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Julia wondered if this was heaven. She felt suffused with good feeling, lying somewhere soft.
She couldn’t see anything but she didn’t mind.
She knew whitish light surrounded her because she could see it through her eyelids.
She couldn’t hear anything except for a sweet sound too far away to identify, but she listened as if it were music, feeling its notes comforting her deep inside, so profound they could be heard only by her soul.
Her thoughts wandered, and she could feel her brain trying to puzzle out what was going on and where she was and what had happened, but none of that seemed pressing.
She felt herself floating along in a channel of spiritual flow, a pristine and peaceful river that led to another world, a place of joined spirits.
Thoughts crossed her consciousness like birds flying in a clear blue sky, on their way to somewhere else.
She remembered Kay Patterson and Helen Davenport, who connected with her and through her, and she began to understand that she was among them now, a spirit free of her physical self, disembodied, at one with the ether, truly ethereal.
She had become her own breath, then air.
Suddenly her thoughts seemed to darken, like the sky before a thunderstorm. An image of Kay popped into her mind, but this time the woman was lying on the floor, having been shot to death. Courtney was crying over her grandmother, screaming in shock.
No, no, no!
Julia didn’t know if she was asleep or awake. She didn’t know if she was alive or dead. She flashed on an image of Samuel, bleeding to death at the wheel of his car, a sight that she’d never seen but came to her as if she had.
Julia felt herself turning this way and that, trying to get away from the images in her own mind, and she didn’t know if she was really moving or dreaming, but her entire body pulsed with adrenaline, wanting to flee but unable to.
Crack! went the gunshot, and Julia was reliving the horrific scene at the farm. McKenna was taking brutal aim at Novak and firing a bullet into his head. Novak collapsed to the ground, the bonfire raging behind him.
She tried to scream but no sound came out.
She was trapped in a nightmare that showed no signs of stopping.
She braced herself for what was to come, filled with a sense of dread that she couldn’t stop something horrific that was about to happen, then the world exploded in a deafening combustion of flame and smoke.
Julia saw people running for their lives, and she was screaming and screaming, and blood was everywhere, and cries of sheer terror.
She begged God to let her wake up.