Caroline

Chapter One

AUTHORS NOTE: This is my first story on here, though I've been writing for a long time, as well as following other stories on Wattpad. I sincerely hope you enjoy my work. Please feel free to comment any opinions or questions you have. I've worked really hard to correct any grammatical errors, so if you see any, PLEASE for your sanity and mine, point them out and I'll fix them right away. Comment and Vote please. :)

One

Caroline tried not to panic. But since she was trapped in the trunk of a faded blue Chevrolet with her wrists and ankles tied, a gag placed in her mouth to keep her screams at a muffled pitch, and enjoying the effects of a pounding headache, her task was not an easy one.

        She’d been lying there for several hours and her arm and leg had long since gone numb. She had screamed herself hoarse long ago, she had beaten herself around the car in a useless attempt to pop open the trunk or cause some kind of damage that would be observed by other drivers, and she had bitten her tongue on several occasions trying to get the gag out of her mouth. Now she was sore, she was frightened, and she was exhausted. She was also desperately wishing she’d paid more attention to the shows that instructed a person on how to escape if they ever found themselves kidnapped and thrown into a trunk. A wish that served her no good.

            And so she lay there, helpless and alone, waiting for the car to stop and the dark-haired man to open the trunk. She assumed he was still driving. He had been the only one she had seen when she had been attacked.

            She’d been getting ready to drive home very late after her shift at the resident’s home. Caroline was slim and bright and kind and she radiated compassion and joy. She wasn’t very old, still a teenager living at home, but she worked most evenings and worked very hard. She always came in shortly after rounds at the beginning of her shift to personally check on each of her residents and see if there was anything they needed. She worked with a gentleness that couldn’t be taught, and she spoke with a love that couldn’t go unnoticed or unfelt. She’d been told on more than one occasion that she was a light of joy in a very dark world, and that the residents absolutely loved her. She was only seventeen, and so by law she wasn’t allowed to work past ten, which didn’t keep the nurses from pushing her right up until the very last moment, leaving her to rush to the time clock in a hurry usually a minute or two before ten. Which left her rushing to her car to make the twenty-five minute drive home where she would eat, shower, and change clothes before going to bed to get enough sleep to get up early for school the next morning.

Looking back, Caroline knew that rushing had been her downfall. She hadn’t been paying attention to her surroundings, focusing only on getting her keys out and opening her car door. This wasn’t the first time she had made this mistake, it occurred almost nightly and if the dark-haired man had been watching her for any length of time he would have known this. The kidnap was made easier by the fact that the parking lot was hard to see from inside the building, especially at night, and since Caroline was the only minor working and therefore would have been the only person coming out of the building at that particular time, well, she knew she had made it all too easy for him. Between the fears, the worry of what was to come, and the realization that she had brought this upon herself by being so careless, her stomach was becoming ill. She wanted to be sick, but knew it would do her no good, and would only result in an even more uncomfortable quarters.

So she laid in the trunk, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

At one point in time the car came to a stop and the engine shut off. Caroline had tensed up and listened hard. She had heard sounds that must have been the gas tank being opened and filled with gasoline. Thinking that perhaps there would be someone at the gas station who would hear her, she had begun to thrash around again and yell as loud as she could around the gag. But it didn’t do her any good. In fact, the dark-haired man hadn’t even made an attempt to quiet her, which left Caroline to assume that they had probably still been in the wee hours of the morning and were the only ones at the gas station, though she couldn’t be sure, since she had had no inclination of the passage of time.