Chapter 22
Greg was holding the keys like they were alive and might try to escape.
The seat was pushed back too far for him. He didn't adjust it. Instead he put his hands on the steering wheel and looked at Dustin. “What do I do?”
“Are you for real right now?” Dustin had gotten himself into the passenger seat.
He hadn't bothered with the seat belt, but seeing Greg in the driver's seat like this, he was rethinking that decision.
His whole left side already felt like it had been dragged through a cheese grater.
He didn't need more injuries. “You start by putting the key in the ignition.”
Greg did as he was told, turning the key. The engine roared to life and his hands flew off the wheel like it had burned him.
“Hell,” Dustin muttered. “Put your foot on the brake. That's the wide pedal on the left.”
“Which left?”
“Your left. My left. Everyone's left.”
Greg found the pedal and pressed it. The relief on his face when nothing exploded might have been comical if Dustin wasn't starting to think that tossing Greg the keys might just end up being the most dangerous stunt he'd ever pulled.
At least when he flung himself off cliffs he knew what he was doing.
Greg very clearly did not.
Dustin sighed and buckled his seatbelt.
“Move that stick there and pull it down to D.”
Greg pulled the shift to D. The truck hummed beneath him, eager to go somewhere.
“Okay. Take your foot off the brake. Gently. Gently, Greg—”
The truck shot forward. Greg stomped the brake. They both jerked against their seatbelts and Dustin's vision went white as his shoulder slammed against the strap. A mangled sound came out of him and his right hand flew to brace his left arm.
“Sorry — I'm sorry—”
“It's fine.” It wasn't fine. Dustin breathed through his nose until the stars cleared. “Just... go slower. It's not a light switch.”
Greg tried again. The truck crept forward. Dustin talked him through the turn onto the frontage road and thanked God, the universe, and—while he was at it—the flying spaghetti monster for the fact that they had the road mostly to themselves. They were moving.
Slowly.
“You're going twelve miles per hour,” Dustin pointed out.
“It seems like a safe speed.”
“You're going to get us rear-ended.”
Greg pressed the gas a little more. The speedometer climbed to twenty.
“Faster.”
“I don't like this,” Greg muttered.
“Then pull over and stop. I'll drive.”
“But you can't even use your left arm.”
“And if I let you drive, we won't get to the hospital before sunset, and possibly not without further injuries. Now pull over.”
Greg did, jerking the truck to an abrupt stop. “Sorry,” he apologized again. “This was not part of reaper training.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
They traded positions. Dustin bit the inside of his cheek getting back behind the wheel.
The shoulder was a dull roar now, hot and swollen and deeply, structurally wrong.
He'd dislocated it twice before. Once at seventeen, bailing on a landing.
Once at twenty-two, in a bar fight that Tyler had started and Dustin had finished.
Both times it had been this same sickening wrongness, the joint sitting somewhere it didn't belong.
It wasn't pleasant, but he could handle it.
An ambulance tore past them on the frontage road, lights blazing, siren splitting the air. Then another. Dustin watched them in the rearview as they screamed toward the interchange. Toward the pileup. Toward the silver sedan crumpled against the median.
A fire truck followed, and then a highway patrol car, and for a full minute the frontage road was nothing but emergency lights and noise. Dustin drove through the strobing red and blue and didn't say anything and Greg didn't say anything and the silence between them was its own kind of loud.
When the last patrol car passed, the road went quiet again. Too quiet.
“Are you sure you can drive?” Greg asked. “Your arm looks bad.”
“I've had worse.”
“When?”
“When I fell eight hundred feet out of the sky onto solid rock.”
“That didn't hurt you.”
“Funny, isn't it?” Dustin pulled his phone from his pocket with his right hand and handed it to Greg. “Look up the nearest ER. My pin is 5498.”
Greg held the phone with both hands and stared at the screen.
“You tap the—” Dustin started.
“I know what a phone is. I've seen humans use them.” Greg poked the screen with one cautious finger. Nothing happened. He poked it again. “Why isn't it responding?”
“You have to turn the screen on first. There's a button on the side.”
Greg did and the phone lit up—as did Greg's face. “What now?”
“Open the maps app and type in Emergency Room near me,'“ Dustin said.
Greg navigated the phone slowly.
“There's one eleven minutes south,” he said eventually. “St. Mark's Medical Center. It says they have... three point two stars.” He looked up. “Is that good?”
“It's a hospital, not a restaurant.”
“But wouldn't you rather go to one with more stars?”
“Greg. Directions.”
Greg relayed the turns with the nervous energy of a copilot who wasn't sure the plane was going to make it. Dustin drove one-handed, faster than he probably should have, and tried not to think about the way his shoulder ground against itself every time he turned the wheel.
“I wonder,” he said when the question got too loud in his head, “why the fall didn't hurt me, but this did.”
He could feel Greg looking at him.
“It doesn't make sense,” Greg said. “You walked away without a scratch from a fall that should have killed you, but today you got a lot of scratches.”
“Maybe I'm losing whatever protection kept me alive.”
“No.” Greg shook his head. “I don't think that's it. If you were without protection now the system would have calculated a new death for you. But you were still Pending this morning.” Dustin could almost see the gears turning in Greg's head as his anxiousness was replaced by professional curiosity.
“I think the difference is that the fall should have killed you. The car wasn't going to.”
Dustin's grip shifted on the wheel. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning whatever is protecting you doesn't care about injury. It cares about death.” Greg said as if he were stating a fact.
“When something tries to kill you, like the duck or the fall — you get total protection.
But the car was never going to be fatal.
It hurt you because it wasn't a lethal threat, so whatever this is didn't need to intervene.”
“So I can't die,” Dustin said flatly, “but I can get the shit kicked out of me.”
“It appears that way.”
“Great. That's comforting.”
“It's good to know.” Greg was still in analytical mode. “It means whatever's protecting you has limits… or rules. It responds to lethal threats, not to harm in general.” He went quiet, lost in thought.
“I left my clipboard on the highway,” he said after a while.
Dustin glanced at him. Greg was looking out the passenger window, his reflection ghosted against the glass. “You left your clipboard? You?”
Greg flushed slightly. “I wasn't really thinking. I just…” His lips pressed together. “I just wanted to get you off the highway and somewhere safe.”
Dustin didn't know what to do with that.
Less than 24 hours ago Greg had told him he could never be anything other than a reaper, and then he'd failed a collection and forgot about his clipboard all because Dustin got a little scraped up.
Dustin would have expected him to run back to HQ, file his reports, and recommit to the mission.
But Greg had gotten in the truck.
With Dustin.
Those weren't the actions of someone who prioritized their job above all else.
Dustin shot the reaper next to him another glance. Not even his own mother got so worked up over his injuries that she forgot the point of her existence.
“Aren't you going to dissolve?” Dustin asked. “You said your clipboard was your anchor or something.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Greg looked down at his hands. “I probably won't be able to stay in the mortal realm for long.” A pause, then an expression of renewed determination. “But I can guide you to the hospital first. Turn left at the next crossing.”
“Got it,” Dustin said.
Mostly because he didn't know what else to say.
St. Mark's appeared on the left, a large rectangular building that looked like it deserved its three point two star rating. Dustin pulled into the emergency lot and parked crookedly across two spaces.
“Nailed it,” he murmured.
“Do you want me to…?” Greg let the sentence hang.
“You're coming in,” Dustin said. It came out more certain than he'd intended.
Greg looked at him. “Okay.”
The emergency room was too bright and smelled of antiseptic in a way that made Dustin want to breathe through his mouth.
He walked up to the intake desk, gave his name, and said, “I dislocated my shoulder about thirty minutes ago.”
The nurse behind the desk looked at his scraped face, his torn shirt, the grotesque angle of his shoulder, and the blood drying on his forearm. Her eyebrows climbed.
“Were you in that car accident on the Interstate?”
“Sort of.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
“Four.”
“Sir, your shoulder is visibly dislocated.”
Dustin shrugged—then winced.
She gave him a look that suggested she dealt with this kind of bullshit on a daily basis and wrote something down. “Take a seat. We'll get you in for X-rays first, then the doctor will see you.”
They sat.
Greg perched on the edge of his plastic chair, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the other patients with the same wide-eyed fascination he'd brought to the ice cream parlor.
Except the ice cream parlor hadn't contained a man holding a bloody towel to his head and a woman rocking a screaming toddler.
“You okay there?” Dustin asked.
“Is it always like this?”
“What, the waiting room? Yeah, pretty much.”
“All these people are hurt.”
“That's generally why people come to the emergency room.”
“And they just... wait?”
Dustin stopped himself from shrugging again.