Whoever had placed her here had taken meager precautions for her. There was a small cooler against the back wall, something that had taken her forever to open because of the absolute darkness. Inside, she had found a six-pack of soda in ice. Beside the cooler, shed found a thin rectangular box. Upon opening it, she found cheese crackers.

Shed snacked on them even though she had no appetite. And already, she had finished two of the sodas. Shed had to pee and, in a humiliating moment, had done so in the back corner of her pitch-black prison.

On a few different occasions, she had occupied her mind by doing a study of her environment while trapped in the dark. She had to. It was the only thing preventing her from curling up in the back and just waiting to die. It not only gave her something to do but it gave her just a glimmer of hopea hope that told her if she could better understand where she was, maybe she could figure a way out.

She did it again now, needing to move her legs and keep her blood flowing. There was the floor, made of what she assumed was metal. She reached up, standing on her toes, and could not touch the ceiling. She figured that meant that whatever weird place she was in, it was at least seven or eight feet tall.

She started taking steps from the back of the wall, which felt like it was made of aluminum, knowing that when she made eight steps, shed come to another wall. Sure enough, eight steps brought her to another aluminum wall. She pushed gently against it. Maybe it wasnt aluminum. Maybe just hollow metal. Maybe…

She almost drew her hand back to thump on itto see what it was made of. But the last thing she wanted to do was to attract the man that she supposed had brought her here. She really couldnt remember how she had gotten here. She remembered sitting in the kitchen and hearing her parents scream. Her father had even yelled at her to run but the sentence had been cut short. Still, she had runbecause of the gunshots. Shed had her phone in her hand and had started to dial the police when she ran into something on her way out of the back door.

And that was the last thing she remembered. She had a very fleeting memory of scenery passing by a darkened car window, but that was all. After that, she had opened her eyes to this dark place.

She walked to the wall to her right and did her little counting-by-steps procedure again. From front to back, the place she was trapped inside was eight heel-to-toe steps. Walking from side to side in the same manner allowed her only five steps. She outstretched both of her arms as wide as she could and found that she could not touch the sides.