Strange Nights ( Dr Strange #1)

Chapter 1 : New Beginning

When she started her journey the sun was shining brightly on Pittsburgh, and the air was filled with the joyousness of early September. As the sun and clear skies bid her adieu, her uncle and the grey clouds of Seattle welcomed her to her new home. It was a seven hour flight journey from Pittsburgh to Seattle which included a stop at Chicago, and nearly a two hour drive from the airport to Rockport. Rockport was a census-designated place in Skagit County, Washington of the United States. Except for the few extremes of temperature it was a region of ample precipitation through the year.

"Y/n." Her uncle, Mathew, waved across from the less crowded airport terminal.

"How is Rachael?" she asked after exchanging the formal greetings.

Rachael, her sister, precisely the half – sister as the girl preferred to be addressed as, was undoubtedly going to be the most difficult part in the new home. She was twenty – three, three years older than her, was the only thing Y/N was scared of when she accepted to move on with her uncle.

"Good. Waiting at home for dinner." He replied as they stuffed her luggage into the car trunk.

She was more than a little confused when Uncle Mathew, her father's estranged twin brother responded to the obituary of Charles. She was stupefied when he turned up on the day of the funeral and insisted that she moved on with him.

"Things go haywire all the time. Our title place is a safe one..."

"And I never passed on the guilt for what your dad did over the past."

"Let the estrangeness end with his funeral. Come home, my dear."

He fumbled with many reasons to make it clear that she was welcomed to him with open arms, whether her half-sister liked it or not.

The ride home wasn't as awkward as she had expected. Neither of them was what anyone would call a prolix, but Mathew somehow managed to bring up a conversation occasionally.

"I thought I had lost you too when I got the news about Jane and then Charles. It's a miracle to have you alive in both the accidents." He acknowledged in a sad voice.

Y/N had nearly lost them when they escaped Queens. When the zombie infection restarted, her dad was strongly positive that things would eventually go back to normal like it nearly happened in 2018. He was sure wherever the Avengers were hiding; they surely would turn up and stop it from an outbreak unlike in 2018. He was wrong though. They didn't turn up and Queens...

Survivors, if any, were asked to evacuate all by themselves because the government just came up with nothing but to turn the entire place to dust. They were one of the few who made it to Pittsburgh.

Hardly two months would have passed when she lost her mom...forever. That was the last time she had heard from Mathew and Rachael.

"He had promised to stay till the end of our world." Her father had promised after a few days when she had woken him up with a nightmare. He had kept the promise until three weeks back.

Matthew placed an arm over her shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze. He knew the pain, having lost his parents at quite a young age. He and Charles had been inseparable all those years back.

Y/N had heard the stories from dad. 2018. They're around twelve years of age. Some experiments went wrong. The Avengers turned up to save the day - they too got infected and in three days it was a zombie apocalypse. Some radiation energy cures. It worked for nearly three-fourth of the zombie population. Rest had to be... done with what solution the government came up with.

And a year or so later all of them went off the grid. Never to be found again.

After they passed the ghost town of Darrington, it started raining. She didn't see it as an omen – just unavoidable. Having already said my goodbyes to the sun, she stared out of the window in silence.

Everything was so green and brown - the trees, their trunks, their branches hanging from the green canopy, the brown clay tracks. It was beautiful. They blended perfectly with one another.

Eventually they made it to Matt's. It was a dark brown house at the beginning of the dense forest. Rachael came to the porch as we drove up the driveway. They parked behind Chief Henley's car. She remembered her father telling how much her mom grimaced, over being driven around town in a car with red and blue lights on top, when she was with Matt many years back.

Rachael gave her an awkward one hand hug when Y/N stumbled her way off the car.

"It's good to see you, Y/n," she said, trying to smile as convincingly as she could, as she steadied her effortlessly.

She had a few bags. It took her and Rachael only one trip to get all her stuff upstairs. She had got the bedroom in the north, beside Rachael's, that faced the backyard. The common bathroom was the only thing that separated the two bedrooms.

The room had three windows – two rectangular ones looking over the backyard and the forest beyond and an oval one opening over the side yard, where the Chief's car was parked. Scarlet sheer curtains framed them exquisitely. The bed was placed by the smaller rectangular windows while a table was standing near the larger. Blue fairy string lights were decorated above the headboard and azure – grey sheets covered the bed. A golden lamp and digital clock were placed over the table, beside which she placed her laptop and speaker.

Rachael handed her a tattered piece of paper. SHAMBALLA was charred over it.

"What is this?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"The Wi-Fi password." Racahel answered in annoyance.

She didn't hover and left Y/N alone to unpack and get settled. She tried not to dwell too much on the fact that she still hated her and her dad over the death of their mother. Staring dejectedly out of the window at the sheeting rain, few tears escaped. This place was going to remind her more of them than she had imagined. She wasn't in the mood to cry bitterly. She would save that for bedtime.

She plopped down on the chestnut wooden floorboard and began to unpack and try to get settled. She placed the few books, which had managed to survive along with her, next to the ones that were already there on the shelf opposite to the bed. They must have belonged to Jane when she lived here. Below it, she stapled the few snapshots that had been taken on Long beach, Highland Park and Coney Island. The family in them looked so happy, enthusiastic and moreover complete. She felt so distant it was as if she was reminiscing someone's else's memories.

When she finished putting her clothes in the closet, she noticed 'Jane' engraved in the insides of the right door. She smiled to myself as she pictured her twenty year lively mom in a white sundress engraving her name with a kitchen knife in her closet; and a twenty five year fair, brunette, sporty Mathew leaning across the door frame, giggling as he watched his wife embossing her name like a child does on what she believed to be hers. Yes, Rachael had all the right reasons to hate her and her dad. they'd taken away what rightfully didn't belong to them.

She sighed and picked up her bag of bathroom necessities and headed towards the communal bathroom to clean herself up after the day of travel. Looking at her face in the mirror as she brushed through her damp tangled hair, she regretted chopping her hair last summer. The long black curls would have suited the cold weather of Rockport than they did the hot Pittsburgh.

Y/N didn't sleep well that night, even after she was done crying. The tinkling sound that the falling rain made on the shingles of the roof of car and house wouldn't fade into the background like the soft pitter- patter that it made when it hit the ground. She had turned on the ceiling fan expecting the whooshing of the air to wane the tinkling but it didn't help much. She pulled the faded old quilt over her head and later the duvet, but couldn't fall asleep until midnight, when the rain finally settled into a quiet drizzle.