A jolt in his heart and his body began firing at all cylinders. His breathing was uneven and beleaguered as if he had ran for miles upon miles. His vision was groggy, the rickety ceiling fan above him languidly rotating its blades, the light from the window nearby creeping across the room. His senses were assaulted once more, a sharp pain on the back of his neck and several bruised muscles across his body.

This room was unfamiliar to him. “But how would-” the muttering was cut off. Again, a searing sensation on the back of his neck boggled his mind and left him disoriented. He reached his hand out and surveyed the skin on his neck for the source of the pain but all he could feel were scars in a pattern he did not recognize. Something in him, an instinctual response took over and assuaged the disorientation. Practiced measured breaths were taken and his mind was slowly cleared until a mental checklist could be made. There was an itch to delve deeper and ask how or why he would know such measures but encroaching on that part of his mind caused the pain to well up as if to cause his head to burst. He would shelf it. Right now he focused on his list.

He started with his surroundings and himself. He was in a decrepit room, paint peeling from the walls with no furniture in sight. There was a window but the glass had since been shattered and scattered across the floor. There was a door to his right and an entrance just above him with what looked to be a white tub. On his person, he was wearing a fitted jacket and a dress shirt, his pants a fitted khaki and thick black boots with scuff marks and copper tones at the toes. Another breath was taken and he gingerly stood up, his body aching at the prospect of moving around. His joints cracked and creaked as he stumbled his way towards the bathroom. 

The room was dark, the light from the window only barely encroaching upon this space. There was an empty patch of wall at the end of the bathroom with the approximate proportions of a sink, now gone to wherever it was taken. What he was looking for, however, he found in large chunks. The bathroom mirror was splintered in large fragments, a dark red substance still lingered at the point of impact. Using a shard, he looked at himself in the mirror. He was caramel colored, his eyes a light shade of brown with short black hair and a beard that was just beginning to grow unkempt.

“At least I know what I look like… and sound like.” He audibly muttered, setting the shard back on the floor. His voice was a rich baritone, his mouth as dry as salt and earth. He turned over to the sink and found a peculiar decorative piece; the remnants of a corpse. Its torso had been thoroughly disemboweled, leaving an open, fetid crevice of ribs that poke out of the flesh. Bits of skin clung tautly to the bone. Oddly enough, there was a distinct lack of a smell and his reaction was a lot more muted than one should expect from an amnesiac.

“Did I do this?” He asked, looking at his the palm of his hands for any visual indicator of the violence inflicted on this corpse. There was nothing but more scars, most faded into the skin. His pockets then? He reached into his jacket pocket first and found nothing but lint, loose coins of indeterminate value, and a crumpled candy wrapper. Reaching into his pants pocket yielded entirely different information; an oval shaped locket and a worn ring hung on a thin silver chain. The chain was tangled together around a scrap of paper. He unfurled the note.

The note was scrawled in red crayon, the wax still fresh. Written on the paper scrap was a simple statement, “Help Dad”. His chest tightened. 

“I have a son?” he whispered. He opened the locket for any additional clue and got it in the form of his family photo. There was a smiling woman wearing a ring similar to the one that now hung on this chain. She clung to the side of a burly set man he recognized was him, in a suit and a bemused smile. Carried in his arm was a boy not much older than 3, grinning widely at the camera, his son. He pulled at the photo and turned it over. In a neat cursive were the words “Arenas Family”. A last name at last.

“I swear you’ll find what ya lookin’ for in there. We’ve got no reasons to lie,” a male voice explained in the hall. Three pairs of footsteps were walking towards his room.

“And you’re certain that this was the dump spot mentioned in your invitation,” a feminine voice asked, her question laced with vitriol and superiority.

“As my partner’s said Miss, we’ve got no reasons to lie to ya. Especially a Fixer of your caliber a-and prowess,” this other male voice stammered, his words coming out in spurts as if experiencing a mechanical jam.

“For your sake, I hope my mark is in there,” she stated matter-of-factly. There wasn’t anything else of note besides-

“Shit,” he grumbled as he ran towards the bathroom entrance. The steps had stopped just outside of his room door, his eyes glued to the handle and the potential people interested in his whereabouts.