Opal looks around the room and sees that everyone in the waiting room, everyone’s head is down. Loother and Lony aren’t even on their phones. This makes Opal sad. She almost wants them to be on their phones.
But Opal knows this is the time, if there ever was one, to believe, to pray, to ask for help, even though she’d abandoned all hope for outside help on a prison island back when she was eleven. She tries her best to keep quiet and close her eyes. She hears something coming from a place she thought she’d closed off forever a long time ago. The place where her old teddy bear, Two Shoes, used to speak from. The place she used to think and imagine from when she was too young to think she shouldn’t. The voice was hers and not hers. But hers, finally. It can’t come from anywhere else. There is only Opal. Opal has to ask. Before she can even think to pray, she has to believe she can believe. She’s making it come but also letting it come. The voice pushes through and she thinks: Please. Get up, she says, this time out loud. She’s talking to Orvil. She’s trying to get her thoughts, her voice, into that room with him. Stay, Opal says. Please. She says it all out loud. Stay. She recognizes that there is power in saying the prayer out loud. She cries with her eyes shut tight. Don’t go, she says. You can’t.
A doctor comes out. Just one doctor. Opal thinks that might be good, they probably report death in pairs, for moral support. But she doesn’t want to look up at the doctor’s face. She does and doesn’t want to know. She wants to stop time, have more time to pray, to prepare. But all time has ever done is to keep going. No matter what. Before she can think to do it, Opal is counting the swings of the double doors. Every swing in counts as one. The doctor is saying something. But she can’t look up yet, or listen. She has to wait and see what the number of swings will say. The doors come to a rest on the number eight, and Opal breathes in deep, then lets out a sigh and looks up to see what the doctor has to say.
Tony Loneman
TONY TURNS AROUND at the sound of gunfire, thinking they might be shooting at him. He sees a kid in regalia get shot behind Charles, sees him go down. Tony lifts his gun and moves toward them—unsure of who to aim at. Tony watches Carlos shoot Octavio in the back, then a drone lands on Carlos’s head. Tony’s gun works long enough for him to hit Carlos two or three times, enough times that he stops moving. Tony knows Charles is firing at him, but he hasn’t felt anything yet. The trigger’s stuck. The gun is too hot to hold, so Tony drops it. As he does the first bullet hits him. The bullet feels fast and hot in his leg even though he knows the bullet can’t be moving anymore. Charles keeps shooting at him and missing. Tony knows this means he might be hitting other people behind him, and his face gets hot. A kind of hardening is happening all over his body. Tony knows this feeling. He sees black in his periphery. Some part of him is trying to leave, into the dark cloud he’s only ever emerged from later. But Tony means to stay, and he does. His vision brightens. He builds up to a run. Charles is about thirty feet away. Tony can feel all his fringes and ties flapping behind him. He knows what he’s running into, without a gun, but he feels harder than anything that might come at him, speed, heat, metal, distance, even time.
When the second bullet hits him in his leg, he stumbles but doesn’t lose speed. He’s twenty feet away, then ten. Another hits his arm. A couple get him in his stomach. He feels them and he doesn’t. Tony charges, ducks his head into it. The hot heavy weight and speed of the bullets do their best to push him back, pull him down, but he can’t be stopped, not now.
When he’s a few feet away from Charles, Tony notices something so quiet and still inside him it feels like it’s emanating out into the world, quieting everything down to nothing—molten silence. Tony means to sink through anything that gets in his way. He’s making a sound. It starts in his stomach, then comes out through his nose and mouth. A roar and rumble of blood. Tony drops a little lower just before he reaches Charles, then dives into him.
Tony lands hard on top of Charles with the last of his strength. Charles reaches up for Tony’s throat. He grips it. Tony sees darkness creeping in around his vision again. He’s pushing up against Charles’s face. He gets a thumb in his eye and pushes. He sees Charles’s gun on the ground next to his head. With all he has left in him, Tony shifts his weight and falls sideways, then grabs the gun. Before Charles can look over, or reach back out toward Tony’s neck, Tony fires a shot into the side of Charles’s head, then watches it drop and his body go lifeless.