Just One Drink...

The lovely Nina Pelletier hosts a prompt and share flash fiction circle on Google+. I hope to participate more frequently this next year. For the prompt on Friday, Dec. 2nd:
"You or your Main Character went out the night before, they remember having one drink, and then nothing else. You or your MC wake up and need to piece together where they are and how they got there."

This was my contribution, (553 words):


I woke. Coughing, choked on the frothy phlegm that spewed up from raspy lungs. Bitter contents from my stomach swirled with it into a potently foul mixture. I folded over and gagged. Steam rose off my too hot skin and from the mucus-y puddle at my knees. A foaming crystal pond on a land of black asphalt. The angry glare of a red street light created rhodolite gems from the bubbles.

I closed my eyes. Leaned into the side of an unforgiving building. Bricks, course and biting, chewed into my bare skin. Chill air sucked the heat away; I shivered. To such a low place I'd arrived. But how? I hugged myself. Nails dug into my arms. Jaw clenched around another wave of futile nausea.

I groaned and squeezed myself more tightly. What the hell had happened? My brain, sluggish, refused to divulge anything. I squinted into the red lit darkness. Halos and strings jumped around dimly shaped objects. Nothing looked right. Where was I?

Panic like the creeping of an easy tide swelled under my skin. Clamped like brutal hands, finally, around my throat. I struggled to stand. Bits of my skin scraped between brick teeth as I clawed my way up to wobbly feet.

"Need help?"

I turned. A shadow monster offered an outstretched hand. I backed up. Nearly fell. The shadow stepped to the edge of the light. I blinked. Blinked again.

The light behind me soaked into eyes that reflected nothing. Soulless pits of endless night. I shook my head. I tried swallowing, but gagged again.

A grin split the shadow face. Gleaming teeth like a neat row of blades. Growing larger as the figure neared. I pissed down my leg. Too scared for humiliation.

"Let's get you home.” It grabbed my arm and pulled me further down the alley. "I can't believe you got so fucked up with just one shot." The creature from the deepest parts of hell, twisted and coalesced as we broke free from the dark. Transformed in an instant into a face I knew well.

I laughed. A hoarse cackling that bounced down the corridor of hungry teeth and hell-spawned shadows. Bursting out into the open where the open sky gathered sound and cast it back in echoes, mockingly.

Just one shot. "No," I sputtered. Slumping finally into a warm cavern of plastic and glass. My head lolled to the side. "Not just."

The familiar face boiled and melted away. Revealing again the demon beneath. I slipped further down as my numb limbs refused to submit to my commands.

"Shit," the demon spat. Venom dripped off dagger teeth. "Someone fucking drugged you! Son of a bitch!" Words like the ringing of metal on metal.

My heart wild in my chest. Beating. Beating. Becoming all I could hear. Fire scalded along every tiny vein. My skin sizzled. Air, shards of glass down my throat until there was nothing left to breath. My arms leaden; I could only clench my hands in a final desperate panic. True dark robbed my vision; I tried to see, but there was nothing. Just the unbearable heat of a thousand fires burning in my gasping lungs, in my swelling eyeballs and finally in the spectacular burst of an exploding sun in my brain.

Just one drink... and I was dead.