Long time reader, first time writer. I've enjoyed so many stories on this site for so many years, and want to try my hand my one of my own.
This first part is intended to be a set-up chapter, and the content here will be important to the story.
Pain is a concept that most are familiar with, but very few truly understand. It is impossible to go through life and not experience it in some form. Loss, fear, love, even anger, can be forms of pain in the right circumstances. It can be physical, emotional, mental, or even spiritual, and all of them hurt in their own unique way.
Many people spend their whole lives in dedication to the study of pain. Doctors conduct years of painstaking research in attempts to find cures to the ailments of life. Therapists work slowly and inexhaustibly to unravel the traumas of scarred pasts and help their patients find relief. Those of faith study the teachings of their respective gods to find comfort and refuge from the pain of the unknown, and the absolution of perceived sins.
Pain is an incredibly vast and multifaceted feeling that can be real or imagined and often exists in and out of physical reality.
For Michael however, the pain was very much not imaginary and was, in all the worst ways, physical. It rolled across his body in never-ending waves, pulsing as though it were the backbeat of some demented song. At times it threatened to drive him unconscious, making his stomach roil and his body sweat. His muscles trembled under the stress they had been put under and every part of him ached.
Michael's head was swimming, a constant ringing in his ears, his thoughts sluggish and amorphous, as though there were shrouded in a fog that he could not quite see through. He struggled to remember how long he had been strung up, arms extended over his head, hands bound in harsh, yellow rope, hanging nearly naked, save for his underwear, from a hook set in the ceiling. His toes could just barely touch the bare concrete floor, enough to keep his arms from completely separating from their sockets after such prolonged suspension.
Long, shallow cuts, too numerous to count, crisscrossed his back in bloody groupings where he had been mercilessly whipped. His face was swollen and bruised, his eyes ringed entirely in black and purple, his lips split in several spots where his captors continued to strike him at their whim. Several of his teeth were broken and if he was not careful with his tongue, the exposed ends would throb in sharp agony. The puffiness around his eyes made it incredibly difficult to see, not that it mattered since he needed glasses to see anyways.
Michael's front had fared no better, with bites, claw marks and more recently, fresh burns, littering his torso as if he were some abstract painting still in progress. He could not be sure but he was reasonably certain that a few of his ribs were broken. His breathing, by necessity, was shallow, for taking a full breath only caused him mind-numbing agony in his sides.
The lower half of his body was in similar shape, though his captors had not yet shown it any particular focus. Most of the cuts and bruises he had sustained there had been more the result of incidental impacts than anything else. He did not, however, hold onto any misguided sense of hope that they would not hesitate to shift their attentions there if they felt it would get them what they wanted.
Which, for Michael, was the crux of the matter. What they wanted were answers to questions that he simply did not have. But no matter how many times he repeated himself, no matter how he screamed or shouted or pleaded with his torturers, they refused to believe him. His cries for mercy, regardless of how he fearfully or desperately he assured them that they had the wrong person, fell on deaf ears.
And so on it went. At first Michael had tried to keep track of how long he had been there, if for no other reason than to try and hold onto his sanity. But as one beating blurred into the next, and with no way to see outside, it quickly became impossible, and thus time became meaningless to him. All he knew was that every few hours, his captors rotated guards on shifts, allowing the ones watching and working on him to rest.
A liberty not afforded to their hapless subject.
One of his captors would whip him, leaving thin cuts from shoulder to hip while another asked their questions. When they felt the answers were not quick enough, they would jab him with an electric prod to hasten his responses. Every now and again, a metal rod would be heated until it glowed bright red, and they would threaten to lay it across his skin if he did not give them the answers they sought. But as he had nothing to give them, Michael was forced to suffer the agony of the rod's searing burn over and over again.
Their methods were far more sophisticated than just physical torture. They intermittently deprived their human prisoner of sleep with bright, flashing lights or by playing constant raucous music. Often they would place him in a thick, restricting hood while forcing him to contort into difficult and stressful positions which would be accompanied by a steady stream of verbal abuse. There was no subject off limits, no line they would not cross as they spat their words at him, breaking his spirit.
Pain.
It ruled his world, and there was no room for anything else except pain. In the beginning, he had tried to fight it. His fear and desperation turning to anger and frustration. He had protested, even tried to fight back where he could. His captors thoroughly disabused him of that notion. Left with no way out, a sense of helplessness had overtaken him and it slowly turned into bottomless despair and then to mindless acceptance.
Everything blurred together and he now only reacted to each new fresh source of pain, his mind retreating deep within itself in a hopeless attempt to hold onto what little of himself remained. He could now only manage to repeat the same three words over and over again, like a mantra or a prayer to higher being for salvation.
"I don't know"
As his mind floated in numb emptiness, he vaguely recalled once again how he had been grabbed, as though the memory were stuck on repeat. He had just gotten back from work, just after four in afternoon on Thursday. It was a short drive from the office where he worked, to his small house set just outside the city. He remembered pulling into the driveway and stepping out of his car when he heard a high-pitched screech of tires behind him. No sooner had he turned to face the direction of the sound than a massive figure, covered heads to toe in plain clothes, barreled into him, knocking him onto the ground.
The impact had driven the air out of his lungs and left him unable to cry out, though in hindsight he realized there would not have been anyone there to help even if he had. Before he could even think to fight back, his arms were seized in a vice like grip, far stronger than any human could ever be, and his hand were cuffed behind his back. A rough sack was quickly thrown over his head and the drawstring cinched tightly around his neck.
He had then been dragged quickly down the driveway before being thrown onto the floor of a vehicle, a van he assumed since the door had audibly slid shut. The last thing he remembered was a painful jab to his neck before feeling extremely drowsy, and a rough baritone voice saying "Mark secured, on route to rendezvous," before falling asleep.
When he had next woken, he had found himself as he was currently. Stripped, strung up, and limbs stinging from his rough ride in the van. He was no longer hooded, but was instead gagged by some sort of cloth stuffed in his mouth with tape to secure it. As he tried to survey his surroundings, he realized that there was very little light in the room.
Michael could tell the space was not particularly large and that it was an empty basement. He could see wood paneling on the walls and ceiling, and that the floor was completely bare. A draft made his skin feel cold, though he had no idea what the temperature actually was. It smelled musty, as though water had been stagnating somewhere in the room before someone had attempted to air it out.
As he looked around the room, he noticed that his captors sat in metal folding chairs loosely arranged around the room and that they had remained completely covered. A few of them passively observed him while others looked down at their phones in complete disinterest.
Micheal felt his heart beginning to speed up, his mind racing as he tried, poorly, to control his rising sense of panic. He tried to think of everything that had happened in his life recently that might give him some clue as to why he was in his current situation.
He was not a criminal by any stretch of the imagination, he had never even gotten so much as a parking ticket in his life. Nor did he work in any sketchy professions, or with clients that would be considered suspicious. He was a data analyst, he looked at numbers in excel sheets and put tables into word reports. It was not a high adrenalin job but it was steady work and it paid the bills.
As far as he knew, he had never crossed anyone important, or had a confrontation with someone that would warrant something like a kidnapping. For the life of him, he could not piece together what someone would want with him, and why they would need to go to these lengths to capture him.
