Small Town Safety

I guess you could call this a bit of a cautionary tale. I wrote it in about an hour or so, and it could probably stand to be revised, but at another time. For now, this is what I have. The idea came to me while I was walking out in the dark, much like

 

The sultry sweet voice of Fiona Apple crooned in her ear through the black foam of her headphones.  She knew she should turn it down, but the angsty noise made her feel all the better; it really was rather therapeutic.  These streets held no threat for her, even though the shadows threatened to consume her, each tree a hulking giant kneeling down around her, ready to scoop her into the air.  The light from the street lights was almost non-existent, and the moon was hiding in the clouds, a pale glow only occasionally poking out shyly, but still she felt no fear.  She’d grown up here, and this was the kind of town where no one bothered to lock their doors since everybody knew everybody else.  Turning the volume up ever so slightly, she allowed herself to shut her eyes, knowing what lie before her like the back of her hand.  She had walked these streets so many times that they had become like old friends.  She missed them when she was away, and when she returned, she was always glad to return to them.  There was something so comforting about the way they had remained unchanged for so many years, while everything else in her life seemed to change in the most unlikely and inconvenient ways. 

She could feel the pavement below her feet, and made a game of guessing what lie below them.  A few twigs, a manhole, a few scattered dried leaves, cracking in the autumn air.  She opened her eyes, just in time to see the moon take a peek from its hiding spot.  She could feel the night envelope her, just as something else reached out to do the same.

 

Groggily she opened her eyes.  Harsh light beamed down upon her, causing her to squint.  Her eyes watered, and she tried to discern her surroundings through the wetness.  Two bleary figures appeared in her line of sight.  She could not yet see their faces, but she could tell by their forms that they were both males.  She struggled to sit up, but to no avail.  With a sudden rush of panic, she realized her hands and feet were bound.  Inside she screamed, but her mouth could muster was a garbled groan. 

 

“Dude, she’s awake.” 

She could decipher the tone in his voice, and their sickly laughter gave her the courage to utter a real scream.  Immediately, their grubby fingers covered her mouth.  She could taste sweat on their palms and she could feel bile begin to rise in her throat.  Her eyes a bit clearer, she could now make out their faces.  One was vaguely familiar while the other was a stranger.  Thoughts raced through her mind, each fighting for her immediate attention.  She couldn’t catch her breath as her heart pulsed at such an alarming rate she feared it would leap from her chest. 

More laughter.  They were enjoying this.  Tears began to stream from her eyes, and this only brought on a giggling fit from the broader one.  Cruelly they gazed down upon her intently, still holding her mouth and watching her wriggle like a fish on the floor of a boat.  Narrowing her eyes into slits, she tried to threaten them with her eyes.  This, of course, just prompted more of the maniacal cackling.  A thought suddenly struck her, and with all the force she could muster, she bit down into the hand that muffled her.  Breaking the skin, blood was now added to the horrible concoction being forced into her.  A piercing scream, oddly delayed by a slow realization, was bellowed by her captor.  He shook his hand in the air, spraying tiny droplets of blood onto the wall near them.  They seemed to hover in the air before splattering like tiny missiles onto the paint. 

“You b***h!  She bit me!”  Turning his gaze from her, he turned to address his fellow miscreant.  His face still screwed up in laughter, no longer at the puny girl but now at his friend’s idiocy, the boy’s eyes almost missed her mouth opening wide to shriek once more.  He could not allow this.  Acting on his instincts, he struck her in the head once.  With a crunch and a sickening splat, her head slammed against the floor, causing her vision to once again darken at the sides, slowly going inwards until all that was left were two pinpricks of light, and finally, all was black.

 

By the time the police found her, still gagged and bound, she was dripping wet from the week’s rain.  She had been stripped of all her clothes and her underwear, scrunched into a tight little ball, were what the depraved individuals had used to gag her.  There were scratches from her breasts to her abdomen, brutally carved first by fingernails, then traced with razors.  Her head was black with bruises and caked in dried blood.  Any miscellaneous liquids that may have tainted her had been washed away in the flood waters.  She had washed up along the side of the river, to be found by a fisherman.  When he found her, her torso was facing the shore, fingers seeming to claw for the side, desperately clinging to the safety of land, while her legs still bobbed gently up and down in the light waves.  Her dark locks of hair were the only remnant of beauty that remained. 

 

So much for small town safety.