The Surprise

A colourful butterfly flew into the abandoned factory building. It hovered over dirty tiles, rusted machinery, weeds and small bushes that broke through the concrete floor, and finally rested on the tattooed hand of a man lying on the floor.

Rambo awoke as a window slammed shut in the wind then creaked open again. His hands and feet were tied with a wide duct tape. “What the f*ck!” he mumbled to himself. He felt a throbbing headache as he struggled to push himself up from the cold, hard ground. The stale air of the abandoned factory building filled his lungs.

The smell reminded him of the cave under the old ruins in the forest where he used to play a lot with his younger brother as a child. His brother called himself the Terminator and he called himself Rambo, a name that stuck with him ever since. They never stopped fighting over who was stronger and smarter either.

Suddenly, he heard people talking, but the voices were too faint and he could not catch a word. Rambo did not understand why he was there, how he wound up in that abandoned factory building. He tried to recall what had happened to him, but all he remembered was that he was sitting in his brother's car. They planned to play tennis. Then, he vaguely remembered the smell of chloroform, just like out of a dream, but that was it. He had a complete blackout.

Was he kidnapped or taken hostage by some criminals? He was sure that no one could have expected a ransom for him. No one ever confided the kind of secrets to him that anyone else would have been interested in enough to kidnap him. The most likely explanation might have been that he witnessed something somewhere and the perpetrators took him hostage. But why then and there? And why him alone? He heard a bird flapping its wings above. Ants were marching in front of his face on the dirty concrete floor.

Rambo hoped that he might be able to escape if his kidnappers were not professionals, and as they used duct tape, he suspected they were not. With both of his hands, he tapped around on the floor for something sharp. He grabbed a piece of broken glass and started working on the tape behind his back. He could not see what he was doing and he even cut his fingers while working with the shard. The ants, apparently surprised by the beads of sweat dripping from his face, disappeared into the cracks in between the tiles.

After a while he felt that the duct tape loosened on his hands and shortly after, he managed to cut through it. His arms were completely numb after having been bound for hours. Next, he freed his legs and tried to locate the voices he could still hear from somewhere. He found out that they were coming from behind the door with peeling paint at the end of the hall. He was afraid that that was the only way out, but as he looked around, he noticed a butterfly as its wings glinted in the pale sunlight that filtered into the building. It hovered over the machinery, then it flew off in the direction of a dark corner with a rusty iron ladder against the wall.

He crept slowly to the ladder as quietly as he could and checked if it was stable enough, “Should be OK.” he thought and started climbing. The ladder led to the flat roof of the building. As he looked around, he saw a nearby road with moderate traffic, trees behind the building, and a run-down factory yard with some wrecked cars. It must have been late afternoon. They drove off to the tennis court around noon, so he had been lying unconscious in the abandoned building for at least four or five hours.

The stretch of road he saw from the roof was bound by two roundabouts. He spotted a gas station close to one of them. He realised that that was the road where he drove occasionally when visiting his parents. He even remembered the abandoned factory building on one side.

First, he took a few steps on the roof to check its stability, then walked around to find any escape routes, looking behind from time to time to see whether anyone followed him. And then it suddenly occurred to him that there was someone sitting behind him in the car who he noticed just before he lost consciousness. But who could it be? His brother was driving and there should not have been anyone else there.

As he expected, there was a rusty ladder on one side of the building that led to the factory yard. He climbed down and was about to make a run for it when he thought he heard shots from behind the building. He took a few steps and as there were no more gunshots, he ran as fast as he could from one tree to the other as the real Rambo in the film after he escaped from the enemy. He wanted to get to the gas station. The wire fence around the factory yard had barbed razor wire at the top, but it was in a rather bad shape, and he could find an opening big enough for him to comfortably creep through.

While running to the gas station he checked all his pockets, but as he suspected, his mobile phone, his wallet and all his keys were probably left in the car. It was his birthday and he thought of his mother. He was quite sure she had been trying to call him for a while, and that she must have reported his disappearance. His clothes were quite dirty by then, but he did not care, just went to the operator at one of the counters.

“Have you watched the news lately? Were there any news about robbery, kidnapping, disappearance or anything like that?” he asked excitedly.

The man behind the counter looked at him rather suspiciously and said he hadn't heard of anything like that. Since the nearest police station was in the town about six miles away, he asked a driver who had stopped to fill up, to take him there. He intentionally chose a woman driver because he assumed women were less likely involved in kidnapping than men. The woman in her forties, with a sense of humour, only asked whether he had escaped from a nearby prison, but as he told her his story, she did not say anything more.

On arriving at the police station, he thought “Who would believe me without any documents?” Still, he went up to the police officer on duty. To his surprise, he looked at him only when he told him that he had been kidnapped, but managed to escape.

“I’m sorry, but as far as I know, no one has been reported missing. Would you like to file a complaint?” he asked.

The weirdest thing was that they didn't even report him missing, or maybe his brother was kidnapped as well – he thought. There was no other logical explanation. “Or there might be something else. I only need to think outside the box.” he thought. Why did his brother insist on driving?

“It is your birthday.” his brother said in the morning “Relax!”.

But knowing what happened, he started to suspect that his brother had planned it all, a birthday surprise typical of him. “If it is so, I have to find something to take revenge.” he thought.

“No, thanks, I’m okay.” he told the police officer and asked whether he could call his mother because she must have been worrying about him.

With a few dollars in his pocket, he took a taxi to the flat that he shared with his brother. In a neighbouring street, Rambo asked the driver to stop and drop him off. He climbed up the fire escape and peeked into the living room through the window. He saw his brother with some of his friends laughing and drinking and probably waiting for him to show up sometime in the evening. Then the phone rang, and his brother picked it up. He could not hear what he was saying to the others, but they all left the room in a hurry.

When Rambo called his mother from the police station, she was already worried because she could not reach him on his mobile, and when she called him on the landline, his brother told her, he had not arrived yet. His mother was surprised when she heard what Rambo was asking of her when he called, but apparently she did a great job. She, as agreed, called his brother on their landline and told him that she had just been informed by the police that Rambo had been ran over by a car and was taken to hospital.

As his brother and his friends left, he took the spare key from its hiding place, went into the flat, then poured himself a glass of champagne, sat down in his favourite armchair and waited for his brother and his friends to return.

“A birthday party isn’t perfect without a surprise.” that was the only thing on his mind.


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