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It had been…Well, Matt wasn’t sure how long it had been. He’d lost track early on and even his near perfect internal clock had since given up. So, he wasn’t sure on the timing, but he knew one thing for certain: He needed to get out of here.
And as soon as possible, because he was growing more sure by the minute that he was losing his mind.
The pain gnawed at the nerves of his spinal cord, sending jolts up through his skull and down, tingling across the highway of veins and into his fingertips which had long since gone numb. Despite the lack of liquid running down his cheeks, Matt was certain his ears were bleeding. They must be.
How did this even happen? How did he manage to get caught so easily?
Matt knew the truth, though. Despite the current torture he was going through, he’d do it all over again.
Around him the audio faded slightly and Matt thumped his head back against the wall, trying to let the ringing in his ears die out. But instead, a voice swirled into his mind and Matt shivered, unsure if it was a hallucination or a trick by his captors.
“Matty, c’mon. You can’t just give up like this.”
Through desert sands, Matt spoke. “I’m not giving up, but I can’t get out.”
“You can. You’re just not trying hard enough, Matt.”
Matt would’ve rolled his eyes if he had the strength to do so, hallucination be damned. “I already broke my thumbs getting out of the handcuffs. I can’t…I can’t fight my way out of here.” The admission felt like a cinder block on his chest and Matt wanted to crumple inwards and never get off this concrete floor.
“Broken bones have never stopped you before.” The voice argued, sounding closer now. Matt could nearly feel warm breath on his cheeks, taste it on his tongue.
“I can’t see.” The nonstop audio, the horrible shepherd’s tone as it had been explained before it was turned on, had a few effects. Psychologically, it turned the human mind against itself. It brought up irritation, anxiety, pain, and in later stages you lost your reasonable functioning and went mad entirely. A thing Matt was sure was well underway by now.
But for Matt specifically, this descending tone had done worse than scramble his noggin. His senses couldn’t keep up. They played the sound at top volume at all times, giving randomized reprieves that made it all worse when the noise began again. The sound pinged off of everything incorrectly, giving no one real picture of the space beyond warbling lines that wouldn’t stay steady. The sound was painful itself, upsetting his hypersensitive ears and the resulting migraine had shut down his other senses fairly well.
Matt was completely in the dark with no way out.
“It sounds like you’re thinking too hard about this again, Matty. Stop using your brain for this one.”
“What am I meant to use then?” Matt snarled, though his head stayed positioned against the brick wall, hair being tugged by the fibers of the rocks. “Am I meant to use my fucking heart?”
An airy laugh breezed over Matt’s skin and he shivered again, but it felt cooler than breath did. It felt almost like…a draft?
“I think you’ll figure it out.” The voice ghosted the shell of his ear and then vanished, but the breeze wasn’t deterred.
Matt turned, on his hands and knees, and following the burst of air. It didn’t increase by much when his fingers brushed across the corner of the wall, but it amped up just enough.
This wall has a crack, a hole, a way out.
Matt began to dig his fingers into the rocks, scraping and pulling to remove them from his way. One by one they budged and the scent of grass, of fresh air and distant car fumes pressed into Matt’s nose. Fighting through the nausea of finicky senses, he continued on.
The sound in the background didn’t stop, but it was no longer shepherding him to a corner, pinning him in pain. Instead, it was a siren in his mind, an alarm, urging him to flee from this place.
Just as he knew he’d make it out alive and bring back help to stop this ring of abuse, Matt knew he’d use this tone as a personal guide back to this hellscape.
Matt wasn’t a sheep, but a wolf.