Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins Read Online Free PDF

but there you are. The entire day was so absurdly normal: woke up, prepped and primped, ignored my way through school, made plans with my friends for summer break, came home, and found Mom and Dad sitting in the living room when they should have been at work. Dad was on one end of the couch. Mom was in the easy chair, as far away as she could be from Dad and still be in the same room. It looked like they were miles apart. I remember thinking that right before they stood up and announced they had something very important to tell me.
    The second Mom said the word divorce I went catatonic. Sounds melodramatic, I know, but I honestly think that’s what happened. I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, I might have stopped breathing, and Mom and Dad sounded like the unseen teachers in an old Charlie Brown cartoon, nothing but whah whah whah whah . Nonsense noises.
    To this day I couldn’t tell you what finallysnapped me out of my stupor, but the next thing I knew I was crying and screaming at them and fury and hatred was pouring out of me like acid and I couldn’t stand to be in that house anymore, I couldn’t stand to look at them, either of them, and I ran.
    There’s a huge nature reserve several miles from my house, and that was where I stopped because I couldn’t run anymore. I was lightheaded from running and crying at the same time and I felt like I might throw up, and whether that was due to my little marathon or because my entire life had just come crashing down around me is anyone’s guess.
    I don’t know why I went there. And I don’t know why I entered the woods, but I felt the need to get as far away from my parents as possible. Maybe I was hoping to get so lost I’d have a perfect excuse to curl up and die.
    I walked.
    It started to get dark. The sun was going down. I’d been wandering around for hours. I’d seen a couple of joggers, a man walking his dog, but it was lonely out there. Empty. Like I felt.
    And then the worst day of my life butted heads with the weirdest day of my life.
    For a moment the woods went silent. Birds stopped singing. The breeze died and every swaying branch and rustling leaf stilled. The silence filled with a distant whistling noise that became a deafening whine. The noise, it seemed to come from everywhere but for some reason I looked up. I could only look for a second because it was so bright, brighter than the sun, but in that second I swore I saw a solid shape in the middle of the light.
    There was a strange whoomp noise and a force threw me back, knocking the wind out of me. I was blind and panting and panicking because I didn’t know what was going on. In time everything normalized and I saw a thick cloud of dust swirling amidst some trees several yards off the path, so I did what any teenage girl with half a brain would do in such circumstances: I went to investigate.
    A few of the trees were leaning dangerously, but unlike the trees after a good storm they’d all splayed out away from each other, and the ground in the middle had sunk. It was a crater, and in the center of the depression was—
    It wasn’t a man. It was shaped like a man, but vaguely. There were two legs, two arms, a head, but everything was stretched out, like a funhouse mirror version of a basketball player. It was hard to tell with him (it?) lying on the ground, but I guessed he was twice my height. He was dressed in a yellow and white bodysuit that for some reason I thought was a uniform. His eyes took up most of his head, like a fly’s eyes, except his were black and shiny, like a pair of oversized eight balls. He had no nose or ears and a funny little inverted V for a mouth.
    Of course, it was an assumption on my part that those were his eyes and mouth, because I was convinced that the thing at my feet was an alien—an honest-to-God alien from another planet.
    Holy crap.
    He even had green skin.
    Holy crap.
    “Are you all right?” I whispered. It was the most volume I could