As I made my way across the darkening parking lot, I got the heavy feeling that I wasn't alone, and yet I still saw no one or heard nothing.  The taxis and shuttle buses sat empty as if frozen in a moment of time.  Luggage lay scattered about the sidewalks. 

Was this real?  Was this  just a dream?  Where had I been headed?  I was at the airport waiting for a flight and yet now, for some reason, I couldn't remember my destination. 

As the sun vanished behind the walls of the parking garage, darkness settled in around me and the cold chill of night and something else enveloped me.  I wanted to move, wanted to find, what? What, I wondered, if the entire city was just as desolate as the airport.  Was I the only one left?

I moved slowly, carefully through the maze of vehicles, trying not to stumble over a dropped carryon.  I stopped suddenly when I heard the faintest of footfalls off to my left.  They seemed to be running, first away from me and then towards me again.  I called out but there was no answer, only a pause in the footsteps.  I called out again and the footsteps came again, toward me this time, louder and louder, until they sounded so close to me that I could---they stopped.

I turned around 360 degrees, straining to see in the darkness but saw no one.  Only, only I could sense someone so close to me, I was sure that I could feel someone staring at me, breathing warm breath on me, and yet there was no one there.  My hairs bristled.  I wanted to reach out, to feel my way in the darkness, but fear had me frozen in place unable to move even a finger.  There was something there, a who, a what, I didn't know, but it was there and I could feel its very presence circling me.  I could feel the slightest brush as when something just barely brushes over the hairs of your arms. 

I wanted to cry out but my voice would not work.  And if it did, who, I thought, would even hear me?