bzzz bzzz
You check your phone and see your mom is asking where you are. You slide the phone back into your pocket. Hopefully you can hold off on responding for just a bit longer. Right now, you need to focus on finding your dog.
He disappeared just over a week ago. Every time you've been to the police station to check for any updates, you get a shrug from the person at the front desk and are told your dog probably just ran away. The police have more important cases to solve.
You know it's possible that your dog ran off, but that seems awfully coincidental considering how many local pets have gone missing in the last few weeks. You had heard your classmates talking about how many of their pets disappeared, and you didn't think too much about it. Once you became one of those students, you asked around and noticed that in the cases where the pets were found and returned, the owners had hung missing posters with large rewards. In fact, the animals were returned within 24 hours of hanging the posters. And the owners who didn't advertise large rewards never heard anything. This was happening much too often to be coincidental, and you started thinking that maybe someone was behind all this.
Your friend's cat went missing around the same time as your dog. Since your friend had some extra cash thanks to her allowance, you hung up missing posters yesterday advertising a large reward. Sure enough, the cat was "found" and returned tonight. You planned for this to happen, and once the guy left your friend's house, you followed him to find out more. You're a little annoyed your friend couldn't come with you since she found out last minute she had to babysit her younger siblings.
You are now keeping an eye on the old warehouse the guy went into on the edge of town. In a matter of minutes he and a bunch of others exit the building and get into vans. Probably to kidnap more pets, you think. As they drive off, you know this is your chance to find your dog. All the doors to the building are locked, but you find an open grate near the ground that gives you access to a basement room. As you begin to climb in, you feel your phone buzz again. You instinctively grab for it, but because you're also lowering yourself through the grate at the same time, you drop the phone on the grass and fall into the basement.
Now that you're in the basement, you realize just how high up that grate is and that there is no chance you'll be able to reach it to get out. You turn around to find the door and are shocked by what you see. Your dog and some other animals are locked in cages! You were right! Those guys were kidnapping pets and making money off the rewards! You check the door, but it's locked. You don't know when the criminals will be back and find you locked in here and without a phone. You know you need to escape, but you can't bear to leave the animals here. You look around the room to find a way to unlock the cages and get all of you out of that room.