Delirious: 53

Shane was feeling far too awake to attempt sleep once she left the faculty tower. The coldness of the air against her exposed skin was too invigorating and stung far too keenly, though impotently. A quiet snow fell around her head, flakes dancing in the air like that night she spent with Girl. She had weeks, but tonight was still beautiful. If this were spring, the clarity of the sky would invite star counting, each twinkling more brilliantly and more numerously than the flurry overhead.

The campus was genuinely deserted to Shane, the thermometers reading temperatures deeply in debt to Mercury that dissuaded all but the stupid and impervious from calling the night theirs. Shane already missed Roselyn's company, but didn't begrudge her absence. She only wished she had a boyfriend to take her to the movies. It was frivolous and so totally normal, wonderfully normal. She had never gone to a movie with Eliot, theirs being a romance of pages and ponds. And with Girl… it wasn't even a relationship. It was simply all she had and she couldn't fault herself nocturnal kisses and diurnal navel gazing. This latter point could be less literal in the case of Girl.

Shane heard the echoing report, though reverberations and the trees obscured the direction. She looked all around and did not see what could have caused the sound. She only knew that she was suddenly incapable of breathing. Falling to her knees, she grabbed her throat with both hands and probed the fissure in her neck, the hamburger flesh of an entry wound. The skin began to close around her finger and she pulled her hands away, wiping the remains of the blood away with a rainbow scarf. She heard the vertebrae shift back into place. She exhaled a cloud and rose to her feet.

It wasn't until she heard the rasp behind her that her adrenaline surged. Virgil's eyes were wide as her looked at his fingers, covered in red from where he had touched his darkening gray coat. His lips moved, but no breath accommodated. The darkness of his eyes begged Shane what he could not.

Shane pulled up his shirt to stop the wound. It was not small and precise as she imagined it, as it felt when it passed through her. It was brutal, tearing his chest up as though the bullet were a drill.

If the universe is truly holographic as Jake tried to convince him time and again, then Virgil need do no more than not be mortally wounded. If everything is intimately and inexorably connected, he just needs to convince those parts of his body that were so recently occupying the inside of his body to realign themselves to their natural location. But these are not the thoughts the run though his mind as he bleeds away the last of his life. He just thought how sorry he was for everything.

Jake dropped the gun when it recoiled and retrieved it if he had to fire a second shot. Shane was standing again, but someone behind her fell. He didn't even see them there, that stupid gray coat made them blend in. The gun could be traced. The bullets were inscribed and infused. They could find him. They would find him and he wouldn't be able to fend them off. It had seemed so simple, spelled out step by step. And he'd practiced so much. He couldn't have missed, it was the easiest shot in the world. She was in the open.

He could run, but for how long? Wouldn't someone - the cops or one of them -- come after him now? He was a murderer after all. He killed an actual human being, not something like Shane.

No, maybe it was just a flesh wound. Just because someone fell down, it didn't mean they were dead, did it? That person could be fine right now, just a scratch, really. Still he had to run. He would go to them, to Anchal and Rhys, and they would make it better. They could hide him for a little while, until they could come up with a plan.

"Oh god. I can't. There isn't anything I can do. Somebody! Help! Please!" she screamed in the air, but only heard the footsteps of someone running. For a moment, she wanted to catch up to whoever did this and beat them until she felt their skull crack, until they were lifeless in the snow, but she couldn't leave Virgil. He was getting cold already. She kept begging for someone to hear her - even on a campus this big, someone had to hear the gunshot -- but it did no good. The night was empty and was growing more so as the seconds passed.

"V, don't die," she screamed, panicked, "There isn't any reason to die. Oh, someone please! Help! Is there a light? Don't go toward it. Stay here with me! Damn it, stay here! We'll fix it. We'll find a way and you will be just fine. Don't go anywhere!"

A bird landed near Shane and, fearing the carrion eater came so soon to claim its share, she swatted it away and shrieked at it.

"Don't die," Shane repeated, almost a chant, but Virgil's mouth was open and she could hear no breath within. She tried CPR, but it did little good against a sucking chest wound.

Girl arrived to Shane curled on the ground next to Virgil's body. She was filthy, covered in the thick rare mud created when from pints of blood and a frozen ground.

"Shane, you have to get up."

Shane moved closer to Virgil's arm and rubbed it too fast. "No, I have to keep him warm. He needs to be warm. Help me."

Girl leaned down and slid Virgil's eyelids over his sightless eyes, picking up a piece of paper on the ground next to him and placing it in her jeans' pocket. "Shane, nothing is going to warm him up."

"You are lying," she replied calmly. "He just needs to warm up a little and he'll be fine. Fine. We can do it. We can fix him."

"Shane, please stop that." Girl tried to look at Shane's eyes, but Shane refused to look at her. "Shut up. Call 911," was all Girl would respond.

"I did." As if on cue, Shane could hear the sirens in the distance.

Shane squeezed Virgil once more and stood up. Her clothes were dark and grimy with Virgil's. Girl smoothed back Shane's hair and put an arm around her, goading her away from the road. She resisted moving.

"We need to make sure the ambulance get him!" she protested, slapping Girl away.

The more frenzied Shane became, the calmer Girl seemed. "We can watch from the woods. Please come?"

They went into the woods enough that that could watch as the ambulance and police cars stopped next to him in a cloud of dust. The paramedics worked on him, but there is only so much they can do when greeted with a corpse. They loaded the body onto a stretcher and immediately covered his face with the sheet. They could not even use the siren as there was so little point.

The police began their investigation, as corpses with hole in their chests were far more their domain. This was a crime, manslaughter at the very least. The game had begun for them and they would play their parts, bagging the bullet and taping off the area from the throng of students that appeared at the siren call. The police began taking the questionable testimony of several eyewitnesses, while the only actual witness stood underneath a tree, staring without focus at the red and blue of the lights.