At the Beginning With You

She had been running for quite a while now, and the midday sun was certainly not helping her at her. Under its sweltering rays, Ash was certain that she was very close to melting, and sweat was running down her face in rivers. So it probably wasn’t too smart to start jogging in the middle of summer, when all other normal people were holed up in their houses with the air conditioning at full blast.

She was also feeling slightly dizzy, which could have been attributable to either the heat or her lack of breakfast this morning. Her stomach chose that precise moment to let out a rumbling growl that had her turning red (or redder) with embarrassment.

Luckily, there was no one there to hear the noise but Ash knew that she should go home and eat something before she collapsed from hunger or dehydration, whichever came first.

But first, where was there anyways? Somehow, without her noticing it, Ash had wandered into a part of the town that was foreign to her, with less residential houses and more abandoned warehouses lining the street.

As she scanned her surroundings, trying to find anything that looked remotely familiar, Ash silently berated herself. She knew that her wandering mind and combined lack of attention to her surroundings was a bad habit but breaking that habit was easier said than done.

Often, it was annoying and more often than not, it was also embarrassing for Ash to realise that she had (majorly) spaced out while someone had been talking to her or to find herself nearly crashing into inert objects for no particular reason.

Take the incident a few weeks ago for example. It had been a nice, sunny day…well, mostly anyways, and Ash had decided to take a walk through the park, particularly following the footpath that winded around the semi-large lake. She had been so absorbed in her thinking that she had almost fallen into the water, never noticing that she had veered off the footpath and was dangerously close to the edge of the lake.

While the lake itself wasn’t particularly deep and therefore would not have caused her any permanent damage, it would have been an unpleasant wake-up call, to say the least. As it was, she had quickly realised that the path she was taking was going to end up with her submerged into the water and she had hurriedly changed her direction.

Before, she had always been able to vaguely remember seeing a particular landmark or building and used that as a point of identification to finding her way again. However, this time it was truly puzzling as Ash had no memory whatsoever of leaving her designated jogging route, nor seen any building or landmarks, familiar or not.

In fact, she had not seen a single thing on her journey.

Granted, she had probably seen something while she had been running, hence the purpose of her eyes, but nothing had registered in her mind and there was only a jumble of blurry images floating in her head.

It was almost as if someone had decided to shuffle each individual memory inside her head as one would do to a bunch of songs, but ultimately leaving her with bits and pieces of different songs that did not add up.

After ascertaining that yes, she was indeed the only person on this deserted street in the middle of nowhere (at least, to Ash it was), she quickly thought over her options:

1) She could stay here until someone happened to wander over and ask for directions

2) She could wander around aimlessly in the hope of finding another person or some kind of a shop, store and then ask for directions

As she was running through her list of options, Ash had been unconsciously moving into the shade of a large but skeletal-looking oak tree, its meagre leaves providing some measure of relief against the hot sun.

Or, as Ash concluded, bumping painfully into someone that she swore had not been there a second ago, she could just ask the person that had just seemingly appeared out of nowhere just where the heck she was.

A twinge of pain shot through her body and Ash glanced down to find the stranger’s elbow poking her ribs uncomfortably. Inwardly grimacing, Ash quickly moved away from the guy. Geez, was he just hiding behind the tree to stick his pointy elbow in my side?

However, before she could even utter a word, a wave of vertigo suddenly swept over her and Ash lurched forward, the combined effects of the hot sun beating down on her and the light-headedness hindering her balance.

And the day just keeps getting worse, Ash grumbled to herself when she tried and failed to regain her balance. Instinctively, her hands reached out to grab the closest stable object, which happened to be the stranger, but her fingers only brushed his sleeves before she lost the fight with gravity and landed gracelessly on the hard cement a second later.

From her current position on the ground Ash glared balefully up at the stranger, noting that he had not even moved a muscle to help her, even when she had reached for him.

His features was ordinary, nothing spectacular but not too shabby either, with brown hair and brown eyes. His height was even ordinary, slight taller than Ash, who was just over 170 centimetres but definitely below the 175 mark.

Now was not the time to be worrying about something inconsequential as talking to a stranger, after all she did want to find her way back home, but the longer Ash stared into his face, the more she felt that there was something wrong, slightly off about that person.

It was not so much the outer appearance of the guy but the fact that there was an expectant glint in his eye, almost as if he had been waiting for Ash to run into him.

Shaking the thought from her mind, Ash clambered to her feet and in the process, she noticed that there was a used syringe laying only a few centimetres from where she had fallen, a strange purplish liquid congealing at the bottom.

Her eyes widened in surprise and somewhere deep in her mind, warning bells were going off, telling her to run, that there was something wrong with the guy before her, that—

In the split second that it took for her to lift her gaze to the stranger, there was a slight rustling of cloth before a dull thump reached her ears…then pain flared from the base of her neck.

—the syringe had been recently used.

She was already unconscious when her body slumped to the ground.