Epilogue
Nicole checked the clock again. It seemed to have stopped, frozen in time. She sighed. Night shifts were the absolute worst. The corridors of the ICU ward were completely empty and dark—only the occasional flickering florescent bulb lighting the way for the stray nurse to move about. She looked back at her screen rereading her notes from earlier. It seemed like there would be no hope for Rogers, Steven Grant—age 22. It was truly terrible, and sadly, this wasn’t even the first mass shooting she had even seen. There was absolutely something wrong with this country; something fundamentally wrong. She could see into the hospital room through a small window on her left. All was quiet. Rogers, Steven Grant was laying in the large hospital bed—hooked up to dozens of machines all active and slowly whirring; keeping him breathing. She could see the faint shape of the man sitting next to him—completely passed out at this point, though still tightly gripping the cold, inert hand from beneath the sheets. She watched him for a moment, watched his chest slowly rise and fall in the slow andante of deep sleep.
Her computer started flashing as the alarm on the heart monitor suddenly started to squeal in agony. She looked at the screen in disbelief.
“holy shit,” she murmured under her breath.
Out of sheer habit she managed to quickly press the call button, then throw the door open to the room.
The dream started much as it always did. He couldn’t move; he was suffocating under the sheer oppressive weight of the charcoal dust. It was coating his mouth, his airways, he couldn’t open his eyes—they were varnished tightly in charcoal. He could sense the smallest glimmer of light—could scent it on the air and it smelled like charcoal, but it giggled and flitted away so he gave chase, but his legs couldn’t move they were frozen in blocks of thick black grime. He heard the voice of the willow-the-wisp calling out, further down the black confines of his mind,
‘til the end…’
‘til the end of…’
‘the line…’
‘the line…’
‘the line…’
He opened his mouth to scream and it filled with the dirt and much and grime of thousands of years of mistakes and it was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, so all he had to do was cough and it melted away; all he had to do was breathe in gold and it all melted away so he did and his eyes fluttered open.
There was beeping.
There was hospital beeping,
and there was white,
and there was the faint smell of cigarettes and the incredible lightness of being that came with the acceptance of gold and he was there, but he could smell him, he had already tasted him on the air so he pushed the word out from swollen lips,
“Buck.”