A Near Death Experience?

I get up and leave, shivering outside as I walk across the hospital front in the freezing rain, the northern winds biting at my fingers and face, the downpour reaching deep into my trainers and socks. It's nearly half four in the afternoon, and already almost dark, more like late autumn or early winter.

An ambulance rushes into the front area of the hospital, lights flashing, and pulls to a halt by the entrance. For a while, I stand watching in a type of daze, remembering another time when an ambulance pulled up in the clearing at the bottom of Whaley Hill to take me to hospital after Vince Macarthur's revenge attack on me. I was unconscious when that other ambulance arrived in the rain and fog, yet I remember it arriving and the female paramedic who treated me at the scene. I watched from far off, floating above myself before drifting into blackness; the thickest blackness interrupted by more floating in the hospital; seeing my mother and Mel in the hospital lobby with Wayne's mother and father, even though I was lying on a hospital bed unconscious with my eyes shut. Then, blackness followed and no further memories.

In the distance, I hear voices above the commotion and sounds of the storm: Gordon and Barry calling my name, their voices like those interrupting a dream, yanking me back to the now.

'You're soaking, man,' Barry says. 'Want to catch pneumonia?'