I wanted to live. That fact came as something of a surprise to me after the last year of planning out my death, but there it was. All of the estrangement and loneliness, loss and ennui, and just plain hopelessness faded and shrank to nothing, like shadows before the sun of my new perspective.
They say that everything becomes precious to the dying; savoring each sunset, each touch and gesture from a loved one, that each and every breath becomes sweet. I can tell you that precious is a meaningless and trivial word to describe the trembling reverence that cradles each second of sensation as you die. I cherished the cold that was stealing the sensation from my limbs, the deeply warm pool under my chest and neck, even the bright tearing pain that fought to eclipse everything else. I pleaded and hoped for one more single instant of agony.
I don’t know how long I lay there on the floor. It could have been seconds or minutes or hours that I strained with everything that I had to exist for just a little longer. No one can do that forever. Exhausted, I slipped away and waited for numb oblivion, but it never came. The pain in my chest sorted itself out into a serrated tin saw that ran from ribs to shoulder blade, vivid and attention grabbing. The puffy undifferentiated pain of before was gone, bringing my body into sharp tactile focus. Feet, hands, belly, face. I could feel them down to the smallest pore and fold. With feeling came volition, allowing me to flicker my eyes open and spread my hands against the cool floor. Sound rushed back, carrying with it my name, shaped by Anne’s urgent breath.
I coughed and watched a glistening ruby fan unfold in front of my face as blood sprayed out across the floor. My anguished name rang out again, sweet in my ears.
My will and my body finally reengaged, and I pushed up off the floor into a sitting position. A sticky, sucking sound accompanied my separation from the linoleum. I focused on Anne who was crying and fluttering her hands over my shoulders and chest, afraid to touch me lest she cause me more harm. I resolved the issue by grabbing her hands in mine and looking into her eyes.
“S’okay. M’alright.” Everything coming out of my mouth was mushy. My voice was slurred and sounded threadier than I had expected.
Anne sagged back against a table leg and squeezed her eyes shut with a little sob. Greg and Chuck’s stunned faces swam into focus as I blinked away the fog.
Anne was the first to act. She got up and fetched a butcher knife out of a block on the counter. Seconds later, she had sawed off my shirt.
“I can’t see anything with all this blood. I need something to clean this up with. Chuck, find me something. Chuck!” Chuck jumped, startled back to attention. He dampened a kitchen towel in the sink, squeezed it out hard, and tossed it to her.
Anne snapped it out of the air one-handed and spent the next couple of minutes gingerly dabbing and wiping at my back. Chuck and Greg walked around behind me to watch her work. The towel stopped wiping at me.
“Well?”
“Motherfucker.” That was Chuck.
That didn’t sound good. “What?”
Anne came around to my front and wiped at my chest, a little more vigorously than before. The men dutifully came around to the front and this time both of them swore.
I looked down at the semi-clean swatch of skin over my lower ribs. In the center of an angry purple-red weal was a puncture wound about half an inch wide. The edges were lined up and mated, outlined with red-black seams of clotted blood. There was no bleeding. It was at least a day-old gunshot wound. I poked at it with a finger, which hurt like a son of a bitch, but the wound didn’t feel like it was going to tear open if I moved.
There was a loud click in the kitchen, and I looked up to see the inside of Chuck’s Taurus. “Shit! You’re one of them! You know where we live and what we look like. Fuck.”
Chuck looked scared and pissed, while Greg looked scared and tired. I looked at Anne, and saw uncertainty and even a little fear on her face. It hurt to think that I had lost the closeness that had grown between us. That she no longer had faith in me.
“I’m not one of them, I’m worm free.” I sounded much clearer, nearly normal.
Chuck’s voice was high and fast, panicked. “Bullshit! You should be dead, but you’re just sitting there talking like nothing happened. That’s all the proof we need.”
“It’s true that bags aren’t affected by shots to the chest, but think about that. They aren’t affected at all. They don’t fall down and nearly die. They just run you down and pull your head off. I was down for, what, ten minutes?”
“Shit, not even ten seconds. More like five.” The gun was still pointed at my face. “Even you’re not one of them, you still aren’t one of us. You’re not human.”
“I already told you that, remember? I’m older than I look and all that stuff?”
“Dude, that was just crazy talk. This is real.”
While all of this was going on, Anne must have come to her own conclusion about me. She slipped under my arm and helped me to my feet.
Her voice rang with scorn and authority, loud and sharp in the small space of the kitchen. “Shut up and point that thing somewhere else, Chuck.” He backed up a step and the barrel of his gun wavered. “This whole town is about to host an involuntary blood drive. Now isn’t the time to be killing off your own people.”
“Fine.” He put the gun away, but he didn’t relax. “Just remember that it’s on you if he turns on us.”
I stepped away from Anne, wobbly but gravity defiant. “I’m going to wash off all this blood and pack up. You guys decide if you want to trust us or not. Oh, and somebody should probably grab that rifle and see to Mazie. I don’t expect she’ll be in a very understanding mood when she wakes up.”
I tried not to let on how much I hurt and how weak I was as I turned and walked carefully out of the kitchen.
37
Scalding water drilled into my face and chest and ran out of my open mouth as I panted and leaned against the tiles in the shower with my outspread hands. Steam curled and rolled up the opaque and beaded glass door and then out into the foggy bathroom.
The hot water was dissolving the scabs sealing up the twin gunshot wounds in my chest and back, allowing long translucent red trails to snake down my body. The one from my chest was a fascinating, ever-changing river, the other a mystery revealed only by the dilute whorls of blood eddying around my feet.
I’ve been shot before, but never in the chest. I took a 9mm from a P08 Parabellum, as the Germans called the Luger, in the thigh, and at the time it was the worst injury I’d ever had, despite being essentially a deep cut.
The bullet missed the bone and went clean out the other side and even stopped bleeding in about ten minutes. I had never been so proud of a scar before in my life.
When I fell in the pit in Warsaw, it took all my scars away from me, which was fine, except that it screwed me out of a Purple Heart. Turns out you need to be able to produce a wound for that.
The water started to run cold, waking me from my reverie. I made an effort to focus and clear my head, letting the frigid water bite into me until I reconnected with the present. I shut off the water and wondered how long I had been standing there. I still felt weak, but the kind of weak you feel after recovering from a high fever, not the kind you should feel when recovering from a near-fatal gunshot wound.
More than ever, my body felt alien to me, a thing of single-minded purpose that had nothing to do with my own.
My clothes were ruined, so I just wadded them up and threw them in the corner. I put on a fresh set from my duffel bag and packed away the toiletries that I had left out this morning. I had a feeling that Anne and I were never coming back to this house.
I entered the kitchen cautiously, but this time there were no guns pointed at me. Mazie was nowhere to be seen, but at least the rifle was back in the corner where it belonged. I dropped the duffel on the table. Anne took one look, nodded to me, and left to pack her things as well.
Greg spoke first. “Mazie went to her room. I think she’s in shock.”
“That makes two of us.”
