Captive: Hopeless

Chapter 3 - The twilight

For three days, Daniella awaited nightfall with growing horror, along with all those with her. Every time the lights went off, twenty girls disappeared. 

With water being dispensed only once a day and hunger gnawing a hole through her stomach, she was quite surprised they weren't weaker and less alert. Despite her discomfort, she wasn't about to die of dehydration and hunger, or at least it didn't feel that way.

Silly thoughts kept jumping into her head, like whether her father would remember to feed her goldfish. Would her sister move into her room now? She never paid Doreen that twenty she still owed her. 

Maybe she was delirious.

Would someone save her? Were they even looking for her? Would they arrive in time? 

Such thoughts brought silent tears that would dry and, since she could not wipe them, left her face stiff, salty, and sore.

***

The lights turned on the next morning, and there were only forty girls left. Her panic echoed in the eyes of the remaining women, but also resignation.

With her interest in detective stories, logic told her that she had been missing longer than thirty-six hours. Her parents and the police probably thought her dead, and she had a feeling there would be no ransom request.

***

When the lights darkened that evening, the hollow feeling in her gut warned her she would be next. She sat stiffly upright, waiting, not daring to move or fall asleep. Concentrating on the pain in her limbs and the cold floor distracted her while keeping her mind busy staved off full-scale panic.

But thinking of home unsettled her, and all other things had lost their meaning. She was too young to die, she'd barely lived, and she would do anything to go home. 

***

Daniella jerked awake in a room half-lit by a bulb in a cabinet, tied to a metal hospital bed, covered by a sheet. The way it lay directly against her skin told her she was naked, and she had no idea how she got there.

A drip with four bags of fluid stood directly beside the bed. The IV leads led under the sheets and to a burning spot in her arm where the fluid entered her veins in a steady stream, and it was not a comfortable feeling.

Overheated, despite the fact that the hairs on her arm stood upright from the chill in the room, perspiration trickled down her brow and itched as it got to her hairline. The rest of her body was clammy, and the odd hollowness to her stomach might be starvation.

Nausea backed up in her throat, and her breathing labored a little while her heart beat against her ribs in slow, painful blows as panic swept through her. 

The monitor responded to her anxiety and emitted low-frequency warning beeps, but nobody came. The camera in the corner whirred toward her, settled on the monitor, then returned to her body.

Daniella sensed their eyes on her, but her breathing became more labored until her lungs seemed to close up. She choked, cried out, and thrashed, but to no avail. 

Black spots danced before her eyes, and darkness threatened to swallow her. Why was dying so painful? She slipped past the murkiness into a world of shadows and shapes. Was this the other side of death? Beyond life?

Muffled voices and sharp, unexpected sounds disturbed the grayness surrounding her, and sometimes she saw glimpses of the room she had been in, but it shifted in and out of focus, gloomy and quiet.