Congratulations on Falling Behind!

The slap slap slap of your feet will feel different from the slap slap slap of everyone else’s, which will make sense. You’ll be lagging, fading, dropping back in the pack. The worst fate that can befall a runner and it’ll be all over you like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll flail your arms, look down and up, stare deep inside yourself to try and be, for at least a heartbeat, stronger than you are.

But it won’t work. Your legs will slack, your stride will drop and steadily, the pack will pull ahead until they no longer even form a motivator for you to keep up with them. Instead they’ll be a reminder of how fast you used to run before now, before the weakness took you. Their feet will seem to wave goodbye to you as you finally stop running, put your hands on your thighs and just pant. Pant. Pant.

You’ll feel your body start to give out, feel vomit creeping up your throat. For a heartbeat, two heartbeats even, you’ll feel still and destroyed and wonderfully obliterated.

Then you’ll hear the hiss. Feel the breeze of motion as the first one leaps on you and the horrible slicing as its hooked claw slams into your shoulder. Then another, then another, three of them on you, nearly two hundred pounds between them, feathers flying everywhere as they sink their teeth into you, clicking and wheezing and burying their muzzles in your meat and blood.

You won’t scream. You won’t be able to. You’ll be so very, very taken with how wrong we were about dinosaurs, how very unlike lizards they are and how very, very similar they are to birds. It’ll be a touching moment, really, at the end of your life as you violently shiver into unconsciousness as the blood is torn from your body and the rest of the velociraptor pack comes to feed upon you, giving those other runners a little bit more time before another one gets caught.

Congratulations on Falling Behind!