Uncontained

My adventure started on a Friday night.

That night when everything went down, I was sleeping, like anyone would be at 2:00 in the morning. That was the night I realized so much could change in a second. My window just exploded.

Crasssssshhh!

My body jerked, my stomach did a somersault, and the floor smacked up against my face. "Beau!" someone shouted. "Beau!"

I'd fallen out of bed. I unraveled from the blanket and pushed myself up. A large rock sat in the center of my room with glass shards all around it like silver coins. Zombie-like, I stumbled to the window and pressed my hand against the cracked, spiderweb glass. Then it hit me. That was when I knew my idiot friend Malachi had thrown it in here.

I was instantly awake. "What the hell?" I screeched. I flung my face out of the hole in my window and saw two figures standing at the bottom of my house. "Malachi, God damn, is that you?"

"Get out here! Grandpa's lab has been broken into!"

But then my blood ran cold and I booked it downstairs.

I was still in my pajamas, but at that moment, the shock of the cold couldn't bother me. A boy and a girl, Malachi and his sister Laura, stood at my doorstep. Their eyes trained onto me but I found I couldn't look at them. I was absolutely frozen, transfixed by the red fire on the horizon.

"You wouldn't answer the door," Malachi breathed. His voice snapped my attention to him. His eyes were wide and his hair was disheveled, like he'd just woken up. Laura was in the same shape, and her arms trembled, crossed over her body. "I panicked. I thought they'd gotten you."

"What?" I demanded. "Who? Who'd gotten me?"

Malachi's face fell grave. "Beau, where's your mom?"

The realization shocked me like electricity. "Oh my God, where is my mom?" I raced back into the house. I flipped on all the lights, threw open every door, and then checked the closets and bathrooms. It took seconds to crack the core of my brain, and some twisted reality showed its face behind my eyes. Mom wasn't here. And right then I came to a dead stop and saw the back door open.

The door lay across the wooden floor, ripped straight off the hinges, and claw marks lacerated the frame where it once stood. There was dark liquid on the floor. A pathetic, kittenish squeak came out my throat once I realized it was blood.

"Shit." The voice wasn't mine. I turned, shaking, to see Malachi standing behind me like a wraith. "We need to get to Viridian City."

Something crashed through my insides like a freight train. "What's going on?" My voice was feeble. "I... I don't..."

Malachi's face became solemn. I'd never seen him like that. The old Malachi had been replaced with someone much older, someone who had seen too much. He fiddled with something on his belt and pressed it into my palm. "Take this," he said. "We're leaving now."

"But-" My mind shifted. My heart beat so fast and my knees knocked together, but some sort of radical emotion blazed through my chest and I looked down at my hand. Inside my palm was a pokeball.

"Come on," Malachi said.

"Okay," I said, and I closed my hand around it.