Free Snatched by Callee Raye

THE BEGINNING
     
     
    Nursery rhymes were playing in the background.              
    Moira was still quite groggy. At first she thought she was still asleep and the music was just a part of her dream. Upon realizing that she was not still asleep, she tried to focus her eyes in the surrounding darkness of the room. The music she heard was a familiar tune. She knew she had heard it before, but long ago.  Suddenly it came to her, it was the nursery rhyme tune from the musical mobile toy that hung over her little sister’s crib. She remembered how her sister Lexi would laugh and be fascinated with the musical toy all day long. Through the darkness she could see that there was something in the opposite corner of the room. She squinted trying to focus her eyes. It looked like a white baby bed. Even though her balance and footing was still off due to her grogginess, she tried to stand up and walk over to the crib. Falling to her knees onto the concrete floor, made her realize rather quickly, that something was preventing her from moving more than just a few feet away. There was something metal wrapped around her ankle.  A piece of the metal had dug into her skin when she fell, causing it to bleed. She was shackled to the floor. Who would do something like this, she thought. She was trying hard not to panic, but it was beginning to be too much for her to grasp.
    “Help, somebody please help me,” she bellowed as loud as she possibly could.
    Her mouth was open, and she knew that she was screaming at the top of her lungs, but she heard nothing. She screamed again and again, but still no sound escaped from her throat. Tears were welling up in her eyes making her vision blurry. Just great, she thought, I can’t speak and now I can’t see. Self-pity was really starting to sink in pretty fast. Something moved in the darkness across the room, where the white crib was.
    “Hello, is someone there?” Still no voice emerged.
    What is wrong with my voice, she thought rubbing at her throat. There was a dull sore achy feeling in her throat, as if she had a cold or something, but she hadn’t been sick. There it was again, she knew her eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on her. Something had moved in the corner. There was someone else in the room. Moira was not alone, but she certainly felt alone. Who would leave their baby unattended and why shackled her to the floor? Questions were steadily popping into her head, but she had no answers. The blood from the gash was dripping down her ankle and soaking the sock she wore. Moira sat down on the floor and rolled the sock down. Immediately she noticed that these were not her socks. These socks had lace along the top edge. They felt like ankle socks, the kind a little girl would wear, not a grown woman of twenty-five. Moira’s ears perked up to the sound of someone walking across the floor upstairs. The footsteps filled her with mixed emotions. A part of her felt glad knowing that someone was up there, maybe they would release her from the metal shackles that confined her movements. The other part of her was deadly afraid of whoever could do something like this and what their ultimate intention was. She could hear the baby in the crib squirming around. She probably needed to be changed or wanted to be fed. No one had come to even check on the poor little thing all night long. Clearly this was a case of child neglect. Moira sat on the floor waiting for the person moving about upstairs to come. She waited and waited and waited. She really needed to go to the bathroom and the cold clamminess of the cement floor didn’t help any. She felt as if her bladder was about to burst at any moment. Moira hoped someone would come down soon and release her. She heard the sound of a blender going upstairs and footsteps walking back and forth across the floor. Finally it sounded as if the footsteps were coming towards the basement door. Her body tensed up in anticipation.
    Moira could hear the door