Prologue
She was drowning.
She remembered swallowing the pill, washing it down with water like she always did.
She remembered the sharp pull in her stomach, like her insides were on fire; her throat constricting … No air.
She remembered the ground opening beneath her feet, hard bedrock shooting upward, growing and growing in size until it became a cocoon that encircled and trapped her within.
Nails scratching at stone, useless.
Voice screaming, screaming.
Tears falling.
Throat raw.
Water rising from somewhere unknown, higher and higher.
Eyes stinging, blurring.
Breath held for seconds, minutes. Face blue, fingers numb.
Screaming again, louder and louder and louder still.
Throat filling with water, burning like fire.
Cold, so cold.
A crack like the world was ending, a light so bright it was an inferno.
Earth shattering, boulders crumbling.
Falling to the ground, nails scratching frantically at linoleum.
Coughing and gasping up water, crying, crying, crying.
Sunlight filtering in through a window, an entire world moving on while hers was ending.
A white wall, a white ceiling, everything encased in emptiness and despair.
Pain all over, a heaviness like the weight of the world had been placed upon her. A strange feeling within, as her DNA rewrote itself, molecules forming and reforming into something inhuman.
Blackness at the edges of her vision, growing, growing...
Blind, she was blind, couldn't see anything, feel anything, but that was okay because she was fading, fading, fading....
Gone.
***
He was drowning.
He remembered running...
Ground hard beneath his feet.
Wind whistling through his hair.
Time slowing, seconds like eons, falling off the clock like molasses.
Bullets flying through the air....
Fear in a young boy's eyes...
Desperation, a sickness he could feel in his bones; because there was no way in hell he was letting another family be broken apart.
Lead hitting flesh, shattering like the ground had broken open.
Fire all over, a strange feeling at first; pain, he believed it was called.
Blood blooming all over his body, like he was covered in a bed of roses.
Falling, seconds like eons.
Legs and arms flailing, numb and useless, wanting to run away, to find her and go back to before the world turned to shit.
Her?
Strange, he couldn't remember her name, just a smile and the color red.
Hitting the ground, feeling like all his bones had splintered.
Blood spreading everywhere, lungs flooding with it.
The old man looking at him, fear in his eyes too.
A smirk, more painful now than all those he had cracked while living on the streets combined, trying to stay positive for her.
"You didn't see that coming?"
Heart beating like a bird's wings, faster and faster, and then fleeting, fleeting. Flying, fading.
Memories washing over him like a warm bath:
A smile and the color red,
A tower as tall as the sky,
A dinner table set for four,
The promise of change and a new tomorrow and beginning anew.
And a name:
Wanda.
He noticed the sky then, how perfectly blue it was.
He couldn't breath, he realized, but maybe that was because of the altitude.
He couldn't feel, he noted, as his heart began to fail.
He couldn't see, he discovered, as his sight began to blacken.
But he tossed all that aside, focused on what he could see of the sky, how perfectly blue it was, letting it fill his vision, let it envelop him and become his everything.
And then he was fading, fading, fading...
Gone.