New Project -- Chapter 1

I haven't decided on a title yet, so it's just called "New Project" for now.  I'm hoping to have 1 or 2 more chapters tomorrow!  

Also, sorry for all the graphic content -- it's for a reason, and it won't all be like this!

Chapter 1

Taking a step off the curb, Thaden caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Jerking himself back so that he slipped on the ice in the street’s gutter, he felt his ankle *pop* as it twisted in a direction it shouldn’t. As his rear end slammed down on the cold pavement of the sidewalk, he watched as the truck that nearly hit him pass him by, its momentum carrying it through the intersection as it slid on the black ice underneath the fine coating of snow on top of it.

He didn’t get to see more than the truck coming to a stop a few feet from the cars waiting at the light on the opposite side of the intersection, because the pain from his ankle shot up his leg to the point where it felt like it was going to fall off.

“Aaaahhh!” he screamed, looking down at his boot, which was currently facing backwards. Even though he didn’t necessarily want to see it, he pushed through the extraordinary pain and grabbed the pant leg on his thick jeans, pulling it up to expose what had happened to his ankle.

He nearly passed out at the sight of a bone sticking out of his lower calf. Blood was already pooling on the snow and ice beneath him as the wound opened even further when he accidentally shifted his leg, and he involuntarily screamed again.

“Hold on, I’m calling 911!” an unfamiliar female voice called frantically behind him, but he couldn’t do anything but stare at his broken leg. I thought the shock was supposed to last longer, but that was almost instantaneous!

It wasn’t like he hadn’t hurt himself before, but the worst injury Thaden suffered over his nearly three decades of life was a broken toe when he accidentally kicked the corner of a wall when he was a kid. Scratches, burns, and even a twisted ankle in the same foot that was currently facing the wrong direction were common, but this certainly topped all of those combined.

“Yes, there’s a man here who was nearly hit by a truck and broke—oh, it’s so bad. There’s blood everywhere and the bone is sticking out of his… Yes, it’s at the corner of Grove and H—”

Thaden was vaguely aware of the woman talking to 911 behind him as he tried to keep himself from passing out, but his focus on the conversation sharpened when she abruptly cut off. Careful not to jostle his leg any further, he turned his head to see a young woman with curly brown hair underneath a furry hat and wearing a pink puffer jacket staring at his leg with her phone held up to her ear. For some reason, she had frozen in the middle of speaking, her gaze unflinching as she looked at all the blood. He stared back at her, urging her to complete the call for help so that the ambulance could arrive as soon as possible.

Wait… she’s not blinking. Or breathing. And that’s not all.

The pain and the blood loss must’ve blinded him from his surroundings, because as soon as he noticed that the woman wasn’t moving in the slightest, he realized that the softly falling snow around them had stopped in the middle of the air, as if suspended in an invisible liquid. Looking further out as panic started to set in, everything seemed to be frozen, from the exhaust coming from the cars at the intersection, to the older trucker that had opened up the door to his cab and was in the middle of jumping down.  As in, he was somehow suspended in the air, six inches from the ground.

It was as if someone had hit the pause button on the world around him.

“What is going on?” he said, or at least he tried to. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Am I dying? Or am I actually dead? Did the truck actually hit me and I’m hallucinating this in my last moments?

He didn’t receive any answer for this as he felt a tremendous heat start in his chest before suffusing the rest of his body, numbing it from all sensations. He would’ve sighed in relief as the intense pain in his leg disappeared, but he found himself completely frozen – just like the world around him. In his peripheral vision, he suddenly witnessed one of the passengers in a nearby car disappear in a flash of light and a hollow-sounding *zap*, followed by the driver less than a second later. He heard another *zap* behind him accompanied by a flash he could only vaguely see, and then the truck driver disappeared in the middle of the air. He saw a few more flashes in and out of his field of vision, before he felt a spike of heat flowing through his own body.

The next thing Thaden knew, he was swallowed up by a blindingly bright flash followed by his every sense going black.

* * *

The feeling of flying was intense, though it was muted somewhat when he realized he didn’t have any physical sensations to experience it. Instead, it was as if Thaden’s consciousness was floating through a darkness that was like a bottomless void, with nothing to see wherever he looked.

Even as he was pondering if this was indeed the afterlife and everything he had seen was just a bunch of random neurons in his brain firing off as he died on that sidewalk, something disrupted the endless void ahead of him. As it quickly ballooned in size, he realized that he was moving exceptionally fast, as the floating structure suddenly revealed itself to be massive in size, almost incomprehensibly vast.

How did he know?

Because what appeared to be a clear, glass-walled building with metal beam supports along the walls showed what was inside quite easily. Millions of completely naked people in a diverse crowd of genders and races stood a few feet apart from each other, staring ahead of themselves with a strange intensity. None of them were moving, which was eerily similar to what he thought he saw right before people started flashing and disappearing.

Thaden thought he should be freaking out right about then, but for some reason a calmness fell over his consciousness as he slowed down, floating toward the rear of the building where it was already tightly packed. He could only conclude that he was there to join these people in whatever they were doing… and that was perfectly fine with him. A sense of peacefulness descended over his mind, like a warm blanket had been draped over his consciousness, and he mentally smiled as he started to look forward to what was happening.

That warm blanket was ripped away as he finally “landed” in massive building, lit by a series of bright lights that were suspended in the air as if by magic. One moment he was carefree and looking forward to the next stage of his life, and the next he found himself in his body – completely healed from his leg injury, fortunately. The only problem was that his body ended up materializing half inside the building and half outside, with the glass-like wall bisecting him completely.

He didn’t even feel any pain as his body began to fall apart, and he knew that this was indeed the end. His consciousness began to break apart just as quickly as his body had been split in half, but he was still somehow aware enough when something seemed to appear inside his mind.

Welcome to your Contender training, #32599999-E!

To begin, please select your—

ERROR!_Training_containment_facility_capacity_reached!

Contender_#32599999-E_damaged!

Contender_#32599999-E_rejected!

Initiating_disposal_protocol…

Huh? What is happening? Wait… disposal?

The glass-sided building suddenly disappeared as he found himself transported somewhere else with no discernable transition. Unfortunately, that somewhere else turned out to be plummeting through the air toward the open mouth of an active volcano.

As his two halves fell toward the bubbling lava spewing out of the erupting mountain, his disjointed vision was somehow still communicating with his brain for the final few seconds of his life. He attempted to close them even as the incredible heat flowed over his ice-cold skin, but the wind rushing past his bisected face was so great that they were forced open. When he added in the fact that he had absolutely no control over the rest of his body, he was forced to watch as he neared the molten earth beneath him.

Just before impact, an enormous explosion of superheated gas shot out of the top of the volcano, slamming into his descending body halves with such force that what little he could feel told him that his skin had been completely torn from his frame, and every bone in his body was pulverized. Blind, deaf, and thankfully numb to the pain, his consciousness drifted from his destroyed flesh, allowing him to somehow observe his body from the outside. Is this my soul or something like it? Thaden was never really into all that religious or spiritual stuff; he was more of a believer in what he could see and experience than anything metaphysical. As a result, he had no idea if this was a reflection of his spirit departing his body at the time of his death… or if he was simply hallucinating everything.

Regardless, he didn’t really like what he saw, which was his destroyed body being propelled through the air at incredible speed away from the volcano. The explosion had been powerful, resulting in him rocketing away from the erupting mountain like a bullet from a gun. The heat and the force had also done something else to his body, which was to smash the two halves together in an amalgamation of burnt and broken limbs and destroyed flesh.

Morosely watching his body flying through the air, he could only hope that he didn’t have to witness wherever it landed, because what he saw was already bad enough.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t turn his gaze away from the body, as if its focus was locked on it, so he couldn’t see where it might land – not that it ultimately mattered since he was dead.

Except that… he wasn’t.

Forced to look at his flailing corpse, he couldn’t help but notice that its bones began to straighten and put the flesh covering them back together, before rapidly reforming the skin that previously covered it. In amazement which would’ve had his mouth catching flies in astonishment, if he had a mouth to open at the moment, he watched as his body was fully reformed before his viewpoint, rebuilding itself as if everything that had been done to it was reversed. Before long, his pale but muscular legs were intact, followed by his torso with no signs of it having been cut in half – though he had to admit that he wouldn’t have minded if the small paunch that had been growing over the last year had been cut off.  His arms and hands were next to be completely restored, all the way down to the pinky finger on his left hand that was just a little too short to be normal, something that he’d had to live with for all his life, unfortunately.

Finally, his neck and head were fixed, the skin regrowing back and revealing the pale-looking face that he remembered seeing in the mirror every day. He didn’t really get out much, which meant that the sun and his skin weren’t exactly friends, though it was worse at this time of year considering that the normal weather was snowy and he didn’t see the sun for weeks at a time. Working from home and at night didn’t really do well for keeping the light tan from the summer that he occasionally developed.

Even his short dark-brown hair was grown back in the same hairstyle he normally wore, parted along the side and brushed over. It was something he’d had since high school and was essentially no maintenance, as it only took a few seconds in the morning to get ready. Lastly, the stubble from his five o-clock shadow stood out darkly along his jawline, exactly as it had been when he left his house for groceries late in the day.

When his body was fully repaired, Thaden suddenly experienced his viewpoint being sucked back into himself, and he opened his eyes with a gasp of surprise.

I’m alive! How did that—oh, sh—

Now that his eyes were open, the recently repaired corpse could finally see where it had been propelled from the volcano explosion. He caught a glimpse of white dotted with streaks of grey before he slammed into the side of a snow-capped mountaintop, and he heard and felt his bones being crushed again even as his skull shattered. Not two seconds later, his consciousness floated out from his body again, and he could see that he, once again, had died. Or at least he should be dead, as his head had nearly been ripped away from his head, and his entire torso was nearly as flat as a pancake.

As it tumbled and flopped uncontrollably down the mountainside, it appeared as though the impact had triggered an avalanche, and it was quickly enveloped by a cascading wave of snow and ice. As it was crushed and torn apart even further than it already was by the pounding wall of white that raced down the mountain, Thaden could only sigh at his horrible luck after the miracle that had just occurred.

His body was pushed along for at least 15 minutes before the avalanche spit him out as it tumbled over and into a ravine in the side of the mountain. Thaden’s flailing corpse fell at least 1,000 feet out and down, passing the snow line and landing amongst tall pine-looking trees that struggled against the steep slopes. Impacting the first tree, his body was impaled by thick branches in numerous places as it spun through the increasingly thick forest, somehow continuing its descent after ricocheting off tree trunks with bone-snapping force.

It took another 5 minutes of his corpse bouncing off trees and rocks like a pinball before it finally hit something that sent it flying outward again. Another minute later, it landed on relatively flat ground with a *thump* that flattened what remained of his body. At that point, he realized that both his feet and one arm had been ripped off… somewhere… though the body had bled so much that it wasn’t even bleeding anymore.

Before he could hope that another miraculous resurrection would happen again, Thaden’s spirit or consciousness or whatever it was watched as a dozen small things suddenly appeared around his corpse. They were a little bit bigger than a toddler and had two arms and legs, but that was about the extent of the comparison. With spindly, wasted-looking legs and arms, their round bodies were covered in thick fur, making them look somewhat like four-legged spiders. It was only what was sitting on top of their bodies that disabused that notion, because their round heads had wide mouths that were full of sharp, rotten, yellow teeth that looked capable of rending and tearing flesh with ease.

Which was exactly what they did, as they used crude-looking knives to hack away at Thaden’s corpse and immediately stuffed their mouths with his flesh. He wished he could look away or close his eyes, but his viewpoint forced him to watch as he was eaten by these nightmarish monsters.

Despite being consumed in almost his entirety, he still didn’t fade away like he expected. With everything but his head essentially gone, he thought that would be it for him and he would “move on” or whatever, but that didn’t happen. Instead, his viewpoint was completely focused on his smashed head, which was completely unrecognizable from all the damage it had taken.

What now? Am I destined to stay here forever, roaming this crazy place as a spirit?

He probably would’ve preferred that, to be honest, because as soon as the nightmarish figures finished their meal, they picked up his head and carried it with them as they disappeared into a large hole in the side of the mountain.

And Thaden’s consciousness went with it.

He couldn’t see where they were going, not only because it was relatively dark inside the apparent cave the things had entered, but because he couldn’t look around even if he wanted to. Regardless, he saw enough to know that the one carrying Thaden’s head brought it deep within what appeared to be a large cave system, before opening a large wooden door bound with iron straps. Before he could comprehend what was happening, the spindly figure brought it inside what appeared to be a well-lit room filled with burning torches, before chucking the head onto what appeared to be a pile of others, most of which were humanoid in appearance, though some appeared slightly off for some reason.

As much as he was able, he looked around the immediate area near his head, and saw what he thought was some sort of wooden chest on one side, and a wooden rack containing metal weapons of some sort on the other. They weapons were displayed in such a way that it appeared to be for a specific purpose, as if it was meant to be shone off or admired.

It was at that point that it hit him.

This was a trophy room. Or a treasure room. He wasn’t exactly sure, but all that mattered to him at that moment was that his head had just joined the others inside of it.

He began to wonder if he would be stuck there forever, watching his head rot away along with the others nearby, when it subtly began to shift around.

No way. Could it really…?

He would just have to wait to find out, he supposed.