Waking

Morning was breaking Tommy's head. It stabbed its sharp pointy fingernails of daylight into his eyes and twisted them around, drilling into his defenceless frontal lobes. His ear drums recoiled from a harsh screech as they tried to retreat deeper and deeper into his head. His skull itself seemed to be shrinking down, squashing his brain into one infinitely dense lump of pain.

He might only have been awake for one or two seconds but Tommy was already certain that this was the hangover from hell; the morning after the alcoholic apocalypse. If ever a hangover was going to be fatal, this was the one.

Even by the standards of his previous excesses this was an absolute electrical brainstorm of a headache. The pain was coming from inside his skull, from outside of it, from within the very bone itself. And from his left cheek. Hang on, that was new. Surely cheek pain wasn't part of your every day hangover? And come to think of it, the cold dampness was unusual; as was the hardness of the bed.

Against his better judgement Tommy opened his eyes. The world swung round in a blur of colour and noise. His stomach tried to make a break for freedom and he half choked as he tried to keep it inside him. The colour. Something was odd about the colour he saw. It was an unusual colour for a bedroom. Grey. A lot of grey.

The harsh texture of the mattress against his skin began to draw his attention. There seemed to be an awful lot of harshness covering an awful lot of his body. The parts of his body not in contact with the mattress seemed to be very cold and a little damp too.

These recently acquired facts joined with the pointing, drilling, screeching and squashing in his brain like raucous inebriated latecomers at a party that's already got far too crowded, noisy and hot for anyone to enjoy.

A rush of cold air across his body arrived at the same time as a deep roar that grew to a crescendo before fading out some distance away from him. A pause. Another rush of noise and breeze. He began to perceive a faint high pitched sound.

This rough, grey mattress was definitely far too hard. The coolness on his skin was definitely not his kingsize duvet. And that high pitched sound was definitely getting closer and beginning to sound an awful lot like a ...

Police siren!

Tommy snapped fully awake. There were a lot of details missing but he was definitely sure that he'd just woken up stark naked, face down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. What he didn't know was that things were going to get a whole lot stranger.