Fend: Chapter 1

Precisely one second before the villain slashes the pretty blonde in the shower scene, the music quits playing. The eerie silence before a gunshot. That two seconds before the coyote looks down and realizes he's run over the side of the cliff and is about to plummet to a cartoon-y near death. Each of these has just one thing in common: that moment when everything goes completely silent. It's just a second, maybe less, but it says everything that the victim isn't going to be able to say after it. "Oh, crap, here we go." Well, I'm having one of those seconds, and I just need you to know what it means, because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be able to explain it properly after the moment is over.

Okay, moment over.

A piercing scream erupted from deep in the woods. The sound, shrill and terrorized, echoed sharply through the nearly barren trees and seemed to pass straight through me. My head snapped up and my eyes searched the direction from which the scream seemed to originate, already in Danger Mode. Of course, I saw nothing but the skeletal form of leafless aspens; the screamer could have been miles off and the sound, obviously the scream of a young girl, may have carried the distance to me merely by chance, or she could have been just a hundred yards off. The wind played a strange trick with the sound in this range; what one person hears clearly, another, just yards away, may not hear at all. Depending on how you look at it, I am either in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time.

Regardless, I'm not happy with my situation because now came the life altering decision: to aid, or not to aid? The price for not investigating might be her life, but meddling in business that I was clearly not meant to might cost me, mine. I arrived at a decision almost instantly; my life was more important to me.

It may seem like a heartless decision, but you aren't the one trekking through a high-crime area of East Leona at two in the morning on a Saturday night. I was already going against major personal ethics by taking a shortcut through the parkway; going Captain America and trying to save the random chick in the dark was definitely going to be strike two. Personally, I'd much rather shake hands with the clown from the movie IT. Cold? I think not. You didn't grow up in this city, where walking through a park at night might get you in the Metro section of the paper the next day. Fight or flight, isn't it? Stick with me and I'll teach you how to fly more than a bald eagle. I'm not a heartless person; I'm spineless. There's a difference.

The aspen and sycamore leaves didn't crunch under my feet. The recent rain had left them soft, something I silently thanked the heavens for. My ears were operating at emergency status as I picked my way through the trees. Hazel eyes wide, freezing like a deer at every sound, I fled. Eventually, I noticed the trees thinning and realized there was a road. From the looks of it, I wasn't that far from the same block I'd started at. My relief was immediate and I wasn't even disappointed that my supposed shortcut was for nothing. A twig snapped a few yards behind me and I stiffened, taking in my surroundings. No birds- bad sign. Stereotypical Twig Snap- worse sign.

Just when I was about to upgrade Danger Mode to full blown Panic Mode, headlights swept through the trees, illuminating the bone white trunks of the aspens and startling an owl into flight-which startled me into nearly peeing my pants- as a car approached from around the corner. Unwittingly, I stepped closer to the road, throwing up an arm and hoping the driver would see me; even if I was a coward, someone should know about the girl. The car, which had started to slow before I'd even stepped to the edge of the road, rolled to a stop in front of an aged warehouse, pulling to the side of the highway and cutting its engine. There was no way the driver could have seen me in this darkness, several dozen meters from the dull sodium-vapor streetlights that marked the start of civilization.

For a few more seconds, and I wondered why they'd stopped. Maybe there was something in the road? A chill crawled slowly up my spine even as I retreated to the pitch black shadow of the large sycamore tree behind me, sensing that something was not right. Too apprehensive to make my presence known, and too afraid of being left out here to pass the possibility of safety up, I slowly moved closer to the vehicle, using a thin barrier of half barren trees as cover to shield my approach. From my new position, I watched as the door swung open and the cab light made it possible for me to make out more detail about the vehicle. I was relieved to see the familiar markings of a Rosser, even if it was, as I recognized, Sydney Colby behind the wheel.

Rather, I was relieved until I remembered where I was. What was a Rosser like Colby doing all the way out in Black Aspen? I know you need a bit of history on the word to fill you in, but we're under a time restraint so you'll just have to live with a brief informational: 'Rosser' is a nickname liberally given to any marked cop car in honor of the esteemed Daniel Rosser, Police Chief of Leona. Daniel Rosser was, in my opinion, a waste of a human being. Owing to the fact that Leona was completely corrupt, it was no surprise that our Chief of Police was as well. Innocent bystander or ruthless drug lord, the rule was the same; cross a Rosser and you're as good as dead.

For the second time that night, a girl's shriek brought me back to reality. Colby had gotten out of the car alone, but now he was towing a sobbing girl from the back. She was skimpily clad in only a short black skirt and silky top, her heels scratched against the concrete sidewalk as Colby drug her by her hair towards the door of the warehouse.
"Please!" The girl sobbed, her voice slurred by some concoction of drugs or alcohol, "please just let me go."

"Shut up, bitch," he barked, his voice just as gravelly as I remembered it.
"Please, don't do this," she begged, "I promise I won't tell anyone."
He laughed, a hard, cold laugh filled with knowing, "damn right you won't, sweetheart. You're not going to be speaking to anyone for a long time." The way he drug out the word made his intentions obvious.
"No-o," her pleas were drowned out as he wretched the creaking door open and hauled her in. She kicked and scratched at anything she could, trying to crawl away. I knew she wouldn't succeed.

"Play dead," I whispered to her, knowing she couldn't hear. Sinking to the ground and pulling my knees up to my chest, I hugged them tightly, trying to calm my nerves. I should be running, trying to get as far from here as possible, but I couldn't. Instead, I sat there in the shadow of a giant sycamore, enormous yellow leaves sifting down silently on me as the wind battered the dark umbrage.

The girl in the woods was forgotten, as was the twig snapping. Time passed- I wasn't sure how much because my cell phone was in my purse, which I'd left in the bar. Eventually, the door of the warehouse swung back open and Colby stepped out, disheveled but triumphant. There was a flash as he lit up a cigarette and took a long drag. Then he gave one slow and steady look around; searching for witnesses. His eyes swept over the trees where I hid and, after what seemed like an eternity, he got back in the Rosser and pulled away.

When he was out of sight I waited roughly five minutes before picking my way towards the warehouse. And, while the little coward of a man behind the controls in my brain was busy pressing the ABORT button as fast as he could, I was again at a crossroads. You know those stupid girls who, even when the little voice in the back of their mind is yelling "It's a trap", they go into the dark alleyway or take the ominous shortcut anyway and then end up getting raped or brutally beaten and left for dead? Yeah, well I'm not one of them. That little voice and I communicate quite regularly; not in a creepy psycho way, more of a 'we need to talk before your ass gets murdered' kind of way. We debate on all topics and come to a solution that we can both live with- one that keeps me alive.

I let myself into the warehouse, giving the door a hard pull and stepping lightly over broken glass and rotting boards. Realizing how stupid I was, I began to back out. This building was huge; searching every room of it for a dead body that I wasn't about to report was insanity.

"P-please," a whisper begged, "please help me."
"Hello?" Disbelief colored my tone, there was no way he'd left her alive.
I heard a shifting sound, like a bag sliding over the glass covered floor. "Over here," she directed and I realized that, as my eyes adjusted to the deeper shade of blackness, I could make out the faint form of someone lying in the corner. I rushed to her side and tried to help her up, ignoring her feeble protests. I realized she was hurt, but we had to get out of here.

"Be quiet," I ordered, hauling her off the floor and supporting as much of her weight as I could. We were nearly to the door when another pair of headlights lit up the opening. I froze and, beside me, the girl stopped breathing. The car cut its engine exactly where, an hour or two before, Colby had parked. My hands shook and my knees were slowly giving out.

And, after all that, I left her there. I heard the shot as I made it out of a back window, scraping my knee on the jagged ledge. The crack of the Chief's Special I knew Rossers always carried startled me and I fell, landing hard on my backside. I ran through every back alleyway I could think of on my route home, wondering if she'd given me up. The possibility of meeting a rapist or murderer was nearly welcome at this point; anything was better than a crooked Rosser like Colby.

The journey back to my 6th story flat was oddly calm. No one stopped to ask me why I was in such a hurry, but they did give the girl's blood on my shirt an apprehensive glance and step out of my way. When I got inside, I locked every bolt on the door before going to sit in the steaming shower for nearly two hours, trying to scrub the guilt away. Two girls might have died tonight, simply because I was scared. That made me sick.

Colby had a reputation in Lower Leona, where I lived, as a shady Rosser. He visited prostitutes and hit up drug dealers regularly. He was the definition of crooked cop, and the reason nobody downtown trusted a Rosser. We took care of our own problems and, as long as the cops stayed out of it, the street laws seemed to hold pretty well. Regardless, I had never imagined Sydney Colby to be as ruthless as he had acted with that girl.

I didn't sleep at all that night, even though I started school again on Monday and I knew how nervous I got when sleep deprived. I sat, staring down at the street in front of my apartment, thinking surely he would have come for me. He didn't. Twice, though, I was nearly sent into a panic attack when a Rosser drove by, but I calmed down when they continued on with their sweep of the block; searching for some young drug dealer they could hit up for cash.