My hands clenched the fence, and metal dug into my fingers. I froze, caught between fear and determination. Injured dogs don’t approach strangers unless they’re sick or hungry. It couldn’t get through the fence. But I needed those clothes!

One more shuffle-scrape on concrete and a shape appeared out of the shadows. My throat closed around a cry of terror.

Part human, part monster, the creature squatted, a tangle of knees and elbows, stringy muscles shifting beneath grayish skin. The limbs were too long and too thin, the angles too sharp. The eyes were too small, but they shone with colorless light that seemed to see deep inside me, as if it were looking for something I wasn’t even sure I had.

Degenerate.

It wasn’t possible. I’d seen them on the news, but never in person. Never this close. Never in New Temperance…

It was bald, with cheekbones so sharp they should have sliced through skin, and ears pointy on both the tops and the lobes. And—most disturbing of all—it was female. Sagging, grayish breasts swung beneath torn scraps of cloth that were once a dress. Or maybe a bathrobe.

The monster roared, and its mouth opened too wide, its jaws unhinging with a gristly pop I could hardly hear over the horrific screech that made my ears ring and my eyes swim in tears. It watched me, and I stared back, frozen in terror.

Run!

No, don’t run. Back away slowly….Maybe degenerates were like dogs, and if I ran, it would chase me.

I pulled my right shoe from the fence and slowly, carefully lowered myself, without looking away from the monster. It shuffled closer in its eerily agile squat, and I fumbled for a blind foothold in the metal as I sucked in air and spat it out too quickly to really be considered breathing.

The degenerate was six feet from the fence when I reached the ground and began slowly backing away, the uniforms forgotten. My hands were open, my legs bent, ready to run.

The monster squatted lower, impossibly low, and tensed all over, watching me like a cat about to pounce. Then it sprang at me in one powerful, evil-frog leap.

I screamed and backpedaled. The monster crashed into the chain-link fence. The metal clanked and shook, but held. The demon crashed to the ground, her nose smashed and bleeding, yet she still eyed me with hunger like I’d never seen before. She was up in an instant, pacing on her side of the fence on filthy hands and feet, her knees sticking up at odd angles. She stared through the metal diamonds at me with bright, colorless eyes, and I backed up until I hit the trash bin.

A low, rattling keening began deep in her throat when I started edging around the large bin, my palms flat against the cold, flaking metal at my back. The degenerate blinked at me, then glanced at the top of the fence in a bizarre, jerky movement. I realized what she intended an instant before she squatted, then leapt straight into the air.