There is a horrible, stuttering, sucking sound. It could be his soul departing. It could be me groaning. I can’t be sure. The only intelligible thing I know that I say is one single word:

“Murderer.”

Exit

Exit

It is unclear how I remain standing, but then I perceive being propped up, underarm, by Charlie. She is saying something to me but I have been made aerodynamic by mortality shock and the words just slide over me. Kong is yelling something at me about a door, but that doesn’t penetrate either.

I have just killed my best friend.

The fact of it, the totality, is on me like an iron blanket.

Only when Charlie reaches for the Nakamura sword do I snap out of the death trance. Abruptly, I box her out and extract the sword. Its withdrawal requires considerable effort. It is necessary to prop one foot against the body and yank, hard, speedily, as if pull-starting a lawnmower. Charlie holds her hand out to me but I shake my head no. I pull the sword to my side, blade erect, a gesture of ownership that is at once samurai-like and childish. The posture says “En garde!” but it also says “No, I won’t give it!” She starts to speak but Kong cuts her off.

“I can’t hold it!”

On cue, the sirens start wailing. Behind Charlie the door opens halfway and starts juddering between opened and closed. Charlie again gestures for the sword but I hurl it like a javelin far down the other hallway. She swivels her head frantically from the distant sword to the distant doorway, trying to determine if she has enough time for both. She doesn’t. She gives me one last look—harried, passionate, inscrutable—and starts sprinting toward the closing door. I grab the gun and hobble after her. Then the door gives up its struggle with itself. It retracts entirely, as if resetting, then starts sliding smoothly closed. Kong, in his usual thugiloquent manner, communicates that he no longer has any control over the system and that it is now time for us to run for all we’re worth.

Charlie takes this advice. Her churning stride is leggy and efficient, the product of expertise and training and native ability; it generates a speed that can be described as “quasi-Olympian.” My stride is the product of a lifetime of unathleticism combined with the spasticity of a semiparalyzed appendage; it generates a speed that can be characterized, at best, as “potato-sack racer.”

She is going to make it.

I am not.