He Led Me To Life

Chapter 26

      I prayed for a long time, and after a while of that, I started speaking out loud. Before I started, I thought for sure that it would feel strange talking out loud to nothing but the air, but as I kept going, I realized it was hardly any different.

      I kept going, pleading, crying. But soon enough, the tears simply stopped coming. Replacing the heavy, cold stone of dread in my chest, there was just peace. I would be fine, no matter what happened. If I escaped, if I died. Either way, it wouldn't change anything. God was protecting me, and that's all I needed to know. Even if I died, I would just be going up to heaven, to be with God for eternity.

      I cried some more, but this was purely in relief. I would be fine, no matter what happened. The words seemed to echo and resound in my mind. I would be fine. I would be fine.

      The tears suddenly seemed unable to pour. I stopped crying now. I knew that sobbing for such a long time should have made me even thirstier than I was, but for some reason, it didn't. I just focused on the peace, the feeling that I would be fine. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that nothing bad would happen to me.

I had no idea how much time had passed since I'd been laying there but it probably wasn't that long.

      I took a deep breath that shuddered just slightly with the force of the tears that had only just ceased, but then I realized that—impossibly—I was tired again. I stifled a huge yawn and settled back again to sleep, and it came easy. There were no thoughts and no troubles with drifting off. There was just peace.

      A crash resounded through the large warehouse room, straight into my ears. That was the first thing I knew when I woke up from the deep, peaceful, dreamless sleep. My heart was beating wildly as I shifted my gaze rapidly through the dark. Not even a moonbeam pierced the pitch black.

I could feel my hands were swollen with the tight ropes cutting into my wrists. I realized how hungry and thirsty I was and my head pounded with a dull pain.

      I heard a shout and realized after a moment that I had been hearing shouts for a while now, lying there half-conscious, but completely unaware at the same time. I couldn't make out the exact words, but I knew that they weren't friendly. I wondered if this would be the end. I felt my life had just begun but I was fine with spending my life with Jesus if I did die tonight.

      Another voice replied to the shouts, this one sounds strange and almost garbled. In my sleep heavy state, my brain I had a hard time recalling where that sounded familiar, but then it hit me. The PA at school gave the speaker's voice a similar sound to it. It must be a megaphone. Police used megaphones. The police had finally found me. I felt my heart beating with relief and fear at the same time.

      I tried not to let my hopes get too high, lest something turns out wrong, and I don't get rescued, but that doesn't stop my brain. Within moments, by heart is racing even more not from the shock of being woken up so suddenly, but from the excitement of the prospect of rescue.

      However, I nearly jump out of my skin when something heavy drops to the concrete very nearby. I can't tell what it is, but I know from simple reasoning that someone has to be over there because there was no way for anything to fall otherwise. There must be two people working together on my kidnapping.

      Once again, fear grips me. I tell myself that I'll be fine, but it hardly works. I try to recall the peace I felt earlier, but that doesn't work either. A soft footstep in the same direction tells me that someone is indeed over there. They probably had a gun to my head, and the other guy was yelling at the police that they would blow my brains out if anyone made a move. My heart was beating as if I had just run a marathon.

      "Sadie!? Sadie, is that you?" I heard the hiss of a whisper, coming from the direction of the sounds from just a second ago. My heart seemed about ready to burst. There was a lump in my throat. I recognized that voice. It was Samuel.

     "It's me." The best I could manage was a half-strangled sob of a whisper.

      I heard a couple shuffling footsteps, and suddenly I could see the very dim outline of Samuel's head and shoulders emerge from the inky black of the rest of the room. "Are you tied up?" he whispered.

      I quickly nodded, but then a second later I realized that he probably couldn't see that, so I murmured a "Yes."

      "Here- put your hands out towards me." He ordered, still whispering. There was a loud noise, like something made of metal crashing to the floor. I jumped, and for a second forgot to do what Samuel said. "Sadie." He whispered.

      "Right, sorry," I whispered back, holding my hands out towards him.

I could feel his fingers, warm to the touch, working at the knots that bound my wrists. The ropes remained stubborn for a solid five minutes, and the shouting went on. Panic rose in my throat, and I feared that my kidnapper would come back and discover Samuel trying to help, but then with a sudden jerk, the ropes slipped free.

      "I can do my feet." I hissed into the darkness before I started blindly feeling around for the knot that held my ankles to each other. It was untied after a bit of effort. My fingertips felt sore, and I was pretty sure that I broke one of my nails trying to undo the tight tying of the knot, but I got it done.

      "Did you get it?" Samuel asked. Of course, he was still whispering, but I detected a slight tension in his voice. I could feel the same tension building up in my chest. I felt like, with every move I made, something could go terribly wrong, and then I would get both of us killed.

      "I got it," I confirmed, stretching out my cramped limbs carefully, so as not to make so much as a sound. The shouting continued, as well as the answering calls from behind a megaphone.

      Then one of my feet stretched a bit further than I intended it to. It brushed the debris of my meager rations, and the water bottle crackled. The wrapper to the protein bar seemed equally as loud.

      I sucked in a sharp breath. The shouting had stopped.