Beckoned Through The Dark

29 // Lesego // Road Trip

The night was dark; it was difficult for me to navigate through the bushes. My feet were hurting from being pricked by thorns and they were burning due to the distance I ran. I was cold, thirsty, and hungry.

And I was scared.

I was in the middle of a forest in the middle of nowhere. I didn't know where I was going, and I couldn't go back from where I came from even if I wanted to; I wouldn't remember the way back.

I tried hard to stay calm and listen carefully for car sounds in order to find a road, but the sounds of the forest couldn't be ignored. Every movement in the bushes, the sound of cricketers, the howling of wolves set me on edge. What if there were dangerous wild animals around?

All the way, I kept reminiscing about all the times my mother refused to let me go on camp trips or any school trips for that matter. I'd never gone out on my own, not even to the store; my daily trips included going to school and then going back home later. My mother did all the shopping, and the only time I could go out was if Clay was with me. Bottom line, I didn’t even know the first rule to survive in the forest.

The thought of Clay made me cry at one point. Sometimes I think that Clay was the only best decision my mother has ever made for me. He never gave up on me, no matter how hard I tried to push him away; he was always there and was always the first person to notice when I was down, sometimes I thought that he cared for me and loved me more than my own boyfriend did.

My relationship with Sihle was always different. I don’t know much about relationships, since Clay and Sihle were literally the only guys I ever knew in that sense. But I knew enough to know that my relationship with Sihle was full of limitations; we were not the hands on couple, we basically spoke when necessary and sometimes coincidentally if we ran into each other, and there were days where we would be spotted together several times. We stayed together because we looked good together than we did apart. I didn’t know his reason for staying in this relationship, but I know I stayed with him because I was afraid of giving in to my feelings for Clay.

The thought that Clay could be dead right now and I would never get the chance to tell him how I feel, was what haunted me.

I must have walked for hours before I found a tarred road, by then I was the walking dead. I had no indication of where the road went, I was not sure whether I should go to the left or right; I was stranded.

There were no signs of live, not even a building around or a single car passing by. At the end of the day, my aim was to get as far away from the hostage building as possible, so I headed south, which in my head was to the right.

I was no longer running, I just walked leisurely, silently praying for a car to come by. It must have been after 5km before a black SUV came in the opposite direction, I hurried to the middle of the road and waved my arms for them to see me, but after blinding me with their lights and probably having taken a good look at me, they sped past me. I only caught a glimpse of a white family.

I just dropped my hands in defeat and dropped down right there and did the only thing I could do – I cried.

At that moment I did not care what happened anymore, even if my captors found me, it would be better than this suffering.

My legs were burning from exhaustion and could no longer hold the weight of my body due to the shaking. I had given up and was more than ready to die.

But life was not having it, because at that moment, a car came from the direction I came from and pulled up next to me; and to my surprise, it was the same SUV that passed me a few minutes ago.

A woman hopped out of the driver’s side. “Hey, Miss, are you okay?” She asked while helping me up. “I’m so sorry we passed you like that, my husband was driving and refused to stop. Kids, give me a hand!” The passenger door at the back opened, and a little girl stepped out.

“Junior, get out of the car!” She yelled in a cute little voice.

A second later, a boy about fifteen years old, stepped out from the other side with his eyes fixated on his phone.

“Junior, put that phone away and help your sister to shift those stuff to the back,” the lady scolded, obviously hopeless. She could not do anything because I was leaning against her since I could not stand straight on my own.

I felt embarrassed.

“But, mom, the reason all those things are in there is because the back is already full.”

“Fine, just make space at the back. I’m the three of you can sit together.” She threw a bemused look at the front seat and shook her head in disappointment when the radio volume increased. Her husband was just sitting there and not doing anything.

After a while, she managed to fit the three of us at the back and then got into the car and continued driving straight.

For the first few seconds, it was quiet and awkward; the only thing filling the silence was the boy’s phone as he played games.

“Junior, if you don’t lower that volume down this instant, I’m gonna toss that thing out the window!”

The boy quickly did as told, while the younger sister laughed happily. “Chloe, shut up!” He snapped.

I smiled secretly. Sibling rivalry, it reminded me so much of my siblings, Duncan and Dineo; we were always at each other’s throats. I missed them.

“Thank you for giving me a ride,” I croaked. Damn, I needed a whole tank of cold water right now. As if reading my mind, the husband tossed me a bottle of water, which I barely caught.

“Brad!” The woman scolded and shot me a quick apologetic look. “You are welcome, dear. I’m Tiffany, this is my husband, Bradley, but we call him Brad; and those two are our kids, Bradley Junior and Chloe.”

“I’m Lesego, but my friends call me Les,” I smiled.

“So, Lesego,” she said in her Afrikaans accent. Now that I had a proper look at them, I noticed that they were coloured, and their accents proved it. “Where are you off to?”

Now that was a question I did not know how to answer. “Uhm…” I cleared my throat awkwardly. “I need access to a phone. I was supposed to call someone to pick me up, but my battery died before I could, so, now I am stranded.”

“You poor thing, you must have been scared out here,” Tiffany said, while Junior chuckled besides me. “We would let you use our phones, but they are dead.”

Bradley turned towards us with a grim grin on his face. “We are kinda lost, we were looking for a motel near a garage close by, but our GPS stopped working and we can’t use our phones since they are all off,” he said in a gruffly voice. I looked at the phone in Junior’s hands. “Don’t bother with that one, his tablet is too old, it’s only good for games. His GPS app doesn’t wanna work.”

Junior snickered on my side. Little sneak! He probably disabled his apps. I did not know much about these smartphones, but I saw something similar on Zack’s phone before.

“Isn’t there some sort of a store or garage ahead?” I asked. I mean, they could not have driven all the way without spotting a building around.

“Actually, mom and dad passed a small garage and a motel, but thought it wasn’t the right one,” Junior said.

“They said it wasn’t nice,” Chloe said shyly.

“Well, were there people there or a working phone at least?” I asked hopefully. All I needed right now was a phone!

Bradley nodded affirmatively. “Yeah, I think I saw a paid phone on the side of the road.”

I sighed in relief. That was all I needed. “If you don’t mind, please drop me off there.”

Tiffany and Brad exchanged a worried glance but did not say anything.  “Are you sure about this?” Tiffany asked for the hundredth time fifteen minutes later when she dropped me off on the side road next to the previously mentioned paid phone.

“Yes, I’ll be fine, Tiffany. Don’t worry about me,” I reassured her.

She gave a worried glance around the deserted area and gave me another confirmation look. I nodded affirmatively. “Okay, but if you need anything, we are right at the motel.” She nodded her head towards an old grim-looking motel far behind me, alongside the gravel. “We will be taking a rest there for a few hours before heading on,” she said.

“Thank you, guys; I don’t where I would have been if it wasn’t for you.”

“Bye, Lesego!” Chloe waved crazily as the car turned towards the gravel. I waved at them and watched as their car vanished beyond the dust.

I searched my pocket and retrieved the small piece of paper that would determine my life in the next few hours.

Thankfully, I got some coins from Bradley. I punched in the numbers on the old phone, and the receiver end rang.