Scars And Stories

Prologue

Somewhere in the middle of the desert of Palmdale, California...

A car drove down the deserted and dusty road. The engine growled and the car slowly came to a stop, close to a motel and gas station. Inside the car, a man with blue eyes and light brown hair, adorned with a black hoodie, was sitting behind the steering wheel. He groaned out of the frustration and hit the wheel with his hands, ringing the horn. The man got out of the car and walked to the front of the vehicle, leaving the door open. He opened the hood to see what was wrong, faint smoke billowing out from the engine. He slammed it shut as he realized he couldn't do anything and walked over to the driver's side, taking the keys out of the ignition. He crawled on the seat on his knees to reach for his backpack from the passenger seat and got out of the car again, shutting the door.

He turned around on his heels and looked at the horizon, not seeing anything except a few dead bushes lining the road. He sighed and turned back around, heading for the gas station. He settled his backpack on his shoulders and put his hood up to hide his face.

The sun was starting to go down in the sky as he entered the motel. He looked around the empty place as he approached the counter.

The motel was old, the wallpaper peeling off the humidity stained walls. The ceiling and the carpeted floor were the same way. An old couch was placed next to the door and under the window was a coffee table full of old magazines.

The man leaned over the counter to try to look at the back room, hoping someone was there, but he didn't see anyone. He rung the bell sitting on the counter, but there was no response. He walked away from the counter and over to the couch, where he sat and waited for a few minutes before a woman came out from the back room. He looked up at her and walked toward the counter.

"Hi," He greeted, "Can I get a room for the night?"

"Yeah, of course," The woman replied as she turned around to grab a key that was hanging on the wall. She put it on the counter in front of the man who muttered a thank you. "It'll be nineteen dollars."

The man nodded his head and grabbed his wallet from his hoodie's pocket, extracting a few bills and handing them to the woman.

"My car broke down, like, just in front of here and I don't have a phone. Could you call someone to fix it?" The man asked.

"Uh yeah, I think I can do that," She told him. He nodded his head in appreciation and was about to leave when she blurted out, "I need your name, for the register."

The man hesitated for a few seconds. He didn't know if he should give his real name or a fake one. But since he was in the middle of nowhere, he gave his real one, thinking that nobody would know him here. "Ryan...Ryan Tedder."

Five years ago, like Patrick and the others, Ryan was kept by the Syndicate in one of their headquarters. He managed to escape one day, before the Syndicate started to take the control of the states, and fled to California. There, he started a brand new and normal life under another name. Leaving everything from his old life behind, protecting his family and friends by doing so and hiding as much as he could during a few months to not get recognized. But quickly a rumor spread that he died and he gave up on hiding.

Soon, money became a problem. He couldn't play music because of the Syndicate and was forced to move out of places because of those problems. Other than that, his life was pretty calm. That is, until he started having nightmares, and the Novocaine came back a few weeks ago as well as the Syndicate, more aggressive than before. He's been apart of a few demonstrations, which wasn't a great idea. The Syndicate saw him, even though he tried to hide his face, and started searching for him. During those five years, the Syndicate looked everywhere for the person that escaped their headquarters the night that their system that was supposed to keep everyone calm and not rebellious broke down.

Almost every night, he would get one of those really realistic nightmares, almost like a vision. In them, he would see the outside and inside of a prison, a red neon sign that read "Twin Skeleton's," and an emergency staircase, as well as other things. He analysed these nightmares, searching for the places he saw on maps and the internet when he could use it. After a few days of research, he found an article about five men that tried to stop the Syndicate and saw that the prison they were kept in was the same that he saw in his nightmares. He hesitated for a long time but then, when the Syndicate started getting close to catch him, he decided to drive to New York. Mostly to be safer but also to find that prison, and hopefully, with the help of the head of the "Blue Birds" - a group that he found some article about - get these men out of prison and end the Syndicate for good.