By Martie Coetser
The sound of a speeding car close behind urged Mia to steer her bike onto the pavement and almost through a shrubby fence. Anger overwhelmed her. The yellow Honda was her heart’s desire for more than three years. At last, a week ago, on her sixteenth birthday, she finally got it. And now she was battling to free it from this shrubby fence. The wind was blowing her hair all over her face, making it impossible for her to see what she was doing or the scoundrel who was speeding like a maniac in a built-up area.
Abruptly she became aware of the car that had come to a standstill right behind her. It was a black car with dark-tinted windows. A man who was dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt was standing between her and the car’s opened door.
The next moment she found herself inside the car, gasping for air under the unbearable weight of a man’s body, stinking of fish, old sweat and garlic. The car was moving fast, cutting corners evidenced by screaming tires.
Her mouth was as dry as a whistle, her heart was hammering in her throat; the realisation that her life was in danger paralysed her like an anaesthetic.
A power inside her took over. The next moment she found herself sitting in the corner of the back seat, twisted with her arms around her legs. In the process of freeing herself, she had kicked the man where no man should be kicked. She expected to be killed with one blow the moment the man caught his breath. In vain she tried to open the door.
They were driving on the N-1 highway. Nobody on the outside could see her through the tinted windows. The steel-blue eyes, in the rear-view mirror, of a driver with a big shaved head, sent shivers with blades through her veins. She had no doubts, she was facing Death.
When the man next to her, the ugliest man she had ever seen, started to hit her in the face, she felt no pain. The hate and contempt in his eyes penetrated her soul and released the tears no one was supposed to see.
The post Kidnapped appeared first on Daily Independent, Nigerian Newspaper.