Night on Earth

London, England in the second half of the twenty-first century, is not a pleasant place. Its structures, social and actual are crumbling, collapsing piece by piece, dust by dust. It has become even more than before a breeding ground for misery, strife and ongoing unrest. Poverty has exploded and death is frequent and often brutal. For most people it is a daily struggle to survive. They can never tell themselves with conviction that tomorrow will come. A wall has been raised around the city, in an attempt to protect it from the rapidly rising sea. Those in charge tell an unruly population that the wall is solid craftmanship and that it will hold forever, but people know they are lying. People have finally become wise to those in charge. Sheila Watts can smell the scent of something, something big and sinister and irresistible. She can sense it in the poisonous air, the toxic torrential rain and every worn down street and derelict building she walks. Sheila is an inspector at the London Metropolitan Police. The anxiety, the constant stirring beneath her skin is not new to her, but now, at what seems like a chance encounter, it becomes that more potent. People claim that the hunters are dying off, that they don't have a place in modern, civilized society. Sheila knows they are wrong. Every notion, every impulse surging through her overactive mind tells her that they are. She is a hunter, and she is pulling her leash, as she starts hunting the ultimate hunter, a creature without skin and bones and blood, a soulless shadow prowling the backstreets and alleys of a city, a society beyond, way beyond the breaking point. Sheila pulls free of all leashes and charges the prey, the beyond vicious hunter on her path. She can taste the sweet blood in her mouth.