Threat- Chloroform- One Woman — Who Was Attacked ...

So she couldn’t let him get near her face.

She walked to the phone on her nightstand. Her fingers dialed 9-1-1. She gave her address, her name, and said the words that would change everything: “There’s a man in my apartment. He tried to use chloroform. I think he’s dead.”

Her college chemistry, the one class she’d nearly failed, suddenly became the most important thing she’d ever taken. Chloroform. Not the movie version where a rag over the face drops you in two seconds. The real thing. Slow. Creeping. A lullaby in chemical form.

That was the moment.

The figure stepped closer. She heard his breathing—ragged, excited. He wasn’t a professional. Professionals didn’t savor the anticipation. He was a collector of fear, and that was his weakness. He would want to see her eyes open first.

She saw the shadow first—a thickening of the dark by her window, which she could have sworn she’d locked. The figure was patient. He held a small brown bottle and a folded white handkerchief. He was waiting for her to fall back asleep.

He staggered, arms flailing, the handkerchief still clutched in one fist. She didn’t give him time to recover. Her right hand, still holding the pepper spray, came up not to his eyes—too far away, too risky—but to the space between them. She squeezed. A bright orange cone of capsaicinoid fire hit him directly in the open mouth he’d been gasping from. Threat- Chloroform- One woman who was attacked ...

It was the hush that woke her. Not a noise, but the absence of one—the soft click of a lock, the sigh of a floorboard that had just been stepped on and had settled back into place. Maya’s eyes snapped open in the blue-dark of her studio apartment. She didn’t move. Her breath, shallow and controlled, fogged the air. The heater had clicked off an hour ago.

He screamed, a choked, gargling sound, and dropped the handkerchief. He clawed at his throat, his tongue, as if he could scrape the burn out. The chloroform on his jacket, mixed with the pepper spray, created a new, vile perfume of chemical fire. He stumbled backward, blind and choking, and his heel caught the edge of her fallen laundry basket.

Maya stood in the middle of the room, shaking so violently her teeth chattered. The pepper spray canister was hot in her palm. She didn’t look at the body. She looked at the handkerchief on the floor, still damp, still sweet. Two feet from her pillow. So she couldn’t let him get near her face

Maya slid one hand, slow as a glacier, under her pillow. Her fingers brushed the cold steel of the pepper spray her brother had given her after the break-in down the hall last year. Useless against chloroform, she thought. The stuff worked by inhalation. If he got that rag near her face, she had maybe fifteen seconds of struggling before her limbs turned to wet sand.

Maya erupted from the bed not backward, but forward . She didn’t run for the door. She drove her skull, hard, into his sternum. The air left him in a wet, percussive grunt. The chloroform bottle flew from his hand, spinning end over end, splashing its contents across the floor and his own jacket. The chemical reek doubled.