Prologue

Something felt off. No, not only something, everything was wrong.

He felt like he was waking up from a dream but with a far more intense feeling of disassociation. The air, the sound ringing in his ears, the pain in his chest when he breathed in, even the way his clothes felt on his skin was strange. It was a stabbing pain in his head like an icepick plunged into one ear through to the other side. Everything, everywhere felt wrong.

He was standing outside, but he struggled to remember why he was there or how he got to this place. Why was he even standing with the pain in his head? In a moment of clarity, he realized how odd it was that he wasn’t panicking. Simply standing out in the open like this was far from normal behavior, but the sheer wrongness of everything kept him off balance, like a confusion-infused Prozac. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then another, and another. As he opened his eyes again, he took in the view of where he was, and then the memories slowly started to filter into his rebooting brain, filling in the story of how he got here.

Slowly he started to regain his balance and reason. Looking around to take in his surroundings, he was standing at the edge of a large forest. Ahead of him, a sloping hill poured down into a large valley. To his left, he saw gigantic mountains that rose above the trees. Not the windswept sandstone mesas he was familiar with, but more like the granite monoliths of the Rockies.

He wasn’t familiar with this place. This was not simply a new location, everything he could see looked strange. The trees didn’t seem like any trees that he had ever seen before, even in books or movies. Still unmistakably recognizable as trees, the branches, leaves, and even the bark were all just a little bit off. It was as though the scene in front of him was painted by a talented blind artist who had heard what everything was supposed to look like in great detail but had never actually seen it before starting to paint. The trees had a dark metallic sheen with arching branches and large deep green leaves. The clouds were oddly different, resembling wispy vines spreading across the horizon. Even the grass on the ground was thicker than what he was used to and had a slight purplish hue that made it look like something you would see on a movie set.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He took another deep breath. The pain in his head was starting to recede. Things were starting to fall into place in his mind. The strangeness of his environment served to prove to him that what he was seeing was real. The events of the past few hours had actually happened, and the strange air that he was breathing, the unfamiliar wind coming up the hill, and the strange new environment all around him, all fell in line exactly with the crazy story that he had been told.

He looked around and spotted his bag. It was lying on the ground at his feet. Reaching down, he grabbed it and looked inside. It contained all of the stuff he had hurriedly crammed into it back at his broken-down car before abandoning it on the side of the road. A half-full water bottle, the dogeared paperback he had kept at his desk, a mostly dead flashlight, a can of Red Bull, the pair of street tacos he had bought for his dinner but forgot to eat when his plans for the day had been sidetracked.

Thankfully, his iPod was still in the pocket of his hoodie. He pulled it out and was happy when the screen lit up as normal. It still had over half a charge. He wondered how he was ever going to get it charged up again. Well, that’s the problem for later he told himself. He scanned the horizon, and just as he had been promised, there was a city in the distance. He could see some smoke coming from what appeared to be a small town just beyond the valley.

Putting the signature white headphones in his ears, he scrolled to his favorites playlist and pressed play. The first song started playing through the earphones, blocking out the low sound of the wind as it blew across the trees behind him. It was the theme song from the movie made by that famous rapper. He loved the opening lines and mouthed them along with the music. This was his one shot to change everything. To live the way he wanted and break away from his nothing life.

Pulling his hoodie down to his eyes, he started towards the town stepping in time to the rhythm. He felt optimistic in a way that he couldn’t ever remember feeling. For the first time in his life, he was free from all the pressures and obligations that had driven every choice he had ever made. He was cut off from everything he had ever known, but he felt as though the weight of the shackles holding him down had been suddenly released. He promised himself that this time things would be different. He had a second chance, and he wasn’t going to waste this life like his last.