The Blood-Testament of Brian Collier

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The night was a steaming reptile. The air hung over the swamp like a wet blanket soaked in chlorophyll and fever. Any normal man would have been reduced to a shaking mass of sweat and mosquito bites.

But you were long past normal.

You felt nothing.

The jungle arched above you like the rib cage of some ancient beast. Moonlight leaked through the leaves in thin, suspicious streams, turning the world into a black-and-silver hallucination. The trees stood like witnesses. The vines twisted like nervous thoughts.

The insects worked the night shift—buzzing, whining, droning in your ears like overcaffeinated reporters at a political convention. You barely noticed.

Something older than memory had taken hold of you. Not the flashy life of cities, headlines, and bad decisions, but the raw, primeval engine of life itself—mud, roots, blood, and decay. The whole swamp breathed with you, or perhaps you were breathing with it.

You lurched forward, your boots sucked at by the hungry bottom of the marsh. If you had still possessed a sense of humor, you might have laughed at the idea that this festering wilderness was trying to embrace you like a long-lost friend.

But laughter belonged to the living.

You were something else now.

A walking wound. A green-skinned prophecy. The livid avatar of death, stumbling through the reeds with the calm certainty of a man who had already crossed the last border and found no customs agent waiting.