Blood Diamonds

Chapter 33

Unknown Location—Present Day

Leila awoke with a groan. Her head ached terribly, and she felt the pain explode like a thousand heinous knives carving into her skull when she touched the spot on her forehead where it hurt. Curious, she touched her head again, trying to discern the extent of the wound. She held her breath for the oncoming throb of agony, which sure enough came, rippling from its epicentre. Her fingers grazed a gash of dried blood; the wound was still open and the area around it fleshy and bruised.

She blinked, trying her best to adjust her sight to the dark and dank room. The last she remembered they were at the rally in front of City Hall, so she thought carefully, getting her mental bearings aligned by attempting to recall how she ended up on a dirty, dust-ridden floor. She felt her surroundings, carefully patting the ground with her palms. It felt hard, yet sandy, like she was in the outdoors with no vegetation and just solid, barren earth—there was clearly no proper flooring in place. She remembered Henry giving his speech and his subsequent fall from the gunshot wound, then the pandemonium that followed within the crowd. She gasped at the thought. Henry! Was he alright? She had flashes of leaning over his unmoving body while frantically calling for help, and blackness. The next she knew she woke up in that cold room.

When she tried standing up every muscle in her body ached so much that it caused her legs to buckle beneath her from the strain. All she managed to do was topple over, collapsing in a frustrated heap back to the ground with a painful thump and a whimper. She realised that the effort it would take to stand was too much, so she resorted to crawling, scraping her bare arms on the gravelly soil in the process, trying to gauge the dimensions of her lightless prison. It was an agonising task. In the pitch-black cell the rough, sandy granules seeped into her open cuts. She cried out in despair from the sting as she creeped her way gradually toward the boundary, trying to feel something, anything at all besides the harshness of the earth on which she crawled.

Her fingers finally stroked something solid and vertical. It had to be a wall. With excitement, she pressed both palms against the structure. It was dusty as well. The texture felt like concrete, but it was definitely a wall. She was still very weak; if she could just use the wall for support, maybe she would be able to hoist herself up and feel her way around the room to a door, and hopefully free herself from whatever sadistic incarceration she was in. it was a poorly thought-out plan. She doubted her captors would be unwitting enough to leave the door unlocked, especially since she had no restraints on her wrists or ankles tying her to the ground; but it was a plan nonetheless, and it was all she could think of, rather than just lying there on the floor in dirt and misery, waiting for almost certain death.

Just as she mustered up the strength to haul herself up, gritting teeth for the imposing effort, a loud bang from above pierced the silent chamber, reverberating off the concrete walls. She yelped in surprise, lifted her head to the source of the unexpected sound, and blinked as a pale beam of yellow light spilled through a narrow trap door, which cut into the low ceiling no more than ten metres away. The light was dim, hardly enough to guide any perfect-sighted person, but enough to induce temporary blindness after sitting so long in pitch blackness. She shielded her eyes from this intrusive light, taking a moment to adjust to the now shadowy ambience, and released her bruised arms from her eyes once she felt they could handle the strain. She could discern a crude, wooden, termite-infested staircase rising to an equally crudely cut trap door. Both structures looked hectically old, and the room in which she lay was tinier than she expected, barely the size of a cheap motel bedroom.

The thud of heavy boots upon the creaking steps sent her senses into overdrive. Her sixth sense screamed impending danger. The internal, clairvoyant warning told her to keep unnaturally still in a stupid effort to remain invisible and the beat of her hammering heart, which pounded fearfully against her chest, could clearly be heard.

The footsteps descended slowly, deliberately keeping her in a fearful state of suspense; and when the figure finally stood at the bottom, with the light revealing their identity and a wicked grin on a familiar face, she gasped in shock. It couldn't be. Somehow she knew that the nightmare had just begun and the terror was far from over. With her own husband staring at her in murderous contempt and with a whole lot of lunacy in his eyes, she failed to believe that anyone could be trusted to help her out of it.