Chasing the Browns

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Five

When my eyes opened to complete darkness, I thought I was blind.

Then I realised that the reason it was dark was due to the fact that it was actually dark, so I stopped panicking.

Then I remembered what had happened. I’d been followed – no, stalked – in the dark, and I’d been whacked on the head with something, and then I’d conked out.

So I started panicking again.

My heart started hammering inside my chest. With the amount of erratic thumping my heart was doing lately, I was surprised that I hadn’t come down with some kind of heart condition.

Even when my eyes adjusted, it was still dark.

Really dark.

Too dark.

It reminded me of last night – had it been last night? Was it this night? How long had I been here? – and the way I’d madly run away in the dark, succeeding in nothing but crashing into a lamppost and then getting beaten on the head.

When I came to my senses, I realised that I was supposed to be scared.

Why wasn’t I scared?

I was sitting on something hard, and my hand was chained against a wall. Other than that, my lack of sight left me with nothing left but to guess.

I tried to pull on the chain.

It wouldn’t move.

My eyes widened and I pulled even harder.

It still didn’t move.

I realised then and there than that I had been kidnapped…

…And I knew exactly what had happened last time someone I knew got kidnapped: they’d been burned alive.

A chill ran down my spine, and I started scanning my surroundings, feeling the floor for anything with my free hand – hopefully any weapons, but I knew that only a stupid kidnapper would have the idiocy to leave weapons in the hands of their captives, and my kidnapper was anything but stupid if she’d managed to burn a baby alive and get away with it.

When I thought about it like that, it sounded inhumanely grotesque.

In the end, I found nothing.

I sank back against the wall and closed my eyes, but it made no difference because it was dark behind my eyelids, just like it was dark inside the room.

Where was I?

How was I going to get out?

Then a thought occurred to me. Had this been what had happened to Angel before she’d been murdered?

Was I going to the stake, too?

I yanked as hard as I could against the chain around my wrist, but it wouldn’t move. I thought about the Saw film me and Marie had watched, in which two men had been chained to pipes by their feet and the only way to get out of them was to cut off their feet.

Hell, there was no way I was going to cut off my hand.

My almost-nonchalance began to worry me. I had just been kidnapped, so why wasn’t I feeling scared? Why wasn’t I terrified or crying or in hysterics or doing something else that suitably fitted the situation?

Maybe I was getting used to it – the whole being-prone-to-running-into-danger-and-possibly-causing-death thing.

Maybe I’d already used up all my feelings…on him.