Our Survivor's story. Prologue – The Wolf

I was standing alone just behind our bay when I saw it in the grass—a wolf spider. Big. Quick. Confident.

The kind John Goodman would’ve run from in Arachnophobia.

I caught it easily. Scooped it up, still alive, and set it down on the new uniform trousers laid out in the sun.

They hadn’t been worn yet. Just issued.

They stank—plastic and pesticide—burning the back of your nose and coating your breath. A stench you couldn’t forget.

I was told they were perfectly safe. They kept saying it—like a mantra.“Bugs hate them. But they’re safe for human use.”

It took seconds.

The spider twitched once, then again. Its legs curled inward—seizing. Its body jerked like it had been poisoned—because it had. Then it stopped moving.

I stood there and watched it die.

It was cruel but necessary.

It wasn’t a fancy scientific experiment. Just fabric in the sun, and a question no one else seemed to ask.

That’s when I knew.

If it killed the spider that quickly, it wasn’t safe for anyone.

Not in heat.

Not through sweat.

Not worn for 52 days straight in one of the hottest, most physically demanding training cycles of the year.

And if the system was feeding us lines like that—lines meant to override what we could see with our own eyes—then they already knew too.

I hadn’t even broken a sweat in those ACUs yet. But something had already broken in me: The part that believed someone, somewhere, would protect us.

They didn’t.

And that was just the beginning.