It shouldn’t have, but it was just my body’s natural reaction to stop in the entryway of the hallway when the house went dark. I could have kept running and tried to make it to through my parents’ bedroom door blind, but I instead slowed to a clumsy stagger with my hands out in front of my like Frankenstein.

I made it a few feet into the hallway, feeling like it was just about a dozen more shuffle steps before I was at my parents’ door when I heard a cough come from inside where my blind brain told me my parents’ room was.

A cough. A cough. It was definitely a cough.

“Who’s there?” I frantically called out into the darkness as I kept stepping backwards.

I felt my ear tune-up until I was high-strung as a house cat, but I could hear no footsteps (they were probably muffled by my parents’ awful shag carpeting) and no hints of breathing. I was literally stumbling in the dark, trying to find my way back into the kitchen. I knew if I got back to the kitchen, the house opened up a lot more and it wouldn’t be as hard to get to the front door and out into the (potential) safety of the storm.

Still silent, I just kept methodically stepping backward until I felt my feet hit the hard comfort of the linoleum floor which let me know that I was now in the little area between the kitchen and the hallway. Now knowing I was just about to the safety point of fleeing, I spun around and readied myself to start a blind sprint.