From "Ridgeline"

"She pulled out both earbuds. The evening was louder than she expected - crickets starting up, a mockingbird cycling through its set in a tulip poplar to her right, the creek somewhere below and behind. The air had cooled. The shadows of the sawhorses stretched halfway across the lot and the light was amber going orange.

Behind her, on the gravel, footsteps.

Not the drift she'd heard before. Not the aimless pace of a man going nowhere. These were faster. The crunch of crusher run under shoes that were covering ground, closing distance, and the rhythm was wrong - not a jog, not a walk, the in-between stride of someone who has made a decision and is executing it.

He had doubled back.

She knew this the way she knew the gravel was under her feet - not through reasoning but through the body's instant triangulation of sound and distance and intent. The footsteps were forty yards behind her. Thirty-five. And they were getting faster.

The stroller handle was already in her fists. The Civic was sixty yards ahead. The earbuds hung against her chest, swinging, and the podcast women were still talking, tinny and small, their voices leaking into the air between Dana and the sound behind her that was not an alarm, not the isolation, not paranoia...

It was footsteps. They were faster than walking."   

     - Ridgeline, Part Two: The Man on the Trail