fearless

Chapter 48: Someone, Anyone, Please Help.

Song: Search Parties- Sam Bruno (from Paper Towns)

••••

My vision is blurred as I hear a door creak open. A shadowed figure steps into the basement-like room I am being held captive in.

I feel my stomach, and immediately stop moving.

Hannah is gone.

I feel my heart ache in my chest. I am about to break down, knowing what could be happening to her, and place my attention on the man that just walked in.

His build looks vaguely familiar, but he's wearing a mask so I can't see his face.

Another masked man stumbles in behind the first, dragging my mother along with him.

She fidgets, and thrashes against the man, trying to free herself, but fails.

The man places her wrists in large, rusty handcuffs on the wall, securing them tightly at her skin.

He kicks her in the stomach and she groans. Bile empties itself from her stomach, and she then rolls her head back to look at me, alarmed.

The two men stand over me and then carry me to a bed in the center of the room.

I am tied to each of the four bedposts, where I cannot move.

Oh shit.

My heart races as the two men begin to remove my shirt from my bruised and cut arms.

~~~ Ty ~~~

"Dad?" I call out to Zeke, my father, who sits impatiently on the couch in my living room. He looks up, concerned. "Yes?"

"We... We need to do something." I finally finish, my voice trembling since I'm holding back a rush of tears.

The two people that mean the most to me, that I love the most, are gone.

"Yes. I'm aware of that, son." My father says rudely.

"Shut the fuck up and listen to the damn plan." I say forcefully, pointing at him.

All tears and sadness and pity forgotten, I launch into orbit my plan to find Hannah and Maddie.

"Maddie said that she was going to her parents' house to ask Tris for advice since Hannah had been acting weirdly after the window was left open." I say, recalling the reoccurring thoughts in my mind from the past three days that Maddie has been gone.

My father nods the whole way through. Just as I'm about to continue, I hear a knock on the door.

I step over to the door, and crack it open. Outside stands Maddie's father. His face is cut up and swollen.

I pull him inside as Zeke applies first aid. "What happened?" I interrogate.

He breathes heavily, looking around, nervously.

"I, I got into a fight with some men outside the control room. I heard screams. Sounded like Tris and someone else." He stops for breath in between comments.

My eyes widen.

~~~ Maddie ~~~

My clothes are now peeled from me like the skin of a banana. My bra and underwear are the only articles of clothing that remain attached to my ice cold body.

One of the men slowly unzips my bra, since it opens from the front.

He strips it from my sickly pale skin, and throws it at my mother, who has a horrified expression painted across her face.