Page 43 of Pulse Zero
A breath. A heartbeat.
I can’t stop hearing phantom sounds—the gunshot, the flat tone. I can’t stop seeing the way his body jerked, seeing his eyes that tried so hard to stay open, tried so hard not to lose sight ofme.
I’m put in the back of an ambulance. Doors slam. The world jolts. I sit there, shaking, my hands in my lap, sticky and red. There’s blood under my nails.
I don’t wipe them off.
If I wipe them off, it becomes real.
If I wipe them off, he’s gone.
Even when it feels like an ending, it isn’t.
I don’t know if he’s dead. I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know anything except that something in me has broken and rearranged itself around the shape of him.
The ride is a blur. The sterile white, the lights, the sirens, the medic talking. That sound still screaming inside my head.
It’s not a beginning either.
It’s something narrower. A precise point in time.
We stop, and the doors open. And then there are cameras. So many fucking cameras. Flashes of light explode in my face. Voices shout over each other.
“Cason! Cason, how are you feeling?”
“Did you know your kidnapper?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Did your family pay the ransom?”
“Cason, look over here!”
It’s a transition. A reconfiguration.
The point where one version of me dies on a concrete floor beside him, and another one stands here while sirens scream and cameras flash and my name is shouted like it belongs to someone else.
That sound. Flat. Endless. It stretches thinner and thinner until it feels like a wire pulled tight between who I was and whoever I’m going to be after this.
Someone tries to shield me, but there are too many of them.I flinch back as microphones are shoved toward my face. The movement makes the dried blood and tears crack against my skin.
The space between one pulse and the next.
I’m rushed into the hospital as others push the press back. I stare straight ahead, numb, as the world surges around me.
The point where one part of your life collapses inward and converges with the one to come.
This is the collapse.
Four years later.
I come home withtoo many grocery bags cutting into my fingers, two rectangular cardboard boxes under my arms, and the faint sense that I probably bought more than I needed again.
The lock sticks like it always does. I have to shoulder the door a little harder than necessary, and when it finally gives, I stumble inside my apartment. The familiar smell hits me—coffee, electronics, and something vaguely like dust and cat.
“Felix,” I call, complete with thepspsps.
A black blur streaks out from the bedroom, skidding on the hardwood like he’s trying to break the sound barrier. He yowls at me with the indignation of a creature who believes he’s been abandoned for years instead of an hour and a half.
