A H Ch 03 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.

Then there was the steady procession of strange creatures I hallucinated into the room with me.

There were other humans to my left and right and a few across the walkway from me. We were all clumped and clustered in conjoined cells.

I recognized a few of them. The enormous Tinkerbell woman in the scandalously tiny fiery outfit from the party couch was next to me, I definitely recognized her from the party. She was stacked on the couch when I entered and passed on the way in before whatever the hell was in that drink passed my lips.

Tinkerbell still looked to mass in around the same as an NFL center, only about thirty to forty percent shorter.

I was pretty much at the limits of my emotional ability to give a shit at the time. There was just too much strange stuff going on for me to effectively process it all.

I stared at Tinkerbell. A mound of human flesh in the next cell.

She was face down like I was, to begin with.

I remembered something from Culinary school about how drunks needed to be put face down. Something about you never wanted someone inebriated to sleep on their back because if they vomited in their sleep, they could asphyxiate. I do not remember where I picked that up, but Tinkerbell was face-down.

The problem was that in all her massed flesh exposed by her scanty fiery costume, nothing moved. No twitching, no breathing, no groaning, shuffling, or squirming you might expect from a drunk coming out of a stupor like we were.

Still emotionally drained, disbelieving what I was seeing, there was a clunking at the cell doors.

My gaze snapped from unmoving Tink and slewed across the grid-work of black bars, and found a pair of monsters straight out of a Tolkien or Gygax nightmare!

They were giant hulking slobbering brutish things!

The massively muscled humanoids carried bony heads the size of large ice chests! Their dull eyes struck me that they were creatures capable of one simple task at a time only. Both trundled in, passing the gate into the cell.

I looked at my cell and realized my door was sized so that they could pass into mine too.

That raised my brow! However, I still felt like that pasty dude with black hair in that bending spoon scene I saw in that crazy classic movie my dad showed me years ago.

My brain labeled the creatures as Ogres. However, I did not really trust that because of the throbbing in my head, as I sat slumped in the middle of my floor.

Ogre number one, because it was the first in the cell next to me, gripped Tinkerbell by the collar and pulled to drag her upright.

Nothing.

Number one grunted at number two who moved in from the door, entering the cell. Number two gripped an arm and pulled as its companion hefted her up by the thick dark brown collar.

I felt my neck and realized mine felt about the same thickness as the immobile Tinkerbell's collar looked.

As Tinkerbell's rotund form peeled from the floor, I cringed at the same flattened rigid morbidity and purplish discoloration that I saw when I found my dad. When I arrived with the sheriff's deputy we found my dad on the kitchen floor passed away from a heart attack, after a day of him not answering his phone.

Poor Tinkerbell was long gone.

I felt gut-punched and sick to my stomach! Nausea and bile rising in my throat!

I pushed my eyes closed and slowly shook my head, hoping to wake from the nightmare of this strange land!

Reopening my eyes, the images before me remained the same. They were just advanced by a few seconds. I knew nothing would change because the place still reeked of filth, dirty straw, bodily fluids, and whatever other moldy nasty scents could be kludged together into this new reality.

The ogre number two grunted back at the gate, while the first in held expired Tinkerbell up. Her discolored morbidity was clearly on display to the onlookers in the walkway between the cell vein.

Ogre two grunted something to the hallway that sounded like, "Heh-hun, Hurahha." Then he nodded down and growled something else that sounded like, "Ru-hash."

That was when I finally looked at the open gate.

For the first time since sitting up my brain and eyes were clear enough to see that far and subsequently focus there.

I immediately wished for all things Holy and good that I had not!

There was a stream of what I could only describe as mythical creatures trundling by in all shapes, sizes, colors, and persuasions.

At the open gate, a paled, gray-skinned figure wrapped in musty brownish and grayish robes loitered indifferently. That being had its cowl up, again looking like a villain in one of my dad's old classic movies. That old movie with the evil politician who made him emperor of the galaxy and plunged everyone into darkness and oppression. This character looked like that old emperor!

The skin looked almost rotted and dried out at the same time on the emaciated creature's skeletal hands.

The yellowish eyes closed to slits, buried in the cowl, not only carried their own light out of those shadows but were suffused with a swirling gray-green mist that looked nothing less than poisonous. The green mist that orbited the being looked nothing less than the antithesis of life itself!

The cowled figure hissed something that sounded like fingers scraping over those dried, crusty cheap napkins. Describing that sound like leaves rustling would be too generous, this sound carried the finality of a tomb!

The cowled figure hefted a single coin from some nook in its festering robe and tossed its clean shining sparkle into the air so it flashed golden in the orange torchlight.

Ogre number two, probably the boss, caught the coin, held the tiny coin between its fingers, and sniffed with its monstrous nostrils. The coin glinted clean silver in the ogre's massive fingers, before dropping the coin into its palm. Number two grunted at its companion and made a sound like, "Rrr-im-hum."

The companion ogre slapped something to the box on Tinkerbell's collar. With a twist and a pull the whole collar released and then the ogre dropped Tinkerbell immediately.

I looked up at the cowled figure again and realized it had companions.

I blinked half a dozen times before pinching my eyes closed praying I was hallucinating the horrors I saw there.

They were not poorly attired men, and women, and bestial creatures attending some master. I realized they were all standing statue-still, unbreathing, unmoving. Their eyes rotting or missing entirely. They all carried grievous wounds no one could have survived. And that toxic green mist slink in and out of them in random slithering snake-like patterns.

The mist seemed to move with a will of its own holding the creatures up!

I just had not noticed!

I mumbled, speaking for the first time that I could remember, "What the fuck is this place?"

The cowled figure noticed me then. Its dead gaze found mine, staring coldly and dispassionately into my terrified eyes.

The ogres left the cage, stepping well clear of the robed figure. The first ogre was still carrying the dangling collar by the box. Both nodded deeply in fearful respect as they left, leaving the cage door open.

The dark figure slowly raised its skeletal hand to waist height, allowing the infectious-looking garment to fall back from its emaciated hand and rotting skin. Tendrils of that toxic green mist connected from that horrific hand into the cores of its animations, as they were waived into the cell next to me.

With alarming speed, the seven animated dead lunged forward with ravenous hunger in their dead eyes

The only word that came to my mind for the cowled figure was 'Necromancer'!

My feet kicked frantically, driving me back as fast as they could, shoving my ass across the rough floor and straw until I slammed into the rock wall.

The animated fucking-zombies ripped into Tinkerbell's corpse. They rent her body with gnashing teeth, ripping hands, and savage hunger as they rapidly consume her dead flesh.

I didn't even know her fucking name!

The cowled terror rasped something repeatedly as my back scraped along the rough and cold stonewall. My right ear bloodied on a jagged rock as I scrambled mindlessly away until I struck the hard and unfinished ironwork bars at that back corner of my cell.

The zombies ripped flesh away digging for the vitals, the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver, all buried deep inside Tinkerbell.

It was laughing!

The fucking necromancer was laughing at me!

I heard myself quail, "What the hell kind of place is this!"