I don’t know how long it was before the guards hurled me onto the floor of my cell. It might have been a long time. It might have just felt like a long time.

When the cell door clanged shut behind me, I lay where I was, bruised and battered and bleeding.

Dunbar had taken me into the Outbuilding. He had beaten me, hard. Punched me, kicked me, slammed my face into the cement floor. He enjoyed it. You could tell by the gleam in his colorless eyes.

When he was finished with me, he called out the door to his guards. A couple of them came in and grabbed me under the arms. They dragged me out of the Outbuilding, my head hanging down, my toes scraping against the concrete floor. They dragged me into the prison, cursing my dead weight the whole way.

They dragged me up a flight of rattling metal stairs then down the second-tier gallery. The prisoners watched me from inside their cells, watched dead-eyed and silent as I was dragged past.

When we reached my cell, the barred door slid open. The guards tossed me inside the way you’d toss an old mattress onto a junk heap. I grunted as I landed on the floor. I heard the door slide shut behind me. I lay there and bled.

Images drifted through my mind. Memories. Faces. My mom and dad. My sister. My friends, Josh the goofy nerd and big Rick the gentle giant and Miler Miles, the runner who would be a CEO someday.

And Beth. Beth, with her honey hair and her blue eyes and her soft lips that I could almost feel on mine. Beth and me walking together on the path by the river. Not me as I was now, beaten and frightened and wallowing in hopelessness, but the guy I used to be, walking with her hand in hand…

I remembered the night before my blackout, the night I remembered going to sleep in my own bed. I was excited because earlier that day I had worked up the courage to talk to Beth for the first time and she’d written her phone number on my arm. I remembered how I looked around my room once before I turned the lights off, my eyes passing over the karate trophies on the shelves and the poster from the movie The Lord of the Rings on the wall. I remembered closing my eyes with the soft bed under me and the warm blankets around me. Home. Safe at home.