You are driving along the coast in a downpour headed for the south of Florida for a job interview as a journalist at a local newspaper when you hear a news bulletin on the radio about a hurricane making landfall and advising people to seek shelter.

You see a motel immediately to right through sheets of rain and pull in. You have only 97$ in your wallet and the sign on the office window says 50$ a night.

You gather your things and make a run for the awning in front of the office door, the neon Bambi Motel signs reflection dancing on the asphalt as the rain comes down in sheets pulling you sideways.

The office door sticks, swollen from the humidity, and you have to put a shoulder into it before it gives. Inside smells like fifty years of cigarette smoke baked into the carpet. A box fan oscillates uselessly against a window unit that's working harder than it should have to, and a TV bolted to the wall plays looping storm coverage, a red banner crawling underneath it that you don't bother reading.

Behind the counter, a guy about your age has his slip on vans on the desk, spinning a skateboard wheel with one finger. Smiley-face tattoo on his forearm. Face that looks like nothing has ever managed to bother it.

“Fifty a night,” he says, not looking up. “Storm's included. No extra charge.” He glances at you when you don't laugh. “That was a joke.”

“Got that,” you say, and peel off two twenties and a ten, setting them on the counter like it costs you something. It does.

He doesn't really count it. Slides a brass key across with a laminated tag — 7, in faded Sharpie. “Ice machine's dead. Has been since before me. Vending machines work, mostly.” He taps the counter, “ The soda machine on the right sticks sometimes, kick t if it does.”

“Manager's office is right here if you need anything,” he adds, eyes back on the TV, vans still up. “Not that I'm — I mean, I am the manager. Technically.”

You don't ask what that means. You're already turning for the door.

Outside, the awning ends where the office does, and there's no cover between there and Room 7 — just the length of the building in the dark, rain coming sideways off the ocean side, door numbers half-peeled off their brass fittings as you pass them. Something above you groans, wind finding a gap it likes.

The key fights the lock the same way the office door fought you. Inside: a queen bed, a window full of black water and blacker sky, a mini fridge humming like it's seen better decades. You drop your bag. You don't unpack. Nothing about this place says get comfortable.

You're still dripping onto the carpet, door open when you hear it — footsteps, unhurried, coming along the walkway from your right. Through the rain-streaked window, a shadow stretches long and slow across the concrete outside, cutting through the parking lot light, headed your way.