Number One-Part 2

Melanie was pretty sure her head had never felt so awful before. Even those nights she and her friends had gotten into the tequila, her head had never throbbed as much as it did right now. She opened her eyes, and it took a minute to clear the fuzz from her vision. It took another minute to remember what had happened. Shit! Where the hell was she? Her heart shot into her throat. She panicked and tried instantly to stand up. That move was answered by a metallic clank and the sound of her falling clumsily to her side. She was tied to a post. She felt around her wrists, to see what was binding her. Handcuffs. Super. She had no idea where she was, and she was handcuffed to a pole. She craned her neck around. It was a basement. At least, the pole she was tied to looked like the kind most people had in their basements. What the hell was going on?
She had been walking home from work, she remembered that much. Then there was that delivery van…wait a second. Chloroform? Seriously? No, that only happened in B-rated movies. There’s no way someone had chloroformed her and taken her hostage. That was just ridiculous. No. It didn’t happen. But she’d read enough cheap thriller novels she should know exactly what chloroform smelled like. Didn’t she remember something about chloroform having a sweet smell? And she definitely remembered that hostile sweet smell being forced into her nostrils. Just the thought of that smell made her head pound even more. And threatened to bring up the curry she’d eaten during her break at work.
No. Okay, this is a messed up joke or something. A game. There’s keys for these handcuffs somewhere, she just needed to find them. She surveyed the room. It was completely empty. There was literally nothing in it. Not a single piece of furniture, not a stitch of carpet. She was sitting on a hard concrete floor, surrounded by nothing but walls and some horribly colored curtains. And the cold was creeping into her butt through the thin material of her scrub pants. She looked down. She was wearing only her t-shirt and scrub pants. Her coat and backpack were nowhere to be seen in the room, so they had evidently taken those. She had no cash in her wallet. And there wasn’t much in her bank account, either. Well, at the very least, they weren’t after her for her money. Though at the moment it might have eased to mind to know if they were after her money.
She shuffled her way awkwardly around the pole. Nothing. Not a damn thing. She pulled a bit on the handcuffs, praying that they somehow hadn’t latched completely and would just miraculously fall off. After all, that’s want you do, right? You check to make sure the handcuffs are secure. No dice. This was for real. Not just a game or a joke. It was for real. Shit.
She leaned back against the pole, trying not to hyperventilate. There was a way out of this, she just had to find it. She had to think. And she needed to stay calm. Panic wasn’t going to help one damn bit. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. Calm down, she told herself. She still felt so tired. Apparently Chloroform-induced sleep didn’t equal good sleep. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but it couldn’t have been long. She should have known better than to close her eyes. As her breathing slowed, she got more and more tired. Until eventually she drifted off.

This time when she woke she knew exactly where she was. The cold concrete was still there beneath her, the handcuffs still pressing unforgivingly into her wrists. This time her headache was mercifully gone, replaced by a terrible crick in her neck, from falling asleep sitting up. She rolled her head around, trying to get rid of it.
The decorating fairy hadn’t come while she’d been asleep. The basement still looked exactly the same. She shuffled around the pole again, looking for something, anything other than total emptiness. Then she heard something scrape on the floor above her. She heard voices, quiet enough that they were only a murmur to her. She held her breath and strained her ears, but still couldn’t understand a word.
She tried to get closer to the sound by standing up, but only managed to fall over on her side. It took her several minutes but she finally managed to lever herself to a standing position, hands still behind her and around the post. She felt her legs tingling painfully as the blood returned to them. It didn’t help. The voices were still just a murmur. Considering the ceiling wasn’t insulated, she figured they must be talking fairly quietly. She couldn’t hear any other ambient noise, either.
Suddenly, the voices stopped, and she heard footsteps walking across the floor, and the unmistakable creak of a flight of stairs. She turned to face the one door that lead into the room, and her heart began to beat a little faster. Why were they coming downstairs? Who the hell were they?
The door opened and a man stepped through. Average height, slim but not skinny. And probably well built, or at least she guessed by the way he wore his t-shirt. If she hadn’t been drugged and handcuffed to a pole in his basement, he might even have been good-looking. But at the moment, he just looked smug and arrogant. He was the driver of the van. He didn’t say a word as he came into the room, went behind her and roughly shook the handcuffs to make sure they were still attached. Melanie wasn’t sure if she should say anything. Would he answer her or just leave? She doubted she’d get any answer, but even if she did she probably couldn’t believe it anyways. But she had to ask, even if the effort was futile. She just sit here submissive.
“Where am I?” she asked. She didn’t think she sounded frightened, and she wasn’t trying to sound demanding. She just asked as though it were a simple question she’d like the answer to.
He glanced up at her, his eyes completely emotionless. For a moment they flickered, showing something she could only describe as a profound sadness. But perhaps she hadn’t seen that right. I was probably a trick of the light, because in a moment that was gone, replaced by a face of pure, impenetrable stone. He closed the door without saying a word.
“Wait!” she called after him. “What do you want from me? Why am I here? Please!” She had no t succeeded in not sounding frightened with that outburst. But the stairs creaked again and he was gone. She slid back down the post and sat on the cold floor again. Why the hell was she here? She’d never seen this man before, but here she was trapped in his basement. She felt the panic rising, the tears welling up in her eyes. She was scared. More scared than she could ever remember feeling. And she’d been plenty scared before, but it had never felt this real. This raw. She was terrified, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. She felt the tears welling and unable to wipe the tears away, she felt one escape down her cheek.
Stop it, she told herself. You’re not helpless, you’re not the damsel in distress. There has to be something you can do. Maybe not to get yourself out, but to get a message out. There’s always an escape route. There’s always some other option to despair. And there is a way out of this, you just have to find it. She wiped her eyes against her sleeves and tried to think.
There was no phone in this room, but there had to be one in the house somewhere. But that would involve her getting out of the handcuffs. Dammit. Okay, next idea. Next idea…but nothing came. She needed to get out of the handcuffs. She felt around them as best she could with her fingers, but the second she started to struggle she heard them click closed one more notch, becoming even tighter around her wrists. Okay, playing with the handcuffs equals bad idea. Could she somehow pick the lock? It was a good thought, except that she’d never tried to pick a lock before. And she knew more about marlin fishing than lock-picking. And even if she had, there was nothing she could get her hands on that would help.
She could hear someone walking around upstairs. Someone talking, but the voices were still too faint to hear. She was going to go insane just sitting here, trapped, with nothing to do but think about her situation, wonder why she was here, and lament her lack of lock-picking skills.
Which brought up a good point. What was she doing here? If she could figure out that, maybe she could figure out how to get out of this. Maybe she’d done something to one of these guys that would have made them hate her enough to, well, kidnap her. Even now it sounded ridiculous, but it was true. There had to be some reason. She closed her eyes and pictured the driver of the van, the guy who had come in momentarily and checked her handcuffs. Light blue eyes, light brown, almost blonde hair, fairly tall. He looked familiar, but there are a lot of guys out there with blue eyes and light brown hair. But she was fairly certain she’d never seen him before. The closest person she could think of with blue eyes and blonde hair was Wally, and he was about 100 pounds overweight with a prize-winning mullet. So this guy was definitely not Wally. In fact he seemed to be in pretty good shape.
So maybe he had a friend she had pissed off. She knew there was someone else in the house, unless Blue Eyes was talking to himself upstairs. Though if he was he could’ve given Norman Bates a run for his money. No, there were definitely 2 people up there. It had to be the other guy from the van. The one with the chloroform who had come from behind her. But she hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of him. So that wouldn’t help at all, now would it?
There had to be someone she had done really wrong for her to be here. Even if it had been several years ago. Whoever he or she was, they were probably off their rocker, and those people tended to hold grudges pretty well. Even for several years. But how serious did this wrong have to be? She’d known people who went off at the drop of a hat, so this could be as simple as someone she had cut off in a line once. Though she couldn’t recall having cut anyone off in any lines. Not on purpose anyway. In fact, she hated when people did that, so she tried never to do it herself.
She tried to mentally go back over the past few months. Was there anyone who had really seemed irritated when she’d seen them last? Well, there were the usual nurses and doctors she’d pissed off when she told them their patient’s lab results weren’t ready yet or weren’t going to be available at all. But that happened all the time. It wasn’t anything they didn’t deal with on a regular basis. And as far as she knew, there weren’t any massively unstable nurses or doctors she had ever dealt with. Slightly unstable, yes. But not this crazy. Patients? Well, that was another story entirely. Most patients hated the lab staff. Having swears thrown at you was really just a part of the job these days. There were always drunks and addicts in emergency that promised retribution when she took their blood. But that was all talk. Usually when they sobered up they didn’t remember what had happened the previous night anyways. Plus Blue Eyes didn’t seem to fit the profile of an obsessive drunk or an addict. But his partner could be. So deranged patient wasn’t out of the mix.
It had to be a guy, she figured. Who ever it was had managed to pull her into the van without much trouble, and had probably helped Blue Eyes carry her into the basement. And she wasn’t exactly a 90 pound skeletal supermodel. So it was probably a he, but she couldn’t rule out a strong woman. But she didn’t know any women who would’ve been strong enough to lift her. Drag her, but Melanie didn’t feel any scrapes or bumps when she woke up other than the throbbing in her head, so that left men.
But as hard as she remembered, she couldn’t come up with a significant event in her life that might have caused someone such intense hatred. For the most part she was pretty passive aggressive, and tried to do as little as possible to make other people angry. Mel’s philosophy had always been that if you’re reasonable and kind to other people there was less chance they would go out of their way to make your life miserable in return. How was it possible that she couldn’t recall making anyone particularly angry in the past couple months? Surely she had rubbed someone the wrong way. She must have, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. Maybe she hadn’t noticed she was doing it at the time.
Her legs were falling asleep. She stretched them out, but it did little to alleviate the tingling in her toes. She maneuvered herself into a standing position, leaning against the post. She was beginning to feel massively uncomfortable. She could do little with her arms short of bending her elbows slightly, and when she did that the handcuffs pressed sharply into her wrists. And her shoulders were beginning to ache from the bizarre position they were in. Not that there was anything she could do about it. She wiggled her fingers.
The feeling returned to her lower extremities, but she stayed standing, slowly revolving herself around the pole. The nearest wall was maybe 6 feet from her. She was literally situated in the direct center of the room. The room itself was dry walled, finished and painted. It was maybe 12 feet by 12 feet, fairly big. The floor, though bare concrete, bore traces of glue and other fibers, which meant it had probably been carpeted at some point, but the carpeting had been pulled up and not yet replaced.
Mel wondered absentmindedly where the house was in relation to where they’d stopped her on the street. Close by, or really far away? There were thick curtains covering the windows that prevented her from seeing outside, and most likely to prevent anyone outside to see that she was handcuffed to a pole in the basement. Even in some of the worse neighborhoods in town, a person handcuffed to a pole in your basement warranted a call to the police. She listened carefully but heard no sounds coming from outside the house. No traffic noise meant they were either in a quiet residential area or in the country somewhere. Or that the basement had been soundproofed.
Without warning, she heard the door open. She swiveled her head to see why, and saw Blue Eyes walk into the room. Again he said nothing, just went behind her and roughly shook the handcuffs to make sure they were still attached. Did they had some kind of schedule set up where they had to check on her every couple of hours? He turned to leave.
“I have to use the bathroom,” she blurted out. It was true, actually, but it was also the firs thing that had popped into her mind as a way to get out of the handcuffs, at least for a couple of minutes.
Blue Eyes leaned out the door and yelled up the stairs,
“Hey, I need you down here,” he called. He then left the room, leaving the door open behind him. Was he just going to leave her there? Melanie heard stomping on the stairs as a second person descended. A head popped in the door. The second guy. And it was, in fact, a guy. He glanced around the room, and seeing no one but her there, left in search of the other guy. Mel wondered for a second if Blue Eyes had heard her at all, but then she heard them talking in the adjacent hallway, loud enough to make out words this time.
“She needs to go to the bathroom.”
“Well she’ll just have to hold it, then.”
“For how long? We have no idea how long it’s gonna take for those assholes to get their shit together. She could be here for days.”
“Well what the fuck do you want to do, then?”
“We’ll just leave the door open partway, so we can hear what she’s doing.”
“What if she comes after one of us?”
“We’re both bigger than her. And that’s why I called you down here. Then at least there’s two of us. Even if she’s a black belt, the two of us should be able to take her down.” Melanie instantly wished she’d taken martial arts as a kid.
“Fine. Go get her.” Evidently Blue Eyes was the one with more brains. He came through the doorframe with a key ring in one hand. He still said nothing as he unlocked the handcuffs. He grabbed her upper arm and pulled her abruptly towards the door. He was taller than her, but not by much. And he probably outweighed her by at least 40 lbs, she figured by the way he was able to steer her towards the door without much trouble. Past the door was a short hallway, and in it stood the second man, about the same height as Blue Eyes but heavier, with a good day and a half worth of scruff on his face. He stepped out of the way as Blue Eyes steered her into the bathroom.
“Be quick,” was all he said. He closed the door almost all the way, leaving it open about an inch. The bathroom was as empty as the room she had been in all day. They must have taken everything out just after she’d asked. The only thing left was the toilet paper, and even then they’d taken the plastic tube with the spring in it that held it in the holder. The window was frosted so she couldn’t see outside, and it had been nailed shut with thin nails pounded into th wooden frame and painted over ages ago. The paint was already peeling slightly. The shower rod was gone, though she was fairly certain even using that as a weapon would be useless against 2 men, both bigger than her. And even if she smashed the window and made a break for it, there’s little chance she could outrun them both without a head start. Hell, she probably wouldn’t make it all the way through the window before they were inside the room pulling her back. There was nothing that she could see that would help her get away.
“You’ve got one more minute,” came a voice from outside. Mel quickly did her business, happy the door opened away from the mirror. As she was quickly washing her hands she noticed that one of the thin nails holding the window shut hadn’t been driven quite all the way in. It was covered in paint but stuck out of the frame maybe a quarter inch or less. It looked thin enough to fit into the keyhole on the handcuff, though.
Just as she was about to go for it, the door opened and Blue Eyes grabbed her arm again. She stood her ground for a second, but thought better of it and went quietly. Back in the empty room he handcuffed her hands behind her back again and headed for the door again.