Emmit had been frozen with fear, his racing heart sucking the breath out of him as the entire row of bank tellers followed her example, and the smattering of patrons left in the lobby scattered away from him like a school of fish fleeing a roaming shark. Seconds. In a matter of seconds, he had blown it.
Just like that, my life is officially over.
He had begrudgingly turned to face Hank, the obese security guard, and had found himself staring into the hateful black eye of his handgun. He'd lined up his shot with Emmit's midsection, one eye smashed closed behind a shiny mound of flesh and the other glaring through the gun's sights. Emmit could see the man's fiery flushed cheeks and sparkling bald dome even now, hanging weightless in the vortex of light and writhing in unprecedented agony. He could picture his one wide open eye, wide but unafraid. Not afraid; ready. He had probably waited his entire career for something significant to happen to him, and his fifteen minutes had arrived.
"Hands where I can see 'em, you son of a bitch," Hank had barked. Emmit had obeyed; of course he had. The security guard's weapon had been loaded and ready to kill, unlike his own, which was still impotent and in the process of sliding down his sweaty ass cheek.
"Take that mask off," was Hank's next command. “Slow. Use one hand.” Emmit had peeled the Joker mask from his face and let it fall to the ground like a dead leaf, exposing his boyish features to the enthralled gawkers around him. The face that would be in newspapers all around the area very soon; the face that would be a hideous mugshot for his friends and family to share as they talked about how he had always been such a nice guy.
"Listen. I want to get the gun off of me before the cops get here," Emmit had pleaded to Hank as calmly as he could, not daring to lower his hands yet. "It's not loaded. You can come take it if you want or let me throw it away."
"You just stay right the fuck where you are and don't move a dick hair," Hank had snapped back, taking a step forward as his sausage finger flexed against the trigger guard. "I will put you in the ground, son, bet me."
Emmit had felt disgusted with himself, standing there like a trapped rat with all those eyes bearing down on him. How the hell had it gotten so bad? How had he lost so much control, and so god damned fast? How had he become a criminal like all the ones he had watched on those "life on the inside" shows, the same degenerates he had thought to be lowlifes who were beneath even a pauper like himself?
"I want. To get rid. Of the gun," he had said again slowly, and then he had moved to test Hank's resolve, to see if perhaps the wired security guard might let him grab the gun out of his waist band and toss it away. Perhaps he had been bluffing; maybe he honestly didn’t want to pull the trigger.
If Emmit could have ditched his weapon, when the police arrived, he could have screamed at them that he was unarmed, begged them not to kill him, proved to them that he had ditched the gun and that it hadn't even been loaded in the first place. He had lowered his hand a fraction of an inch, and that had been enough to set his own personal Hell in motion.
The shot had been deafening, ringing out in the bank lobby like a hand grenade in a microwave. Even as he had dropped heavily to his back, staring dazedly at the ceiling as a hot wetness had begun to spread beneath him, it hadn't clicked home that he'd been shot. Emmit had just sprawled there, blinking and breathing slowly through his open mouth, too terrified to move even a single muscle. There was a tingling sensation near the center of his chest, coupled with a rubbery feeling of muscle exhaustion as if he'd spent the last hour pumping iron at the gym. There had been no pain; not at first. He realized now that he had been in shock, and the excruciating pain tearing through his chest was coming from the kamikaze path of a bullet.
"He's down," Hank had said, his words sounding far away and high above him, his voice ethereal. He was speaking from some other realm, a place separate from criminals. A place where Emmit would no longer be welcomed.
Emmit had been absurdly offended at the calm pride in Hank's voice as he spoke into his walkie, pride in the fact that he had shot the bad guy down and saved the day. "He was going for the gun and I plugged him in the chest. Get an ambulance down here, PDQ. I don't think he's going to hang out much longer, he's gonna bleed out."
Emmit hadn't been able to move, and so he stared up at the ceiling and noticed a water stain splotched across it. It was a yellow Rorschach blot that resembled the crooked hind leg of a dog, and as consciousness had begun to drain from him with his blood, he had thought dizzily to himself, Deacon... I have a puppy named Deacon, and I'll never pet him again. His strange shock-think was enveloped in inky black, and his journey to the winter woods and the cannibals had begun.
He suddenly sucked cool breaths in deep, wheezing gasps, throwing gasoline onto the fire that was raging in his chest. The breaths were forced out again in the form of hoarse screams as he opened his eyes, and suddenly the tunnel of
