I was about to ask her what she saw when she started sprinting forward, and that was answer enough for me. I tried to catch up to her, but she wasn’t about to slow down for me, remaining a few steps ahead.
The street ended with a parking garage, and Jane ran into it, and rather dumbly, I followed her. There had to be other places with crowds, but her first choice had been a dimly lit underground parking garage.
I allowed myself a look back for the first time. In the darkness, I could see little more than the silhouettes of four large men. When they saw me looking at them, one of them started to cat call.
I ran forward, only to realize Jane wasn’t in front of me. I didn’t have a very good fight or flight reflex, so I just froze when I didn’t see her.
“Over here!” Jane hissed, but the acoustics in the garage were awful. I couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from, so I just stood frozen underneath a flickering yellow light and hoped that my death would be quick and painless.
“Hey little girl,” one of the guys purred in a voice that sounded anything but friendly.
I turned to face them. Since I had stopped running, so had they, and they strolled over to me.
“Do you always run from a good time?” another one asked. For some reason, the rest of them thought that was hilarious, and their laughter filled the garage.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I opened my mouth to say something, maybe even scream, but nothing came out. I stood in a pool of cold water and oil, and the light above me decided to go out for good.
Closing my eyes against the dark, I didn’t want to risk seeing anything they did to me. They talked amongst themselves, laughing and making perverted jokes, and I knew I was going to die.
Somewhere behind me, I heard the screech of tires, but I just squeezed my eyes shut tighter.
-2-
“Hey! What are you doing?” a voice shouted to the side of me. As soon as I heard him speak, I knew that it didn’t belong to the group of guys closing in on me, and I opened my eyes.
“What’s it to you?” a large tattooed guy growled, but he started taking a step back. A car had pulled in the parking space to my right, shining the bright headlights past me.
“I think you should just back off,” the new voice said.
I peeked over to the side at him, but the shadows from the headlights hid him. It was too dark for me to make anything out, except his pink tee shirt.
He took another step forward, and my would-be-attackers continued taking steps back. They weren’t moving very fast enough, and then suddenly, the blur of the pink shirt rushed towards them.
The darkness and my fear couldn’t let me trust my eyesight anymore. It looked as if the pink shirt was moving faster than humanly possible, and the guys yelled as he pushed them, sending them flying out of the garage.
I blinked my eyes to adjust them better, and then everyone was gone.
Not everyone, exactly. The light above me flickered on again, and the guy in the pink shirt stood next to me. In big black letters across his chest, his shirt read, “Real men wear pink.”
He looked older than me, probably in his early twenties, and he wasn’t particularly well-built or tall. In fact, he leaned more towards wiry than he did muscular, and I couldn’t imagine what had frightened off the other guys.
His face was open and friendly, and he had an easy smile that I couldn’t help but respond to, even though I had just been a few moments away from death.
“Are you okay?” he asked, appraising me.
“Yeah,” I said in a voice that barely sounded like my own. “You saved my life.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he replied, completely ignoring the fact that he’d done anything heroic.
“My friend Jane is around here somewhere.”
I remembered Jane and looked around for her. Part of me was angry that she had done nothing to save me, but then again, neither had I, and I didn’t think that I should hold her to a higher standard than I did myself.
“Two girls?” He raised an eyebrow.
“I think Jane has mace,” I added lamely.
“Where is this alleged friend?” He took his turn scanning the parking lot, and then pointed to something by a van parked on the other side. “I think I see her over there.”