Chapter 1: Marco Navarro Jimenez
Marco Navarro Jiménez always had the weirdest dreams. Sometimes they were in spanish, sometimes in English, but no matter what language it was in, they were always extremely vivid. In one dream, his abuela grew to the size of a building and tried to hit him with her sandal because he had eaten the last tamale she had been saving for herself. In another one, he got super tall and buff, (not like his actual short pudgy self), and all the girls at school were like, “Oh Marco, you’re so hot. You should like, totally date all of us!” But then his dog showed up, and he was more buff than Marco was, and so all his muscles blew out like air in a balloon and his dog got all the prom dates he wanted and Marco was left with none.
He didn’t like that dream very much.
So when he started to have a dream where he was walking through his high school and everything was made out of candy, he didn’t think much of it. Marco punched the locker of this guy he hated and his hand came back out full of chocolate bars, which he immediately stuffed into his mouth. Marco could eat anything and everything he wanted, and he was having a grand old time stuffing his face like a kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. However, he stopped when he heard voices.
He would have called out and asked who was there, but his mouth was filled with fifty two sour straws at the moment, so he simply looked around. Marco caught movement out of the corner of his eye to see a black girl that was probably a little younger than he was, pass by and then out of sight. Curious, he quickly swallowed the candy in his mouth and ran to follow her.
“Hey! Wait!” he yelled. With each step he took, the school became less and less made out of candy and more like a place that he had never seen before. Marco blinked and looked around. There was a fridge that was alive, to his right, having a casual conversation with two people. One woman had four kids running around her that she was trying to calm down, and the other was a black guy holding what looked to be the woman’s baby. He heard the words “possessed fridge” and chuckled to himself.
Classic dreamscape stuff.
Marco walked through a courtyard, looking for the girl that he had seen earlier, to suddenly run into a real life teenage mutant ninja turtle. It was Leonardo, which was awesome, because he was his favorite, and he was slicing up a watermelon. As soon as he was done, he vanished, and that’s when Marco saw the girl he had seen earlier as well as an older man who looked asian.
“Well done Akaysha!” the guy said, smiling. “I really think you’re really starting to get control of your power!”
“Thanks Chief Lenard.” the girl said proudly. “I’ve really been practicing hard.”
At that moment, a new group of people came up, and Marco casually walked up to the table of watermelon and grabbed a slice that he could munch on. The guy named ‘Chief Lenard’ went up to them.
“Are all of you doing another research day?” he asked, raising a brow. A man with short brown hair and glasses shrugged.
“We just want to be as prepared as we can be for whatever happens next.”
As they started to talk, Marco watched with interest, wondering where this dream was going to go next, when a larger woman with crazy, curly brown hair with feathers in it suddenly looked at him.
“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing straight at him.
“Who’s… what?” the chief guy asked, looking around as if Marco were invisible. Was this lady the only one who could see him in this dream? Weird. The woman furrowed her eyebrows forward and started to walk towards him.
“Do you guys not see the boy standing here eating watermelon?” she asked.
The others shook their heads.
She had almost reached where Marco was standing, and he was about to introduce himself, when suddenly, the dream shifted. New surroundings fell down around him, and he found himself in a dark, musty basement. Something was off with this place. Something smelled rotten. He made his way to the stairs, eager to get out of some creepy basement, when he suddenly fell through the floor in classic dream motion. Helanded on something that snapped, and when he looked around, a chill ran up his spine.
Several decaying bodies were down there with him, and Marco watched as a centipede crawled out of the nose of one of the corpses. He couldn’t even tell what the people who had died looked like, because all of their faces had been peeled off, and all that remained was bone and muscle. Marco screamed, which thankfully woke him up.
For a moment, Marco sat there in his bed, gasping and panting, feeling uneasy about the dream that he just had. What the heck was that?? He could understand things like candy schools and possessed refrigerators, but faceless bodies in a basement was just… too much.
Maybe it was time for him to lay off the horror comics for a while…
Marco glanced at the clock to see that it was 12:30, which made him jump out of bed.
He was supposed to meet up with Jaquel at 12:00!
Marco threw on some clothes and shoes and then burst out of his bedroom door to find some of his little cousins running back and forth up and down the hallway. He almost bumped into his older sister as she rushed around the corner whilst on the phone, talking about some boy as always, and then he crawled under the vision of his grandparents watching tv so his abuela wouldn’t throw another sandal at him. He almost reached the door when his mother stopped me.
“Mijo, where are you going?” she asked, her hands on her hips.
“Mamá, you know I’m going to meet Jaquel at the park. It’s Saturday.”
At the sound of this, she rolled her eyes.
“Oh that’s right. Aren’t you two a little old to be climbing trees and reading comic books?”
“I’ll be back for dinner Mamá. I know the drill.” Marco said with a little smirk.
“Ok so make sure you’re back for dinn-hey!” she started and stopped with a smile. She grabbed him before he could run out the door.
“Mijo, don’t think you’re going to get away without giving your Mamá a kiss first.”
Marco groaned, quickly kissed her on the cheek, and then rushed out the door. A few minutes later, he showed up at the park to his usual spot, where Jaquel was sitting and reading manga.
“Dude, I was wondering when you were going to show up.” he grinned. “I’ve got a really good manga you should read.”
“Sorry-I slept in…” Marco explained, dumping his bookbag and collapsing on the ground. “Is this manga from another anime that hasn’t caught up with it yet?”
“Of course. You know how impatient I am. I have to find out what happens next!”
With a shrug, Marco picked up the first copy and looked it over, willing to give it a shot.
“Why does the first one look so different from the one you’re reading?” he asked.
“Cause the guy’s been writing it since the eighties and his art style has changed. Ok, so a lot of it’s really weird, but it’s fantastic. You’re going to love it. And don’t stop reading just because the dog dies. I know how much you like dogs.”
With a roll of his eyes, Marco opened up the book and started to read. Usually, they liked to get up in the tree and read because people were more likely to leave them alone when they did that, but since he ran all the way due to sleeping in, he felt lazy and decided to just stay on the ground today.
When he got to the dog burning alive after being drugged and put in a furnace, he hit Jaquel on the arm and told him he wasn’t reading anymore, but his friend simply laughed and begged him to just keep reading. Once it got to a guy with a bowler hat that had razors on the edges of it, Marco stopped complaining as much.
In fact, he was so into this new manga series by now, that it took him a moment to realize that someone was yelling at them.
“Hold on-what’s going on now?” Marco asked, tearing his eyes from the comic he was reading. Jaquel rolled his eyes.
“Just a group of racists trying to heckle us. Should we climb up in the tree now?”
Marco looked over to see a group of white guys who were probably 19 or 20 shouting at them to go back to Mexico.
“He’s not even Mexican!!” he yelled at them, referring to Jaquel. “He’s black! Get it right your racist bigots!”
“You probably shouldn’t have said that…” Jaquel told him as they started to run towards them.
“Well, I guess it’s time to go then!” Marco said as they both quickly grabbed their things and took off running. They ran down a path through the woods and through to the other side, where they noticed they weren’t behind them anymore.
“I guess they gave up pretty easily. Lucky us.” Jaquel gasped, his hands on his knees. No sooner had he said that then they heard an engine rev. They looked up to see a truck swerving onto the grass and blocking their way back into the woods.
“Mierda!!” Marco exclaimed, glad that his abuelo wasn’t around to hear him swear. The two of them sprinted out of the way of the truck and tried to hop over drainage ditches in hopes that they wouldn’t be able to follow. It did nothing to deter them, and the rowdy young men hung out the windows, whooping and hollering, throwing drinks and snacks as they chased the two preteens.
“Try to make it to the creek!” Jaquel gasped, pointing. “There’s no way they can drive through that!” Jaquel had always been a faster runner, and he pulled ahead pretty quickly. He got to the pipe they liked to use as a bridge and as quickly as he could, balanced himself and walked across.
“Come on Marco!!” he yelled. “Move your fat little body!”
“I’m not fat!! I’m plump!”
Marco was so close, when he suddenly felt the truck hit his backpack, and he felt himself flying into the air.
“MARCO!!” Jaquel screamed. Marco hit the pipe really hard, pain spreading through his arm, and then he fell into the creek.
Everything went dark and cold, and the last thing that crossed his mind was whether or not he was going to wake up...
