Nick looked over his shoulder to scan the horizon, filled with a dark foreboding. To where a sliver of neon ruby was peeking past the rim of the crater containing the bog. It was at least three times the size of the regular moon, as if the satellite’s orbit had shifted to swing closer to the planet’s surface.

He supposed that it could be another moon altogether or that some manner of magic might be magnifying its image. His understanding of the laws of physics had been rendered obsolete the moment that the System had entered his life.

Either way, the sight filled him with an instinctual dread. An apprehension beyond that roused by the awakening of the swarm. A sense of otherness, of consummate wrongness, that he had never known before. He had a sense that whatever was happening, the cause was up there, and what was happening down on Drezen was merely a symptom. A magical malady on a global scale.

But Nick had no time to ponder the significance of the blood moon or the chittering swarm right now. No time to do anything other than sprint madly for his life, heading for the doorway beckoning to him another hundred feet ahead.

Moving faster than he ever had before, for just a moment longer, he thought that he was going to make it. That he would gain the safety of the walls before the moonlight struck him, rousing the swarm in its wake.

But that was the moment when the bloodlight broke over the hilltop and Nick’s true ordeal began. The instant that the sanguine moonlight touched bare soil the chittering began. A gnawing, gnashing, shrieking cacophony. A predatory dirge, growing louder by the heartbeat as the creatures burrowed up through the ground at breakneck speed.

He could feel the ground rumbling below his boots, size up wailing like a banshee that danger was no longer on the way. It had arrived. A threat on a scale that left Nick with absolutely no chance of surviving if he was caught out in the open when the swarm emerged.

Eighty feet to go… sixty. His legs throbbed and his lungs burned within his chest. By now, he was running on the dregs of his stamina and only sheer determination let him keep placing one battered foot in front of the other.

Stolen story; please report.

Forty feet. When he glanced at the ground, he could see the earth sinking in several places, as whatever was coming breached the last few feet of topsoil between themselves and the surface. He had to get inside before that happened, then hide and pray it couldn’t find him.

At thirty feet to go, he realized that he had a problem. He had been hoping that the door was ajar, but the entrance to the building was shut tight. Nick suspected that if it had remained closed for so long, the door must be thick, was likely barred, and potentially barricaded as well.

Even if it was locked but not barred, running straight into the door at maximum speed seemed like a bad idea. Surrounded by the imminently arriving swarm, he couldn’t afford to slow down either.

Nick’s instincts were certain that he was dead if the chittering horrors caught him. It was as simple as that.

Twenty-five feet. The urge to panic rose within his gut, a churning mass of bile and apprehension. The knowledge that his next action would likely determine if he survived the night or was eaten alive.

Instead of giving into his fear, he entered a state of total concentration. A cold, clear reason born out of need that he had experienced several times before. A state that he had begun to think of as arctic clarity.

At twenty feet until impact, he began looking for another point of entrance. The obvious choice was the great stained-glass window, reflecting the gore-smeared light of the rising moon. Simply crashing through the thick panes of glass was an option of last resort. Nick would do it if he had no other choice, but the noise would likely draw fatal attention from the chittering swarm, defeating the purpose of hiding within the walls.

Those are all separate panels held in place by metal rods and brackets. Breaking through one shouldn’t bring down the rest. But there might be a better option. What are the odds that not a single piece of glass has broken over the years that this place has been abandoned?

With fifteen feet to go, the stone wall was looming large. In the periphery of his vision, he could see dirt flying out of the ground and soaring into the air. Whatever was coming was breaching the soil, and it was doing it now. Nick observed these facts and then cast them aside. Every scrap of his concentration was devoted to scanning the individual panels, surveying the first half of the window in the blink of an eye.