“Me and You Against the World” (Section 1)
“Noah, it’s our song,” Lily said turning the volume of the radio so high the car practically shook. She hoped the other drivers would hear it outside the car as they passed. “Me and you against the world!” the song exclaimed through the speakers. She smiled and leaned back in her seat.
“Not so loud, Lily,” Noah said quickly glancing in the rearview mirror. “Turn that down, please. I’ve got to concentrate.”
She reluctantly complied, but kept it loud enough to cover the roar of the car and pavement. She reminisced in her seat about the rainstorm. She seldom thought about the rainstorm, she much preferred the morning after, but it was such a crucial turning point in her life that she often thought about it when her adrenaline had worn down.
It was a night where everyone could hear the rain. It flooded the streets, overfilled the sewers, swept cars up in a single wave. Hundreds of cars on the highway split the water like Moses, drenching her huddled body on the shoulder of the road in a mass of heavy cold. She stuck out her now blue thumb one more time trying to get anyone to stop. But the rain was a blanket of wet and she couldn’t see into the light of the cars and she knew the windshields were too smeared with water to see her. Finally, a car stopped a few feet away from her in the shoulder and blinked its lights. She walked over to the driver’s side as the window went down.
“Need a lift?” a man asked her. He squinted up into the rain through the small slit of open window he let her talk through.
“Yes,” she said. “I need to go to Union Station.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Get in back.” The window shut before she could thank him and she opened the back door of the car quickly and slipped inside.
She hadn’t noticed how nice the car was until she was out of the rain. It had a heavy smell of leather and aftershave with a black coffee interior. The man reached over and turned on the heat for her and a blast of warm air hit her in the face from a vent she couldn’t see. She thanked him, but he didn’t reply and only asked her again where she wanted to go.
“Union station,” she repeated.
He made an affirmative grunt from the front seat. She glanced out the blurry windows as they past, but all of the signs looked like waves of color and the lights were will-o-the-wisps. She leaned back in the car inhaling the leather while he drove in silence into the city.
She woke up a little while later. The car was stopped but she couldn’t see her destination for all of the water. The man was gone along with the keys. The world outside was dark and the rain still pounded on the roof of the car. She reached out for the handle of the door, but when she pushed to open it, it didn’t budge.
“Looks like someone’s awake,” another male said. The door was shut and then flung open and someone reached in and pulled her out into a soaking wet parking lot of a highway oasis. About six men came to her side of the car and something hit her in the stomach like an anvil. She kicked one and two grabbed her legs; the group of men becoming something of a hydra. She reached out to punch another and both her arms were stuck. She closed her eyes and tried to tighten up, willing the tears out of her eyes so she could see a weakness in their armor. She felt a hand reach for the wallet in her pocket…
Then the headlights of a car hit the back of the mob and scattered them like vampires to the sun. She fell onto the ground with a thud and barely got her head far enough away before the kidnapping vehicle sped away towards the highway. She pushed herself up and tried to see the new car. The rain settled up enough for her to see a figure get out of the driving seat and walk towards her. She made out the letters and numbers on his license plate: ME N U 218. She willed herself not to black out, but she felt faint. She nodded her head and grabbed the hand that reached out to help her. No more, she thought and then fainted.
She woke up in the bed of a motel room cursing herself violently. But she was dressed and lying neatly on top of the covers. She got up and looked around the small room. Besides having one bed, everything else was unused and she had a sinking feeling she was all alone. She didn’t know why since the events of the previous night were enough for her to wish to be alone for centuries. There was a knock at her door and she walked cautiously over to open it.
“Morning,” the boy at her door said. He smiled. “I understand if you don’t want to let me in, but I promise I’m not going to touch you.”
He was wearing a black tee shirt and jeans with red and black converse shoes and he had a dark gray newsboy cap in one hand. His eyes were light bluish gray like winter and his hair cherry wood brown. In the morning sun it looked much more red than she found out it actually was. He stepped back to lean against the railing of the balcony across from her door. Although she could see a ghost of his breath, he wasn’t wearing a jacket; she was shivering.
Lily opened the door a little wider. “What do you want?”
“Sorry I didn’t introduce myself last night, you seemed pretty distraught, so I thought I’d let you sleep.” He extended his hand. “I’m Noah.”
“Lily,” she said. “And thanks for helping me…and giving me this room to myself.”
“It’s only fair,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, sorry. I took the liberty of seeing who you were. Don’t worry, you’re wallet is still in your jacket pocket. But I was wondering if you were interested in doing me a favor. You are twenty-one after all.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, sorry to bother you, then,” he said. He snapped his cap on his head and gave her a little nod before stuffing his hands in his jean pockets and heading down the stairs towards his car. She shivered in the cold and headed back inside. Turning on the television, she slumped on the bed.
“Good morning, Green Bay. The temperature today is—”
She shut it off suddenly grasped by a terror she couldn’t explain. Her groggy mind was coming to like an old machine finally warming up to the tasks at hand. She ran to the door and down the stairs running after the boy and hoping—praying—he would be in the vicinity. Green Bay was a long way from Chicago.
As she ran around the front of the building a blue car stopped and Noah got out of the driver’s side. She didn’t care that he was illegally parked or the fact that he seemed to know she would be running after him in a short enough time.
“Please,” she said. The whine in her voice surprised her. “Take me back home.”
“And where would that be?” he said patiently.
“I need to get to Union Station,” she started and then stopped. “Well, just take me to Chicago.”
“I hate to seem rude,” he said leaning against his car like James Dean, “but I don’t want to keep doing favors for a stranger who doesn’t do something in return. I don’t have time to drive all the way back to Chicago for you. I do have a job.”
“But I have no other way of getting there,” Lily said. “You already know I don’t have money for a bus or train.”
“All I’m asking is that you help me with something along the way.”
“Fine,” Lily said. “Just don’t get me arrested or hurt.”
Noah smiled. “Absolutely not. I just need an extra set of hands for something. I’ll tell you more about it in the car.”
And the rest was history, Lily thought, smiling to herself. The song faded off the radio and Lily reached over to turn the volume down.
“I think we finally lost them,” Noah said.
“Good.”
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction, Short Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.