Without Chance

Prologue: The Dream

It was always the same. All I could feel was pain and heat. Pain from the bruise on my forehead that I was sure was just developing. Pain from the fire that was slowly, but tangibly, rising all around. Locked in a steel prison, burning alive as I peered through a tiny glass window, screaming noiselessly for someone to help me.

No one would help me. The face outside the tiny window was grotesque. It was a devil, I know it was a devil, but it wore a cheap rubber mask to make itself look human. I'm not sure which human it was supposed to look like, but he wasn't pretty.

Underneath the mask, the face was all wrong. It bulged in the wrong places, a sharp red chin peered out from beneath the rubber. Two small horns had pierced the mask, protruding from the forehead of the garish face. Fierce, yellow eyes seemed to burn into me, their glee at my anguish evident.

As quickly as it had appeared, the horrible face was gone. Moments later, a new face appeared. The heat was rising. I was still screaming, but I couldn't even hear myself anymore. Everything was silent.

I pounded on the door, but no noise came back to me. Even the flames licking all around brought nothing to dispel the cacophonous silence. As the new face appeared, time seemed to slow. I shouted my pleas for help.

The face drew close. This face was human, though I could not distinguish the features exactly. It was a nice face though, warm and pleasant, though the expression on it was sad.

Surrounding the image outside the glass was a halo of wispy light, like a backlit silhouette. The light was golden, and seemed to shine not from the face, but from somewhere deeper. It trailed off the face in my window like iridescent steam. As the face stopped just before the window, it spoke. I couldn't hear the words. I couldn't hear anything. But I knew what the voice said, as it echoed in my mind.

"I'm sorry, Ryan. I can't help you." Then the claws came, breaking through the form in my window as though my regretful visitor was made of nothing more substantial than the wispy light surrounding it. The pleasant face broke apart like smoke in a breeze, glowing faintly for a moment before it was gone.

The devil in the human mask reappeared. He was laughing. I couldn't hear it. I could feel it, grating against my bones as the flames consumed the tattered remains of my flesh. I silently screamed again, and the dream broke.

I sat bolt upright, startled awake by a bump in the road. It never seemed to matter when or where I had that dream, I always woke up at the same point; just before the fire devoured the last of me. I didn't understand how that worked.

I rubbed my eyes, and ran my hands through my longish hair. My dad kept telling me I should cut it. It didn't even reach my shoulders, so I didn't know what the big deal was. Besides, I took care of it. It was nothing special, just the sort of dirty blonde that half the kids I know had, just the slightest hint of an outward curl at the tips. My dad beside me spoke, pulling me more fully into the waking world.

"You okay Sport?" he asked me. I hated when he called me that.

"I'm fine. And I'm not five," I retorted.

He glanced over at me. I got my hair and looks from him, which is to say he's about as average as I am. Although I got my blue eyes from my mother, thank God. My father's eyes were a dull, listless gray. They used to be a lot brighter, before mom died. He sighed and nodded.

"Sorry Ryan," was all he said. He couldn't get it through his head that I was fourteen, not five. He still called me Sport, still kept trying to tousle my hair. He even asked me if I wanted to go to the zoo last month. What he was thinking, I have no idea. Lions, and tigers, and bears? Yeah, right. Just give me my mp3 player and my game console, and leave me alone. Was that too much to ask?

Apparently it was. Not only would he not leave me alone, but he went and uprooted me in the middle of the school year, taking me away from all of my friends, my baseball team, my home, even my mother's grave. He basically robbed me of my entire life. He said it was all for his job, but personally I thought he just couldn't stand being where everything reminded him of her.

She'd died a year ago. Cancer, pretty common these days, but she hadn't beaten it like some people did. We'd spent two years before she finally died watching her wither and rot in her own body, and not a thing any of us could do about it. Nothing had been the same after that. Dad barely spoke to me, and when he did he treated me like I should still be playing Cops and Robbers with my kindergarten playgroup. Everyone we talked to was constantly telling us how sorry they were, as if they actually gave a damn.

To top it off, we moved from Phoenix to some backwater redneck town called Turnbridge. This place was so far off the map I couldn't even find it when I looked. Dad said it wasn't that small, had fifty thousand people. Please, anything less than a cool half million and you're kidding yourself.

We had actually come into town yesterday, and moved all our stuff into a barn that they apparently call a house in this part of the country. It was okay, I guess, but Dad said we'd be without internet for at least two months while he saves up enough money at his new job in the local hospital to pay to have lines run out to our place.

I'm not kidding, we actually were going to have to pay someone to have internet lines run out to our place. What kind of civilized town doesn't have lines for internet and cable run to every property already? I could answer that fairly simply. This town wasn't civilized.

"You ready?" he asked, again breaking me out of my thoughts. We were pulling up in front of the school.

"Are you kidding? I can't believe it takes half an hour to get to school," I grumbled at him. "And I can't believe you're making me go to school on a Thursday, one day after moving to this dump. Can't cut a guy a bit of a break? Couldn't we have taken the week to settle in? It's not like I'll be behind or anything. They probably teach the three R's; reading, writing, and roping. Half the town probably has the same last name. Bunch of inbred, dumbass hicks."

"Ryan!" my father snapped, giving me his warning look. He hated it when I swore. I didn't care though, he didn't intimidate me. He was too broken to do anything about it since Mom died anyway.

I glanced out the window at the school. The place looked about like the rest of the town. It was old, rundown, and shabby. Definitely not up to my standards. As the car pulled to a stop I grabbed my bag from the floor in front of me and jumped out.

"I love..." my dad began before I slammed the door on him. How could a guy be expected to build a decent rep in a new town with his father shouting that kind of thing across the school grounds? Fortunately, nobody seemed to have noticed.

The kids were a bit more fashionably dressed than I'd have expected, only about five years behind the current styles by my estimation, though there were definitely more cowboy boots and hats than I was comfortable with. It wasn't the universal standard, but they were clearly widely accepted out here.

As I walked toward the front doors of the school, backpack slung over one shoulder, I actively avoided the stares being directed my way. I was obviously unfamiliar, and clearly not from around here.

I didn't blame them. I'd have stared too, if one of these yokels had wandered into my school back home. That didn't make me any less resentful though. This was probably one of those towns where everyone knew everyone, and was nose-deep in everyone else's business. I took a deep breath. This was going to be a long day.