Arkham Horror: Feeders from Within

Prologue: A Soldier’s Tale
In the days before the summer of 1916, death had never troubled Mark Harrigan.
It had always been with him, of course. No boy grows up on the wrong side of Harrisburg without seeing its work now and then. There were the school friends who went home coughing and never returned, and the aunt who caught a fever in the fall and simply vanished, her name never spoken again. There was the time he saw policemen pulling something off a railroad track, something that was the size of a man but no longer the shape, although his mother would not let him close enough to see what it was.
Sometimes he would be awoken by noises—shouts, screams, dull pops—that his father told him were probably gunshots. Lives ended on those nights, certainly. It was a distant thing, though, an abstract. Something that happened far away, to other people.
Even when he grew up and joined the army, following the path forged by his older brother before him, death remained aloof. Harrigan’s time was filled with training, rather than fighting, with ill-fitting uniforms and misfiring rifles, not the blood and howls of combat. The war in Europe was far away, east across the sea, a muddied nightmare glimpsed only in newspapers and barroom gossip. When Harrigan’s regiment finally shipped out, it took him south instead.
It was as though death were something half-seen under dark water, vast and cool and uninterested, occasionally brushing past him while he swam and never quite choosing to cross his path.
But all things must end, especially innocence.
And so it was that in the summer of 1916, in the foothills of the Sierra Madres, with the sun setting and the water gone and the Villistas closing in, that death stepped out of the shadows and presented itself to Mark Harrigan in all its glory and its myriad ways.
After that, it never really left his side.