She woke up to the stridulation of crickets.
As she raised her arms to rub dried mucopurulent discharge that crusted in her eyes, she sensed something preventing her from abducting her wrists from each other. She could flex and extend her knees without any difficulty. It took her a few moments to notice that her hands were bound to each other by the wrists.
As she scanned her immediate surroundings, she noticed moonlight pouring from the window to her right. The dim illumination rendered a stack of unlabelled boxes visible, along with outlines of some articles of furniture, but not much else. The soft sensation against her back when she woke up led her to infer that she was inside a bedroom of sorts.
Standing up with as little noise as she could make, she suddenly felt as though an electric current surged through both of her legs. She quickly sat back down, trying to remember how she wound up in her current situation. Her mind drew blanks as she attempted to reconstruct the events following an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy she performed on a patient referred to her from the emergency room.
The more she strained herself to recall where she went after leaving the hospital, the left side of her forehead became increasingly painful. Thinking about the hazy figures that started to manifest in her memory exacerbated the discomfort she was feeling. Like a bolt of lightning, she called out, "Hello?", into the opposite end of the dark room she occupied.
The only response she received was the mewl of a cat.
Struggling to keep herself calm, she took to making a few deep breaths, laying back down on the bed.
"1..."
A faint trickle and the whirring noise of a moving engine were audible.
"2..."
A few drops of rain on the window gave the illusion of sparkles.
"3..."
The sound of footsteps and indistinct chatter in steady crescendo predominated her senses.
"4..."
Keys clanking as the footsteps come to a halt, someone must be fiddling with a knob. She knew she had to stay quiet and lay still, as a niggling feeling started to grow into fear. Closing her eyes before she can internally count to 5, she heard a creaking noise come from her left side. As footfall resumed, murmuring turned into two different voices.
"Are you sure this is him?"
"He certainly looks the part."
"What do you mean, 'looks the part'? I told you to bring him to me!"
"Not much I can work with from the grainy phone camera photo that you sent. I took him from the hospital where you saw him. Know if he has any siblings?"
"'Him'? What on earth are these two talking about?", she thought as she heard the flick of a switch. Hoping that she did not appear visibly jolted by the sound, she kept her charade.
"It does look like him."
She looks nothing like a man, she thought to herself. How could they say that she looked like whoever they're after?
"'It'? Have a little more respect. He's a person too, you know?"
"You're telling me to treat that guy as a human being? He's a criminal responsible for the deaths of many innocent people. I'm just going to give him his just desserts."
Could they be talking about... him? If they are, exactly what do they want to do with him?