Bonus Chapter : A Walk in the Dark

This “Please Use Rear Exit” bonus chapter is sponsored by:

All the Things That Scare the Shit out of You

atya left her friends on the Brown BTWN. Her girls continued on the bus to the #720, but she just wanted to go home. She walked through the transfer pod’s automatic doors and walked along Little Rectangle’s sleepy street to her apartment. The route was immaculately well kept, especially in comparison to the other lines in its price range. Faux-brick dominated most of the interior’s floor and during the day it bustled with foot traffic going to the suburban bus’s quaint corner stores or cheerful transfer stations. Like many others, Katya went jogging in the mornings; the

BONUS CHAPTER(( a walk in the dark ))

K

bright heat lights from above were hot on her skin and she imagined it was the closet thing to the mythical sun from ancient lore that she would ever feel. But as the night moved further and further from the day-hours, the lights dimmed, perhaps to save energy or maybe to provide an illusion of whatever the “outside” was supposed to be. Katya had never seen it as dark as it was as she left the transfer and began her walk home. She had drank a few glasses of wine with the girls and what normally gave her the warm comfort of home, quickly grew into an uncontrollable paranoia. She took out her cell phone and decided to call Mikhail. It’d make her feel better to hear a familiar voice. She was feeling good about their rediscovered relationship, him just coming to his senses already, and their second beginning was feeling like something she could trust. He

would be different this time. The phone rang once before cutting off, her screen smiling at her fainter and fainter before it went black. Katya picked up her pace and tried to restart her phone. It wouldn’t budge. The battery was dead. It was a 10 minute walk to her apartment and she told herself that she could do it alone. She put her cell back in her purse and tucked the leather bag tight beneath her armpit. It was only 10 minutes. At all hours, even these ungodly late ones, women did it without problem, all the time. It was only 10 minutes to get home. She felt alone in the terminal. There were no lights peaking out from the apartment windows that faced the main corridor, none of the pedestrian bustle she was used to, no one at all was in sight. Her steps furiously echoed. The click of her heels bounced back from the ceiling, startling her with each vicious

return. She kept turning her head from side to side, checking beyond the bends of her peripheral vision with a desperate need to see everything around her. The nooks and crannies and gaps between buildings, the same ones that she always said were so charming and vintage-feeling, now possessed unknown dangers, waiting and lurking to attack her at her weakest. Shit. I probably look scared. Looking around like a ‘fraidy-cat, sprinting home, Katya thought, that’s no good. She calmed her breathing, straightened her posture to its biggest and baddest pinnacle, and slowed her steps to a purposeful and confident jaunt. That’s a better presentation. Just stay alert and prepared, but looking scared doesn’t help me. Bad guys are like dogs, right? They smell fear. OK, I’m not scared...I’m not scared...of bad boys or big dogs.

Katya was terrified. Between the words of her very own pep-talk, images of being raped pillaged her mind. She saw herself being pushed to the ground from behind and forced to turn onto her back. Her shirt was torn at its seams and the imaginary hairy hands that groped beneath her bra burned her skin in actuality. Her skirt would be hiked up and her panties ripped off. Her nose was bleeding from its impact on the fake bricks and no matter how hard she kicked, punched, spit and bit, there was nothing she could do, no way to remove the mass of man on top of her unbuckling his pants. Then, two more shadows would step out of the darkness and she would see their toothless smiles and the faint sparkle of drool in the dying light, as she was absolutely helpless.

Her pace had quickened again. Someone screamed behind her. It sounded like it came from above, from one of the apartments that lined the corridor, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder every few seconds, from looking for signs of danger behind every bush and in every dark space. And there were plenty of dark spaces. Nearly at a run, she felt the splash of liquid against her naked legs. Why hadn’t she worn leggings or pantyhose or something to protect her from being raped? The liquid was red and thick. She slowed just enough to reach down and wipe her shin, but couldn’t bring herself to smell the stain on her fingertips. It was all she could do to get a closer look in mid-sprint. It was warm. It looked like blood. It must’ve been

blood. There was no way that it could be anything else. A bottle broke a few hundred yards behind her. She knew that she had missed someone lurking in the shadows and soon his hairy hands would be scratching her skin as the man grunted and smiled a toothless smile. She started to run. Her heart pounded through her chest and she could feel tears streaming down her cheek. As fast as she was running, she wasn’t getting anywhere. She looked behind her and saw a man walking at a gingerly pace. She thought she heard him whistle. Her stiletto heel struck a hole in the floor and stuck. It twisted her ankle and threw her body to the ground, ripping her foot from her shoe. Her hands scraped across the plastic brickwork and Katya could feel them starting to bleed. On the ground, she looked behind her to see the man rushing up.

“Are you OK, ma’am?’ He asked loudly, still at some distance. “Don’t move, did you hurt yourself?” Katya kicked off her other heel and stood up, by now in full sobs. She gathered her purse, not worried about the contents that had sprayed out during her fall. Maybe she screamed something back at him, probably something about “staying the fuck away,” but she couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of her heart. It rushed blood to the scrapes on her hand while her brain pumped adrenaline to her legs. The exertion, the sobs, the terror, they were all making it hard to breath. She could feel the onslaught of an asthma attack. At full sprint, barefoot and barely breathing, she looked back again. Katya had gained some buffer in front of the man, who was just now passing her $200 shoes and the former insides

of her purse. Panicked and panting, she finally reached the stairs to her apartment building. At the door, she dug furiously through her purse. She couldn’t find her keys. The man got closer and closer. Fuck. I dropped them. Fuck. Fuck. She kept digging, every pocket, every crease. Fuck. I have to go back. I have to call someone. She couldn’t call anyone, her battery was dead and Katya felt like she was about to join it. The man was now 20 feet away from her. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Relax. Are you okay, ma’am?” Katya was suddenly aware of the blood that was everywhere. Who knew whose was on her legs, but hers was everywhere else. It was in and on her purse, on her arms, her shirt, her jacket...Shit, my jacket...my keys are in my jacket...

in the pocket. Katya grabbed the keys from her jacket pocket, but her shaking hands dropped them to the stoop at her shoeless feet. As she ducked down to pick them up, she put the keys between the webs of her fingers, clenching them tightly in a brass knuckled ball of pointed fury. But the man made a right turn and went down a flight of stairs into the apartment next door. Convinced this was a ploy, she didn’t relax, furiously turning through her keys. Why do I have so many fuckin’ keys, here! Here it is! She opened up the door and slammed it shut behind her. She sprinted up the two flights of stairs, readying her apartment key as she skipped two, sometimes three steps at a time. She could feel the stairs pound on her naked soles. Katya opened that door and

locked all three locks behind her, before running around to turn on every light in the small studio she called home. Once she opened up both closets and the shower curtain, with a knife from the kitchen in hand, Katya started to calm herself down. She was finally alone. She looked in the bathroom mirror into a face streaked with blood. She washed her hands and then her face. The scrapes on her hand weren’t that bad, a little sore, but nothing that would require stitches. Still crying, Katya sat on the floor and unravelled a handful of toilet paper to wipe her splattered legs. The blotches on the paper looked more purple then the blood she had just rinsed from the upper part of her body. It smelled like grape. It was juice. Katya started the shower and plugged in her phone. Turning it on,

she waited for it to reboot. Despite the time stretch of the harrowing ordeal she had just escaped, imagined or not, the phone seemed to take forever. Once it came into service, she watched intently for the new messages to pop up. This took even longer. Surely Mikhail would’ve called her back. It rang once before her battery died and it must’ve worried him. When her phone finally came into service, it revealed that there were no new messages. She called Mikhail, but it went straight to voicemail, all three times, before she hopped into the shower to wash the grape juice from her legs and the tears from her face.