He was beginning to feel the hunger stir in him again.

He would need to go out soon.  He would need to find his fix.  The pain wasn't bad now, but it soon would be.  Soon a hunger would fill him that dwarfed anything he felt when he was simply a drug addict.

He hated going out.  Hanging there from the ceiling of the abandoned warehouse he felt safe.  The creature called Hollow didn't belong in the world anymore.  His monstrous form wouldn't allow him to walk freely among people.

Better to hide.  Better to hide.

Still, soon he would have no choice.  He would need to sate the hunger... crawling across rooftops until he could find a source, a victim, a fix.  Then he could come back to the safety of this place.

There were others out there, others like him.  He could sense them sometimes hiding in the shadows.  Sometimes he thought he caught glimpses of them, but they were elusive.  He didn't pursue them.  It was better to seek out the weaker prey... the normal people.  He had no desire to confront these other beings of power.  They left him alone and he left them alone.

Until now it seemed.

The sound of a warehouse door being forced shocked him to attention.  A dark figured entered and took position behind the door.  He could sense the power in this one, and he felt a tinge of fear rise in himself...

Tik tik tik...

The long, chitinous legs of the half-breed clicked along the wall of the warehouse as he moved toward the door. The darkness of the storage room was a welcome cloak around him, though the light streaming through the door was unwelcome distraction.

The silence and the darkness were his only welcome companions, and now the intruder betrayed the only things he had left to call his own. He hissed, baring his fangs, though the sound failed to carry through the empty space between them.

Despite being hidden in the shadows, Hollow's presence apparently did not go unnoticed by the stranger.  He had only a moment to make his decision... talk, fight or flee?

Hollow scrabbled along the wall, moving behind the crates, still keeping the figure in sight. He was not yet openly aggressive, but did seem to be moving closer, in anticipation of a possible conflict.

The dark stranger watched Hollow as he crawled along the upper wall of the warehouse, coming to a position just opposite.  The stranger paused for a moment, and then slowly and casually slid hands down into the large, outer pockets of his coat, as if to show he had no intention of making any sudden moves.

"Look pal," the stranger rasped, "trust me when I say, you dont want to eat me. And I don't want to send you packing, either. I just want a place to hole up for the day. This is a big place, so I'm going to move over here and just grab me a corner, OK?"

As he spoke, the stranger slowly made his way over to the corner nearest the door, never taking his hollow eyes off his wary roommate-to-be.

He then slid down into a low crouch, using the corner of the room to prop himself up. His unblinking, lifeless eyes seem affixed to Hollow as he raised up his arms to rest on his knees.

"So tell me, pal," he uttered casually, "you been here long?"

Hollow made no move to approach closer, but instead simply watched the figure. Occasionally, one of his legs lifted off the wall, moving back down swiftly with another eerie 'tik'.

"This is not your home, human. You may not stay here. The only ones who live here are Hollow...and prey."

It seemed quite clear from the narrowing of the black eyes that such a statement was not a threat, but merely the simple fact of this creature's existence.

All words, pictures, characters, tiles and just about everything else was created by and is copyright Stephen Rice and Electric Comics, 1996

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