Mark robber's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Mark pressed his back against the wall and counted hunger pangs instead of hours. Three days, give or take. He just wanted to go home, to walk back into the warehouse and find his three friends still arguing about the shot. Instead, he was here, in a grey place he had basically written into being. He noticed the yellow first on the little house he had been using as shelter. A damp patch bloomed across its cheerful pink siding, eating the paint. The orange door sagged. His safe spot was rotting in front of him. Then he saw the rest. A tall light post nearby was wrapped in thick yellow tendrils, glowing sickly bright. His old film camera, the one he had found and hauled around like a lucky charm, sat half-drowned in the same yellow sludge. The air grew thick. Each breath tasted like wet pennies. Mark coughed and stumbled back. A shape moved at the edge of his vision. A dog, yellow-furred and too still, watched him with human eyes. Behind it, something taller unfolded itself from the haze — a thin black figure with a bulbous, potato-shaped head, twitching like a bad puppet. He ran. He did not pick a direction. He just moved, lungs burning, away from the house, away from the spreading stain. He ran until the air thinned and the yellow glow faded behind him. When he stopped, his shelter was gone. The camera was gone. Everything he had gathered in three days — gone. Mark stood alone on flat grey ground, gasping. He had escaped. He had also lost the only place he had made his own. Whatever was chasing him now had a face, and it knew where he had been.