[WP] There is a man that appears in photographs of every major disaster. You've been searching for him for years. Now you've found him, or did he find you?

I looked closely at my phone, unsure if my eyes were deceiving me. I held my breath as I zoomed in closer. The high cheek bones, the gaunt face, the knee-length dark brown trench coat and matching fedora, a deep violet shirt and slightly lighter tie, and his hands tucked into the pockets of his khaki pants. That familiar dead look in his eyes as he stared directly into the camera, almost as if he were expecting me to take the picture. It couldn't be... I thought.

I turned to face where I expected him to be, but no one was there.

People moved around the crowd at the pier, buying ice cream, looking out on the water, feeding the birds that landed on the railing, almost as if nothing were wrong.

I looked back to my phone on this cloudy day, trying to glean any clues about this man. Last year, I had come across his picture across a conspiracy section on some subject-based forum, where people claimed that his presence was a bad omen -- a harbinger of absolute destruction, but many people say that the pictures were photoshopped, given the number of strangely distorted pixels around him. But when I looked at my own picture, I knew the conspiracy must've had some merit -- how did he appear in my picture, just moments after I took it?

Finally, a small detail caught my eye -- his shoes dripped with water, almost as if he walked through a puddle. My heart beat faster and faster, as I slowly looked up to find his spot on the pier. There it is... I thought, looking at the pair of wet footprints leading nowhere. I placed my feet above them, and noticed my feet looked like children's feet, miniature compared to his own.

What...in the world...? I thought, about to take another picture.

It was then I heard the screams.

"RUUUN!"

/r/WritingPrompts Thread