J92

The night of the accident The bar was busy. Which was good. Crowds of people in their high-end fashion flare and pints all around. People in good roaring spirit. Arjan smiled as he leaned into the bar, the barmen all busy pouring as many drinks as they could, the smell of alcohol wasn’t too overwhelming. There was a loud chattering of people, he looked around. He barely recognised some of them, not that they hadn’t aged well but probably aged better. Not t

The next day Arjan came in with almost a sprint in his step. ‘Oh, Arjan!’ the head nurse catches up to him, running. ‘Oh, morning!’ Arjan grins, as he takes off his coat. ‘Morning,’ the nurse pants and grins, she hands him a note. ‘We’ve put you in the west area today.’ ‘West?’ Arjan stares at the notes in his hand. The west was far away from his normal workstation. ‘I mean, yeah. Sure. Not a problem.’ Nothing

Tom wakes up in a UK hospital and has no memory of who he is. The more he finds out about who he is supposed to be, the more disappointed he is, and he can’t seem to shake off the fact he feels he has a historic connection with the Sikh male nurse that is supporting him.

It’s bright. White everywhere. It smells like metallic, or is it chemicals, he can’t tell. The smell makes him feel uncomfortable. His eyes hurt when he opens them like he’s been punched in the face. The more he opens his eyes the more he takes in the pale walls. A large window at the side, there’s a bunch of bare trees outside. Next to him there’s a small table with a jar of water and a mix match of small and large cards. All get better soon cards. The machine on his other side is beeping and t

It had been a few months now. Casso was in the news. Serial killer in Norway finally caught. Number of victims is forty and still counting. Dustin and his friends were all back in the UK. Dustin’s aunt protected him from the media. His friends hung out with him in his room. Today it was Anne and Al who were with him. His beard was now shaved, his hair cut and he was putting weight back on again. His throat was still healing.

Smashing the skull onto the floor, he picked up a sharded piece of bone. He tried to turn the screw but it still struggled to turn. Dustin was running out of time. He looked down on his jeans. There were buttoned jeans. He pulled hard and got one of the buttons off the jeans. Using the buttons and the bone, he pressed hard into the screws and eventually they began to move. He burst into a massive smile and focused all his energy into unscrewi

The door banged open to the basement and Casso came in. He unchained Dustin from the bed and brough him up the stairs. Casso laughed, ‘Some kids walking up here. Fresh meat, gonna get me gun out tonight.’ Dustin said nothing as Casso walked him outside. Casso had been out a while and Dustin had to wait for him to come back to go to the toilet. Casso had him toilet trained now. He took Dustin outside and as Dustin relieved his bladder, Casso m

Friends View - after weeks of searching ‘Two mountains!’ shouted Al, pointing his finger. ‘Southwards, this time, let’s go.’ Ronda lagged behind as the group of friends rushed forward. She had the police’s number ready on her phone. She looked up nervously and then jogged slowly to catch up with her friends. They were so keen on rescuing him but Ronda didn’t want to be the accidental death of her best friend, she couldn’t live with that. They had been lo

Dustin sat on the mattress, the room smelt awful of pungent damp and mould. The wall was so wet and slimy and the floor was starting to dry off with all the water. Casso had managed to fix the pipe. Dustin also got the joys of mopping the floor. He then got pushed over onto the floor by Casso who dragged him around the floor, yelling at him and kicking him hard in the stomach. But then he left and Dustin lay there on the floor, his face scratched up and stingi

Friends View It had been a few days since Alexander received the message. He didn’t believe it at first. Was it a hoax? Alexander passed his phone to the police. But all the friends hung out in the hotel room, all pondering what it meant, if it was real. They didn’t know much of his life before college, Dustin never talked about it in detail. He stayed with his aunty and his dad was in prison. He never mentioned his mum. ‘Why would he text

One cold night, Dustin thought he would try out his plan. He had been putting it off for a while as if it went wrong, he could die. He went over and over in his head. He had to go for it and he was terrified. He needed something to happen in the basement to cause a distraction long enough so he could get on that phone. He noticed the pipes in the corner of the room. He didn’t know if there was any water going through them. He could reach over and make a hole an

Christmas must have passed by now. Casso never celebrated it. Dustin was glad of this really. His coughing and sneezing were getting less, Dustin felt like he was clawing his energy slowly back. Casso eventually got Dustin sleeping at the bottom of the bed again, with his chains. He had seen the mobile phone two more times and saw that Casso left it deep into the couch cushion. Dustin had to think very carefully how to get hold of that phone. But he was barel

Casso had since calmed down since the escaping incident. He had left Dustin in the basement all day and night with no food or water before letting him back upstairs, yanking at the chain around Dustin’s neck. He put new screws into the wall for the chains to be attached to. Dustin would rub his neck every now and then, the collar feeling sore and dirty around his throat. He hoped there was no open wounds. He still coughed and sneezed every now and then, but most of his time d

Flashback It was New Year’s Eve and the party was going on. The house was absolutely trashed, of course, drunk teenagers messing around, laughing, yelling, spilled beer everywhere. Dustin had been hanging out with his friends, laughing and cheering with them. This was his second party he had been to. He got some pizza and shared it with them; they ate in the corner. They heard sniggering and some guys looked over at them. They were the slim models from co

There were a few times that Casso had to go out to do some errands and he would put Dustin back into the basement again. His hand was still chained behind the bedframe but Casso had been lenient and added more links to the chain so Dustin was able to walk around the room. The room was weird, there was a rusty pipe in the corner, no windows and there was damp feeling in the air. Dustin would sit on the edge of the bed and look at the messages he wrote on the wall for himself. A