Frankentown by Aleksandar Vujovic

the kitchen nook gave him two second notice before a dart sent him to the ground, foaming at the mouth in violent spasms, vision blurring.
Someone pulled a bag over his head and two men carried him by his arms.
    Then he passed out.
    He came to with hot breath condensing on his face, still inside the bag, no telling how long he might’ve been out. The air around him was no longer moving.
Cold sweat. Chills.
By the coldness of the ground he was lying on, he guessed it might’ve been concrete. Maybe a warehouse.
The chamois bag flew off Frank’s head as quick as it had trapped him before. Everything was still coated in a haze of divided conscious blur.
    They were in a behemoth   pitch-dark hall.
    To their side was an enormous closed door.
It was a giant warehouse. Save for a few lights, it was dark, and Frank, who had been hard rapped in the head hard a few times, now had blurry vision.
He was on his knees surrounded by half a dozen guards with semi-automatic weapons.
But it wasn’t an action movie.

    This was HIS LIFE.
    Happening.

    After a brief moment, too soon for Frank’s eyes to adjust to the scarce lighting, a man’s voice poked him with a sharp question.
    “What have you seen?”

    The question came rather quick.
    Shit! he thought.
    “What have you seen?!”
    “Aliens?”
    Because he didn’t say anything, guilt was assumed.
A slight nod between guards and one of them left his post to get closer to Frank.
The situation felt very threatening, to say the least.
    Then the first thud on the head came, temporarily robbing him of vision.
    And then the second. Frank was too distracted to notice the warehouse’s ceiling lamps, what with his retina absorbing all the guard’s punches. The guard stopped to withdraw his baton to speed up the rate of pummeling.
    Frank spat an ounce of blood onto the concrete, but it kept rushing into his mouth.
When the guard drew near again, he spat in the face of the blurry shape to his side.
Then one of the shapes spoke a dry, cold voice.
    “Are you a patriot?” said the gray shape with glowing tops, waving something shiny around.
    “Depends what my patry stands for.” Frank said, playing tough-guy.
    The army man’s baton flew in the direction of his face. Each hit brought thousand bright lights in fractal patterns. The blood rushing down his mouth was starting to fill up and everything the man said sounded like he was hearing it through a tube. It almost turned into a stinging whistle and gurgling of the rushing blood.
    “Sign this and you’ll live.”
    “HEY! Ever heard of first amendment?! Stop hitting me, Goddammit!” he said, spitting a clotted gob aside, unable to see what the blurry guard looked like, though he couldn’t care less. He could already feel a tooth coming loose, but he knew better than to sign such a contract.
    Baton rapped him square across the face.
    The guard then emptied what seemed like an entire can of mace on his face with Frank screaming, breathing in some of its pepper flavored pain. He immediately dropped to the ground, coughing, panting, heaving.
Then a familiar female voice he couldn’t quite place screamed “What the fuck are you doing?”
    Too late, Frank was close to death.
    “You promised you’ll go easy on him!”
    The handwriting on the contract barely constituted his signature.
    But it was legally binding . Have I just signed my death certificate?
    The female voice was so familiar, but he couldn’t think of any woman who had such a raspy voice.
“Clean him up!”
    Someone brought in a cart with a bowl of warm water and a couple of towels. They wiped his face with washcloths, which although wet, were very rough to his broken, bleeding skin. Several minutes later, two guards dragged him out of the stockroom, through a wide corridor to a narrower corridor and to a dark, tightly-shut room. Thick dark leather belts secured Frank in a small chair about a size too small.
Then came a jab of a needle went under the skin of his lower right