Hostage
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
hostage written by Kay hooper, read by Jason fix shana Freeman woke with a throbbing headache and the groggy realization that she must have really tied one on the previous night. Not that she could remember, but that had to be it because she never felt this bad unless alcohol was involved. Stupid! Stupid! When will you learn to ignore? Dare? That was usually how she got in trouble. She just lay there for a while, eyes closed because she knew from experience that the room would be spinning dizzily if she dared open them gradually though things started to nag at her. The bed beneath her felt oddly lumpy and damp. The as she breathed had a stale, faintly sour odor, even though the headache she was aware of. The room felt weirdly hollow somehow and cold. She didn't feel cover over her. Why not? Little things lying there, eyes closed, feeling more and more cold. She kept telling herself nothing was wrong again and again. She told herself that because if she believed it then well then nothing was wrong. Nothing Shanna didn't know how long she lay there with her eyes squeezed shut. The mantra of nothing being wrong on a continuous loop in her mind before she finally forced herself to open her eyes dark but not completely dark. She thought she could make out heavy timbers above her. The sort she imagined would be used to hold up tons of earth to allow passage into a mountain for a mine of some kind. Maybe she was in a mine how on earth she tried to move her arms to lever herself into a sitting position. And that was when she heard the loud rattle and felt the heavy constrictions on her wrists. Both wrists instinctively, she tried to reach one hand to check the other and discovered it to be impossible. Whatever she was lying on the chains, the manacles were fastened from her wrist to either side. She couldn't even push herself up to her elbows because there wasn't enough play in the chains, couldn't lift either hand high enough to confirm what she felt. Not handcuffs. The bands around her wrists were wide and heavy. The chain was sounded thick. Old rusty. She could smell the rust and when she tried to move her feet, she lay there for some unmeasurable time staring at the heavy beams and trying not to think about why someone would have gender, wrists and ankles to an old smelly lumpy cot. And what might have been a mind somewhere in the mountains? Because that was surreal. Something like that didn't happen. Not to her, not to anybody she knew because it was just crazy. She didn't have a rich family so nobody would consider kidnapping her for ransom. And if she hadn't been kidnapped for ransom, then then young women were snatched every day she saw it on the news snatched out of their lives without warning. Sometimes never to be seen again. And sometimes sometimes seen found as bodies buried or floating in rivers or just left somewhere like garbage bodies showing the evidence of the horrible things that had been done to them. Unspeakable things. She could hear herself breathing in shallow little gasps, the only sounds in the cold, dank, hollow space all around her. The chill was seeping into her into her very bones, a kind of cold she had never felt before, a terror that took hold of her and squeezed and squeezed until it forced out a sound, a name she hadn't uttered since she was very very young, Mommy.