CHAPTER 1

Five-year-old Mason Thomas woke up on the ceiling.  Nausea overwhelmed him as men and women beneath him moved around at an odd angle.  The room was unfamiliar.  He couldn’t remember how he got stuck above everyone else.  Was he dreaming?

Terror gripped him as he realized something was horribly wrong.  He shouldn’t be seeing the tops of heads and shoulders.

He called the first name he could think of.

“Mommy!”

The men and women below didn’t hear him.

The adults spoke quickly to each other, almost running around the room.  There were machines making loud noises.  Mason put his hands to his ears, but that didn’t help drown out the noise.

A scent touched his nose that made him gag and dry-heave.

In the middle of the room below were three gurneys.  There was a person on each one.  The two larger figures were burnt beyond recognition.  He could only make out the tiny body beneath him.

It looked just like him.

He finally recognized he was in a hospital.  He watched enough TV to know what a hospital looked like.

A doctor ran into the room.  “What do we got here?”

Another doctor cut Mason’s shirt up the middle and ripped it away.  He couldn’t look away from the tiny child beneath him.  It was like looking into a mirror, only his eyes were closed.

“A lightning strike,” a woman said.  She gestured to the two motionless figures next to his body.  “The parents are gone.  The boy’s alive, but we’re losing him.”

“Mommy!  Daddy!” Mason shouted.  “Where are you?”

He was lost and confused.  He didn’t understand what the doctors and nurses were doing.  They no longer even looked at the two gurneys next to him.  They shouted at each other and rubbed something on his chest.  A doctor rolled up a cart with another of their many machines on it.

Mason tried to turn on his side.  He pushed away from the ceiling with his elbows.

It didn’t work.

His little mouth opened in horror as his elbows sank inside the tile ceiling.  He could feel the roughness of the tile surrounding his elbow.  He shouted, then crossed his arms tightly.  He rubbed his forearms, still feeling the flesh on his bones.

He slowly started to float toward the body beneath him.  A second ago, he wanted nothing more than to get down from the ceiling.  As the body on the gurney got closer, he wanted to go back up.

“No!  Get away!”

He drifted through his body, like it wasn’t even there.  For just a brief flash he saw things no five-year-old should see.  Blood vessels, tissue, his own optic nerves.  He emerged through the back of his skull, drifted through the gurney, and landed gently on the cold floor.

He cried, yet no tears stained his face.

“I want my Mommy!”

He tried to crawl away, moving in between the legs of the doctors working feverishly to save his life.  He ran from the room, knowing the two blackened things back there weren’t his mother and father.

The hallway was much quieter.  People walked back and forth, talking to each other and looking at clipboards.  Mason looked up and down for his parents.  He knew they had to be around somewhere, probably looking for him.  He didn’t want them to worry.

Everyone ignored him as he walked down the hall.  The hallway opened up to a waiting room.  Mason looked around with wide eyes at the many people sitting and pacing, either waiting to be seen, or waiting for loved ones.  As he searched their faces, trying to spot his parents, something terrifying settled in his mind.

He didn’t know what his parents looked like.

He shut his eyes tight, trying to remember them.  He knew his name was Mason Thomas.  He was five years old, with black hair and brown eyes.  He had a mother and father.

And that was all.

He didn’t know his teacher’s name, or if he even went to school.  He didn’t know where he lived, or if he had any friends.

Worst of all, he didn’t know his parents.

He felt tears running down his face.  When he went to wipe them, he again felt nothing.  He walked up to the office in the corner with the window and the pretty nurse.

“Miss Nurse?” he said.  “Could you help me find my Mommy and Daddy?”

Mason tried to put his hands on the desk.  His hands passed through the top.  He yanked them back and stared at them.

The nurse picked up the phone.

“Hey, it’s me.  You should have seen the family they wheeled in here.  Killed by lightning.  Can you believe that?  I think they were holding hands or something, got all three of them.  It’s so sad.”

“Miss Nurse,” Mason said, jumping up and down.  “I’m right here.  Can you help me please?”

A doctor approached the desk.  He stood almost on top of Mason.  The boy’s body penetrated the doctor, all the way up to his ear.  He could almost hear the doctor’s blood pumping inside his body.

“Hey!” he said, jumping away.  He was angry at everyone ignoring him.  “I want my Mommy and Daddy!”

He reached out to put his hand on the wall.  He hadn’t touched anything solid except the floor since falling from the ceiling.  Still surprised when his hand dipped into the wall, he moved it around for a moment, feeling the drywall and metal studs.  For just a moment, it was the coolest thing in the world.

Mason looked up and noticed the doctor didn’t look at him.  The nurse behind the desk, the people in the waiting room, the technicians and the janitor that walked by, no one saw him.

He was surrounded by people, but he was alone.

“I don’t like this dream.  I want to wake up now.”

A stab of pain gripped his chest, and the waiting room vanished in a flash.  Three doctors peered down at him, a bright light behind them.

Then he was back in the waiting room.

He buckled over from the pain.

“Please help me,” he whispered.

He clenched his eyes shut and bounced back and forth between the two places.  The doctors shouted mysterious words and directions to each other.  Then he heard the relatively quiet whispers of the waiting room, and the occasional page over the intercom system.

Finally, he was awake, sitting up screaming.  He looked into the faces of the men and women that just minutes ago he watched from the ceiling.

“It’s okay, son!  It’s gonna be okay.”

A doctor tried to gently lay him back down onto the gurney, but Mason fought.

“Where’s my Mom and Dad?  I heard you talking, about the lightning.  I was just getting ready to go look for them some more.”  He looked to his left, at the empty spots where those black mannequin-looking things were.  “Where are the tables that were there?”

The doctors traded puzzled looks.  One of the nurses stared at Mason, her eyes filled with fear.

A doctor wheeled him away.  Mason was only half listening.

“You’ll have your own room…meet a nice doctor lady named Mary…”

The nice doctor lady named Mary wasn’t prepared to meet Mason Thomas.  She was ready to tell Mason he was an orphan, help him during the traumatic adjustment period, and transition him into foster care.

She wasn’t prepared for his memory loss.

Or the vivid nightmares of Mason waking up in strange places