The footsteps were slow; whoever the guy was, he wasn’t in a hurry to get to where he was going.  It sounded like he was just stumbling around back there kicking bottles, taking his sweet time, maybe looking for something.  Trouble, maybe?   Was it just one guy?  I swear, I couldn’t even be sure.  I didn’t know and I didn’t give a shit.  I knew for a fact that I was going back there though, but Sally had to know…I wasn’t sure if she could see me through that pitch black, so I grabbed for my phone…and the damn thing got knocked out of my hands just as soon as I could grab it.  Maybe it was the wind, or the thunder, or my heart pounding the hell out of my chest, but whatever it was, it muffled the footsteps of the guy that was standing over me, tall as shit and screaming like a fucking wild animal.  The bastard snuck up and caught me from behind.  I should’ve been able to smell him coming if it weren’t for the rain; he smelled like a hot bucket of piss, shit, and coppery blood.  The phone flew out of my hands and into the rain a few feet in front of me, and I flung myself up to meet the guy head on.  Rage and fear and adrenaline filled my veins as I lunged at the guy and sent him stumbling backward.

I followed after him and landed a string of solid blows to the guy’s head, and managed to put him flat on his ass in the parking lot.  He went down hard like a sack of bricks; I stood over the schmuck and demanded to know what the fuck was going on, and why the hell he came at me.  All he did was scream, man; from the look of him, I wasn’t the first guy to kick his ass that night either.  Even in the dark, I could see that his face was beat to hell and covered in blood, and he had a gash the size of my fist peeking out of the front of his shirt.  I didn’t know what to make of it, I really didn’t, and I didn’t have too much time to think about it.  Just as soon as I got him on his ass, he was crawling up and making another go at me.  I hadn’t forgotten about the guy in the back, and wasn’t about to get double-teamed by these bastards, so I pulled out my pistol and whacked the guy over the head with the butt of it.  I wasn’t trying to kill the guy, just keep him from getting the drop on me.  I bashed him good, man…and yet he kept on coming.