Face First ch.01

“Miniature people moved into my head while I was sleeping and replaced my brain with cotton candy,” was the very first thought to cross the boy's mind, and it did not make any sense at all.

“Sttttttupppppttttt mmmmmuuuffffffrrrrr bbbbrrrrrkkkkb bbeooo beeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyssssssssssssrrrrrrrrr!”

Were those words? Probably. They weren't water, that was for sure. Not enough wishy washy noises. Too pointed and very pissed off.

The last thing he remembered was standing up, shoulders tense, back arched, salt water soaked. That much was clear. Then, all of a sudden it was like a pipe burst in heaven. Like the angels were bowling. Like someone poked a hole in one of the clouds. Like God was flooding the world again because he hated rainbows.

“Peeeeeesssshhhhhhhheeeeeeetttttt! Beeeeeeeetttttt fffffffffffuuuuuuuuttttttt oooooooooooottttttt oooooooooooo.”

Plan and prepare all you want. When you're thinking about running away, a God sized tsunami ripping your boat in half never comes to mind. Sixty two feet of aluminum--a hundred pounds of ship's mast bouncing up and down on your half conscious skull is beyond worst case scenario.

“Whaaaat is ur problemmm?

This is what happens when you "borrow" your teacher's boat with every intention to keep or destroy it. Call it karma. Call it reaping and sowing. Hindsight is still less than twenty-twenty when your eyes are rolled backwards, staring at the far side of your skull.

Annoying doesn't even scratch the surface. Like when you're trying to sleep and someone keeps poking you, only now there's less drool and instead, more blood and brain cells leaking onto the deck.

"I'mmm going to killll you if youu live through thisss."

He felt like a pinata who wanted to kill every kid who had never cared about the candy; who just wanted to beat the crap out of a paper-mache pony until it's head flew across the yard.

He'd be lying if he said he regretted running away though. He did what he had to do to get out of the orphanage, even if that meant getting beaten senseless in the middle of a storm.

"I don't even think he can hear me."

What was going on though? He couldn't see anything. Everything looked twisted, like his eyes had been screwed in backwards. They kept turning in circles and crashing into each other like a couple of cars in a demolition derby.

"I can't understand you," the boy replied to the strange noises. His left ear was working better than his right, but his brain wasn't doing anything with what he was hearing. The letters were all stretched out like someone was pulling at them from all sides.

“All your words are inside bubbles. Someone put them inside bubbles... Am I under water?”

"Hey, moron. Get out of the way!"

Something warm was leaking out of his ear, and he really hoped that it was just blood. He didn't want to think about the itty-bitty men and women inside of his head using his skull like a public bathroom.

Was it a he or a she? She didn't look like a he. If she was a she, she looked to be a girl about his age: eleven or twelve. Her head hung by itself in the air, surrounded by a halo of blurry nothing. Two plus two said that it was probably attached to a body, but even on his better days he wasn't very good at adding things together.

It bobbed back and forth in front of him almost too fast for his eyes to track, mouthing angry words, covered in bright blue hair. It wasn't as blue as the sky or as blue as the ocean. It didn't remind him of sapphires or even the beautiful, brightly colored birds that he had once seen outside the small window in his cell. It was more blue like... Walmart, or interstate highway signs, or the same kind of blue plastic they use to make kiddie pools. From the side, her hair sloped down from the back to the front in a bob cut with little zig-zags along the bottom, almost like a set of stairs. When she shook her head back and forth the boy thought it looked like a miniature, blue escalator running down the side of her face.

Then pain. Sharp pain shot through his side as he heard the girl yell, “Move!”

A steel toed boot slammed into his leg, instantly turning that part of his body from numb, to sore, to...

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” he moaned in his still half dazed condition.

Then, punch, crunch, splatter of blood, the girls gloved fist came down on his nose like a rocket propelled brick.

“Owwww!” he cried out, cupping his face as an explosion of reds and yellows sprayed out of his nostrils. “What is wrong with you?”

“Move!” she shouted back, bending over to shove him out of the way.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” he continued to complain as she rolled him over onto his stomach. Fine bits of glass stuck and stabbed through his shirt as he was turned over. Half conscious, more than half stupid, he pressed his palms against the grass beneath him as he pushed himself to his feet, crunching small shards to powder and larger pieces to bits that stung as they cut open his hands.

He didn't give much thought to the pain, or the blood, or even the girl who was walking around, making biting comments under her breath but otherwise ignoring him. Instead he was focused on trying to figure out where exactly he had ended up after getting his ship, his face, and most of his life smashed in by that storm.

He rubbed at his eyes and asked the question, more to himself than to anyone else, “Where am I? What is this place?”

Looking back and forth from place to place, he had to wonder if he had died and woken up in a cartoon. Everything looked so... Walt Disney. It was all too bright and sunny. Pretty, little flowers. Perfect, green grass exactly two point five inches tall. No scabs of brown earth. No patches of dried yellow.

A little town sat only a short distance away with buildings made of every kind of shape except for squares and rectangles. There were houses shaped like domes, and cones, and spheres, and even a few that looked a bit like giant crayons sticking out of the ground. In some places the shapes were even stuck together in odd sorts of ways. He watched as a woman walked out of a dome that was attached to a crayon that might have also been connected to a pyramid, but he couldn't tell for sure from this angle.

On top of all the oddly shaped buildings was at least one, if not more, antenna like poles. Some had as many as a dozen different poles on top of them. And just like the buildings they decorated, not one of them was exactly like the others. One curled up and spiraled around itself. Another split in two different directions and was connected back in the middle by what looked like a few different kinds of wire. There was even one that looked like it might have exploded at one point and then was reassembled with whatever they had left. In other words, it really didn't make any sense at all.

And hundreds and hundreds windmills, round and about the size of a basketball, mounted and placed just about everywhere he could see, because someone felt the need to make some place that already looked crazy into a giant middle finger in the face of all symmetry obsessed compulsives.

While all of that was on one side of him, the other side had something that was, in a way, even more interesting. In the opposite direction of the town there was absolutely nothing. The ground just dropped away. He didn't know how far down it went, mostly because he really didn't want to lean over to check. But all he could see in front of him was a blue, meshed with a foggy white that shouldn't have been, but reminded him too much of the sky. But how could the sky be below him?

“Where's the ground?” he asked, inching toward the edge in confusion.

She had been walking around, picking through the glass on the ground, but not finding whatever she was looking for. "You broke every single one of them. It'll take Jek months to get me another set of beakers like these. It could be too late by then..."

"Hello?"

Finally she gave up and stood up straight, shaking her head in anger and looking away as if she couldn't bear the sight of him. "Have you looked underneath you?" she spat.

“No, I mean, where's the rest of it?” He motioned toward the edge of the cliff.

“Down there..." she flared the corner of her upper lip and rolled her eyes. "...somewhere.”

She walked right up to the edge, standing so close that the tips of her boots stuck out over the drop. “Well, not right now from the look of things. We're probably flying over the ocean right now.”

He raised an eyebrow at this. “Flying? What do you mean we're flying?”

“It means if I were to suddenly push you, and you were to fall off the edge, you would have just over thirty seconds to pee yourself and make peace with God before hitting the water. I hope you're good at multi tasking.”

"Pretty tough talk for someone just a sucker punch away from dropping off the edge."

The boy remembered playing a video game a long time ago that had a character who this girl reminded him of. The girl in the game was rude; sarcastic. She didn't get along with the main character for any reason, no matter how important it was for them to work together. In fact, he thought she was so annoying that every now and then he would take a few swings at her with his sword for some not so friendly payback. But for the most part this blue haired, pre-teen was the exact copy of that character. The only difference being, this girl didn't have six arms or drink blood... Probably.

"Please. You wouldn't stand a chance in a fight with me."

He resisted the urge to crack his knuckles. “What is this, like some kind of ship?”

“Do you see any wings? It's an island... Probably flying at around three or four thousand feet over the Atlantic right about now.”

"Oh, that makes sense." He flexed his sarcasm muscle, trying to figure out what she was playing at. Was he suppose to believe this nonsense?

Even the way she dressed wasn't close to anything he had ever seen in real life. He wasn't even sure if he could call them “clothes”. All the different accessories and strange things wrapped around her, along with the layers she had underneath, was more like a suit than anything else. She had a thin belt covered in small, metal strips wrapped around her shoulders, waist and torso at least five or six times. A bracer with leather straps covered most of her forearm. Along one side of it there were three, golden circles covered in arrows and strange, crescent shapes. On her feet she wore a large pair of boots that looked as if they might have belonged to Batman at some point. Her hands were covered with thick, metal gloves, and both of them had the word “AIM” written on them in sloppy, red paintbrush strokes right over the knuckles.

"What does "Aim" mean? Is that suppose to be your name or something?"

She put her hand up and turned away from him. “I'm done answering questions, so you better be done asking them. How did you get up here? Did you sneak on the lift when we stopped for supplies? Were you hiding in a crate?”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know where here is. If you could just tell me...”

“Hey!” she shouted, cutting him off. “I told you, I'm done with questions.”

Looking straight into her doubly oversized, blue eyes, his brow came together ever so slightly. “I've been having a really bad day. Actually, I take that back. I was having a great day. A fantastic day even. Until a tornado, or a tsunami, or a sea monster shaped like a huge wall of water came out of nowhere and wrecked me and my boat. I don't know what it was. I don't care what it was. Whatever. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure that the wave didn't actually murder me, and this afterlife thing isn't exactly what everyone thought it would be. But right now I just want some answers, and if you could just cut me a little slack I would really appreciate it.”

“A wave? What kind of wave?”

“Really? That's what you got out of everything I just said? I don't know what kind of wave it was. It was the wet kind. The wet, skull crushing, empire state building sized kind.”

Her eyes seemed to focus, and he could practically see the dozen or more questions spinning between her ears like a hurricane picking up speed. Then suddenly, she reached out, grabbing him by the wrist and turning to pull him with her as she started to dash toward a nearby tower. “You need to come with me.”

“I'm not going anywhere until I get some answers.” He pulled back against her, but she held tight to his arm, scraping skin with the metal of her glove as they both stuttered half a step toward wherever she wanted to take him.

"I'm not giving you a choice." She kept low to the ground as she tightened the vice of her grip around his arm. Her blue hair fell across her face as she crouched, and only one eye shown through like a sharpened blade, feral and cutting in its confidence.

If it had been anyone else in his shoes, they might have swallowed their pride and done what she said. But in his case, he couldn't just go with her without knowing where they were going. There were too many people looking for him, and he wasn't about to let them take him back.

"Let go of me!"

"Fine!" She released her grip in an instant, sending him tumbling backwards off the edge of the island.