In the Belly of the Beast

32

She had always loved the city, loved its fast-paced frenetic energy. Some people thrived on peace and quiet, but she lived for the sensory overload of gaudy neon, blaring sirens, angry horns, the restless sea of people eternally on the move.

But as the car's headlights lit the monolithic rectangles reaching high into the night sky, she found herself unsettled and on edge. She was a foreigner moving through an alien landscape.

The blackness had transformed her once familiar city into a sinister scene of strange and menacing structures. Alleyways were cavernous in their endless darkness. Unknown streets faded into obscurity beyond the headlights' beam. It was a valley of shadow, a place transformed, an indecipherable maze of confusing thoroughfares. She found it impossible to get her bearings.

Abby rode in silence and thought of Traynor. Occasionally, she tried to see the stars through the open window, but the clouds obscured them. Black sky. Dark horizon. There was no clear-cut division between.

At least the encounter with the drunks had shut Mecham up. He had changed his route and seemed to be meandering down the neighborhood streets. They were no longer on the main avenues.

He drove past postage stamp yards littered with trash and rundown houses, tired and unkempt. The glowing eyes of fenced in mongrels glowered back at them.

Pit bulls and mixed breeds, scruffy and scarred. Steely-eyed, they bore the traces of injury left upon them by their brutish owners. They moved stiffly in the cold on sunken haunches, flea-bitten misery surviving on scraps tossed carelessly onto the frozen yard. They glared at Abby as she rode past each of them, their hard unflinching stares watched her from behind the fences of their prison lots.