<strong>Maggie Foss</strong><br/><strong>Location</strong>: Outside Foss apartment, 3rd floor at Riverwalk Apartments<br/><strong>Tag</strong>: Jin<br/><hr/>Maggie's mouth works silently as she struggles for an explanation, but the gnawing fear persists, occupies her thoughts-- she can still feel the shadows looming in the room, and although she wants terribly to keep looking out the window, to find some trace of movement-- a plane, a car on the highway, anything-- she keeps feeling the glint of unseen eyes.  The memory of those shadows-- or perhaps an awareness of them, their looming, slinking presence, they are vague shadows, edging closer like the dark shapes of swimming predators in the deep sea.<br/><br/>She has to get out of the apartment.  "My... um, everyone.  Everyone on the road... my apartment..." she thinks she has to get her boots and coat, she gets chilly, even in the late summer nights, but she's already wearing them both.<em>I was already ready to go,</em>she realizes,<em>before I knew everyone was gone</em>... "Jin, I don't know, really, how I thought to call you.  I just remembered your number... I have this weird, like, feeling that everybody's gone in town, but not everyone, not quite.  Like, somehow I knew you'd be there, that maybe you'd know what I mean..."<br/><br/>The phone's low-battery alarm chirps three times in her ear, startling her so badly that she drops the flat black plastic shape to the floor where it bounces next to a broken toy bulldozer.  It clatters against the doorstop of her little brothers' room, and she can't help but stare at those empty beds, in disbelief.  She sees her own shape in the doorframe, reflected in the window opposite the room, and feels a twisting, cold knot tighten in her chest.  She fumbles clumsily with the phone and places it to her ear.  "I'm going to the school."  She doesn't explain any more, the futility muting her lips, the meaningless insensibility silencing her in shame.  "I'm going there now."<br/><br/>She drops the phone onto the hallway's faded, worn carpet and runs to the door, desperate to escape whatever lingers after her dream.  The sound of the electric light's buzz echoes in the summer night's breezeway, and her footsteps echo with the shudder of metal and thud of concrete as she descends the stairs to the street.  Without a car, it will be a long walk, but she is going.<br/>