Crickets are chirping. A gentle early summer breeze blows over my face. For a moment, I forget that I'm dead and just lay there enjoying it. Just for amoment before my memories rush back to me, and I remember what happened.
My eyes snap open. Leaves and wilderness. I'm right where I died.
"Is this heaven?" I wonder aloud. Maybe I'm a ghost. That makes a lot of sense if ghosts really are souls with unfinished business left on earth. I try to sit up and feel horrific pain in my back. Guess I'm not a ghost. I'm alive. How long was I out for? It feels impossible to tell. Was it a minute or hours? Surely it couldn't have been that long considering how badly I am bleeding.
One singular thought occurs to me, regardless of whatis happening, I need to get up. Now. I try to sit myself up again and just now feel that my arms are pinned down.
They're out to my side and feel impossible to lift. I try to turn my head to look at them, but even this hurts worse than any pain I'd ever felt before. I strain one more time to sit up but again, my arms prevent me fromdoing so. I concentrate on my right hand. Putting every last ounce of strength thatI have left into just trying to pick it up.
What is holding me down? Did the man return to shackle me in the middle of the night? Now that I think about it, my right wrist feels cold, almost like it is wrapped in steel. I feel my chest and arm muscles burning as I strain. It feels as though I am going to dislocate my shoulder or tear a muscle. None of that matters though, especially if today is going to be my last day on Earth, anyway.
As if a rubber band snaps, my arm frees itself from the ground. It feels like a magnet's switched polarity and now, whatever it is that was holding my arm down, is instead flinging it in the other direction, across my chestand onto my left arm.
The last thing I remember is hearing a metallic clang. Like two medieval swords smashing into each other, only a hundred times louder. For a long moment, I feel nothing at all. The pain is gone. It is as if for the first time since I was in the womb, my body feels entirely neutral. Reset back to factory settings. Then it happens.
At first, it feels like a mild electric shock. Like when you accidentally put your finger on one of the prongs of an electrical plug as you're shoving it into the wall behind a couch. It takes a moment to realize that it's electricity moving its way up your body.
Not a painful feeling, necessarily but entirely unpleasant in its unnaturalness. I stand up. All pain is gone and I now feel better than I ever have in my life. I can feel every cell in my body as though they're waking up for the first timeever.
All of my senses are heightened. The woods are alive with seemingly a million different sounds, and I can now differentiate them all. The fullmoon illuminates the surrounding forest like a spotlight, and I can seethrough the foliage for miles in either direction.
Right about now, I also realize that I am no longer standing, but rather hovering a meter above thegrassy earth.Yes, hovering. I let out a brief yelp. My body does that involuntary twitch thing, like when you're starting to fall asleep and dream that you're falling. Once I relax though, my body slowly descends back to solid ground, which I'll admit is very much a relief. That's when I first see them.
Metabands. Silver and seamless. The finish is dull and non-reflective. Even under the bright full moon, they're hard to see, but there they are. And they are on my wrists. This is impossible. Maybe I am dead after all. That was a lot simpler of an explanation than why I am now standing, and only a moment ago hovering, in the forest with metabands on my wrists.
These shouldn't exist. They haven't existed in a decade. Not functioning ones anyway. There was no possible way on Earth that I could be wearing metabands. And yet I am.
The little girl. I'm so busy admiring my new fashion accessory, that I have almost completely forgotten about that poor little girl. Well to be fair, I am also marveling at just how not dead I am, which is also quite a spellbinding of a mystery, although not as unbelievable, considering I am wearing bracelets that had made some nearly immortal.
Was she still alive? I still don't know how much time has passed. Have I been out twenty minutes, or have I been asleep for days while the metabands slowly brought me back from the brink of death? And most importantly, how did these find their way around my wrists in the first place?
Now isn't the time to ask these questions, though. A terrified young girl was somewhere in this forest with a very dangerous man. At least hopefully she was still here. But which way? That's when I hear a small muffled cry. It sounds as though it came from right beside me. I quickly look to the right, but there is nothing but woods for miles. So I begin to run.
Running feels strange. Effortless. I am moving faster than I've ever moved before in my life. Moving faster, not just running faster than I've ever ran before. I feel like there's a jet engine strapped to my back. Trees pop up into my path, but I move around them with complete ease.
Even though I am running at what must be at least a few hundred miles per hour, it feels as though everything is in slow motion. The entire world had slowed down just to make running at this incredible speed easier for me. My amazement ends when I smash directly into a maple tree.
Except I hardly feel it. The tree explodes into a flurry of splinters andsaw dust, but I wouldn't have even noticed if I hadn't been looking when ithappens. I run through another. And another, delighting in how it soundslike gigantic baseball bats cracking. I stop dodging trees altogether and begin just plowing through them at full speed.
That is until I reach the clearing. And them. They're both still at least a mile away from me across a field of tall grass, but I can see them clear as day.