Chapter 3: A Strange Land

A horrible headache pierced what had to be my skull, as ragged scraping thoughts screeched and clanked into painfully reluctant motion.

The headache was unimaginably agonizing! Like a railroad spike driven through my left eye, in that soft pink part between eyeball and nose, and splattering out the back of my head.

I groaned at the pain.

Listless and unable to control my movement, for a long time there was just pain!

Eventually, I felt that I was face down in dried grass or hay.

I heard moaning and realized that it was not just me. I still could not open my eyes to look around though, so that was not helping.

Just hurting!

A painful kink in the neck, eyes glued shut with irritation from smokey room gunk, clinging into, scratching, and burning my eyes. I must have partied hard after whatever the fuck happened at Liam’s.

My ass hurt, well just above my ass, just above my tailbone and low back. It felt horribly bruised, stiff, and painful.

My low back felt like someone hit me with a hammer!

Trying to move hurt, badly!

But finally, the body-wracking pain and face-splitting spike of headache pain gave way enough for me to flop to my side.

My eyes still would not open, the lashes felt glued together with gunk.

I groaned, clear enough to hear myself mumble incoherently into my ears, “Urgh! Ma’ head!” If I did not know what I was trying to say through the throbbing headache pain, I would have never guessed by what I mumble-moaned into the musty filth of straw under my face.

There was straw under my face, not grass or lawn from passing out drunk outside. This was an allergy-inspiring dirty, dry straw laid atop a concrete or stone floor.

I tried to roll to my front and instead ground my face harder into the floor.

Throwing myself back the other way the blunt pressure on my eye abated a little, but the horrific hangover stabbing pain through my eyes and into the squishy bits of my brain redoubled as harsh yellow light blared straight into my skull.

I groaned and pressed my hands to my head.

That failed.

One hand missed entirely, and the other missed clobbering my nose and cheek with my forearm as I flailed about.

That was when sounds started returning. However, my eyes were still not working right and the headache was just as intense as it was to start.

At first, they were nothing more than a cacophony of chaos in my head. Then they slowly started to filter out into individual sounds of crying. Others shouted incoherently. There was also quiet talking, not polite, but not rushed, just conversational and unconcerned, beyond there being people in the area talking and not helping.

I blew hard through my nose several times, attempting to clear the accumulated allergy and face down sleep-hard crusty boogers that irritated my nose. That just dislodged them and caused them to scrape painfully inside my nose.

I wanted to blow them, but failing that, pick them out! My hands still were not working right though.

Instead, I managed a dry ragged cough. And then another.

I finally drew an inhale through my mouth. As the musky, dry, dirty air, filled with what felt like wood smoke entered my lungs, I regretted that too!

Slowly, ever so slowly, I pressed my palms to my eyes, fumbling uncooperative fingers into motion and over my eyes.

I managed another groan while trying to force my hemorrhaging brain back into my eye sockets.

This was hands down, the worst hangover of my life!

Exhaling slowly through my nose, my wind left whistling past the painful nose rocks. But all that was secondary to my headache.

Drawing air in slowly through my nose I got little beyond the same stale, dusty air sensations that accosted my throat earlier. Only this time I was pretty sure I was laying on my back, because the cold stone floor and itching, pokey hay was on that side now.

Finally, I managed to sit up.

The world swam in a harsh, dizzy spin that threatened to topple me back over. Only years of hard drinking experience and too much partying, before I started cleaning up while getting serious about my working out, kept me on my ass and from falling over.

I finally dropped my hands and they too fell into the annoying itching sensation of hay atop a stone floor.

Breathing in and out until the spinning stopped, or slowed until I was not going to fall over again by lifting one hand. I slowly flexed my fingers and felt them, I realized I was still too foggy to count them, but they felt like they were all there.

Then I did the same with my toes, feeling them wiggle and press around inside my shoes. So they were apparently still there. That was good.

My eyes still refused to open. But I could move them around inside of my skull, so they were still there. I just had some eye gunk that still painfully glued my eyes shut.

I groaned recalling the last thing I remembered, and only managed to visualize the devil-girl at the party.

I could not really form the words, as an internal narrative. It was more of a questioning feeling. I was just wondering if I really nailed Liam’s new girlfriend in his kitchen after drinking whatever the hell was in that drink!

I grunted to myself as enough manual dexterity returned to my hands so I could use a single hand to rub my painful eyes.

Drawing a breath of the stale air, I managed to rub each eye with the index finger from that eye’s hand. Still slumped forward, head painful, I managed to knock the massive slimy eye boogers away from my eyes. I could feel the crusty junk breaking away from the lashes during the gentle but painful headache-filled eye massage.

I sighed slowly blowing out the toxic shit air that was scratching my lungs, as I slowly blinked and realized I was still in my jeans and work boots.

As more of my vision returned, driving back the blurry white of the throbbing hangover headache, I could see my hands pressed into what indeed appeared to be cut hay. And my arms wrapped in my gaudy lumberjack, red and green flannel shirt.

My hands were many shades too dark, from dirt, but the painful whistle in my nose had to go!

It took some scratchy digging around to first dislodge the rocks and then pry them out of my head. Which hurt like hell, enough to drive away the hangover headache momentarily.

Drawing a breath in through my nose, there was still gunk backed up in there.

I was still seeing little around me beyond the five feet of straw immediately surrounding where I was plunked down on my ass. I could see shapes moving around through the haze at the edges of my vision.

The brief question about, ‘Was I drugged, last night?’ dragged unwillingly through my addled and misfiring mind.

I pressed a thumb to each nostril in turn blasting globs of green out of my nose somewhere away into the straw. Then went back and blew again knocking out the clingy chunks that first rotation dislodged and made ready for the next round.

Still reluctant to shake my head, at the pain of the headache, I slowly looked around.

More of my vision filled in as I focused past the hangover headache and drove back its encroaching white-out.

I was indeed smelling smoke, because stepping past the disbelief, there were actually torches, honest to God medieval style torches like from the movies burning down the central walk.

Craning my neck painfully from sleeping on my face, there was a stone wall at my back.

Something weighed heavily on my neck, thick, stiff, and off balance.

That could not have been good.

The stone was different.

There were no stones like that underground in Texas. Houston was organic mud, while central Texas was petrified seabed turned to sandstone just a few feet down.

These stones were grayish-brown. But that was hard to tell by both the lighting and years of moldy grime that had accumulated.

Looking left and right, I was not alone.

The brain slowly began to process and realized that there were what appeared to be iron or steel bars between myself and the next over to each side. The limits of my metal work knowledge are a half hand’s worth of renaissance festivals and the occasional Youtube snip of ‘Forged in Fire’, that blade-making docu-drama show. So I really could not tell for sure, but these bars looked hand-beaten and rough, nothing like the smooth clean steel bars on TV and in movie police station scenes.

The headache still throbbed, stabbing pain through my eyes with each beat of my heart, but I could now see that we were in a long, thin room, something like a long chamber carved into the rock or some dungeon hallway.

The bars secured directly into the masonry between cells, and then ran to columns of stone at the corner of each ten-foot by ten-foot cell. And the doors were way too tall and wider than needed for me as a Human.