“Let’s see…” Keegan said to himself as he began planning his escape, “First I suppose I should figure out how to keep the sedative from kicking in.”
Glancing around as much as the tight space allowed, he noticed two tubes ending in holes in the corners of the box closest to his head.
“So it’s an inhaled drug,” he observed. “I mean, it kinda had to be, considering I don’t have any tubes or anything poking into me…”
He shifted around some more, trying to locate the means by which the device detected his temperature, but he found none.
“Okay, so I guess my best bet is to block those holes…”
He struggled to remove his shirt, and after a couple minutes of squirming he managed to remove it, albeit with a few brand new holes.
“Dang it. I liked this shirt…” he lamented, before shoving as much of it as he could into the holes on either side of his head.
“Now how the heck am I supposed to trigger an activation?”
He considered possible ways of “killing” himself, but being unable to do much of anything all he could come up with was trying to choke himself. That would be too long and slow for him to keep the sedative contained. Besides, the one item he had with which to achieve that was already being used to stop the holes.
“Well I can’t just wait for the headache to return… that… hold on,” his voice faded to a whisper as he recalled what the shadow-man had said the second time he had awoken in the box about binding to parts of the brain.
“My mind can trigger an activation.”
He even realized that he may have already done so accidentally. The time he woke up in the shop he had gone to bed thinking about what he was going to do at work the next day. Then there was the time he regained consciousness in midair just in time to hit the sidewalk. He couldn’t remember for sure, but he thought the flashback that hit him just before that may have been around that building.
So he closed his eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and tried to focus. All the brain cells he could muster fired, thinking about his home. Nothing happened. He relaxed briefly, then tried again, and again nothing happened. He repeated the process several more times to no avail. Annoyed, he banged his hand against the glass, causing a brief pang followed by a light partial activation.
“Wait, that’s right. Pain is the trigger…”
He again focused his thoughts on his home, this time also calling to mind as many memories of pain as he could. He thought of the headache that had kept him in the nightmarish cycle of the last day. He thought of face after his shoelace got caught in the door. He thought of landing on the sidewalk after falling a few stories. He thought of the fire that shot up his back from Rick’s good-natured slap.
And his temperature surged.
One more month and I’ll have a whole year of this story under my belt… Neat. 😀
‘Till later
-David
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