Things were shaping up to be quite normal that Tuesday evening. That is, until a call from my boyfriend resonated across the house and summoned me down to the basement workshop.
Pulling my attention away from the computer screen, I rapidly sprinted out of the bedroom and happily sauntered down the stairs leading to the basement exercise room and the attached workshop garage.
The first thing I did upon reaching the bottom of the staircase was turn the light switch on. Bizarrely enough though, the basement lights themselves didn't respond. Either the bulbs had all burned out, or the breaker had shut off.
Thinking nothing of it, I made my way across the gloomy unlit room and opened the door to my man's dusty workshop garage.
My brow arched up in surprise as soon as the heavy door swung open and revealed a seemingly desolate, pitch-black workshop.
"Nick?" I asked, believing that he was down here but not understanding why all the lights were off.
Still seeing no reason to be alarmed, I slowly stepped into the roomy workshop and blindly felt around in search of that light switch. My fingers found it, but much like the basement lights in the exercise room, none of them came on.
"Hmm. Nick must've gone outside or something." I silently thought to myself, turning around to head out of the lightless garage, but freezing in place upon hearing the sound of rushing air from somewhere in the vicinity.
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"Nick?" I quietly called out, only to be answered by nothing more than an eerie silence.
Then there was another rush of air. And another, and another.
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I didn't know much about power tools but understandably thought it might be one of Nick's compressors going awry for some reason. My inquisitive nature immediately caused me to press onward. I squinted my eyes to try and see better and tentatively took a few steps towards the mysterious sound.
There it was again! That strange noise.
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Forms slowly took shape around me as my eyes began adjusting to the darkness. I could see the lightless silhouette of Nick's large pickup truck, could make out the garbage bin he used to collect sawdust and could spot the shapes of various power tools lining his cluttered work tables.
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The sound was getting louder and clearer.
It definitely sounded like rushing air, but what was making it?
Something sinister was afoot. I could practically feel it.
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My eyes struggled to make out the two dark shapes standing immobile in front of me, but when they finally did, my blood froze into an icy terror and my body grew rigid with fear.
An overwhelming feeling of dread overwhelmed my senses as the sight of the two immobile figures standing in front of me slowly dawned before my eyes.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to bolt out of the room and run out of the house to alert the neighbours. I wanted to do something, anything! But I couldn't. I was paralysed, and not because of some spell or some foul dark magic. I was paralysed by nothing more than my own fear.
My motor cortex communicated with the neurons in my spinal cord, but all its commands were hampered by the blood-freezing fear still coursing through my body.
My eyes scanned the freakishly immobile figures standing in front of me, sizing them up in an effort to ascertain the degree of threat they both presented. In those fleeting seconds of inaction, I noted the height and broadness of their hulking statures, noticed the absence of any discernable differentiating features to set them apart and took note of the face-concealing military gasmasks adorning their respective heads. In other words, the stuff of nightmares.
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I just stood there, terror-stricken and paralysed as the two towering silhouettes looked at me through those freakishly-hued circular eyesets of theirs. Neither myself nor the duo of masked intruders made a move during the initial three seconds of our encounter. But when the one on the left pulled out an expandable police baton and snapped it to attention with one lightning-fast flick of the wrist, I immediately felt a kinetic surge and took a tentative step backwards.
As soon as I did, the two would-be assailants advanced.
I saw their positively towering bodies draw closer, saw their freakishly oversized, lustrous gloved hands reach out to grab me, and then I bolted. Bolted out of the gloomy workshop and rushed towards the adjacent exercise room.
My socked feet sped me off the cold workshop's cement floor and onto the ever-so-slightly better lit gym area's warm wooden one. I saw the staircase, saw the welcome brightness of the not-so-distant main floor beaming down across its wooden steps.
I ran. Ran as fast and as speedily as my cotton-padded soles would carry me.
The thin hairs populating the back of my neck stood up to attention as the bone-chilling sound of laboured breathing echoed from somewhere behind me.
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I ran, faster than I ever had.
The staircase's ornate wooden railing seemed almost within reaching distance.
My feet sped me towards it at a velocity I'd never previously thought imaginable.
Hoping to use the railing as leverage to further increase the swiftness of my upcoming ascent to safety, I extended a hand out to grab it.
In my single-minded focus to reach the stairs leading up to what my mind perceived as a safe haven, I failed to notice the heavily cushioned gym mat lining the floor space around my boyfriend's punching bag and benchpress machine. The front of my foot caught into it, briefly propelling me up in the air before sending me crashing down to the vinyl-covered foam flooring.
The high-density foam's embrace absorbed the shock of my unceremonious collapse but didn't protect me from the weight of the positively hulking intruders that came crashing on top of me. The adrenaline spike still coursing through my veins would've normally been enough to ensure a near-instantaneous recovery had it not been for the fact that my accidental collapse had sent my two towering pursuers barrelling down onto me.
I yelped, or rather, tried to. But the impact of their colossal bodies landing on my meagre frame was such that my lungs found themselves robbed of air and gasping for normalcy.
Whoever these men were, they were heavy.
Even at a glance, that much would've been obvious.
Seeing it and living it were two different things, however.
Heavily geared up as they were, each of them weighed no less than an estimated three hundred pounds.
My panicked mind momentarily struggled to identify the hulking intruders, attempting in vain to understand the purpose of their unexplained presence and the motivation behind their aggression towards me. But the urgency of my dire predicament rapidly did away with those questions, and then all I could think about was the danger I was in and wonder what fate had befallen my unsuspecting lover.
I struggled to recollect whether Nick's call had sounded distressed and struggled to cope with the possibility that he'd been assaulted and possibly killed or knocked unconscious while I'd been gaming on the computer.
My mind raced to fill in the gaps, but still, no answers came.
Only the cacophony of fiercely laborious breathing filled my ears.
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The hulking intruders worked with the silent efficiency of trained professionals.
One of them sat on my head and upper back whilst his equally hefty counterpart took position on my hips and upper thighs.
Insanely powerful legs clad in jet black police-issued cargo pants and boots straddled my comparatively scrawny, incapacitated form.
The largest and most forceful of gloved hands took hold of my feeble wrists, crushing them together behind the small of my back and giving little doubt as to the musculature that wielded them. I let out a pained whimper, but the leathery grip remained stringent and inflexible.
A series of clicking sounds ensued, followed by that of a very distinctive low-pitched zipping noise.
I felt something hard press against the skin on my wrists and then felt it tightening around them, securing my hands behind my back.
From the feel of the hard plastic as well as the sheer thickness and width of the object restraining me, I knew I'd just been zip-tied. Even more alarming was the zip-tie itself. It felt nothing like those hardware store cable wraps. This was SWAT unit calibre stuff. In other words, riot-grade police cuffs.
Another series of clicking sounds were heard; the eerie silence of my captors being punctuated only by the dissonance of their filtered breathing. A second thick restraint was added around my already cuffed wrists, and then a third one after that; each one causing telltale zipping noises to fill the room up.
The 135-kilogram gasmasked assailant straddling my upper thighs briefly stood up before turning around to face my legs and regaining his position on top of me.
The disproportionately restrictive process which had just been imposed on my wrists was repeated around my ankles.
Considering the lightness of my body and the relative thinness of my limbs, a single one of those massive anti-riot restraints would have been amply sufficient at preventing my escape. That, however, did nothing to dissuade my assailants from continuing their showy display of brute force, nor did it convince them that the imposition of disproportionately severe restraints was both unnecessary and uncalled for.
When the zip-tie wielding intruder climbed off my thighs and forced me to bend my knees and raise my ankles up, I yelped again. I tried raising my head up off the foamy gym mat, but the hulking giant straddling my upper back was quite literally sitting on my cranium and crushing the left side of my face down to the floor.
My hopelessly restrained ankles were forcefully pulled up towards my similarly incapacitated wrists before a pair of those dreadfully thick police restraints trapped me into an excruciating hogtie. Much to my rapidly mounting terror, the cold and dispiriting bite of steel police cuffs were slapped and double-locked onto my already zip-tied limbs, even further securing my restraints.
I whimpered and moaned, both from the discomfort of my bonds and from the terrifyingly dire predicament I was in.
I got a better view of my captors when the giant man sitting on my shoulders and head climbed off of my hogtied body just long enough to spin around and sit himself down on my upper back again. This time his tremendously heavy rump came down on my upper back, allowing his unreasonably harsh grip to grab my head by the hair and yank it up 'till my chin was off the cushioned gym mat.
I coughed from the weight of his seated body and yelped in fear that he would sever my spinal cord.
When the zip-tie wielding captor crouched in front of me and sent his gloved fingers fishing into one of the many pockets adorning his heavily-padded ammo vest, my eyes were permitted to briefly dance over him.
The room was still dark, but due to our proximity to the staircase and the light beaming down from the main floor, I could see him much better now.
Whoever he was, the guy was a behemoth. His body - and that of his fellow intruder - was clad in a complete set of jet black and dark blue riot armour. Not a single micron of skin or a single glimmer of his identity could be seen from outside the innumerable layers of protective gear adorning his tremendously tall and incredibly broad-shouldered body.
Every part of him was clad in cumbersome body armour; from the Kevlar helmet covering his gasmasked head to the heavily-insulated and thickly-padded armour protecting his knees, legs and lower shins.
My still very much fear-stricken eyes were still wandering across the monumentally large intruder's hulking frame when my head was unceremoniously swallowed up into a thick sack of some kind. I panicked at first, but then breathed a little easier when I realised the fabric was porous and allowed for normal breathing.
A series of drawcords were tightened off and knotted, securing the black burlap sack around my neck. A pair of fingers then squeezed my nose shut, catching me off guard and causing me to yelp out and whimper into my lightless prison. As soon as I tried doing so, a squishy mass was pressed against the cloth sack - right where my gaping mouth was positioned - and forcefully pushed in.
I cried out anew and tried expelling the intrusive object from out of my mouth, but the angry growl of some seriously heavy-duty-sounding tape filled my ears up and preceded my demise. By the time my mind was set on pushing the speech-impeeding material out, some freakishly wide and incredibly sticky tape was being wrapped around my lower face; securing the cloth bag over my head and preventing me from ridding my mouth of the bulbous mass that had been rammed inside it.
The cacophonic dissonance of heavily filtered breathing and the angry growl of uber wide military tape noisily resonated across the basement gym room. Seven revolutions of the stuff were wrapped around my lower face, and then four more were spun around my eyes and upper head.
The vision-impeeding cloth sack not only prevented me from seeing anything but also prevented me from accidentally choking on the gag I'd been imposed. There'd be no calling for help or assistance and no alerting the neighbours of what was happening.
With the treatment I was getting being reminiscent of how extranational spies, high-priority criminals and dangerous terrorists were captured; something led me to believe that I'd been accused of the most gruesome of crimes or that my identity had been mistaken.
For a while there, I even found myself considering the possibility of this being a prank; something set up and orchestrated by my own boyfriend. But when my hogtied body was lifted up off the gym room floor and carried back into what I could only guess was the garage, I right away felt as though something was off.
I screamed into my gag and struggled against my undefeatable riot restraints; something which yielded absolutely no worthwhile results.
The sound of laboured breathing continued permeating the air, and still, no answers came.
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Before I knew it, my fully incapacitated, gagged and blindfolded body was lifted up and placed side down into a very narrow crate of some sort. The wooden box must've been about a meter and a half in length but was far too narrow for me to think about turning over on my stomach or moving around at all.
My state of alarm skyrocketed once more as I heard the telltale thud of a heavy lid being closed on top of me.
The sound of metallic clicking ensued, instantly causing me to realise I was being locked in. And then there was nothing.
Only the sound of my own breathing and the thumping of my rushing heart provided me with a pale semblance of company.
I was very much alone and possessed no way of warning the neighbours, no way of alerting my lover and no way of breaking free of my bonds or escaping this wooden crate I'd been locked in.
I was too scared to cry and too frightened to shed tears. The events of the past year rushed through my mind, flashing before me as though they were nothing more than a jumble of distant memories. It's only when the rumbling of an engine drew me out of my frightened stupor that I realised I'd been loaded in a vehicle of some sort.
The rumbling continued for a while still, and then I felt myself moving.
No answers were provided as to what lay ahead and no assurances were given either.
I was being forcibly removed from my own home and taken away to an unknown location.
Everything else remained cloaked beneath a thick veil of mystery.
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