Quietness, the only sound that fills my ears. Blackness fills my vision. An ever growing panicky feeling starts to course through every vein in my body.

I lift my head slowly noticing that the reason my vision is black is because there is some type of blindfold covering my eyes. I try to reach for it, but notice that instead my hand sears with pain with every small movement I make. I yelp in pain.

I begin to hyperventilate, which only make my hands ache even more. I’m about to cry out for help when my blindfold gets ripped away from my face. The vision slowly adjusts to the new brightness that fills the room. The room is dark and damp, but still brighter than having the blindfold covering my eyes.

It takes a few seconds before I realize that there is a man glaring down at me. His grey hair is starting to bald on top, yet looks like he is in his mid thirties. He has pale green, bloodshot eyes, a slightly crooked nose, and a five-o’clock shadow. He’s breathing heavily and I can tell that he has been drinking, but he doesn’t look drunk at all.

“Where am I?” I croak.

The man raises his left hand and slaps me hard against my right cheek.

“Shut up!” he roars in a deep voice. He hobbles away from as if he has a limp in one of his legs. As he is hobbling away I am able to get a good look at him from the neck down. He is tall, but clearly overweight for his height. He wears a pale green button-down shirt to match his eyes, a white apron, a pair of extremely distressed jeans, and a pair of black worn-out rain boots.

I look up to see why my hands were searing with pain earlier and see that I have a rusty nail in the center of each palm of my hand. I can already feel the blood that ran down my hands begin to dry. I try to move my feet, but see that they’re shackled and attached to a pipe that connects to the wall behind me.

Looking around the room, I see a workbench to the far left of me that is covered with all kinds of tools: hammers, screwdrivers, hacksaws, pliers, etc. The table also has a few surgical tools: scalpel, scissors, tweezers, surgical rags, and surgical masks. The wall above the workbench is covered with posters, photographs, and flyers of, from what I can tell, the same dog. I couldn’t tell what the dog looked like or what any of the flyers read from where I was.

On the far right of the room I could see a twin-sized bed with no sheets, a medium sized TV playing reruns of old school Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, and a single worn-downed recliner chair. In the center of the room was a small dining room table that could only sit two people and a white mini-fridge.

I turned my head once again to the left of the room and see a small rectangular window nearly touching the ceiling next to the workbench. I thin sliver of sunlight peaks through and lands onto the moldy, tan carpet that covers the left half of the room.

The man walks over to the workbench, picks up a tool, inspects it, and repeats until he finds the exact tool he is looking for. I can’t tell what he is holding as he walks back towards me until he is a few feet in front of me. In his left hand is a rag dripping with some kind of clear liquid.

At this point I’m tearing up, scared to make any noise. Through my blurred vision I can see him raise his hand up to my face. I’m whimpering and trying to turn my face away from, but he grabs my chin forcefully and places the rag under my nose. Still struggling helplessly, he laughs in amusement. I slowly start to stop struggling as my vision begins to blacken once again.

I hear his voice saying, “Wake up, Wade,” amongst the mist that floats through my head.

I awaken instantly and ask, “H- How do you know my name?”

He leans in closer in his chair, so that he is only a few inches away from my face.

“I know many things about you. I know your name, obviously, address, family, occupation, so on and so forth.” He breaks out into a sinister smile, exposing his yellowed teeth and deep purple gums.

“What do you want with me? I’ve done nothing wrong to you. I’ve never even met you before.” I was in full-on panic mode. This just seemed to entertain the man even more.

“Go back in time in your thoughts. The day July 16, 2015 to be exact. Does anything seem to ring a bell after hearing that date?”

I think as hard as I possibly can. Nothing. I shake my head from side-to-side.

“Maybe this will spark your memory.” He thrusts one of the flyers that once hung on the wall above the workbench in front of my face. It read, Award-winning dog, Henry, was hit and killed by an oncoming car. My face must have had a mask of confusion written all over it because the man punched my jaw as hard as he could.

“That dog was my ticket out of this shit-hole!” He then punched me in the face so hard that I immediately blacked out once again.

In the fog that surrounds my vision, I see a bright light in the far distance. I walk towards it until it opens up and I’m standing on a well-kept lawn in a seemingly nice neighborhood. Hearing a car screeching to the left of me, I turn to see a grey Sedan flying down the road. At that same moment I see a tall, muscular man throw a ball for his dog to catch. The dog matched the dog from the flyer that the man had showed me before I went off to dreamland. The man had thrown the ball a little too far for the dog to catch, but that didn’t stop the car from slowing down any.

I went to cry out to the car to slow down, but discovered that nothing would come out. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything other than watch the horror that was about to happen. The man who threw the ball had his back turned, but turned back around when he heard the yelp of his dog. The man in the car still didn’t slow down, he just continued to speed down the road.

When his car passed me, time seemed to have slowed down. I looked in through the passenger window and saw that the driver was obviously drunk. I peered in even more and saw that the driver was, Oh god! It was me.

Time sped up once again and allowed me the access of being able to walk around. I walked towards the man, who now was crouched down next to his bloodied dog. He looked up and right at me with fury in his eyes.

“You did this to him. I vow to get my revenge on you one day, Wade Heere.”

I’m greeted once again by a hard smack to my face.

“Have a nice dream, Wade?” He was standing over me with a mirror in his left hand.

“Look at the killer you have become.” He thrusts the broken mirror four inches away from my face.

I could see both of my eyes had turned purple, yet weren’t swollen, my lip was busted open, and my right cheek had a handprint shaped mark now embedded into the skin.

I look up at the man. Tears start to pool and run down my bruised face.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit your dog. I was so drunk that day that I thought it was just a speedbump.”

The man jumps out of his chair, while pulling on the little amount of hair he had left. The chair he was sitting in topples over to the side as he pushes the dining table to the ground. He goes to break one of the dining table chairs, and then punches a hole in the wall above the mini-fridge in rage.

I’m more terrified in this moment than I have ever felt in my entire life. And in that moment I notice that the nail in my right hand felt loose. I tugged a little on my hand, suppressing the feeling of wanting to cry out in pain, and notice that I’m able to move it out of its original hole in the wall. I look at the floor next to me and see a paperclip about an inch in front of me. This sparks an idea in my head.

A few moments had passed while I waited for the man to calm down from his rage induced tantrum. The aftermath resulted in a broken dining table and chair, a hole in the wall, the mattress now having a huge gash though the middle, and the TV toppled to one side, but still playing reruns over and over again.

He glanced over to me one last time before heading up the stairs. As soon as I heard the door slam shut I put my plan into action. I quickly pulled my right hand away from the wall. I silently cried out in pain for a second as the nail dropped out of the bloodied gash in my palm. I bent my fingers slowly and placed them on the nail that was stuck in my other hand. I pulled with all my might. My fingers feeling as though they were being dipped into molten lava, but finally the nail slipped from my hand and onto the cement floor.

I had no time to care for my wounded hands. I reached over and grabbed the paperclip, bent it straight, and got to work on unlocking the shackles. It usually took the man seven minutes to do whatever it was he did in the upstairs portion of the house, so I had to work faster than I thought was capable with my wounded, sore palms.

A full minute passed before I was able to get the right shackle off of my ankle and another minute for the other. By the time I was able to get both off, I estimated that I had about four minutes left. I limp over to the staircase and see that the lock was on this side of the door. I thought this was quite strange, but didn’t question it any further. Quickly, I walk up the stairs towards the door, twist the lock shut, and walk back down the stairs.

Not a second passed that I walked down the final step, I heard the doorknob start to turn. I can hear an angry grunt from the other side and then banging. I freeze, like a deer caught in the headlights, but I snap myself out of it and head over to the workbench.

Shoving the tools out of the way to make a spot for me to climb was a bigger ordeal than I had ever imagined. Finally I managed to move them to one side of the table and slowly haul myself up, all while the man continued pounding on the door.

I grabbed the bottom of the window frame, pushed myself up so I was level with the window, and to my horror, discovered that the window had no lock or way to open. In my crazed panic, I quickly scanned the contents on the table and see a hammer that is amidst the other piled up tools. I lowered myself away from the window, grabbed the hammer, and push back up from the table.

By this point, I was beyond exhausted, but I pushed myself to continue on forward. I held the hammer behind my head, shut my eyes tightly, and swung as hard as I possibly could at the window. I waited to hear the sound of glass shattering, but nothing, just a small dink. Snapping my eyes open I discovered that the window remained the same. No shattering. No opening. Not even a crack.

In that moment I discovered that the pounding had also stopped. The only sound now was my heart thumping fiercely in my chest. I looked back down at the workbench and saw a small hand drill. I picked it up, placed it on the glass of the window, and pressed the button to create a hole. I started small because I thought I had more time, but I soon discovered I was wrong.

I was about to increase the size of the hole because at that point it was as big as a golf ball, but I heard a strange whirring noise coming from the door by the stairs. I ignored it, thinking it was just a machine running upstairs, but the sound seemed to be coming closer. Still, it didn’t bother me as continued to make the hole bigger.

The sound of something hitting the door pulled my attention back to the door. Spinning metal poked through a vertical lined shaped hole in the door. The hole getting bigger and bigger. That’s when I knew that the metal was the blades that connected to a chainsaw.

I was frozen in place. My brain wouldn’t tell my body to snap out of it. I knew I was going to die.

The door was now covered in slash-mark cuts, weakening the strength of it. The man knew this too because he burst through the door and coming straight for me with the still whirring chainsaw. His face was the color of a stop sign from the rage that enveloped every part of his body.

The hole in the window wasn’t big enough for me to fit through, so I knew I was screwed. The only thing I could think to do was call out through the hole for a possibility that someone will hear me. I opened my mouth, but nothing. No words would tumble out of my mouth.

In that moment the man grabbed my left ankle, causing me to fall backwards and land on the pile of tools, which resulted in me blacking out in an instant.

I know what happened to me after all of this occured, but I would rather not think about that moment anymore. You can think of your own interpretations as much as you would like to. If you were to take anything from my story, please be safe when driving because you never know how people will act afterwards.