Ellie

I woke up with my eyes still closed, and panicked. I didn't have the faintest idea where I was, what time of day it was, or even the month. I felt like my brain was operating through a thick, heavy fog. Worse still, I was even afraid to open my eyelids, in case I didn't like what I saw.

My brain kicked into gear, seeming to through a series of mental checklists the like of which I'd never experienced before, almost as if the adrenaline pumping through my system was activating parts of my mind that normally lay dormant. Parts of the brain that had to do with survival.

Where are you?

How did you get here?

Are you being threatened?

How are you going to escape?

The circumstances of my newfound situation were still a mystery to me, but one thing was absolutely clear – wherever I was, I hadn't arrived under my own steam. And that was all kinds of concerning. I began to scan the room, but with my eyes still firmly clenched shut with the same cold, terrified distrust that a child has of the dark, I had to use the only senses left available to me – sound, touch and smell. Taste was out, unless I wanted to

I was alone, in the room at least – as for the rest of the building, I couldn't say. Or, if I wasn't, then the other person must have been almost statuesque in their silence, unbreathing, unmoving, and barely alive. The prospect was terrifying

The craziness of the past few hours began to come back to me in the form of a cold, chilling realization that gripped my gut in an iron fist of fear. I'd been at the hospital. I'd been about to find out… something. An alarm had gone off, the sound of bodies hitting the floor, and then the doctor stepped out mid-sentence. And then he came in. And now I was here, somewhere, but wherever it was, it sure as hell wasn't Alexandria General Hospital. In short, I realized that I'd been kidnapped.

My eyes finally sprang open. I glanced around the room, not looking for details at first, just to check that I was alone. I was. Everything seemed like a blur, my heartbeat was racing in my ears and my lungs were blowing in and out ten times harder than they'd ever done before, and getting faster. I felt as if I was running a race, a greyhound down at the track, and the mechanical rabbit was just getting faster and faster, and my legs were pounding away faster and faster in turn just to stay in place.

Panic.

It was rising inside me, gripping my stomach in its grasp, causing every neuron in my brain to fire a hundred times a second, my breath to speed up and my senses to close in.

Get a grip, Ellie. I begged myself. I searched around for something, anything to hold onto, like a tree trunk in the midst of a raging, swelling river. And then it struck me – the four questions my brain had already asked

Where are you?

A bedroom.

How did you get here?

I was taken.

Are you being threatened?

Not right now.

That left just one question: How are you going to escape? And that was the most telling one, because I knew that escape was the one thing I positively had to do. Whoever the crazy bastard was that had kidnapped me, he was obviously unhinged. After all, why the hell else would anyone kidnap a recovering coma patient? Especially a recovering coma patient who was also a broke ass investigative journalist who hadn't worked in months.

An idiot, I thought. Or worse, and my blood ran cold. A psychopath…

I leapt into action, grateful for the physical therapist's constant hounding over the past month, as well as my own extracurricular pacing. My legs still didn't feel as powerful as they had before my accident, whatever the hell it was, but they were strong enough that I could move around. I didn't understand why the doctors couldn't just have told me how I ended up in hospital in the first place. Alice's constant refrain echoed in my ear – "we’re afraid you're just a bit too fragile right now." I snorted under my breath with disbelief. Fragile!

The bedroom was pleasant enough, if bland – identikit dark gray IKEA furniture, gray sheets, cream carpet, cream walls. It had a hotel's business like sterility, but no en suite bathroom, which indicated that it must've been an apartment. Whoever owned the apartment, I thought, had less personality than the worst office drone. There wasn't a single personal item in sight, and the tops of the bedside tables were bare and sparkling clean, not even adorned with something as trifling as an alarm clock.

I padded quietly over to the built in wall-closet, grateful for the fact that I was clothed, but somewhat drowned in a sea of cloth. I was still wearing the Alexandria General jogging bottoms, complete with the white snake on a cross logo, but someone had carefully placed me into a black T-shirt. A man's black T-shirt, and it was half a dozen sizes too big. As I closed the short distance between the bed and the closet, I felt the unfamiliar feeling of a tiny weight of hair on the top of my skull, and realized that someone had pulled it into a ponytail. I hadn't done that in years.

What the hell's going on?

I pulled the closet door open, only letting my arm move an inch at a time so I didn't make a noise, but I needn't have. The hinges were well oiled, and it barely made a sound. I was more and more confused, if this was a prison, it was a five-star prison, and one that had hired someone to tie up my hair… The closet was dark, and I began to curse under my breath. I didn't want to turn on a light switch, in case my captor somehow realized that I was awake, but equally, I didn't want to miss finding something that I could use as a weapon.

A baseball bat sure would come in handy right now…

Just as I began to consider whether I would be able to open the window's shutters an inch or two to let in some, but not too much, illumination, I heard the familiar electronic hum of a pair of incandescent lighting tubes springing into life, and the contents of the mirror-backed cupboard quickly came into view. Far from revealing anything useful, the revelation simply plunged my situation ever deeper into mystery. On the left-hand side of the closet hung six identical charcoal gray men's suits. On the right-hand side hung six crisp, pressed white shirts. There was a chest of drawers in the bottom of the closet, but no baseball bats, that was for damn sure.

I sighed heavily, and felt the now familiar driving drumbeat of panic beginning to rise in my throat. I bit down on it. If anything was going to help get me out of here, it sure as hell wasn't giving up entirely. I wasn't that kind of girl, and I wasn't going to start now.

I pulled open the top drawer, only to reveal twenty odd pairs of identical black boxer shorts. I was beginning to sense a theme. Unless there was another room somewhere else in this joint, this was a guy's place. A very particular guy, it seemed by the painstaking choice of clothing. I pushed it back in slightly harder than I'd intended, pausing for a second as the wooden drawer clattered. My entire body tensed as I waited for someone to storm in, slap me around the face and tie me to the bed.

It didn't happen.

I pulled open the next drawer. Socks. Christ.

There was one left. I crossed my fingers and held my breath, just in case someone up there was looking out for me – not that I'd seen much evidence of that so far. I pulled it open.

Cash. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of cash, all bundled up in stacks, and tied with holographic paper bands which read "$10,000". There must have been hundreds of them, all brand-new, piled up almost to the top of the drawer.

"Holy Shit," I mumbled under my breath, briefly forgetting that I was supposed to be staying quiet. It was more money than I'd ever seen in my life, and probably more than I'd ever see again. I asked myself the question for the second time.

What the hell's going on?

Still no answer, not that I was expecting one. I stuffed five or six of the bundles into the jogging pants pockets, just in case. Almost two years salary, and tax-free to boot. Whoever's place this was, they must have been into some crazy shit. Normal people just didn't have tens of thousands of dollars in cash lying around for a rainy day. No, normal people used banks. There was only one explanation for anyone to have a stash like this on hand – crime. I'd spent the last decade investigating exactly this kind of behavior for the Alexandria Herald, but now that I was part of it, it just felt surreal.

I stood back up, and I was about to make the door when I noticed something… Unusual. The shiny, mirrored back of the closet seemed to be loose, almost as though it had been knocked ajar, or like a bathroom closet that had been improperly closed. Whatever the reason, it didn't fit, especially in a room that was otherwise so carefully manicured to perfection, without so much as a charcoal gray suit out of place. I pulled back, and it swung open and outward easily, revealing a secret cupboard. My breath caught as I opened it, revealing what seemed like a small arsenal of ammunition. As the first few inches of the closet came into sight I was overjoyed, thinking I'd found my ticket out of there. But as the mirror swung backwards to completely reveal what it had been hiding, my stomach fell through the floor.

Sure, there were plenty of bullets, in boxes and scattered around, and dozens of fully-loaded magazines.

But no actual guns. There were clips where perhaps half a dozen handguns might once have rested, but the weapons themselves were gone, as if the ammunition was just there to taunt me.

As if I needed it, it was another reminder of exactly how dangerous the situation I found myself in. I needed to tread carefully. I walked over to the door, grateful that's the thick cream carpet soaked up every single wave of sound that I made. I tried the brass handle, and just like the closet door had been, it was well-maintained and recently oiled, and opened without so much as a click. I pulled the door back carefully, peeking through the crack to make sure I didn't find a nasty surprise waiting for me. But there was none.

I stepped out into the corridor, tense, jumpy and ready to run at a second's notice. I couldn't believe that I'd been left unattended. My mind was still casting around for the reason why I'd been taken in the first place, and not coming up with much in the way of answers. I could only think that it had something to do with my job at the paper, that perhaps someone thought I knew something, and wanted to silence me. It wouldn't be the first time a thing like that it happened in Alexandria, that was for sure.

I wished they'd just checked with my doctors, though, it would have saved everyone a whole lot of bother. I could barely remember a thing before my accident, and I definitely wasn't in a fit state to write a hard-hitting report on police corruption, or whatever.

Accident. Something niggled in my brain, as though it wasn't the right word, but I shook it off. My mind had been playing up enough recently, to the extent that sometimes I barely knew what was real and what wasn't. The nurses all said it'd go away in time, if I rested. I don't think they expected a situation like this.

The bedroom's carpet gave way to rough, unvarnished wooden floorboards, and the corridor was strewn with the detritus of recent construction: pots of paint, loose screws and nails, and enough sheets of plasterboard to build a house. All in all, it was basically an obstacle course. I trod carefully, like a misbehaving child breaking out of their bedroom late at night, and walked as close to the walls as I could, so that I didn't disturb a loose floorboard. The last thing I wanted was for an errant Creek to give me a way to my captor.

The apartment, if that's what it was, was weird. It didn't feel like a block of condos, more like someone had found a warehouse and decided to turn it into a home. It had an industrial vibe, with old brick walls and

I froze.

There was a man lying on the couch, a huge man, perhaps six foot four and two hundred and twenty pounds of lean muscle, though it was hard to put a precise figure on his height lying down. I held my breath and didn't move, didn't even put my foot back on the ground in case it made a sound. I watch the man carefully, and saw that his chest was rising and falling gently. He was asleep. At least, I hoped he was, because there was only one way out of the apartment, and it was past him.

I gently placed my foot back on the floorboard. The last couple of feet before the corridor gave way into the living room felt like a couple of miles, and I made it almost without breathing. The room was surprisingly large, and had a kitchen at one end, and a doorway at the other. The doorway called to me, it was freedom, escape. But as I look to my left, I saw a row of chef's knives attached to a magnetic strip on the wall, and a wall of rage swept through me. I didn't know why I was here, I didn't know who the hell this guy was, but I knew that I wasn't just going to let him control my life like this. I had a vague sense that someone had tried to control me before, even if I couldn't remember the details. I cursed my stupid amnesia for holding me down like this.

Whatever the reason was, I did something stupid.

I went for the knife.

I crept towards the kitchen, grabbed the largest knife that I could see, and stalked back to where my captor lay resting on the couch. I stood over him, desperately battling with my breath, trying to get it under control, instead of ragged and hurried. It was a losing battle.

The big man's chest rose and fell, and he turned in his sleep, and suddenly I saw his face for the first time. I'd expected to see, well – I don't really know what I'd expected to see. Perhaps scars, and the hard edges of the killer. But what I saw didn't fit any of that. He looked peaceful, at rest, and suddenly the knife in my hand that was raised up high ready to plunge down into his throat felt like it weighed a million pounds. It felt like a responsibility I simply couldn't bear. Who was I to take a man's life, even if he had taken my freedom?

And then something unexpected happened. The man opened one eye and stared directly at me. His hand shot up and grabbed my forearm, closing around it in a vice like grip.

"Give me the knife, Ellie," he rumbled. I couldn't have even if I'd tried, I was completely shut down with fear, and besides his hand was closed so firmly around my forearm that I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to release the knife at all.

You should have just run. Why did you try to be a hero?

"What," I trembled, looking at the face of the man I was sure was going to kill me. "What are you going to do to me?"