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Chapter 8: 212 Degrees
Part 3: Sophie
Sophie’s heart refused to beat a normal rhythm. Her mouth felt awful, all the moisture sucked out of it by the rag silencing her. It was hard to breath through the hood. Her shoulders ached from the strange angle with her bound hands. Her hands were tingling as though their binding was too tight for normal circulation.
The man driving still said nothing. He had buckled her in, then started the truck and driven them away without a word. She tried to think back to when he had announced himself at her apartment, but nothing about his voice had sounded familiar. With the mask covering his face, she couldn’t recognize him.
Her brain spun, not completing thoughts but pinging from one thing to the next like a broken pinball machine. She was frightened, sick to her stomach, and desperate for escape.
In an effort to calm herself, she started singing her favorite hymns in her mind. She quickly grew frustrated when she couldn’t remember the words to songs she had sung for years, but she kept at it, skipping lines or verses when her brain wouldn’t focus.
Sophie realized after a good long while that remembering how many hymns she had sung might help her know how long she was in the car. She was determined to hold onto any possible clue in the hopes of passing them along to Sam.
When she got to the Easter hymns floating around her mind, memories of Jonathan and their Easter egg hunts at their grandparents’ house surfaced. Jonathan was so competitive, where Sophie was definitely not. Grandma had resorted to buying only two colors of eggs to make sure they got an equal share, because then she could forbid Jonathan from collecting any that were Sophie’s color.
No one knew that sometimes Sophie had just snuck candy out of Jonathan’s basket later, especially if he had a lot of the tiny Snickers bars. Those were her favorite.
Will I ever taste a Snickers again? she wondered idly, then had to stifle a sob at the thought. She chastised herself; that kind of thinking would not help her. She had to keep her wits about her. More Easter hymns helped soothe her fears again.
After 10 hymns of driving, the truck bounced over what sounded like a gravel road before jerking to a stop. Sophie breathed slowly and silently while she waited for the man to exit, round the vehicle, and open her door. It took him much longer than it should have, she thought. But finally, the door opened, her seatbelt was released, and he gripped her arm much too tightly to pull her from the vehicle.
They marched across gravel, then some grass – she could feel it soft and wet against her socks – before he pulled up on her arm to guide her up three steps. Across a wooden surface, he pushed her ahead of him until she felt cool air on her hands. The little bit of light that had been filtering through the hood was gone, leaving her to understand she had entered a dwelling of some sort.
The man shoved her into a soft seat.
“Stay,” he growled. She simply nodded, listening to his footsteps move across wooden floors. He made some other noises, but she couldn’t pinpoint them to any normal household activity she had heard before. Of course, she didn’t make a regular habit of closing her eyes and listening to life.
“I’ll be back. I expect you to be right where I left you.” With that command, she heard a door slam, and then utter silence.
Fear jacked her heart rate up again as she sat in the stillness, listening, waiting for she knew not what. At some point she started counting, wondering how long the man would be gone. What if she needed the bathroom? Come to think of it, she did need the bathroom.
Sophie had counted to 600 by the time she decided it was safe to move. First things first: vision. Grateful for the flexibility gained by years of dance, she bent her head between her knees, squeezed, and slowly managed to pry the hood off. With disgust, she realized it was a not-very-clean black reusable grocery bag.
Next step: hands. She tried to slide her hands under her hips, but after much wiggling, she came to the conclusion that her arms were too short compared to her torso to accomplish such a maneuver. A glance around proved she was in a one-room cabin. A tiny kitchenette was to her right. She headed there in search of a knife.
Opening kitchen drawers behind her back was a new experience for Sophie. It took a lot of trial and error to bend and lean just right. Eventually, the third drawer revealed a somewhat old-looking knife, hopefully sharp enough to do the job without injuring her too much. Now how to prop the knife securely so she could saw at the ropes around her wrists?
The knife was too short to jam upright in a drawer. The couch was too squishy. There was no dining room chair. Across the way, she spotted a door cracked open enough to reveal a toilet.
Jackpot! Sophie set the knife on the bathroom counter, lifted the toilet seat, then gingerly laid the knife across the edge of the toilet before closing the lid. The knife clattered to the floor, causing a moment of panic. Was the man still here? Had he heard?
When she had counted to 60 with no noise, she picked up the knife and tried again. This time she was able to complete all the backwards maneuvers necessary to wedge the knife under one side of the toilet seat. Then she sat down and oh-so-carefully slid her hands over the knife. She knew enough to ensure that the blade was facing away from her skin and that she was working away from the blade.
She worked her hands back and forth for what felt like an hour, although a tiny digital clock on the counter told her only 10 minutes passed before she felt something slip. She wiggled her wrists, and more space opened between them. With a little more finagling, she was finally able to slip one hand free.
Thank you, Jesus!!! Free of the ropes, she was also able to yank the rag out of her mouth and take a full, non-smelly breath for the first time in… 2 hours and 47 minutes, if the clock was accurate. It had felt so much longer.
She moved to reach for her phone to call Sam just as the horrifying sound of tires on gravel reached her ears. Another huge dose of adrenaline burst through her system.
I have to run, she thought. Immediately, she looked for an exit. There was the front door right next to the couch, but that was out of the question. The window above the sink was too small. The only other window opened onto the front porch, as well. There was no escape.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a small, low door that reminded her of an oversized dog door. She crouched in front of it and pulled it open. Her pounding heart was almost louder than the little door’s squeaking hinges, but she panicked and stilled nonetheless.
The truck engine stopped. Soon she’d hear footsteps…
Sophie forced herself to look through the little door. A small ‘room’, barely big enough for a large dog or a child, had bits of tree bark on the floor. What was this space?
To her great delight, the opposite wall of the box/room featured a glowing rectangle – sunlight shining around the crevices of a second door. Sophie forced her body into the small space, pushing the other door open as footsteps sounded on the front porch.
Panic made her movements jerky and fumbling. Stay on course, Sophie Lane. You can do this. She finally used her foot to kick open the door, a wave of fresh air enticing her. Keys sounded in the front door lock as she pulled the interior door shut behind her.
Springing to the ground, Sophie heard a man’s howl of rage and the slamming of the cabin’s door as she sprinted across the grass and into the thick forest all around.