Chapter 1
It had been days, maybe even weeks. You didn’t really know. A long time of just endless torture. All you could feel and recognize was pain. Agonizing pain. But you had to keep going. No matter how much blood you lost, no matter how blistered and broken, your legs were.
How nobody had seen you yet was beyond your understanding. The halls of the compound had never felt so long. A ringing sound filled your ears and spots covered your vision. You weren’t sure if you had lost your sight, or your hearing, perhaps both.
Your hand was raised beside you, trying to feel the wall so that you could know where you were going. Honestly, you did not know. You had somehow dragged yourself this far, you wouldn’t quit now. Where you had been, you had left a bloody trail behind you. The wall had a long continuous trail, but the floors had spluttered blood in various spots you had been to.
No sounds were leaving your throat, no matter how hard you tried to scream. No amount of banging your hand on the wall or stomping your feet seemed to gain anybody’s attention.
This was it. The glass doors to the common room. You knew it by the sliding sound of the doors opening on their own. The motion sensor had caught your movement. Good. Not much longer.
A few steps to the side to put yourself in the centre of the hall, a couple more to the front and you knew you had entered the room. You found your way to the nearest wall to rest for a moment. Maybe, just maybe, if you rested for a second, you could keep going on. Or then someone would find you here.
Your back was pressed against the wall, and you were slowly sliding down and groaning in pain. This was the first time you had been able to catch your breath in hours. Everything went black in a matter of seconds.
The next time you woke up, you could hear the heart monitor beep. Most of the pain was gone, most likely because of medicine. It was bright. Way too bright. You kept your eyes closed. One sense at a time. Hearing. You could hear voices in the room.
“How the hell did nobody notice they were gone for two weeks?”
At that moment, no amount of physical pain compared to the pain that those words had caused you. Nobody had noticed? Your own team, the family you had? Nobody?