The night fell heavily across the hills and plains running north of Barcelona. Shadows that only an hour ago slipped through the landscape had now faded into an unformed mass of darkness. Clouds rested over moon and stars, rendering the landscape blank to any but those beasts with the most developed night vision.
Slowly, over one hill, more than thirty miles from the city, the ground shifted. Rolling, slowly tumbling, and trailing over and around the summit. Something was traversing the gentle landscape.
The tide increased incrementally, until the roiling trickle running down the mountain became a dark flood. The jostling mass tore through abandoned farmhouses, and overgrown farms. Vineyards that had once been prized for the pungent elixir that flowed from their fruit now lay vacant, alone, until the flow reached their thresholds and they were trampled underfoot. The torrent was monumental in scope. A man standing in the direction of the deluge would have been thrown into the air and crushed by one thousand blows, nothing remaining of his frail body.
It was never ending. The limbs thrashing through short trees and brush. The quiet landscape overtaken by a undercurrent of groaning, snorting, growling; each voice calling forth to the others. There were no longer deer, or mice, or common woodland creatures about. There were no signs of life at all despite the rolling ground now spread from horizon to horizon. Birds of prey and large cats prowled on the outskirts of the horde. But to one overlooking the scene, if they were to stand front and center, neither extreme was visible, from the east to the west, no break, no peace. Such was the scope.
The flood paused in certain areas, now to travel over a large brook or stream at a shallow crossing, now to pass through a ravine, either towered over by hills, or man-made structures. But as if of one mind, the individual components returned to a common goal. Their noses guided them, unconsciously searching for the next target, the next feast. The vineyards were picked clean, grapes, vines, shrubbery. Old trash heaps worn to the soil, structures stripped of wood and drywall. The people of this town had tracked the migration of the monsters. They had seen the devastation, the death and destruction left in their wake. Some municipalities had gambled, trusting their strength to deliver them. But no amount of humans nor advanced weaponry had been able to do more than postpone their inevitable end. The beast bred too fast and were sustained on so little. They devoured both the bodies of their fallen and their enemies alike.
But they harbored no hate. No animosity. Only a primitive instinctual desire to live, reproduce, and eat. Unable to compete with the growing horde, villages condensed into cities where they could better defend themselves and light the dark streets. But no matter their numbers, no matter how bright they lit the night, no matter how far away they fled, mothers and fathers shook as they tucked in their children, and pulled the blinds of the windows in their overcrowded apartments, afraid of the same beast that had driven them from their ancestral homes.
Afraid of the boar.