Allison Colleen bounded through the corridor outside her bedroom, vaguely aware of the howling bloodhounds approaching from the street adjacent. She peered through the window of the hall facing the gray streets of Monday Town, her nightgown matching the maternal red colour of the curtains. Her heart pulsed with madness as she took in the entirety of the laboring district, filled with smog and heat mist.

Six men in black suits were approaching from the opposite side of the street, their wrists wrapped around thick leashes holding massive hounds from the chase of her scent. They held pistols strapped with silencers and extended magazines, looking sharply from one end of the street to the other. The dogs led them closer to the house, noses bobbing with the mechanical movement from the ground to the air. Each step was a second of her time, and she had lost so much of it already. Allison threw herself across the hallway and down the stairs into the kitchen, where her front door threw the shadows of everything into the den and adjoining halls. The silhouette of a man splashed faintly across her ceramic floor, and she watched as the doorknob twisted slowly and rebounded from the lock. The hounds began to bark furiously, a low rumbling growl, and the wind rattled the panes.

Without coherent thought, Allison padded soundlessly from the stairs to the back door and sprinted out into the street behind her house, the door swinging and hitting the siding. She ran so fast her feet burned with the rough friction of the pavement beneath her. The sound of shoe soles and claws scraping the street became louder as she made her way through second alley, terrified of them catching her. She didn’t know what they were, only that they had let the dogs eat Andrea after they liberated her. She had no reason to stop running.

It was dawn. The twilight had recessed into the ground and each frame of glass in the city full of reflections gave her a view of the show at present. They were so close to her, now. They pressed inches behind her, panting, drooling, snapping their massive undeterred maws, unhindered with genetically modified aggression and sixty pounds worth of flesh-ripping muscle.

They crossed a dead intersection filled with parked cars. Allison hurtled over the hood of a chrystler and into the divide between Monday Town and Kid Town, where she knew they would not follow. The goal was ascertainable. It was evident and reachable. She continued sprinting down the street, the dogs slowed by the volley of silent vehicles. It gave her time. Momentum. Hope.

Allison recognized the wire gate. It lead directly to the terrace, and from there she could find him. She could be safe. Her hands braced the fence gate, but it wouldn't give. It was chained. Seconds. Milli-seconds. Too late.

The first enclosed around her left thigh, pulling her back from the fence. The second bounded, pounced, and grappled her cheekbones with universal molars, twisting and snapping her top cervical vertebrae. Her skin came away in swathes of cloth, torn easily from the self. She lost feeling in her leg. Her arms slowed to the speed of the sky.

And they let the dogs eat her alive.