, I make it up the side of a small hillock and onto a plateau that only has a smattering of small, half-dead trees. They're a starker white here than the forest below, almost pure, with only a few black leaves still clinging on to the branches.

The hill isn't tall enough to get a good view from, but I can see the shimmering dancing of the fog again.

I unstrap my bag and let it fall onto the ground, then I crumple down next to it. I strip my jacket and shirt and notice my bandages are red and in need of changing.

I attend my wounds, cleaning them first with an antiseptic that smells as fierce as it feels on my skin, then strapping on new bandages. After that, I get my tent set up. No domed-wonder for me, just a one-man instant pop-up job. Big enough for me to curl up inside and get some sleep, once I'm ready.

But I'm not ready just yet. The sun's barely setting. I take the opportunity to look for firewood. Don't need the heat of a fire -- it's warm and muggy and I doubt it'll get much colder in the night -- but I figure that I'll cook my dinner the old fashioned way. Something I've not done since training to be a Storm Guard.

Always had to be prepared, back then.

I snap a few low hanging branches off a big ol' maple. They come away too easily. But right now, deadwood is exactly what I want. And it's not rotting, only dead, so that's good news.

The fire's soon crackling in front of the tent, and I wonder if they can see the smoke back in camp. I doubt it, it's probably mingled in with the haze of the gas, and near impossible to differentiate from.

My can of beans slops into a small pan. I set up a few sticks to hold it over the fire, and I wait. And even though this whole place is jus' 'bout dead, I'm feeling good again. Not my chest, not my ribs, but my mind.

I eat the beans and pop a few painkillers.

Then, for a while, I let myself daydream about being a kid, about being sent out into forests and woods and having to survive a night without an adult and having to navigate our way back to the base by either using the sun or the stars.

We'd have to go out in pairs, dropped somewhere random, and then it was meant to be a race back to camp.

But when me and Susie were put together, we'd get ourselves lost on purpose.

We'd spend a night like this under the warmth of the summer sky, just talking.

And shit, I felt good about being alive, back then. Not that I ever stopped to think about how good I felt. Because, when you're young, you don't think those kinds of feeling are goin' to go away. At least, not for good.

There's always time, when you're young, to make more of those feelings.

I find myself asking why I even left the Storms, but I cut that line of thought off something quick.

They say I was fired, anyway.

The sun falls and the stars twinkle like sugar in the sky. The moon's curved arm-bone is out, and it's the same white as the few trees around my tent.

I slide into my green cotton tent and then into my sleeping bag, and I'm almost content as I drift off.

The crunching of leaves awakens me.

I don't sit up, just open my eyes and listen.

It's not an elk. The steps are too fragile, too cautious.

They're purposeful, that's what they are.

I can't have been out for long, as the fire's still crackling outside, the embers still burning and lighting up a patch of ground that I can just make out through the thin fabric of the tent.

I watch, half-paralyzed, as the figure -- a silhouette, through the tent's skin -- approaches the fire.

The shadow of a person.

A person with a long twisted beak.