Run baby run

The weather forecast was right: within moments of exiting the diner, the heavens opened and unleashed their fury; rain fell in buckets, soaking everything. After convincing Max to hang behind and spend time with his brother, I ran to my car, quickly getting soaked as I unlocked it and dove into the driver's seat.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered, shrugging off my jacket as I put my seatbelt on, preparing to drive the winding road home. Maybe I might even see Ariana in her window studying if it wasn’t too late…

As I headed out of town, weaving smoothly in and out of the traffic, even with the strong lights in my car, it was still really hard to see more than five feet ahead, and impatiently, it wasn’t long before I had slowed to a crawl. The school came into view, and the building was dark, with no sign of life. Funny how much a place can change when it doesn’t have the injection of kids hustling and bustling around.

Truth be told, I was a decent student; my teachers got so frustrated with my effortless grasp of every subject and my failure to hand in homework or turn up to class on time, but despite this, I always passed the tests, and the teachers, after a while, just started to accept it.

The puddles on the road looked more like creeks the further I drove, and just around the bend before the suburb I called home, Pikes Creek, an actual creek, had burst its banks, covering the road in water at least knee-deep. Knowing my baby wouldn’t make it through that, I turned off the ignition, thinking about where to go. I could lock my car up, wade through the water, and jog the last couple of k’s home, or attempt to turn my car around on a narrow road with a blind spot in the rain, risking an accident. My only other option was to call Max and get him to send someone to pick me up. I leaned over to grab my phone from the glove compartment, and once I had the damn thing in my hands and pressed the power button, I waited, watching the water slowly rise.

My phone was dead. Goddamn it!

There was nothing for it but to back my baby to the side gravel where she’d be safe, grab what I needed, and haul ass before the water rose any higher. 

I hate putting wet clothes back on, but my jacket would at least provide added warmth from the waist up as I jogged, and it had pockets for my wallet, phone, and anything else I needed. 

Opening the door was a jarring experience. Somewhere between the diner and here, the weather had not only pissed down, but it was colder than a Nun’s fanny.

“Fuck me!”

And then I heard it. Out of the soundproof confines of my car, I heard a scream. Listening again, trying to cancel out the sounds of Mother Nature to see what direction it was coming from, I heard another scream. I’m pretty sure the scream was a female’s, and it was past the water. She sounded fucking terrified.

Ariana

She hadn’t walked more than five hundred meters before the rain started coming down in earnest. Ariana tried using her bag as an umbrella but it wasn’t effective and after another hundred metres it hurt her arms and head, having to try and balance it above herself while the bag was filled with textbooks. 

It was just her luck that they lived one town over, while her classmates lived closer to the school. There was no point ringing anyone to ask for a ride, and moaning never changed anything so Ariana decided to stash her bag in the bushes and run the rest of the way. There was a tree that had a nice outcrop of cutty grass, perfect to conceal her bag from the road, and gratefully Ariana quickly jogged over, placing her bag in the middle where it wasn’t as wet.

Maybe if the rain wasn’t making such a loud noise or the wind wasn’t blowing the sounds away from her, she might have been better prepared when two burly arms wrapped themselves around her waist, lifting her clear off the ground.

Twisting in his arms, Ariana turned to look at the face of the person who had her, her brain still playing catch up on her situation.

Two large men stood behind the giant that held her, their hair plastered to their faces by the rain, dark eyes filled with cruelty gazing at her and Ariana knew a moment of fear before her captor spoke, “Well, well, Ariana Scott, how fortunate are we to catch you on your own?”

Ariana trembled, hearing the voice of her nightmares. The McCann brothers were well-known predators, living off the land, in a log cabin way up in the bushes. Parents used to scare their kids with stories of them taking off with children who didn’t stay in their beds after dark, and Ariana’s father was no exception. They hardly ever came into town, but the weather must have forced them to seek warmer accommodation, and they’d happened upon Ariana as they headed into town.

Derek, Paul, and Sam McCann were brutes. Built like tanks from living in the wild, resembling bears with their shaggy hair and dirty skin, but there was only one thing crossing Ariana’s mind right now, and that was the newspaper article a few years back when a couple of women hiking, went into the woods up where the brothers lived, and only one woman came back, clothes torn and all bloodied up, Bethany Andrews wasn’t even coherent enough to provide a credible explanation for where her friend was, claiming they were attacked by three bears, and she only managed to get away because they focused on her friend.

Everything clicked into place in a second for Ariana, and she lifted a leg back as far as she could, kicking the family jewels of the man restraining her, causing him to drop her and clutch at his balls. She didn’t wait for the other two to start chasing her, going into flight mode, running as fast as she could until the bend appeared, signaling that Arianna only had two kilometres left to run to make it home.

 Blood pumped hard in her ears, the sound of Ariana’s heavy breathing providing a hypnotizing backdrop as her legs pushed as hard as they could. Launching herself around the last bend, Ariana let out a startled cry as Pikes Creek burst its banks, spilling water onto the road. She knew if she stopped, the brothers would catch her, so willing her legs to stay strong, Ariana plowed straight through. Misreading how fast the water was traveling, she was instantly knocked off her feet, scraping her legs and hands on the road as she scrambled to get back up and carry on. Her ankle refused to obey her brain, buckling under her weight again and again until Ariana had no option but to crawl. Risking a look behind as she dragged herself through the water, she screamed, seeing the two other brothers gaining on her, bad intentions dancing in their obsidian eyes, and real fear began snaking its way through her belly as she forced herself to keep going. Reaching the other side just as the two men crashed into the water, Ariana got to her feet, trying desperately to ignore the pain screaming through her ankle as she doggedly jogged on as fast as she could. She was just around the bend when they tackled her, their huge bodies squashing her between them and the road. 

“HELP! SOMEBODY PLEASE! HELP!”

Ariana’s face was smashed onto the gravel, muffling all efforts to alert someone, and the man on top of her leaned down, the stench of body odour and bad breath overwhelming her,

“Now you can be quiet like a good girl, who knows, maybe we’ll even let you go when we’re done, or you can keep on fighting, and we can be a whole lot rougher than it has to be. So tell us, Ariana, what’s it gonna be?”