Vukodlac, Chapter 2

As one wakes up, another goes to sleep.

It was about four hours and twenty minutes after the man's horrific demise when Sarah awoke. She did so on her own, without the use of bothersome alarms or hungry animals, for she had no use for such things, and did not possess either of them.

She got out of her simple twin bed and, with none of the sluggishness usually found in a person so recently asleep, crossed her nearly empty room and opened her closet door. Opening the bottom drawer and moving up, she soon held a neat pile of clothing, all a uniform gray, and she proceeded to leave her room.

Entering her bathroom, she placed her clothes, as well as a towel that she had selected from the hall closet on her way in, on a counter clear of anything but a sink, hand soap, and a toothbrush.

She busied herself with her morning rituals, and at four forty-five she exited the bathroom. After eating a bagel lathered with a thick layer of peanut butter, she went into her back yard.

The ground of her yard was mostly concrete, with a few patches of dirt and several enterprising weeds in the worn down corners of the her home. Above, a tarp, held up by the house's roof on one side and three tall steel poles on the other, blocked out the dark morning sky, and probably protected the area from the sun during brighter parts of the day. The yard was littered with weights, weapons, and various appliances designed for exercise or combat training. With a certainty that suggested habit, Sarah picked up a light metal bar and began to warm up.

…

It was five in the morning, still around fifteen or twenty minutes until dawn, and the thing was happily making bedtime preparations. The thing walked through the dead man's house with a spring in its step, humming as it covered the windows with anything it could find.

After the thing had finished the man, it had rested for a while, pink with blood and in a food stupor. When its energy returned, the thing dressed itself in the man's smallest clothes which, to the thing's annoyance, were still a couple sizes too big for it. Not letting such trivial things get to it, the thing had worked quickly to make the place comfortable.

Three minutes before dawn, it was finished. Yawning, the thing collapsed on the man's bed, curling up beneath the robin's-egg blue covers as twilight announced the nearness of sunrise. No more than five minutes later, the thing was as still as a corpse, safe in the shadowy protection of his deceased victim's home.