Still, he wanted to close his eyes and escape into the darkness of his own thoughts. Martin’s drugs were still blocking even the tiniest of movements.
Then there was the subtlest twitch in his little finger. He concentrated all his energy on trying to do it again. Twitch. Twitch. He could move his little finger.
Adam’s throat closed around the tube lodged down his windpipe. His survival instincts were firing like a Tsunami alarm, blaring loudly that he should pull the plastic tube out of his lungs.
He closed his eyes and tried to keep calm. Blinking was becoming easier. The anesthetic was wearing off quicker now.
The only sound in the room was the ventilator, whooshing every few seconds, and flooding his lungs with air. There didn’t appear to be anybody else in the room, no one he could hear or see in the reflection in the lights hanging from the ceiling.
He closed his eyes and made a wish that when he opened them again he’d be back in his hotel room. That all of this was only a bad dream he could snap his fingers and wake up from, refreshed and ready to face another day on the corporate battleground.
But when he opened his eyes he wasn’t in the hotel room. He was where he most feared he’d be, lying on the hard operating table in the grimy dark room.
Adam’s whole hand twitched. Only a fraction at first. Then his instinctive movements kicked in. His chest jumped as he breathed on his own again, fighting the ventilator that struggled to compensate and match his inhalations.
Soon he could move all of his fingers. His hands were numb and tingling, but they worked. Minutes passed as no one returned to check on him. Movement ascended up both arms. Eventually, he had the strength to lift his hands and hold onto the endotracheal tube. Adam pulled and the tape sticking the tube into place in the corner of his mouth came free. Another tug, and he was sure the tube would rip out his vocal cords. He pulled harder, and the pain multiplied a hundred times as the tube slipped out of his gullet.
His body shook all over as he tried not to scream and waited for the burn in his throat to subside.
Adam realized that he could now move his feet, and although his legs were completely numb, he could lift them too.
He focused on shifting his ankles, and then his legs over the edge of the table. The momentum helped lift him up into a seated position. Sudden dizziness made him almost collapse over the edge of the table, but he held on for dear life.
When his head stopped spinning, he ripped the electrodes and IV lines from his body, and tossed them aside. His legs were still numb, coursing with pins and needles as if he’d spent hours sitting on them, but he had to keep moving through the pain. Time was running out before one of his captors returned to finish the job they had started.
His feet hit the cold floor. He tried to stand, but his legs didn’t have the strength in them to support his weight. With a mighty thump, he fell onto the floor, landing hard on his already injured arm and cracking his ribs. His shoulder relocated back into the joint with a sharp click. As the pain in one part of his body subsided, every breath became an agonizing stab in his chest.
He crawled on hands and knees. Then slowly took to his feet once again. He held onto his thighs until he was confident he could take a step while standing upright. With each step it became easier to keep moving forward as the drugs wore off. But it was still like walking on wobbly jelly.
Terror heightened his every sense. Adam’s vision collapsed down into a narrow tunnel directly ahead, with only one goal, survival.
He couldn’t hold back the tears. Emotions overwhelmed his ability to think. He wanted for it all to be over. To walk through that door and have a live audience yell “April Fool” when he reached the other side. But he knew it was never going to happen.
I’m probably going to die down here. Wherever here is?
Adam had never imagined himself dying surrounded by loved ones, family and friends. He was never that naïve. A guy like him was destined to die either alone in bed, at his own hand, or because of poor life decisions. If he was lucky he’d wind up in a nice private hospital somewhere, and have a nurse beside him when the time came, but no more than that. He’d never invested in the people in his life and didn’t deserve anyone’s pity. Everyone was expendable in his life, and he had no immediate family. If a new acquaintance couldn’t help him work his way up the chain of success, they were an obstacle in his path that needed to be circumnavigated, or bowled over.
Focus. I have to focus, and open my eyes.
He’d been resting against the filthy shelves that lined the room, and his hands were now covered in mold and sticky, gelatinous, red goop. He wiped his hands on his sides, forgetting he was naked, spreading the bloody mess across his abdomen and hips.
Acid wash rose in the back of his throat and vomit erupted across the floor. It came in one projectile mess, and splattered in front of him, blocking the once clear path between him and the door.
He had no choice but to step through his own puke, the chunky bits catching between his toes, and the slippery gall threatening to slip him up. His feet skidded up beneath him, and he came down hard on his side, landing in the mess, and covering himself from head to toe in rancid vomit.
Adam was vaguely aware of someone sobbing. It took a few moments to realize it was himself. He had to be quiet. He had to be stronger than he’d ever been before. There was no one coming to save him. No one who even knew where he was. If he had any hope of survival, it lay with him keeping a clear focus.
This was his opportunity, perhaps the only one he might have to escape. He had to think clearly. He had to get out of there.
Adam rose slowly to his feet, a fresh surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins, and heightening all of his senses. He rummaged through a dirty linen bag and found a discarded hospital gown. It was almost clean, with only a few splashes of old brown blood across the front. He quickly slipped the gown over his head. Hiding his naked body instantly made him feel less vulnerable.
He stepped as quietly as he could into the dark hallway. As his eyes adjusted to the wan light, the further he ventured through the complicated maze of hallways and dead ends, he started to formulate a better idea of where he might have been. It wasn’t a slaughterhouse. It was more like a bomb shelter. That made more sense. There were no exterior windows, and the walls seemed to absorb every sound. It explained the musty odor he hadn’t been able to place before now.
Some of the hallways led to dead ends, others to interconnected rooms. Whatever this place had been before, it was abandoned long ago, but at some point it had been repurposed as a makeshift medical facility. There were rooms filled with medical equipment, surgical instruments, boxes of fluids and fridges with rows of expired medications behind moldy glass doors.
He turned a corner and entered a room that looked very similar to the one he had first woken up in. It was another makeshift operating theatre. Piles of old discarded boxes, gloves, and gowns sat in the corners. There were two operating tables in the center of the room under a broken surgical light that was swinging from the ceiling by a single frayed cord. Both tables had decaying corpses lying on top of them. Someone had gone to the effort of throwing a dirty blanket over each of the bodies, but the once-white cotton was soaked through with bodily juices and blood. A limp arm hung over the edge of one table, black veins standing out proudly against pale white skin mottled with purple necrosis.
Adam was no expert in forensic pathology, but he’d watched enough CSI to know these bodies had been there for at least a few days.
Then he saw something that made his heart jolt. Sitting on top of a surgical trolley beside the operating tables, covered in bloodied gauze and scalpels, was a phone.
He gingerly stepped further into the room, trying not to look at the bodies, afraid that he had been close to succumbing to the same fate.
Adam gagged in disgust. He forced himself to breathe through his mouth. Still, the vile stench of metallic old blood and decaying flesh crept into his nostrils and
tormented his senses.
He picked up the phone and tried to hold it steady in his trembling hands. He held the power button down and after a second the screen illuminated. It was an old Samsung, and fortunately, whoever had owned it before him had chosen not to put a lock screen on the phone. The battery was down to 3% and a notification appeared that warned him the phone was about to turn itself off.
The phone was in English. Its background wallpaper was of a young gay couple, probably in their late twenties, holding each other in a tender embrace in front of Prague Castle. They had matching backpacks on their shoulders, and one of them had his arm stretched out holding a selfie stick.
They appeared so happy in the photograph. Seeing the photograph made Adam think about was his sweet, adoring Kate, and how much of a fool he’d been to take her love for granted.
Did the two bodies on the operating tables belong to the men in the photograph? Did it even matter? Of course it mattered. If two grown men weren’t able to escape this nightmare scenario then what chance did he have on his own?
Am I going to get out of here alive?
He cried a mix of sorrow and fear as his fingers hit the buttons to dial the United States.
He put the phone to his ear and instinctively held his breath and closed his eyes. To his surprise, the line rang through.
The phone let out a loud, annoying alarm to warn Adam that it was now down to 2% battery remaining.
Answer the phone. What time is it there? Please answer the phone.
There was a click on the line and Adam feared the worst, that his call had been disconnected. But then he heard a familiar voice.
“Hello?” said Kate. Her voice was croaky, as if she’d just been woken from a deep sleep.
Adam whimpered.
“Oh my god, it’s you,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Adam?” Kate said, surprised. “Is that you? It’s the middle of the night!”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have much time.”
“What’s wrong?”
Adam heard a baby start to cry over the phone in the background. “Is that Gemma? Is she awake?”
Kate groaned. “No thanks to you. It took an hour to get her to sleep. Why are you calling me now? Are you drunk?”
“I don’t know where I am. I’ve been kidnapped.”
“You’ve what?!”
“You need to call the Prague police and tell them to search my room, search the hotel video surveillance for anything that could help them find me. You have to be quick. I don’t have much time.”
“What do you mean you’ve been kidnapped? Who has taken you?” There was panic in Kate’s voice. “Oh my god, Adam! This can’t be happening.”
The phone blasted out another alarm and a notification arose that only 1% of the battery life remained.
“This phone is about to die. If I don’t see you again, I’m sorry—”
“No, don’t say that,” Kate screamed.
“—I’m sorry for everything I ever did to hurt you. You deserve someone so much better than me—”
“Please don’t say that. I’ll call the cops right now. We’ll find you,” she said desperately.
“I love…” The phone went silent. Adam took it away from his ear and saw the screen was blank. The battery was dead. “… you.”
He threw the phone across the room. It shattered against the tiles. His knees bent and he crouched down on the floor beside the operating tables, screaming into the palm of his hand to muffle the noise. He was red in the face with rage and despair.
What sort of monsters could do this to people? He asked himself over and over again. How could they hurt innocent people like this?
But was Adam innocent? What about all the people he’d screwed over in his desperate attempts to scramble to the top of the heap in the business world? Did they deserve the backstabbing, the lies, the betrayals he had played a part in? And what did he have to show for it? A fiancée he took for granted. A child he never wanted. And a job he hated. His father would have laughed at him and reveled in watching his failure of a son finally get what he deserved.
It made Adam angrier, and more determined than ever to find a way out of this place. So he could right the wrongs of his past. He pulled himself together and took a deep breath. Panicking wasn’t the answer.
He got up again and moved silently out into the hallway. Every footstep filled him with fear. Even the sound of his own breathing terrified him. What if someone could hear him? There could be somebody waiting around any corner.
There was a rat infestation down there. Their high-pitched squeaks disgusted Adam. He stepped carefully to avoid standing on top of them as they scurried past, their fur brushing against his feet.
He turned a corner and saw a room up ahead that had light streaming through the doorway.
Is this the way out?
He moved quickly toward the doorway, his mind committed to escaping, forgetting about the rats at his feet, the smell of death that hung heavy in the air, and raced for salvation.
Only it wasn’t salvation. It was just another room, black-and-white tiles on the walls, and another body lying dead on an operating table. The body was facing away from Adam, duct tape tying its hands behind its back and also wrapped around the lower half of its head. It didn’t look rotten and old like the last set of corpses. This man had recently been alive….and no doubt kicking.
He’d also been subjected to the same deep colonic cleanse as Adam. The hose still hung over the edge of the bed, and faeces was caked on the floor around the drain.
Adam shook with fear and found himself close to breaking point. He took a few steps into the room, toward the body, and reached out to touch it. He had to know if it was still warm. He couldn’t explain why, but he had to know.
Adam’s foot slipped in a puddle of yellow liquid the he hadn’t noticed on the floor beside the operating table.
“Shit,” he said in a loud whisper.
Adam caught the side of the table before he lost his balance. The body on the operating table moved and Adam recoiled in terror. He was still alive.
Adam raced around the table. The man was in his early thirties, body bruised, and looked like hell. Adam had never seen so much terror in another person’s face.
“It’s okay,” said Adam. “I won’t hurt you.”
But the man moaned even loader. This time loud enough that someone outside the room might hear him.
Adam held a hand over the man’s mouth to gag him, and brought a finger to his lips
“Be quiet,” he said in a hush.
The man hyperventilated for a few seconds before he calmed. He didn’t trust Adam. It was clear from the way he stared at him. As if the man suspected this was all part of a sick game.
“Do you speak Czech?” asked Adam in Czech. “Or English?”
The man nodded when he heard English spoken.
“I’m going to take the tape off your head.” As Adam explained the plan, he grew increasingly nervous. He was petrified the man was going to call out and get them both killed. “Please be quiet, or I will leave you here. Do you understand me?”
The man nodded again.
Adam found the end of the tape and ripped it away, pulling out small chunks of the man’s beard with it. The man winced in pain, and trembled, but he never screamed.
“Thank you,” said the man. He had an English accent. “Please untie me.” He held his bound wrists up for Adam.
Adam fumbled with the duct tape on the English man’s wrists.
“I can’t find the end,” said Adam.
The English man tipped his head forward to gesture toward one of the nearby tables.
“Over there,” he said.
Adam turned his head and saw what the man was pointing at, a table covered in scissors, saws, and scalpels. He reached over and grabbed a pair of scissors. They were as filthy as everything else down there. One snip through the duct tape freed the man’s hands.<
br />
“My name is Grayson,” said the Englishman.
“Adam,” he replied. A cold shiver ran up his spine and he held a finger to his mouth to shush his companion.
Grayson stood bolt upright, his whole body tremulous with fear. There was somebody coming toward the room. They could hear the footsteps from the hallway. A tall, heavy man Adam guessed from the time between heel strikes, and the loud stomp of his boots.
Adam’s eyes scanned the room around them for a place to hide. There was an open storage cupboard beside the door, possibly big enough for both of them to fit inside. He wondered if they could hide behind the clothes.
The footsteps were getting closer now. There wasn’t much time left to decide. He knew it was a stupid plan, and likely the first place their kidnapper would look. He grabbed a pairs of surgical scissors off the nearby tray. Grayson chose the largest scalpel and clutched it tightly in his hand. Without making a sound, Adam crossed the room and shut the storage cupboard, then slipped behind the open door. Grayson followed his lead, slipping out of sight just as the footsteps stopped in the doorway.
Both men were too afraid to breathe. They couldn’t see who was on the other side of the door. Adam assumed the worst; that they would be discovered moments later and meet a very grim end.
There was a gruff groan of frustration from the man who had just entered the room. His footsteps moved further into the room and stopped.
Adam couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He covered his nose and mouth to be as quiet as possible.
There was a sudden, loud crash, as the tray of surgical instruments was upturned and landed on the floor.
Grayson looked up at Adam with fresh fear in his eyes.
The footsteps raced towards them. Adam closed his eyes momentarily and tried to summon all of his strength to face their opponent.
To his relief, the storage cupboard door was ripped open and slammed shut. Then their pursuer left the room in a fury, pulling the door closed, and exposing Adam and Grayson to the empty room.
Headhunter: An Extreme Horror Story Page 4