The sounds of the rain hitting leaves in the trees was usually a soothing sound, but now it served only to aggravate him.  The rain had begun to get on his nerves hours ago, by this time all he could think about was how much he wanted to pitch tent and get dry if only for a few hours.  But, he still had many hours to go until nightfall and many more miles to cover.  He resolved to keep walking and try to find some way to occupy his mind.

As usual when his mind began to wander it began to wander into the past.  A time when his most pressing concern was how to spend a lazy afternoon or what he felt like eating for lunch that day.  It seemed like so long ago to him, now he spent his afternoons the same way he spent his mornings and evenings, walking; and he hadn’t had a meal other than some old bread in nearly four days.  He was beginning to reach the end of his strength.

Walking, always walking, how he hated it now.  When he first started he had grand idea about a life time of adventure and excitement.  But now, after nearly five years he had grown tired.  He called it his Million Mile Marathon, despite the fact that he knew he hadn’t gone a million miles and had certainly not walked it all.  Though, the journey did have its upsides.

He smiled now as he thought of the wonders he had seen on his journey.  The Pyramids of Egypt, Jerusalem, the Great Wall of China, all of them he had seen and admired.  His smile grew when he imagined all that he had yet to see.  There was so much of the world he had yet to visit, but he would soon have completed his first circumnavigation of the world.  And it only took me a fifth of my lifetime to do it, he thought to himself.

He was snapped out of his reverie by a screech off in the distance.  He instinctively crouched down and tried to remain as still as possible.  After several minutes with no threat in sight he resumed his walking.  Gotta keep on my toes, no telling what might be out here, he thought.

The little scare caused his mind to drift towards more unpleasant subjects.  Everyone had a name for It, but he just called it the Shift.  He had no idea what It was, and the last he had heard no one else had any real idea either.  New and incredibly dangerous species of animal, new species of plants, many of the normal animals had been altered much of the topography of the planet had been changed in mere moments, forests sprung up, mountains rose, lakes dried up and turned to deserts, deserts turned to oceans.  The entire ecosystem of the planet had been fundamentally altered in moments

Thousands had died from the changing of the land itself, but so many more had died in the subsequent years as humans desperately tried to find a way to regain their superiority.  Fully five billion people had died according to the last estimate, humans had nearly become extinct before they had figured out how to exist in this new world.  The death-rate and birthrate seemed to have stabilized for now though, so it looked like the human race would survive. 

Nothing could explain It.  Oh sure there were theories, everything ranging from alien invasions to the Apocalypse.  He, for one, hoped it wasn’t the latter, not because he didn’t like the idea of a supreme being destroying the world, but rather that a supreme being had attempted to destroy the world and screwed it up, that just scared him.

He personally believed that whatever had happened to the world was supposed to happen.  All the other species of the world had managed to reclaim their niche in a matter of weeks, under normal circumstances it should have taken hundreds if not thousands of years for them to come to adapt to their environment.  But then, these were anything but ordinary circumstances.

His mind began to drift further into his memory, bringing to the fore the memory of his family, among the very first victims of the Shift.  He had grown up in a small town, nothing exciting ever happened there it seemed, but his home was about to change.  Mere moments after the shift had occurred some of the newer and deadlier inhabitants of the planet had begun to claim their dominance over the world.

His town was near the ocean, his house within spitting distance of the water.  This it seemed was to be the downfall of his family.  Creatures the likes of which he had seen only in videogames and nightmares began to crawl up out of the water.  But it wasn’t the monsters of the water that had become his nightmare that day, but rather the creatures of the land.

There were many new types of creature now-a-days.  Almost all of them were vicious, even the herbivores were dangerous.  One of the main reasons for their deadliness is because the main weapons of nearly all societies were completely useless against them. Bullets had no affect on them; they just seemed to bounce of their hides.  No one could explain how so many types of creatures with so many differences could all share such a specialized trait.

When it first began nobody much cared how they were able to do it, though.  Soldiers the world over had fought to protect their homes and had died trying.  At first people believed they were invulnerable, but when some of the soldiers had affixed bayonets as a last resort and found to their shock they had worked.  The news spread like wild-fire, but it wasn’t enough to halt the widespread destruction the creatures had wrought.

The only weapons that had any affect were bladed or piercing weapons, why they worked and not bullets confused him, and everybody else for that matter.  But, he didn’t concern himself with trying to figure out the secrets of the world.  He had long ago decided not to try and question how the world worked but rather just survive in it.  It was when he decided this that he decided to leave his home where he had been attempting to scratch out a living with the other survivors and attempt to see the world with his own eyes.

Once again he was snapped out of his thoughts, but this time not by any sound or anything else his brain had registered.  He simply snapped to complete awareness without any real reason why, an ability that had saved his life on a dozen different occasions.  He had learned to trust his instincts over the years.  The hairs on the back of his neck began to stand up; it seemed his sub-conscious mind was aware of something his conscious mind wasn’t.

He had wondered over this ability of his, among others, whether or not it was always there. Or perhaps it was something he had begun to develop during his travels.  What frightened him was the idea that it hadn’t been a part of him and that the Shift had altered him just as fundamentally as it had altered the rest of the world.