Everything was black.
Had she gone blind?
What was going on?
Where was she?
She couldn’t think. Her head pounded like a jackhammer eating away at the inside of her skull. Something was blocking her thoughts.
What was her name? She couldn’t recall.
Her feeble questioning ended as she faded back out of consciousness.

The ground was cold and hard. She felt something jabbing into her ribs, just below arm, but she didn’t have the strength to move. It felt as if an elephant were sitting on her back, pinning her beneath it.
She couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes. Not only did her eyelids feel as heavy as lead, but she didn’t want to look. She knew she was in a bad situation.
It was strange, she couldn’t remember anything, yet somehow she knew it would only get worse if she saw where she was and what had happened. She couldn’t open her eyes, couldn’t bear the thought of the despair that would follow when she did.
What on earth had happened to her? She wondered. She tried to remember what happened before all this. That certainly couldn’t be bad. Maybe the situation wasn’t as terrible as her brain told her it was. Maybe it was just the headache making her uncomfortable.
But still, something wasn’t right.
What was her name? Why couldn’t she remember anything? Had she been drugged?
Something moved near her. She could hear voices, but her headache made it sound as if they carried through water. Everything was garbled and couldn’t be made out.
A heavy jolt from her headache forced her to slip away again.

“Dis a pretty one, eh?”
“Damn right. Fuck dat shit in a second.”
Her heart skipped a beat. The voices were directly above her. Were they talking about her? They had to be.
She felt like vomiting, but her muscles were too weak.
“Look, da bitch is awake. I think she heard ya, too.”
Someone grabbed her arm, fingers crushing down on her and surely going to leave a bruise.
“Dat turn you on, sweetheart?”
They had some kind of accent, maybe Jamaican, or something from a similar or surrounding area. She couldn’t place it.
My God, had she been kidnapped by some third-world country pirates? She could remember that happening on the news, multiple times. Pirates holding vacationers for ransom, looking for hundreds of thousands of dollars to return them to their own country.
Then she remembered.
She had been on a vacation.
She had been invited by her older sister to go with her and her friends skydiving somewhere in the Pacific ocean. They had landed on some island in the middle of nowhere…What was it’s name? Something she had never heard of before.
Took? No, that wasn’t it.
“Eh Randy, come take a look a dis one!” she heard someone shout.
Rook! Rook Island! That was it. The pilot had warned them about the island, something about…
Pirates!
She had been right! She had been kidnapped!
Oh God, she thought nervously. She was now in the middle of something she had never thought could happen to her. It was just one of those news stories, something you never expect to happen to you, not you, nothing like that ever happened to you.
Why had she agreed to this? Why had she jumped even when the pilot had warned them about the island below?
There was something missing in her memory. She would have never done that, ever. She was a careful, nervous girl who never did anything she thought would be dangerous. Most people hated her because of it. Other teens were out smoking pot, cigarettes, doing crazy stuff like getting drunk and jumping out windows. You name it. Even her sister was part of those groups, and she had hated it, but what was she to do? Her sister was her own person, she couldn’t control what she did.
Maybe that was why she never did stuff like that. She had seen her sister get into so much trouble, had such terrible things happen to her because of her crazy lifestyle. That had to be why she hated it so much. Before now she had never come to this realization. Something about this situation she was now in had somehow enlightened her to this realization. It made her feel a little better about standing, too. She wasn’t just some goodie-two-shoes girl that didn’t want to be rebel. She had a reason for it. She had seen her own sister destroy her body using alcohol and weed, seen what drunkenness can do to young party-goers, and nothing ever ended well.
The fingers dug into her arm, pulling her somewhere.
"’Ey! One of you got the key?” the man holding her arm shouted, jerking her arm the wrong way in the process. She cried out weakly, but no one seemed to hear her.
“What do you need it for?” This voice was softer than the rest, and had a slightly Spanish-sounding accent.
“We want to ‘ave a little fun with dis one!” the man above her shouted.
The soft voice became angry. “Fuck you! You think that’s okay right now you dumb fuck?!”
She was appalled at the language these people were using. It was like children, cussing just to cuss, for no real reason.
“We don’t have any fucking time for that now. Get the fuck over here and help me!”
The man abruptly let her go. Her arm fell limply into the dirt. She still had no energy to move, talk, or resist.
“Shit, man…”
She heard footsteps as the two men above her left.
For the third time, she lost consciousness.

When she awoke, she finally found the strength to open her eyes.
She was lying beneath a beautiful night sky, the moonlight pouring through the trees thick greenery like liquid; however, wooden bars shielded most of the light from her, casting unnatural shadows all around her.
She was in a cage.
She rolled over and sat up, looking around despairingly.
There were bamboo cages all around her, all filled with up to three people. She looked over and saw she too was not alone. A scruffy man looking to be around the age of 40 or so sat near to her, his hands tied in rope and strapped to one side of the cage.
“About time, missy,” he said to her as she looked around.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been passed out the whole day. And by the way, you almost got raped.”
“…I was awake for that conversation…”
“I’m sorry.”
She sighed nervously and took another look around.
The cage’s door was built on simple hinges, bound by a thin piece of twine. The only thing keeping them inside was a short knot of rope, but neither had anything to cut with. Not even rocks existed within the cage, and even if there had been, she as well as the man across from her were both roped to the cage. She had been so out of it earlier she hadn’t even felt the rough rope against her wrists, binding her to the far side of the cage.
“Shit…” she muttered, tugging at the rope.
“No use, lady,” the man told her. Of course she knew this already, nothing was ever that easy, but she felt she had to try anyway.
“What do we do?” she whispered, her fear forcing her voice to shake. She wondered if the man thought she was some emotionally challenged teen, but quickly through the thought out. Surely he must understand the fear she felt. He was probably terrified too, just more adept at hiding the emotion.
“We can’t do anything.”
She was stunned at his lack of needing to escape. Was he really content to just sit here and let the pirates kill him?
“That’s it then? We just give up?” The fear in her voice changed to disbelief and slight anger. Than mans face didn’t change.
“Well what do you suggest?”
“We try to escape!”
“And how do you suppose we go about that?”
His calmness made her angry, but as he spoke, she realized he was right. There was really nothing either of them could do. If they could find a way to untie themselves, maybe, but even that seemed far fetched.
Her stomach leaped up into her throat. She, and the man across from her, would be trapped here. At least until a pirate came along and decided to do something with them.
God only knew what would become of them now.