Taken

Chapter 6: Overly Drugged

"Hey! Eavesdropper!" I yipped.

"Uh, you've been talking over the public mind link this entire time." A separate voice noted. "Everyone can hear you."

"It sounds like you're having fun." A new male voice sighed wistfully. "Man, I miss drugs. Especially acid and weed. Me and the homies back home used to get high and go on hikes or just drop tabs and listen to Enya or Pink Floyd. I was actually caught by the scientists while I was on a two tab acid trip in a local park with my girlfriend trip-sitting and a couple friends who were also pretty zoned. Man, that wasn't a good time."

"She's been constantly high for as long as I've been in this stupid place." Someone sighed. "I don't think that it'd be fun to constantly be tripping without a break. And from what I've seen and heard so far, I don't think that the scientists plan on letting her have one."

"Yeah, you do make a fair point." The ex-Stoner replied. "I want the option to be high vs. sober on my own terms."

My entire body was now shaking uncontrollably, and I resorted to laying down where I stood and in the direction that I had been facing. I closed my eyes, rolled onto my back, and allowed my tongue to lazily flop out of the left side of my mouth along with a massive amount of drool as I opened my mouth in what probably looked like the world's derpiest doggy grin. Even though my eyes were closed, an array of color exploded in my field of vision and separated into complex fractals, which was different than what I had experienced before. Some of the constantly shifting fractals were slowly rotating clockwise, while others were rotating counterclockwise. A low humming started in my head and as the seconds went on, the humming morphed into a high-pitched ringing accompanied by a series of clicks that occurred in three second long intervals which caused me to experience a sudden and overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety. The black leather collar that had remained comfortably around my neck since day one began to feel like it was starting to slowly choke me.

And that's when I began to panic.

My eyes snapped open and I flailed my limbs around and squirmed in an effort to right myself like a beetle that had been flipped on its back, but to know avail. I had simply lost control over my limbs. Even though my eyes were open, everywhere I looked, I could faintly see the outlines of the spinning fractals that I had seen clearly when my eyes were closed, along with the waviness and the enhanced colors that I had seen earlier. I could hear the others trying to calm me down, but their voices sounded fragmented and distant. All I was able to understand was that someone was talking about benzodiazepines and someone else was talking about overdosing, which fueled the paranoia for me. Was I intentionally overdosed? I thought worriedly. I could hear the valves opening and closing in my rapidly beating heart and I kept trying to put my tongue back into my mouth, only to have it flop back out; heavy, limp, and useless. My head kept lolling to one side or the other and my eyes kept threatening to close as my limbs continued to thrash wildly in the air above me.

A panicked squawk sounded from somewhere in the room, which was followed to a chorus of loud yipping and screeching. What felt like seconds after the ruckus began, a flurry of footsteps hurried over in the direction of my cage and stopped. Through the now rapidly spinning fractals, I was able to faintly make out the panic-stricken face of Band Lady as she looked at me in my cage as I thrashed around and gasped for air like a fish stranded on land. She took out a handheld radio and quickly spoke into it. I watched in horror as the fractals that surrounded her slowly began to bleed onto her face. The whole experience of watching a normal Human morph into a fractal-covered alien was horrifying, and I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to go through such a thing.

"Fun, not! No language! No longer! Help!" I managed to desperately plead over the public mind link, but no one did anything.

The weren't able to do anything. The ringing in my ears had increased considerably, along with the clicking. The pitch and frequency of the clicking reminded me of someone with a bad case of ADHD rapidly clicking a pen in a completely empty room that had a slight echo to it. I let out a distressed whine and began to thrash my head around violently in an attempt to stop the noise; throwing sand everywhere in the process. When that failed to do anything, I managed to roll over onto my stomach and began to paw obsessively at my ears and roughly shake my head. It didn't help that my ear canals were now also filled with fine grains of sand.