Skipped ahead a little to get some activity in.
Norm’s eyes snapped open.
That wasn’t a euphemism; he could hear the muscles on his face move as they pulled up his eyelids — then pulled them back down from all the horrible, horrible visual stimuli. He could also feel every spot where his clothes touched his flesh, taste everything he had eaten since the last time he brushed his teeth, and smell the adhesive on the duct tape binding his feet and arms. Oh, and he could definitely sense Cartwright, similarly tied to a chair right next to him. She smelled/sounded asleep.
That kind of sensory hypersensitivity — and no other side effects — meant that he’d been dosed with xenoform. This was bad. Only the federal government was allowed to use it, and that had always been one of the restrictions the government had taken seriously. That meant his captors were feds themselves, or they just didn’t worry about being caught with the stuff. Either way, they weren’t playing by the rules, and that was very bad.
On the other hand, they had left him alone in a darkened room with no guard, which wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do. They figured I’d be out for longer, he thought as he snapped the duct tape off his wrists with one quick jerk. Must not know FSOBs are desensitized to the stuff. That didn’t rule out this being a black-ops job, but at least he wasn’t going to worry it was an in-house one.