Mirror World (part 4)

    I am in Hell. Strapped down by my wrists and ankles to a cold metal slab, I had no choice but to stare up at the infernal blinking red light above me. I tried calling out a few times, my voice cracking from minor dehydration, but nobody responded. How long had I been strapped to this thing? Minutes? Hours? Days? There was no way of telling. Windows seemed non-existent in my prison and of course there were no mirrors for me to escape back to my world through. I might have been able to count the seconds by the blinking of the light but even that was inconsistent. Sometimes it would blink spastically like a strobe-light, but other times it would not come back on for a long time, leaving me in the darkness to face my fears.
    I thought of The Home. My old home, that is. The foster one. there had been three other kids to come into The Home after me. We had all been put into the system younger than ten years old and we're tough as nails. Even though I was the oldest, I admired them. There was Stephen who was put in the home at age seven after his parents died in a crash with an oil tanker. Five years have passed since then. Next there was nine year old Sophie. Her mom died in child birth, leaving her dad to work three jobs to try and support himself, Sophie, and Sophie's twin brother, Michael, who was in some orphanage across the country in LA. After four years of exhausting work, Sophie's dad had fallen asleep at the wheel of an oil tanker.
    David was the peculiar one. He had been picked up at age nine scavenging in a Food Lion garbage can. The police had been the ones who had found him and damn near bashed his head in when he had "resisted arrest." This beating had resulted in a concussion, causing David to not remember anything of his life before the day he had been captured. He had a bald patch on the left side of his head where the beating had dented his skull and he was always humming a strange, mystical tune he certainly had not picked up during his five years at The Home.