CHAPTER 13: "THE CORNFIELD"

Golden cornfield. Blue sky. Two suns—no, wait. One sun. Just one. His brain was still catching up, still processing the transition from void to here, from black to gold, from nothing to something. He pushed himself off the ground, his hands sinking slightly into soil that felt real, that smelled like earth and growing things and a world that definitely wasn't his.

He stood.

The cornfield stretched in every direction. No buildings. No cars. No sign of Ohio anywhere. Just golden stalks swaying in a breeze that felt too warm, too foreign, too wrong.

Speed spun slowly, taking in the full 360 degrees of his new reality.

"HELLO?" he screamed, his voice cracking on the first syllable. "ANYONE?"

The echo came back to him, mocking. His own voice, alone, in a place that had no people.

No response. Just wind through corn and the sound of his own rapid breathing.

Speed's hands were shaking. He pressed them against his thighs, trying to ground himself in something real, something he could control. His heart was doing that thing where it went so fast it stopped feeling like a heartbeat and started feeling like his entire ribcage was vibrating.

"Okay. Okay," Speed muttered, trying to sound calm even though his voice betrayed him. Every word came out shaky. "This is just a dream. The pills made me hallucinate. That's all."

He paused. Looked down at his hands.

"I'm gonna wake up any second now."

But the sun on his face felt too warm. The air smelled too real. And the fear in his chest felt too heavy to be a dream.

Speed pinched his arm hard. Really hard. The kind of pinch that was supposed to hurt in dreams but wouldn't.

"OW!"

Pain shot through his arm. Not dream-pain. Real pain. The kind that made his eyes water.

He looked at his arm. A red mark was forming where he'd pinched himself. Not fading. Not dissolving into dream-logic. Just getting darker, getting more real, getting more permanent.

"That... that hurt. Real pain." His voice sounded small. Younger than nineteen. "This isn't a dream."

Speed's legs gave out.

He dropped to his knees in the middle of the cornfield, his hands coming up to grip his head like he could squeeze the panic out through his skull. His breath came in short, sharp gasps that weren't helping. He was hyperventilating. He knew he was hyperventilating. Knowing didn't stop it.

"What's happening to me?" he whispered.

The cornfield didn't answer.

Then he heard it.

Laughter.

A child's laughter. Pure, innocent, joyful. The kind of sound that didn't belong in this nightmare version of reality.

Speed's head snapped up.

"Hey! HEY!" he shouted, hope flooding through him like cold water. "ANYONE THERE?"

He pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the dizziness, and scanned the corn. Movement. Through the stalks, he saw a figure—small, child-sized, running.

A little boy. Maybe six, maybe seven. Blonde hair, simple medieval-style clothes that looked like costume gear. He was chasing something—a butterfly, Speed realized. Just a butterfly, dancing through the air ahead of him.

The boy's laughter echoed across the field.

Speed's fear shifted. This was something he could help with. A child. A lost child. He could do that.

"Yo! Little man! Over here!" Speed waved his arms, jogging toward the boy.

The boy didn't look at him. Just kept running, kept chasing that butterfly like Speed didn't exist.

Speed was getting closer now. He could see the details—the boy's face, his smile, the way his eyes tracked the butterfly's movements.

"Hey, buddy! Can you hear me?" Speed crouched down, trying to make himself less intimidating, trying to look friendly and safe and like someone a kid would want to talk to.

The boy kept running.

Right through him.

Speed felt it like a cold shock—not a collision, not contact, but the absence of contact. The boy's body passed through his like Speed was made of smoke, like he wasn't there at all. The temperature dropped for just a second, and then the boy was past him, still chasing the butterfly, still laughing.

"WHOA! WHOA, CHILL! WHAT THE—" Speed spun around, his hands coming up like he could grab the boy if he just tried hard enough.

Nothing. The boy was a ghost. Or Speed was. Or both. Or neither. The logic of the world had broken somewhere between the void and the cornfield, and nothing made sense anymore.

The boy's laughter faded as he ran deeper into the corn, still chasing the butterfly, completely oblivious to Speed's existence.

Then a woman's voice called out from the distance.

"Come on, sweetheart! It's getting dark!"

The boy turned, his smile still wide and innocent.

"Okay, Mommy! I'm coming!" he called back.

He waved at the butterfly one more time.

"Bye-bye, butterfly!"

Then he turned and ran toward the voice, toward a family that Speed could see now in the distance—a mother, a father, the boy. All heading toward a village that sat on the horizon like a promise.

Speed tried to follow, jogging after the boy, screaming for his attention.

"YO! HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME?" Nothing. The boy didn't even glance back. "WAIT! PLEASE!"

But the boy just kept walking with his family, hand in hand with people who loved him, toward a place that looked safe.

Speed watched them get smaller and smaller, disappearing into the landscape.

"What the... why are they ignoring me? Am I a ghost or some shit?" He looked down at his hands, clenched them. He could feel them. Could feel his heartbeat in his palms. "I can feel my heartbeat... so I'm not dead. But then—"

He stopped talking to himself. Something was different.

The light was changing.

Speed looked up at the sky.

It was night.

Not sunset. Not dusk. Full-on night, like someone had flipped a switch and burned away the entire day in an instant. The sun was gone. Stars covered the sky, but they were wrong—too bright, too many, arranged in patterns that didn't match Earth's constellations.

And there were two moons.

One blue. One silver. Both hanging in the sky like lanterns someone had forgotten to take down.

Speed's mouth went dry.

"What...?" he whispered.

Then he smelled it.

Smoke.

He spun around.

The cornfield was burning.

Flames spread across the golden stalks like a plague, consuming everything, spreading outward in concentric circles that grew bigger and bigger. Black smoke rose in columns that reached toward those impossible two moons. The heat hit him even at this distance—a wave of warm air that made his skin prickle.

Rain fell from the sky. Not water. Fire.

Meteors. Burning embers. Ash. The entire atmosphere was screaming down in flames like the world was being unmade.

Speed backed away, his eyes wide, his breath coming in short gasps.

"NO," he said. Then louder: "NO! WHAT'S HAPPENING?"

He looked back toward where the family had gone.

The village.

The village was burning.

Massive flames consumed the structures, orange and red and gold, climbing into the sky. Buildings collapsed into themselves. Screams echoed across the burning landscape—so faint they might have been his imagination, but real enough that his body responded, tensing, preparing for flight.

The ghost boy. The family. They were walking toward that.

Toward the fire.

Toward the screaming.

"Oh no," Speed whispered. "Oh no... the kid! That family!"

His legs started moving before his brain caught up. Running. Full sprint. Toward the burning village, toward the screams, toward the two moons and the impossible sky and the flames that reached upward like they were trying to touch the stars.

"HEY! GET OUT OF THERE! THE VILLAGE IS BURNING!" he screamed, but his voice was lost in the roar of the fire, lost in the chaos, lost in a world that had stopped making sense and decided to burn instead.

Speed ran faster.

The flames grew bigger with every step, hotter, closer, more real than anything he'd experienced since arriving in this nightmare. His eyes watered from the heat and smoke. His lungs burned from breathing in ash.

But he kept running.

The village was getting bigger. The screams were getting louder. And somewhere in there—somewhere in that inferno—was a little ghost boy who was about to learn what horror really looked like.

Speed ran toward the burning village, screaming the whole way.