Prison Absurdism

[Jameson Bardolph 0]

This just ain't bloody fair.

 

It had just felt like a paper cut when he'd first brushed his fingers against it. A bit of shaved skin behind his ear and a little slice into the flesh, almost too small to be noticed except that it stung like all hell when he touched it. Kidnapped and dumped into a room he didn't recognize, with a few people he barely knew, it had been the least of his worries, particularly once he got tazered into unconsciousness by one of his captors.

 

He'd woken up alone. Fair enough, he supposed. He was a prisoner; being locked away kind of went along with the deal. But it didn't make it any less unnerving or puzzling, and between the salty-smelling bowl of...stuff...next to his bed and the unconscious engineer visible outside of the room's only available door, Whiskey was starting to get a distinctly bad feeling about the whole business.

 

So when one of his captors -- pale, silent, admirably direct if not the world's best conversationalist -- appeared in the doorway and squeezed some kind of bracelet device and knocked him to his knees, it almost wasn't surprising. It sucked, of course. It hurt like hell. But he almost wasn't surprised.

 

The feeling began at that small cut, a stinging pain that quickly grew into a searing heat spreading from his neck to his entire body. He'd once, in his younger and more vulnerable days back on the Fenrir, taken an accidental hit with a Klingon painstick from an annoyed customer -- the impact had sent a shockwave up and down his spine like every vertebrae had fused together simultaneously. This...was nothing like that. It just hurt, a confident pain that settled into every centimeter of his body and made itself at home as if it had always been there. It crawled behind his eyes and into his brain and he yelled aloud...

 

And then it stopped. He found himself curled into a ball on the decking, breathing raggedly, and managed only a delayed lurch towards the door as it slid shut behind his captor. He was alone again...only this time he was minus one bowl of suspicious white paste and plus one bowl of...bug. Live bug.

 

"Gross..."

 

It was all kind of surreal. Through the window behind him, he could see the engineer still being worked on; his captor had inserted something into the man's back, and it occurred to Whiskey to be scared, to wonder if he was next on the list, or perhaps had already undergone whatever procedure was taking place. However, since his chutzpah was all that was left to him at the moment, he clung to it, shouting through the door.

 

At first he thought he was being ignored altogether. Then the pain came again, radiating out from his neck like the heat of a brand in his skin, as the silent pale alien made his way back through the door. Then nothing, silence again as Whiskey rasped for breath and watched helplessly as his engineering compatriot found insult added to injury as one of the bugs was stuffed into his mouth.

 

A parasite? Whiskey wondered absently. A poison? Their idea of a meal? He didn't know. He knew he didn't like it. Curling his legs under him, he began to scoot backwards, pressing himself up against the wall, a vague idea in his mind to escape, as if he could soak backwards through the strange white surroundings.

 

No dice.

 

Before he could do anything, before he could even yell, the pain was in his neck and his back again and the alien captor had their fingers in his mouth and something was moving and wriggling and crawling down his throat and he choked and swore and swallowed and the pain knocked his head backwards against the wall and then he was alone again, facedown on the floor and covered in sweat.

 

"Gross..." he rasped weakly, touching his neck gingerly and rolling over to stare at the ceiling. This just ain't bloody fair...

[STSF_BluRox 0]

Should have drank the koolaid and ate the white paste.