A Capable Captive

“We understand that you've been through hell and the last thing we want is to have you relive that. So when you can, tell us everything that you can remember. Take your time."

I shut my eyes and for a second there was only silence, my mind grew still.

I think I remember waking up to a bright white light shining in my face.

My ears were ringing, kind of like a car alarm but not quite as shrill, sort of like the sound you hear in a hospital when shit really hits the fan.

I was hazy, like I had been drugged, but it was the good stuff, you know. The type of drugs that provide you with a euphoria, an escape from the real world.

The lights dimmed; I could see the outline of two men dressed in white. I thought they might have been doctors, maybe. They were in lab coats, but I quickly realized they weren't there to help.

My back was sore, wherever they had me, it wasn't meant for comfort. The "bed" I was on was hard and stiff, it might as well have been stone.

I tried to sit up, but my wrists and ankles were strapped down.

The fog that I was in slowly faded and I could see the two men clearly now.

The taller of the two men was holding a syringe and filling it with a solution of some sort.

The other was just standing there smiling. He was smiling the type of smile you’d only ever see on your child’s face as they hand you the corpse of yet another dead little birdy.

He noticed me staring and made some comment to the tall guy, which made him turn to me.

My first instinct was to call for help but when I opened my mouth, there was no sound. My eyes searched the room frantically for some sign of familiarity, but I had no idea where the fuck I was.

My fingers were numb, I just laid there trembling while they circled me in that makeshift hospital bed, they had me strapped to.

My heart hammered in my chest as I struggled to break free. The straps cut right into my skin and I almost passed out but then they started talking to me.

 "so glad you're awake, I—I mean, we've been waiting forever”.

He looked a lot like the Penguin from that old Batman movie. His hair was greasy and slicked back, the collar of his turtleneck shirt was worn out like he had been sweating and running a lot.

 His protruding belly, and chicken legs told me that he wasn’t the “running type”

He smelled of eggs and vinegar, but it was his smile that disgusted me the most. The way his beady little eyes lit up whenever our eyes met made my skin crawl. His thin-lipped mouth housed a set of jagged, mismatched teeth which were rotting out of his head.

He was very careful not to upset me, I think he really felt something for me.

“Please don’t damage your vocal cords, it’s pointless. You’re a smart girl, have you ever heard of Aphasia? We’ve taken steps to ensure you won’t be leaving us so soon”

I had only heard the term used once before. It was during my time working with Sam, the elderly man at the assisted health care facility I was doing a term at. It was losing the ability to speak, and Sam had struggled with it for a while after he was injured in a three-car collision.

The taller of the two men put his clipboard down and stepped out the room, he was quiet, but there was something terrifying in his silence.

“Well, I won’t bore you with defining words, we don’t want you talking out of turn, they always talk too much.”

They. There had been other girls who these creatures had taken hostage.

“Oh, and don’t worry about running off, we’ve taken care of that too” he said while holding up the syringe the taller man had just injected me with.

My lids snapped open

"Hey, that would explain the initial soreness in my back"

I shut my eyes again and dove back into my memory bank

“I’m Douglas” he placed the syringe on the table next to me and stooped down closer to my face. The smell of his lunch on his breath made me gag, I tried to turn away but was bound in place.

Douglas’ tongue slithered out of his head and grazed the side of my cheek just as the taller man came back in.

“AGAIN? I can’t leave you for five minutes, can I? But you won’t taint another one of my subjects, this one is perfect, and we need her, you understand me?”

I saw Douglas turn bright red in the face, his tongue scurried back into his head and I could breathe again. Douglas left the room muttering under his breath, he was very obviously angry, but the tall man didn’t seem to care. I think he might have been the one in charge and I wanted to know what I could have done to deserve all of this.

“Don’t worry, he’s mostly harmless.”

“You probably have a lot of questions, the first of which: Why are you here? Why you?’

I just blinked, couldn’t do anything else.

“Well, they say bad things happen to good people, and you are the definition of good.”

I was shouting with my eyes, pleading with them to let me go, that I didn’t deserve this, that I would be missed. Frighteningly enough, I think that’s why they wanted me. They wanted to watch a good person suffer.

"The countless hours you spend volunteering, donating your hard-earned money to various charities, and the care in which you devote to the elderly that couldn’t make it through the day without you? Delicious.”

I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, this was it. I spent my life in service of trying to help others, and now I was to die alone in a dark room, with two creeps molesting my cold body.

“Oh, don’t cry, we’ve only barely begun. For now, it’s probably best you get some rest, stress has a way of messing up the results”.

I felt a cold prick on my neck and watched reality slowly fade away.

When I woke again, it was even colder than it had been originally. I looked around the dimly lit room again, my clothes had been tossed carelessly to the side and now sat in a pile across the floor.

A cracked mirror across from me showed that I was stripped naked, my hair a mess, and my makeup smudged from the tears.

I saw an ID badge on the ground next to me. It must have fell off my bag, I knew it was me, but the girl in that photo was barely recognizable.

All I wanted to do was drown in my sorrow, and cry. I felt hopeless, I had never so much as even gotten into a fist fight before and here I was being held against my will with no help in sight.

This is it.

Almost immediately as the thought crossed my mind, I heard the heavy breathing of someone who most likely hadn’t done cardio since elementary school and knew something bad was about to happen.

I closed my eyes tightly; I had seen enough movies to know how this all plays out. Pretty, innocent girl is abducted by two gross men: a tale as old as time

I heard footsteps and then unzipping, followed by more heavy breathing.

“I may not look it, but I really am a gentle lover. You’re in good hands”

Douglas had returned, seemed like he was ready to take advantage of his new toy.

He put his hand on my forehead as I lied there, still too weak from all the drugs in my system to move. I bet he thought he was comforting, but this disgusting incel made me want to die just for being in the same room as him.

 “Tim doesn’t think we should play with the toys, he’s always been a bit of a stickler though. He doesn’t understand the finer things; like you.” He told me while another venomous grin danced playfully across his face.

His pants were at his ankles, he started unbuttoning his shirt with one hand while caressing me with the other.

“PL..Pleugh.. Ple.. Plz” was all I could force out, Douglas noticed.

“You’re regaining your strength aren’t you, well that’s gonna take some of the fun out of this for me”

He turned his back to me and went over to his table to find the right solution that’d incapacitate me once more.

The taller man, known as Tim re-entered the room now, he and Douglas exchanged looks before Tim’s eyes dropped to Douglas’ ankles.

“What the FUCK did we just talk about? We JUST talked about this”

Tim shoved Douglas away from me and began examining my body, likely checking to make sure Douglas hadn’t done anything irreversible.

“Tim, she’s MINE. You can’t have her”

Tim turned around to face Douglas.

“What did you say to m-“

Douglas wasted no time waiting for him to finish his thought, he stabbed him in the neck with a lethal dosage of the paralytic he gave me.

I finally could move my fingers again, but I was still strapped to the bed.

Tim stumbled and eventually fell like a sack of potatoes.

I could hear the sound of Douglas’ breathing pick back up, he was panicked.

“Look what you fucking made me do?!” He yelled at me, I couldn’t understand how this was my fault, but didn’t want to anger him more so I refrained from trying to move anymore.

“He was my friend, he taught me everything, and you had to get between us.”

I looked back to the body of the man lying on the ground, good riddance. Douglas was saying some other shit about their relationship, but my attention was fixated on the scalpel sticking out of Tim’s lab coat pocket.

I knew I had to do something, but what? Even if I could free myself, I still had to get by the insane serial kidnapper. Like I mentioned before, I hadn’t ever been in a fight before and got cut from the touch football team in the first round.

“OKAY, I have to get rid of this before it starts to smell, but you stay right there...” He gestured towards the body, then went over and grabbed Tim by the feet before pulling him into a different room.

My heart started beating faster, I knew what came next. There was nothing left between us to prevent this monster from raping me.

“Doug.. Douglas, ri-right?”

He peeked his head back into the room when he heard my strained whispers

“You’re more of a fighter than I thought. When we’re done here, I might be able to make some money off you”

“Please… just wait” the words were coming a lot easier now, but I still hadn’t regained full control of my body.

Douglas walked back into the room with yet another syringe.

“I don’t wanna die, please. Im so young, I’ll do whatever you want, but please don’t kill me.” I breathed out.

Douglas put the syringe down and walked back over to me.

“I don’t want to kill you, beautiful. Then I’d be alone again, no, no you’re staying with me. You’ll learn to accept me, to love me.”

A teardrop fell down my cheek and he wiped it away.

“That shot I put into your spine should have made running away impossible, so I’m going to unstrap you. DO NOT make me regret this.”

He undid my hands first and then my ankles. I could feel the creep’s nostrils flare up as he moved down my body, delighting in my disgusted groans, making the hair stand on edge.

Once completely unbound, he looked at me from head to toe, reveling in his apparent good fortune.

I raised my eyebrows, wiggled my toes and bent my fingers to see the extent of my immobility. I looked back to their side table. There were a bunch of potential weapons: a bone saw, a scalpel, a mallet, and the syringe.

I thought that maybe if I crippled him; then I could get away. I could slice open his leg and he’d have to stop the bleeding, right?

Or maybe that would just piss him off more.

Decisiveness had always been hard for me to manage but right now it was driving me mad. I was afraid but the anger building in me was starting to overwhelm that fear.

“Are you ready, my beautiful? When I’m finished I bet you won’t even want to go home haha”

It was like I could feel something inside snap. Visions of my parents, at home losing their minds. My boyfriend, running around the city searching for a sign of me. My best friend heartbroken with me gone.

She always told me I wasn’t strong enough for the world and would always encourage me to look for ways to strengthen myself. She would have already gotten up and choked this pathetic bitch to sleep and skipped her ass on home.

Reluctantly, I began spreading my legs. He climbed on top wearing only his wife-beater, in any other circumstances I’d laugh at him dressed up like Winnie the pooh, but at the time all I could feel was sick to my stomach.

I let my leg fall to the ground and started feeling around for the scalpel that fell out of Tim’s coat. I pulled it in closer to me until it was in arms reach.

Douglas fumbled with his weak excuse for manhood, he was sweating and nervous. Again, in other circumstances, this might be endearing, or at least humorous, but this piece of shit deserved no sympathy from me.

I reached down and grabbed the scalpel, preparing myself to do the unthinkable. He was too concerned with his inability to get himself excited to notice what I was doing.

I opened my eyes, and stared at him, then thrust the scalpel into his back as hard as I could. He jumped off me, desperately trying to retrieve the weapon.

I dropped to the floor and pulled myself across to the door while he squealed in pain behind me.

I reached for the door handle and pulled myself up. He had given up on trying to pull the scalpel out and just sat there, trying to contain the bleeding.

“YOU BITCH, YOU’VE RUINED EVERYTHING”

I did my best to shake the remaining weariness off. He was in no shape to chase after me, and I could finally go home.

“I WILL FIND YOU. YOU WILL NEVER BE SAFE, AND THE NEXT TIME, I WON’T BE SO NICE TO YOU, YOU SLUT”

I held onto the door handle for a second. He was right and something in me wasn’t satisfied with him sitting there bleeding out. I know the logical thing would be to run for it and call the police.

I stepped towards him, nudging the door closed with my foot. Then I walked over to his equipment table and picked up the little bone saw they had laid out there.

“You wouldn’t actually kill me, that’s not what nice girls do”

“Don’t worry, I may not look it, but i'm very gentle. You’re in good hands.”

 Opening my eyes again

The investigator taking notes paused before looking up.

“So, where is he now? Did he run off?”

I looked down at my shaking hands, covered in blood, nails chipped and damaged.

“Are you okay miss” he inquired

I blinked solemly and smiled. I smiled the kind of smile you might see on your child’s face as they hand you the corpse of yet another dead little birdy.