Death rides on everyone’s shoulder their whole lives like an invisible friend. A tiny whisper in our ear, a reminder that this gig could be over as soon as it started—that’s all it takes to wake us up from the self-pity and humdrum of our everyday lives. Some have their epiphany when they miss their footing on a ladder, or nearly cross the road at the wrong time, only for a car to whizz by and remind them of their mortality. Some get it with a rare disorder, disease, or illness that they somehow survive. Others, like me, don’t realise death has been with us all this time until it’s too late.

Death is always waiting to take advantage of our mistakes, our complacency, and our ungratefulness. Every moment we’re awake is a moment we could come face to face with him. Every moment we’re asleep is a moment in time where we’re trying to hide.

It turns out I spent two whole days in hiding from the man in the dark cloak.

Two whole days of my life, wiped out completely, my body floating and pain-free while my mind struggled to clear the fog and find the bright light again. It was a time where everyone else knew what was happening to me—everyone but me.

“Marcus.” The first sounds of muffled noise started to filter through, dragging me back to reality with a harsh thud in my head and a tingling sensation across my body that made it feel detached from my soul.

My eyes were glued together with the remnants of sleep. Chairs screeched across the linoleum floor. Footsteps began to drift farther away, then closer again until the silence took over. A hand on my hand. A stroke of soft fingers through my hair. A thumb sweeping gently across my forehead.

“Marcus,” Sammy whispered. “It’s me. Your annoying little sister. I need you to open your eyes for me, big bro. I’ve given the staff in this hospital all the grief I can get away with. I need you to abuse for a while.”

The sad smile in her voice was obvious. I tried to part my dry, cracked, and swollen lips to speak, but the voice I’d once had was drowning in the dry quicksand of my throat. All that came out was a strangled croak.

“Yes, that’s it. Try opening your eyes.”

My head rolled to one side, the weight of it making me move far too quickly, causing a shooting pain to tear down my spine and my neck to lock in place.

“No, don’t do that, Marcus. No sudden movements. Stay still. Just open those eyes.”

I groaned. Pain. Pain was everywhere. The fluttering of my eyelids hurt my already sore head and made me want to just give in and go back to sleep until it was over.

“Okay, I’m officially out of my depth. I’m pressing the buzzer,” she mumbled to herself.

A muted noise buzzed behind me. Time had lost all meaning in my current state, but I was still able to acknowledge how quickly someone swung the door open and for unfamiliar voices to start talking again.

“I… I think he’s trying to wake up,” Sammy told them, her voice shaken and unsure.

“The morphine will be wearing off,” spoke a calm, feminine voice. “Don’t worry, darling. This is what’s supposed to happen. We want him to come around, remember?”

“I know, but I don’t want to see him in pain.”

“Nobody does. But in order for us to know if the surgery worked, we need him to wake up and tell us what he can and can’t feel. Pain is part of the process of healing.”

Sammy blew out a heavy, weighted exhale. “Please just make sure he’s okay, Joan. I can’t take it if he isn’t Marcus when he wakes up.”

“He will be,” the woman reassured her.

Someone began to press buttons next to me before I felt the gentle tug of wires that were quite clearly attached to my body.

“Why don’t you go and tell your parents. I think your dad took your mum to the chapel. She was having a moment. Go and tell them he’s waking up.”

“No,” Sammy answered in her usual stubborn voice. “I want him to see someone he knows when he opens his eyes.”

Open my eyes. I should probably be getting on with that.

I inhaled through my nose as slowly as I could before I focused and let my eyes flutter open. Sleep does strange things to you. It disorientates your world. It makes everything look abstract for just a few moments. It makes you wonder if your whole life has been a dream and you’re waking up for the first time. Sleep after two whole days was even worse. The roll of my eyes hurt my head. The sharp intake of breath stabbed me in the chest. Every organ inside of me moaned and groaned and grumbled words of complaint at having to get to work again. They’d enjoyed the rest, it seemed. They weren’t ready for the marathon ahead. Neither was I.

“Marcus,” Sammy cried, flying across the room to stand above me as I struggled to bring her into focus.

“S-Sam.” It was barely audible but it was all I had. Breathing was tiring. It was like I’d just been run over by a…

Wait.

The memories, like a badly thrown together montage of highlights in a movie reel, assaulted me all at once. The smoke. The hissing sound. The creaking metal. The blue flashing lights and the sirens. Shattered glass. Blood.

So much blood pouring out of Alex’s head.

Alex.

My fingers twitched on the bedding, my scowl deepening as I sucked in another breath and prepared myself to hate the taste of oxygen.

“Go steady,” Sammy whispered, pulling up the chair beside the bed and planting her hand over my hand. “I’m here. You’re safe.”

“W-what… h-happened?”

A frantic buzzing and beeping rang out from a machine somewhere to my right, and Sammy’s head snapped up to the side to study the monitor as the nurse came up behind her and started pressing buttons to quieten down the noise.

“It’s just his heart rate spiking,” the nurse said, offering my sister a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry. It’s normal.”

“You sure?” Sammy asked.

“There’s a battle going on inside of him right now. One that’s helping him win the war. Trust me.”

“I do.” Sammy smiled at her.

“I’ll go get him some water and send one of the other nurses to find your parents.”

“Thank you.”

When she turned back to me, my vision began to clear, showing the horror of her face. She looked horrible, which was difficult for my beautiful little sister. When you were as pretty as her, it was hard to look rough, but she did then. Her eyes were sunk and dark. Her hair was matted to her head, unusually greasy and tied back. Her cheeks were pale and tear-stricken.

“Fuck, S-Sam,” I croaked. “You… look… like shit.”

She blinked and looked at me as though I wasn’t real before her eyes crinkled at the edges and she let out a small, exhausted laugh.

“God, I’ve missed you,” she admitted with emotion in her voice and tears in her eyes.

I wasn’t strong enough to smile yet. I was barely strong enough to stay awake. I had a feeling the pain was going to see to that, though.

“Alex,” was all I could force out.

Sammy’s face paled even more as I studied her from the corners of my eyes. Tears welled in hers, covering the green that was barely there as she stared at me. If she was trying to keep a neutral face, she was failing. She looked like she was going to be sick.

Her teeth sank into her lip to stop it trembling, and her fingers worried my hand over and over again as she looked down into her lap and let the tears fall there. My sister was trying to be strong when she clearly felt weak.

“Alex,” I repeated.

When she looked up at me with bloodshot, full to the brim eyes, fear took over every one of my senses. The blood seemed to drain from everywhere, and I went cold. Colder than I’d ever been. I twisted my hand in hers, gripping hold of it tightly as I silently pleaded for her to tell me he’d survived.

“Alex,” I breathed out one final time.

She sucked in a breath, one that got caught in her throat and forced her to sniff back her tears and swallow down harshly.

“I’m s-sorry,” she gasped.

“Tell… me…”

“Alex hasn’t woken up yet, Marcus. We don’t know if he will.”

I wasn’t in any state to understand the medical terms Sammy and my parents were throwing at me. After an emotional reunion with my mum and dad, I’d demanded as firmly as my weak voice would allow me, to know about Alex. They’d tried to convince me that the doctors and nurses had everything under control, but I knew better. Mum went mad at Sammy for telling me the truth so soon after waking up. I was grateful for my little sister’s inability to lie. I had a right to know. I wanted to know.

Eventually, they’d caved and were giving me all the details they could. Alex was in a coma. He hadn’t woken up since the paramedics and fire fighters had pulled him out of the wreckage, and Natalie hadn’t left his side once. Not once. From the moment she knew her father hadn’t suffered any serious injuries from his fall and was fit and well, Natalie hadn’t left her boyfriend’s side. She’d not slept, eaten, showered, or spoken to anyone besides the medical staff and Sammy—obviously to check on how I was doing.

It was hard for me to register every little thing they were saying. I’d never been much use at understanding medical jargon—I could barely watch ER on television without frowning in confusion—but I got the gist of it in fragments. The impact of the crash had caused bleeding on the brain, and he’d had to have emergency surgery. The words acute subdural hematoma were mentioned by my mum, but it was Dad who’d broken it down for me and explained it in layman’s terms.

Alex had been closer to death than me. If the surgeons hadn’t have gotten him into theatre within two hours of impact, the bleeding would have killed him.

His father would have killed him.

The coma was helping him heal—peacefully and properly. It was probably the only goddamn peace he’d ever known.

Now he was sleeping, and the whole world was waiting, hoping he’d wake up and survive this, waiting for the critical time to pass and for the swelling on his brain to go down.

“I need to see Natalie.”

Sammy kept pushing a straw to my mouth so I could take incredibly small sips of water to moisten my lips and wet my throat.

“You will,” she breathed out as she sat back in her chair. “But not yet. She’s a mess, Marcus. She doesn’t want to see any of us. She just wants him to wake up.”

I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the pillow.

“Son,” Dad started. “Don’t you think we should talk about your injuries?”

My injuries. Right.

I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” I mumbled to myself. “That’s enough for now.”

“You need to know what happened.”

“I don’t want to know,” I admitted with all the broken honesty I possessed.

Sammy’s hand reached out for mine again, her thumb stroking my knuckles to let me know she was there.

“Baby,” Mum whispered from the other side of the bed. Her hand, too, came to rest on top of mine, and for one small moment, I just revelled in the feel of my family holding both of my hands and being there. The sounds of their voices were enough, it was true, but Alex wouldn’t leave my mind. The image I had imprinted of him, covered in glass and blood, was there. It was haunting. I didn’t know how I would move on if that was to be the last ever image I had of him in my mind.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” Sammy said quietly.

“No?” I asked, turning to face her. “I’m still going to be able to dance on my wedding day? Walk my kids to school? Run the London Marathon if I want to?”

My father, the man who never took charge or stepped forward unless he was pushed, took charge and stepped forward without any prompting from anyone.

“I promise you, you will be able to do those things.” He smiled. “You’re going to be just fine, in time. With a lot of physical therapy, patience, determination on your part, and thanks to these wonderful doctors and nurses, you’re going to be perfect.”

Sammy’s hands squeezed mine harder, but I stayed staring into Dad’s eyes. He went on to explain to me that I had two broken legs, and the impact of the crash had forced a disc to slip—one that had trapped my nerves and made me lose feeling from the waist down. Something I should probably have been grateful for given the fact that both my fucking legs were broken and the pain of that could have caused me to pass out on its own.

I’d had surgery but I’d never been critical. Not like Alex. I’d responded well to pupillary tests, the light, eye movements, and despite the fact that it was bust up to shit, they hadn’t been concerned with my facial symmetry, motor functions, and some other shit I didn’t know the meaning of, even while I was out of it.

All I had to do now was come off the pain medication, wake the hell up, and heal—a painful luxury that would eat me alive with guilt if Alex Law didn’t ever wake up again.

“And Tom is definitely okay?” I asked them again as I tried to do a mental inventory of everyone that was hurt that day.

“Physically, he’s as fit as a fiddle. Mentally, he’s broken for Natalie,” Mum said softly.

“And what about Alex’s father?” I found myself asking as the memory of him crashing full force into the roundabout struck me. “What about Nicholas?”

Mum looked at Dad. Dad looked at Sammy. Sammy pulled my attention back to her.

She didn’t even hesitate when she spoke. “That bastard is dead.”

I wasn’t someone who’d ever been glad for someone else’s misery before. It wasn’t who I was deep down. So it was a foreign feeling, one that made my face tense and my eyes narrow as I looked up to the ceiling when it washed over me, to be grateful that one good thing had come out of such an epic disaster.

Some people didn’t deserve the gift of life.

Some people destroyed other lives without a care in the world, taking what suited them without guilt, remorse or conscience.

Some people ruined other lives because they couldn’t figure out a way to live their own.

Some people deserved to be the ones to suffer.

And I held no guilt over feeling relieved that Nicholas Law could no longer hurt another innocent soul on this planet. No guilt whatsoever.