It’s cold... dark... where am I?

I opened my eyes to the world around me. There wasn’t very much to look at in the first place, considering that it was already nothing but pitch black, but it was something. Fumbling around the dark, hard interior of what seemed to be a holding cell I groped the floor and crawled forward, getting a feel of where I was. For one, it was a concrete floor, judging by the texture of the material below me, and with a few more centimetres of blind crawling, I bumped into a wall. I turned the other way and found that wherever I was, it must have been a pretty small area because it didn’t take long for me to hit the opposite wall.

I crawled up to another wall and sat there. Again, where was I? The interior of this dark prison smelled of antiseptic, akin to a hospital, yet without any source of illumination, I could hardly tell if it was a hospital or not. My gut feeling told me that where I currently was currently in anything but a hospital, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember how I even got here.

I strained my mind, trying to think. What was I last doing? Strings of stray, disjointed thoughts of the recent past flooded my mind; an exam I had recently sat for, a moment of laughter, a careless whisper, but nothing of particular use to me. Frustrated, I thought harder, if that was possible. What had I done as of late? My mind brought me back to myself, walking home after dark from school, and as I was walking away from the bus stop just outside my neighbourhood, the memory ended abruptly. I thought about it again, was that my most recent memory? If so, it didn’t quite link to how I got here in the first place.

A sound of chains rattling caught my attention. Was someone there? “Hello?” I called out, looking around the cell in hopes of finding the source of the noise, “Is someone there?”

As if responding to my words, a bright light flooded the cell suddenly, causing me to squint and bring a hand up to shield my eyes as the sudden burst of light fried my retinas. Wonderful. I thought, putting a hand up to adjust my glasses, I’ve always needed to worsen my myopia.

A rough hand grabbed the hand that I had brought up to shield my eyes and tugged, and instinctively, I resisted the tug. It was followed up by a more insistent tug again, this time, much harder, causing me to slide out from the cage and into the bright, sterile environment ahead of me.

It took me a fair amount of time to be able to open my eyes from that point, and in the time that I had taken to do so, I was roughly man-handled into another cell, or cage, this time one with both lighting and a small sleeping bag on the floor. By all things compared, this cell seemed much bigger than the one I had been in, and with a turnaround, the man who had dragged me in here left without another word, shutting the metal door behind him. Great.

I looked around the room. Like the other, this was made of nothing but concrete, and the walls were obviously (and poorly) whitewashed. The only differences that this room bore against the other was that it was lit, and that there was a sleeping bag and alone security camera inside.

I looked at my wrist and remembered that there was a watch on it. It was now two in the morning, and though I didn’t really feel sleepy, I felt somewhat compelled to at least make use of the sleeping bag provided. Rolling the sleeping bag up into a pillow, I laid myself out on my back and rested my head on my makeshift pillow.

Where was I? How did I get here? I worried about how I had gotten here and why, thinking about my family,  but I had not the foggiest of idea as to what had happened between what I believed to be my most recent memory and me ending up in a dark cell.

I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself down. Fear, worry and an impending sense of doom were the few emotions to run through me at that moment, and that night, I fell into an uneasy sleep.

-o.=.o-

The next morning came with a prick to my arm. I jerked in response and felt someone hold me down, long enough for a syringe to empty out its contents into my arm before a man in a lab coat got up and began walking away.

I called out to the man, asking for help, but he ignored me and left, leaving me back in the room with nobody but myself and the sleeping bag for company. The lone camera in the corner of the room continued to watch me with an unrelenting gaze, and for a moment, I wondered what it was for right up to the point where it happened.

I didn’t expect it, but then again, it would be fair to say that I couldn’t have anticipated it as well. A tingling, bubbling sensation coursed throughout my arm, causing it to shake uncontrollably, and I grabbed it with my other, trying to steady it. Of course, that served to do nothing for me as the tingling sensation spread from my arm down into my body and through the rest of me, causing me to slump to the floor in uncontrollable convulsion. It didn’t hurt at all, save for my face kissing the none-too-soft floor, but I screamed anyway, unsure and fearful of what was happening. It felt like I was deflating, my already-thin frame starting thin a lot further out as I watched the entire process with my own eyes. The bubbling sensation that coursed throughout my entire body seemed to dampen down and concentrate itself on my back and rear, before large, fleshy appendages burst through them, ripping my shirt and tearing a hole in my pants.

I yelled in surprise, a mixture of shock, fear and curiosity coursing through me...