The Shattered

Chapter 9: Meeting the captors

I woke up disoriented. The first thing that I was aware of was that there must have been another something near me because I could hear ragged breathing close to me. I pried my tired eyes open, and I was met by complete darkness. I tried to move, and found that I was tied to a chair.

Great. Absolutely great. Good job, self. Where have you gotten yourself to this time?

The breathing near me hitched and then sped up. The thing moaned, a very distinct, human moan that I recognized immediately.

"Ethan!" I exclaimed, realizing only after the fact that I probably should have been quieter. I mean, considering that I was tied to a chair in the pitch black probably meant that we weren't dealing with friendly people here. I let out a stream of profanities, careful to keep it down this time. Ethan didn't reply to either my exclamation or my cussing, so I assumed that he was still out. How had he gotten here? I mean, the last time I had seen him was when I turned around and ran from him back in the village. Did he follow me here? Why did he decide that it was worth it follow me out into the forest as it was getting dark without any weapons when I had been so mean to him?

With a sinking feeling I realized that he probably blamed it on himself and had followed me out because he would have blamed himself if anything had happened. Oh my god. I almost laughed at the irony of it. He was doing the thing that had caused me to storm off into the woods to save me from the woods.

"Rin?" Ethan's voice rang out quietly from somewhere off to my left.

"Oh my god, Ethan, you're awake!" I squealed, all thoughts of keeping the volume down dissipating almost immediately.

"Yeah, I guess I am." He replied. His voice sounded tired and weak, and I wondered yet again what trials and tribulations he had been through since I had stormed off from him in the village. I decided that now probably wasn't the right time to ask him about it, because I was likely to get mad at him for doing whatever had dragged him into this mess with me, and I really didn't want to fight with him right now. After all, we were both tied to chairs somewhere that was really dark. In other words, we had absolutely no idea what was going on.

"Ethan, do you have any idea where we are?" I asked, praying to every god that I could think of that this was just a nightmare and that I'd wake up in my bed, safe and sound any minute now. No such luck.

"Nope. I was just as unconscious as you when I got here." He replied. I took stock of our situation. We were tied to chairs god knew where without any food or water completely defenseless from the animals that could happen to chance upon us at any moment. Not only were we in an awful situation, but the only thing that I could get myself to think was 'Remind me, how did you get yourself into this mess in the first place? Because for it to be this bad, you really must have screwed something up.' And then I'd talk back at myself, and pretty soon I was having a conference with all of the voices in my mind and even I was beginning to wonder if maybe I was going crazy after all.

Time passed, and I had no way to measure it. My internal clock was not working, and so the time was left to my imagination. Eventually, I could see a faint glow coming from random places all around me. It couldn't have been two minutes later that I could make out the room that we were being kept in.

It was a wooden room, pine, I was pretty certain, and it was solid. There were a few cracks between the boards in various places, some looked intentional. They must have been made on purpose to let the light in. They definitely had not worked during the night time when it was hard to see when you had a clear view of the moon and stars. There was a door off to my left, and Ethan was hunched in a chair to my right and a little behind me. I refocused my attention on the door. About half way up it, there was a slot that looked kind of like the doggy doors that I remembered seeing from way back before the crash. I guessed that it couldn't have been very functional though because only a small dog would have been able to fit through it and they would have had to jump three feet into the air to reach it. It must have been used for something else.