Stolen

Chapter One

~KATERI~

The sleep I was in wasn't the good kind.

There are those sleeps that are the good kinds, the kinds where you sleep and feel so well rested in the morning that you could sing, or where you just dreamed about getting a new car or falling and love. Then there are the in-between kinds of sleep, the kind where  you close your eyes and the next moment you open them and it's already morning, and you don't know if that was good or not. Then there are the bad kinds of sleep, where you keep waking up multiple times in the night, and then fall back asleep hours later, or you feel like you can't move because your arm is stuck underneath you and it's so tingly that it feels like you don't even have an arm, and you're half-asleep so it really scares you, believing that you don't have an arm.

That was the kind of sleep I was in, and it wasn't ending any time soon.

There was one point in time where I was awake. I knew I was because I could hear voices and the loud thrumming of the van's engine underneath me. We were driving. We were moving, and I was alive.

I was sprawled out in the back of the truck, hot and sweaty and uncomfortable. My eyes were shut closed with some kind of bandana, along with my mouth and hands. My legs were free, so I used them to search around me. I paused when I sensed a figure near me. I nudged at it, wondering if it were my mom or dad. I got no response, and that’s when I wondered if the body was dead. The idea that the body was a dead one completely repulsed me, it sickened me so much that I didn't even want to imagine who it could be. Without meaning to, I jerked in anger, desperation, and fear, and managed to make a loud enough noise to catch my kidnappers' attention.

Crap.

After struggling through the force and breathing through the nasty cloth, I fell back into the sleep which I now preferred to be in.

When I awoke the next time, I wasn't in a black truck. I wasn't hot, but I was sticky with sweat and propped against some kind of wall. My eyes were free to open even through my hands and mouth weren't. I slowly opened them, the dim lighting of the room hard to adjust to after what seemed like hours of darkness.

Three men stood in front of me, bickering in some language I didn’t understand. They had browner skin, and black hair. All I could think was terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.

We were in some kind of basement, a dimly lit, cool and stone colored basement. I looked around and met the fearful eyes of three other people and instantly the blood drained from my face.

They were all women.

One of them was older, maybe forty or fifty, I couldn't tell with all the dirt caked on her face. The one beside her was somewhere in her twenties, and I recognize her as the tourist lady with the black pixie cut hair with the Texas accent. She had offered me a piece of gum on my way onto the bus, and her accent had dazzled me because I had never heard anything outside of Chicagoan English. The last pair of eyes frightened me the most, because try beloved to a young girl. She couldn't have been more then twelve, and her chest rose and fell with her fearful breaths and her eyes twitched in fear.

Something familiar dropped in front of my face. I looked down to see my cross-body bag and its contents scattered along the floor. I looked up at my kidnapper.

"This you, no?" he said. I barely recognized it as English through his accent. "Your family has much money right?" 

I looked back down at my stuff, and it was obvious I couldn't lie. My coach bag stared back at me, along with my sunglasses: Dolce & Gabanna. My wallet, Prada, and chock full of cash. The only thing missing was my iPhone.