He's dazed and disoriented when he wakes. There's blood and metal in Dave's mouth, but he can't will his jaw open to try and spit it up. He twitches as whatever kept him under slowly fades and the pain of whatever is keeping his mouth closed starts to set in.
It's heavy, whatever it is. It's heavy enough that it makes his head hurt with the pressure against his skull.
"Hello, Dave." A TV monitor that he didn't notice before crackles to life behind him. He turns to face it and immediately regrets the decision as fast motion makes the device's hooks in his mouth shift slightly. A strange puppet on the screen with creepy-blue eyes and red-dotted cheeks laughs at Dave. The sound is an eerie, but almost childish, HEEHEE HOOHOO. "I'd like to play a game." Whoever's speaking through the puppet sounds like they're smiling.
He tugs against the straps keeping his wrists pinned down to the arms of a chair and they're loose enough that his arms are freed within seconds. Dave goes fiddling with the contraption on his head, lightly pressing and feeling along rusted metal as he tries to figure it out.
"Here's what happens if you lose." Dave's fidgeting immediately stops when the screen changes to show him what the device looks like.
There's large metal plates covering his mouth, pins in the front that probably coincide with the spikes digging into his flesh, and a large chunk of machinery in the side. It comprises of a gear, a tension-locked spring, and a stopwatch.
On the monitor, the trap is strapped to a mannequin, a loud ticking coming from the timer as the hand ticks to complete a full rotation. The noise continues for about three seconds until the hand strikes 'sixty' and the trap snaps open, completely disintegrating the material the head was made out of. The rapid motion and loud sound makes Dave flinch. "Think of it like a reverse bear trap."
The puppet laughs again and if Dave wasn't panicking before, he is now. He slaps his hand over where the timer is; It's not ticking, he's safe for now. Right? But he doesn't know if it could be remotely activated or if-
His hand slides further back and he manages to grab ahold of what he thinks is a wire. It's simple enough to put two and two together. If he pulls it then the trap primes and his time limit starts. He very gently follows it behind his head to find it connected to the chair he's in.
"The only key to unlocking it rests within the stomach of your dead cellmate. You'll only have sixty seconds once the device activates. Hurry up. Live or die. Tick Tock." The feed cuts out just as Dave is graced with the information that he's not alone.
In the corner of the room, far out of his reach from the chair, lies a girl he knows from rehab, a fellow addict. Dave and his needles and nose candy, Roxy and her alcohol. But she was more than just a fellow patient. They were best friends, she was like a sister to him; not that he fully understood what that meant. It didn't matter what that meant. He knew that he cared a lot about her... and there she was on the floor.
Dead.
His voice is a muffled and hoarse whimper when he tries to call out for her. “Rr..x?” He can't even get her name to sound right in his mouth, and in exchange for his effort, he coughs painfully as the blood coating his tongue slips down the wrong pipe. The pain gets worse when the spikes punish him for jerking around, but Dave blocks it out so that he can focus.
He needs to focus.
A knife lays next to Roxy and reality sinks in. Dave takes a moment to think of his plan. No, he takes several moments to think of his plan. If he gets up then the timer will start and Roxy is far out of his reach; if he wants to do what the puppet said he needs to then he'll have to be quick. Why should he listen to the puppet, though? What's stopping him from just sitting in the chair forever without triggering the device on his head? He stares at Roxy. She's still and lifeless, but she's full of color. If she's already dead then things shouldn't matter.
Dave looks back to the television screen as if it'll come on again to tell him more, but there's nothing. He scans the room, finding pipes running along the walls and tarps everywhere. There's also a camera in the corner, aimed straight at him with a little red light indicating it's recording. There's not much he can work with, there's only what he knows.
The longer Dave sits, the shittier he feels, beginning to shake and sweat. It's not just the room that's dingy, it’s him too. When was the last time he'd indulged in his guilt-filled pleasures? Sure, he was going to rehab for his addiction but it wasn't working in the slightest. He still filled his body with all of the toxic funtime substances he could get his hands on. He remembered getting his fix a good few hours before he went to pass out on his shitty bed. Dave couldn't tell how long it'd been since then to now. Withdrawals could kick in anywhere from eight hours to a full day after the last dose.
Dave could only entertain himself with his thoughts for so long before he felt like he needed to vomit. He couldn't, he couldn’t open his mouth so when he gagged, he leaned forward with the motion. Hunched over himself, blood leaks from a space between the maws of the bear trap, painting his thighs crimson.
He drops his head just an inch further to try to get comfortable- a soft click seems to echo through the empty room, his breath beginning to quicken as the ticking noise starts.
Sixty seconds. He had sixty seconds that were rapidly counting down all because of his stupid body crying at him to inject it with poison.
Dave falls out of the chair on weak legs, scrambling across the room as fast as he can to get to Roxy. His knees scrape open on rough concrete as he lunges for the knife laying next to her, his eyes watering.
"She's dead". Dave repeats the phrase like a mantra in his head. She's already dead.
He doesn’t see Roxy's eyes open when the knife plunges into her abdomen. Gore splatters out from her wound and Dave jabs a few more times, digging as fast as he can. It's fine. She's dead.
When he eventually finds what he thinks are her intestines and stomach, he's disturbed to find them warm.
Why were they warm? Why was she warm?
"She's dead", she has to be.
He spends a good half of his time just sifting through blood and guts, but he stays as calm as he can keep his shaking body so that he doesn't lose. He can't lose. The image of the mannequin head replays in his mind in perfect timing with another gag rising up his throat. Dave's arm comes up, bracing across the front piece of the device on his head as if it'll help him keep the feeling down.
His still searching hand finally grabs onto something smooth and metallic under the sea of red and fleshy colors. He holds it up triumphantly in the light created by a single lamp in the room.
His victory is short lived as his ears helpfully tune back in to the ticking coming from the side of his head. He scrambles with the key, patting around the sides and back of his head to try and figure out where it goes.
Dave's fingers are slick enough with Roxy's blood that his first few attempts to grab it slide right off, leaving fingerpainted whorls of blood in his light-blond hair.
Finally, he grips it securely, and he desperately brings the key to meet it. The key misses, once, twice, five times, skittering across the blood-drenched surface. The key slots into place on what has to be his tenth attempt. He turns it, and the metal curved around his head that keeps the trap in place swings outward.
Immediately, Dave rips his face out of the rig, throwing it at the ground to watch it snap open with barely five seconds to spare.
He's breathing heavily. Blood drips down his broken and cut lips to his chin.
Dave wants to scream. He doesn't.
He heaves, he shakes. He finally vomits and the blood clinging to his mouth falls with the bile.
The same puppet he'd seen on the screen rolls into the room on a shitty little tricycle. It stands in the entrance of a hallway that had been obscured with the hanging tarps. It wasn't like the room needed to be locked or anything if he only had a minute of walking around time before inevitable death.
"Congratulations. You are still alive." It's the same voice, and Dave watches in horror as the HEEHEE HOOHOO that comes out of the puppet's chest reverberates around the room. He backs up against the nearest wall, slipping in the blood pooled around him.
"A lot of people are incredibly ungrateful to be alive... But not you, Dave." He whimpers, cowering before the doll and hysterically trying to scoop Roxy's guts back into her body. As if it’ll make what he did to her any better. "Not anymore."