"Soon."  Monica opened her eyes to sheer darkness, making her wonder if her eyes had ever really opened at all.  Blinking her long lashes still laden with sleep, she sat up in her mother's voluminous pink satin nightgown.  Rubbing the nasty grit from her eyes, she turned to eye the ancient, funny-looking clock on the bedside table.  Was it analog that it was called?  Flipping the light on and then remembering there was no power, Monica involuntarily groaned when she realized that it was still pitch black at seven in the morning.  What had she dreamed about? Someone had said "soon" to her about something. Was it getting out of this hellhole called Albany and somehow finding a better life?  Oh yeah, that was probably it.  

[i]God I hate winter,[/i] she swore silently as she swung herself over the side and slipped her feet into her mother's ratty old pair of bunny slippers.  She did not have the money to pay for utilities in her old childhood home. Hell, she technically wasn't even supposed to be living here again (although she was a legal adult now).  Thus, Monica was reduced to taking a sponge bath with an actual sponge and cheap, coarse baby wipes that made her skin tingle as she swiped them over herself wishing for the umpteenth time that she could have running water and heat and have all her worries disappear for even a single day.  

Ten minutes of fumbling with Wet Wipes in the dark and the canister that hurt her fingers to reach into, Monica shivered as she slid into well-worn, sky blue jeans, a plain white I <3 NY T-shirt that had a small hole right smack in between her breasts like somebody had  tried to stick her with a ballpoint pen (long, orphanage-related story), and a pair of sneakers that were simply too old to keep out water anymore.  As she swung on her heavy black wool overcoat, the one piece of her ensemble that wasn't falling apart at the seams, she stepped outside and sighed into the freezing morning air, noting that only one low, barely discernible, gray streak of light had adorned the horizon - so faint that she could hardly even be sure it was really there.  

The walk to the supermarket for supplies was relatively uneventful, the few people who still lived in Albany either staying in bed a few more minutes or having trudged to work roughly a half an hour earlier.  The former capital of New York state, such as it was before Manhattan had grown so large that the New York City mayor had motioned for the change and won, lay in a somewhat degenerative state around her.  Sure, most of the shops were still intact, but windows were boarded up everywhere and abundant graffiti scrawled across almost every blank surface.  Even now, Monica strode past a crude blue, yellow and black drawing of a penguin in a scarf whacking a human over the head with what looked like a spatula.  Something dark inside her made her chuckle at the image.  

Upon arriving in the supermarket's wide open, mostly empty parking lot, Monica walked up alongside the long, beige building with its faded red stripe and had just passed a gray-bearded hobo and his trashcan fire when she felt a tug on her arm.  Monica Dansbury froze as if she had been shot through with electricity.  Her eyes momentarily flashed from their hazel brown to full black and back to normal again.  Looking down at the greasy old man, grinning at her with several gaps in his severely yellowed and crooked teeth, she yanked her arm away even as he rose, mumbling, "Pretty hehehehe!"  

"Ew, get AWAY from me, you creep!" she shrieked.  It was just as well that it was early in the morning, for the unexpected shrillness in her voice would surely have alerted several people had they been present on such a mind-numbingly cold morning.  The greasy old man reached for her again and Monica instinctively found her left hand swinging up to rake her nails across his face in a forceful slap before turning away.  Her left hand thrummed with energy as if she had just grabbed a live wire. Flexing it as she ran, the terrified Monica oddly wondered why she hadn't used her free right hand.  The fleeting thought passed and she instead felt a fleeting surge of guilt for having made that poor beggar's face even uglier.  

She reached the end of the long store, ducked around a corner, and peered back in the direction from whence she came. Nothing and nobody had followed her.  "Looking for me, girlie?" a raspy voice came from behind her as smooth black talons clamped around her right wrist.  "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!" Monica screeched at the top of her lungs, whirling around to behold a monstrous silhouetted brute of a figure with the old beggar's face and pure black eyes.  His grin, though still crooked, glinted an unnatural pearly white - all the more horrifying given his new visage.  Monica stamped on his toes, causing him to momentarily relinquish his grip on her wrist enough so that she could tear free. 

She started to run back toward her house, then realized that this....thing had gone all the way around the outside of the large building faster than she had walked one length of it.  Instead, she dashed into the supermarket, slipping a bit on the pristine white tile and very nearly tripping herself on the big yellow sign by the door that read "Wet Floor".  There was only one clerk on duty and the stands were so far away from the entrance that the sleepy woman didn't even look up when Monica entered.  

Monica made frantically for the aisle marked Kitchen.  She grabbed the largest steak knife she could find, tearing through the childproof hard plastic packaging and getting a large cut on the pad of her right thumb as a result.  Putting the affected digit in her mouth to momentarily suck the flow of blood back in, she grasped the knife first with her right hand, wincing heavily, and then switching it into her left.  To her amazement, the knife seemed to settle more firmly and surely than it did her right. What the hell? She was right-handed and had been for eighteen years!  

The lights in the store flickered once, a seemingly once in a blue moon occurrence for an outfit as large as theirs and Monica knew her time was coming to a close.  She raced up to the front of the store, ignoring the clerk even as the clerk ignored her, and used one of the convenient self-checkout stands to purchase the knife as well as a couple feminine items and a box of reduced fat blueberry muffins which she lodged securely between her bosom and her overcoat after paying for them.  With the freed knife's package scanned and paid for, Monica raced over - knife still in hand - to the sleepy-eyed clerk.  The woman's keys hung from her neck by a lanyard, Monica's target.  

The clerk finally looked up and barely got off a "Can I help you miss?" before Monica yanked the other woman by the lanyard so hard that it seemed the clerk's eyes would bulge out of their sockets.  Monica used her newfound knife to cut the lanyard, and quickly snatched the key (with trailing lanyard).  "Sorry, I need this more than you," she huffed.  "If I can, I'll leave it at the Rens train station!"  The last sentence she yelled over her shoulder as she quickly departed, even as the stunned woman was already on the phone at her desk while rubbing the back of her neck where the lanyard had snagged.

As the store alarm went off behind her, Monica looked left and right finding no black inhuman figures anywhere.  She frantically held the keys in front of her, grateful for electronic car buzzers (even though she had never driven a car in her poverty-ridden life, she had at least played with her mom's keys before The Fever).  Pressing the button marked "Panic" as she ran around the parking lot's few  parked cars, she finally got a response from a beat-up, well-worn Nissan Micra that had obviously been in at least one fender bender and not been repaired.  

She opened the door, turned the key in the ignition, locked the doors and realized the front passenger window was still open when a white-uniformed guard ran out of the store at her waving a taser and yelling, "You! Stop right there!"  His black pants, shiny black loafers, and the signs of relatively easy-living all took their toll as Monica found the right button to raise the appropriate window and put the car in gear, thankfully an automatic though she wouldn't have been able to tell the difference, and tore out from the stall. Looking in her rearview mirror, Monica saw the guard running and then the next thing she knew, a hulking black form with bat-like wings fell down on the man, tearing through fabric and rending flesh from bone with startling ease.  Even over the loud hum of the engine, Monica could hear a bloodcurdling scream in the still dark, oddly bluish light that predated dawn.  For just a moment, right before she entered the street, Monica slammed on the brakes at the sight of the gore.  The monster looked up at her from across the entire parking lot, and she knew he or it was looking straight at her with those eerie homeless person eyes as if to say, "You're next."  

She floored the accelerator, only to sideswipe the car alongside an SUV that was moving with her in the lane she was turning into - towards the train station.  Monica's left shoulder and head got slammed into the driver-side door, but she managed to keep the car intact as the asshole SUV stopped and a burly guy in a red sweater and khaki pants got out, dazed.  Spots swam in front of her vision for a split-second, but then adrenaline reasserted itself and she was once again mostly in control of her faculties.

Leaving him to whatever the hell was behind her, Monica floored the accelerator again, dismayed to see that - in addition to her probably bruised left shoulder - the entire right  mirror of her car was gone and the door was so bent that she could see the road whizzing by underneath it as well as hear the roar of wind whipping through the car itself.  

Twenty minutes of reckless driving later, Monica swerved to a violent stop in the parking lot of the train station.  Thankfully there were no police or security guards in evidence yet, a testament to just how slow everything was on such a freezing, subzero morning no doubt.  Monica hurried across the lot, bundling the muffins a6nd women's products underneath her coat while tossing the steak knife in the trash can right outside, but not before looking this way and that as well as above.  Entering the train station's well lit, airy and cold, waiting area, she walked as calmly as possible up to the counter and asked sweetly, "May I please have one ticket to Manhattan?"  

The kindly elderly lady peered over the rims of her bifocals as well as her newspaper to give Monica the once-over.  Shrugging and pulling her shawl further up her shoulders, the woman stuck out her wrinkled hand.  "That'll be thirty-five dollars please."  Somehow, as kind as the woman was, something disgusted Monica about the woman almost as much as the hobo, but why she felt that way when her late mother had always taught her to respect her elders, Monica had no idea.  Maybe it was how the woman's hair reminded her of the headmistress of the orphanage she had run away from. Yes, that must have just been it.  

Doling out nearly the last of her money save the $550 remaining she had made from working at aforementioned supermarket this past month, Monica went and sat in the waiting area for two minutes before the appropriate train could be heard and seen coming to a squealing stop on the other end of the building.  Monica quickly rose and boarded the nearly fully automated train, flashing a smile at the flushed, handsome conductor/engineer who gave her a helping hand up into the train.  Her smile seemed to make him go witless and he stumbled, nearly falling out of the train just as she got in, but somehow managed to regain his grip on the train's stairway handrail just in the nick of time. 

Roughly three hours later Monica - who had positioned herself in the front-most car facing the rear of the train in the compartment closest to the exit - debarked the train in Manhattan.  She made a very long, very cold, shivering power walk through the city for miles until she reached the the closest airport. Which airport she couldn't have even told you, for even though it was now midday, her feet were so achy and her fear was so all-consuming and heart-pumping that she paid attention to neither the Fifth Street shopping deals that she passed nor the multitude of people who passed her, save for making sure that none of them were that blackened....thing.

And so Monica Dansbury stood before the airport's electronic overhead concourse screen, trying to decide which city or even country to fly to to escape whatever the hell that creature was.  All she knew was that her life in Albany had been so full of bad luck and, sometimes actual, shit that that creature had been the last straw.  No more childhood home.  No more orphanage to tell her what to do.  No more dead-end job at the supermarket.  For better or worse, she had left Albany behind for horizons unknown, fully aware that she might just end up as a beggar herself on the streets of Manhattan.  However, ever since that other beggar thing had grabbed her, she felt more alive than she had ever felt before.  She was actually [i]smiling[/i] up at the board, until something sharp poked her upper lip and she felt around with her tongue, feeling nothing but normal teeth until one small pointed tooth near the bottom corner of her mouth. [color=f6989d] "Huh, I guess that car accident made me chip a tooth,"[/color] she mumbled to herself, even though the tooth felt perfectly formed...just really pointy for some reason.  Most interesting indeed....