What was now was only pain.
What was the damn point?
He went away for a while, sinking down below the pain, where the world
was a dark and dingy red. From somewhere outside that world came the
shriek of the sirens, the pressure on his chest, the speeding motion of
the ambulance.
Then lights again, bright white to seer his closed lids. And he was
flying while voices shouted on all sides of him.
Bullet wounds, chest. BP's eighty over fifty and falling, pulse thready
and rapid. In and out. Pupils are good.
Type and cross-match. We need pictures. On three. One, two, three.
His body seemed to jerk, up, then down. He no longer cared. Even the
dingy red was going gray. A tube was pushing its way down his throat,
and he didn't bother to try to cough it out. He barely felt it. Barely
felt anything and thanked God for it.
BP's dropping. We're losing him.
I've been lost a long time, he thought.
With vague interest he watched them, half a dozen green-suited people in
a small room where a tall blond boy lay on a table. Blood was
everywhere. His blood, he realized. He was on that table with his chest
torn open. He looked down at himself with detached sympathy. No more
pain now, and the quiet sense of relief nearly made him smile.
He floated higher, until the scene below took on a pearly sheen and the
sounds were nothing but echoes.
The pain tore through him, an abrupt shock that jerked the body on the
table, sucked him back. His struggle to pull away was brief and
fruitless. He was inside again, feeling again, lost again.
The next thing he knew, he was riding in a drug-hazed blur. Someone was
snoring. The room was dark and the bed narrow and hard. A backwash of
light filtered through a pane of glass that was spotted with
fingerprints. Machines beeped and sucked monotonously. Wanting only to
escape the sounds, he rolled back under.
He was in and out for two days. He was very lucky. That's what they told
him. There was a pretty nurse with tired eyes and a doctor with graying
hair and thin lips. He wasn't ready to believe them, not when he was too
weak to lift his head, not when the hideous pain swarmed back into him
every two hours like clockwork.
When the two cops came in he was awake, and the pain was smothered under
a few layers of morphine. He made them as cops at a glance. His
instincts weren't so dulled that he didn't recognize the walk, the
shoes, the eyes. He didn't need the identification they flashed at him.
"Gotta smoke?" Phillip asked it of everyone who passed through. He had a
low-grade desperation for nicotine, even though he doubted he could
manage to suck on a cigarette.
"You're too young to smoke." The first cop pasted on an avuncular smile
and stationed himself on one side of the bed. The Good Cop, Phillip
thought wearily.
"I'm getting older every minute."
"You're lucky to be alive." The second cop kept his face hard as he
pulled out a notebook.