“What -?” Weasel began, staring at me in incomprehension as I carefully shot him, right between the eyes.
Blood and brains squirted out the back of his head, his eyeballs bulged onto his cheeks from over-pressure, and he dropped like the sack of shit he was. His grip loosened as he fell brain dead, and the spoon flew off his grenade with a tinkle.
I toppled forward atop him, fumbling for the grenade as if it were a loose inflated ovoid in some kind of team sport championship game. I grabbed it with my numb fingers and pulled it in tight to my stomach and landed heavily on my side, body curved to maybe shape the blast a little bit away from the children.
Time slowed way down as I lay there and waited forever. When I finally realized the main charge wasn’t going to detonate, an epiphany sputtered and fizzled through my sodden brain: This is what it comes down to, I thought – a freaking hang fire, that’s all it was.
I lay there for a moment on my side, stunned for the second time since the start of this whole thing by the mere fact of my continued survival. Then the last scraps of my strength gave way, and I lost my grip on the grenade and rolled onto my back.
The cops were coming into the building now, baying at each other like hounds as they cleared the rooms in turn and by the numbers. Outside, ‘Gimme Some Lovin’ finally ended and the DJ began spieling an excited monolog about the hostage situation at the school. This whole fracas had lasted less than three or four minutes from beginning to end.
Despite the growing cold seeping into my bones, I was mentally spry enough to wonder if they’d get an ambulance to me in time. To tell the truth I was getting pretty tuckered, and a dirt nap didn’t sound like that unpleasant of a prospect. I looked up at the darkening ceiling for a while and then I managed to peer around at the hysterical children, all of them unharmed as far as I could see.
My eye lit on the wall clock, and I tracked the second hand as it swept round the dial. I seemed to be riding an eternal present here. How strange to lie here counting each new ‘now’ as it came into existence with every second ticked off by that ratcheting clock hand, surprised each time that I was still there to see it.
I was still wondering what was going to happen next even as everything faded to black.
Chapter 12
I died on the way to the hospital but they weren’t willing to let me go, they insisted on bringing me back with their drugs and machines. I remember a dream wherein I bobbled balloon-like around the ceiling of the ambulance, looking down at my torn bloody body from outside as latex-gloved hands scuttling over me like crabs on a drowned corpse; hands doing hateful things to me. But the hallucination ended when I ectoplasmically burrowed back into that meat puppet shell.
I remember frantic voices and bright lights, and the acrid medicinal stench of the E.R. I knew so well from my misbegotten youth. They’d successfully jump-started me back into the land of the living but I was living in pulses by then, fading in and out until it all went completely black again as they wheeled me into the O.R.
I went away, for how long I couldn’t tell you. There was just enough consciousness flickering through me that I had a dim somatic self-awareness – but not enough to know my name or care about my situation.
My ego was on hold. ‘I’ no longer existed. ‘I’ was a plant, a vegetable enjoying my unconsciousness.
There was none of the pain of being a human, none of the burden of identity. Just sweet dreamless oblivion. It would have been nice to stay in that nirvana forever, but it wasn’t to be: my eye opened and I stared up at the plump pretty blonde nurse hovering over me.
She was adjusting some piece of equipment out of my field of vision. Wires and tubes were stuck all over me, their coordinated beeps chorusing throughout the room. Half my head was cocooned in bandages, and there was an agony where my left eye had been.
The nurse sensed me looking, and our gazes locked. She had beautiful hazel eyes that widened as she gasped; but she got her game face back on fast, gifting me with a smile.
“The children,” I groaned.
She shook her head, not understanding my gargling attempt at speech. I growled in frustration and heaved up off the bed. The nurse pressed my call button over and over and doctors, interns and RNs ran in like they had nothing better to do.
“Relax, Markus,” the oldest doctor said, pressing my shoulders back down. “You need to rest.”
I was too weak to fight the pin. And besides, the look he gave me wasn’t hostile. He was probably a pretty nice guy, a gray haired old veteran of the medical wars.
“The children,” I whispered, all energy fading fast.
He finally understood: “The children are all just fine, Markus. Not one has a scratch on them.”
“Okay then,” I muttered, and sank into blackness again.
Chapter 13
“It’s a miracle, really,” Doctor told me, shaking his distinguished gray head; residents and nurses flanked him as if adding moral support to his expertise by their numbers. “A few millimeters to the right and you’d be dead, or a vegetable.
“The bullet passed completely through the orbital bones of the left socket and out. The brain was physically untouched except for hydrostatic shock, but I’m afraid the eye is completely gone.”
I reached up to touch the bandages swathing the left side of my head and face. Even through the excellent dope they had me pumped up with, I could still feel throbbing pain in the hole where my eye had been.
“How’s about bringing me a mirror?” I said.
Dorcas, the same blonde nurse I’d first woken to, went and fetched one. I held it up to take a gander at myself. They’d done a good job; the bandages were wrapped pretty neatly.
The right side of my face looked completely normal. I plucked at the clean white gauze concealing the left half, lifting the bandages away.
Doctor raised a hand as if to stop me. “I don’t think this is a good idea, Markus.”
I looked at him, and his hand dropped. Even though I was a convalescent Cyclops, I was still twice as wide as him and fully conscious this time.
“Let’s just call it a self-diagnostic, Doc,” I said as I finished pulling the bandages off. “I’ll be my own second opinion.”
I raised the mirror and studied my reflection: the angry red pit where my left eye had been; the stitches radiating outward from the weeping hole like the cracks you’d see fanning out around a bullet hole in a windshield after someone got shot helpless and terrified in their car.
Slash had popped me at point-blank range so the muzzle gases had left a grayish stain surrounding the wound; the packing and un-ignited cordite had peppered into my skin. I’d be wearing that facial tattoo for the rest of my life as a sweet little additional embellishment.
The empty eye socket and the gunpowder stain looked fake somehow, like something out of a horror movie. It wasn’t me, couldn’t be.
But it was. My jaw clenched so tight the muscles thrummed a drum roll in my temples that wouldn’t stop; my teeth squeaked and ground together.
Someone fumbled at me, holding me down as a needle slid into my arm and everything started feeling right again. As I slipped back home into darkness I opened my eye and spoke to the faces surrounding me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all good. I wasn’t much to look at before, so no harm done, eh?” I rolled my head on my pillow, closing my eye to shut them all out. After a short while I got to go to sleep again.
