“Got it,” Dustin said.
Mostly because he didn't know what else to say.
St. Mark's appeared on the left, a large rectangular building that looked like it deserved its three point two star rating. Dustin pulled into the emergency lot and parked crookedly across two spaces.
“Nailed it,” he murmured.
“Do you want me to…?” Greg let the sentence hang.
“You're coming in,” Dustin said. It came out more certain than he'd intended.
Greg looked at him. “Okay.”
The emergency room was too bright and smelled of antiseptic in a way that made Dustin want to breathe through his mouth.
He walked up to the intake desk, gave his name, and said, “I dislocated my shoulder about thirty minutes ago.”
The nurse behind the desk looked at his scraped face, his torn shirt, the grotesque angle of his shoulder, and the blood drying on his forearm. Her eyebrows climbed.
“Were you in that car accident on the Interstate?”
“Sort of.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”
“Four.”
“Sir, your shoulder is visibly dislocated.”
Dustin shrugged—then winced.
She gave him a look that suggested she dealt with this kind of bullshit on a daily basis and wrote something down. “Take a seat. We'll get you in for X-rays first, then the doctor will see you.”
They sat.
Greg perched on the edge of his plastic chair, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the other patients with the same wide-eyed fascination he'd brought to the ice cream parlor. Except the ice creamparlor hadn't contained a man holding a bloody towel to his head and a woman rocking a screaming toddler.
“You okay there?” Dustin asked.
“Is it always like this?”
“What, the waiting room? Yeah, pretty much.”
“All these people are hurt.”
“That's generally why people come to the emergency room.”
“And they just... wait?”
Dustin stopped himself from shrugging again.
Greg was still processing. “Collecting souls is usually quick. The transition takes moments. This is...” He gestured at the room. “This is the opposite.”
“Yeah, well. Most of living is the opposite of quick and painless.” Dustin shifted in his chair and regretted it immediately, pain flaring hot through his shoulder. “You deal in clean endings. This is the messy middle.”
Greg looked at him, and there was something in his expression that Dustin recognized. He'd seen it on the faces of people who came to watch his jumps — that mixture of fascination and fear, the inability to look away from something they didn't fully understand.
Except Greg wasn't watching a jump. He was watching a waiting room. And somehow finding it just as terrifying.
