A Hefty bag. They put a Hefty bag over my head. There was some kind of cloth over it, but they made it clear. A Hefty bag.

My hands were tied up. My wrists burned. They were bound with something painful. Probably zip ties. I felt perfect 90° angles cutting into my wrists. I wondered what color they were. Probably black. Of course they were black. What kind of kidnappers would buy multicolored zip ties?

I heard a gun make that hollow metal gun sound. That sound you only hear in the movies when people play with their weapons. Fuck.

I was face-down in a van-truck-thing. I guessed. I felt a running engine. People were around me, wiggling around the moving car. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to make them think I was awake. Maybe they thought I was dead and that might have been a good thing. When someone puts a Hefty bag over your face, that’s what they’re expecting, right? The bag-faced person to die? Wasn’t that why every pore on my face dripped with sweat? I mean the thing wasn’t tight against my face. I was breathing from under my chin. Surely they knew this. Of course they did. How else would I have been there? Why else would I be transported? If I were meant to be dead, I wouldn’t have been inside the truck. I definitely wouldn’t have been bound like that. I would just start rotting ’til someone came to check on my room.

People were talking, but I couldn’t hear them well, you know, with the hunk of plastic over my head. They sounded Middle Eastern. Lots of phlegmy “x”s, and “thx”s. That weird guttural thing, that had like seventeen variati—

[bump]

…ions.

That was a hard bump. I went up in the air and came down nicely on my right cheekbone. My teeth clicked together. I squirmed and let out a “Wha-guh” as I slapped against the hard steel floor. Jesus, it couldn’t have been colder. The icy steel sent goose bumps up my arms.

The whole truck went silent. A wind that swept through the air… like a kraken had woken up.

The fiery pain burned my face. I refused to move. It was bad enough that I’d reacted. Surely that wouldn’t buy me any bonus points with these people. They didn’t seem to care much about my well-being. The bag hid my bulging eyes. I tried desperately not to move.

The talking resumed. Cigarette smoke filled the air. They continued speaking with the driver. Everything calmed down.

Hold up. How did I get there? Last I remembered, I was on the city library website. Mom kind of texted me from the hospital asking if I could send her stuff about her books that I told her I would, which was a serious pain in my ass. Mom had this textbook company. She illustrated online textbooks that other people wrote. They didn’t suck, but no one used them. Literally no one. It’s mostly ’cause no one needed new textbooks. Mom didn’t really get it, but the company was all she had anymore. Also… I kinda started hiding money into her company.. So I put all that money into her textbook company. It’s called laundering. I made it look like it was from real people. She was blown away when she started seeing the money. She could finally afford rent. She could afford her medical bills.

But then she started getting uppity. She wanted to see her textbooks being used and to talk to all these “people”. To keep her from looking any further, I needed to set up a trap. A diversion. So I was gonna post all her textbooks on the library and send that to her. Make it seem like the public library was what made her so rich all the sudden. It was a start, I guess. It was also interfering with my Pyramid plans, cause I was hungry to finally see those giant fuckers.

Then I heard a knock. That’s RIGHT! There was a knock at the door.

My secret apartment in Portland was all kinds of creaky. Especially when it was so windy. I didn’t really pay attention to the sounds anymore, but that knock was direct. It was a pounding. It sounded like wood on wood. Maybe even metal on wood. In my head, I imagined some Indiana Jones villain with some ComiCon knife behind that door. It was most likely Johnny. He always had to mess with ya. Come over unannounced. Pound the door down.

So I closed my computer, stood up to let him in and… and. Well damn. What happened. I was suddenly somewhere else, tied up, hoping I wasn’t going to die.

I heard laughter through the Hefty bag. Something was going to be really funny in a second. It was secret laughter. They didn’t want me to hear it. They stopped talking. They were just still. I heard the hollow gun noises again, but I couldn’t seem to… Then suddenly, my left palm went ice cold. It was like a sub-arctic pen tip on my wrist. Oh shit. Oh no. It wasn’t cold. It was fire. I ripped my wrist away. It was on my good hand. I gripped my wrist with the other. “Ah,” I let out, and immediately regretted it. The men, whoever they were, proceeded to kick my bowels. They stomped and kicked and laughed. A boot crunched down on my back, and plenty of steel toes napped me in the stomach.

I guess I was right. They had brought me here to die.

A thunderous whap hit my neck and I went out.

Next I remember I heard planes taking off. My cheek was still on the cold steel.

I woke up again after someone had just thrown my body down. The planes were louder now, like through a hollow tube. My wrist was still throbbing. Then I felt a serious pain in my neck. Like an intense pin prick. Then a flood of something into me. Oh god… I’m being injected. I tried to resist, but how? It made…

It made me…

Ma… me…

The blue tiles were polished. It was dark. They were kaleidoscopic. They reflected every light beam that could have hit the tiles. I instantly thought of Instagram pics of classmates on vacation in Santorini. Lucky fuckers.

It then dawned on me that I could see. My face could breathe. Now instead of a Hefty bag, I had blue tiles punching my eyes. I lay there. Facedown, with blue hexagons in my face. It reminded me of geometry class. I wiped my eyes. I had to lift my mug off the floor. I had a pretty good puddle of drool hanging out of my mouth. I rubbed my eyes, and immediately reflexed my hand. My cheek was killing me. It felt puffed up, bruised from something. Oh yea. That cold steel truck floor. Then my hand sharply sprang to life. Not in a good way. I looked and saw a bullet wound. No. It wasn’t a bullet wound, was it? It wasn’t too deep. And my hand was working. I tried to touch it with my other fingers, but they recoiled. MotherFUcker. I took my right thumb and squeezed deep into the wound. Holy shit. Strings of pain sprouted up my forearm like the roots of a prehistoric tree. My muscles sprang to life as I realized that I wasn’t tied up any longer.

My body felt like I fell off a mountain. My legs were cool, but damn, I must have gotten beat. And it looked like I was in a mosque. Wait. What the hell? Is this a mosque?

The tiles were amazing. They streamed out from under my drool and sprang all around. They swept the entire floor, polished and waxed. It seemed to go on, in that same geo pattern, forever. The only thing that stood in their way were the pillars. Great pillars. Marble, maybe granite? I was the last person to ask what pillars were made out of.

The ceiling above was white, almost uninterrupted except for an immense Arabic word. It was made of tiny tiles but created a tremendous image: pixels in a screen. It lashed across the ceiling. It was like a Fox News ticker frozen in time.

The lights were on, but they were pointed behind me. I went to turn my head. Nope. My neck was way too sore. I guessed that my ass beating reached as far as my neck. I got on my knees, and then it registered. There was someone speaking behind me. Like a dog, I groveled to the tiles to get a view.

A golden tower. Followers. A man praying. He was groveling, only to something. Maybe begging. But he wasn’t begging to anyone around him. He was begging to the words on the wall. The news-ticker-Arabic-on-the-dome-mosque-temple-thingy.

It was humid. It was really humid. My breath was cooler than the air around me. I noticed then that there were great openings in this dome, giving a slight cross breeze. Not enough. My arms were peeling off the tiles from my sweat. Where the fuck am I?

A follower came running up to me. He waddled like a flamboyant beaver. His ass pushed up and out like he was catching something. He more powerwalked than ran. He got up to within a few yards of me and stopped. Quite abruptly. Like I had polio or something. Shit, I hope I don’t.

A man stood atop the golden tower-thing. The tower was a sort of half-pyramid. It had 4 steps on it. This pyramid man had a long beard and wore a turban and military fatigues, but they were brand-spankin’ new. This guy was a big deal I guess, but he didn’t see any combat. Like a baseball coach. In the outfit, without the dirt.

The tower guy said something in Arabic. I think it was to beaver-man with the big ass. The man, Big Ass, then looked at me with his gorilla eyes. He was a smiley gorilla, but it seemed as if at any moment he would tear me limb from limb and use my arm as a toy. He then pulled out a pack of smokes and threw them on the ground in front of me. Camel Silvers.

“boot cigarette on hand?” Big Ass said. He pointed at the man begging, I think. There were plenty of people around, and I couldn’t make out exactly who he pointed at. Also, what the fuck did he just say? Boot-cigarette? As if I’d fucking know what that was. I’d just woken up. In a Mosque.

Looking at the smokes, I knew what that pain was in the van. It was this praying dude. Must’ve been in the van smoking cigarettes. Thinking about my cigarette burn made my hand jerk in pain. My wrist-burn was nasty. All kinds of grey and red. It was definitely infected. Ohhh—put cigarette on hand.

I grabbed my wrist, and then Big Ass turned to his man on the tower and yelled something in Arabic.

The tower man nodded and came down completely off his tower. The groveling guy was still groveling. Hands and knees. Must have been praying to Allah. Tower man stepped heavily onto the blue tiled floors. His eyes fixed on me. His mouth with a grin. His boots squeaked against the waxed floor like he was downloaded from the Matrix.

Tower man stepped in front of Mr. Begging-to-Allah. He said something in Arabic, less gruff than his first command to Big Ass.

Without hesitation, thought, motive, pleasure, or pain, Tower man pulled out a Golden Desert Eagle. And I mean straight up Fortnite. Like, fresh out of the loot box. Golden. Desert. Eagle. Eyes stuck on me, he pointed it at Mr. Begging-to-Allah and

Pop.

Pop. Pop.

Pop.Pop.Pop.

Pop.

Tower Man butchered that one. He ended up turning around, missing the first 6 shots, and finally shooting him in the head. Mr. Begging-to-Allah wasn’t there anymore. I mean his body was there, but he wasn’t praying to no god no more. He wasn’t causing a ruckus of noise. He wasn’t doing anything anymore. Whatever thoughts he had were sprayed on the floor. I know from those ISIS videos what a .50 cal bullet at point blank will do to a balloon like your skull.

His body was so still. I’d seen a dead body before, on the Darkweb. I’d never seen death so instant… at least in real life. My body was tight as a guitar string. I wanted to inspect the lifelessness. I wanted to poke his body with a stick.

And now it looked like someone just got capped for putting out a cig on my hand… Or for smoking? What are the rules? I figured these guys were Muslim. Hell, I figured they were ISIS.

I dropped backward from my knees and landed on my ass at the potential realization.

Then Tower Man started to walk towards me, his boots chunky on the blue tiles. He walked closer and closer, eyeing me like a Thanksgiving turkey.

He stopped past Big Ass, about 5 feet from me. I could see that his beard was hazel, almost orange colored. His eyes were even more hazel than his beard. He had no mustache. His skin was soaked from the sun and his gun was nearly as shiny as the tiles. The golden gun was inscribed with all kinds of Arabic designs and symbols.

He was smiling. Smiling, only differently. He smiled like we were friends. Without offering a hand, or a piece of food (I was hippo hungry), he opened his mouth, which made his beard wiggle.

“Welcome to my Caliphate.”