Chapter 1: Falling Through
"Hey man you should probably sit down, you know?"
Carl smirked and took another swig of beer, taking his other hand off the dented roof of the truck to wave off his friend Gene's concern. There were three of them in the back of the truck - a dented-up F150 they had bought for three hundred dollars at the start of summer. Gene and his girlfriend Alice were sitting in the bed, the girls brother Joseph was sitting awkwardly across from them between the wheel tub and the cooler. Noticing his beer was empty, Carl turned around and threw the empty bottle into the plastic trash can that his cousin Billy had insisted on.
They were currently on one of the smoother stretches of ATV track that crossed the back-end of his uncles land five miles north of Green Ridge, Missouri. In a few hundred feet they would start coming up on an un-groomed part that started before a shallow creek. He'd sit down when they crossed that, but for now he was going to enjoy the ride from his vantage point. The track was lined on each side by oak and dogwood in bloom and there was the usual buzzing noise of insects and the chirping of birds, even a few deer that ran across the track in a graceful sprint. Above them the sky had been turning darker with grey clouds for the last half-hour, but the sun still shone through in dappled rays that danced like reflected off a disco ball. There had been a few flashes of lightning off the west, but they were well below the canopy here and it was still a warm day, no reason to call it in for a little rain. Ducking down, he stuck his head into the cab and turned to look at Billy, who was busy with his own beer and leaning half out of the windowless door.
"Hey Bill," he spoke, not loud enough to startle but to still get attention, "hows about another beer?" Bill had turned and nodded, reaching into the cooler between the driver and passenger seats. The cooler in the bed had a few beers, but mostly it was sandwiches; the one in the cab had more ice anyway.
The truck hit a slight bump as the beer was pressed into his hand, and Carl had to jink to avoid hitting his head on to the roof of the cab. Charley at the wheel turned with a snap and mumbled 'siddown' before concentrating on the shifting trail again. With a quick thanks he pulled himself back out, grabbing onto the roof again through another bump. Charley had slowed the truck down now, and he could see that the creek wasn't too far away. Switching his hand over to the bed wall he took a seat, leaning back and reaching into his pockets for the bottle-opener. 'Oh shit, that's right." His opener was on the key-chain, and he had insisted the key for the truck be put on his chain. The near-miss in the cab had made him forget all about it. He looked up from his beer and shouted to where Gene was burying his face into Alice's neck.
"Hey Gene, gimme your bottle opener!" Gene didn't bother to look up, but reached into his jeans and waved the steel tab into the air, keeping his face into his blushing girlfriends neck. sighing in exasperation, Carl heaved himself up unsteadily, another bump nearly sending him back on his ass, and walked the half step over to the offered opener.
That's when everything went wrong
The truck had just reached the start of the creek, and Charley had slowed down a little as they approached it. The creek bed itself was flat on the bottom, but seeing as his uncles property line ended a few yards back from the creek the trail had only been groomed up to that point so far this early in the spring, and the banks on either side rose half a foot from the water. Carl reached out for the opener just as the front tires had settled in the water, and was grabbing for it when a bolt of lightning struck down about fifty feet up the trail. Now, normally that wouldn't have caused too much trouble, but Charley had been put on the wheel because he was usually the easiest to push around, and he was a bit squeamish. The blinding shard of light - and the simultaneous boom of thunder that accompanied it - sent Charley's foot down on the gas and the truck accelerating through the rest of the creek bed, directly into a foot-tall pile of gravel and mud.
When the front tires met the natural speed-bump the cab end of the truck bounced nearly two feet into the air. For Gene, Alice and Joseph, they received some rough treatment as they were lifted and slammed back into the bed of the truck.
Carl was tossed off of the bed like a stone off a catapult.
He didn't understand what was happening until he reached the top of his arc. At that point, his eyes grew to the size of bottle caps and he forced his arms and legs to curl in towards his torso against his instinct. He had been thrown from vehicles before, and his cousin had taught him the trick by throwing him off a diving board when he was six. Even so, as he landed on his back in the creek a sharp pain went through his ribs and the back of his head bounced off a submerged rock like a bowling ball.
Two things happened at once; first, Carl's mind exploded into horrendous pain, and he immediately went to grasp his head. The second was that there was a bright flash of light. So bright that he could see and recognize it through his clenched eye-lids. For a moment his body seized, and he managed to think through the pain that he might be having a seizure. But just as quickly as it happened, his body loosened up again. His hands wrapped quickly but tenderly around his skull, and his legs kicked out in an instinctual spasm. Kicking in the ankle-deep creek, his world shrunk down to the sharp, throbbing pain in his head.
For eternity, he thrashed around in the creek bed, legs jutting at nothing, grasping his skull and rocking into a fetal position in an instinctual attempt to alleviate the all-encompassing hurt. Somewhere beyond the pain his mind chanted that his friends would come help him any second, and all he needed to do was stay where he was and bear through it. His mind didn't need to tell him that though, because staying where he was was all he could manage to do.
After a while the pain started to ebb away, though it was still too much for him to even bear to open his eyes. There was a noise somewhere, something loud and high-pitched, but raspy. After a moment he realized that it was his own scream, and tried to work his mouth shut. It seemed locked open, though, and when he rocked himself back down again, he noticed that he was dipping his face into the creek, his mouth filling with muddy runoff from the farms and pastures that surrounded the woods he was in. One last dip and he was choking, the wet coughs coming to join his world of pain. This time he kept himself upright, heaving up water and mucus while trying impossibly to keep his head from moving as he did so. From where his hands met over the back of his head he could feel an unusual warmth pulsing into his palms, though he could not tell if that was caused by an open wound or if blood was just rushing to the area under the skin without pulling his hand away, something he was not willing to do.
Slowly his eyes blinked open, the cloud-darkened sky helping him reacquaint himself with the outside world. Thick tree branches swayed in a quickening wind overhead, the shivering leaves mesmerizing his clouded mind for a long moment. 'Where's Gene, and Bill, and Charley..." His mind was slow, and it took a conscious will to bring his head up and look to the ATV track for the truck, and his friends.
A wall of trees.
Groaning, he, rolled his body over - to the left, he could feel something was wrong on the right - and looked behind him, maybe he had been flipped around mid-air.
A wall of trees.
'What the fuck,' his mind ejaculated. He began to look to either side, thinking that maybe he bad been thrown downstream from the track, but to either side the trees made an endless wall that faded from view around soft bends in the creek. Groaning again, he turned himself back over, and after a moments preparation heaved himself into a sitting position. He looked again, and still he saw no sign of the ATV track, or the truck and his friends. His mind didn't want to think, it only wanted to focus on the pain that made his vision blur in drunken-like pulses, but it coughed up an explanation eventually, 'must have been carried downstream, maybe I got knocked out..."
He knew he couldn't stand, and even though it was a warm day he did not want to stay in the slow-flowing creek forever. Shifting himself onto his knees, he began to crawl to the closest bank. He slipped once, his whole upper body sliding into the water before he could catch himself, and his head spiked in pain again as he lay face down in the water. He concentrated on a wisp of silt that his hands had disturbed, watching it curl and dissipate in the water like cigarette smoke in the wind for a moment before he felt he could move on. When his torso cleared the bank he turned onto his back, one hand curling under his head to keep it off the ground while he let the other flop into the mud. His feet found a moss covered rock to prop themselves up onto, and for a minute he lay there with his eyes closed and his hips sunk down into the water as he tried to recover.
'Ok, time to move,' he thought after what felt like a minute, pushing his free hand under him to drag the rest of his body on the shore. When that was done He rolled back onto his stomach and pushed himself up slowly, his hand leaving his head only long enough to do so and then be cleaned in the creek, and he sighed in relief when his hand came away from his head unbloodied. He knew that he would only see trees, but he took a minute to look up and down the creek.
'That's impossible, there's no way I floated far enough down the creek to clear the trail.' For one thing, it cut across the creek only a few hundred yards from where it flowed out into a neighbors sweet potato field, and for another he didn't recognize the trees he was seeing. Not that he knew the trees along the creek by sight, but these didn't look like the oaks he was used too. They were too tall, nearly sixty feet tall, and he could see what looked like vines and Spanish moss growing pn the branches in the gloom beyond the tree line.
Looking back up into the cloud-darkened sky, he saw the flash of another lightning strike in the distance, and for a moment the forest was lit up as if with a lantern.
He couldn't see anything through the forest growth but more trees.
"Where the hell am I?" He asked the air.
