It's only a few days after the masquerade and it comes unexpectedly in the night like quiet. She thinks its another bad dream, another prequel to a sleepless night, until she feels the haunting sensation soft rain and realizes what's happened. They always said it never stopped raining.

She stood in the center of a street, somewhere near 5th and Burnside. Logically there should have been cars screaming down the road and hurdling into her; this was a four lane street that was never quiet.

Never quiet ... until now. She held up a hand to catch some of the falling rain drops and squinted to see what was out there. Most everything was covered with a hazy gray film. Cars parked on the side of the road had dust and cracked windows, as though they'd been there for ages. Windows were boarded up and birds with three legs sat on a telephone wire above her.

"Hello?" The words echoed off the surrounding buildings, bouncing back to her uselessly. She took a few steps to move out of the road (despite no cars coming, it felt unsafe to just stand there) and the footsteps seemed amplified somehow. Each tap was loud with the echo that resounded.

It was so empty.

To Chel, silence was nightmareish. She thrived in big cities with throngs of people for her to meld into, in dance floors where telling one person apart from another was hard. When she was this alone and it was this silent, what could she do? It reminded her of the silences of her home. It took her back to a place she didn't want to be.

She tried walking to something she recognized; part of the problem was that she recognized everything. She knew this part of town and everything was as she remembered it ... but not. If she tried looking to the sky it felt blurred by the tiny droplets of rain that fell like ash and smeared the gray canvas with more gray. Chel felt like a burst of color against her familiar scenery, like her hair was somehow even more of an intrusion than it was in the real world.

One of the birds called from the telephone wire, starting a cacophony of bird calls. A greeting. A warning. Raven caws began mixing with car siren and suddenly the entire street was alight with the sound of screeching tire.

A car slammed into her side; where had it come from? Had it always been there?

She didn't even feel the pain of impact; as soon as it hit her, everything went black.