Sal should have heard the click of the gun and the echoing sound of the blast, but it refused to register in his brain. Instead he saw a dog, colored in brown fur with perked up ears. Some person must've brought it along from their home since the day was nice and the New Jersey sun was gentle. His mother had warned him not to go far.

But that was the end.

The dog attacked, cold and quick and without hesitation. It had been waiting. It was not some person's pet, but instead a wild animal with one objective and one objective only.

To kill the boy.

But Sal didn't die. He was close. Automatically his mind cut away all his senses when the feeling of aching pain swept over him. But even that didn't kill him. His heart never stopped beating. His brain wasn't pounded into small little pieces. Instead, keeping him alive cost something more than his own.

Sal's mother and his face.

He didn't know what had happened the next time he awoke. The dog probably thought he was dead. It left him lying besides the body of his mother, painting a gruesome red that stained the beautiful green grass. Sal couldn't see her. He couldn't see from one side. It was just all red and black. A color he would grow to adapt to.

Where was his dad? Sal didn't know. His mother promised that they would see the dog when his father came. They just had to wait. Sal was persistent. He didn't exactly want to wait. He was impatient. The dog wouldn't be there forever, and he wanted to see it and pet it for himself. With or without his parents. So the little three-year-old ventured on forth, ignoring the warnings his mom gave as he scrambled after her curious toddler. Were the signs clear? The dog didn't really look like a dog. Why didn't Sal notice that sooner? The dog looked like a man.

A man. After that, he would tell people what he saw. A man, wearing a dog's face. That was what killed his mom. That was what destroyed his face. Not the blast of a gun. Not the murderous intentions of a cultist. People didn't believe him. Sal couldn't say he was surprised in their disbelief. They were being told this by a kid who experienced more than two traumatic events in not even the span of an hour. He was in shock, they would all say. A dog took his mom's life. A dog took his face. It wasn't like it wasn't uncommon for such things to happen. Especially out in the middle of nowhere.

The smell of metallic blood was heavy in the air when Sal woke up. It caused his mouth to curl up, flaring pain across his face. His nose felt wet and his left cheek felt like it was melting off his bones. Sal had to place one of his small little hands over that wounded part of his small little face just to keep the nipping air from biting and causing him to ache in more pain. He could still see. Only through his right eye, though. But at the same time he wished he didn't see her body.

Every step to take was horrible. Sal's brain was foggy. The doggy wasn't a nice doggy. The doggy was a weird doggy. The face of the dog mask kept flashing in his mind, the expression on his mother's face as her stomach blew apart at the force of the gun's blast. Wide eyes, bloodshot. A mouth torn open, mid sentence, frozen in a sudden surprise and too instantaneous pain. Was that the expression all people had when they exploded? Sal would rather not know. He wished he could stop thinking about these sorts of things.

All toddlers seemed to be hyperactive. Sal was the same. Was. Now he was passive. Too passive. And things for him that brought him excitement not brought him anxiety too high for his body to handle. Maybe if he got anxious enough he would throw up. That wouldn't be a good thing. So instead, in the future, he would use medications to keep that from happening. Because Sal didn't want to know what would happen when his anxious thoughts got the better of him.

His father didn't find Sal and Sal's mother first. Sal found him first. He crawled up from the soggy forest floor and pushed himself up his feet. But his mom. She was still breathing, right? He had to check. She was still alive, right? She was only just sleeping, right?

Sal's toddler brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept of death. And even if it could, his parents thought he was too young to know about such a harsh experience. They tried to keep him safe from the dangers until they thought he was ready, which Sal later would understand why that was reasonable. The world was a giant shithole, and that only seemed to be more and more true the older he got and the more dark secrets he unraveled. But here and now, the promise to keep him safe was a promise that was broken. And it would haunt him.

Would things stop haunting him? Would he forever have nightmares, surrounded by the people he loved all tormented by the inevitable fate of death? Would Sal always be surrounded by death? Was that his fate? Death? Could things stop dying while he held the delicate sources of life in his hands? Was it so hard to wish things were how they were before, when the dog was never a man and the demon was never brought into existence? Couldn't people just get the happy ending they wanted instead of getting close and never being able to reach it at all?

His head hurt. That was understandable.

Was it always this dark? There was once an old man that lived across from their house in New Jersey, before the incident happened. He looked weird, and Sal noticed that he never really looked at anything. Just touched, hands always outstretched, sometimes a cane he smacked so lightly against anything and everything in his path.

"He's weird!" the young Sally Face said, pointing at the man with a stubby finger.

"He's blind Sally," said his mother. She was always so calm, so pretty. Sal didn't retain her golden hair or her eye color, earning his from his dad, but he knew that he would get her shorter height. She wasn't the tallest person. That never bothered Sal.

"He's smacking lotsa things with a stick!"

Then his mother, smiling at him, picked him up and stared at him in those glistening blue eyes. "He sees nothing but black, Sal. He can't see very well."

Sal would see black for a long time, but it wasn't because he became blind. The blast destroyed his eye. He would have to learn how to live with one. Just like he would have to figure out how to live with scars stretching and peeling the skin on the left side of his face in directions skin shouldn't be pulled in. He would learn how to hear out of an ear that became deaf that the doctors could only save so much of. He would learn how to eat in a manner that others would find extremely savage, and that eating without such manners like a normal person was undesirable and inhumane. And so in result came the insults and the harsh treatment from kids his age. They would think Sal was a freak. Their parents would think Sal was a pyromaniac or even sometimes something worse. Words Sal didn't understand and didn't know the meaning of.

Sal was a sweet kid. That was something those people didn't know. He was nice, polite, and even the tragic events couldn't take away his endless curiosity. He was smart too, sometimes eager to know things he probably should not have wanted to know. He looked creepy, yes, with that prosthetic mask that looked more like something that came out of a hit horror movie than an attempt to give a boy his face back. Sal got used to it all. And he adapted.

Change was a thing Sal used to be afraid of. The change of having a face riddled with lines colored red and pink and white and brown. The change of going to school, those dreams of making friends that would last a lifetime falling apart right in front of him. The change of having no mom, but instead having a dad that succumbed to drinking because even the pain for him was too much to bear. The change of moving away from New Jersey into another place thick of pain that could never be healed. That, however, ended up being the best change of all. Because not all change was bad. There just hasn't been any good changes recently.

People would ask, "What happened to your face?" Sal couldn't answer that question. He would tell people that he wore a prosthetic when they exclaimed in sudden surprise at his creepy physical appearance. It didn't bother him as much as it used to. It was almost predicted. He might as well have been tallying who was shocked, who ran away from him, and who just took it as the norm. There weren't a lot of people that took it as the norm.

Sal was surprised when Larry Johnson took it as the norm. It was the first kid that was his age that didn't react in total disgust. Like Sal carried some sort of disease. Well, it wasn't like Larry seemed like that sort of guy. Honestly, Sal first took him as someone who secretly got high in the bathrooms between classes. Despite how he looked, Larry probably didn't really smoke drugs all that much. So that made Sal feel silly for prejudging someone based on the shit they liked or how they looked. Considering what people did to him.

"I'm Sal, but my friends call me Sally Face." That was the greeting Sal had adopted. He wore his blue hair up in pigtails that honestly caused a lot of confusion about what his gender was. Boys could wear their hair up in pigtails too. It wasn't like that was against the law. Sally Face was just goddamn good at rocking them. And his friends would think so too, if he really had friends.

The people he called his friends before were just fuckholes who used him to get closer to girls. Because Sal looked like a girl sometimes. Honestly that was something that confused him. But the people didn't mind him being nearby, so that was at least something. Even when most of them probably chugged down awful smelling beer during parties and classified themselves as "flamers". They weren't really friends at all. Just fuckholes and jackasses. So Sal kept thinking of them as such, grateful when he wasn't forced to pass them down in the hallways of school anymore.

The thought of death was getting to his head. Sal knew this. What was the point of thinking about the things that happened in the past when he would have no future to reflect on them? The time had come. Death was inevitable. Even if he were to prove his innocence, even if Ash had been able to show them he was telling the truth before they strapped him to that chair, it wouldn't matter in the end. He basically committed homicide. Larry killed himself to prevent himself from being consumed by the demon. Todd was being used as the vessel for said demon. Ash couldn't do anything about it, her friends dying left and right and all the good things falling apart in front of her. Sal wanted to hug her and tell her that the same happened to him, and that it was still happening to him. She was not alone.

Ash would never be alone, Sal thought with a smile. It pulled up the scars on his face. It didn't bother him anymore. Who would care? Sal didn't. When people looked at dead bodies, all they saw was death. Never the person. So when people looked at his scarred face that haunted him since he was three, people would only think he was some horrible person. And he couldn't really do anything about it.

But Ash could. Ash was nice. Pretty. Kind. Even though she cut all her hair off, she was still the same Ash Sal remembered. People would think she lived a good life. Probably riding like the wind like a badass and died a badass. And for a good cause too.

A good cause. Be that for me, please. I know you can prevent them from finishing all the things that began everything. I know you can find the truth. You did that for me. You saw who I am. Not what I looked like.

Death tapped on Sal's shoulders. Are you ready?

And he nodded. "Yes."