Sunny Side Down: Chapter One

Conciousness returned slowly, quietly, like a bearer of bad news who doesn't want to deliver. The first thing I heard was the steady beating of rain on an already wet ground, the frenzied tapdance of falling water. I was soaking wet, but that wasn't what was getting my attention.

It was the pain... pain like a migraine headache that had spread to include my entire body. Some spots were worse than others. Some were better, though at this point my definition of "better" meant they were too numb to hurt. I tried to remember what was going on, where I was. Why I was lying in the mud and the rain feeling like somebody's human piñata.

I drew a perfect blank and decided to start at the beginning, with the easy stuff. Who was I? When that came up blank, I knew I was in deep shit. Not that lying in the mud feeling like I'd been run over by a truck hadn't clued me in, this just made certain I knew how deep the shit really was. And boy, was it deep.

I still had my eyes closed. I hadn't opened them because I didn't want to see if I looked like I felt. Nothing for it now... it was time to face the music.

I found myself looking up into dark, heavy clouds that were leaking raindrops like tears at a funeral service. It might have been my funeral, except I wasn't dead. I only felt like I should be. Staring up into that bleak, dreary sky didn't do much to lighten my mood. I rolled my head sideways, figuring I might find something more pleasant to look at. No such luck. A gun was clenched tightly in my right hand, it's baleful red indicator blinking the sinister warning that I was out of ammunition, out of options, out of time.

For awhile, the gun and that damn blinking light was all I could see. My eyes didn't want to focus on anything else. I couldn't blame them... this whole scene was just gonna get worse with every move I made. Eventually my eyes and I came to an agreement, and the rest of the world swam into view. Off in the distance was a city, bleak and dreary as the cloud covered sky. Towering skyscrapers dissapeared into the clouds, dreary granite monoliths that could've done duty as gravestones for a giant. It almost seemed as if the city was nothing more than an extension of the storm.

I looked away, found my other hand. It was empty, and for good reason. All my fingers had been broken. They were crooked and gnarled as if I was an old man. Suddenly, not remembering didn't seem like such a bad thing after all. There was no cityscape to be seen on this side. There was something much more interesting instead.

A van, headlights sending shafts of light into the murky gloom of the rainstorm. It's engine was idling, adding it's soft hum to the sound of the rain. There was a body crumpled near the front tire, pose suggesting that if the guy wasn't dead already he'd wish he was when he woke up. I figured I'd better get up. That was a mistake.

I woke up the same as last time, rain drumming down on my face. It was a little softer now, more a heavy mist than a shower. At least this time I remembered blacking out. I tried sitting up again, more slowly this time. The pain in my side told me it wasn't just my fingers that were broken. Whatever it was, it wasn't life threatening. If it had been, I wouldn't have woken up this time. I frowned as much as I could without hurting myself. How many times had I passed out and woken up again without any memory of it? How long had I been out here in the rain and the mud?

I added those to the rapidly growing stack of unanswered questions and concentrated on standing up. Slowly and carefully, of course. Good thing, too. I couldn't feel one of my legs. I'd thought it was broken, but the series of neat little holes in my pantleg said otherwise. I'd been shot... with flechetes, looked like. Most had gone in and out the other side, right through the muscle. A few were still lodged in the bone. That was gonna be a bitch to fix.

I tested my balance, found I could keep my feet as long as I moved with a shamble. For some reason, I kept the gun clenched tightly in my right hand. Without any memories to fall back on, it provided a fragile sense of security. I't'd been with me before I blacked out, was the only thread I had to tie me to who I was.

I hobled over to the van, saw a second corpse laying near the open back doors. He'd taken a hit to the head, close range. Hard to tell if it'd been flechetes or a bullet, not that it mattered. Dead was dead. He was, and I wasn't. Not yet, anyway.

A look inside the back of the van revealed some blood stained ropes, plastic sheets, and two pairs of gloves. There was a hammer in there, too. My left hand ached at the sight of it and I quickly looked away, pushed the sight of it out of my mind.

Turned out the guy near the front of the van had a gun with him. It fired flechetes. Apparently fair was fair, though. The stiff had taken a burst right in the chest. Some of the razor sharp little darts were still stuck in the side of the van, sparkling clean thanks to the rain. I slowly raised the gun I held, noted it's ammunition. It didn't take me long to come up with a theory about what had happened. It was a pretty ugly theory, but it was all I had.

I closed the back doors and climbed into the drivers seat. Luckily I still remembered how to drive. I drove towards the city... there was nowhere else I could've gone.