It started with the gap that shouldn’t have been there, a narrow space between two perpendicular wooden fences at the threshold of an abandoned apartment complex backyard overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. Actually, that’s where it accelerated. It truly began a handful of hours earlier, under considerably more mundane circumstances that all the same started Richie’s tumble down the hill and into the rabbit hole. Down, down, down. His bare knuckles stung, bruised on what remaining teeth the presumed crackhead or tweaker who bum-rushed him in the alleyway still had. The thug’s face was haggard, the look of a young man going on age seventy five, whose remaining ambitions and optimism died with the last of his functioning brain cells, ravaged by whatever cocktail of narcotics he’d been drowning himself in over the last how many seasons. While the impetus to attack Richie for whatever cash or valuables he may have had on hand was an opportunistic one judging by Richie’s harmless outward appearance, muscles and dragon tattoos concealed under red jacket and trailing fuzzy scarf, it was nonetheless a poorly planned out one. The junkie tramp looked ninety five pounds soaking wet, all sinew and pale skin and bone. Even any attempts to bite wildly like a rabid dog were axed with the blow that knocked out those teeth. All the same, Richie recoiled in revulsion and the fear that he probably just got infected with a dozen different horrific gutter diseases. While he may have been throwing stones in glass houses on account of being a homeless drifter himself, of the two of them, Richie had obviously made the better career of it.

Riding the rails from his last haunt when the vice closed too tight and hotwiring another car would only bring the hammer down faster and harder, the ginger-haired boy randomly dropped off here in this metropolitan cityscape that sprawled out into emerald fields and rolling hills, dotted and interwoven with crystal blue lakes like some kind of arthouse fusion of wilderness and urban jungle, with sixteen dollars in a battered wallet, a swiss army knife, and the clothes on his back to his name. He’d lay low here for a while where the territory was far more spread out and regularly peppered with violent crimes and incidents to detract attention from Richie’s own survival necessities of pick-pocketing and petty thefts. Not as bad and rundown as Detroit, but it was an ideal place to drop off the radar. That had all been without accounting for the reality that, as a vagrant with no identity or legal protections himself, Richie was fair game to the city’s swathes of other undesirables. No honor among thieves.

That’s why it always came in handy to be a proficient street fighter. Richie didn’t care how out of his head the loaded punk was, a solid kick to the junk always dropped a man like a bag of bricks, and so it had. Then he knocked out his teeth, grabbed and twisted the wrist of the clumsy knife hand so hard that it broke clean with a gruesome snap, spilling the knife to the grimy ground, kicked in the side of his knee to pop the ligament, and finished by shoving him hard into the cold wall. Richie almost winced at the sound of the thud the junkie’s head made against the wall, but his anger over having rotten-tooth abrasions on his knuckles overrode any empathy he might have felt for the hunter who had become the hunted. Survival of the fittest, motherfucker - don’t start fights you can’t finish.

Richie was willing to leave things there, and made the rookie mistake of turning his back before he made sure the enemy was down for the count. He stayed on his toes again as the wounded man’s animal shriek of blind rage alerted him to the fact that this fight - if such a one-sided beatdown could be called a fight - wasn’t quite over yet. Richie turned, barely ducking out of the way as the man swung a heavy metal pipe at his head. A lightning-quick glance at the now bare wall proved that the junkie, in a fit of mixed hysterical strength and drug-fueled adrenaline rush, had ripped the implement clear off the wall, and was powering through his ruined knee, blind to pain as he banked on an all-or-none final go at Richie.

I’ve had enough. Richie sighed. Keeping the hand he’d scuffed on the punk’s now-missing teeth tucked away in his pocket, Richie threw out his hand against the follow-up swing. He caught the bludgeon with an audible, cathartic thud in his open palm, closing fingers over it and wrenching it free of the attacker’s grip, pulling him off-balance. The pipe clattered to a corner of the alley as Richie raised his dominant arm overhead and dropped the point of his elbow directly down into the man’s face. Crunch goes the nose. That finally did the trick, and the prick collapsed, whimpering like a whipped dog as his face leaked tainted addict’s blood.

“Nighty night, asshole.” Richie sighed, then turned to walk out the way he had come. All this just for foraging in a dumpster out back of a bakery for something to salvage for a desperate breakfast. This tweaker in particular must have already pissed over the alley and marked it for himself. People liked to put up fences everywhere, Richie guessed, even in the concrete jungle of the displaced and the dirty. His eyebrow twitched suddenly, and a wave of righteous indignation came over him. He grit his teeth so hard he realized he might chip a tooth, and forced himself to stop. He turned around, looking at the unconscious, split-faced man who caused him so much trouble unprovoked. A sudden sadistic streak took hold of Richie, one that he couldn’t place as having come from anywhere in particular. Not used to dealing with such violent, irrational impulses, he had no practice at restraining them, and gave in instantly. Richie kicked in the beaten man’s ribs, and heard them break. The satisfaction of the act instantly melted away to cold disgust, both at the sound, and with himself.

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I think I’m going to be sick. Richie held his mouth. He was salivating uncontrollably and his heart was lurching. He felt hot bile well up in the back of his throat. He fell to his knees and lost his excuse for a lunch - or last night’s dinner - all over the brutalized thief.

Lovely. Insult to injury.

A dog was barking somewhere, either a stray or a guard dog corralled up behind a link fence somewhere who had been alerted to the scuffle by the sounds of violence, and been roused to a frenzied alarm because of it. Richie had these kinds of sounds memorized and categorized down to a science. The sounds of arguments, trading blows, frenzied dogs, and breaking windows usually preceded the instant escape-cue sound of sirens. Better get going.

And so Richie stumbled out of the unmarked alleyway, leaving prince charming stewing in pain and vomit on the dirtied floor.

Through little fault of his own, the distance Richie put between himself and the scene of the urban duel wasn’t enough. The ever-familiar sirens howled their blood-curdling screams down the streets again despite the boy’s efforts to just keep to himself and stay out of trouble. As was usually the case, trouble found him anyway. The cruiser screamed to a screeching halt at and partially over the curb right in front of Richie only three blocks from the nondescript alley. Richie’s fight-or-flight instincts were engaged, but ground to a freezing halt when a gun was leveled at him. At the same time, the other cop cars were closing in on him, he heard the draw of several more pistols from their holsters, and his ears were pounded with demands to get on the fucking ground now. All this over a street fight with some crackhead they’d sooner walk over as he laid dying in a ditch anyway?

Richie had been in trouble before, was no stranger to spending a few nights on a cold slab of a bed in detention cells while undergoing questioning here and there, but not like this. He’d never been encircled by guns that meant business. He complied, going facedown in the same grime his unfortunate opponent had just ten minutes earlier, and felt his own wrists nearly snap as they were wrenched behind his back to be slapped in biting cuffs.

How had this all sprung on him so quick?

Richie blinked.

He was on his feet again. No, he hadn't gotten up or been yanked up. He wasn't being walked to a cruiser. He wasn't bound anymore. No, he hadn't been bound in the first place, he realized, even as the echoes of the red and blue lights flickered in his weary eyes. Had that been a daydream of some kind? He wondered as he stood, slack-jawed and dumbstruck. A shiver went down his spine. A premonition, that's what they called it, right? And it would become deja vu in a minute if Richie didn't snap out of it and get his ass in gear. He could hear the distant echo of a siren. Shocked suddenly into action, as if by being dunked into ice water, Richie bolted into a dead sprint.

Losing track of how many blocks he was clearing and how many random twists and turns onto and off of streets both trafficked and offshot, Richie felt the taste of iron on his tongue as his heart pumped madly, laboring to keep up with his panting breath. His quads ached madly, and smaller sensations of burning muscle were sparking and nibbling all over his body. The cityscape rushed by in a panicked blur, and at a certain point Richie felt his movements were not his own, as though he were being guided by an unseen force. Ducking into another dead-end alley, he kicked off the walls using a large locked dumpster as a starting point springboard, throwing himself up and over the ledge of a low roof. He bounded across the rooftops, tucking and rolling between leaps from roofs, sliding under the overhangs of adjoining buildings and branches of metal fixtures, till at last he came to a sudden dropoff in the sky-level terrain. He had climbed some distance, like stepping stones rising out of the streets, till at last he was at an elevation that churned his stomach to look down upon those same streets, which now looked like part of a child’s model playset of a city. He could see the sprawling nature park as a radius of greenery with quaint little shrubs and trees whose height paled in comparison to Richie’s own, looking like little more than reeds. The drop before him was in fact a steep slope, an angled pane of reflective window which tapered off to a sudden right angle drop some dozen meters down. Richie could hear the sirens echo in the distance, fading off as their pursuit went cold elsewhere. If they indeed had been in pursuit of Richie in the first place, and their sudden appearance had not been incidental to Richie’s vision of his arrest, he had lost them. All the same, he could not stop his sprinting momentum in time. A foot stumbled over the bank, and then he was sliding like a freeform skier down the glass slope.

Richie shrieked mortal terror as his stomach dropped and his life flashed before his eyes. He tumbled over the abrupt edge of the artisan angled glass protrusion of the tower, and he was in freefall. He struck his tailbone hard on the underbit ledge of an adjacent structure and pinballed off of it, plummeting at the mercy of the winds once again. Below him was a hidden canopy of treetops, hitherto unseen as they were boxed in by a quartet of towers whose sides intersected at each corner. Leaves and branches whipped at Richie’s body as he tumbled and bounced through the limbs. At last he fell clear through the bottom of the many arms of the conjoined treetops, and crashed through a ceiling of glass.