Chapter Four: The Changing Wind

Penny examined the figure trudging ahead of her through the snow- which was more of a brown-grey slush than anything- wondering how she'd let herself get into this predicament. It had been a very long time indeed since she'd accepted a favor, and longer still since she'd done something so stupid, and she blamed a number of things for doing so now. She was tired and sick, and the bags had been heavy and awkward. Her son had been restless and full of complaints- and Penny was not above placing some of the blame on him for backing her into this situation. What had she been thinking, anyway? It was almost midnight on a Thursday; the snow falling slowly in large round flakes, and a stranger whom she'd not properly glanced even a distinct facial feature was leading her to her home.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," she thought harshly.

She'd been warm and friendly to the peculiar man in the store, more out of a need to be less sheltered and submissive than her old self had been. But the warmth and friendliness had lacked any genuine enthusiasm, and she'd felt chagrined. "Try to be like the old you, Penny," she'd think, always shamed by the way she'd behaved for years upon years with him. "Try to be like the girl you were before you met Curtis, before Daddy died…"

Curtis, her Ex-Husband, had ruined her for a very long while. Penny was determined to make the person she'd been when she was with him as cold and as dead as he was. But she was no longer a girl, and her eighteen year old self was long forgotten after eight years of the nightmare she'd called marriage. Penny found that she could not recall the girl she'd once been, because she was no longer a girl, and that it made being her own person- the woman not tied to Curtis like a dog on a leash- a task much harder than she had ever thought possible.

Penny sighed and pushed the thoughts away. This was no time to panic about one's individuality. She instead looked at the man's back, eyes narrowed. He was very oddly shaped, she decided. His back looked almost as though it was hunched, but he seemed to be standing straight, and he sounded quite young, certainly not old enough to be crouched with age. He was tall, though with her small height of only 5'3, that wasn't a particularly daunting feat. His scarf was pulled high and his fedora pulled low, making it impossible to get a good look at his face. This made Penny more than nervous, alarms sounding in her head as nefarious implications ran rampant through her mind. Without thinking she maneuvered the gallon of milk to give herself a free hand and clutched her son's tiny palm, sending a look at him that she hoped conveyed all the warnings she didn't want to vocalize. Julius smiled brightly at her, revealing that he did not, in fact, understand.

From ahead the man (Mike, she remembered) sighed and said, "I can feel you glaring at me."

Penny suppressed the urge to apologize, carry over from her marriage to Curtis, and instead replied, "I'm just being cautious. This feels… really stupid on my part. … No offence."

He chuckled softly ahead of her. "Yeah, I guess it would seem that way."

They walked without more conversation for a while after that, the only sounds being the slushing of feet through the ugly grey snow, or the occasional cough from Penny. Eventually, when she'd had to stop for a moment because of a particularly nasty bout of hacking on her part, the man turned and asked, "Getting sick, huh?"

Penny cleared her throat and nodded, gesturing that he should continue walking. "I'll be fine," she added as they moved on. "It's just a little cold. Julius had it last week."

The man again glanced behind him at herself and her son, and Penny tried without avail to peer at his face. It was unrecognizable though, and between his hat, scarf and upturned collar, she could see nothing in the way of facial features. She sighed inwardly, feeling again that this was one of her lesser of endeavors.

"Get it from daycare or something?"

Penny nodded, but answered yes when she realized he was no longer looking at her, but the path ahead. "Yeah, kids pass everything. It's the worst."

There was silence before she asked, "Do you have kids?"

Might as well make small talk, she reasoned. Again a soft laugh came from ahead, and she was lost on why he'd find the question in any way amusing.

"No," he replied. "No kids."

She wondered why he'd said it that way, with wry humor and a sense of finality. She mentally shrugged, choosing to let it go and remained silent, deciding that chatter was the last thing on her mind. Small talk had never exactly been her forte at any rate. Instead she let the only sounds be the city itself, punctuated from time to time by her coughing.

Penny's small apartment was only a short walk away from the grocery, and as they approached it she felt her worry increase tenfold. She couldn't shake the feeling that something awful was about to happen, and what seemed like hundreds of horror-esque scenarios began playing through her mind. What if this man was a deranged killer, a sociopath, a deviant? The most she had was his first name, and her distrust of people in general made her rue the decision to accept his help. After a brief internal struggle, she finally called to the goliath of a man in front of her, making sure Julius was strategically placed behind her.

"It's this one."

He stopped, looking up at the building in front of them and nodded. Penny wondered what he was thinking. The brick of the apartment was dull and graffitied, and there were rusting iron bars on most of the first and second story windows. She wondered if he were judging her and the decrepit state of the building she was living in. If he was thinking of her as less of a parent for subjecting her child to this kind of environment. She almost opened her mouth to explain, to tell him that she knew how awful this place was, and that she was going to change her living situation within the month, but changed her mind almost as soon as the thought had come to her. Who was he that she needed to explain anything to him?

If he did think anything about it, he didn't say so. Instead he held out his hands, indicating that she could retrieve the array of plastic bags from his wrists. She began taking them from him, still keeping Julius behind her, and once she became more and more laden with groceries Mike began to hand them to her. They exchanged no words, Penny trying desperately to calm her nerves, to keep her instinct to rush into her apartment building and leave countless purchased items behind, in check. The man, Mike, seemed to understand this, because he handed her the bags quickly, seemingly sensing her rush to end this situation.

It was in the handing of her last bag that the wind changed everything. As he was hooking it on her wrist with one hand, his other still holding his own bags of food and the six-pack of beer, the light whip of cold air turned into an angry gust of freezing winter wind. It charged down the street, picking up loose snow and trash in its path, causing traffic lights to sway on their wire. It blasted through Penny's thin coat, chilling her to the bone. The chill, however, she would instead attribute to what the wind revealed. In its lashing course it did not leave the man in front of her unspared. His low pulled fedora was gone with the blink of an eye, the wind claiming it as its own, and what stood before Penny now was most certainly not a man. What stood before Penny wasn't even human. Even with his scarf covering his mouth, green skin revealed all too much, and all too clearly under the direct light of a street lamp. His blue eyes, now exposed and wide, locked with hers.

Penny took a deep breath, and screamed.

Authors Note;

So, it has been a great long while since my last update. There was actually more to this chapter, but this was a good stopping point and I wanted to finally give you guys something.

As an explanation to my extended absence…. While I know that I don't need to- or maybe even shouldn't- just throw this out to strangers, I'll do it anyway without going into too much detail. I actually found out I was pregnant in November. Later, we were told that the baby was diagnosed with lethal skeletal dysplasia. She passed away on March 31st, after living for one hour and twenty minutes. This has been the worst time of my life, and writing has been the last thing on my mind. I get 6-8 weeks off to recover (I don't know how you recover, I assume they mean from the C-section and not emotionally), and in my boredom I've tried to pick this all back up. We'll see how that goes, but honesty, no promises. I am just now able to get up and get dressed for the day… and that's really only every other day or so.

If I catch them, I'll fix any mistakes later. Reviews are forever loved.