<strong>Maggie Foss</strong><br/><strong>Location</strong>: Outside the high school, approaching the front entrance.<br/><strong>Tag</strong>: Jin, Al, Robert<br/><hr/>Halfway to school-- a route that she has walked, and run, many times before-- Mags realizes that she is shaking.<i>Should have brought Mom's phone</i>, she thought,<i>dead battery or not.</i>Scenarios and explanations run rampant in her sleep-starved, fear-addled mind, one after another in a progression from the unlikely to the ludicrous, but she is carrying her weight on the balls of her feet and, without exception, she is skirting the pool of light under every streetlight-- she's not stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, and she can hear a song in her mind despite trying, above all, to think clearly and be quiet.<br/><br/><i>Step on a crack.  Break your mother's back.  Step on a line, bend your father's spine.</i>At that, she slowed slightly, deliberately stepping on a crack in the sun-bleached asphalt on her way, bringing no sound of breaking bone-- only a pang of guilt and annoyance at the frivolity of the same guilt.<br/><br/>It's then that she feels the creeping cold, like a someone left the walk-in freezer open at The Fresh, and the cold air is reaching her in faint waves.  She turns, studying it at first in a fixed stare at the first odd place-- from the alley between a shipping office and a deli closed for years.  She realizes that the fog is trying to reach her, and somehow that scares her so badly that she freezes.  Normally, when she freezes doesn't think straight, but this time her mind is clear.  So clear that she hears a voice... she thinks it's real, or maybe it is... and she listens, because that fog looks promising, like a cool shower n a Monday morning, and that scares her.  The woman's shape-- she stars, stares, mouths words that have no sound, and then hears that voice again.<i>Run</i><br/><br/>She flees... she's never truly fled something before, not like this-- she's had issues at school, she's raced in cross-country, but this time she is running a chase from something that wants to consume her, flight from an actual adversary.<br/><br/>When she reaches the school, she doesn't stop running.  Her boots are thudding at the pavement, and she's not the first one there.  She calls out, "Get inside!  She's almost here--" and though she doesn't know who "she" is, she is heading straight for the building, her long, pale legs stretching out like a sprinting gazelle's and her red hair streaming from under the low-riding black ballcap where the wing has blown her hood back from her face.