“What”? I fired back.

Susan didn’t answer. She just silently sniped the rope that tied my wrists together.

I recoiled from Susan and stood in front of her. I snatched the scissors away from her and went to work on the rope around my ankles.

“What are you talking about?” I asked as I ripped away the rope around my ankles.

“You’ll find out,” Susan muttered.

I pushed Susan away from me. I didn’t have time for whatever she was trying to do.

I saw a flight of wooden stairs at the other end of the room. I ran at them as fast as I could, leaving Susan crumpled on the cement floor behind me.

I pushed the door at the top of the stairs open and burst into what looked like a barn. The thick smell of hay and musty animal feces overwhelmed me once I stepped out of the basement I had been held in.

I didn’t have time to analyze where I was anymore. I just ran straight forward until I found another door and opened it up.

The hot sting of a summer day said hi when I opened the door. I looked around and saw a rural backyard lined with dense forests of trees which formed a U around a pale yellow farmhouse. It was a beautiful, quaint setting for the most-horrifying event of my life.

Little did I know at the moment, that dash through the backyard would only be the beginning of the horrors I was going to experience. I was only a few strides into my run across the grass when I heard a frantic clicking sound ring into my ear and felt myself get flung high up into the air.

I hung in the air for a few seconds feeling weightless. I looked down and saw a crude crater in the ground where I just was. An ugly scar on the otherwise beautiful grass. I tried to form an idea around what had happened, but couldn’t before I fell hard back to the earth.

I felt footsteps approach me from the direction of the house as my ears rang. I looked up at the sky until my view was overtaken by the face of an elderly man who I vaguely recognized for a few seconds before I went out.