Greg Cassidy was having a good day. He got to get off work at the insurance company early, there was a cancellation at a fancy restaurant that he took advantage of to get a table, and to top it all off he was planning to ask his longtime girl friend to marry him. It was a good day.
In retrospect he wished he wasn't such a nice guy. If he hadn't held the elevator door at his apartment building for those two large guys, he probably would have continued to have a good day. He had never seen the two men before, but had no reason to believe that they would attempt to cause him harm. But he did hold the elevator which allowed the two men to get in.
Once inside nothing was said as is normal for an elevator. It was strange to Greg that neither of the men pressed a button to go to a particular floor. But something like that is not something that normally bothers Greg. Right before they got to Greg's floor, one of the men grabbed him. Now Greg was pretty fit, he worked out regularly and tried to keep in pretty decent shape. But these guys were huge and massively out powered him. The one that grabbed him wrapped his huge arms around Greg's body pinning his own arms down. Greg tried to kick his way out and managed to kick the other in the face. But Greg's best efforts did nothing other than piss the other man off.
The man he kicked reared back and punched Greg in the testicles. The force of the blow sent his head spinning. He didn't know where he was for a few seconds. When he regained his composure he realized that he had been dropped on the floor and the elevator doors were open. He made a desperate attempt to crawl to safety, but to no prevail. The men grabbed his legs and dragged him back. He tried to scream, but his mouth was covered with a damp rag. He started to get dizzy and felt faint. The last thought before he blacked out was, It was going to be such a good day.
Greg woke up in a dark room. He had a splitting headache and the taste of pennies in his mouth and his groin still hurt. He didn't know that people actually used chloroform anymore, he always thought that was just something in the movies. He stood up and looked around. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could tell that there were other people in the room. Before he could ask any of them what was going on, a screen on one wall turned on and the silhouette of a man appeared.
He said in a proper English accent, "Good day, gentlemen. You may be asking yourselves why it is that you are here. The answer to that is simple: You are here to survive. You see, I am a very, very wealthy man. I am also, admittedly a bit eccentric. I love to see a good contest, but regrettably, have yet been able to find one that keeps my interest. That is why I have developed a contest of my own. The object of this game is to make it out of the jungle alive. This will be no simple matter and the ones that make it will be greatly rewarded. But beware, there are things on my island that exist nowhere on Earth, and not everything is as it seems. Good luck and God speed."
The screen went blank and a door on the opposite wall opened. Bright sunlight poured through and hurt Greg's eyes. He didn't know what to think. He had no survival training, he didn't know what to do in the jungle. And from the looks of things, neither did anybody else in the room. When his eyes readjusted to the light he saw that there were twenty-five men in all. There was a wide variety of people, Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians. There also was a wide variety of social classes based on their cloths. Some were in business suits like him, others were in blue collar work cloths, a couple appeared to be below the poverty line, and one guy appeared to be wearing a prison uniform.
He heard one man voice an opinion that he wasn't going to participate in the sick freak's twisted game and just wait in the room. Almost everybody, including Greg, voiced an agreement. But the strange British guy must have planned for that, for at that moment the floor of the room started to move towards the door. Greg looked back and saw that the moving floor was reveling a gaping hole with large metal spikes at the bottom. Greg took this as a sign that they wouldn't be staying in the room and stepped through the door and into the jungle.