Through The Valley Yates, B.D. (mobi reader .TXT) 📖

that was also true. But his life as he knew it was still dead and buried. Once he had recovered enough to be taken off the various tubes and machines wired to his broken body, he'd be taken to jail.

  I'll be off the street I suppose.

  The last visit from Dr. Fuches had been fifteen or so minutes before, and as was his new routine, Emmit had simply lain in bed like a corpse and listened to the soft-spoken man talk, giving him the occasional "mmhmm" to let him know he was paying attention. Emmit liked Dr. Fuches; he was the only physician who didn't seem to be judging him every time he looked at him. Emmit knew he deserved the judgment, no matter how noble his motives may have been, but it didn't make it any easier to take.

Dr. Fuches had come in with his laptop under his arm and white coattails trailing, sat on the edge of the hospital bed and gone over the usual agenda. He asked him how he felt, checked his bandages and his drainage tube, listened to his heart and his breathing. This time had been a little different, however, and Emmit suspected it had been the dejected look on his face that had inspired the thoughtful doctor to strike up a heart-to-heart conversation.

  "You're very lucky to be alive, Mr. Mills," he said with a small, tilted smile. His dark brown eyes were soft, and his jet-black hair was styled, but only slightly. Emmit liked that about him too. It seemed to imply that he was too busy to waste a lot of time on his looks.

Emmit forced a pained grimace that served as a smile, pushing his glasses back up onto his nose after checking for the hundredth time that day to make sure they were unbroken. The weather outside his window was a perfect match for his mood.

The summer heat had been busy building severe thunderstorms all day, and now that the blazing sun was setting and the suffocating air was cooling, they were being born into a sky painted with brushstrokes of black, purple, and otherworldly green. Fat drops of rain were pattering against the glass, and Emmit felt immeasurable gratitude to see something other than fucking snow.

"You were dead, you know? That bullet, it narrowly missed several vital organs. Any one of them, if damaged, would have been the end, my friend."

Dead.

It was incredible, impossible to believe, but it was the only explanation that made any sense to him. The walking corpses, the strange way time had moved, the lack of any living thing other than criminals like himself. It went against everything he held to be true, but Emmit believed that once his heart had stopped, he had been cast into the bowels of Hell itself.

If not Hell, then at least some plane of an afterlife, some nightmare creation designed by a vengeful deity unknown to religion.  A harsh and diabolical prison built to punish the wicked with every form of pain imaginable; hunger, cold, fear of the dead and of dying. Animals weren't wicked, they were incapable of evil acts because… well, they were just dumb innocent animals. But people; people had motives, intent, malice. People deserved to go to Hell. And the second he had decided to walk into that bank with the motive and intent to take money from the innocent, he had called the gaze of that all-knowing executioner God onto himself.

Thunder rumbled outside, bringing with it driving sheets of rain that pelted the windows and changed the fading sun into an eerie wavering spotlight as it shone into his room. There were two chairs for visitors just in front of the window that were sitting empty, save for the curled remains of some mindless magazine.  They appeared to be crawling with worms as the rivulets of rain were reflected onto their ugly green cushions.

Suddenly his morose pondering was torn away by a violent flashback, one that was so potent that it was almost a physical impact.

  Emmit saw the thing he had initially thought to be another "survivor" when he had first arrived in Hell, the ghastly image of it forcing its way into his brain like some sort of mind rape. He saw the tattered blue business suit it had died in, its patchy hair clinging tenuously to its mummy's skin. Its one faded eye, locked on him, craving him. The flesh of its lips ripping apart, stretching and snapping. The grating rasp of its voice, calling him out as the criminal he was.

  He nearly leapt off the bed, startling Dr. Fuches and plucking every traumatized nerve ending he had. He screamed through gritted teeth, arching his back and pounding his fist into the mattress as the monitors around him beeped angrily.

  Dr. Fuches launched to his feet, gently placing one brown hand on Emmit's chest and easing him back down onto the bed.

  "Is your pain bad?" He asked, with such sincere concern in his eyes that Emmit felt that he might come to love the man as his brother, love him for the selfless way he could care for a degenerate like himself.

  "Only when I move," Emmit whispered. "The scream wasn't from the pain, it was from... a memory, I suppose."

  Dr. Fuches eyed him warily, then finally relaxed enough to sit back down once he was certain that Emmit hadn't sprung any leaks.

  "Some PTSD is to be expected," he said matter-of-factly, patting Emmit gently on the shoulder. "You went through quite a traumatic experience. Not many people get to die and come back, you know."

  Emmit arched his eyebrows, nodding enthusiastically.

  "Definitely lucky to be alive," he said, raising one shaking hand to rub at his cheek. It was surreal to feel no wound there, no lacerated flesh, no scarring, no pain. It was as if it had never happened, and yet faintly, under