Chapter 1 — Awakening
Awakening... It wasn't just bad. It was downright lousy—the kind that makes you regret its very existence.
The first to strike was a hammer of pain, splitting my skull from the inside. Not a sharp, stabbing pain, but a dull, throbbing rhythm in my temples, as if an inept satanic drummer had taken up residence there, behind the bone, beating out a devilish rhythm with every heartbeat. The second was the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but a sensation as if my throat had been filled with hot Sahara sand and then polished with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, rolled in my mouth like a dead lizard dried out in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in ragged shreds, clinging to saving dark scraps of nothingness, but reality was persistent and merciless.
Before I could fully recover and piece together the fragments of my thoughts, a smell hit my nose—a sickening, sweet-sour, unmistakable stench. The smell of vomit. Ironically, this stench cleared my mind better than a bucket of ice water ever could. I tried to wince, but even this simple movement of my facial muscles caused a fresh wave of nausea to rise in my throat.
No, actually… it was even worse. It wasn't just the smell. It was vomit—a sticky, cooling puddle of my own vile waste soaked my T-shirt and chilled the skin of my back and shoulder with an unpleasant chill. The realization of this washed over me in an icy wave of disgust, making me shudder. And that would be fine—you never know what happens in life—but this was frankly not how I remembered those last moments before sleep. I distinctly remembered going to bed. At home. In my clean, freshly made bed. Completely sober and in a sane state. And now...
With difficulty, leaning on the sticky, rough floor with trembling, unusually weak arms, I forced my poisoned body into a sitting position. The room rocked like the deck of a ship in a force-nine storm. I closed my eyes, clutching the floor with my fingers, waiting out the dizziness, and finally looked around. I absolutely, gnashing my teeth, disliked what I saw.
This was not my bedroom. This was not even close to my home.
A tiny one-room apartment—or more accurately, a studio. Roughly twenty-five, maybe thirty square meters. A large, if that's even the word, room that doubled as a living room, a bedroom, and who knows what else. A tattered sofa with springs poking through here and there, seemingly having seen better days back in the Nixon era. A clunky dresser made of cheap chipboard with the woodgrain film peeling off at the edges. A desk littered with papers and empty instant noodle packages. A kitchen unit huddled in the corner—a couple of cabinets, a sink piled high with dirty dishes, and a two-burner electric stove. Everything looked not just shabby, but squalid and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house, which I'd been rebuilding with my own hands for the past ten years, this place looked like a doghouse next to a palace.
But that wasn't the main question. WHAT. AM. I. DOING. HERE?
My thoughts were jumbled, clinging to one another. Kidnapped, forcibly plied with alcohol, and abandoned here? What a crazy idea. Who would need me? Had my friends pulled some idiotic prank beyond the pale? No, that wouldn't be their style. And practically all of them were in the city, hundreds of miles away. Did they have nothing better to do than drive in the middle of the night to pull off such a complex and pointless operation? Plus, they'd have to somehow drag me out of the house without waking me, pour liters of alcohol into me... No, it didn't add up. Absolutely not.
And only now did it dawn on my still half-conscious mind—the very discrepancy that my subconscious had stubbornly ignored but kept creeping up, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety. My body! My size! My hands! Why the hell did they look so... skinny and delicate? These weren't my sinewy, working hands, covered in a thick mesh of old scars and calluses from decades of working with wood and metal! Hands that could drive a hundred-pound nail into a pine board with one precise blow of a fist and not even notice. And these... these were good for nothing more than pressing keys on a keyboard or turning pages. And overall, I felt somehow... shorter. Lighter.
It was complicated. Too many questions and no answers. All I knew was that I knew nothing. But I had to figure it out. Determined to find at least some clue, I staggered toward the only private room in this studio—the bathroom. Every step sent a dull throb through my head, and my body ached mercilessly, but with great difficulty I made it inside. Dirty... that would be putting it mildly. A yellow stain ingrained on the toilet bowl, a deep crack in the sink crudely patched with gray tape, a slippery, cheap bar of soap instead of real soap. A dim, lifeless light emanated from a single bare bulb. Everything here screamed poverty, indifference, and neglect. My gaze fell on the grimy mirror above the sink, covered in dried water splashes. It was into this mirror that I looked.
"Fuck yeah, bitch!" I blurted out in a hoarse, alien, youthful voice. I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie with a time bomb strapped to its chest.
Looking back at me from the mirror was… not me. That's the long and short of it. A young man of about nineteen was staring back. Tousled dark blond hair, large brown eyes that brimmed with a mixture of animal fear and confusion, and a rather ordinary, unremarkable face. None of my usual three-day stubble, no mesh of wrinkles around my eyes, no deep scar on my chin left by a slipped chisel a couple of years ago. Just smooth, pale skin with faint traces of teenage acne. He was skinny, about six feet seven by rough estimate, and wearing a gray, vomit-soaked T-shirt and plaid cotton shorts.
I stood there, thunderstruck, staring at my reflection, but it wasn't him I saw. A different image appeared before my mind's eye—my garage workshop. The smell of ozone from the welder mingled with the tart sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, which I'd thought of so inopportunely earlier... I remembered them down to the smallest detail. A broad, calloused palm, capable of effortlessly grasping the end of a hundred-kilogram beam. A network of small whitish scars—the memory of broken drill bits, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had already become part of the texture of my skin. Under my nails—an ingrained, almost permanent dark streak of machine oil and wood dust, which no solvent could remove. These hands were tools, extensions of my will. And what I saw now in the mirror... those pale, narrow palms with the slender fingers of a pianist or artist—they evoked in me not just rejection, but a deep, visceral feeling of wrongness. As if not just my body but my very essence had been replaced. I clenched my fists, feeling the thin knuckles crack unusually. No, those were definitely not my fists.
How? How did I end up in this... guy's body? Why me? What happened to my real body? Who the hell was this guy anyway? What the hell was I supposed to do next? Questions swarmed in my head like frantic bees, and the already stubborn hangover pain turned into a deafening migraine.
With difficulty, I peeled off my vomit-stained clothes and disgustedly tossed them into the corner, then stepped into the cold shower. The icy streams brought me back to my senses a bit, washing away not only the filth but also some of the primal shock. Deciding not to fill my sluggish head with a thousand questions for now, I sidestepped the vomit stain on the floor and collapsed onto the couch.
Lying down and staring at the cracked, finely wrinkled ceiling, I tried to think of nothing. Surprisingly, I began to feel sleepy. That was good. To hell with problems—the morning is wiser than the evening. A faint, irrational hope still glimmered within me that this whole thing was just a dream. A bad one, terribly realistic, damn scary, but still a dream. With such reassuring thoughts, I once again fell into the realm of Morpheus, and even the headache finally faded into the background.
How long I slept like that… I had no idea. But when I woke up, a thick, velvety night reigned outside. The city was alive with its own life: neon signs and streetlights cast whimsical, dancing shadows on the walls, the hum of cars and the distant, mournful wail of a siren could be heard. New York at night must be beautiful, but it's best not to venture out onto the streets of Hell's Kitchen after dark. You'll be lucky if they just take your wallet and smartphone, not your life. Although, there's a chance the Devil of Hell's Kitchen will hear your prayer for help and deal with the bandits. But what will he ask for in return? A simple vigilante wouldn't be called the Devil for his pretty eyes…
"What the…?" I whispered into the void, suddenly realizing that these thoughts… weren't entirely mine.