Baited - Part Two - by Tabitha Gidcomb

"Hey," sounded a rough and labored voice from behind. The hand had left my shoulder the moment it made contact. I spun around and found myself in the company of a sweat-dripping, breath-heaving, football player still in uniform whom I recognized vaguely from high school. "You...okay," he asked between breaths, hands on his knees, in a manner that seemed more like a statement than a question. The villain had fled, and here was the hero. He'd run him off with mere presence. "You're white...as a sheet."

"Yeah," I answered shakily. "I think you scared him away." I chuckled, not forcibly but out of nervous tension. I felt the color of my cheeks beginning to return to its normal shade. "Um," I stalled a moment while he caught his breath. "It's Donald, right?"

"Don, yeah. Only my mother...calls me Donald anymore." He stood up, still breathing deeply but not as heavily or labored now. "Don Westmore," he added and then looked at me peculiarly. "You're Sally Caldwell, aren't you?" A smile seemed to creep across his sweat-beaded face. "You won the writer's contest every year in high school. Got a grant from the state for it for college too, didn't you?" He grinned, flashing a set of teeth that could have used a little corrective care from a set of braces, but was otherwise gleaming. I had the sudden notion that he might have been about to ask for my autograph. I shooed the silly thought away.

"Do you write?" The question came as placidly as it would have at any other moment of time despite the fact that a vulgar and obscene young man had demanded I join him in his rolling black love machine.

"Me, no," Don replied. He held up his helmet, still clenched in his fist, as if he had intended on using it as a weapon in earlier moments. "Get smashed in the head too much. Doesn't make for fluid prose." Don chuckled as he gently tapped the side of his head a couple times with the helmet. "I do like to read, though." He dropped his eyes, seeming embarrassed now, as if he'd suddenly revealed a secret he'd kept silent about since birth. "Kind of a contradiction, eh? Jocks and books?" He looked back at me, and his pale blue eyes twinkled. It was a contradiction, to popular belief at any rate. I was intrigued, but he didn't give me a chance to elaborate upon that feeling. "So, who was that guy? Friend of yours?" He was all smiles, and I couldn't help but to smile as well as the prior conflict melted away beneath the warmth of Don's genuine admiration.

(#)

My entire afternoon had derailed in less than an hour. I was still a bit numb and couldn't seem to follow the conversation on the way home. Don lived in a frat house just a few blocks from my own top floor of a triplex, in the neighborhood behind the college that served mainly as off-campus housing. He insisted on walking me at least part of the way home, regardless of the fact that my home lay out of his way in the opposite direction. On any other day, a boy walking me home would have thrilled me in a way that it would, or should, any other shy, reserved young girl who hadn't had a decent date the whole four years of high school and first year of college. Winning the writer's award, and then the scholarship, had only served, until now, to place me in the 'definitely geeky' category, as evidenced by the few friends I actually hung around in public.

Somehow, I convinced Don that I could make the rest of the trip alone safely. Though quite hesitant, but laden with not only a satchel of homework as large as my own, but also an armload of uniform and equipment, he conceded to leave me there at the intersection of my road to backtrack for his own. I watched him walk away in the growing dusk, watched him turn around and walk backwards for a few awkward paces, smiling. I watched as he reached the end of the sidewalk, crossed the next street down, and turned the corner with a wave, still smiling in the fast fading sunset.

I sighed, long and slow, and the emotions of the day began threatening to return before their time, before I could get them into the safe and isolate comfort of my pillow. I sighed again and began walking at a slow sauntering pace. Home was barely a dozen or more houses down the lane. Thought took me in its lost recesses, and from somewhere far away, my mind began to hear a rumbling purr quivering amidst a muscular exterior.

The rumble got louder, and I scolded my numb thoughts, assuring them that their time would come to scream bloody murder at the top of their lungs, quietly muffled within a pillow as they released their pent up anxiety into the cotton stuffing. As my thoughts grew quiet, the sound grew loud, and I turned on reflex and looked behind me. Speeding down the lane was the same black car with the same rude driver, and it didn't look like either of them was going to stop. On impulse, I ran, but my book-laden pack weighed my back down and I loped oddly in more of a trot.

The tires squealed against brakes and pavement and the smell of burned rubber singed the air in my lungs. I stopped short, nearly tumbling headfirst to the sidewalk as my pack tried to continue without me. The car had mounted the curb mere paces from where I stood, blocking my path.

"Get in the car, you little twit," in the same low, seductive, and vulgar tone as before. I spun on my heels and began running the other way. Tires squealed as he began toward me with the car half on the sidewalk and half on the road. I wondered vaguely why there was never a cop around when needed.

As if by the grace of miracle, another vehicle turned onto the road, at the intersection where Don and I had parted ways. My lungs screamed with the sudden abuse, my back cried out from the torture of the banging books, and my legs threatened to send me hurtling to the ground. I made for the vehicle, a tan minivan, flailing my arms for it to stop, please stop, and help me.

"Are you all right?" the woman in the van asked before the tires had even stopped rolling. The sheer amount of concern in her voice and on her face could have made even the stoutest of people wonder at personal integrity.

"Please...help," I managed through labored breath and a dry mouth. The black car lurched off the sidewalk and back onto the road, speeding past the van. "He's trying to...to..." I couldn't say it, couldn't bear to think of it, and I found myself leaking at the tear ducts despite their commendable effort to wait until I got home. I was out of breath, out of stamina, and running low on options.

"You'd better get in the van." The woman in the van held little expression aside from grand, almost deliberate concern. Her face revealed no deception, but my very breeding screamed of distrust.

"I think he's gone now," I said, skirting her statement. Never take a ride from a stranger, no matter what, and be certain you bob your little head in tune with the last four syllables. "My house is just down the road." I looked up the street toward my apartment, just ten houses down. I looked back down the street to see the shining black muscle car turning back onto my road. I didn't want him to know where I lived, not after everything that had so far transpired, definitely not. "Maybe if you coast beside me as I walk..." It was a good idea, but not good enough.

"It doesn't look like he's going to give up." The woman, fair-skinned, dark-haired with light-colored roots in need of a touch up, gazed intently into the rear-view mirror. Her tone had dropped the sheer exhilaration of concern and now sounded flat and matter-of-fact as a professor delivering a class lecture, while still keeping its soft and motherly texture.

"Thank you, but I don't take rides from strangers." Square one, back to the drawing board, round the list of karaoke singers to the top of the set. Down the lane, the black car sped closer, mounted the curb wholly, and barreled straight towards me.

The woman leaned over the passenger seat and opened the door. "It looks like you don't have much choice. Get in quick." Her voice had taken an urgent tone, and I felt both a strong compulsion to flee and the utter inability to flutter even an eyelid. The black car kept its collision course with the target that was I. A stray thought crept into my mind, and I wondered if this woman had insurance enough to cover my getting smeared across the side of her van.

What happened then happened so quickly that everything played in slow motion, the way it does when adrenaline surges its way through the bloodstream and refuses inhibition by the regulation of the heartbeat. The car, black and shiny, with its prowler behind the wheel, surged its way toward me and the tan van promising sanctuary, mindless of the yard turf kicked up and behind it. The car skimmed so close and so quick that it nearly took off the van's door, and likely would have, with myself sandwiched between the two of them, had I not tossed my pack into the floorboard, leapt into the seat, and slammed the door shut behind me in a moment of last-ditch escaping effort. The car spun around in front of the van and squealed back the way it had come, again. Out the side mirror, I could see the car do another half circle and then it stopped, pointed toward us, idling in place, as if waiting for something.

I turned to the woman, to say thank you, to ask if she would be so kind as to drive me back to the college, to say that I would call someone to come get me there, that I didn't want this crazed boy with his unwelcome and vulgar advances to know precisely in which house I lived. I turned to say all these things, but I never got a chance to utter even a syllable. When I turned from looking in the side mirror to look at the woman in whose van I had taken impulsive shelter, all I saw was a square of cloth shoved against my face. Within moments, I saw nothing. The chloroform did its duty well, though I do remember, as I drifted into unwitting oblivion, the unmistakable rumble-purr of the black muscle car trolling along at a pleasant pace close behind.

A last thought before the void took me, faint as my mind grew uncomfortably numb, whispered into the darkness behind my eyelids, mocking me with memory. Never take a ride from a stranger, no matter what. And be sure to bob your little head in time with the beat of the last four syllables.

THE END

#tabithagidcomb #baited #Serials