Hell. He was in Hell.

“H-E-L-L.” the girl spelled out for him, her scratchy voice rising higher in pitch for each letter.

Great, he thought.This is fantastic. He flinched at the girl’s voice, giving an acknowledging grunt as he rose from the ground. He briefly raised his head to look at where the rip in the sky used to be and wondered how his brother had managed this one. As he bent to wipe the dirt off of his pants, he noticed that this high-spirited girl was no younger than he was. But no, she’s dead. So age wouldn’t matter. She’s probably hundreds of years older than me.

“It’s nice to see some new people around here.” she said calmly.

Pfft, sure, he told himself. “Hm..so where do I go from here? This is my first time being dead and all.”

The girl twirled the ball on her finger and smiled. “You’re a pretty funny guy. If I were you, I’d head straight into town, someone’s bound to help you get situated there.” she answered, pointing with her chin. With that, she trotted back over to her friends, only turning her head back once — wondering just what it was that bugged her about the boy.

While getting situated was the last thing that he wanted to do, it was his only option at this point. As much as he wanted to stay and learn about Catch, swings and sand castles, he knew that they were not going to help him get back to his grim and desolate home above. That is, unless he was willing to bank his life on the swings to throw him back up into the hole that had closed up seconds after his conspicuous entrance. And willing he was not; one risk was enough for one day.

Determined to find a way out as quickly as possible, the boy began to walk towards what could only be the center of the city. He wrapped one skinny arm around himself as he made his way down the rocky path, jumping out of the way of children on bikes and men pulling old rickshaws. Bikes that he only knew were bikes because of how often he read the books in his family library with his brother, his brother who promised that they’d both learn how to ride them together. He raised his other hand to cover his face from the curious gazes of those he passed by. Judging, prying eyes watched his every move and women banded together to whisper at a volume just loud enough for him to hear.

“Psst…just look at him.”
“And that wretched hair–”
“No no, look at his arm.”
“He’s not tagged.”

Tagged? But he did not have the chance to ponder any longer. There came a shoe flying toward his head. “Gyah!” he managed to utter before ducking for cover behind a fruit stand. Every shop owner on the street seemed to move almost mechanically as they threw covers onto their dumplings, their fresh vegetables and their grilled meats and push their carts away from the destruction to come. He now felt more lost than ever with so many carts, stalls and bodies running every-which-way in the street. Shit, he thought as the fruit stand in front of him shifted and the cause of the commotion came into view. He was so focused on the two women running towards him on their bare feet, with spears and sticks raised into the air and faces twisted into scowls that he did not see or feel the small flurry of clothing flying by him until it paused and took two steps back to tap him on the shoulder.

“Hey, we’re about the same height right?”
“Wha-”
“Yeah yeah, it’ll have to do.”

The next thing he knew, his vision was obscured by a brown shawl that he could only guess the stranger had wrapped around his head and shoulders. Before he could even open his mouth to form another word, the hilt of a sword was pushed into his left hand and the stranger was gone with a hard slap on the back. “Look after yourself, g’luck.”

“Look after my-”, he couldn’t finish his sentence even if he wanted to, the spirits of Hell were not going to let him today. His body was thrown around so quickly that he was only able to process the lack of contact between his feet and the ground by the time his back had made contact with the concrete wall and the air was knocked out of his lungs.

“Alright you little thief! This is the last…!” The shawl had long shifted on his head and he now peered through his golden brown locks into the fiery hazel eyes of his attacker.

Crack.
I’m dead. I’mdeadI’mdeadI’mdead. If he wasn’t sure that dead ten year-olds didn’t have heart attacks, he was sure that he was about to have one now. Wait, I’m already dead. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. The boy willed his body to stop shaking and eyes to open, assuming that they hadn’t been popped out of their sockets. He caught the crumbling pieces of cement out of the corner of his eye and allowed his body to relax at the sight of the other girl, holding the opposite end of a wooden pole now lodged into the wall an inch away from his face.

“Hey, his eyes changed color.”
“You missed! How could you have missed!? I was holding him in place!” the hazel-eyed one yelled over her shoulder, not forgetting to give his body a shake against the wall every other word. “Talking some shit about eyes, seriously. Alright kid, you can only blame yourself for this!”

He braced himself as he watched the girl holding onto him raise her right fist. As much as he wanted to stay rational at this moment, he could not. He had no reason to be scared, he had braved missile fire and arsenal attacks and there was no reason that this could scare him now. I’ve already hit rock bottom, he repeated in his head, waiting for the punch that never came.

“Will you calm down?” came another voice, though different from the one that holding the wooden pole. The back of this woman’s palm lightly brushed against the tip of his nose; crossing his eyes he could see the tight grip her hand held around his attacker’s fist. “Ready to listen?”

His attacker let out a breath and he saw the tension drain from her face as her grip on his shirt loosened.

“Are you ok?” his rescuer asked, freeing him from the other’s grip and returning him to the ground. She patted his shoulders and back, as if it would remove the bruises that he could feel were already forming underneath his skin. His two attackers stood silently behind this woman, eyeing him as if he were still the felon they believed him to be. Suddenly, the woman’s grip tightened on his right arm and eyes shifted towards his left. “Notice something weird?” Her question this time, was not directed towards him.

The two girls peaked out from behind each shoulder and carefully eyed the boy.

“Isn’t it obvious?”
“He isn’t tagged.”

“Which means…” the woman started.

“He’s still alive.” they sang in unison.

—> Chapter 2