Taken By Surprise

by Jessica Frances

  ***

  A creaking noise rouses me next and I open my eyes to find the sun outside is only just starting to rise. I’m groggy and still tired. It’s beyond me how I can still feel tired after spending days being out cold and doing nothing. I turn my head at the sound of the door handle being turned and a sharp knock against the door that makes a loud echo in the room. I try to get a glimpse of the person who has taken me hostage. I only see them from behind and I watch them leave, keeping the door ajar.

  Is this someone helping me? Am I being rescued?

  I sit up, feeling stronger again. That must be a good sign. I stand up, glad to be able to hold my weight fine, and look at the open door nervously, fearful of what I might find out in the corridor. Now that the moment has come to leave this room, I’m hesitant to do so.

  Knowing that I can’t risk missing out on this chance to have a look outside the room I’ve been trapped in, I creep cautiously to the door with my bare feet slapping the cold floor while I ignore the chill it brings. I push the door open further and peek out for a quick second. I see a black blob at the end of a hallway that fills me full of dread. I don’t dare look back again. Across from me is another doorway. This door is also open, but no one seems to be in the room it shows. From what I can see, it looks to be a room like mine, but it’s dark. There is either no window in there or the curtains are shut.

  “Hurry up, everyone,” a male voice grunts from down the hallway, sounding gruff and strict. I’m positive I’ve never heard this voice before.

  I chance another look out and see a well-dressed man wearing a suit and tie, maybe in his forties, standing a few feet away from me. He must have been the black blob I’d seen moments before. I look down the other end of the hallway to find a small boy standing at the doorway of the next door down from mine. He looks young and frail with wild hair that gives me the impression someone has taken garden shear to it. How long have they held him captive? He looks like he hasn’t been taken care of properly in years. Is he a sign of what is to happen to me?

  I notice another doorway across from his and diagonal to mine. A girl stands out in front of it. She’s wearing a heavily crinkled dress and even though she looks like she has only just woken up like me, I can already tell without looking at my own reflection that she looks runway model ready compared to me. There is a strange mark over her throat and I think it might be a bruise. Has whoever taken us done that to her?

  No one says anything. I look back to the open door opposite me. Is someone in there, too?

  “Come on, Blackout, we’re all waiting for you,” the Suit Man who spoke before raises his voice louder.

  He appears to be bored and begins tapping his left foot against the ground. There is something about him that makes me not trust him. He has the look of someone starting to age gracefully, however I can tell he is hard and unforgiving. He stands straight with his shoulders back in a way that looks unnatural and uncomfortable. He’s fit looking and I guess he might have been in the army or something similar. His dark hair is slicked back and his eyes are permanently narrowed at us all. I can picture him being one of those creepy paintings where the eyes follow you all around the room. It gives me shivers and I have to firmly plant my feet on the ground to stop myself from taking a step back from him.

  “Blackout, hurry up!” Suit Man yells again and I mentally promise myself never to get on this guy’s bad side. I also wonder who he’s talking about, surely there isn’t a person called Blackout, so what is he waiting for? Is he cueing someone to cover us in darkness?

  Finally a guy emerges from the doorway opposite from mine. He looks worse than any of us. His hair is pointing in all different directions and his eyes are half closed. His white shirt is creased in every place and he appears as though he is about to fall over. I hear Suit Man utter “finally” and I guess this guy must have been Blackout. What a strange name.

  “Muscles, I don’t suppose you’ll give him a hand? He received a large dose of the drugs we gave him and as a result he hasn’t fully recovered just yet.” The man speaks while looking at the kid behind me. He doesn’t look like he has any muscles to me. He is scrawny and seems rather frail. Muscles is a strange name for him. Is it something like when you’re in the mob and they call the skinny guy named Tony ‘Fat Tony’? The kid doesn’t move and I don’t blame him. Everything about this situation screams to me that we’re in trouble.

  Not really sure why I do it, I take a step forward and Blackout lets me put his arm over my shoulder. My body struggles under his weight and it momentarily distracts me from the fear that has gripped me.

  Is this man going to kill us? Why has he taken all of us?

  “Are you okay?” I whisper to Blackout, fearful that I might get in trouble for talking. Blackout is slowly letting more and more of his bodyweight lean down on me and my legs immediately begin to protest.

  He doesn’t answer me, but the other girl who has been standing opposite the kid comes over and puts Blackout’s other arm around her.

  “Muscles would be a better choice. Follow me.” Suit Man walks down the corridor, not looking back at us once.

  “Who are you?” I call out to him, feeling a moment of bravery.

  “You’ll find out everything soon enough.”

  “Where are we?” the girl helping me with Blackout asks.

  The Suit Man never answers her and, as he turns a corner, we lose sight of him.

  “Do you think we should try and escape?” I ask the girl with me, my voice shaky.

  “I doubt we’ll be able to get far with this guy,” she points out.

  Blackout grunts and I see him trying to open his eyes further. “S’feel tired.”

  “How long have you been here?” I ask the girl.

  “I woke up to his knocking just before, I was taken yesterday, I think. You?” she asks calmly.

  “This is my third day here, first time I’ve been out of that room, though.” I swallow down my cries that try to surface when I say aloud how long it has been, since it’s also a count for how long I’ve been without Dana.

  “What do you think this is about?” she asks me.

  “I have no idea.”

  We turn the corner and enter into an area that has couches, a pool table, a large television and a table with a couple of chairs. There is a small kitchen area which also houses a bar fridge and microwave. The Suit Man is over by a double set of doors on the opposite side of the room.

  “We’re just waiting on one other person and then I’ll be able to talk some things through with you. I realize it’s unfair to keep you locked in your rooms without any interaction so you’re welcome to enjoy this area. Talk amongst yourselves. Throw around some theories. I anticipate Reader will be here in a few hours.”

  Reader?

  “This is kidnapping! You can’t keep us here,” the girl screams out, making me jump from her sudden outburst.

  “We’re protecting you all, Hacker.”

  “What does that mean?” the girl whose name I now assume is Hacker demands. Why does everyone here have such strange names? Am I the only one with a traditional normal name?

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Like hell I will. I demand you let us go at once or my Dad will bring a ton of lawyers down on you and you’ll never see the light of day again!” Hacker growls. I hope that’s true. Could we all be let go soon?

  “Your stay here can either go smoothly and comfortably, or complicated and unpleasantly. It’s your choice. I recommend you hear me out before you plan on storming out of this place. I have armed guards on each door which will be locked securely so you can’t cheat your way out.”

  I wonder what he means when he says that, but Hacker appears to have bitten her tongue on any further arguing. Suit Man leaves us then, locking the door behind him.

  Hacker had stopped helping me with Blackout when she started yelling at Suit Man and I’ve been slowly losing my grip on him. I manage to drag him closer
to one of the couches where I allow us both to finally collapse. I can tell by his breathing that he’s dozed off.

  I wish I could sleep through this situation. Sleep through being kidnapped, through losing Dana. In fact, what is the point of being awake for any of it with my best friend dead?

  “What the hell is going on here?” Hacker now demands of us. Her words pull me out of my dark, circling thoughts.

  “I have no idea.” I shrug at her since Blackout is still asleep and the kid Suit Man called Muscles seems unable to talk at all. Maybe he’s mute?

  “Why the hell were we taken? Where the hell are we? And how the hell do we get out?” Hacker begins pacing around the room and I feel even more helpless because I know none of those answers.

  “He said he’s protecting us,” Muscles speaks up and I’m shocked by how deep his voice is. For some reason, I thought that if he could talk he might sound high pitched, like a boy Dana and I went to school with. His voice didn’t break until he was in the eleventh grade which made him a prime target for some pretty horrible teasing and caused him to have the same feral look about him that this kid has. Dana insisted we be nice to him and she even managed to get Drew and him to become good friends. Turned out, he wanted to be an accountant, too, and he helped Drew with his exams. Dana always knew what was best for people.

  “Kidnapping us isn’t protecting someone, kid,” Hacker snaps at Muscles.

  “I was about to be killed when they took me. If they hadn’t been there, I’d be dead right now.”

  Hacker stops pacing the room then and looks at Muscles carefully.

  “Where are you from?”

  “What?” Muscles sounds taken aback by that question.

  “Maybe we’ve got something in common, like where we’re from, that explains why we’re all here. I’m from Los Angeles.”

  “Phoenix.” Muscles shrugs.

  “Boston.” I frown, realizing they’ve taken us from opposites sides of the country. That makes this seem a lot less random and more likely that we’ve been kidnapped on purpose for whatever reason.

  “Houston,” Blackout speaks up from by my side and I jump, not expecting to hear his voice. He rubs his eyes and I help him to sit up more since he has slowly moved down so that he’s leaning heavily on me.

  “So that’s weird. Okay, what about jobs? I work in a bank. Maybe this is about some big heist that they need us for?”

  “I don’t have a job.” Muscles shrugs at us all again.

  “I’m just a personal assistant.”

  “I work for my Dad’s construction company.”

  “Okay, any other bright ideas?” Hacker snaps at us all. She is clearly getting fired up.

  “You said your dad would bring a ton of lawyers down on that guy, right? Does that mean your family is well off?” Blackout asks, his eyes closing again before he forces them back open.

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “Maybe this is about money, but not from a bank. Maybe it’s a ransom? My Dad owns his own business. He has money.”

  Hacker seems to consider that seriously. “My family does have a lot of money.”

  They both look at Muscles and me expectantly.

  “My Mom does okay, but not great enough to expect her to be able to come up with much money for a ransom.”

  “I don’t have parents.”

  “What about other family or friends? Anyone willing to pay money for a ransom?” Hacker pushes.

  “No.” Muscles is short with his answer. It leaves no room for argument. It gives the impression that he is suddenly older. At first, I thought he might be fourteen or fifteen, but now he seems closer to eighteen. It’s his eyes, they look haunted. How can a kid who is most likely quite young, look so burdened?

  “What else is there?” Hacker changes the subject from Muscles, perhaps sensing that he seems rather uncomfortable.

  “You said that you nearly died right before you got taken, right?” Blackout talks while his eyes remain shut, he has given up the fight to keep them open.

  “Yes,” Muscles answers him while leaning against the wall of the hallway we had just come through. It’s like he isn’t quite ready to commit himself to this new room.

  “Well, some crazy lady tried to stab me with a knife before I got taken.”

  “A guy was chasing me with a gun.” Muscles shows his first signs of being scared, remembering what must have been a frightening scene from his recent past.

  “I suppose someone did try to blow me up at the bank,” Hacker speaks calmly and I gawk at her.

  I can’t believe they’ve all had near death experiences and are saying it all so easily. Now they’re looking at me and I start to shake my head, but then stop. Joel had been aiming for me when he fired that gun. He had hit Dana by mistake. I was his intended target.

  “I was shot at, too.” I feel my voice break and I quickly stop talking. I’ve been crying on and off while being stuck in that horrible room. I don’t want to start again and especially not in a room full of people I don’t know.

  I move my arm out from under Blackout while I still have feeling left in it and a rush of blood flows back to my hand. He has already started to lean on me again. I lift my feet up onto the couch and tuck myself into a ball, wishing I had the forethought to put on socks. The ground is freezing. Our rooms have floorboards on them and they’re cold enough, but out here it’s just concrete which means the floors are downright freezing. There are spluttered spots of paint on the ground where it was evidently spilled while the walls were painted. It’s almost as if they simply didn’t have time to get everything done, like putting your furniture into your new house when you haven’t even completed building it.

  “Okay, so what does that mean? They hired people to pretend to try and kill us so they could save the day and get us on their side?” Hacker frowns.

  “I knew the guy who tried to kill me.” I swallow past the lump in my throat. I knew what Joel’s reasoning had been for trying to kill me. Do I tell them that reason? They’ll definitely think I’m crazy; I’m not even completely sure if Joel isn’t crazy.

  “So they paid him off. Point is, that still doesn’t explain why us.”

  “Maybe this is one of those black market, organ donor things. We just have the right blood type?” Blackout chillingly suggests.

  My body shakes in fear and the look on Hacker and Muscles faces are sure to echo my own expression of horror.

  “Ew, that’s disgusting.”

  “Makes sense, though.” Blackout yawns and I suddenly become very aware of just how close I am sitting next to him. Our shoulders are touching and even our legs. My nerves start up then as I breathe in his scent and find myself moving closer to him. I feel such a sudden attraction towards him that I grip my nails into my hand, causing sharp pain to shoot up to distract me from my thoughts. I have no idea where that had come from and now is a completely inappropriate time to let my mind think about such things.

  “Right, then we have to get out of here.” Hacker is over by the door Suit Man had exited through in a blink of an eye.

  “What about the armed guards?” I gasp out, moving away from Blackout and standing up, feeling myself shaking at the thought of more guns being around here. What if we get shot at? What if we’re killed trying to escape?

  “Look, if they want us, then they aren’t going to kill us, are they?” Hacker jiggles at the door, slowly building up more force. It doesn’t budge.

  “There must be another exit somewhere, let’s look around.” I suggest, watching Hacker pull out a clip from her hair and twisting it in her hands. I wonder if she is actually going to pick the lock. Doesn’t that only work in the movies?

  Hacker leans closer to the lock just as the door bursts open and, for a brief second, I think guards are going to come in with machine guns and shoot us all dead. Instead, two men rush in holding a kid in their arms. One man looks panicked and the other guy is dead serious.

  �
��Medical lab is this way,” the serious man yells at the panicked one and they run through the corridor together, leaving a trail of blood behind them.

  The door they have come through is left open, but none of us take a step towards it. I think I’m going to faint as I look at the blood left on the ground. I hear a rushing noise in my ears, like a strong wind or water perhaps. The ground moves from under me and then strong arms wrap around me, bringing me to sit on something soft.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  I shake my head, wanting myself to drown in that water I had heard, wanting to disappear from this situation I’m now trapped in, but unfortunately, the water starts to recede. Already my head clears up and I slowly become aware that I still have Blackout’s arms around me, keeping me sitting up.

  “Who the hell was that?” Hacker demands, her voice sounding strained as she, too, takes in the sight of so much blood.

  “I don’t know, but maybe we should get the fuck out of here.” Blackout’s voice sounds stronger. I again sense my instincts screaming at me that we should get out. Staying here is a mistake.

  “Maybe that is what that guy tried to do and they shot him?” Muscles warns.

  We all stay where we are, taking in his words. Should we try to escape and potentially get killed for it? Or do we stay and possibly get operated on or whatever it is that they want to do to us?

  Either way, they both aren’t very appealing options.