Week 67 – The shadows danced but

Piper gasped and dropped her kindle as the lights suddenly went out.

Power outage or something more sinister?

That was the first thought that jumped into her mind. She was what most people would call a pessimist but she liked to think of herself as a realist. It wasn’t being paranoid if you were right.

And unfortunately she was right more often than not about things like this.

Leaving her kindle discarded on the floor where it had landed she slowly stood up. Despite her natural inclination to believe the worst she tried to convince herself that she was wrong. She had chosen this apartment for a reason. It had a doorman and a great security system. It was huge with hundreds of apartments, safety in numbers and all that.

This had to be a power outage.

It had to be.

They’d been going through a huge hot spell, day after day of sweltering heat. The nights were almost worse, they were stifling, they felt like they were smothering you, without the sun it should cool down a little but it didn’t. And the constant running of everyone’s air conditioning had already knocked the power out several tines.

That was all that had happened now.

Piper crept through her apartment, trying to remember where she had left her phone so she could call down to the front desk and find out when the power would be coming back on.

The shadows danced but she couldn’t tell if it was because there was actually something there or if it was just her imagination.

A few seconds later she got her answer.

Pain exploded in her skull as something slammed into the back of her head.

She tried to turn, tried to see who her attacker was, but she was already tumbling quickly towards unconsciousness.

It didn’t matter anyway.

She already knew who he was.

He had found her.

Again.