12 Hours

I opened my eyes, a heavy throb at the back of my head throwing me cruelly into consciousness.

All I saw was darkness. And then I heard the sound of murmured conversation not far from where I was laying. A coldness stabbed at my back like a winter breeze as I pushed my self off the hard-packed, earth ground into a sitting position.

"Who's there?" My voice came out unexpectedly slurred and raucously loud in the silence of the dark room.

The conversation stopped at once and then I heard one of the voices whisper, closer than I originally thought, "Is that you, Johnny?"

I noticed the voice as my college room mates, George.

"'Course it's bloody me, you idiot." And then, "Who were the people you were talking to? And what the fuck am I doing on the floor?" At that I became instantly confused. I felt rough dirt under my fingertips. Last time I checked, my room at college was carpeted. A sense of dread crashed over me like a tidal wave. "Where the fuck am I? Is this some sort of prank? It's not funny."

"Johnny, Johnny," came my room mates voice from the blackness. I still couldn't see a thing but he sounded closer again. "Calm down, mate. This isn't a prank. None of us know where we are."

"us?" I asked tentatively. Now I was really confused.

"Yeah, us. So far we have counted eleven. Twelve now, including you."

"What the fuck?" I had no idea what to think. So, I was in a dark room with eleven other people, all of whom were from my college: I had worked that out from their voices. We had no idea where we were. From touch alone, we had worked out that we were in a metal cage with iron bars on one side. The cage was about fifteen feet by ten feet, so we were packed in pretty tightly.

We tried yelling but to no avail. And so we sat.

About six hours after I had first woken, a crack of light appeared at the wall facing our cage's iron-barred door. The light grew and became more intense until we had to shield our eyes from the piercing brightness. When my eyes had adjusted somewhat, I looked up and squinted.

A black shadow moved toward us like a wraith. The light was behind him and he cast a shadow over himself, making it impossible to see who he was. But the outline of a gun was clear in his left hand.

Someone next to me whimpered.



The pen shook in my hand as I wrote.

Out of a possible twelve people, the man had chosen me. I remembered the sense of utter dread I felt as he had pulled me, by my hair, with his calloused hands, out of the cage.

At the moment he was dictating as I wrote. He told me if I didn't write exactly what he said, he would kill me. Pretty good incentive not to screw up, so I was concentrating, using the light coming from the open doorway to see. His voice was gravelly and thick with some sort of European accent, I couldn't tell which. He made me write his commands to the sounds of the others, still in the cage, gasping and crying. I felt the gun he held, pressing into my head, his finger quivering in anticipation.

When I finished writing he shoved me to the ground and proof read my work. I heard several of my college mates sobbing uncontrollably beside me. One asked me if I was okay but I dared not answer her.

"Nice work." said the man with no identity.

And then, quick as lightning, he grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back until I was standing up.

I felt his rough hands encircle my neck and squeeze.

What is happening. My mind couldn't make sense of what was going on. Everything had changed so quickly.

I gasped for air and scratched at the hands that were constricting my throat, but his hands were a vice. Unmovable.

My throat made strange noises as I tried to loose a scream that ended up as more of a hoarse whisper. I was aware of intense sobbing and loud shouting somewhere near me. But nothing seemed to make sense to my oxygen deprived brain.

And still, steel-like hands, ever squeezing my throat with increasing malice.

A blackness creeped into my vision and I could no longer feel my flailing limbs. The last thing I was aware of in my life was the feeling of bones snapping in my neck and a peculiar whisper in my ear:

"I'm sorry."