Zero Tolerance Policy In Effect

Copying this material in any way, shape, or form, without the express consent of the author will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including via civil suit.  The author has had enough.

Chapter One

My first thought upon waking was that maybe I was dead.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized how accurate that initial, intuitive, irrational notion was.  It seemed to pop into my consciousness as soon as consciousness did.  It made no sense.  It was based upon no reason.  It was just there.

I must be dead.

And just as quickly, gone again.

I wasn’t dead.   I was cold.  But it was an odd kind of cold, because it didn’t make me shiver, or feel uncomfortable, it was just an awareness of the fact.  I was cold.  And wet.  I was wet, too. 

I opened my eyes slowly, blinked to wipe away the blur of sleep, for I must have been asleep.  It was dark.  Newborn darkness, though.  It had that sense to it, though I wasn’t sure at that moment how it was I could sense newborn darkness from any other kind.  It wasn’t something I would have thought came naturally to ordinary people.  And certainly nothing I’d ever noticed before.

Or had I? 

Oddly, I didn’t remember, but I dismissed the slightly queasy feeling that notion brought to my stomach, and focused instead on my surroundings.  The immediate ones first.  Beneath me, dirt.  Solid packed, damp, but not muddy.  A few scraggly patches of crab grass and dandelions struggling for survival here and there, and looking proud of their triumph in such inhospitable conditions.  All right then.  I was on the ground.  Not flat ground, but an area that sloped precariously downward to a stretch of pavement at the bottom.  And on the other side of that pavement, another patch of ground, sloping upward—a mirror image of the one on which I lay.  And above them both, a ceiling.

A bridge.

I was on the sloping ground beneath a bridge.

On either side of the bridge, to my left and to my right, rain poured from heaven’s open spigot, soaking the road at the bottom, except for the part of it that was sheltered.

Why, I wondered, am I lying outdoors, on the ground, under a bridge, in the rain, at night?

Naked.

Drawing my attention inward again, to the things in closest proximity, I noted the damp sheet of cardboard that lay over me, like a makeshift blanket, and noted further that, aside from it, I wore nothing.  It had that wet cardboard smell to it, and as I flipped it off my body, I thought my skin did, as well.

I started to shake.  Not from the cold, because as I’ve already said, the cold didn’t bother me, and it seemed like it should, and that had me worried.  Maybe my nerves weren’t working just right, but at any rate, I was scared, and I could feel panic creeping like ice water through my veins.  And I closed my eyes, firmed my spine, held my breath, told myself, “Easy.  Just take it easy.  Just take it easy and figure this out.  It can’t be all that difficult to figure this out.”

Nodding in response to my own advice, I opened my eyes again, and this time, I looked down at my own body.  I was long, and I was lean.  Perhaps athletic, I thought, and it scared me that I didn’t know if I was or not.  Maybe I was just sickly.  Although I didn’t feel sickly.  And my body seemed more lean than skinny, which suggested the former theory more than the latter. 

I felt . . .

Strong. 

I opened my hands, and turned them to stare at them, then closed them again.  I studied my slender arms, lengthy legs, small waist and hips nearly the same size, and my compact, round little breasts as if I’d never seen them before.  It felt as if I never had.  And then I noticed a lock of hair hanging over my shoulder, and I grasped it, lifted it to look and feel and smell it.

It was copper in color, the kind of hair they call auburn, I thought, and it was curly and long, long, long, just like the rest of me.  But also like the rest of me, I had the feeling I’d never seen it before.

I stood up to see how long my hair was, and also to move around a bit.  Maybe if I woke up more thoroughly this fog in my head would clear and I’d be able to know who I was and what I was doing here in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night, naked and alone.

So I stood, there, noticing that my hair reached to the tops of my hipbones.  A sound jerked my attention away from it, though.  Something running, scampering, off in the distance.  My head snapped toward the sound fast, and I felt my nose wrinkling and realized I was scenting the moist air, and my eyes narrowed, and my mind thought, rabbit.  And then I saw it, scurrying from one clump of brush to the next, far, far in the distance.  Perhaps as much as a half mile from me.

And there was no possible way I could see a rabbit a half mile away in the dark, in the rain.  Much less identify it by smell. 

And yet I had, and I realized as my senses came to life one by one, that I could hear many many things and smell even more—the flitting of a little bird’s wings and the scent of the leaves in his nest, the hushed flight of a moth and the smell of powder on his body, the bubbling of a stream somewhere beyond sight and the smell of its water and even the fish that lived in its depths.  I smelled Autumn.  There were decaying leaves, their aroma so pungent and wonderful and evocative that it overwhelmed almost everything else.  It was comforting, that scent.   I heard the sound of cars on the road that had not yet come close enough to see and I could smell their exhaust.

My brows drew together, and my fingertips pressed to my forehead.  “What am I?” I whispered.

Lights came into view then.  Headlights, and a vehicle rolled closer and closer on the road below.  I started to move carefully down the hill.  My feet seemed extremely sensitive to every pebble and lump they touched, and I sucked air through my teeth, and tasted every thing it carried in its breath, but hurried all the same.

I reached the roadside just as the car rolled under my bridge, and I heard the brakes engage, as the vehicle came to an abrupt stop, still ten feet from where I stood.

I didn’t move toward it.  I just stood there, naked, and waiting.  There was something tingling up the back of my neck that felt like unease.  Like a warning.

The car was black.  Big and black.  An SUV, I thought.  An expensive one.  My eyes slid toward the logo on the front of the thing, and I saw it.  Laurel leaves encircling a shield, with blocks of color on its face. I thought I should remember it, though I wasn’t certain why.  As I stared, unsure whether to move closer to turn away, the driver’s side window, which was deeply tinted, moved downward just a little.  A voice, a man’s voice, said, “Get in.”

The chill in my nape turned icy.  I shivered with it and everything in me went tense and tight.  I felt as if I were coiling up inside myself in preparation for flight, though I didn’t know why I should feel the urge to run.  I ignored the impulse, and still I didn’t move.

And then, through the tiny gap in that window, I saw the black barrel of a gun, pointing right at my head, and again the voice.  “I said get in.”

That spring that had been coiling up inside me—it released all at once.  My body sprang into motion as if propelled by some outside force.  I turned, I lunged, I leapt, soaring from the top of that sub-bridge embankment, to the pavement beyond the bridge, behind the car, where the rain pounded down.  Barely had my feet settled on the macadam, before I was moving again.  I pushed into a dead run, the speed of which astounded me. 

I heard tires spinning behind me, and then gunshots, three of them, so loud I thought my eardrums had split, but no pain came with those shots.  The bullets, though certainly fired at me, had missed their mark.  And when I dared glanced over my shoulder, I saw those headlights falling farther and farther behind me as I ran.