The timba of drums somewhere in the alleys of these small cities coincided with the beating of her heart. Its grim sounds added more to the portents. The woman had known just 15 minutes ago where she was. She had been getting ready for bed in a foreign city in the midle of nowhere. Now, as she raced out of her hotel room, it was completely irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was-
The door to her hotel room flew open in a splash of splinters. Someone very, very strong had kicked it in, strong enough to send that brittle door flying.
...the only thing that mattered was the fastest way to escape.
Whoever had 'opened' that door... the woman didn't want to meet him, her, or it.
She stood on the balcony. That hesitation would be her undoing, though she did not know it. Moments of contemplation and trepidation, and then she leapt. From the third-floor balcony onto the adjacent building, barely landing on the soft-looking mattress some vagrant had left on the roof.
Yelling from her room - the woman scrambled to her feet. People were shouting, not simply from her room but from below.
Her pursuers were just as determined to track this woman down as she was to escape. They jumped, too, though not all of them made the soft landing that the fleeing female accomplished.
Another leap gave her headway. She ran to the edge of the building and managed to maneuver onto a construction scaffold. From there, she went to the ground level, hoping she could lose her pursuers in the crowd. It always worked in-
Another roar. Something on the ground level.
...it always worked in fiction. Said fiction relied on several caveats, however, including a large crowd. This was the middle of the night in a relatively low-population city. She couldn't lose a blind cenetarian in a deserted street like this.
She panicked again. They knew that she was in the streets. The gap was closed behind her.
In another attempt to make some headway, she began running through the most labyrinthine areas she could find. Into an alleyway, first, one that reeked and one without any lighting. She almost tripped at least once before she reached the other side.
More of them. More of them on the other side.
As she hit the edge, she made a 90-degree turn, tripping in the process. She fled down a road she had definitely not seen before, past a restaurant she would never visit, and into a park that she had been hoping to see under calmer circumstances.
The park was deserted, but its trees and hedges made for this-
Something big dove in front of her. Something huge. Something that made her shiver with primal urgency through carefully cultivated evolution alone. Something that could cause temporary unconsciousness when run into top speed.
...this time, she didn't recover.