Forgetting to Remember

The Attack

I am walking suspiciously fast in an ally too dark and gloomy for a high schooler on a Tuesday night. If it wasn’t been so important, I would’ve stopped myself from going. I keep repeating the same phrases over and over in my head. 

“It’s going to be fine. He just wanted to talk.” 

I find myself standing underneath the familar red awning all too quickly. The lights are off. Even the display case that holds up a retro themed window for the dinner is robbed of its white Christmas lights. My watch says I’m early. He wouldn’t have set me up…would he?

I hate how the door to the diner always creeks. I get a shiver up my spine every time it does, yet surprisingly, it didn’t help that the lights were out everywhere. I had expected a slight glow from the back rooms of the kitchen at least, but there’s still nothing. He wouldn’t have left the place with the alarm disarmed like that…

A squeak makes me turn my head to the left only to see nothing. I can feel my heart throbbing in my chest and my heartbeat quickening. I knew I shouldn’t have listened to him. Where was he? Was he trying to scare me?

Another whisk of sound makes me whip my head forward again, long enough to see the moonlight on the counter flicker. At the sudden blur of my vision, something blue catches my eye, but I am distracted by the empty malt glass that remains on the counter with something still sticking on the bottom. My mind never could seem to focus on just the right thing.

My thoughts turn on me and I can’t find the sanity to move. I am dumbstruck and scared and find myself looking at the black and white checkerboard tiles across the floor, trying to control my breathing. A smear of red to the right catches my eye. Blood? My eyes widen and I can feel myself screaming internally.

“Alright Talia, this would be a good time to run out of here…!”

I take a step back, ready to turn and run the next instant, but I was a second too late. I take the time to remember the last words he had said to me.

“Come alone.”

My thoughts cannot compute as a force makes its way to the back of my head and throttled me forward. Too much pain shoots through my body from the blow to my skull and in falling to the floor I fall into nothing.