A middle-aged woman looked at a burglar through a muzzle sight and pulled the trigger.

Gunfires flashed within the dim hallway and crashed into her with thunder and the odor of gunpowder. Nearly blinded and certainly deaf, she kept shooting until the hammer of her gun hit the empty chamber.

"Oh my God..."

She whispered weakly and slowly dropped the gun. She felt stiff, unable to breathe. A body had dropped just a few meters away, blood slowly dyeing the carpet in red. First time in ages the woman felt sick looking at a dead man. She killed this one herself, after all, the first time having to make use of all the gun training she had been filling lone hours of Monday evenings with.

Trembling fingers touched the joystick on her wheelchair. Noiselessly – not because her head was bursting from tinnitus, but due to the quality of the wheelchair – she drove closer to the unfortunate burglar.

"Everyone here has panic buttons and alarms, you idiot, what were you thinking?"

The woman lamented softly, lowering her head. The dim light of the hallway cast a shadow on her dark face. She felt heavy... mostly shocked but not fearful, not even from seeing his gun lying so close to an unmoving hand: she was apparently quite good at hitting the center of mass from distance zero. With so many 10mm holes from hollow-point bullets puncturing through the guy was dead.

"The police is going to arrive shortly... I have to explain... It is self-defense... stand-your-ground?.."

Thoughts were sieging her in disarray when she noticed.

"Oh.."

Her lower abdomen was quite wet and red. And that hole on her pajama wasn't a part of the flowerful design. The woman paled. The heart galloped, blood flushed up, pressured her temples in rising panic. There had been two guns firing this night, she realized in despair.

"Focus, Rhi. Focus."

Control breathing, rein the brain, suppress the animal. Repeating the mantra she had learned to center herself and will her broken body about, Rhi clenched her teeth and gripped her leg, feeling no more than the usual nil; with the other hand, she drove the wheelchair across the room to a desk. She then grabbed a phone and tapped the other panic button.

A call, a short pause. Rhi waited for the beginning of a standardized greeting to recognize the voice and interrupted,

"Joan, it's me. I need a bus at my place. Hurry!"

The woman then listened to shouts and orders on the other side before a worried female voice reached her:

"They are coming, Rin. What are the symptoms?"

Good. Briefly, Rhi or Rin, a woman of many nicknames rejoiced her work was half her wheels battery away from her apartments.

"Not that. I had a break-in. It's a gun wound, 9mm I think."

Ignoring the followed gasp, she rolled the pajama up and proceeded to fill the girl on duty with details while applying first aid from her abundant medicine chest. There was one in every room – a necessity for someone in her condition.

"Lucky it hit the paralyzed parts, eh?"

"Not, funny, Rin."

"I think it's funny. I fought hard and it now spares me from the pain shock. My luck is on the rise. Maybe I will outlive those two years."

"Not jinxing."

"Hey, a little faith here... Sirens, Joan. I need to meet cops."

"Don't get shot twice."

"See? It's funny! Ha-ha."

Weakly the woman faked a laugh and ended the call. Her fingers kept pushing her abdomen. Those two years might be a lie.

"Police! On the ground!"

A young male voice heroically rumbled from down the hallway. Rhi rolled her eyes and ignored the order entirely, though she pulled down her pajama and opened her hands towards the door. Two cops ran into the apartment, guns up. The burglar's pistol was kicked away by a heavy cop's boot and for the second time in her life, Olivia had an opportunity to look inside a muzzle.

"Relax," the older, black cop nudged the nervous cop's arm aside. "Miss... Rhiannon Wilds."

There was a pause as he was focusing on remembering her name. Yeah, I don't know what my mother was thinking either, Rhiannon wanted to comment and even commend them for under-5-min reaction time following her having hit the panic button, but her head spun around violently at this moment so she spent it on stabilizing herself.

"I presu-  Oh shit."

His eyes focused on a certain detail.

"I am a doctor, I called a bus – an ambulance – from my hospital," seeing his hand not letting go of the radio, she nodded. "You have your protocols..."

Her voice trailed off. The women felt weaker with each minute, anemic. Probably connected to a thickening bulge in her guts. She was quickly losing focus to follow up on the cops' actions.

"Ehm... I passed the first-aid exam... if you want..."

Holding back what she was thinking about his first-aid training, Rhi blinked and gawked at the young man momentarily, then made a vague gesture,

"I am a doctor." There was even an anatomic atlas and one of her diplomas on the wall, what more proofs one needed?

The cops' eyes jumped from the wall to her wheelchair, then to an instillator and other medical equipment near a bed, to a gymnastic bar in a corner, and finally to her abdominal wound. Rhiannon almost saw question marks in his eyes. She felt funny. Or maybe it was a lack of blood in her brain.

"An ascending paralysis... is a bitch," she humored him, or the universe absentmindedly.

"Miss..." the experienced cop finally addressed her.

"Missis," she fixed automatically, busy observing the dark circles all over her sight. "He was alone. Listen."

There were more words from the other side, the words she wearily filtered out.

"I am dying," sounded in her mind, but it came out with too many pauses and weak breaths in between, yet still shut them up.

“I… massive internal bleeding,” a moment ago, she probably seemed uncanny fine and now Rhi was rapidly losing it as if her gears were just switched off. “Fix me… in this position. Do, donnot… movme... at all.”

The room was spinning before her eyes. Rhiannon heard cops arguing, then wide hands grabbed her shoulders. That was as much as she could do with a pair of untrained men in ten seconds till the shutdown. Keeping her awake was one last strong, stubborn desire.

“Pho-to…”

She tried to point at a wall, but her arms barely twitched. A second – or an hour? – later she felt a frame touching her numbing fingers. A familiar sense of carved wood and glass filled her mind with peace. She could see it no more through the fog in her eyes, it didn’t matter. Rhi knew well who was in the photo.

Three people smiling on a not big occasion. Just a picnic on a regular sunny day. Simple happiness.

A family.

Rhiannon Wilds tried to look one last time but stared into welcoming darkness instead.

A ball of light flashed, growing in size. Like in a movie, a dramatic scene was played on the other side. Paramedics were fussing around a moveless body on a stretcher.

I want to live. The woman on the stretcher had thin, atrophic legs and asymmetrically well-trained arms. Syringes were prodding her veins, an oxygen mask was put on her face, hiding early wrinkles.

I want to live, Rhi was wordlessly praying. Was it real or a hallucination of her dying brain? She cared not.

I promised to live. I won't die. Soundlessly the scene was unfolding. The stretchers were rolled into an ambulance and somebody hooked the middle-aged woman up to monitors. Weak pulse zig-zagged across the screen.

Then she noticed a person. His face was hidden by a mask and eyes by glasses yet she recognized him in an instance.

Jon. It's not your shift.

The pulse on the screen jumped sporadically and flattened. Another paramedic handed him defibrillator pads. They contrasted with her dark skin.

It's no use, Jon.

She watched her body bent up when electricity passed through her nerves and muscles. They looked at the screen.

I was too sick and lost too much blood. There are no miracles.

The pulse line never moved.

I am sorry.