Storm Rising

1. Storm Driven

I’m running, as the trees roar in the wind and sleet lashes my back and face.

The wind howls from behind, driving me forward in my mad dash through whipping branches and treacherous undergrowth. There is no shelter beneath these creaking trees, threatening to wrench free from the waterlogged soil and come crashing down. Nor are their thin branches any defence against the icy rain as it turns to stinging hail, biting bloody flecks out of my flesh.

My legs churn, scrabbling for purchase in loose dirt and dead leaves, eyes hunting wildly for shelter. Blinding lightning rips through the sky above me, followed immediately by an earth-shattering boom that sends me staggering sideways, shrieking in terror. My flailing limbs meet empty space and I tumble down a slope, searing pain stabbing through my leg as it crumples beneath me.

I lie prone at the bottom, my lungs battering my ribs and my leg throbbing. The dip at the base of the slope is filling with water, which threatens to drown me. Instinct drives me to my feet, rain and hail battering me mercilessly; blasts of wind threatening to send me over sideways.

Everything in me is screaming to run to safety, run until the storm ends if I have to; but there is no end in sight, and now my leg is screaming with every step. Staggering through sucking mud, flinching with every hail-strike and lightning flash, I stumble through a world bent on ripping itself apart and taking me with it.

Lightning flashes near continuously and rolling thunder shakes the ground, shuddering through me in tremors of cold and pain and fear. In the staccato flashes a shadow appears ahead: a narrow opening in a rocky outcrop. As the lightning fades I stagger towards it, its after-image burned into my eyes. I feel stone brush my sides as I enter, and my skin prickles as I move; I can sense the rock walls receding as the crevice opens to a dry, dark space.
 
The air here is scented with rain and ozone and decaying leaves, which rustle beneath my mud-caked feet. I stand shuddering in the musty dark, soaked and cold and gratefully alive. The blood rushing through my trembling veins begins to slow, my heartbeat calming as the pain from dozens of hail-strikes makes itself known alongside the ache of my injured leg.

I shift uncomfortably and sneeze, then freeze as something rustles nearby in the darkness. Every muscle tenses, poised for flight, and my flared nostrils detect a new scent: one of pain and fear and blood.

There is something else in here.