I stepped out of the doorway to look at the adjacent buildings and street. The store that had once been a popular book store was now empty; its windows also smashed in or spray painted with various gang tags and words of profanity. The street was littered with old bits of newspaper and trash. Everything had the look of being old, worn, and forgotten.
My thirst finally drove me to move; a slow wary pace down the darkened road. My watch said it was still around midnight but the sky held a grey cast to it, like a stormy day's. How long has this taken? How much time had passed? Where was the world I had once known? The world so familiar and constant; the world where I could wheedle my way out of any problem with a well timed smile and expertly crafted compliment; the world where I barely had to work in order to get through life.
The strange woman on the street moved slowly southward, seeming to be lost in her own world of turmoil. She was foolish to be out in the daylight so openly; she was fair game to anyone or anything that might choose to come along. The shadowed figure moved slowly after her, darting from alleyway to alleyway, shadow to shadow.
I stopped just short of the last doorway on the street and looked around. My ears perked as I heard a faint shuffle and slow, controlled breathing, the kind of breathing a hunter would make as it stalks its prey. A few blocks away I could just make out the sound of cars rolling past on their way to various menial destinations.
My feet urged me toward the sound of human life before my brain had completely decided on a course of action. I was nervous of the sounds I had heard only seconds before and was worried that I had become the prey. As I looked around I could still not see any sings of human habitation in the area, all the buildings had the forlorn look to them, the same look an abandoned house might have, the house that all the little children and old folks said was haunted by some terrible demon.
Behind me the foot steps quickened their pace, now I knew I was the prey, the mouse in the game with the cat following close behind.
The figure that had been darting from one shadow to another, following the young woman along the street, sped up it's pace, closing the gap between the two of them. The figure paused only a moment before lunging out of the shadowed doorway, wrapping its arms around the woman's chest and laying a hand quickly over her mouth to stifle any screams she might dare to emit. It then drug her back into the shadows of the buildings, the safety of the darkness.