Chapter 1: Who, What, and Why?

Three days before my 16th birthday, I was rolling over in bed when my hand hit something. Hard. Hard enough to cut the skin and make a mess. It was gone when I got my eyes open, though, so I had no idea what it was.

Still, whatever it was made me hurt all over. My left hand, now bleeding from whatever-it-was. My old broken nose, from that fight in the 4th grade. My right ankle, from getting caught up in an opponent’s legs during a soccer game in the 6th grade. My left pinkie toe, which I broke in the shower at the “Y” one year.

I couldn’t even tell you what most of the aches and pains were from, but I pretty much hurt all over. And, sorry, but my yelp of pain woke up my Mom and my sister. Mom ran in from her room to ask what the problem was. How would I know?

All I knew was that I hurt all over, from old injuries I could remember and a bunch more that I couldn’t remember. And now, my left hand which was dribbling blood all over me and my undies. And the sheets.

That was Mom. I’m bleeding to death here, and Mom wants me to stop ruining the sheets. What the heck, Mom? I got up and stumbled to the bathroom so Mom could wash my hand clean, put Mercurochrome solution on it, and then something like seven Band-aids on top to protect it.

I read the label once after Mom used it on, yeah, my knee, that’s why THAT hurts, I jammed it in football last year, then looked it up. It doesn’t have any Mercury in it any more, that stuff was banned as poisonous, it’s all Iodine now, but it’s still called “Mercurochrome” and it’s the go-to thing Mom uses for any injury. If Mom sees blood, it gets covered in Mercurochrome. No, it doesn’t have any Chromium in it, either. Apparently it never did; the marketers just thought the name sounded cool.

Oh, hi! I’m Sam McGowan, Samuel Alfred McGowan, but my buddies call me “The Missile” for my initials. When I was 14 and I entered high school, my ninth-grade English teacher made everyone in the class start a journal about our lives. Every day there was some sort of exercise we had to do for homework, but every Monday we had to turn in at least one journal entry from the previous week for review.

She wanted to see a mix of proper ‘professional’ writing about the world around us and informal colloquial writing our own lives. We didn’t have to write something for every day, but there was something wrong with our imaginations if we couldn’t come up with something to write about at least once a week. Yeah, a lot of the time it was about something completely inane, but it got us all past our fear of being ridiculed. Hey, my writing about the tick we found on a neighbor’s dog was no worse than Jimmy’s disastrous treehouse or Jeanie’s exhaustive experiments with makeup. Yes, some people chose to write about not being able to go out and do something important because they’d been sentenced to prison and could not get paroled until they’d written something in their journals.

Within a couple of months I was telling people “Hold on, I know I wrote something about this when it happened, let me go check my journal.” The damn thing turned out to be useful! So, I kept up with it, off and on, even after 9th grade ended and we were free for the summer, as things happened that might be worth remembering in later years. That turned out to be a good thing, because two years later my life changed in ‘weird and wonderful ways’ to quote somebody or other, and now, in my 20s, people ask me how I got to where I am. Sure, why not?

So, I’m going through my journal and publishing some of it about how I went from just “Sam the socially inept fifteen-year-old” to “The Missile”. Please try to remember that this was pulled from my journal about me and my life, so there won’t be much in it about current events or world affairs except as they affected me. It’s all me, me, me.

When all this happened I was just short of my 16th birthday and trying to not think about having to go back to school in another month. Next week I’d go with Mom to Gadsden and get my driver’s license if I didn’t do too bad on the test. I didn’t see how I could fail the driving test, we had 90-year-old grandmas who were totally blind driving around causing wrecks and I had to be a better driver than them, right?

We lived in Attalla, Alabama, which, I know, no one has ever heard of. It’s right next to Gadsden, which at least shows up on a map. Both cities are in Etowah County. Okay, how about Birmingham? Not the one in England, the one in Alabama? How about Chattanooga, Tennessee? Right. Well, THOSE two cities have an interstate going between them, I-59, and Etowah County is pretty much in the middle between them. I-59 actually goes through Attalla, although not by much. Don’t blink twice, ya know?

We lived on the north side of ‘upper Attalla’, which meant absolutely nothing. It was just something to hassle the poor disadvantaged ‘lower Attalla’ natives about. Attalla’s city limits were shaped like an hourglass with one part northeast and the other part southwest. Right in the middle at Big Will’s Creek there was a stretch of the town along US-11 that was only about six hundred feet wide. There was nothing but forest on either side, so that never made any sense to me, but the county people in Gadsden probably had a reason.

Anyway, in another month I was going back to Etowah High School, yeah, I was a proud Blue Devil, down in ‘lower Attalla’ and “go get me sum more ‘o thet edumakashun”. I’d be a Junior, at least. Today, though, I wanted to just stay in bed. I hurt all over, like I had the flu or something. Then, on top of that, every little injury I’d ever had was acting up.

We all went back to bed and I slept until Mom got me up for breakfast. I went back to bed after that, too.

I woke up again with Mom screaming my name, telling me to ‘come in here’. Apparently she’d gone online trying to figure out what I had this time, and she’d keyed in on something about those Portals that had been appearing everywhere for the last year. According to the news, last night there had been another Portal break-out or outburst, where instead of us going into the Portals to kill them, the inhabitants had come out to kill us.

All over the world, Portals had donated a bunch of monsters to our world. Some of the Portals were guarded, and the monsters didn’t get anywhere. Some of them weren’t guarded well enough, and the monsters had gone through the guards and gone on to go kill innocent people. Some of the Portals weren’t even known. Many areas had been overrun by monsters that no one had expected.

One of the not-so-bad-unless-it’s-you breakouts had been only a few miles away, in Gadsden. Last night, 20 or 30 ‘Goblins’, small ugly green humanoids, had rampaged through a couple of neighborhoods in northern Gadsden with knives, hatchets, and bows and arrows, killing everything they found until they’d been wiped out.

That had mostly been done by good old American gun nuts who kept a World War Two assault rifle by their front door, at least one hunting rifle in their truck, and at least one pistol by their beds. For once, paranoia and the Second Amendment had actually done some good, and just about every one of the Goblins was taken out by a pistol round at close range. In the house in a few cases, and out in the front yard in several more. The Goblins had gone through a lot of houses that didn’t have guns first, though.

So far, the news didn’t know where they had come from. Clearly, there was a ‘Green’ Portal that we didn’t know about somewhere in or near north Gadsden. Okay, that was scary. Knowing that there was a Violet Portal a mile or so away would be one thing, if it was guarded. Knowing that there was a Green nearby but it wasn’t even watched because we couldn’t find it was a lot worse.