The first thing Huck registered was the ambient electrical humming. He lay flat on his back momentarily, allowing his vivid dreams to dissipate. The mental images were more so recollections than imagination and he wished it was the latter instead. Through his closed eyelids he perceived a dim light directly above him, and he covered his eyes with a forearm. Huck breathed in deeply, and his body ached. It was an uncomfortable soreness unlike the sharp or throbbing pangs he had begun to grow accustomed to over the past two years. As the fogginess of sleep receded, he realized the stiffness in his body resulted from sleeping on the cold floor. Huck sat up frantically and stirred up a cloud of dust that stung his throat, making him cough and spit. He also noted then that his mouth was parched.
Huck found himself in an unfamiliar room. The floor was plain pale concrete blanketed with a thin layer of dust. Tracks and prints in the dust indicated that Huck was dragged in here through one of two steel doors to this room. The concrete walls matched the floor in hue and blandness; there were no decorations or windows. The room was bare aside from a singular bunk bed of red aluminum frame with two thin mattresses. The mattresses looked new, but the frames had visible wear: there was rust around the bolts, and patches of paint had flaked off the metal. The steel doors also looked new, each with a horizontal bar as thick as a wrist that could slide into an opening in the connecting wall. The room was cubic, and the doors were perpendicular to each other positioned at the centres of their respective walls. One door had "2" scrawled on at eye level at the middle, and similarly the other had "4".
Huck slid his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants, and discovered that his phone and wallet were missing. He patted the breast pocket of his opened Hawaiian shirt and felt a stiff flat surface. It was a standard-sized playing card with a typical red floral pattern on the back, but on the front was the word "victim" printed diagonally on an otherwise blank face. He returned it to his breast pocket and scanned the room desperately, but to his dismay, his recently acquired handgun was missing. He then grabbed a side rail of the top bunk and shook, hoping that the rod would come loose. Despite the bed's condition, it was securely assembled, and Huck smacked it in frustration. He had no choice but to rely on his fists, with which he was usually confident, but his current predicament presented too many unknowns.
He began to call out to her, and immediately decided otherwise. Huck feared for her safety, and hoped that she was close by, yet prayed that she was nowhere near here. Or perhaps she was safest under his care. He could not decide. Those around Huck tended to come in harm's way; he forced away these negative thoughts.
With a door before him and another to his left, he chose the latter and attempted to open it. Beneath the "2" on the door, a locking bar with a perpendicularly protruding handle was entirely out of the wall socket, but pushing and pulling the door did nothing. Huck reasoned it must be locked from the other side. He then walked to the door marked "4", slid the locking rod out of the small recess in the wall, and pushed. Except it was more of a shoulder check against the cold steel, as he expected it to be locked externally as well, but it gave so easily that he stumbled sideways into a dark room. Three steps in and he crashed into a shelving unit that wobbled, but otherwise withstood the impact.
"Damn it," Huck muttered. As the door swung back naturally, the radiance from the other room retreated. Before he could gather himself back up, Huck was immersed in darkness. With only the bright outline of the door to guide him back, Huck walked slowly, sweeping each foot in front of him with every step to ensure there were no obstacles. Once at the door, he felt around for the sliding bar and pulled on it. As he did so, he heard the sound of fabric shifting behind him. His forearms shot up defensively with his fists hovering in front his face, a conditioned response he learned late in his life. He tried to spin his torso around, but he reacted too late. An immobilizing pain jolted throughout his body, and he groaned in agony, doubling over on the spot.
