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 bougainvillea. 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 didnât scream. I didnât move, either. My tears were 100% gone and every muscle in my bodyâwell, except maybe my heartâ 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 hard or run like hell, right? But somewhere along the way, scientists realized that âfreezeâ was a common response, too.
Apparently, thatâs 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 kidânot a literal child, but a young guyâraise his hands, shout, âFireball!â 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 â âWho the fuck throws a fireball at a dog?â â while raising my shovel in front of my face like a shield.
Now I know what youâre 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 fireâs 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 didnât even duck.
The worst partâfor me, not for him, of courseâwas the smell.
Iâd been working in the garden for hours and Iâd 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.
Iâd never been prone to panic attacks, but I could disassociate with the best of them, so I did.
It was like flipping a switch.
I walked over to where heâd fallen, perfectly calmly, and knelt beside him. I carefully did not think about how Iâd 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 wouldnât 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 like 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.
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?
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For a perilous moment, I felt my disassociation 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. Sheâd 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 wasnât 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 didnât know, couldnât tell the difference.
âLeave it,â I managed to choke out. âZelda, leave it.â
Zelda didnât leave it.
She took one more wobbling step forward. Then she lowered her head, sniffed near the boyâs 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.
âZelda, no. Leave it!â 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 oppossum poop or road kill, but still. Youâd think either of those would be more compelling to a dog than some weird blue goop.
She didnât 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.
âNo! Zelâdaâ¦â The word broke apart in my mouth, then trailed off into disbelief.
Z was 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 hadnât 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 wouldâve 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 didnât know which.
And even though I didnât exactly feel like I owed him anything â It wasnât my fireball! I didnât throw it! I hadnât attacked a woman carrying an injured dog, completely unprovoked! â
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 Iâd 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 didnât know that her kid had just cooked himself with a fireball, and I couldnât 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 Zeldaâs tongue, my glove, the inside of this kidâs mouth. I scraped at his jeans where some of the syrup had dribbled, but couldnât 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 didnât.
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 didnât look like we were in Florida anymore, so maybe I was the one whoâd ended up in North Carolina somehow
Eventually, I gave up. Iâd 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 heâd thrown a fireball at me.
How the hell had he thrown a fireball at me?
Also, where he got 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, Iâd 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 thatâs 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 â on my motherâs grave, if sheâd been dead â 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 Zeldaâs 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. Healing potions made of blue goo.
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 usânot Jack, not me, and definitely not Zeldaâneeded to be here if more of those squirrels appeared.
I didnât know what to do.
But sometimes, you gotta play the cards youâre dealt. Even if you donât know the rules, donât trust the dealer, and arenât completely sure youâre playing with a full deck.