Dozens of fat, two-headed beetles fly about the room and crawl over my skin. I can no longer move. I can’t chase them off.
My consciousness is still there, it never went away. It’s just cold. So cold that I can’t breathe, look or move. And it’s very quiet. Quiet in my chest.
It seems to me like now I am made of ice. My eyes have rolled up into my head and frozen to my eyelids; my arms have gone stiff; my legs have gone stiff and stuck together.
It seems to me now that I am hard and icy, I cannot be broken. But if you took my body out into the sun, it would melt and soak into the ground like watery lymph…
But there is no sun.
My son is sitting at the opposite end of the room and sniffing. I hope that he feels at least a little bit sorry for what he has done to me… Somewhere nearby there is the rumble of gunfire.
The dog comes over. She pokes her face into my stiff body and yelps thinly.
Quietly and imperceptibly I am temporarily ceasing to exist, and after five seconds I will appear in the System again. With the number nought.
And then another nought will spring up. And another.
Small round holes in the body of the little man made of numbers, more and more of them all the time…
The dog howls over my corpse. Gunfire rattles the glass, but the dog stays by me. She licks my frozen hands.
She is so consumed by her grief that she lets the Son come up very close.
They both sit over the body. The dog’s breathing is heavy and fast, and a hot, rotten smell comes from her mouth. An explosion makes the glass burst and fly out; the dog trembles in fear. The Son carefully reaches his hand out to her and strokes her raised fur. She growls limply, but stays where she is.
‘No death,’ the Son says to her and smiles tentatively. The dog looks at him, cocking her head to one side.
His smile is utterly childlike.