They were gone. All of them.

He was the only one remaining.

The silence was deafening, only broken by the crunch of dust beneath his feet as he cautiously moved through the building. Everything was dark... but it was enough to allow him to see at least a few feet ahead.

He could see that there were various objects strewn about the room, in a terrible state of disrepair. Not that he cared. He was simply cautious; and afraid.

He just wanted somewhere to rest for the night without *them* coming to hurt him: The zone had become a most unforgiving place recently, more even than before, and many more of *them* had begun to appear. They had been causing exponentially more deaths as they multiplied. And finding somewhere truly safe was getting more difficult by the day.

Slowly he shuffled through the dusty corridor, and found a small room with one window, and the remains of a mattress on the floor. Not the best, as it was singed around the edges from the zone's fiery emissions. They'd become more frequent, and could burn him up in an instant.

To protect himself from any of those, he shuffled the matress out of the door and into the corridor. At least there it was sealed.

He turned to look down the corridor: movement. movement meant danger.

And it was approaching from outside. Could it be? one of *them*?

He hid in the dark. silent. moving slowly toward the entrance doorway. There was no door, and moonlight shone in.

He could hear it getting closer to the door, making a horrible shuffling sound with every step it took.

His breathing sped up.

It was there.

A sillhouette in the moonlit doorway, he could hear it breathing. no more than a metre from him. It huffed heavily.

He pressed himself against the wall. scared. in the dark. alone.

Painfully slowly, it shuffled through the doorway, into the darkness of the room.

His heart was beating so hard that his chest hurt. He'd have to kill it: the thing in the darkness. Simply to survive.

So he moved slowly... towards it... blending into the scattered shadows as he went, readying himself to attack.

It was looking around. It suddenly caught a glimpse of him and begun to turn. It had fear in its eyes too.

He launched his bodyweight at it and knocked it to the ground, writhing. Struggling hard to hold it still, he drained it's blood with his tentacled mouth, ripping through it until it stopped moving: white as a sheet.

He scuttled off quickly, hoping no more of them would follow, leaving it laying, white, on the ground.

______________________

the hallway empty of all but the drained body, a radio on it's cargo belt crackled into life:

"S.ta.l.k.e.rs: an emission is coming. Find cover ASAP. And Look out for bloodsuckers. They're everywhere. Good hunting S.t.a.l.k.e.rs"

...