Rage

AfterDark: The Scariest Things, You CAN'T imagine: begins a new story today.

He was taken from her before he was born. Now he's back and wants her to know what she's missed.

RAGE: Part One: Shapes:

They moved with an aching, grating gait that sounded to normal ears like moldy gravel scraping down a culvert.

They moved slowly.

They moved oddly, suddenly lurching in one direction or another.

They moved always in oblique curves, never directly forward or sideways.

That they moved at all was the second most frightening thing about them, to Eva.

The first most frightening thing was that they took her baby.

It had been quiet that night. Quiet, and misty. But still. The mist did not fall, or blow. It hung in the air, a curtain of water through which Eva had to continually pass, the light reflecting at unusual angles off the billions of tiny water droplets that hung in her way, the shadows more liquid than usual, the edges of everything blurred a little and blending into each other. Brick into air, water into ground, light into dark: there were no sharp edges that night.

Eva had been nine months pregnant. She was ready to give birth at any time and should not have been out. But she had needed milk and Tom was away for two days. There was no telling the baby that she did not have milk and could not go get it, the baby wanted milk and she'd learned that she'd have no peace until she gave it milk. And so she'd put on her housecoat, women still wore them then, and her slippers, and she'd walked the three flights of stairs down to the street that looked to have nothing in it but parked cars and the misty air and the streetlights striving to shine down through the weather and provide her some illumination.

She clutched at her purse and began walking the seven blocks to the grocery store that was open late. It was only 9 p.m. but that was late then, that was before all-night convenience stores and all-night everything.

She'd taken a few steps when she heard the scraping sound. Rock on rock?

She paused.

Nothing.

She took a few more steps and heard it again, behind her. And in front of her? A scraping, slight echoey, not quite rock on rock, not the sound you get when a brick lands on another brick. It was... mushy. She looked around. Had she had sharper eyes, she might have been able to see her reflection, wide-angled, in the water droplets that surrounded her and were slowly coating her clothing, her hair, her face. She saw nothing.

She walked again and heard it again, looked around but did not stop. The sound was loudest behind her, but never directly behind her, it was off to the left, then the right, then the left. It was off to both sides of her now, but not ahead of her, and she picked up her pace, she tried to walk faster with her belly bulging in front of her, the baby kicking and fidgeting. As she walked faster, she felt a pulling, tight, spasm across her body and through her back.

"No..." she muttered. "No." She walked as fast as she could through the pain. The sounds were catching up. She stopped and inhaled sharply, looking to her left and right. She was directly below a streetlight and took advantage of that to see what she could.

Shapes.