The ashram stood in the distance, nestled among grey-green pines on the far mountain slope. Above the temple’s beaten dome loomed a spire capped by a golden Buddha the size of a weathervane. It stared across the vast distance, looking down on the black muscle car pulling into the marijuana dispensary.
Jake cut the wheel on the black T-bird, throwing it into park beneath a clutch of shaggy-headed firs. He looked over at Brendi, ridiculous in her head-to-toe burglar black, especially as they’d been forced to use wetsuits with their balaclavas.
He stifled the laugh, though. To laugh would risk making her feel ridiculous, and then she might question herself, get thrown off her game.
They could do this. They were, in fact, doing it.
“Let’s go.” He opened the driver’s side door and Brendi rushed out after him. As she did, she slipped on the gravel and fell to the ground, letting out a little yelp.
Jake ran around the side of the car to pick her up.
Once he had her back on her feet, they scurried forward together.
Jake rushed for the door, Brendi right behind him.
“Can you see?” she asked.
“Don’t turn on the light,” he whispered. “I can feel my way along.” His finger groped the brushed steel knob, the only sound from inside the shop a dull electric hum. The cameras were definitely running, both inside the store and out. But the T-bird was parked in a blind spot, and their head-to-toe black would do the rest.
The gloves made it hard to get a grip, fingers sheathed in cotton wool slipping, but finally he found the metal buttons, quickly punching in the sequence to open the door.
They moved inside, and were smacked immediately with the wall of smells mingling inside Escape Saṃsāra. The rich base note of patchouli hit them first, then the earthy chocolate scent of edibles. Even the distressed wood of the post and beam construction gave off a strong cedary musk.
“You can turn on the flashlight now.”
Brendi’s beam splattered in shaky arcs against the walls, glass cases, vaporizers and tie-dyed glassware. The light shined over the poster art, ancient Chinese medical scrolls showing acupuncture points, oil-on-black-velvet paintings of dayglo wizards guarding stoner realms.
“Up the stairs.”
Jake made for the second story, hugging the wooden banister as he went. Reaching the landing, he forced himself to breathe slowly, repeating an old string of words taught to him (ironically enough) by Raymond.
Brendi made it upstairs half a second afterwards.
Jake approached the office door, then everything went dark, buttery glow of the flashlight gone. He spun around, saw Brendi moving the cone of her flashlight downstairs, over the glass cases.
“Look!”
The cases were shattered, picked bare, the crushed velvet lining speckled with bits of glass shards. The cellophane-wrapped bundles of both indica “couchlock” and Sativa “up” strains were gone, along with a number of oils, dabs, extracts.
“Who would steal tagged weed?” Brendi asked.
“Idiots,” Jake said. “People who don’t know it has radio-monitoring devices on it. Let them worry about it,” he added, whoever the hell they were. “We’re after bigger game.”
He ran to the office door and Brendi followed him. Quickly he punched in the sequence.
They waited for the red flickering light to buzz green. The bolt threw, and he pulled the door open, holding it aside for her to rush forward.
“Scumbag,” she seethed. Jake didn’t take offense. He knew the word was meant for Raymond, for what he had done to Marissa.
Mér-i-da, mar-i-juana, Mar-i-ssa.
Is that how they had gotten here, free associational alliteration from one word to the other?
He could worry about that later. They had a safe to crack. Or rather open, as Brendi’s cousin had installed it and had only needed the serial number to tell them its code. He’d refused at first, saying it was a felony and would ruin his career. But when Brendi had explained why Marissa was in the hospital, the cousin had offered to set things right with a hickory-handled tire thumper. They had talked him out of it, offering him a ten percent cut, but he’d refused the money and given them the code for free.
They moved deeper into the office.
Raymond’s desk was a frosted glass amoeba on top of which sat several smiling red resin Buddhas.
Jake and Brendi fumbled as they exchanged the light, her hand grazing his for an extra second that could have been taken as a caress.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
They went to the safe, a matte-black carbon fiber number set flush against a wall accented with brick backsplashes.
Brendi leaned down, gripped the knob on the safe, muttering the sequence of numbers her cousin had given her. She spun the dial, and a sandy, granulated sound leaked from the machine, tumblers moving.
When she had finished, she tugged the chrome knob, and the thing popped. She jumped back and Jake flinched.
They looked inside.
Money, banded crisp stacks sheathed in manilla-colored rag paper that marked each stamped bundle as worth ten grand.
“There’s got to be a half a million in there.” Jake let the light dance over the cash.
“And it’s not dispensary money either.”
“It’s cult money,” Jake said, remembering Marissa with the mummy gauze wrapped around her wrist, handcuffed to the gurney in the ER (and how had she escaped that? And where to?)
Jake put the light in his mouth, clenching it between his teeth.
They stuck their hands into the safe at the same time, fingers fumbling, picking at each other like crabs in a bucket struggling to climb out. The cash began to disappear from the safe and the duffel bag began to swell, growing bulky and cumbersome as an overstuffed sack of potatoes.
Mérida was getting closer. He could see it: Brendi in a white puka-shell bikini, doing the backstroke at the edge of an infinity pool overlooking pastel city blocks and roofs clad in red Spanish tile. Him using the penthouse telescope to gaze into the distance at the sun-kissed, ivy-covered ruins of ziggurats. A tour around the mouth of the crater where the meteor had landed, signaling the end of the dinosaurs, the beginning of a new world.
“That’s all of it,” Brendi said, waking him from the dream.
Jake spit out the flashlight, caught its wet handle in his gloved palm. He pointed the torch where it had shined a moment before. “What about that?”
They stared deeper into the safe. In the very back, flush with the steel plate wall, were CDs in jewel cases, glowing like disc-shaped bones in the moonlight.
Brendi reached forward, took a case in hand. Jake threw the beam over it. Someone had written something on a strip of masking tape, in black magic marker. “Local Pols. Young.”
They looked at each other. “Maybe we should put it back,” Jake finally said. “This isn’t about blackmail.”
“I know,” she said. “But if we send it back from Mexico to the States, it might help Marissa get some justice. Plus it can be used as evidence by whatever girls are on these discs. And it’ll give us leverage if wannabe Deepak Chopra sends some of his brainwashed goons to retaliate.”
He nodded, took another deep breath. “Okay.”
Brendi used her right arm to shovel the CDs into the duffel already brimming with cash, making a sweeping motion like a croupier raking in chips.
Jake killed the flashlight.
“Mérida,” she said, sweating, huffing, as she took one of the bag’s leather-padded grips in her hand.
“Mérida,” he said, taking up the other grip.
They hadn’t said the city’s name in quite some time. They had talked about pulling the job during shift, since they were the closers and the only bud tenders instore afterhours. They’d nurtured the idea then, brainstorming the idle daydream into a plan, feeding each other’s fantasy to work up the courage until it became real.
Which it was now.
Soon they would be on that Amtrak, barreling from sunny LA to dusty El Paso, down into the ancient and mysterious heart of the old Mayan empire.
They struggled through the door of the boss’s office, shoulders burning in their sockets, driven onward by the dream.
***
Cool night air hit them in the face, a wintergreen tang coming from the strong wind as it shook the heads of the firs. Jake drew breath deep into his lungs, and exhaled a mighty roar.
Brendi laughed, sounding freer than she had in years. Then she yip-yowled her own coyote screech.
“Cute,” a voice said, so clipped and echo-free they doubted it was real. But it was followed by the clicks of two rifles going off safety, which sounded very real.
“Both of you,” the flat-cadenced voice said, “listen.”
They turned together, shuffling with the bag between them.
Another voice burst out with giggles, a fit of cackling that was ugly but contagious, and soon passed to the owner of the first voice. “Wetsuits? Really?”
“And they think they had a chance with Bhikkhu Raymond.”
Jake looked down the barrel of a gun. “Do Buddhist monks typically sexually molest underage girls? I know it’s a cult leader’s job to molest the mind, but the body, too? Just asking for a friend.”
“Father Raymond didn’t do that,” the other one said. On his head he sported something between a Krisha’s topknot and a manbun, sprouting upward from a skull otherwise shaved down to skin. Fanaticism lit his grey-green eyes. “You’re just trying to poison our minds, and justify your theft of what’s ours.”
Jake glanced back toward the shopfront, the glass window radiant with moonlit frost. “We weren’t the only thieves out tonight.”
“You were, too,” the other guy said. His head was bald, not shaved but tonsured by time. He made up for the baldness with a bushy beard that tapered to a pharaonic point. It almost made him look wise.
“All will be revealed later,” Krishna said, “but first…” He stood aside, letting them see a VW minibus behind them.
The VW—like the dispensary and the Buddhist retreat (and Raymond himself)— possessed a superficial charm, equal parts hippyish and Zen. But just like the man, closer scrutiny revealed something off. The windows were draped with blackout curtains, and in the dark the minibus’s body—usually shining with maroon primer paint—was a deep shade of oxblood.
“Let’s go,” the bearded one said, and jerked his rifle once toward the bus.
Brendi took a step forward over crunching gravel and compacted snow. Jake put up a hand to stop her. A shot rang out in the dark. Gravel exploded at Jake’s feet, the sparks melting snow, producing a heat he could feel even through his wetsuit.
“Father Raymond has all the cards,” the bearded man said. “By which I mean, he didn’t just know about what you were planning. He also picked up the lamb who strayed from his flock. She proved quite the escape artist in getting free of Foothills General. But she’s home now, among friends and fellow-believers.”
“Marissa!” Brendi lunged forward, ignoring Jake’s hand and the rifles pointed at her.
“Be smart,” Krishna said. Ray had taught him well, his voice a passable facsimile of the master’s sonorous b-flat drone. The guru had claimed that note was in fact the one produced by the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. To speak in that voice, supposedly, was to harness the energy that could create worlds. Or destroy them.
Krishna ran to the rear of the minibus while the bearded man covered them with his rifle, then used its long black barrel to prod them inside. The cab’s interior was upholstered in purple yoga mats that made the berth soundproof. A salt lamp shaped like the buddha glowed from a small chandelier bolted to the interior roof. The light waved back and forth like a lantern in a high wind, turning the purple mats golden, and giving the minibus the vibe of a mobile opium den.
“Get in,” Beardy said, curling wisps of bluish smoke still spilling from his gun’s barrel.
Jake sighed, let his head touch his sternum.
He took Brendi’s hand in his own. As they moved forward, the bearded gunner stepped back to keep Jake from trying to grab the gun. Once Jake and Brendi were inside, Beardsley one-handed his rifle, and lifted the duffel with his free arm, showing impressive strength by doing a bicep curl with the money-filled bag.
Krishna, now one-handing his own rifle, reached up with his other hand. He moved so quickly Jake barely saw what looked like a tiny black cylinder of pepper spray. Jake opened his mouth to scream and got squirted in the eyes. He choked on the stillborn shout, tasting something acrid that burned like superstrength mouthwash. Then a wave of drowsiness settled over him, pulled him down into the depths of a forced peace.
Brendi screamed, and Krishna depressed his button again, laughing lewdly as the stream passed from his hand to her mouth. She gargled, gagged as the wet freshet spilled down her throat.
The two black-clad lovers fell into each other, asleep and in darkness, bodies comingled in imperfect embrace.
***
“Wake up, thief.”
Jake opened his eyes, golden light blurring his vision. He blinked several times, forcing the gold into focus until it became an uncountable number of lit beeswax candles. They were placed around the altar, in stone alcoves, on shelves, before a giant ormolu statue of buddha seated beneath the ashram’s drome.
“He’s up,” the bearded man said. Neither he nor Krishna still held their rifles. Jake tried to rush them, and found his arms held by tightly roped knots. Probably made of hemp taken from the same stock of wholesale clones that Raymond grew.
Jake looked over at Brendi, saw that she, like him, had been sliced free of her wetsuit. Her hair was in a sweat-matted pile, though the wavy shape of her red-brown curls remained mostly intact.
Krishna was togged in his robe, a mandarin-colored shroud that didn’t quite cover him, a cross between sarong and toga, naked shoulders mosaicked in India ink tattoos. He stood to the side of the buddha statue, leaning against it. Before him, on a bamboo cane mat, were brown paper grocery bags overflowing with stock from Escape Saṃsāra: edible chocolates in multicolored cardboard boxes, boasting of fair trade origins; butters in tubs that smelled like some beloved grandma’s kitchen; buds with tropical green and purple seams in their nuggets.
The bearded man stuck his large hand out, displaying a cellphone.
“Just watch,” Krishna said.
Jake and Brendi looked.
Onscreen, Raymond sat behind a horseshoe-shaped teak desk. The sound of a sitar droning from speakers hummed in the background, a Shankar-esque twanging. Behind him was a curtain window, looking out on rows of stubbly fields, the furrows of the Chaitya Colorado Retreat’s farmland lying fallow in the winter.
“You’ll forgive me for confusing you.” Raymond grinned, a pensive smile that barely broke his thin lips. His eyebrows showed more animation than the rest of his face, its lines so hard they looked faceted, all interlocking angles like on a praying mantis. “I heard you and Brendi talking about your plans. And decided I might as well offload some nontaxable stock.”
Krishna smiled, glanced over at the brown paper bags.
“I’ll also of course be compensated after filing an insurance claim. Just a pity that the cameras instore weren’t working tonight, so it’ll be hard to tell that two crews came through, mine before yours.”
“You’ve thought of everything,” Jake said.
“I’ve obviously outthought you. You, after all, are the one tied up on the floor, and at my mercy.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, groaning, moving closer to Brendi, not with any plan, simply for comfort. “But gurus like you usually come to a bad end.”
“Oh?” Curiosity made Raymond’s eyebrow pitch upward.
“You either drink your own Kool-Aid, or get assassinated by one of your devotees. You’ll get yours.”
“Could be.” Raymond shrugged. “It’s certain to be less ignominious than your end, which I have instructed Erin to carry out after our little facetime.”
The bearded man grinned, showing off a mouthful of off-yellow teeth. “Old Egyptian cure for hemorrhoids. Gonna give you a cannabis suppository, laced with a little cyanide just to take the edge off.”
“Be grateful it won’t be more painful,” Raymond said. “You’ll experience a nice body buzz before expiring. After which, you will continue to serve us, as fertilizer.” He turned from his desk, gazed out the window at the frost-covered field. “Of course, we’ll have to wait for the spring thaw to see the fruits of your contribution.”
Brendi sniffed a dribble of errant snot back into her nostrils, before asking, “How did you know?”
“Come on, Brendi.” Raymond’s voice was edged in contempt, laced also with something like affection, maybe lust similar to what he felt for her younger sister. “How did I know your sister’s innermost thoughts when she was a member of our retreat? Bugging the rooms, of course. Maybe I’ll soon travel to Mérida, in your honor.” His lips curled into a sneer.
Jake, still trying to twist his hands free of the knots, tilted his head. “You’re admitting here, in front of two of your disciples, that your supposed omnipotence comes down to some well-placed microphones?”
“More than a couple. Many, many cameras as well. Speaking of which, the discs you took proved you are not above availing yourselves of the intel I gathered, even if you disapprove of my methods.”
“Where’s Marissa?” Brendi asked.
“We’re getting to that.” Raymond moved his cellphone, panning over to a wingback leather throne next to his own chair. Marissa lay slouched, slumbering deep as a princess under an enchantment, razor-scarred arm wrapped in gauze. Her dishwater blonde hair fell over her face, half-hiding her eyelids rapidly aflutter in rem.
“Muh!” Brendi’s moan was a pre-vocal cry, like something from a hungry baby that hadn’t yet learned to say “milk.”
“Brendi,” Raymond said, intoning in that basso profundo b-flat. “How would you like to not only save yourself and your sister, but actually come out of this night ahead?”
He opened his mouth wide so that his dancing uvula showed, almost as if he were saying “yes” for her, thereby planting the yes in her mind.
“Businesses have lifecycles. I will be trimming headcount, as regards your erstwhile, bud-tending boyfriend here.” Raymond leaned forward in his throne. “But you’ve often demonstrated initiative, prior to this unfortunate escapade, which, I’d hazard, young Jacob talked you into undertaking? That’s at least what I gathered from my eavesdropping.”
Jake, forearms blistering from his futile struggle, looked over at her.
Brendi glanced at him, eyes gone wide, mooning with a kind of naked pity mixed with terror she couldn’t put into words. Or at least no words more complex than the softly whispered “Yes,” she now gave Raymond.
“Good,” Raymond said, pleased and savoring the word, as if tasting honey. “Vispi,” he said in an entirely different tone.
“Yes, Shīfu?” The topknotted cultist bowed once before moving, wooden sandals slapping the hexagonal amber tiles of the temple floor, releasing hollow echoes until he stood center-frame for the camera.
“I want you to bring Brendi up here, to see her sister and me.”
“Yes, Shīfu.”
Brendi stood, avoiding Jake’s stare, shivering in her black cotton underwear and matching bra as she moved. She hugged her body, arms folded across her chest as if to hide her heart as much as breasts.
Vispi threw a spare orange muslin shroud over her, muttering, “We’ll go quickly to the van so you don’t catch cold.”
Jake watched as they walked to the front door, which groaned as Vispi shoved it open, before heading off with Brendi into the night. A blast of arctic-chill air swept the chamber, snuffing several candles and turning the sanctum dark.
***
“You should consider yourself lucky,” Erin said, grin widening.” He walked over to the brown paper bags, next to the giant golden Buddha. “That you will be able to serve our community in such an intimate way. To feed the soil from which Shīfù’s next crop will grow.”
Jake squirmed against his bonds, but his straining did nothing but make the ropes cinch tighter.
Erin continued rustling through the bags. “My word. Where did I put it?”
Jake forced himself onto his knees, almost losing his balance, senses screaming for his hands to brace him as he struggled upward. His arms writhed harder against the bonds, which only made them lash deeper into the skin. The hemp abraded flesh, cut off circulation. But in the spilling blood Jake could feel the leak from the wounds adding a soggy red coat to the coiled ropes, lubricating them. Maybe even loosening them.
He finally struggled from his knees to his feet, but as he did, a rattan mat beneath him slid free. He went down, hard, occipital lobe smacking tile so that he saw a short white strobe.
Erin half-turned, amused by Jake’s attempt to blindside him. Then he went back to searching the bags, whistling as he worked. “Got it!” He held up the suppository like a good luck charm, walked over to Jake. He shook his head, the bristles of his longish beard making a scritch sound as he wagged his chin. “I struggle to understand why you’d even want to live after seeing she clearly prefers to live and learn at the feet of Shīfù rather than being with you.”
Jake shrugged his shoulders. The motion made the ropes bite harder, burn deeper, and more warm blood trickled down his forearms. “You think she’s going with him because she can’t resist his charms? She’s got to defend her sister. And survive.”
“That’s true,” Erin said, considering it, almost commiserating with him. “But she’s not just going survive. She will thrive, and not as mere fertilizer. She will learn to love the master as we have. You, on the other hand, must die before metamorphosing into something of use.”
Jake shrugged again, less intent on conveying indifference than using the motion to slide his hands free. “We all die. You, too, even.”
Erin nodded. “True, but when I do, I will escape the Wheel of Saṃsāra.”
“Maybe.” Jake shrugged again, and the bonds fell off in a coiled pile.
He shot his hands out, grabbed Erin’s thick ankles, and yanked.
Erin let loose a short shriek. The back of his head banged hard against the floor, bumping once on the rebound, as if made of rubber.
“You…” His voice trailed off.
Jake rushed forward, half-naked. He saddled Erin’s bloated belly, took his head in hand by the ears, readying to bang his head against the floor. Erin seemed to sense what was coming, arched his back and lifted his neck, trying to slough Jake off like a second skin.
Veins in the bearded man’s throat strained, and dewy tears of perspiration appeared in the bristles guarding his chin.
Jake ceased to push—no match against strength fortified by fanaticism. Instead, he twisted Erin’s ears backward, yanked the rubbery outer edges, tugging them downward, trying to make them touch the lobes, or failing that, tear.
Erin screamed as his ears went from red to purple. Jake kept turning, stretching the sensitive flesh until it became as pliant as taffy. The big man let go a high-pitched scream that made Jake shrink and shudder.
Jake released the ears and shoved the head for the tiled floor again, this time meeting much less resistance.
There was a thunk and a spot of red appeared on the tile. Jake slammed the head down again, as much to stop the terrible shrieks as to keep from being bit by the chomping teeth.
He lost count of how many times he’d slammed the skull, the smack of cranium on tile becoming metronomic. He wanted to stop but had ceded too much body and mind to the adrenaline, and could only watch himself work, horrified, his screams joining Erin’s.
A jellylike pile resembling purple frogspawn started to leak from a hole newly punched in the back of the bearded man’s head. Clumps of brain matter swam in the blood, puzzle pieces of ivory jigsaw-shaped skull suture floating in the red lake.
Jake looked around the temple, heartrate slowing, senses returning.
The rifle lay in a stone alcove niche, like a saint placed in a tiny nook. He stood, limped over to it, coughed to clear his voice hoarse from screaming. He picked up the gun, tested its weight.
It was walnut and steel, a reassuring blend of the light and heavy.
He held it close now, walked out into the night blue with cold frost.
Long, hoar-covered metal poles rose from the hard ground, each topped by a four-way megaphone blasting a prayerlike litany. “The resolution of one’s unresolved karma requires one to dwell on their worst acts. Do not chase them away, like noisome insects, from the mind. Confront them.”
Shithead’s faux sagacity continued echoing down into the valley where house trailers were platted on a gravel lot. All of the lights were off in the tin modular homes, the faithful gone elsewhere—on sabbatical, expedition, in search of more converts—until the planting and harvest time returned.
Atop the hill, overlooking the valley, sat the Prayer House. Its roof was made of Japanese cherrywood tiles, scaled like a dragon’s armor, ornamented with sword-sharp flying buttresses.
Snow crunched beneath Jake’s toes, burning them with freezing fire. He tromped upward in rutted tracks left by the minibus, wincing and gritting his teeth as his feet began to numbly itch, the first sign of frostbite. If he made it out of this, he might do so minus a couple toes.
He reached the frozen hillcrest, where the minibus was parked to the side of the lodge. A moving head was visible through the driver’s side window. Its shadow passed by a slit in the venetian blinds, reflected in the windshield, gold from the buddha salt lamp now a jaundiced yellow.
Jake lifted the rifle, flipped off the safety, squeezed the trigger with a numb finger. An anticlimactic clunk sounded from the rifle, the report perhaps muffled by the wind, or maybe dulled because his ears were almost as numb as his toes. The shadow in the van jerked, and a spiderweb of cracked, blood-spotted glass appeared in the windshield. The owner of the shadow lay unmoving, pressed against the seatback.
Jake walked as if on a bed of nails toward the front door of the prayer house. He tugged the cold brass knob. The door was open, which didn’t surprise him. Figuring the interloping boyfriend had been killed, Raymond had probably decided he had nothing more to fear.
Jake stepped inside, gusting warmth rushing over him in waves.
He moved along a corridor, its walls painted with pastoral chinoiseries of some Asian quayside where battened junks moved to unload crates of opium or tea.
He passed into the main room, which was high and domed like a rotunda. In the center of the room, on the floor, Raymond sat meditating on a rug made of indigo batik cloth. He was naked, body surprisingly well-sinewed and bronzed for an older man in the dead of winter.
Off by itself in a corner of the room sat the duffel bag.
To Raymond’s left, Marissa lay still within the depths of slumber, on a cane chair with a wicket back. To Raymond’s right, Brendi sat on a chair shaped like a crocus calyx surrounded by unfolding saffron petals, staring blankly into space. Her eyes, downcast since saying “yes,” in the ashram, looked up now, taking Jake in.
Jake raised his rifle, pointing it at Raymond, whose eyes remained closed.
“No!” Brendi shrieked.
Raymond’s eyes opened, isosceles slits in the face of the hungering mantis awakened and scanning for prey.
Jake squeezed and a reddish speck appeared in the center of Raymond’s naked sternum.
Raymond’s eyes widened, showing fear for the first time Jake could remember.
The Shīfu fell face forward, nose pressed hard against the rangoli-patterned batik cloth, appearing to be locked in ecstatic prayer.
Jake dropped the rifle to the floor, where it landed with a loud clatter before sliding across the room.
He rushed toward Brendi, where she still sat, watching him as if through the wrong end of a telescope.
The look worried him, seemed to sting him, literally. But when the second shot rang out, he realized it was Marissa, the rifle now in-hand.
He opened his mouth to say he forgave her even as she squeezed the trigger again. But then all went black, and only sound remained, that hum mixed with a melismatic harmony like a holy choir chanting.
It could have been the b-flat drone of the universe birthing itself in a primeval atom. It might have been Wheel of Life turning once more to punish him with rebirth as a maggot, or, even worse, a man again.
It might even have been that meteor that found Chicxulub and made that crater in the heart of Mérida, turning the world of the dinosaurs into one giant ashtray. More likely, though, it was just his ears ringing from the shots, and his skull throbbing as the blood leaked out of his dying body.
[Image Credit : Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash ]
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