You deserve it, Evan told him, though the words didn’t make it out. You were better.

He could no longer feel his legs. Now that he’d halted, he wouldn’t be able to start up again. He stared wistfully at the apex just a few strides away.

His blistered lips moved. “At least I tried,” he said.

The sniper’s features were cloaked in black. He raised the rifle.

Evan felt a deep thrumming in his bones and the blissful release of having no options left.

He could stop fighting.

The scope glinted in the day’s dying light, and Evan sensed the crack of a shot.

He pitched forward, holding his eyes on the brim of the valley. He wanted his last view to be of the summit.

The thrumming turned to thunder, the beating of giant wings. The sniper was jerking around as if yanked by strings, laced through with bullets. A strange calm descended over Evan as he grasped what this was: a dying fantasy played out in his mind’s eye.

Well, then he might as well enjoy it.

The thunder took on a rhythm, the whomping of some great beast. And then a Black Hawk broke majestically over the wall of the valley, sunlight gleaming off the blades. A door gunner leaned out over the skid, peering down over a machine gun, assessing his work.

Jack.

Of course. What better than Jack Johns as Evan’s archangel and a Black Hawk to bear him into the sweet hereafter?

The machine gun unleashed overhead, razing the pines behind Evan, and he understood that Imaginary Jack was protecting him, driving Candy McClure and Orphan M back into the woods, pushing them downslope and away.

Evan was safe now. He was beyond harm.

The helo set down, the rotor wash ruffling Evan’s hair, his clothes. He smiled into the fever dream.

Jack hopped down and tromped over to Evan, the sun winking into sight behind his head. He’d aged. He’d be in his seventies by now but looked a hale sixty.

Evan knew that he was beyond a dying fantasy, that he was dead and gone, riding the last random neuron firings through his expired brain.

Two more men leapt from the Black Hawk and jogged over, a stretcher bouncing between them. Jack shouted over his shoulder, “Get him out of here!”

The men sped up, wading through the snow.

Jack set his hands on his knees and grimaced down at Evan. “What are you doing lying there?”

“… dying.”

Jack’s face warred between concern and anger. “You gave that asshole a wide-open shot. Where’s your gun?”

“… back in woods … couldn’t fire anymore … right arm … no good…”

Jack’s square head snapped down, assessing Evan. “Nothing wrong with the left one,” he said.

Evan peered up at the brilliant violet sky, grinning.

Jack. That was Jack.