A flash of lightning hit the beach in front of him, scattering granules of sand across the the beach in a fiery arc of madness. The man staggered, thrown off by the blinding light and the fear of what he had just seen. If adrenaline hadn’t already been coursing through his veins, it certainly was now. The shock of what he had just witnessed slowly died down to awe, but an angry shout from behind reminded him he had to keep moving. No time for nature’s wonders now. Briefly, the man wished the bolt had struck just a little further down the beach and hit the shadowy figure that followed him. Before he could finish the thought, thunder exploded in the sky and his legs collapsed beneath him. The rain dripping down his back suddenly felt a bit warmer, and as more and more of it flowed down his back he realized it was too much to just be rain. It suddenly came to him that the liquid on his back was no longer just water; it was blood. The thunder that had brought him to the ground was not just nature yelling, it was the sound of a gunshot. Another angry shout from behind reverberated through his mind, echoing again and again it’s vile meaning until it finally lodged itself in the man’s cerebral cortex and told him to keep going. Don’t stop. No matter what, don’t let him get you. Slowly, as if a thousand weights held back his body, he moved his hands forward, clutching at the sand, pulling his body out of the hole he had collapsed in, crawling to a spot just beyond the dunes. Each passing second seemed like an eternity, and gradually the sand in front of him began to look like the ocean; a thousand waves all moving at once, each one holding him back for longer periods until he was no longer moving forward but stuck in a ceaseless rhythm of wave after wave. Somewhere off in the distance, his body was bleeding out, but that wasn’t all. There was something he was supposed to be doing, something he was supposed to be running from. Two hands reached forward, but to what? Why were they still reaching, still displacing the muddy sand beneath him? What was the point? In the back of his mind he remembered a dark figure calling at him through the night; a pair of light footsteps sinking into the sand behind him. That man, there was something so familiar about him, something so personal, yet so dark all at the same time. As the last of his remaining blood drained from his brain, the man saw the earth around him darken. So this was it. The end. He looked up into the sky for one last time, but no stars greeted his dying eyes. Instead, he was staring up into the blank face of his fearsome oppressor. With a muffled sob the man’s head collapsed, and it seemed he was dead but for the last twitch of his hand which came to rest against the shadow’s foot. When the police found him the next morning, the man’s open hand lay palm down on the sand, but no footprint was beneath it. Blood did not dye the sands red, nor was a bullet found buried in his back. Though the policemen carried his lifeless body away, no tears were shed that day. Instead, the men all sighed in relief at the prospect of a safe town, and a single “Wanted” poster was removed from the wall in the police station. As the poster was removed, a ray of sunlight filtered in through the window and lit up the shadowy abyss that had once existed beneath the man’s grimacing face.