Sole Survivor

by Holly Dunn

  “You’re crazy—I can’t do art,” I said. “I’m not creative. I can barely draw a stick person.”

  “Sure you can. You don’t have to be good to be creative. Anybody can do this.”

  He pulled a sheet of paper from his sketchpad and handed me a set of colored chalks. I took the chalk and started fanning bold arcs across the page in yellow, fuchsia, green, and blue. Then I used a fork to write my name in the chalk and engrave designs into the bright arcs. While I was playing with the chalks, Chris placed his hand on the center of a piece of paper and traced it with one crayon after another. He drew concentric shapes of bright hues that radiated outward until the page looked like it was pulsating.

  I couldn’t help smiling, both at his childlike spirit and how he had pulled me out of myself into this new, undeniably positive experience. This was exactly what his friends loved about him. He would turn a rainy day into an adventure, splashing in puddles and shaking droplets from the trees. If the sun was shining, he’d be flying kites against the wind. Chris had an irrepressible, infectious energy. When I was with him, he made me feel like the most important person in the room. He was always smiling, and he would always greet you with a hug. He gave the best hugs.

  Shortly before school started, he took off on his trip to Maine. While he was gone, he called me several times and left funny messages on my answering machine.

  “Holly, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said once, “but I have no concept of time right now. I’m out here, and it’s just amazing.”

  He made me laugh. I had no idea what he was talking about. It sounded like he was reaching out to me from another dimension somewhere in time and space.

  By the time he came back to Lexington, I had moved out of the apartment on Aylesford Place and back into my sorority house in preparation for the start of the semester. Chris brought me a souvenir from Maine—a plastic ring that looked like it came out of a Cracker Jack box. A purple daisy with a glittery stone in the middle and an adjustable metal band. It was simple, but it meant he had been thinking about me. He really liked me. This was amazing.

  I was glad to have him back and aglow at the prospect of a new school year. Classes were starting soon, and parties would commence soon after. We had plans to go out the next Thursday night, and his fridge was stocked for a picnic we were planning for Friday. Everything about our being together in the days and months ahead seemed so full of promise. On a scale from like to love, we were firmly in the “really, really like” phase. He was truly someone special, and I could tell that this would be a relationship I would never forget.

  CHAPTER 2.

  House Party

  The foliage around Lexington wouldn’t start changing colors for at least another three months, but by late August, fall was in full swing on the University of Kentucky campus. As the new school year started, the campus teemed with energy.

  Move-in day at a school as big as UK is an epic event. Thousands of students—along with parents, resident advisors, and student volunteers—converge on campus to help freshmen and returning students set up residence in campus housing. The streets are congested and the sidewalks are lined with moving dollies and metal carts stacked with boxes, crates, plastic tubs, small appliances, and garbage bags stuffed with bed linens and clothing. Every college student settling into the new year is entering a new phase of life. For many freshmen, it’s the first time they’ve ever lived away from home. Other students are rising up a grade, one year closer to graduation and the start of adult life. But the best part is that it’s a season for making new friends and for reconnecting with all the friends you haven’t seen all summer.

  By move-in day, I had already moved out of my apartment on Aylesford Place and back into the Kappa house with my sorority sisters in preparation for new-member recruitment, which took place the week before classes began. Students who were participating in recruitment also moved in about a week ahead of everyone else. About a fifth of the undergraduate guys and a third of the female undergraduates took part in Greek life at UK. Joining a fraternity or sorority was a great way to make friends and get involved in campus life. My sorority had about 120 members, and we welcomed more than thirty new girls once recruitment was complete. Being a Kappa was a source of endless fun and immense joy, though I couldn’t have known back when I first joined exactly what my sorority sisters would mean to me in the months to come.

  Classes started on Wednesday, August 27. Over the summer, Chris and I had admitted to each other that we were used to getting by at school with minimal effort, but we wanted to work harder that year. I was carrying a full course load, and I made a diligent effort to attend all my scheduled classes those first two days of school. On Thursday, I had a date with Chris to attend an off-campus Phi Psi party, and I couldn’t have been more excited for an evening out with him.

  That Thursday night, the Kappa house was buzzing as girls got ready for parties or to go out of town for the Labor Day weekend. The Kappa house is an elegant, red-brick building with four cream-colored columns reaching high to the top of its pitched roof and a long walkway that runs from East Maxwell Street to the front door. Since the start of my sophomore year, I lived in one of the bedrooms on the second floor. I loved living in the sorority house. We had a cook and a maid, which made it feel like living in a hotel all the time. Plus, there were always people around to hang out or watch a movie or grab a smoothie off campus.

  Before I headed upstairs to get ready, I spent time on the side porch telling my sorority sisters how excited I was about Chris. I had been to fraternity parties in the past, but going on a date with someone who was actually in the fraternity was new for me.

  Getting ready can be half the fun of going out. It wasn’t a fancy-schmancy date; I wanted to look good but not like I had tried too hard. I picked out brand-new, tan corduroy pants and a brown leather belt, a white T-shirt, and my favorite Birkenstocks—light beige, closed-toed leather clogs that I wore everywhere. I put on small, silver hoop earrings and a silver necklace with little pine cones dangling from the chain. On one hand I wore two silver rings—one was my Kappa ring in the shape of a key, and the other was three concentric bands connected by a squiggly design. On the other hand, I wore the funny ring Chris brought me back from Maine. Every time I looked at it, it made me smile.

  The sun had long set by the time Chris pulled into the driveway on the side of the house. I was downstairs waiting with a few sorority sisters who were perched on the side porch smoking cigarettes. I had only seen Chris briefly since he returned from his trip to Maine, and I was thrilled about finally having some time with him.

  Chris drove a gold Isuzu Trooper he nicknamed Buddy. He loved this car. He didn’t have a car his first year at school, so he was excited to be able to get around campus, and to travel out to the Red River Gorge or back and forth to Ohio. As he pulled up, he called to me through a megaphone mounted on top of the Trooper.

  Still seated inside, he held his mouth to a black square microphone and yelled out, “Holly Dunn! Come out! It’s time to go.”

  I laughed out loud hearing his voice booming from the megaphone. No one had ever serenaded me by megaphone before. It made me feel special.

  I climbed into the front seat next to Chris. One of his roommates, Adrienne, and two of his fraternity brothers, Mike and Ryan, were already piled in the back of the Trooper whose stereo was blasting Blind Melon. Chris turned around in our back parking lot and pulled out of the driveway, making his way toward the southwest side of campus.

  We headed straight for the party, hosted by a group of Phi Psi brothers who lived in an off-campus house on Suburban Court. The interior of the house was plain and rundown and packed with forty or fifty people. We were supposed to be celebrating the fraternity’s new recruits and the start of a new year, but despite the crowd and a keg of beer, the atmosphere was listless, and after a couple of hours we grew bored. Labor Day weekend was just ahead, and it seemed many students had already left campus for the holiday.


  “This party isn’t happening. Wanna get out of here?” Chris asked. “Let’s go take a walk.”

  Chris had lived at that house at one point and knew the neighborhood. He said he used to stroll along the nearby tracks to watch trains go by. Mike and Ryan heard us and apparently thought our venture sounded like fun. I’d hoped to have some alone time with Chris, but they ended up following us out the back door. Adrienne stayed behind at the party. Later she would say she tried to join us three separate times, but she kept getting called back by someone she knew, until finally another friend offered her a ride home.

  A small, black backpack with blue and black nylon straps hung from Chris’s shoulders, heavy with a six-pack of his favorite craft beer. He took my hand. I was smitten with this guy and would have preferred to be alone, without his two friends trailing behind.

  Suburban Court was lined with small, Craftsman-style homes, and porch lights from the houses we passed cast the only light on the path. The street dead-ended right at the Norfolk Southern Railway where a double set of train tracks ran north-south the entire length of Lexington. Once we turned north from Suburban Court, the house lights gave way to darkness. It was well after midnight, and the sky was pitch black and still. There was almost no moon, and the air had only just begun to cool from the day’s heat and humidity. I was beginning to regret the corduroy pants I’d chosen.

  Given how close the railroad was to campus, hanging out there seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. We had no idea we were walking into dangerous territory.

  We walked north along the two sets of tracks toward a high, metal tower whose lights signaled approaching trains. To our left was the General Electric lightbulb plant whose expansive grounds were marked off by a chain-link fence topped by continuously looping razor wire. Security lights near the plant’s buildings glowed in the distance and cast only the faintest illumination onto the tracks.

  We scanned the horizon for the pinpoints of light that would signal an oncoming train. That stretch of tracks supported at least a dozen long and brawny freight trains a day. The Norfolk Southern locomotive was shiny jet black with cream-colored trim, its front emblazoned with a steed on its hind legs. The undercarriage stood off the ground nearly as tall as a grown man, and the train’s diesel engine lugged an endless line of boxcars, flatbeds, trailers, and container cars that rose up some twelve to fifteen feet high.

  When I was a kid my family used to lay coins on the tracks near my grandmother’s house back in Evansville. I suggested that we try that too, but the pennies and quarters didn’t so much as tremble on the silent tracks. For the next thirty minutes we strolled and waited, but no trains came by. The guys passed the time by picking up stones from the railroad ballast and hurling them toward the lights on the tower.

  Chris and I were deep in conversation, affectionately absorbed into each other, oblivious to the guys until they started teasing us.

  “Kids. You two are in lovey-dovey grossness. Get a room.”

  Mike and Ryan were feeling like a third wheel and decided to leave.

  “We’re out of brew. We’re gonna head back to the party and let you two be alone.”

  Chris leaned into me. “Let’s stay for a while.”

  We waved to Mike and Ryan as they walked away, and we strolled farther north of the tower to sit down on a grassy mound and talk. Being alone was more fun than being at the party. Chris and I could always talk forever. He was still elated from his time in Maine and his experience at a Phish festival called the Great Went. I had no real perspective on what he was talking about. I had never been to a concert like that, and I hadn’t even listened to the band’s music yet.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” Chris said. “The way they jam, it’s like the music flows into you and takes you on its own twists and turns, and you don’t know where it’s going, but you’re part of it. You’re completely in the music, you’re in the present moment, you just feel so alive.”

  Chris was one of the most creative and vibrant people I had ever met. He inspired me. Just being around him made the world seem bursting with fresh energy and possibility. He felt completely present in his favorite music, in nature, in art. I felt completely present right there with him, and I didn’t want it to end.

  But it was getting really late, and we decided to head back. No trains had gone by at all in the entire time we spent on the tracks.

  We stood up to leave and started walking on the tracks toward Suburban Court. The hard gravel between the sets of tracks pressed through the soles of my Birkenstock sandals. Chris’s hand felt warm. I felt light and giddy as our arms swung between us.

  To our left beyond the tracks, tall grass and dense shrubbery hid the high wooden fences that marked the start of the nearby neighborhoods. We would have to walk all the way down the tracks until we were back at the end of Suburban Court to find a break in the fencing. We walked through one endless shadow. Nothing lit up the path, nothing to help us perceive movement, nothing to warn us that something unexpected was waiting, hiding out just ahead.

  When you’re only twenty years old, you don’t imagine that harm can ever come to you. One of the joys of youth is a sense of invincibility, of being impervious to danger. We remained blissfully ignorant of impending menace until it crept out from behind the electrical box that stood on the far west side of the tracks.

  We never saw him coming, and then suddenly he was there. We looked up to see a man squaring off against us in the darkness.

  “Where did your friends go?” he asked. His black eyes were vacant.

  CHAPTER 3.

  The Monster Appears

  He had been watching us for some time. He knew there had been four of us. He had listened to Chris and me all the while we thought we were alone. We had no idea he was lurking until he was mere inches away.

  “Gimme your money!” he demanded.

  We were being mugged. Nothing like this had ever happened to me or anyone I knew. I couldn’t believe it, but I assumed in that moment we’d just give him what he wanted and he would let us leave.

  The man had emerged from behind a large electrical panel that stood off to the right of the tracks, just past the point where the plant’s service road turned into Edison Drive, a residential street dotted with tiny white houses. The man’s English was strong but his accent was distinctly Mexican. It was dark, but I could tell he was older than we were. He had olive skin and black, wavy hair. Plain khaki pants. A shirt about the same color. There was nothing particularly descriptive about him, but his eyes unnerved me. No irises, just blackness framed by square glasses.

  Chris was standing between me and the apparent mugger.

  “We don’t have any money,” he said.

  “We’re just broke college kids. What do you expect?” I joked. It was true. We didn’t have even a dollar between us. Mike and Ryan had supplied the few coins we had laid out on the tracks.

  “Get down. On your knees.”

  The man was yanking on Chris’s arm, forcing him to kneel, and I kneeled down next to him in the rocky ballast.

  Chris didn’t fight back. I didn’t catch on at first why Chris was complying, besides the fact that he was simply a gentle, loving soul. He was nearly six foot five and I’m five foot eight and this guy was shorter than both of us. How much of a threat could he be? But Chris seemed to notice something I didn’t. He was afraid, and that made me more afraid.

  As the guy rummaged through Chris’s backpack looking for money, I saw he was holding something in his hand—something pointed and sharp, like an ice pick or a screwdriver. I felt completely helpless. I had pepper spray on hand, but it was in Chris’s backpack along with my keys. I couldn’t understand what was happening to us. This was unimaginable to me. One moment we were laughing, kissing, and enjoying each other’s company. Now we were face to face with a danger we couldn’t even measure. I had always been taught that if I were confronted with a situation like this to just do whatever the muggers asked, and the
y wouldn’t hurt you. We only wanted to get away from him and make it safely back to our friends.

  “Listen, you want money? You can have my ATM card and my credit cards,” I said.

  “Take the keys to my car,” Chris pleaded. “Whatever you want, you can have it. Just don’t touch her.”

  The man grimaced. He had asked for money, but money didn’t seem to be what he really wanted. If we could figure out what he wanted, we’d be happy to give it to him. He finished searching Chris’s backpack without taking anything from it. I watched in disbelief as he started wrapping the backpack’s nylon straps around Chris’s wrists until his hands and forearms were bound tightly behind his hips.

  My heart dropped when he turned to me.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Chris yelled.

  The man reached toward my waist. I drew in a quick and uneasy breath. He fumbled with my buckle, pulling my leather belt from the loops of my corduroy pants.

  “Put your hands behind your back,” he said.

  “We’ll give you whatever it is you want, just please let her go,” Chris pleaded.

  “Shut up!” he snarled. “Stop looking at me!”

  He was jittery and anxious and grew increasingly agitated the more either of us tried to appease him.

  He wrapped the belt around my wrists, looping and tying it as firmly as the material would allow. As soon as he turned back to Chris, I started working on undoing the knot. The attacker grabbed Chris by his arm and started dragging him across the tracks. Chris scrambled to get back up on his knees, wincing and screaming in pain as his body hit the metal and gravel and broken glass. I didn’t want the man to drag me like that, so I followed behind them on my knees toward a ditch near the thick foliage and wooden fence that blocked off private property from the railroad.

  He pulled Chris down into the ditch so that he lay perpendicular to the tracks. I crouched near Chris, my hands working free from the leather binding.