Carmo hurried up the stairs after him and his ridiculous strides. Seriously, what was up with this dude's proportions if he could clear five steps at a time? 

"Fourth floor," she called after him. When they got to the correct landing, she pushed past him to run to her apartment door, jamming the key into the lock and shoving it open. Once they'd both cleared the threshold, Carmo slammed the door shut – just as she heard the sickening crack of snapping wood and shattering glass from the ground floor. She didn't know if the ice seeping through her veins was from the rain or terror. Gritting her teeth, she spun to face the stranger in the darkness.

"There are [i]families[/i] in this building!" She hissed it at him like it was a threat. The crackle of destruction had died down, but now there was the scraping again. It was getting closer. Fear and anxiety mixing with frustration, Carmo's hand curled into a fist and she slammed it against the wall. "Call the police," she said as she pushed past him, marching to her bedroom. When she returned, she was holding an aluminum bat.

--

No matter how rapidly he climbed the steps, the screech of his attacker's claws never sounded any more distant. Like a needle at the peak of his spine, the groan of metal on undulating concrete reached intimately through his bones and deep into his nerves. The hair on the back of his head stood on end. His skin felt taut to his trapezius. Still, he made it upstairs in good time -- whatever that meant.

[i]Crash.[/i]

His panicked mind struggled to make sense of the splintering. For an instant, he assumed the worst. He turned to look for his new ally -- futile, in the black night -- only to hear her voice, urgent and desperate as his own. This was all wrong. 

Before he could begin stammering his justifications, he had orders. His thumb swished across the screen, back-lighting the watery, red smear he'd left behind. His gaze fixed on the upper corner of his phone. No signal. His molars creaked into one-another as he pounded out 9-1-1. 

For his efforts, he got the frozen, off-color tone of the busy signal. His ears rang, pleading.

"Connect, damn it..." He might have said it more harshly if he hadn't had this argument every hour before. Had the outage claimed the cell tower, too? He wiped the screen on his coat and tapped the numbers in three more times as he stood at the door. None of his attempts surprised him.

His knit brows lifted to face the woman -- who was now armed.

"I don't understand -- it ignored everybody else! I thought if I came in, it would..." [i]Does it matter?[/i] he asked himself. [i]It's here now. What are you going to do about it?[/i] He glanced back at the door of the apartment, toward the figure that had followed him so far.

He weighed his options.