I awoke bound and gagged in the center of a dimly lit cavern. The men that had taken me were stood some distance away from me and both exactly as intimidating as I remembered. One stood around six feet and two inches tall and was bald, with a scar running the length of his left cheek. The other was far shorter, only standing around five foot ten, but more than made up for this with the rippling muscles that layered his arms. They were talking among themselves and did not seem aware that I was awake yet but I knew that this would change soon. I didn't know how I had gotten into this situation, with ropes tightly pressing into my wrists and other ropes binding me around the waist and breasts to what felt like a piece of wood, but I had to escape somehow.
It really did not take a genius to work out exactly what two men who looked around twenty five wanted with a fifteen year old girl such as myself. I had heard stories of such men; Bandits that would slip into towns such as my own and take young females to forcibly indulge in certain pleasures with. I made a resolve in my head that I would not be just another girl raped and left to die in the barren wasteland that the world had become long before my birth but that I would break free and find my way back to my town. But first I would need to get out and that could not be easy.
As quietly as I possibly could, I straightened what sections of my body that I was able to and scanned the stone floor of the cave. About half a foot away from me I saw a small chunk of jagged rock and knew that would be my saving grace. I slid one of my feet out absolutely silently, and hooked my foot around it and swiftly reeled it in. The tricky part would be getting this instrument of the escape I so desperately needed into my hands. I pressed it between my two feet, and braced myself, before lifting both feet off of the floor. I almost grunted in pain as I found myself dangling from my waist, which was firmly roped to the wood behind me. Somehow I got the rock into my hands but then I made my mistake, and my feet clattered to the ground. Both men turned.
The smaller man spoke first, with more than just a hint of malice in his voice. "Eh up, me ol' china, our girlies awake."
"Should have stayed asleep, little girl," the larger man said directly to me, and I felt a tear trickling down my cheek. I knew that I had to keep calm, and focused on the task at hand, slowly scraping away at the rope that bound my hands. With every cut, the two men were getting closer. And closer. Within ten seconds they were upon me, and simultaneously I felt one of the ropes binding my hands free itself as the rock cut through it. One of them lunged. I brought the rock round. Squelch.
I was in a state of shock as the man I had just stabbed in the throat collapsed in front of me, as dead as a doornail. His friend was just as bewildered as me, and this gave me time to cut myself free effortlessly, adrenaline giving me strength that I didn't know I had. Seeing the cave enterance behind where I had been stationed, I fled, leaving the man behind, stood over his fallen friend. I fled out into the Wasteland. And that's where my story begins.