Journey Out

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The water falling from the ceiling is the only sound breaking the deadly silence.

The first thing the girl noticed when she regained consciousness it's that she was blindfolded. At the realization, she starts to panic and tries to move but her hands are tied and her ankles are tied too. What happened? She can't manage to remember.

After a couple of minutes of struggling against the chains keeping her almost completely immobilized, she starts screaming for help.

“Help!! Someone! Please where am I? Get me out of here, help!!”

The tears soaking the cloth against her eyes as her throat aches from the desperate screams. She's cold, thirsty, and clueless about how she got caught up in this awful predicament.

Suddenly, the girl goes quiet as she hears footsteps nearing her whereabouts. Every step makes an echo as they come closer. She can't help but imagine the makers of those footsteps are military boots, heavy with every step. Her thoughts begin to race when the sound abruptly comes to a halt. Then silence, followed by the rustling of keys against what sounds like a metal door. The unknown stranger is just a door away from her and in the vulnerability that she finds herself she decides to fake being unconscious just as she feels the keys clinking and the door knob turning. The door opens and the girl's keeper slowly creeps into the humid room going directly in front of where she lies “unconscious” and tied in the cold floor.

The girl feels her heartbeat rising as she feels the presence of whoever came into the room breathing heavily so near.

“Wakey wakey little girl”, said the man standing before her in a raspy grave voice. The smell of nicotine burned her nostrils as his breath hit her like a slap on the face. She couldn't help her body from shaking and reacting to the foul smell.

“Oh, you are already awake!”, he said, making a grim smile as he ripped the blindfold off of the girl's face.

She blinks rapidly as she tries to focus her blurry vision on the familiar face in front of her. Terrified when she unexpectedly remembers the events that happened before waking up kidnapped. The girl was alone at home and had decided to go to the gas station to buy snacks to eat while she watched a movie. She was in a bit of a lazy mood and didn't want to take the car because the gas station was very near her house so at the time she thought it would just be simpler to walk seeing as she just had to cross the street in front of her house. But now she regrets even having thought of going out that night…

She put on her sneakers, her favorite purple hoodie and went out. While crossing the street her best friend called her. Her best friend had just gotten out of work and began telling her about her day, meanwhile the girl was happy hearing her friend while walking. After arriving at the gas station, she noticed a strange man standing beside the ice container beside the front door entrance. The girl didn't make much of it because there were always men standing around the gas station, sometimes just drinking beer or reuniting to talk and smoke, so she entered without a second thought as she had done almost half of her life living in that same town. Inside, she grabbed her go-to snacks which consisted of potato chips, ice-cream and soda. After paying, she went out holding her snacks in a paper bag, still talking with her best friend on the phone.

“I was hungry af and my supervisor wanted me to stay overtime but I swear if I stayed even 5 more minutes I would have passed out! I can't, let's go on vacation Jessy”, she heard her friend ranting away after having a tiresome day.

The girl began crossing the street when the man she had previously seen next to the ice container started to follow her, she turned to look at him and he stopped and just stood there watching her. She asked him, “Can I help you?” But he didn't reply. So she began walking again, but then he also proceeded to follow her. She stopped again but when she looked back he wasn't there anymore.

“Jessy are you there?”, her friend grew concerned when she heard Jessy maybe had run into someone.

Scared, Jessy began running towards her home when suddenly the man attacked her from behind and everything went dark.

“Jessy?! Jessy Oh my God, Jessy what happened? Are you there?” Jessy?!”, her best friend had heard the muffled sounds.

The girl's phone and bag had dropped to the ground. But she was nowhere to be found…

Now staring back at the face of that man, in the coldness of the room that was her cage, she couldn't help but think that her life would end there.

“Who are you? What do you want from me?”, Jessy asked the awful man.

“Be a good girl and everything will be okay”, he said, giggling to himself and leaving the room, locking the door and leaving her to be swallowed up again by the deadly silence.

What she felt like more than three days or maybe a week had gone by and as time passed she started analyzing the times the man would come see her. In each visit he gave her water and food and after the first two times of trying to feed her himself but not opening her mouth or spitting out the food he freed her right arm so she could eat. He would watch her almost without blinking, with excitement in his eyes.

The girl had begun to have nightmares in which he would kiss her and when he stopped kissing her, worms would come out of his mouth. Traumatized, with little sleep, no appetite and absolute coldness taking hold of her, she knew if she wanted to try to escape she needed to do something soon. So the next time he freed her right hand to eat, she decided to distract him, and began to ask him all sorts of questions. He began talking and talking as someone who clearly didn't have many people to talk to, besides maybe his previous victims. To her surprise, it seemed as the days passed he thought she was so defeated she wouldn't even try to do anything to save herself. But that day when he turned his back while talking about his twisted childhood and the abuse he suffered, she hid the fork beneath her feeling it slowly stab her thigh. Distracted, he tied her arm again and left, locking the door behind him and not noticing the fork was missing from the tray.

She had to plan what to do with the fork but her mind wasn't clear. It would all come to when he unties her arm again, at that moment she will do whatever's necessary.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It's raining and the water droplets falling from the leaky roof remind Jessy of that first night she woke up in that horrible place. As she lay there shaking, she swore the next time he came through those doors will be the last. She fell asleep for a couple of hours, she guessed, she couldn't know for sure but she was certain it had been a while. Then stayed staring at the door until she heard his footsteps approaching. The time had come, it was now or never. He came in with the tray of food talking about how thanks to the rain he had slept like a baby. He came near her to untie her eating arm as always. When he untied it and stepped back, she started faking a seizure. He got surprised seeing her contort on the floor and hesitated on what to do, if she were to die he wanted to do it on his terms but not like this so grabbed the keys and untied her other arm and legs as she seemed like she was going to pass out. That was the moment she had been waiting for, she quickly reached for the food tray and hit him on the head with it. Disconcerted, he fell back grabbing his head in pain. Jessy ran for the open door and found herself in an empty hallway. She kept running as she heard him scream in the distance that he would kill her. There were doors to other rooms that looked the exact same as the door where she was being kept. She tried opening each of them but they were all locked. She needed to find the exit, he was getting closer, she could hear the heavy boots echoing in the hallway.

After trying to open five doors hopelessly, finally one opened and she quickly entered trying to find a place to hide. The room looked like a laundry room, she could see a washer/dryer combo and a pile of bloodied clothes. There was a rack of cleaning products, a wooden closet and a large storage bin. She touched her pockets and made sure she still had the fork she had hidden in case he found her and had to defend herself and decided to hide in the place she thought he wouldn't look, the storage bin.

The mad man banged on every door with rage, screaming and threatening her. Jessy uncovered the lid and stared into the darkness inside of the storage bin noticing it was hiding a ladder inside it. It seemed the storage bin was actually a disguise for an entrance to someplace, or in this case, an exit for Jessy. Without another thought, she went down the ladder as fast as she could. Jessy slipped on the last step of the ladder but managed to not fall. The ladder brought her to a tunnel, she couldn't see what was ahead but she kept moving. If she had gotten so far she wouldn't give up now. Then she ran into a crossroads, the tunnel divided into two. She chose the right tunnel and kept running until rays of light began to shine through cracks on the top of the tunnel-like passage, she continued until she was out of the tunnel and was surrounded by trees and the sun blinded her for a moment making her squint at the light after being stuck in that closed dark room for so long. Jessy had no idea where she was but knew she had to keep going forwards. She kept walking through the woods until she was at the border of the road and asked for help swaying her arms in desperation towards the cars passing by until someone stopped.

An old lady stopped and immediately told her to get in, worried about the girl's appearance. Jessy bursted into tears and told her everything that she had just escaped. The old lady drove into town and called the police. Jessy had escaped, Jessy was alive.

Afterwards, the police went to the place Jessy described looking for that psycho that had kidnapped her but found nothing but empty rooms in an abandoned motel that connected to the tunnels where she escaped from. In the tunnels there were old clothes, some were ripped and bloodied, and chains. The man was nowhere to be found, the thought of him still out there kept everyone including the police in tension. The old lady was going to town to the cementary for her daughter's death anniversary; it had been already 30 years since her daughter had disappeared and was found buried a year later near the same woods. She had been so open to help Jessy because her daughter was a victim too and she would have loved it if someone could have saved her daughter in time. In Jessy she saw her daughter, and was glad that Jessy could now return home and recover. The police contacted her family and best friend and they came to pick her up feeling the relief of seeing her again, alive.

She had been missing for almost four weeks. But now that she was home Jessy couldn't help but think, what would have happened if instead of the storage bin she had chosen to hide in the wooden closet? Or what if instead of the right tunnel she had chosen the left one?

She had learned that our lives are a series of decisions, in one moment making the wrong one could have big consequences but if you follow your instinct you will always choose right. The question is, what will you choose?