That day,

The sun light blasted threw his closed eyelids in a golden reddish hue that mimicked the burning sensation in his chest. He knew it was bad. Two gun shots at close range. One shot going clear through him. His shirt, saturated with his own blood, was now torn open. But he couldn't open his eyes anymore. He didn't even notice the movement of the gurney beneath him as paramedics were running him over to the ambulance. He could no longer hear any of the external sounds around him. He was focused purely on his battle to breathe. His right lung was in agony as it filled with blood and fluid, a painful sensation that increased in intensity as he fought for every breath. Each time he struggled for a gulp of air he could hear the sound of fluid crackling, popping, fizzing from within him all while knowing this was killing him.

I'm drowning, I'm dying. He told himself as he grew weaker. Blood was now spewing out of his mouth as he coughed and gagged at what little air he could grasp. The color in his face had darkened as he was loosing his battle to live. His whole body was fighting its last fight now as his arms and torso struggled against the restraining straps around him. The paramedics had to stop and struggle to secure him down tighter into the gurney all while pumping air through a portable respirator forced over his face and down into his throat as they tried to keep his left lung from total collapse.

The sunlight outside the house was bright and the air warm against his skin, but his mind began to fill with dark cold images of that girl back inside the house. And much like his lungs filling with fluid, these thoughts filling his mind destroyed him.

How could she, how could she? He told himself as he began to drift into unconsciousness.These were his last coherent thoughts whispered to the darkness as it began to swallow him. Then he felt the release, and relief, the calmness of nothing.

The paramedics quickly rolled him into the back of the ambulance. As the vehicle sped away he never knew of the commotion he was leaving behind back in that house, nor of the situation the paramedics were dealing with as they tried to bring him back from cardiac arrest. And he definitely never knew of the four dark unmarked cars that now raced down the highway alongside the ambulance escorting him away.