Read The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen for Free Online

happen to her? In her mind’s eye, she saw an image of herself trapped below ground. Or was she trapped in some strange unreality? Trapped in a dream—behind the door. Then she felt something being pulled over her head, and a moment later, there was light. She blinked against the sudden brightness, squinting into the dirty golden cast of a late summer afternoon. Sunlight filtering in from above fell over her black yoga pants in a stripey pattern. She straightened her legs, then drew them up to her body and hugged them tight, cradling herself in a fetal position.
    Where the hell am I?
    “Oh wakey wakey, little girly.”
    That voice again. Where was it coming from?
    She thought hard, and the effort made her brain hurt. The last thing she remembered was walking down the driveway before breakfast to get the mail. She was expecting—hoping—to get an early admissions acceptance letter from Vanderbilt. But there was just junk and some bills for her parents. She remembered flipping through an Old Navy catalogue and then… darkness. So what happened? What happ—
    Abduction.
    The word shattered her mind like a baseball crashing through a stained glass window. Her heart stopped beating and she went cold with fear. She screamed. Nothing came out. She tried again and gagged. Then she realized her mouth was open—pried open. Something was in it. Something had been stuffed in her mouth so deep it brushed against her tonsils. It tasted like sweat, sour milk, and lunch meat. The smell (and the taste) was starting to make her sick.
    Then she saw it.
    The thing hovering over her was mountainous. Its sheer bulk mystified her. It was too big to be a person. But her mind was playing tricks on her. Because it looked like a person; it had legs, arms, and… was that a head? But it was too gargantuan. It couldn’t be human. It had to be something else. Didn’t it?
    “You hear that?” the monstrous thing said, and cupped a cinder block-sized hand to its ear. “That, my dear Angela, is the sound of a cargo train.” The ground vibrated. She felt it in her legs and in her back, then the ground shook and swelled, jostling her like a trip down an unpaved country road in an old car. Shafts of sunlight streaming in through gaps in the walls caught the dust that swirled down from the ceiling and the little plumes that eddied up from the dirt floor.
    She felt her eyes bulge in shock. It was a person. A man. Her disbelieving eyes drifted up to his face and cold fear flooded through her. She knew who it was. She sucked in a startled breath and gagged on the thing in her mouth. She coughed and choked and gasped for air. But each time she inhaled, it tickled the back of her throat, setting off another round of coughing, making her body tremor. Her vision shrank in on itself, starting at the edges. Everything went dark. She felt herself slipping into the blackness, then the voice—the chilling voice from behind the door—called her back to the light.
    “The trains pass by here every five minutes this time of day,” the man was explaining. He lifted his chin as if to indicate an area somewhere off in the distance and his head scraped against the ceiling, causing the corrugated-metal panels to shudder. He didn’t seem to notice. He raised his voice a notch so she could hear him over the shriek of the train’s whistle. “They’re loud enough to mask almost anything. Anything could happen to you in here.” He gestured around him, at what appeared to be the inside of a shed of some kind (four walls and a ceiling—all dilapidated, rusty, and streaked with stains). “And no one would hear a thing. You could scream. You could cry. You could bang on the walls. It won’t matter. Nobody will hear a thing. Nobody. Does that frighten you?”
    It did.
    Her heart was racing so fast it thundered in her ears. Her brain felt soggy and useless, but some portion of it was sputtering into gear: It occurred to her that the train tracks were on the town’s