Elena had been right to call it a haze. The distant trees, at least from the cap of the hill I'm standing on, look like they're swaying in a green-tinted dress. Something almost siren, about the way they dance. Like... like they're calling to me.

For a while, I just stand here on the hill, watching the forest shimmer, as if its the planet itself breathing.

My mind snaps to the Pitt twins, and how they'd been stationed somewhere like this, pulling up hills and mountains out of the earth to try to barrier the spread of the mist.

How futile it must have been, to try to stop the air itself. Like building a sandy-wall on the beach as a kid, in an attempt to keep your sculpted sandcastle safe -- hoping that wall would be enough to stop the castle being swallowed as the tide came calling. But the sea would lap at the wall as if it had a tongue of acid and all too soon your castle would be reclaimed.

Was it the hypnotic swaying that pulled the Pitts into it? I've got both their dossiers somewhere in my bag, along with the other two dead Storms. I flicked through the files last night -- walls of redacted, mostly -- but there were photos, too. Taken by a secuity camera attached to the single dome-shaped tent they shared. Black and white frames of the twins: their heads turned towards the camera, their eyes black; then they're looking at each other. Finally, snapshots of them walking -- not running -- towards their death.

Nothing had lured them, as far as any of us could tell. But here, now, seeing the swaying trees... Well, maybe we'd been wrong.

They hadn't made it far into the forest before collapsing, one a little in front of the other.

There were images of their recovered bodies, too. Their skin peeling away from their bodies as if it had somewhere real important to go. Eyes a bright red from where blood vessels had popped. It was like they'd stared right into the face of God and the vision had been too much for a human to handle.

I pass a cairn on the way down the hill. A Jenga-pile of flat rocks that reaches up to my thigh. More often you see these things on mountains, than you do a hill. Sometimes they offer guidance to a lost climber. More often, they mark the spot of where something bad happened. Mourners honoring the incident with a pile of slate or granite, as if that would placate the angry mountain.

I don't see any shifted earth around this cairn though.

The grass is thicker at the bottom of the hill, bristly tussocks of green and gold trying to tie my boots as I plod on. I push my way through, tearing grass out as I go.

This was where I'd seen the fog swelling around trees, from up on the hill. But down here, near the treeline, the haze is harder to see. Thinner and more nuanced, without the long-distance perspective. It's clear now that these trees were never moving -- and if they ever did move in the future, it would only be when they were felled and sold off to a lumber yard.

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I should be apprehensive. But three things stop that feeling dead:

For one, there's Susie and how she acted, how she looked and responded to me. Susie, but not Susie, and she's all over my brain right now and not leaving much room for other thoughts to get in.

Then there's the fact my body is feeling the best it's been in... years. The bag on my back feels lighter with every step, and I've twice turned to check there's no hole in it, that I'm not Hansel-and-Grettling a trail of tent parts after me. It's like I've been eating all those superfoods people talk about -- spinach and beets and all that shit, and not swigging suds and eating grease.

Then, the third reason is -- and I'm thinking maybe this is something to do with the first reasons -- that I don't really give a shit about what happens to me. I mean, I don't think I want to die, but I also don't know how keen I am to go back to bar crawling and performing tricks for a pint. At least before... At least before, I could remember her how I wanted to. Now she'd wiped her shit-stained shoes all over those memories and I doubted I'd want to smell them again.

The leaves crunch beneath my boots as I enter the woods, and it takes me a moment to realize what's strange about that sound: it's barely summer, yet the leaves that litter the forest floor are dried and dead. There are still leaves on the trees above me... but...

I reach up and grab a low hanging branch of an oak, yanking it down until I can get at its leaves.

Dry. They crumble apart as I crush them in my palm.

And the tree bark itself... Even the oaks are starting to look like birch, the color being sapped out of them, whitening them as if they'd just walked in on their parents fucking.

I'm not dead yet, I tell myself, as I push deeper in. So that's good. In fact, I couldn't feel more alive. Maybe it was being on one last mission. Risking my life again. How sterile and boring the last decade had been. It's the memories before that, funnily enough -- of being a Storm Guard -- that are either to pull up to the surface. That are more colorful and vibrant.

The last few years are a sepia, sticky mess. Polaroids I can't pull apart to look at separately.

The mist rolls in coils and waves, and the deeper into it I march, the more constant it becomes. Thick and filling my lungs with each breath.

"Hello poison, my old frienddd," I find myself singing. "It's good to taste you once againnn."

What's wrong with me? Am I suicidal, or do I want to proclaim my love for the wold and everything in it?

It's after an hour or so, long after I'm done singing, that I see it.

Or rather, I hear it. The deep thud thud thud. Like the kid smacking his shoes into my seat on the plane, and how it sent waves reverberating up my body. Only, these vibrations are coming from the ground itself, as the creature tramples towards me.

I smell it. Rotting and fetid, and it's bad enough to make me question my own odor.

The eyes are red, and through the fog, right now, they're all I can see. And I'm thinking: gee, do those bloodshot eyes belong to one of the Pitt twins? Did they only get one body out of the woods after all?

But it ain't a Pitt twin.

It ain't alive either.

But its charging at me with a snarling mouthful of jagged teeth. Hurtling forward, stomping over the leafy earth.

And if I didn't already know from the smell, I know when I see its flaking body: this thing that I'm going to need to kill, is already dead.