Time of Death Prologue

Time of Death

Prologue

I remember it. I remember ALL of it. I remember all the sights, the sounds, and every single throbbing wave of mind numbing, searing pain as I clutched my chest. I remember thoughts firing, screaming, and fading in my mind. “Is this it? Am I dying? What will happen to me? My wife? My son?” was just a few questions that circled in my head. I remember looking around me through burning tears at the people around me, my partner calling for help, the sirens… I looked down to my side, and realized soon that I was lying in a pool of my own dark red blood and tears. I could see the hole ripped in my chest and the bent and chipped pieces of my body armor. I remember feeling the bullet in my heart and left lung, the drowning feeling of asphyxiation as blood filled my lungs. My partner, just a rookie straight from the academy, kept looking at me and saying that it was going to be alright, but from the look in his eyes, I could tell that I was going to die, right here, in this spot, on some god forsaken street in some damn neighborhood outside town. I remember the ambulance ride to the hospital, or parts of it at least. In and out of conciseness, like some sort of deadly tug of war, I drifted. Whenever darkness washed over my eyes, I remember my partner’s frantic, angry, and confused voice yelling at me, “Wake up, damn it! You’re not dying on me, I’m not gonna let you!” I could tell by the way his words were choppy and cracked that he was crying, but trying to hide it with anger. Hell, when I think back, he actually kept my alive for the ride with his words, but in the end, they were useless. Lights flashed above my eyes, buzzing tubes of white, and I was being pushed through the halls of the hospital, every turn just another wave of pain throughout my body. The light finally left but people’s voices drifted like wispy smoke between my ears. I remember hearing an ethereal voice say something about something being arrested, and slow, quite beeping. Suddenly, electric pain seized my muscles, and white-hot light burned my eyes. The beeping suddenly rose, and then fell, and everything went silent, and I my mind was lost to the darkness, the gaping abyss. But the most disturbing fact of the matter is… I REMEMBER dying. And though it seems like I began at the end, in truth, my beginning IS my end. My Time of Death card says 8:00 PM, July 19th, 2008… But I’m not dead, and it’s 12:00 AM, July 20th…