“You can’t do shit!” Eric cried out. “I have the power of the Lord on my side and he says that you have to die.” Eric cocked the gun.

“I feel like this is really bad timing on your part,” Preppy started. “I feel compelled to share a little something with you. A motherfucking life lesson, if you will.” Preppy’s breathing became labored. “The greatest gift I was ever given, was death. Because only then did I learn what it meant to truly live.”

“That’s touching,” Eric said sarcastically.

I had to get the gun to Preppy. I would have fired it myself, but I had no shot. I didn’t want to risk not hitting Eric, or even worse, accidentally hitting Preppy. I finally managed to shuffle the gun between my legs. I pressed it up against Preppy’s back. He leaned back against me and Eric followed him over with the gun still at his head. Preppy folded his arms behind his neck, over my legs, like he was getting ready to tan at the beach, grabbing the gun in the process.

“And since my death was such a gift to me, I’m about to pay it forward and give that same gift to you.” Preppy shifted the gun from his back to his front while Eric was too busy focused on his words. “Now say ‘thank you’,” Preppy demanded, firing a shot off before he knew what happened. It hit him in the forearm, his gun flew across the room. He dropped to his knees.

“Say ‘thank you’,” Preppy repeated through his gritted teeth, cocking the gun once again and aiming for Eric’s chest.

Still nothing.

“Say fucking ‘thank you!’” Preppy roared, sitting up on his knees so the two men were eye to eye, only a few feet apart.

“Th-th-thank you!” Eric cried out in fear.

Preppy squeezed the trigger, hitting Eric in the thigh. A spurt of blood streamed from his leg onto the floor. Eric slumped to the floor.

“You’re fucking welcome,” Preppy said.

Eric sat back up, producing a smaller gun that must have been strapped to his leg. Preppy fired his gun first but nothing. He tried again and again. It was jammed.

Eric laughed long and loud. My heart was beating so rapidly I feared cardiac arrest at any moment. Preppy, still bleeding from his own gunshot wound on his upper chest, dropped back down to once again shield me from Eric’s bullet. “Remember what I said, Doc!” he called out as Eric aimed his gun at Preppy’s head.

“No!” I cried, reaching for Preppy but he turned around to face Eric. “Noo!”

I braced myself for the boom of the bullet meant for Preppy, but it never came. Eric stilled, dropping the gun. His mouth opened and blood poured over his lips, spilling onto and off of his chin like a bloody chocolate fountain.

He fell forward onto the ground revealing the hand axe that had been lodged in his head, and the person who put it there.

Bo.

Preppy

Life was all about sacrifice and my son has just made a big one.

A human one.

Not only had he just killed a man, he was standing there twirling his arms around like he was about to ask me to change the channel from Sponge Bob to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Sweetly. Innocently. He stepped around Eric’s blood pooling at his feet without so much as a second glance. He pointed to Dre who was awake but incoherent. Her eyes open but seeing nothing. Mommy okay? he signed.

“She will be. How the fuck did you get here, Bo?”

Hid in van.

Kevin came running in. “I heard something explode. What the fuck happened?” he asked, surveying the scene, huffing like he’d ran all the way to the house.

“No time to explain. Take Bo to the van. NOW!”

Kevin did what he was told, grabbing Bo’s hand and dragging him from the house.

The collapsed ceiling-turned-wall shook, revealing a dusty but alive King and Bear standing on the other side. “You look like you guys fell into a bowl of blow.”

“I fucking wish,” Bear answered. They both looked as relieved to see me alive as I was to see them but there was no time for a family reunion.

I picked up Dre, ignoring the shooting pain in my chest, and followed King and Bear out into the sunlight.

Dre was dazed from all the blood loss. Her skin pale. The circles under her eyes dark. “I have to get her help. Now.”

Before it’s too late.

King started dialing numbers on his phone.

Dre’s eyes rolled back in her head and she began to shake. Then the world began to shake.

We were only a few steps from the house when it exploded around us with a boom that was both blinding and deafening. Bursts of orange flooded my vision, bits of metal tore open my skin as I was blown forward.

My wife torn from my arms by the blast.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Preppy

I hate the term ‘nothing left to lose’.

Because lying there in that hospital room was everything I had to lose. I barely let the hospital staff tend to my gunshot wound and stop the bleeding, it was barely even a wound. It was a sandspur in my sock compared to the chunk of my guts destroyed the last time I’d been shot. But my injury wasn’t important. What was important was Dre and that’s why as ridiculous as the idea I just had was, I couldn’t ignore it. I’d try everything and anything to bring her back. I didn’t care if she was getting comfortable wherever she was. I didn’t care if they were ushering her through the pearly gates with a bottle of champagne and three-dozen white fucking roses. I didn’t care if she was the happiest she’d ever been and if heaven was everything she could ever want. Didn’t care. I was a selfish man.

She was mine, and I wasn’t letting her go.

Ever.

I closed my eyes and started the deep breathing technique Mirna had taught me years before. I hadn’t meditated since getting out of Narnia, but sitting there next to my wife I felt helpless. It was worth a shot.

It was only seconds, or at least that’s what I felt like, when I was no longer in the hospital room, holding onto my wife’s bloody hand as the machines she was hooked up to beeped and blink with the erratic rise and fall of her chest.

We were now on top of the water tower. She was awake, standing on the edge just like the night I met her. Except this time, she wasn’t naked. She was in a hospital gown splattered with red. The IV tube still taped to her wrist. Her eye and lip swollen and bruised. She looked over the edge of the rail. Her black hair blew around her battered face.