She was cold. Couldn’t stop the shivers. And her head hurt. God, it hurt. She tried to blink but her eyes were full of grit; she couldn’t open them, not even a crack. She ran her tongue around her mouth. Tasted blood. Swallowed.
Jeez, her head.
If she focused hard, she could move her hand. She slid it towards her face and probed her fingers against her eyes, rubbing away the gumminess. It was too dark to see, so she felt around. She was lying on something soft – a mattress? The rough blanket under her was stiff and smelly.
This wasn’t her bed.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make sense of the jumbled things in her head. The argument with her mum’s dickhead boyfriend. Her mum screaming at her to piss off and go. Then she was waiting on the roadside. Hours and hours in the sun, her bag heavy. She had long since drained her water bottle and her throat was parched. Just when she was giving up hope, a car pulled over and she got in. After that was a blur. She had a glimmer of lashing out and stumbling away through the trees. Falling and getting up again, blinded by the blood pouring out of her hair, but she didn’t stop, didn’t dare. So desperate to get away from something, someone—
—crashing through the trees behind her in the dark.
Her breath hitched on a sob. ‘Mum?’
The word was muffled, as if the dead blackness around her had soaked it up. She rolled sideways off the thin mattress onto her hands and knees, and got to her feet. Reaching out, she shuffled forward until her fingers bumped against something flat and metallic, damp. A wall. She moved along it, tracing her fingertips over its cold surface, eyes blinking wide, but there was nothing to see, just black. No door that she could find. No window. Where was she? And why was she here? If it was someone’s idea of a prank, it was totally unfunny.
She hammered the wall with her fist. ‘Let me out of here,’ she yelled, her voice hoarse and ragged. ‘Let me out!’
The darkness gobbled her words into its dull, dead silence.
Her legs buckled and she slumped back onto the ground. And as she retched what little was in her stomach onto the dirt floor, it occurred to her that it didn’t matter why or how or where. Or even whether someone had done this to her. All that mattered was that she was trapped. Alone in some forgotten hole. Lost in the blackness.
And no one knew she was here.