Night time. An empty intersection in the industrial section of the City. The streets are slick with recent rain.

Suddenly a bright red sportscar comes screeching through the intersection, sliding sideways. Its spinning wheels find purchase and it careens down the road. Quick on its heels are two police cruisers, sirens blaring, lights strobing. The soundtrack blasts techno-metal as the three cars race through the abandoned streets, blowing red lights and taking right-angle turns in barely controlled power slides.

The red car turns into a narrow lane bounded on either side by tall, brick warehouses. It passes a sign that reads "LOADING ZONE ONLY - NO OUTLET." The cops fall back, expecting their quarry to hit the brakes at any moment.

But the red car never even slows down.

It crushes itself against the warehouse wall at upwards of 80 miles an hour. The rear end of the car bucks into the air as the front end disintegrates. Glass and metal fly in every direction. The chassis slams back down onto wheels bent nearly parallel to the ground. Steam pours out of the mangled hood. Miraculously, the car does not explode, but nothing could have survived that impact.

The police cars skid to a halt and both officers jump out. They approach the wreckage with guns at the ready, although it seems like a wasted formality at this point. As the first officer comes around to the driver's side, he suddenly lowers his gun and gapes in amazement.

"There's... there's no driver," he says. "There's no one in there at all."

As the two police officers ponder this impossibility, a mist begins seeping from the red car's twisted remains. The officers take no notice of it — it is completely invisible to them. The mist curls around the officers' legs and flows to a spot about ten feet behind them, where it coalesces into the form of a man. Without so much as glancing back at the car or the cops, the man gets up and starts to run.

He runs down a narrow side-alley, dodging past dumpsters and piles of garbage. When the alley ends in a chain-link fence, he does not slow, but passes right through it, the substance of his body flowing through the links like smoke. Though his form is that of a ghost, he is breathing hard, and the look on his face is desperate.

The next alley ends in a brick wall — and again, he does not slow, but passes right through it as though it were air. Cut to an interior shot of the warehouse, which is jam-packed with ravers dancing to thumping trance-techno. The running man is invisible in this shot, but a gap appears in the crowd next to the far wall, as though the dancers there unconsciously edged away to avoid a sudden, localized chill. The gap moves quickly through the crowd, from one end of the warehouse to the other.

Cut to an exterior shot. The street on this side of the warehouse is ten feet lower. The running man emerges from the wall and falls, hitting the pavement in a sprawl.

Exhausted and in pain, the man picks himself up — and freezes, as he sees something sitting atop a garbage can just a few yards distant. The camera changes focus, and the object becomes visible, huge in the foreground of the picture. It is a plastic chess piece... a white bishop.

Footsteps grit on the pavement. The man turns, and sees a second man walking toward him. This second man has a shaved head, intricate tattoos covering his bare torso, and a malevolent gleam in his eye. The first man does not even try to run. His face is that of someone watching every nightmare they've ever had come to life.

The tattooed man stops a few paces away. He smiles. Then he raises a huge, black, automatic pistol... and fires.

Cut to black.