Al Zander jumped.

A purple vise covered his pupils, and an expanding pressure spread on all the walls of his esophagus. His chest convulsed and his arms and legs trembled as his head slid back and onto what felt like a stone-cold floor. He felt something warm at his feet, but could see nothing under the purple eye contacts. Was it a warm foot at his feet? He managed to think through his body's tremors, and he moved his cold bare foot across the warm object at his toes, and scribbled them over and across what felt like a wave of flesh. Soft, and leading up to the joining of what could have been two legs, two soft thighs, but he was then met by the silk bunch of fabric that could have been a designer dress. That was his guess. But his mind broke away from this examination when suddenly his stomach cringed under a stinging pain, that cascaded into a boiling broth surging up out of his stomach, rushing up his esophagus through the plastic tubes that was attached to his lungs to give him oxygen.

His chest jolted over and over like rapid fire, and meaty sweep of adrenaline made him realize he was drowning in his own vomit, as the stomach acid filled the oxygen tube and plugged his lungs.

He could not scream, not even a burbling cry could reach out of his cemented lips. He wriggled and tried to reach for a cap over his mouth connected to the tubes. But the jangle of handcuffs tight over his wrists prevented him from saving his lungs. No coherent thoughts entered his head. Only the deranged reflexive movements—jolts, trembles, kicks, rolls, grits, and pulls of the damn handcuffs to get himself free of drowning in his own stomach acid sent him over the edge to insanity. He managed to push himself by his legs to the wall, he felt the skin of two bodies and their tubing on the floor beside either side of him, and he laid his back down between them, and crawled his legs over his torso, and touched the walls with his feet like they were his hands, and walked them up the wall. The stomach acid hurled up through the plastic tubing as he managed to bring himself upside-down even more. This might have killed him if he hadn't done it so fast, because, he seemed to knock the stomach acid down and out of his plastic mouth against the pressure of the oxygen, and his lungs escaped the suffering as the plastic tubing cleared. He imagined the stomach acid thinned out along the length of the external tubing now because he could final breath a stream of steady oxygen now.

Lying that way, crumpled and upside-down for a minute, the thoughts started to come in with coherent language.

What is this... what's happened...

He suddenly remembered now as though trying to cling to the remnants of a night's dream, that Francisco had choked him and drowned him on a Martian beach. He had died slowly and painfully but now all of a sudden, could see the purple, mirrored contacts over his eyes, like the shock of sudden death had ejected them from his pupils and exited him from the virtual reality.

He then felt his hands and wriggled them to get loose, but to no avail

Get out of this, dammit. He felt around for something sharp. Nothing.

Impossible.

Am I really stuck here? Must I wait for my kidnappers to find me and put me under again?

Then came the conclusion that would help him see the way...

Get the contacts off.

They were surely on like normal contacts, right? The skin on his forehead felt no pressure of metal. No helmet, no nothing. His balding scalp licked the hard cement flooring and the chill helped him determine there was nothing keeping him from shaking the damn contacts off.

So, he did. He shook his head and left and right. Over and over until his head hurt. His brain bounced against the walls of his skull and his skull bounced against the side of someone's leg when finally, his left contact, the looser of the ones, let go, and disappeared somewhere into the darkness.

Immediately the dark walls of the janitor closet were revealed through the stream of light creeping out from under the door. Deciding to escape the closet before his captors would return, he kicked his legs off the walls and snaked his way over to the door. He felt a cold pain in his spine, ut managed to push himself with his hands that were still cuffed, so as to do a push into a squat, onto his feet.

Something in his chest cracked and a cold sweat snapped out of his forehead. A squeal escaped his lips and he bounced backward against door. Looking down, he spotted a dark spot spreading over his chest, staining his shirt. He chest wound was still bleeding where Ventura had thrown the spear. Where was Ventura anyway. He hoped she was dead in that space hotel. Or dead or stranded on Mars. Would suit her right.

Reaching his hands to the knob, he jiggled it, and found it wouldn't budge. He cursed.

Then, in a last-ditch effort after looking about the room at the row of shadowy bodies, he bit his tongue, and started bashing his back into the door. A grunt of air escaped the tube cap that had managed to detach from the oxygen filter on the other wall. He was essentially breathing through a plastic tube open on both ends. But it was so uncomfortable he had to keep his head up to prevent it from bending.

He hit his back against the door again. And again. Each time his chest would feel the wave of the hit. Gripping his eyelids shut, he continued through the pain. The door was a light wood meant for a non-security janitorial closet, so the lock would break with enough force, he knew.

Then—he had a better idea—he turned around stepped back and with his eyes wide open, sweat dripping down his face, blood racing down his chest, he kicked the door once, kicked it twice—then knocked the door down.

Panting, chest catching fire, he paused for a moment, looked back at the dark closet, and then ran out, hoping to find his way to an escape pod. Blood dripping in a trail behind him