PULSE

Prologue

[ JULY 7 ]

By the time my stepmother woke up on the morning of July 7th and realized that not only I, but also her boyfriend's motorcycle was gone, I was clear on the other side of the city. She usually rose earlier, hardly past five A.M. even on the weekends, but on this particular morning, I'd finally beaten her. No matter how she searched our apartment high and low, she had no chance of finding me.

Looking back on that morning, I'm actually not sure why I stole my stepmother's boyfriend's motorcycle and left the house so early in the morning. The events leading up to that fateful ride stay locked in a vault in the back of my mind, and I've never been able to unlock them (not that I want to). To me, all that matters happened after that.

By the position of the sun in the sky, I can guess that it was about six A.M. when I came circling back to the downtown area of the city. Even at such an early hour, the sun was already beating down on my spine and burning a hole through the back of my helmet. Every movement I made brought about the horribly uncomfortable feeling of my sweat-stained shirt clinging to my back and moving with me like a second skin. Despite the city's size, no one seemed to be awake at this time, as if everyone collectively decided that Saturdays didn't begin until noon. The only sound that broke through the eery silence was that of the motorcycle's engine.

I roared through the narrow streets with no particular goal in mind, other than to go—if at all possible—even faster than I already was. Despite the fact that I was still clearly anchored to the ground, my mind was entirely somewhere else, straining to move fast enough to outrun everything in my past. I was completely convinced that if I was faster, just a tiny bit faster, I could leave everything behind.

I couldn't.

Even now, I'm not positive how I felt her when I was going at that speed. As I passed by a small storefront on the side of the road, I felt an indescribable presence radiating on my right side—like a warmth in the air. Under any other circumstances, I would have ignored the feeling, but in the two years since my father's death, I'd come to recognize the feeling as proof that he was with me.

So, when I felt this warmth, I had no choice but to look.

When I turned, though, I didn't find my father; rather, I found a pretty brunette girl standing in the doorway of a shop, pushing unruly bangs out of her eyes as she stared at me. Her gaze startled me; it gave me the sudden, nonsensical feeling that she was looking straight into my soul. Even more shocking was the fact that I believed that I could see into her soul as well. There was nothing but her and me, plus ten pavement spinning by at seventy miles an hour between us.

Because of my sudden infatuation with the stranger, I didn't see the child that stepped out into the road until it was too late. By the time I noticed, all I could do was jerk to the left and squeal sideways toward my victim. For an unspeakable moment, all I could hear was the sound of rubber tires sliding across the pavement, and the sound of glass shattering.

The motorcycle skittered onto its side, leaving me to embrace the full impact of the crash on my own. I stopped a few feet away from the child, but the bike was only an inch or two away from crushing him before it came to rest. The damn kid was left untouched and completely unharmed in the street.

I wasn't. I never got the chance to see what happened to him, because the moment I hit the ground, my head split open and I could do nothing but bleed to death on the pavement.

But I know one thing: if the strange girl didn't see my soul in my stare, she certainly saw it in my bloody, embattled body as I died—out in the open, for the entire world to see.