You scream. You cannot stop screaming. You wrench yourself free from the creature's embrace, and you run. Your kitten heels stab into the soft earth with every step you take. Each step requires you to yank them free to continue. You hadn't even taken a dozen steps before you trip, and all the air is knocked out of your chest as you try desperately to yank your shoe free, to continue running, to escape. As though this were something that you could escape. You abandon the shoe altogether, and you stumble to your knees when the creature that gave chase finally catches up to you. "Kitty!" It cries, "Kitty, it's me! Your best friend!" It pounces onto your back legs, effectively pinning you in place. You struggle to turn around to face your attacker. Your arms shoot up defensively, on instinct. You try to shove the creature off you, but it is unrelenting. Unmoving and unwavering. You struggle, and it watches you curiously with its empty animal eyes. "Kitty, the bad man is gone now; let's go home and play!" "Get off me!" You hiss, and the creature, to your surprise, obliges. Once freed, you try desperately to crawl away, to put some distance between you and the creature. The manager's blood still dripping from its awful mouth in crimson rivulets. It follows you, crawling towards you at the same pace and keeping the distance from growing any wider. "What do you want?" You hiss at the thing. It laughs at you. Its an awful sick, demented laugh. "I just want to go home and play with my best friend, kitty!" It continues laughing far beyond the point at which any human with lungs would have been capable of. It scoops you up into its arms as though you weigh nothing at all and begins carrying you back down the road. "Put me down! Let me go!" You struggle against the thing, but it is strong. Its long, lanky body belied its seemingly impossible strength. You can't free yourself. "If I let you go you will run away again!" It laughed. Speaking in a singsongy voice that grated upon your ears as you struggled fruitlessly against it to free yourself. "You can't run away from me, kitty! I'm your best friend!" It sang. It taunted you with its seemingly ceaseless laughter. It seemed to go on an on forever as you struggled and fought to wrench yourself free from its grasp. In your desperation, the glasses fell from your face, falling to the pavement with a clatter. As they fell, so did you. Suddenly, finding yourself falling through space and landing in a heap decides them with a sickening thud as for the second time today, the air was forced out of your lungs by gravity. You don't stop to pick them up. You run as fast as your battered body can take you; you run, barefoot as your shoes seem to get lost somewhere along the line, but you could care less about your shoes. They were loaners from one of your few remaining friends, and somewhere in the back of your mind, you think about how your losing them might very well be the final nail in the coffin if the friendship. You don't care. Not even when you run along sharp stones and cut your feet on the brambles and underbrush. You don't care. You just run, and you don't stop running until you get home.
