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6:21 A. M.
“Mr. Ryan?”
Johnny came back to the present. When he opened his eyes, bright lights surrounded him; the place smelled of disinfectant. He was sitting on a hard plastic chair in the hospital waiting area.
A man stood in front of him, wearing blue scrubs and a surgical cap. “I’m Dr. Reggie Bevan. Neurosurgeon. You’re Tallulah Hart’s family?”
“Yes,” he said, after a pause. “How is she?”
“She’s in critical condition. We’ve stabilized her enough for surgery, but—”
Code Blue, Trauma Nine blared through the hallway.
Johnny got to his feet. “Is that about her?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Stay here. I’ll be back. ” Without waiting for a reply, Dr. Bevan turned and ran toward the elevators.
Five
Where am I?
Darkness.
I can’t open my eyes, or maybe I can open them and there’s nothing to see. Or maybe my eyes are ruined. Maybe I’m blind.
CLEAR.
Something hits me in the chest so hard I lose control of my body. I feel myself arch up and flop back down.
NOTHINGDRBEVAN.
There is a crush of pain, the kind I never even imagined, the kind that makes you want to give up, and then … nothing.
I am as still as a held breath; the darkness that cradles me is thick and quiet.
It takes no effort to open my eyes now. I am still in the dark, but it’s different. Liquid, and as black as water on the seafloor. When I try to move, it resists. I push and push until I am sitting up.
The dark lessens in stages, turns gray and gloomy, and a light appears, diffuse, almost like a distant sunrise. And then suddenly it is bright.
I am in a room of some kind. I’m up high, looking down.
Below me, I see a crowd of people moving feverishly, calling out words I can’t understand. There are machines in the room, and something red is spilling across the pale floor. The image is familiar; something I’ve seen before.
They are doctors and nurses. I am in a hospital room. They are trying to save someone’s life. They are clustered around a body on a gurney. A woman’s body. No. Wait.
My body.
I am the broken, bleeding, naked body on the gurney. It is my blood dripping onto the floor. I can see my bruised, bleeding, cut-up face …
The weird thing is that I feel nothing. It is me, Tully Hart. I am the body bleeding out in this room, but this is me, too; I’m floating in the corner, above it all.
White coats crowd in around my body. They are yelling to each other—I can see how worried they are by how widely they open their mouths and how red their cheeks become and how deeply they frown. They drag other machines into the room, wheels whining on the bloody floor, leaving white tracks in the red.
Their voices make sounds that mean nothing to me, like the adults in a Charlie Brown TV special. Wa-WA-wa.
SHESCODING.
I should care, but I don’t. The drama down there is like a soap opera I’ve already seen. I turn suddenly and the walls are gone. In the distance, I see an effervescent, luminous light, and it beckons to me, warms me.
