Collapsing to the pavement, I curled up like a spider set to a match, the muscles in my limbs contracting painfully. It felt like my blood was boiling in my veins, setting every nerve ending and synapse on fire. I’d never experienced such searing agony before. Even the pain of Samson ripping into the soft meat of my belly paled in comparison to the agony coursing through my body now.
Through the haze of tears, I saw Johnson coming at me and tried to move away from him, but the crippling pain kept me from doing anything more than rolling onto my side. Rough hands grabbed me by the hair, turning my face towards him. A rag smelling of gasoline and oil was wedged into my mouth, cutting off my scream to leave me moaning helplessly as tears streamed down my face. The next few minutes were a jumble of flickering images as fire raced through my body, burning me up from the inside.
I couldn’t do anything except whimper and mewl like a helpless puppy as Johnson bound my wrists in front of me with a zip tie, pulling the plastic tight until it bit into my skin. He grabbed me under the arms and dragged me down the alley, the heels of my boots bouncing along the asphalt and ice. I tried to struggle, to twist in his grip or kick out, but the wolfsbane seemed to have paralyzed me. I fought to stay conscious but time was starting to come in disconnected pieces like a movie skipping frames.
A white car sat idling at the end of the alleyway, and I knew what Johnson planned to do even before he propped me against a nearby dumpster to pop open the trunk. Listing sideways, I hoped to use my momentum to escape, but before I knew it Johnson was back, his hands maneuvering me roughly, tossing me about like a sack of potatoes, as he dumped me into the trunk. The edge of a tire iron dug into my shoulder, but the drugs pulsing through my veins made me too weak to make any use of it. I cried out in a wordless plea for mercy as he reached to close the trunk.
God no, please don’t lock me in here! Please don’t! I wailed internally, trying to express my terror around the oily rag that made me gag, but pity was not something he appeared to be acquainted with.
“Shut up, bitch. You’ll have plenty to scream about later,” he said, his beady eyes gleaming with sadistic glee.
I let out another plaintive wail but it was no use, the drugs left me paralyzed, unable to kick out at him or stop him from closing the trunk. As I watched the sliver of grey clouds shrinking, I wondered if I’d ever see daylight again.
***
Sensation slowly trickled into my awareness as I drifted back up to consciousness, struggling through the cobwebs in my mind to make sense of what was happening. My head felt as though it had been packed with cotton. There was a faint ringing in my ears that, combined with the stab of pain that shot through my skull when I tried to open my eyes, made me think I probably had a concussion. Nausea twisted in my gut, and I decided that perhaps it was best to just keep my eyes closed for a while.
What the hell is going on?
I was glad to discover that the foul smelling gag had been removed, and moved my tongue clumsily to lick my lips. My hiss of pain at the burning throb in my lower lip came out more as a wheeze. Probing the wound with the tip of my tongue, I tasted blood, knowing it should mean something but with my thoughts sluggish and muddled, I couldn’t seem to put the pieces together. My chin rested heavily on my chest, the muscles in my neck aching from the awkward position, but the effort of trying to raise my head left me dizzy and exhausted, pushing me back down into the murky waters of unconsciousness.
***
A soft scraping noise cut through the darkness, rousing me from a dreamless sleep. I couldn’t tell if I had been out for only a few minutes or a few hours, time having lost all meaning in a haze of unconsciousness. Gritting my teeth in anticipation, I dared to crack my eyes open, relieved when the wave of nausea that hit didn’t instantly knock my ass out again. I took several shallow breaths and pushed through the dizziness, having to swallow several times to keep from puking all over myself.
Yay me!
I concentrated on focusing my vision, the pounding in my head making it hard to bring my eyes into focus. I had to blink a few times before the blur of blue directly in front of me resolved into the shape of my legs, the knees of my jeans torn and covered in dirt. Trying to stretch my legs, I discovered that my ankles were bound to the chair, the position spreading my knees wide in some sick facsimile of a striptease. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I should’ve been panicking, but I was too dazed to care. An attempt to move my arms found them similarly secured to the arms of the chair with thick white zip ties.
A prepared kidnapper. Just my luck.
Looking past my knees I saw a patch of concrete floor, layered with dust and debris. Scrabbling through the detritus was the source of the noise that had woken me: a mangy, skinny rat searching for some scrap of food. If the abandoned atmosphere I was picking up on was any indication, I didn’t think he was going to have much luck.
I guess that’s why he’s skinny.