They were confined by walls, as if perhaps they were in—
An ambulance!
But why?
Even as the question came into his mind, he knew the answer, and looked down once more at the figure on the stretcher.
He was looking at himself.
His shirt was open, his chest bare, and his face looked as pale as death.
Death.
The word hung in his mind.
Was that what was happening to him? Was he dying?
But if he was dying, why didn’t he feel anything?
Then he knew.
He was no longer in his body. Somehow, during that last terrible flash of blinding pain, he’d managed to escape, slipping away from the agony before it could break his mind.
Now, gazing back down at his body, he could see that the pain was still there, for his face was contorted into an anguished grimace.
He heard Alan Cline’s voice drifting up:
“Jesus, what’s happening? Can’t you do something for him?”
Another voice, this one shouting, but somehow no louder than Alan’s had been:
“We’re losing him! I’m gonna need some help back here!”
As Glen floated far above, the scene continued to unfold. Though he felt nothing, he knew the ambulance had stopped, for now the driver had joined the man who crouched over him. As the first medic began pressing rhythmically on his chest, the second one removed a plastic object from a cabinet fastened to the ambulance’s wall.
Almost disinterestedly, Glen Jeffers watched as his own mouth was opened and a plastic airway was thrust down his throat.
“Let’s get some lidocaine into him,” he heard the other medic order. As if no time at all had passed, he saw the other medic slide a needle into the IV tube and press the plunger. But even as the drug was going into Glen’s system he heard the paramedic who was crouched over his body speak again.
“We’re getting PVCs! Get the defibrillator ready!”
“What’s happening?” he heard Alan Cline ask. “What’s PVC mean?”
“Premature ventricular contractions,” the paramedic snapped. But when he spoke again, his tone had changed, now sounding almost pleading. “Come on,” he crooned. “Come back to me!”
The words hovered in the space around Glen, but held little meaning for him. Darkness began closing around him until he seemed to be in the depths of a tunnel, with only a single speck of light visible in the distance. As the voice of the medic spoke again, Glen began moving toward the light, and now the light itself seemed to be beckoning to him.
He moved faster and faster through the landscape of his own life, watching himself as a baby in his crib, at home, and now his mother was picking him up, holding him, cuddling him. Then he was at school, and everyone he had ever known — everyone he thought he had long ago forgotten — was there.
On and on it went, his life spread out before him, and as he experienced it all, he grew ever closer to the welcoming beacon of brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel.
Now he could see figures in the lights.
His grandparents were there, and someone else, someone he recognized in an instant.
The baby.
The baby they’d lost twelve years ago, when Anne had gone into premature labor with their second child.
Alex, his name would have been.
And now here the baby was, waiting for him, his arms held out eagerly.
Glen moved faster now, racing toward the light, leaving even the memory of the pain far behind.
Then, from behind him, he heard a voice, pleading with him not to leave.
Not a single voice, but a plaintive chorus, a blend of tones in which he could hear not just Anne, but Heather and Kevin, too.
Calling out to him, pleading with him.
He paused, slowing his rush toward the light, and looked back.
All was darkness, a vast and forbidding expanse of black, which he knew was filled with pain.
Ahead, bathed in the sweet light, his grandparents and the child he’d never met awaited, reaching out to welcome him.
The voices from the darkness cried out again, though, and with a great wrenching pang of anguish, Glen knew that he had to turn away from the light, had to make his way back into the darkness.
Those who awaited in the light were eternal, and would be there to welcome him when the time was right.
But behind him there was still unfinished business, still things yet unaccomplished, still deeds left undone.
Turning finally away from the light, Glen Jeffers started back into the darkness.
“Put it up to three hundred joules and hit him again,” the paramedic who was struggling to revive Glen ordered. The driver adjusted the controls on the defibrillator, and a second later Glen’s body jerked involuntarily as the flash of electricity shot through him. His heart stopped for a moment, then started up again. “That’s the way,” the medic murmured under his breath as he studied the display on the monitor. But a second later he saw his patient’s heart run wild again, the first fluttering pulse turning into a useless vibration.
“Try again at three-sixty,” he commanded, pressing the paddles against Glen’s naked chest.
Once again the defibrillator fired. The paramedic held his breath as he watched the monitor, then ordered a milligram of epinephrine, and resumed applying CPR. As the seconds ticked by and Alan Cline unconsciously held his breath as he prayed helplessly for his partner to live, Glen’s heart began to beat again, and a moment later he was once more breathing on his own.
Scrambling into the driver’s seat, the second paramedic jammed the ambulance into gear and pressed on the accelerator.
The siren wailed its mournful plea, clearing the streets ahead.
The back doors of the ambulance were thrown open. Even before Alan Cline could scramble out, two orderlies pulled the stretcher bearing Glen Jeffers onto a gurney and wheeled it through the doors to the Group Health emergency entrance on Thomas Street. His mind only starting to recover from the shock of what had happened at the top of the skyscraper, Alan followed the stretcher inside, but as it turned left through another set of double doors, Alan went to the right, toward a counter behind which several people were struggling to cope with the barely controlled chaos of the emergency room.
On a worn Naugahyde sofa a large woman sat with her arm curled protectively around the shoulders of a sobbing child; in a chair nearby, a teenage girl with stringy blond hair and a vacant expression was attempting to nurse a baby whose screams made it sound as if it was in excruciating pain.
A man with eyes that smoldered with fury clutched at the makeshift bandage that had been wrapped around his upper right arm. When a woman with an already purpling bruise on her cheek tried to help him, he shoved her roughly away. “Ain’t you already done enough, bitch?” he growled, and the woman instantly recoiled as if he’d struck her. A second later, as a policeman appeared, the injured man turned away from the woman, who immediately began insisting to the officer that nothing worthy of a police report had brought them to the emergency room.
The whole scene struck Alan Cline as coming from some alien planet he knew nothing about, and for a moment he felt completely disoriented. Then he remembered Glen, still unconscious — perhaps even dying — being rushed into the opposite wing.
“The man they just brought in,” he said, injecting himself into the midst of a conversation one of the staff
