The Last Hour by Charles Sheehan-Miles

anything, we’re making things worse.”
    “I need to stay with Carrie.”
    She crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a skeptical look. “You may need that, Ray, but does she? Look at her! You keep touching her, and it’s driving her insane. You heard what they said! We’re both as good as dead. How the hell is she supposed to get through this if you keep touching her?”
    In all my years, I’ve never hit a woman. Never even wanted to. But it took everything I had to not scream at her. My fists were balled at my side, and I shouted back, “She needs me, Sarah!”
    “She needs to survive this, Ray.”
    I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to run out of here and howl at the doctors and the idiot driver who had hit us. I wanted to find all the people in the Army and NIH who had made our brief lives together such a miserable struggle, and hurt someone. But I couldn’t do any of that. Even if I’d been here physically, even if I’d had the opportunity ... I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.  
    I looked up at the ceiling, struggling to contain my rage. I tried to breathe, and calm myself, and let the emotions just flow out. It was almost palpable, almost real.  
    But not quite.
    My shoulders sagged, and I said, “Look, why don’t you just go on without me, all right?”
    And then Sarah did something completely unexpected. She looked away from me, and wiped her right arm across her eyes, and said, “Because I’m afraid to go alone.”
    I closed my eyes. All right. I could do this.
    “Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”
    I grabbed her hand, and we walked together out of the waiting room, right through the sliding doors that you needed an electronic pass card to open.
    Beyond the doors, it was crisp and brightly lit.  
    “How do we find ... us?” she asked.
    I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    “I feel gypped. Aren’t we supposed to get a spirit guide or something?”
    I suppressed a laugh. “They must be all booked up or something. We’ll find it.  
    And we did. We walked down the hall, looking in the small window in the doors. The first door was an office, but the second opened into an anteroom, filled with equipment on tables and sinks that looked suspiciously like something you’d see on television, where surgeons would wash their hands on their way into an operating room.
    “In here,” I said. We slipped through the doors. Another set of sliding doors was beyond. We walked toward those and peered through the glass.
    Bingo. An operating team stood around a small body draped in sheets. They were doing something to the leg. I looked closer, and in between the surgeons, underneath an air mask, I could see Sarah’s pale face, badly bruised on the left side.
    “You sure about this?” I asked. “This is you.”
    I looked at her as I asked the question. Her eyes were wide, scared, and she chewed on her lower lip.
    “Hey,” I said.
    Her eyes darted to me.  
    “It’s going to be okay,” I said.  
    She nodded rapidly and said, “Let’s go.”
    So, we stepped through the door. I was immediately assaulted with the sound of quiet music. It wasn’t the volume that struck me, but the music itself.  
    Disbelief spread across Sarah’s face. “Are you serious? New Kids on the Block? Do these people have no respect at all?”
    “Someone must have lost the coin toss,” I muttered, trying hard not to laugh.  
    “This music is probably destroying my immune system as it plays. Are they trying to kill me?”  
    The music continued, despite her disbelief. At that moment, the boy band on the radio was singing something like “oh ... oh ... oh ... oh…” and she screwed up her mouth into a sneer and quietly sang, “Oh ... oh ... no, you don’t. Will you turn that off?”
    She took her hand from mine and approached the table, carefully, her expressive face showing fascination. I followed.  
    Her left arm must have been broken and reset. It was immobilized now in an inflatable cast,