Light. Painfully bright light. So bright that it was shining through my closed eyelids, turning everything red.

My eyes fluttered open. I blinked rapidly, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

I was lying on my back on an uncomfortable metal table. A man was bent above me, picking meticulously through my hair and examining the strands. He was dressed like a doctor, with a white lab coat pulled tightly around him. The bright light positioned directly above me and pointing into my eyes was washing out the remainder of my field of vision. I closed my eyes as they began to water from the painful exposure.

I tried desperately to remember what had happened. Slowly, bits and pieces began to return to me, as did a dull throb in the back of my head.

Maybe I was in the hospital. I had been hit in the back of the head. When you got hurt, you went to a hospital.

No, no, that wasn't right. It was the apocalypse. No hospitals were open. We had been in the hospital...exploring...for medicine...was one of us sick?

Oh.

Oh.

We had been exploring the hospital for a cure, a cure to the zombie disease. Then we had been ambushed. And now I was here, my hair being examined by a stranger in a lab coat.

"Good morning," the man said pleasantly, moving the light away from my face and waiting for my eyes to adjust. Once they did, I noticed immediately that the ceiling of the room was made of jagged stone.

The man above me had brown hair and matching eyes, and a kindly smile that seemed incredibly out of place in this terrifying situation.

"Where are they?" Talking took a monumental effort and the few words that I could manage to force out were laced with fury. "What did you do to us?"

"Simple. I lured you into an ambush using a carefully placed bug," the man said, articulating the final three words as he searched for something on a table of tools next to me. He grabbed one of the devices that doctors use to examine your ears and brushed my hair away from my cheek. I stiffened at the contact. His fingers were cold and strangely soft, as if he had done no strenuous work using his hands in the past six months. I clenched my own hands, feeling my rough palms and fingertips, once as smooth as his were.

"What do you mean, a bug?" I rasped.

The man smiled. "I can't tell you all my little secrets, now, can I? At least, not until we're all back in a group."

"Where are my friends?" I repeated, struggling to keep my eyes open. I was fatigued.

"They're being held in another room, and you're in no state to try and rescue them," the man pointed out. "Sleep."

And I drifted into a heavily drugged slumber.

*

When I awoke again, I was in a different room. It was pitch black, much as the hospital room where we had been ambushed had been. It brought back memories that I was less than fond of.

I shifted my weight back and forth. I was sitting on - tied to - a chair. My ankles were bound to the legs of the seat and my arms were tied behind the back.

I tried to move again and the back of my chair hit something. Another chair?

I tried to speak but found my mouth to be too dry. Wetting my lips as best I could and swallowing painfully, I managed a quiet, "Hello?"

"Lilith? Oh, Lilith, thank god." It was Benji, frantic, tied to the chair behind me. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. You?" It was a lie, but I wasn't dead, so it was true in some aspects.

"My shoulder's bruised from where I hit it on the floor, you know, when I fell...Do you remember everything that happened? It's all kind of a blur..."

"Yeah, Lydia told us to turn into that dark room and we were ambushed. Benji, the man who examined me said that he put a 'bug' in our group."

Benji was silent.

"Benji?" Not Benji, it can't be Benji. Please don't let the bug be Benji.

"I - you don't think - " he choked out, and then said in a rush, as if eager to get the words out and as far away from himself as possible. "You don't think Lydia was the bug?"

"Lydia?" I thought of the strange, damaged child. I thought of the way she had appeared out of nowhere after being missing for so long when we found her, conveniently at the very location of the antidote. I thought of her staring at the rope with wide eyes after I thought I felt a slight tug. I thought of her ordering us to turn into that dark room with such a strange tone in her voice...

"What have they done to her?" Benji's voice was so raw, so full of pain, that I felt tears swelling in my eyes. "What have they done to my baby sister?"

I tried to imagine Reggie doing those terrible things and shivered. But surely Lydia hadn't jumped at the chance to help get her brother kidnapped. Had she herself been abducted, much as we were currently? Had she been brainwashed, even? Or worse...tortured? No. She couldn't have been. She was so young...

But if she had been brainwashed, to what ends? What were we here for?

My thoughts were interrupted when a square of light opened in the wall - a door. I blinked, eyes squinting against the sudden change in lighting.

"Hello, children!" the brown-haired man sang out, coming swiftly into the room and bending down to stare me in the eyes. I wanted to be brave and daring, to do something headstrong like spit in his face or cuss him out, but I couldn't speak, paralyzed as I was by fear. I just sat, holding my breath, until he nodded in satisfaction and stood just as quickly as he had strode over to me, moving out of my line of sight. I twisted my head around and examined what little of the room I could make out in the weak light.

It seemed to be carved out of stone, just as the room I was examined in had been. It was completely empty besides Benji and myself tied in the center of it.

Were we underground, then? But no - that would be too much work, wouldn't it? Then perhaps a cave system. It would have to be a large one, but there were many in America. It was possible...

I heard Benji spit and swear and stared at my shoes, heart speeding up. I was just glad that he was courageous enough to do what I had wished to, although I was worried for how our captor would react.

The man didn't seem particularly upset. In fact, he chuckled. "Time for you to reunite with your friends."

Did they get KC? I wondered in a flash of panic. No, not KC. She was too strong, too skilled. They couldn't pin her down. Could they?

The man clapped his hands and two large figures entered the room. They were huge. One reached down and swiftly cut the bonds on my ankles. Before I could kick him or try anything else, he was holding my ankles together with one gargantuan hand and duct taping them together. He did the same with my wrists. Then, he threw me over his shoulder easily and left the room.

We waited in the hallway for Benji, the other large man, and the smaller man. Once they joined us in the barren, stone hallway, we started off down the corridor.

The hallway and rooms were obviously natural formations - so I had been correct in my guess of this place being in a cave system. The space was not specifically made to accommodate humans, that was clear from all the jagged edges and low ceilings However, the lighting and equipment all had looked new and professional - not to mention expensive. Was this legal?

Well, obviously the kidnapping wasn't, but I had read somewhere once that many cave systems in the U.S. were protected by the government. Had this place been set up before or after the American government fell?

Finally, we entered another room. It was only lit near the entrance, and I could somehow tell that beyond the pools of light on the floor, the cavern was enormous. This was more recognizable as a cave.

I remembered a tour of one cave I had gone on with my family, in which the tour guide had warned us of the dangers of caves and explained the various semi-blind fish and species of bats residing in them. This didn't seem safe, this small ledge before a narrow path leading further into the cave and shrouded with darkness.

The man carrying me lowered me unceremoniously to the floor and I fell, unable to support myself on my bound ankles. My tailbone collided with the stone floor painfully and I bit back a cry, not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing me in pain.

Benji fell next to me within seconds. He wriggled closer until our shoulders were pressed together. For me, at least, there was nothing romantic about it. We did this to convince ourselves that we were still there, still alive, that this was actually happening to us. We did it to ground ourselves. This was a nightmare. The past few months had been livable, strangely, but this? This was kidnapping. This was what happened to stupid girls in thriller movies. This did not happen to me.

But then, our entire lives were thriller movies, one big reel of screwy zombie-apocalypse-prompted panic attacks. Nothing about this situation was normal.

The brown-haired man stood before us, close enough that we were forced to look up to see him. It was obviously a power move - I felt weak and small. I pressed closer to Benji. I hated seeming needy, but this situation threw all of that out of the window.

"Bring him in," the man called to someone behind us, and we twisted to see two other large men dragging Jared in between them.

"Jared!" I screamed, unable to hold back my terror anymore at the state of my friend.

He was conscious, but unable to support himself, he was so weak. He was peppered with bruises, and the skin surrounding his left eye was violent shades of purple and black. He lifted his head with great effort and smiled weakly at us.

I burst into tears. Within seconds, I couldn't catch my breath with the force of my meltdown. My head felt like it was slowly being compressed inward at the strength of my sobs, and I felt sick to my stomach at everything about this situation.

"Lilith, calm down," Benji tried futilely. "Shhh, look, Jared's fine."

Jared was thrown next to us and didn't even try to sit up. He just grunted, all the air leaving his body in a rush.

"Where is my sister?" Benji demanded, face turning red with fury as he shouted at the brown-haired man. "Where is Lydia?"

"Oh, darling little Lydia?" The man smiled cruelly, lips curling. "Why, she's right here." He bent down and grabbed a chain that the rest of us hadn't noticed, giving it a sharp yank. There was a choking noise, and a little girl with a thick collar around her neck stumbled forward, falling to her hands and knees with the force of the man's tug.

Lydia.