So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Chapter 11: Fade to Black

Three days is an eternity you know.

***

It's amazing how much the sight of blood evokes the instant response of fear in each and every one of us.  It's bad when the blood is your own and there is lots of it, but on a certain level your mind can process it and deal with it, even if it involves just freaking the fuck out about your almost imminent death, because damn that is a hell of a lot of blood; when the blood is coming from a loved one however, you are  desperate to make it stop.  In fact you will just about do anything at all in the world to make the blood not be outside where it doesn't belong.

Panic can take over and some people deal with panic in different ways.

Until that moment what Jaime was lying in front of me with a hole in her head and the pool of blood around her getting bigger and bigger, I had never known what real panic was.  I had always thought I would focus well under stress but even now, looking back and trying to focus on what actually happened... it's hard.  There are holes in my memory as if my panic self-edited... or my brain decided that the operator was a functional idiot and couldn't be trusted to steer.

In case you're still not clear: I kinda sorta blacked out.

But just a little bit.

Black.

 ***

 Someone was calling my name, calling me out of the blackness and I didn't want to look, didn't want to come back from the dream where everything was okay, everything was perfect and where I didn't have to hurt so goddamn much.  In the light was the reality of pain and grief and that was the one place I didn't want to stand at that moment, all I needed was just a few more moments, decades even to wallow in my pain.

"Bob!"

There was a dream I had once where Jaime had been shot in the head and all I could do was hold her in my lap and try to hug the life back into her, but there was so much blood and it was a terrible thing, and I knew that she was going to die... that was a horrible dream.  This reality I wanted to push away felt exactly like that dream and it was a horrible thought that I could wake to something as devastating as that.  So I shook it off, tried to escape it, tried to not think about it at all.

"You have to let go of her Bob," the voice was saying and I tried to form the words to tell the woman, the Beatrice shaped piece of reality, to go away and leave us the fuck alone. The dark was nice and it didn't hurt down here.

"I'd normally get a kick out of this, but you're making it very difficult."

Leave us the fuck alone!  Those were the words I wanted to say, the words that threatened to tear out of me, the words that would echo my pain and perhaps burn as much as the hot tears on my face, the words that would burn the soul of—

Beatrice's fist hit me with the approximate velocity and force of a Mack truck.  The fact that it wasn't Mack truck shape or size probably worked against me in this instance, since so much power was concentrated into such a small body part, but it knocked me directly into reality.  The fact that it almost knocked me on my ass was a just a bonus side effect.

I snapped fully awake and it all came back, the panic, the fear, the hopelessness of it all.

Beatrice kneeled on the ground in front of me and Jaime and this was the most vulnerable I had ever seen her.  She reached out to me and I could see the pain in her face, the sorrow that she felt, and I understood then that she shared my pain and more.

"Let me take her Bob.  We can save her."

I looked down at Jaime and all I could see was a blurry mass of blood and hair as seen through my tears.  The blood-smeared phone on the ground that I must have used at some point in the black parts of my memory answered the unimportant question of how Beatrice had found me, had found us. Here she was, the last person in the world I should have called, the last person I would have expected to come.