Vice

23: Night Meeting

An eerie quiet settles over the town as Natara pushes her bike toward home. 

No cars pass her by on the streets. No one else walks down the sidewalks. All of the local businesses sit shadowed by darkness, with the exception of a scattered gas station with their doors and windows barred shut with just enough of an opening for the cashier to ring someone up and hand them their cigarettes.

Usually, silence is peaceful for Natara. In the silence, she doesn't have to worry about being asked any questions about her future. She doesn't need to be concerned about hearing she did yet another thing wrong at work. She can walk alone with her thoughts beneath the moonlight.

But something about tonight's silence feels unnerving. The chill of the nighttime air brushes the nape of her neck and sends shivers through her body. Natara wants to get home and she wants to be there quickly. If only her bike hadn't broke.

...Or been sabotaged. She still thinks the chain being broken when it was perfectly fine this morning is awfully suspicious.

Because of her discomfort, Natara makes the unusual decision to take a shortcut across the town's bridge. 

Usually there's too much traffic for her to consider going home that way but the streets are still and show no sign of changing. She also avoids the bridge because occasionally there's a gang or a drug dealer hanging around below the bridge and that's not something she wants to accidentally get involved with.

But Natara wants to get home so badly that she's willing to take the risk tonight. She assures herself that she'll sprint across the bridge with her bike beside her if she needs to. So - there she is - booking it across the bridge when she comes across the first person she's seen out on the streets tonight.

It's a young man, maybe five or six years older than Natara. A pair of pure white slim jeans cling to his legs and a loose white over-shirt billows behind him in the chilly breeze. His hair is as pale as his skin and his clothing - bright blonde, sticking up haphazardly in a collection of messy spikes. 

Under the moon's glow, he looks like a ghost.

Natara stares for a few seconds before she feels her heart sink to her stomach. It's not the man who makes her heart sink, but what the man is doing. 

He's going to jump off the bridge, Natara realizes.

"Hey, stop!" She screams , dropping her bike. She steps closer, slowly, afraid she might startle him into a fall. The young man's shoulders tense, but he otherwise doesn't move. He doesn't bother even turning around to look at her. Natara's heart thrums violently in her chest as she continues stepping toward him.

Her anxiety feels overactive; her chest tightens and her legs shake as she travels down the bridge. What is she supposed to do in this kind of situation? Should she call the police? Would that startle him even more if he caught her doing so?

"Why don't you, um, come down here? It's a l-lot safer to stand down here instead of up on the guardrail like that," she stammers. Her eyes swivel between the edge of the bridge and the man. She's not sure if she imagined it, but she almost hears a low chuckle slip through the breeze.