Mystic Circuits

Open Your Eyes: Part 2

The evening's cool breeze no longer showed Azura any comfort, the air now seemed cold, and the wind felt like it cut through her. All prior thoughts had been swept away, the fondness of dinner had been erased, and all the calmness of the night had been killed. All that remained was one loud, persistent feeling that Azura could not rid herself of: sheer panic.

Bear was completely still, the only movement his body showed was Azura's relentless shaking of his torso, trying anything to get his eyes to reopen, and his mouth to move, but she knew it would do nothing. She knew in the back of her head that at that moment her hand needed to reach to her watch and press the emergency call button, but the panic wouldn't allow her. She kept shaking and screaming for seconds on end, wasting the little time she had to act. He still had a pulse. How long that would be the case for, was up to her. She had to stop the panic.

Her screaming stopped, and her breathing became as slow as she could make it, which at the time was just a few notches below hyperventilation. She activated the emergency call on her watch.

She counted the time the call took by the number of pulses she felt in his wrist... she counted four pulses... and that was nine seconds of waiting.

"911, do you need fire, ambulance or police?"

"I need an ambulance!" Azura used all her focus to clearly answer the caller's questions.

"What is the location of the emergency?"

"It's..." She collected herself. "It's at Martin's Melodies on 57th, it's my current location."

"Okay. An ambulance is on its way, please tell me exactly what happened."

"We were at the store..." Azura cut herself off as more of the panic left her, and a realization struck her.

"You were at the store?"

Azura snapped back. "Send fire! We need fire, we're on the roof of the building. My friend got ollie on his leg, he's unconscious."

"Ollie on his leg? Okay, just try to relax."

She stayed on the line counting each beat while she waited seven terrible minutes for the emergency services to arrive. Red lights screamed at her as the service workers lifted Bear off the roof and stuffed him into the back of the ambulance, sparing not one second to error. The doors slammed, and the sirens cried as the metal box sped off to the hospital.

She could now only imagine each beat; she could have no idea if he would be in that box when he has his last pulse. The nearest hospital was about a five-minute drive from her, and she had to be there. She only had her legs then, so she used them. She sprinted through the black streets with just one objective on her mind, nothing else mattered, not the dryness of her mouth, not the soreness of her legs, not the side stitches that stabbed into her ribs.

She would make it to the hospital. She would not get the comfort she hoped it would bring her being there. All she could do was make the calls she needed to and wait in the lobby.

Eight hours passed.

Azura, and a handful of other people occupied the harshly cushioned chairs of the frigidly lit hospital waiting room. No one spoke a word. They were either distracting themselves with their handhelds, or resting their eyes, but it was clear nobody wanted to remain in that dead room for any longer.

Azura couldn't take her eyes off the wall. It was lined with a grid of white square tiles all separated by small divots, and in the intersection of four of those divots something caught her attention. A small fly crawled around, following the path created by the lines between the tiles. It moved up, and down, left, and right, like it was walking down the street. How peculiar, she thought it was. She wondered how long it had been walking down the tiles' streets.