False Start (Boyxboy)

16: INTO THE ABYSS

(WARNING: slight gore soon)

It took me a few microseconds to realize it, but I'd darted straight off the side of the mountain. My pulse picked up like the alarming beep of a bomb about to detonate. The sounds of wind and rain were amplified by the openness, exploding in my ears. My feet pedaled frantically for footing, finding only dark, unfathomable nothingness, and plummeting down into it.

Fast.

At first I was overcome with shock. Disbelief, even.

Then panic. Gaping back at the void about to swallow me whole. The epitome of terrified.

Then came the agony.

This is it. I'm actually going to die here. Oh, good God, what an idiotic way to go.

It's as though my neurons were firing more quickly than ever; I never knew that so much could be felt and thought in the matter of a moment. And that's all it was: one moment.

I'd dropped just about the height of my own body when the hood of my sweater snagged. The momentum of my free-falling caused me to choke, and through the throbbing in my temples I heard Kei's voice.

"Grab my hand!"

Suspended high above any ground, sure that I was dead meat only a heartbeat ago, I was paralyzed.  My stomach was still dropping one hundred ninety miles per hour.

"Kazuhiko! I'm losing my grip!"

My chin was beginning to slip into my collar, his cries so desperate, and I was jolted into motion, reaching shakily around my head. I felt the rough texture of Keiji's cast there and took hold of his wrist with both hands, just as he released his grasp on my hood, and, without him bearing my weight, dropped an inch or two. For a second I sputtered for breath, gripping so tightly that my fingers went numb, fearing that I couldn't hang on. Then I craned my neck to look back at him.

His face was contorted, both from the heaviness of my body and the strain I was putting on his freshly broken wrist, one eye squeezed shut and mouth tugged into a grimace. With his other hand, he clutched the trunk of a tree.

When I tried to speak, I didn't sound like myself. My lower jaw trembled wildly and only one syllable at a time came out.

"Kei-ji, I'm sca-ared."

The rain made it hard to hold on. My palms were sliding down my friend's cast, rubbed raw by the plaster. My own hyperventilating frightened me.

With an anguished cry whose echoes were lost in the storm, Keiji started to tug me upwards. Dangling there, facing the vast emptiness before me, feeling like my shoulders were ready to rip out of their sockets, I've never been more scared or helpless. Couldn't swallow, couldn't breathe, couldn't settle the endless flipping in my gut.

"Kazu," he said, and it sounded like he was sobbing, "don't let go!"

My fingers slid down to his, feeling his arm shake violently as he struggled. Our skin was so slick. 

"Kei," I wheezed out, "I'm not gonna--"

And then my words were torn away and I was plunging into the abyss once more.

Have you ever tried breathing in while strong gusts of wind are blowing at your face?  It's like a vacuum is suctioning the air, the life, right out of your lungs.  I writhed around for anything to grab, not sure if I wanted to close my eyes or see the whirring world one last time.  Not one fiber of my being thought I'd live to tell the tale, to talk about how horrifying it all was.

What will it feel like when I hit the ground?

A flurry of memories attacked my mind, and I had time to realize how shallow my argument with Keiji had been.  I heard Hiro saying, Karma caught up to you.

Then, suddenly, my back whacked against a rocky wall, and I found myself sliding at a high speed, spine raking across sticks and stones as I went.  It had been so dark and stormy that I couldn't see, but the cliff sloped outward a little ways down.  As I scrambled to stop myself, swatting at the bushes and tree roots that lacerated my skin, the two bracelets on my wrist were ripped off.

Like I'd ridden down a slide, I was flung off the edge again, flapping in the air for a brief moment before I crashed onto a ledge.  At last, I was still.

I'm not sure, but I hit the ground so hard that I might have passed out for a few seconds.  I had no awareness of my body or what position it laid in.  All that my world consisted of was a deafening ringing in my ears and a pulse against blackness.

Until I heard Keiji screaming my name.

I pried apart my eyelids, flinching at the raindrops that plopped past my lashes, expecting to see my friend right there.  But then I heard his calls again, coming from the far distance above me.

With a hoarse voice, I cried out for him.  I doubt I've ever yelled so hard, surely doing damage to my throat.

"Are you okay?" he wailed.  "Where are you?"

I looked around me, gathering my senses, and only then did I see the blood.

And only after I saw it did I feel the pain.

Swallowing back the puke that threatened to come up, I began to freak out, caterwauling.

"Help!"