nude girl alert!

NUDE GIRL ALERT

        Tami stood on Main Street and contemplated the headline in the window of the newspaper vending box.

        Not that she was out to expose herself.  This town was called Tombstone Flats, New Mexico, and according to the sign the population was 326.  And it was around 3:30 a.m.

        And freezing.  She hugged herself, her legs together, her toes almost numb standing on the gravel, watching her breath come out in clouds.  Well, maybe not “freezing”, as in 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but still pretty cold.

        Her eyes shifted left and right.  There was not a soul around -- except there was a police car patrolling somewhere, she had seen it from the roof of that store where she had hopped after getting that ride on that empty cattle truck.  It was a daring jump; the interstate wound around a hill and suddenly she could see this little town right down below her.  It was just after dark, and as the truck got into low gear to climb up the hill, she jumped out into a sandy gully on the side of the road which fortunately was as soft as it looked.

        She wasn’t too worried about the police seeing her.  If she heard the car coming she could easily leap into an alley, and it was so silent here that she could hear it from quite a distance.  She just didn’t want to be caught in its headlights.

        She looked up and down this “Main Street”, this short line of stores and offices on each side, the drug store she was standing in front of, then her bare shoulders drooped as she concentrated again on that newspaper.

NUDE GIRL ALERT

        Obviously the headline was about her.  Obviously the all-points bulletin sent out by Chalfont -- at the instigation of Henry Ross, it was easy to figure out -- was still in effect.  But what did the article say? The three-word headline was just above the fold in the paper, a broadsheet, and she had no way to see the other side.  She wished she had a quarter to open the box with.  She had looked, but there were none on the ground nor in the return slots of pay phones.  And kicking the vending box open with her bare foot, that would not only hurt, but the crashing sound would reverberate through the whole town, attracting the police.  The risk wasn’t worth it.  She stared a hole in that headline and finally realized she just would have to never know what it said.

        She thought of that bulletin in the post office.  She squeezed her eyes shut.  Damn that Mr. Ross!  What an evil, sadistic man!  Will he ever stop torturing her?!  She thought of the many humiliations he had subjected her to during that awful weekend “helping out” at his house.  How he was at the bottom of all the bad things that had happened to her.  And now, he was threatening to have her committed.  That, especially, scared her.  She had heard once about a newspaper reporter who faked his psychiatric diagnosis to get committed to a mental hospital, but then lost track of his contact person and couldn’t convince the doctors to let him go.  They thought his story was just a manifestation of his paranoid delusions and he ended up being stuck inside.

        If they caught her way out here, Mr. Ross would have her committed out here too, thousands of miles from help.  And somehow she knew they would manage to keep her naked!  She imagined herself having to undergo “total nudity therapy”, and had a fleeting image of herself up on a treadmill, on a pedestal for better viewing, head and pussy shaven, having to run with frantic sweaty bare feet and bobbing breasts as a doctor in a white lab coat paraded class after class of graduate students to see her.  “You see here this unfortunate patient, the victim of advanced psychotic delusions, we have to keep her without covering and exposed at all times as her permanent lifelong therapy .  .  .”

        Tami shuddered and idly kicked a pebble with her toe.  Well, no way I’m setting myself up for that.  I will make it home somehow, finding clothes along the way, without ever letting myself fall into the hands of the police.  The naked girl had a grim determination now.  And was getting more confident that she’d succeed.  After all, she had gotten through three big states already, almost a third of the distance back to Rhode Island.

        With all the plants she was finding, she would solve her biggest problem, food.  For which she could also thank the easygoing habits of store owners out here.  Just two hours ago she had found an shed behind a grocery store.  Inside were hot dog rolls and jars of olives.  An unorthodox late-night snack, but she enjoyed it.  And then a bonus, a jar of strawberry jam.

        A flash of headlight far to her left and she darted into the alleyway.  She crouched down as the patrol car approached and meandered by.  Then it was gone.  She mused on what a boring job it must be in this town to be on late night patrol.  Her uncle was a cop, and he had talked about how boring patrolling was.

        The naked girl, squatting in the alley, looked down at her toes in the dirt.  There was a stone nearby.  An odd thought came to her.  It was hard to see in the darkness but she scrawled in the dirt with the stone:

        “Tami Smithers Was Here”

        It was a little crazy, but it made her feel good.  She stood up and thought of erasing it with her feet.  But she decided to keep it there.  Her little poke in the eye to Henry Ross.

        She decided to go back to her favorite place in this little town, the roof of the hardware store next to the gully.  She hopped onto some barrels and was on the flat tar roof in two minutes -- looking across at the back of the little clothing store, the dress on the display mannikin, complete with shoes and nylons, that was still brightly lit.  And with the back door half open!

        She had spent a solid half hour looking at the steep drop between the two stores.  It had to be thirty feet, a fatal jump into what was total blackness.  As she looked down she had to squint into the glare of the big floodlight on top  of that pole next to the interstate, hiding from its glare behind the little brick chimney which scraped against her breasts.  In the cold her breath formed little clouds in the glare.  She kept crouching there behind the chimney, peeking around it to look at that dress, watching the little clouds of her breath, hearing the big trucks boom by on the interstate above her.

        It was so pitch dark down there that she couldn’t see anything -- not that it would matter.  A jump would be impossible.  How could she do it?  She looked to the sides of the clothing store, but there was nothing next to it, no way to climb up from the sides, and there were high walls on each side, one forming the side of another store, the other simply a high wall that must have had some other purpose at one time but now just stood there, twenty or thirty feet high, mocking her, daring her.  And climbing around the tops of those walls would do no good -- aside from shining like a beacon for the police to see, a naked girl lit by a floodlight, there was just solid brickface above, no way to climb down to that dress from above.

        A pitch black pit to jump into.  Impossible.  Yet that dress was so pretty, blue cotton, a little frilly for her taste, but about her size.  And the white shoes and nylons.  .  .  God .  .  . Her freezing toes flexed on the gravelly roof behind the chimney and she felt almost about to jump forward, a bird in flight, to get that dress, or whatever else could be got behind that half-opened door.

        Finally she decided to quit torturing herself.  She climbed off the other side and into the gully and peed, then found a hidden spot and went to sleep.  When morning came she crept onto the roof of a nearby diner and, after about an hour of waiting for the right one, caught a truck.

        It got onto the eastbound interstate and whipped around the hill, going terrifically fast, not with the slowness that had allowed her to jump off the cattle truck.  Once more the naked girl, peering through a hole in the canvas, saw the little town beneath her, this time in daylight.  And then she saw that there was no pitch dark pit at all, there was a series of steps going right down from the roof of the hardware store to the back door of the clothing store, painted black so that she could not have seen them.  She could have just walked down there and grabbed the dress, or had her run of the clothing store.  Upon realizing this, there was nothing for the naked girl to do but cry.

        .  .  .  .

NUDE GIRL ALERT

A HOAX

        Albuquerque, August 6 -- A series of fax notices sent to police and post office locations in the Southwest, warning of a psychotic nude woman demanding clothes, has been revealed as a hoax.

        According to the fax, the woman, whose name has been withheld, would disrobe in her car and then enter public buildings and demand clothes.  The fax also stated that attempts to give her clothing would trigger psychopathic and violent behavior.  A telephone number to a Northeastern college was given as a contact number for psychiatric guidance, stating that she was an escaped patient from an associated institution.

        The college, which has requested not to be identified, has informed the FBI that this was clearly a hoax and though the telephone number had the college’s exchange, an internal investigation had indicated that no students, faculty or staff were responsible.

        Said Henry Ross, counsel to the college, “This was obviously a sick joke played by someone who just picked a college number out of a hat.”

        A spokesman for the FBI said that their investigation is continuing but because no one was harmed their file on the matter will likely be closed soon.