The in the shed

I was homeless for two years, living on the streets of a city with the dubious distinction of ranking in the U.S. Top Five (for violent crimes per capita) every year. This wasn't the most harrowing thing I experienced during that time—not by half—but I think it fits the bill for this subreddit.

If you follow any of the city's main avenues from end-to-end, you'll see the hip-but-dangerous midtown district at one end and the ultra-corporate downtown district at the other. Between these two urban biomes, for about seven desolate miles, is a post-industrial wasteland of rusting and abandoned infrastructure haloed by forgotten project houses and condemned apartment blocks. A friend of mine once referred to this part of the city as "Zombieland," and the name kind of stuck for me.

Alongside one of those main avenues, just at the sort of gradient point between midtown and Zombieland, there was a row of shops that had always unnerved me in a very hard-to-explain way.

It wasn't just that they always seemed to be empty, with all the lights on and no customers or employees that I could ever see from the street (one of shop's windows was plastered over with newspaper from the inside, but the other two had floor-to-ceiling display windows). It wasn't just that the same two vehicles, a rather old sedan and a big cargo van, were the only two that I ever saw there (and they were literally ALWAYS there, and always in the same spots, as if they never moved).

I mean, both of those things contributed to the generally shady character of the shops, but the really eerie thing about them I can only attempt to describe... The shops seemed... fake. Like props. The store names were laughably generic, and the signs were all hand-painted in a way that seemed not quite amateur, but not taken seriously either — like they were just meant to be seen in the background shot of a movie and glazed over by the viewer.

I know I'm doing a poor job of conveying their true creepiness, but like... imagine if a giant took the time to hand-paint some dollhouse miniatures of storefronts and then plopped them down in the middle of a city block. Something about them just wasn't right, and I recoiled from them on an instinctual level.

It was a sex shop, a used furniture gallery, and a clothing store. They were all part of the same long strip of building, and they shared a common loading dock/dumping area out back. The back lot was where I found myself on the night these events took place. The lot was overgrown and littered with broken furniture, but all I cared about was what appeared to be an unused metal outbuilding behind a very sad excuse for a chain link fence. I had never gotten too close to it before, but I had it mentally catalogued as a likely place to wait out the rain or maybe even spend the night when I was in the area.

The outbuilding had one of those large, side-opening steel doors on heavy rollers. To my dismay, it was secured by very hefty lock and chain on the outside. I gave the door a good shove anyway, because you never know. It rolled open about two inches before catching on the chain, and I took the opportunity to peek inside out of curiosity.

Concrete floor, old empty wooden shelves, and rusting heaps of machinery. That was all I could make out. As I started to pull away, something collided HARD with the inside of the door. I leapt backward and froze. Pressed to the other side of that two-inch gap was a man's face, dirty and wild-eyed. He threw himself at the door again and SCREAMED. And kept screaming, and pounding on the sheet metal with his fists. I want to be clear that he was not screaming in terror... there was an unmistakable and absolute primate RAGE in that man. I ran as fast as I could. I could still hear him smashing himself against the inside of the shed and screaming a full block away.