Lock & Key

He brought his hands to his face, tentatively, and felt for gunshot wounds.  Finding none, he sat up, blinking, and began to move his hands around.  This was done with considerable trepidation.  He was understandably curious about his surroundings, but at the same time, the problem with darkness is that anything could be in it with you, and you’d never know until it was too late.  As far as he knew, he could be sitting in a tiger’s lair, the cat's dark-adapted eyes already sizing him up and deciding which parts of him would be the tenderest.  He could be in a basement, at the mercy of the gangs his mother had repeatedly warned him about during his childhood in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.  Worse still, his high school chum Lee McCaskill could still be there, somewhere, with the neat little pistol aimed at his forehead, like it had been minutes ago.  Only this time, Lee would be wearing night-vision goggles, so he could see him in the dark.

Or maybe all three at the same time.  Just because those were unlikely scenarios didn't mean they were mutually exclusive.

But whatever horrors might await him in the dark, he couldn’t sit where he was forever.  For one thing, the floor felt like tile, and was hard, uncomfortable, and cold.  And for another, he was, much to his own surprise, beginning to be more curious than afraid.

This was largely because, however impossible it seemed, he had evidently survived a shot to the head not only without dying, but without injury.  He had felt the bullet strike his forehead—the sensation had been pressure rather than pain, and over in a flash—but now there was not so much as a scratch on him, much less the kind of wound that a point-blank gunshot to the head would cause.

Honestly, he should have been dead, and missing a considerable portion of the top of his skull.