Chương 2: Forever or Five Minutes

The black nothingness lasted seconds at best, but they were long seconds. I think I was still drawing in a breath to scream when my surroundings changed. No more bougainvilleas. No more scrawny sand pines. No more scrub brush, white sand, or yellow dirt. Instead, I was in a quintessentially perfect deciduous forest. It looked like a movie forest. The Hunger Games, maybe. Cool, green, quiet. Lovely, really. Except for being totally wrong in every possible way.

I let my breath out on a long, slow exhale, but I didn't scream. I didn't move, either. My tears were 100% gone and every muscle in my body—well, except maybe my heart— was frozen with uncertainty. Not fear, exactly, but doubt. They used to think the adrenaline response was fight or flight. Danger hits, and you either hit back hard or run like hell, right? But somewhere along the way, scientists realized that 'freeze' was a common response, too.

Apparently, that's what was happening to me, because I felt like my entire body was made of stone, as if I was a living statue. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw a flicker of movement. I turned my head, just in time to see a kid—not a literal child, but a young guy—raise his hands, shout, "Fireball!" and hurl a literal ball of flame in my direction. WTF? Seriously, who does that? I was holding my dog. My injured, incredibly sweet, small, fluffy, white dog.

Who the fuck throws a fireball at someone holding a dog?! In. 02 seconds, my freeze turned into pure rage. I screamed those exact words—"Who the fuck throws a fireball at a dog?" —while raising my shovel in front of my face like a shield. Now I know what you're thinking: what good is a shovel against a fireball? Obviously, fire goes around things. It burns through stuff. With a shovel, maybe the wooden handle starts burning.

If the fire's hot enough, maybe the steel melts, and then molten metal is dripping all over your hands. Yeah. 0/10. Would not recommend. But lucky me: that is not what happened. The fireball hit the blade of my shovel and bounced. Bounced. Right back at the idiot who threw it. He didn't even duck. The worst part—for me, not for him, of course—was the smell. I'd been working in the garden for hours and I'd skipped lunch. I was hungry. The smell of his face melting was like grilled hamburger.

Okay, his scream was pretty bad, too. He fumbled around at his waist for a second, like he was trying to pull something out of his pants pocket, and then… he toppled. Face forward. He hit the ground with a solid thump that kicked up a swirl of leaf debris. I was kinda frozen again. I'd never been prone to panic attacks, but I could dissociate with the best of them, so I did. It was like flipping a switch. I walked over to where he'd fallen, perfectly calmly, and knelt beside him.

I carefully did not think about how I'd just been doing the same thing in my own yard next to my dog, and I equally carefully did not think about my other dogs. (Where were they? What had happened to them? It was like a tiny little scream in the deepest depths of my brain, and I ignored it.) I set my shovel down. I noticed that it looked different. Not in the way you might expect. I wouldn't have been surprised if the steel blade was scorched or the wooden handle charred.

Instead, the blade had lightened to an almost silvery white, and the handle, top to bottom, had turned deep black. It was as if it had been remade out of new materials. I noticed it. And then I thought no more about it. It was just one more oddity. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Zelda wiggled against my chest, her paws on my shoulder. I set her down gently beside the shovel, on the side opposite the… Was I going to call it a body?

For a perilous moment, I felt my dissociation starting to crack. I closed my eyes and took a few slow, deliberate breaths. In. Out. Under control. When I opened them, Zelda had staggered to her feet. She'd made her way across the shovel and was nudging the kid. Ugh. Did she smell the aroma of fresh-cooked meat, too? Of course she did. She was a dog, with a much better sense of smell than me. At least she wasn't trying to eat his face.

Hysterical, somewhat desperate, and totally inappropriate laughter bubbled up in my throat. I swallowed hard. Or maybe it was nausea. I didn't know, couldn't tell the difference.

"Leave it," I managed to choke out.

"Zelda, leave it." Zelda didn't leave it. She took one more wobbling step forward. Then she lowered her head, sniffed near the boy's hand, and nosed a shard of broken glass. It glinted blue, with a puddle of something viscous forming in the moss beneath it. She licked it.

"Zelda, no. Leave it!" I said again, grabbing at the shard. Being injured had apparently affected her hearing, because she was usually pretty darn good about that command. Of course, usually I was saying it about opossum poop or roadkill, but still. You'd think either of those would be more compelling to a dog than some weird blue goop.

She didn't think so, though, because while I was examining the broken glass, trying to figure out what it was and trying not to think about where it had come from, she lapped at the puddle of blue liquid.

"No! Zel—da…" The word broke apart in my mouth, then trailed off into disbelief. Z is a rough-coated Jack Russell, the scruffy kind. White with black ears and one black paw. Cutest dog ever in my completely unbiased opinion, but those bloody tears along her back had not added to her beauty. Except now, as I watched, before my eyes, they were closing up. Healing. Her fur was still matted with dried blood. She hadn't miraculously gotten clean. But the deep red gashes closed, turned pink, then faded away.

I dropped the glass and ran a hand over her back, fingers light, ready to feel torn skin, raw muscle, blood. Instead, I felt fur. Zelda sighed, a soft doggy puff, and eased into a lying position. She tucked her nose against her paws. Her tail gave one tired little thump. I would've liked to take a break just then. Lie down next to her, bury my face in her fur, and cry my eyes out. That sounded like a really excellent plan. Except… there was still the kid. The kid. Or, you know, the body. I didn't know which.

And even though I didn't exactly feel like I owed him anything—It wasn't my fireball! I didn't throw it! I hadn't attacked a woman carrying an injured dog, completely unprovoked! Well, despite all that, I did feel like I should help him if I could. If it was even possible. I rolled him over. His moan was as tiny and as pitiful as the whimper Zelda had given earlier. And his face was the most horrific thing I'd ever seen in my life. I closed my eyes, swallowed the bile, tried to think.

Every cell in my body wanted to run away as fast as I could, to leave this scene behind me and never think of it again. But somewhere in the world there was a mom who didn't know that her kid had just cooked himself with a fireball, and I couldn't do that to her. I swiped my finger through the blue goo, trying to collect as much of it as I could, and then slid my finger between his barely parted lips. So, so, so gross.

I was grateful for my gloves because I think if my bare skin had touched his burnt lips, my revulsion would have stopped me cold. And I might have missed it. The change was minuscule. Seriously, so tiny it was almost imperceptible. But not quite. I looked back at the moss. The blue puddle was practically gone, smeared across Zelda's tongue, my glove, the inside of this kid's mouth. I scraped at his jeans where some of the syrup had dribbled, but couldn't collect even a drop.

It felt incredibly awkward and so invasive, but I slid my hand into his pocket, pulling the fabric inside out. The vial must have been half-in, half-out when he fell, because bits of glass were embedded in the cotton, along with more traces of blue goo. For the next infinite forever, I tried to get those traces into him. I pressed my glove to his lips. Dabbed, nudged, whispered dumb encouragement like he could hear me. I yearned for scissors to cut out the pocket so he could lick it.

I longed for water and a bowl, to soak out every last speck of blue so he could swallow it. And yes, I was smart enough to check his other pocket, just in case he had another vial tucked away. He didn't. I found his wallet, though. Jack Francis. Durham, North Carolina. Eighteen years old. Dumbass. What the hell was he doing flinging fireballs around in a Florida forest? Although it sure didn't look like we were in Florida anymore, so maybe I was the one who'd ended up in North Carolina somehow.

Eventually, I gave up. I'd done the best I could. Jack was still in deep shit. His burns were maybe slightly less horrifying than they had been. But only by a little. At this point, it felt like all I could do was wait. So I waited. Yes, I was waiting for him to die. Or maybe wake up and explain why the hell he'd thrown a fireball at me. How the hell had he thrown a fireball at me? Also, where did he get the blue goo? And how could I get him some more? I waited forever. Or about five minutes, maybe.

Whichever came first. The thing was, it did not exactly feel like a great time to just be sitting on the ground in an unfamiliar wilderness, watching a kid slowly die. Stuff was happening. Weird, crazy, surreal stuff. I believe I mentioned that as a certified crazy person, I'd had my share of hallucinations? In my experience, hallucinations were more like seeing a black cloud around a guy in a gas station and deciding he was dangerous.

According to my shrink, the black cloud was the hallucination, the decision that he was dangerous a delusion, but po-ta-to, po-tah-to, amirite? (Also, I am pretty sure that guy was dangerous and even though I have no proof, I figure that's mostly because I stayed the heck out of his way. No regrets over that decision.) Sometimes, though, I saw things out of the corners of my eyes that were gone when I looked closely.

Once I would have sworn—on my mother's grave, if she'd been dead—that I saw the same person walk into the police station three times in a row, never walking out. But mostly it was just colors. Red floating out of fires, a blue glow around one of my favorite teachers, that kind of thing. Hallucinations. You know what hallucinations were not? Gigantic squirrels that left your dog bleeding. I touched the dried blood in Zelda's fur, just to remind myself that it was real. It sure felt real.

She looked up at me and thumped her tail a couple of times before shifting to sprawl on her side, her head on my ankle. Hallucinations were also not scenic forests. Fireballs. Blue goo miraculously healing injured dogs. Error screens that appeared out of nowhere, though? Those could definitely be hallucinations. In fact, strange things that only you could see involving mysterious messages directed specifically to you? Pretty much the very definition of a hallucination.

That said, if this was a hallucination, I seemed to be trapped inside it, with a set of problems that were only going to get worse. Jack needed either serious medical care or some more of that blue stuff. I needed lunch. And none of us—not Jack, not me, and definitely not Zelda—needed to be here if more of those squirrels appeared. I didn't know what to do. But sometimes, you've gotta play the cards you're dealt.

Even if you don't know the rules, don't trust the dealer, and aren't completely sure you're playing with a full deck.