It was Susan’s husband, Kirsten’s dad, Dave, his face horribly weathered since that photo which rested in Susan’s living room that I saw when I made that fateful visit. He smiled at me before everything went dark.

*

My entire body seared with hot pain when I woke up. I felt like a piece of meat in a frying pan. The pain was so intense I could barely breath.

I knew the feeling of a hospital bed from when I had my appendix taken out as a kid. I was all too familiar with that thudding pain which develops in your lower back when you lay down in a stiff bed for too long.

“Ugh,” I groaned.

I looked around the lonely hospital room thinking about how much whatever happened was going to cost me. Well, cost may be the least of my concerns. Nancy walked into the room before I could even buzz a nurse for some pain medication. She sat down in a chair at the foot of my bed and looked at me with a stone face.

Nancy filled in the missing pieces from the incident. She had been left at the scene of our wreck, but I had been taken away by Susan. I was taken to a farmhouse Susan and her husband owned outside of the city where I was held with Luke. The story Susan told me about her husband being dead was fabricated. He was alive and well and was a doomsday prepper out in the sticks with a yard filled with homemade landmines, one of which I was unlucky enough to step on.

Stepping on the mine was actually a stroke of luck though. The neighbors were always on red alert for one of Dave’s land mines going off so they called the cops the second they heard one explode and ran over seconds after to find me knocked out in the yard, scaring Dave back into the house. It actually probably saved my life.

Luke wasn’t so lucky. He was still missing. Luke’s mom was pushing to get Susan and her husband arrested for taking Luke, or killing Luke, she wasn’t really sure, and kidnapping me for a period of time. She needed me to talk to the police to tell them what happened.

I agreed, but I just needed to heal up in the hospital for a few days. Luke’s mom was pleased. She said officers would be by soon to take my story right before she left.

It has been a day now and officers have not yet been by. However, something came by this morning that has given me alarm. It is probably just a coincidence, but a heaping piece of seemingly-homemade peach pie was on the food stand next to my bed this morning. It smelled delicious, but I didn’t care.

I threw the thing in the trash next to my bed and pushed the button for the nurse so I could ask her to remove the basket as soon as possible.