Chapter 1
She sat facing the door. In her lucid moments, she held onto some tiny vestige of hope that her rescuer would at any moment come through it.
Her head lolled once again toward her chest. Fighting to stay conscious only made her more aware of her situation. Wrists and ankles tightly bound and sore. Throat hoarse and dry. Her head and back aching from being forced to sit upright for so long on the hard wooden chair.
“Yousef” she croaked, her voice little more than a whisper.
“...contact” A voice boomed in front of her as she tried vainly to look up at her captor. Her vision blurred, as she looked through the slits in the swollen skin of her eyes. Seeing only the shape. The bulk. The stench. The malevolence of the beast before her.
Pain suddenly seared the skin on her cheek as once again, a sharp slap forced her momentarily into wakefulness.
“No one is coming for you!...your contact”
The voice, as if from far away, as if from a loud speaker, an echo almost, assaulted her sanity. The words made no sense. Sudden nausea took hold and she retched. Her body jerked in an attempt to lurch forward causing the restraints to dig painfully into her waist and wrists.
Then - a sudden gust of fresh clean air blasted across her face. In desperation, she struggled to suck in the air, endeavouring to cleanse her lungs of the stale, stuffy, filth of her tiny prison cell.
Sensing, rather than seeing someone else in the room, she braced herself for further pain. But then she felt, rather than sensed, the hard, coarseness of twisted fibres pushed roughly over her head and placed around her neck. She felt, rather than sensed, her body being lifted roughly. Felt the constriction around her throat as she made one last tiny effort in her exhausted state, to fight for life. And then finally, felt herself succumb to calmness and serenity as her life slipped away.
What was that? Yousef is that you?
