"ARENA" A SNOW-PUNK, SCI-FI, GLADIATOR STORY

I'm working on this just as a habit of writing a bit every day. It's a conversational, plain-clothes, personal sort of style. The world here is supposed to be filled with just the apathetic mechanics of a modern slave-based society. Our hero eventually becomes a gladiator. This has probably been done before but I haven't read anything like it, but then again I don't read much. C&C is appreciated.

CHAPTER 1
I remember having a headache. That's pretty much it. I wish I could tell you more, but everything before that is pretty much a blur, a cloud of shapeless memories with nothing to say about them. I remember having a really bad headache, rolling over, and puking my guts out. Some of whatever was in my stomach got lodged in my nasal cavity, is how bad it was. It was a violent bodily convulsion, a sort of loss of control where your muscles automatically tense and throw your head forwards so that you don't vomit all over yourself.
Then I remember cold. I remember being freezing cold. Not just a, “Oh Its sort of chilly out, I had better wear a sweater” kind of cold, but the kind that freezes your eyelids closed and crystallizes the air you breathe on your nose hairs. It makes your scalp hurt and your hairs freeze together. It bites at your skin and purses your lips, makes your teeth chatter to the point that they start to wear down. It swells your feet if they start to sweat. If your feet start to sweat then your feet start to freeze. I'm a couple of toes short now, because of how cold it was. Luckily, they were not the important toes.
I was lying, prostrate, weak and unable to move. It would take all my effort to turn my head and open my eyes, just to look across the inside of the steel case I was being carried in. I was tied down, like a piece of cargo strapped in for a bumpy ride. Why was it so cold? Someone had cut a hole in my sweater and put a tube in my arm, and there were some wires and pads strapped to my chest and head. I would weakly try to move and the cold steel of the needle would pierce deeper into a muscle, scrape against the bone. If it was on the surface, I wouldn't have felt it, but it was in deep. Whoever put it in there did a damn shitty job. I lied there and listened to the hum of outside machinery, and felt the vibrations of locomotion underneath my aching bones.
I open my eyes and turn my head every once and a while. I didn't have the strength to talk, but the two others I saw huddled up in the corner of the ice box would throw words at me everyone once in a while. I couldn't understand what they were saying. A thickly built, powerful looking bearded, graying man, and a twenty-something woman, blond. They were curled up, covered in each other's limbs, trying to keep warm.
It must have been hours. It's almost always shorter than you think it was when you are cooped up alone in a box like that, but it was, at the very least, hours. It was too cold to sleep, and I was too weak to get up and untie myself. Eventually the vibrations slowed and the machinery began to rev slower, sputter and stop. An airlock unsealed and a metal door swung open near my feet, and light poured into the compartment. A breath of warmer air entered the fridge. It was still freezing cold.
I was too tired to even open my eyes, and by this point I am fairly certain they were frozen shut. I felt the not-so-warm breeze flow in, and then heard the boots of a couple of men tromp past. From what I could tell, they picked up the man and woman, from whom I hadn't heard a sound in a while.
“Geez, its cold in here.”
“Enviro must have broke. We'll check it on the way back.”
“Uh, I think this one is dead.”
“Oh, shit. He was a big guy, too. We just won't tell the boss about that one.”
“What do I do with him? Just throw him in the garbage or something?”
“I guess.”
They shuffle about, and I hear the dragging of bodies and the clatter of unloading, and the wind outside. Its a while before they come back.
“We're going to have to unhook him.”
“Whatever. Just pull that shit out him and let's go.”
A couple quick yanks pull the wires off. Another one does it for the needle. I feel a warm ooze of blood come out of my arm after a shocking tear of cold steel against my bone. Thank god they pulled the needle out. I wondered why these two guys weren't being more graceful and gentle with human passengers.
They wheeled me out into the wind. It threw wet clumps of snow onto my face. A snowflake lands on my eye and starts to melt the ice on my eyelashes, the cold water beading over and around the fine hairs. I force it open, and the overexposure of the sun makes me wince.
“He's waking up.” I've been awake for hours. The other one pipes in to give me “something.” I hear a shuffle in a bag and then feel a prick on my neck as the injector let out a little puff. I started to feel a little less cold. Too bad I wouldn't be awake to enjoy it.

I woke up when my body was dropped onto a concrete floor and just about every bone in my body felt the impact. I was still weak, and managed to let out a little yelp, and roll over to move most of my aching body off the cold floor. The air in the room is stagnant, hot, stuffy, but the floor is ice cold.
One of the two voices from before echoed across the room, “That one is pretty strong but he's taken a bad hit to the head, lost a lot of blood, and I think he's sick. Probably just a really bad case of the flu or something.”
A woman replies, “Right. Give him a tat and we'll see if we can't fix him up before we put him on the block.”
“He seems like the kind who might run,” said the guy.
“Then drug him.” Not a warm and cuddly sort of lass, I guess.
I was still coddled up on the floor, trying to deal with burning feet, frost bitten skin that feels like its melting off, and a hole in my arm the size of a penny. Steel shanked boots stomped against the ground over to me and I got another injection. I was picked up and slowly my thoughts started to blur together. Voices began to echo incoherently. There was poison in my blood, I kept thinking. They've poisoned me. Why would they poison a sick guy like me? Why can't they just leave me alone?
For a while I was dragged by the arms by a couple of pairs of boots. My eyes stayed closed, but I was seeing multi-colored, antiseptic, and terrifying images of the man and the woman freezing to death in the box with me. He's dead, I remembered. She's wasn't, though.
Through the azure apocalyptic haze of the narcotic, I made sure to remember certain things as my knees start to throb by repeatedly being banged against the floor. I remember a number, 6-0-4-3-7, spoken by a woman with a soft voice. I remember them labeling me as an off-worlder and then, when they had finally set me down and I began to reel, they strapped a machine to my arm that branded me with a laser. It dug into my skin like a shovel.
The pain was enough to make me puke again. I lost control, turned my head, and threw up on my own sleeve. I apologized through a series of slurs to whoever was watching. Not very dignified, I imagine. Its amazing how through the thickest of narcosis you can still feel embarrassed. They let me sit for a minute, and I was thankful that I passed out again within a moment or two.

I stirred awake. I was in a bed, and a fairly comfortable one at that, albeit I was tied to the fucking thing. I had gained back a little strength, and so I opened my eyes to see a spectacled and bearded gentleman in a white coat, pulling a catheter out of my arm. He seemed friendly enough to do it gently and patch me up when he was done.
“You were in bad shape, son.” I don't bother to answer. I stare blankly at him and turn my head to stretch my neck, and my swollen skin burns against the fabric of the sheets.
“You've lost a couple toes from frostbite. You got lucky though. They're not important toes.” The bastard chuckles. “Your ears are pretty bad too, but they will heal up. You were severely dehydrated and had a pretty bad case of acconnosis.”
I still have no idea what acconnosis is. I was in a hospital or a clinic. The walls were white-painted brick, and there were bars on the windows. I looked down the row of about half a dozen empty beds and medical machines and saw that the one on the end had a girl in it.
“That's the girl who came in your lot, eh? Don't worry, she's not as bad as you are. She'll be okay. Maybe you'll get lucky and wind up in the same lot on the way out.”
I turned my head back up at the bearded gentleman, who is jotting something down on a chart. “We're going to keep you here for three more days. I think it would be best if we kept you under sedation until it's time for you to go.”
I wanted to plead with him not to drug me again, but I wasn't about to beg. Its not like I had much choice in the matter. I saw him pull out a needle and load it up with whatever it was that he was going to give me. I still had no real idea where I was or what I was doing there.

What I suppose was three days later, they roused me awake. I felt a lot better, like a healthy guy might feel on the worst hangover of his life, but still, it was a definite improvement. They had shaved me when I was asleep. A couple of old, stocky nurses got me to sit up, and then coaxed me into trying to stand, despite the fact that I was bare-ass naked. I let go of my modesty and dropped my feet out of bed. It was hard, and they burned weirdly when I stepped down without all my toes onto not-quite-healed stitching. They gave me a black woolen sweater and a knitted cap and some fatigue pants, underwear, socks, and boots to put on. Nice clothes, I suppose. I was really hungry.
The doctor walked down the aisle, stopping to push a couple buttons on the girl's monitor. She wasn't awake yet.
“Feeling okay?” he shouted from down the hall. I shrugged. I just wanted to get out of there. I fingered at the bandage on my right arm, where the laser had dug its mark into me.
“Well, if you can walk, come with me.”
It takes me a minute to gain the wherewithal to shuffle down the aisle while holding onto bedposts. I pass the blond girl, she's out like a light. Probably won't be getting up anytime soon. Her skin is frostbitten and her pretty face is all blistered. At the end of the hall and around the corner, a giant steel door barricaded us in. The doctor opened it with his keycard, and we entered a security chamber. A short black woman sat behind a desk with an x-ray machine.
“We're checking him out,” said the doc. “0-6-0-4-3-7.”
The security officer punched it into the computer. “He's not listed with a name.” The doc turned to me, “You got a name, son?” I stared blankly at him. If I had a name, I didn't remember it.
The doc chit-chatted with her, "He's an off-worlder, so I wouldn't be surprised if his DNA isn't in the database.”
The lady finished her imputation and I was shuffled through a series of anti-chambers to what looked like a waiting room. A middle-aged, tall, thick, blond and bearded man sat waiting for me. He stood to greet the doctor.
“How do you do, doctor?” he had a thick accent, I couldn't tell from where.
“Just fine,” the doc pulled out a pen and checked a couple things off on his clipboard. The viking smiled at him, “And how is he?”
“He was in rough shape but he's healing up. Just sign here.”
“Good, good. No, he looks good, aside from the skin.”
“Looks like you got a pretty good deal,” said the doc as the man scrawled his mark on the clipboard. “We don't get many off-worlders anymore.”
“Well, that's why Ichabod bought him.”
That's when I realized I had been sold into slavery. Could be worse, I thought.