Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is a city that knows despair. I lived there; it’s a small country on the border of China. It’s a former Soviet country. The Kyrges people are farmers by nature and mobile—they tend to move from place to place. Putting them in a city is like taking the spirit out of them, and you can tell by the city. The city falls apart; All of the infrastructure is decrepit and made of cement and breaking down in pieces. The greed and avarice of the people up high suck the life out of the people below: unemployment is a quarter of the population. People starve to death everyday. Some die of cold in the winter because heating is unaffordable. If you want see the life of Kyrgyzstan, you have to get outside of the city. But in the city, the despair is obvious and unavoidable.

One night around Christmastime, I agree to drive home my girlfriend at the time. She’d come over to our house and stayed late, baking in our kitchen. It is midnight. My brother agrees to go with me—driving alone in the city is an unsafe idea. We climb into the minibus, the kind of car whose quirks manifest themselves in the small things, like the missing passenger side mirror. We begin the drive home in the dark of Bishkek.

Only half of the lights in the city come on. There’s only one street that’s really lit—Jurbeckjoyee. We begin driving across this overpass—it’s the only overpass in the whole country. I shift over a lane.

“Dane, you just cut someone off,” Brian says.

“I did?” I check the right side of the car. I see nothing because of the missing right mirror. Someone must have been coming off the ramp, and I didn’t even notice that I’d cut them off. I don’t think much of it. I keep focusing on the road in front of me.

Suddenly, a little car pulls up beside me on the road, matching my speed. They roll their window down—a strange behavior. I roll down my window.

“Ashtor?” I say. “What’s going on?”

The man in the passenger seat unleashes a flood of profanities in rushed, blunt Russian. I can’t understand a word he’s saying, but anger doesn’t need language. He was livid—more than the situation warranted. I’d only cut him off, and it was unintentional. He practically froths at the mouth. I look, and when I look at him there is something strange. I keep driving and I look back into his eyes—it is like he isn’t there. He isn’t drunk. I know what drunk people look like—there’s tons of drunk people in Kyrgyzstan. I know what high looks like—he isn’t high. His body is animated and alive with movement, but his eyes are dead like they’ve lost the light of life. It is something else, something more.

“Sorry, sorry,” I say. I roll my window up to quietly end the conversation, if you can call it that. The little car speeds ahead to pass us. It pulls in front of our car—and then it begins to slow down. Okay. I slow down, I slow down. Our cars crawl at the speed of five miles an hour. So I maneuver around the slow-moving car. It happens again, the little car speeding up and around me and slowing to minimal speed. I’m not getting road rage, but this is a little irritating.

Our slow procession comes to one of three lights on this street, a red light. Both cars stop. They can keep going as slow as they like, I’m just driving her home. We sit at the red light, waiting behind the small car. Then their passenger door opens. A man gets out and slowly starts walking back toward us. He has a crowbar in his hands.

“Shoot,” I say. “Not staying here.” I throw the car in reverse, back up, and zoom around him through the red light. The man slides back into his car and they speed off after us. Our minivan is no match for their small car; in no time, they catch up with us, looking at us through their side windows. They get right near the driver’s side, a little bit ahead of me. Then closer and closer. We swerve a little to the right. They start edging me off the road.

“Not good.” I slam on the brakes suddenly and zoom around on the outside of them.

Now in Kyrgyzstan, calling the police is not an option. For fifty somme, they’d assist these aggressors. There’s no one to call. I’m running away in this van and I’m beginning to get a little nervous.

Our cars reach a red light. We stop, and this time both of the car doors open in front of us. They get out, both tall against the dark. One of them is dressed in army gear. They each have a crowbar in their hands. Thoughts are fragmented and fast. Red light—people coming toward me. Red light—no traffic—go.

The car chase ensues. My only hope is that we have a chance of losing them. We rush quickly down the main street—and this is where I make a bad decision. I leave the only lighted street in Bishkek. I see a street off to the left that I recognize, so I turn left and slide my car in the dark alleyways and side bypaths of Mishkev Urban Center. As I zoom along, I see a side street that seems familiar. I turn into it. It becomes clear that don’t know this place at all. There’s shabby apartment complexes that form a c-shape, a thin road, and a small shed. A padval—a hybrid between a park and a concrete dump—is in the center of apartment complexes. I pull into the driveway, backed into it so we can be ready to leave at any minute. Our car is surrounded on all sides: the back of my car is to the shed. A fifteen story concrete building rises to my left. A ditch and stand of trees sit off to my right. In front of me is one-cars worth of space for going in and out of this padval—and this is where I make my second really big mistake.

I don’t turn the lights off. There’s no lights in the city, and I forget to turn my headlights off. I basically announce our presence to these aggressors. We sit there when they arrive. They pull into the driveway and instead of pulling straight in, they pull in sideways so they can block us, so there’s no way out. Their car doors open, and you can see the figure in military clothing moving out of the car door.

I’ve been nervous before. I’m not of the temperament to get scared. Scared is not something that I do. But terror is a completely different feeling. And terror has had, for me at least, nothing to do with my own personal safety. I could see it all happening, what is about to occur. These men are going to rape my girlfriend and kill my little brother—and there is nothing I can do. It is two on one. They have military training. I have a steering wheel lock as my weapon. I am completely helpless.

We begin to pray, “Oh, God. Save us.” The guys get out of their car, loose and confident. Start swaggering toward the car real slow-like with their crowbars. One of them pulls out a billy club.

“Oh, God. Save us.”

Just the last minute, I have this crazy idea.

I look over to the right near the stand of trees and see a thin sapling. I rev the engine. The guys stop. We have one shot.

I slam on the gas pedal and cut right and barrel over the small sapling. The car slams through the ditch. Two of my tires pop. The minivan is thrust over and lifted to the other side of the road. I shift down to the lowest gear. I drive away as fast as I can in my lowest gear and two blown wheels. I manage to pull the car back onto the main street, back into the light. It is only a matter of time before they catch up to us. God God please please please.

The next few hours are a blur of motion. We rush to the American embassy to hide out there, only to find that they can’t keep vehicles outside of the building until 8am. We stall, waiting and waiting and waiting out front of the embassy. We can see them driving past the entrance to the embassy, circling like hawks. They had us trapped. They were waiting for us to come out.

We breathe hard and fast. The adrenaline streams through me. It’s past one in the morning. We wait and wait and wait. Finally, after an hour after we pull into the embassy, they take off. Disappear into the dark streets. My girlfriend’s nervous father comes to meet us. He helps me fix the wheels. Lifting heavy things, turning cranks, the manual labor of working with hands—there is nothing more therapeutic after being completely terrified than lifting heavy things.

I’m not scared of dying. But I am scared—I was terrified—of what was going to happen to the people I love. You’ve never experienced terror until you’re helpless to protect those you love.

I have nightmares every night for a month. Terror is not an emotion that leaves quickly. It has to be drained a little bit at a time.

One night as I was praying, I have a dream. I see it all—I see us, helpless in the car again. I see the men walking toward us. But this time I see the spiritual realm—the demonic hosts pictured as a swarm, clinging to the car, clinging to those men, prompting them on, whipping them on, stoking their frenzy. And I see three angels, tall and massive, one for each of us on our minivan. The angels lean close and whisper encouragement to us: come on, you can do this. Get out of this. We’ll be okay. I see myself praying that same prayer: “Oh, God. Save us.” And then I see it, faintly. A small glow from my chest. A small voice speaks from within that center. I hear the words for the first time: “As long as you’re with me, you’ll be okay. I will protect you. I will protect those you love. Turn on the car. Drive through the trees.” I see myself, hand on the wheel, foot pressed down to pedal, the car moving through the trees.

That night, I sleep—dreamless and sound. The nightmares never come again.