Beast 01

Siren

No one thinks that anything bad will ever happen to them, or so I hear. Well, I always knew that something would happen to me. I lived in the city, after all, and I read the crime report in the paper. I knew how often people were mugged, or raped, or beaten for no reason at all. I worked the late shift and had to walk a quarter-mile to the parking lot every night, and I wasn’t very big or threatening-looking. Of course I did what I could to protect myself – I took the self-defense class at the YMCA and was planning on moving up to Karate, I carried a can of pepper-spray, and when I walked I always kept my eyes up and stayed alert. But I knew, sooner or later – probably sooner – something bad would happen to me. That was just the way life was.

So I wasn’t surprised when I saw it all coming well in advance: I got off work the same time as usual, just about midnight, and took the hurried walk to the lot. The streets were empty, except for the occasional speeder and yellow-light runner. My car was lonely in the far corner of the lot, but of course at two in the afternoon I had been lucky to even find a space. There, slumped against the pole of a parking lot light not a dozen yards from my car, blocking the path between where I stood and the relative safety of my Volvo (of course, even in a car you still have to avoid long traffic lights or suffer the likelihood of car-jacking), a disheveled-looking man sang some drunkenly-slurred song a bit too loudly. He saw me as I entered the orange-drenched anti-shadows of the parking lot, before I had decided what to do, and yelled out with a failing voice, could I spare any change? A quarter perhaps?

That was enough for me. I knew how this scheme worked; we had seen the scenario in self-defense class: while you slow long enough to dig in your pocket for a quarter, or just turn to ask him to leave you alone, his buddy jumps out from behind a car or fence or pillar and sticks you in the back with a rusty knife. They take your wallet and leave you without the slightest concern that they probably killed you – if not from the bleeding, then from tetanus. The drunken slur was probably just an act.

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