Who? My darling Angelina, that's who. Temptress, sorceress, murderess,
that's who tried to kill me. I remembered now. The wide black muzzle of
the gun looking big enough to park a spaceship in. The fire blasting
out of it, the slugs hammering into me, and the pain as my expensive,
guaranteed, bulletproof underwear soaked up the impact of the bullets,
spreading it across the entire front of my body. I remembered the hope
that this would satisfy her and the despair of hope as the muzzle of
that reeking gun lifted to my face.
I remembered the last instant of regret as I put my arms before my face
and threw myself sideways in a vain attempt at escape.
The funny thing is that escape attempt had worked. The bullet that
had smashed my forearm must have been deflected enough by the bone to
carom off my skull, instead of catching it point blank and drilling on
through. All this had produced satisfactory quantities of blood and an
immobile body on the floor. That had caused Angelina's mistake, her
only one. The boom of the gun in that tiny room, my apparent corpse,
the blood, it must have all rattled the female side of her, at least a
bit. She had to leave fast before the shots were investigated and she
had not taken that extra bit of time to make sure.
"Lie down," the doctor said. "I'll give you an injection that will
knock you out for a week if you don't lie down!"
Only when he said this did I realize I was half sitting up in the
stretcher and chuckling a particularly dirty laugh. I let myself be
pushed down easily, since my chest was drenched in pain whenever I
moved.
Right at that moment my mind began ticking over plans for making the
most of the situation. Ignoring the pain as well as I could I looked
around the ambulance, looking for a way to capitalize on the bit of
luck that had kept me still alive while she thought I was dead.
We pulled up at the hospital then, and there was nothing much I could
do in the ambulance except steal the stylus and official forms from
the rack above my head. My right arm was still good, though it hurt
like fire whenever I moved. A robot snapped the wheels down on my
stretcher, latched onto it and wheeled it inside. As it went by the
doctor he slipped some papers into a holder near my head and waved
good-by to me. I gave him back a gallant smile as I trundled into the
butcher shop.
As soon as he was out of sight I pulled out the papers and scanned them
quickly. Here lay my opportunity if I had enough time to grab it. There
was the doctor's report--in quadruplicate. Until these forms were fed
into the machinery I didn't exist. I was in a statistical limbo out of
which I would be born into the hospital. Stillborn if I had my way. I
pushed my pillow off onto the corridor floor and the robot stopped. He
paid no attention to my writing and didn't seem to mind stopping two
more times to rescue the pillow, giving me time to finish my forgery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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