Through The Valley by Yates, B.D. (feel good books .txt) 📕

Above him, he watched himself stuffing the new-used firearm into the waistband of his shorts, not bothering to load it. He intended to scare; not kill. It was a relief to finally know that regardless of what he had done in the camp down below, in his heart of hearts he was not a murderer. He saw himself snatching a "help wanted" sign from an electric pole and pinning it against the side of the bank, scrawling on it with a pen he had been carrying:

Please do not scream. Please do not trigger the alarm. I have a gun, and if you alert the police I will kill you and everyone in the building. Please quietly empty your cash drawer. Put the money in an envelope and calmly hand it to me like a normal transaction. After I'm gone, do whatever you want. I don't want to hurt anyone, but I will.

His ghostly avatar hesitated, and then added:

I am a very desperate man.

Behind him now, a shimmering vision of himself stalking through the revolving door of the bank, rubbing his sweaty palms together in nervous anticipation. He could see the beads of sweat collecting on his own forehead, not just from the summer heat but from his fraying nerves.

  He had already been wearing a mask that day, a black cloth mask emblazoned with the wide and toothy grin of The Joker, and he could remember thinking how fortunate it was that everyone was wearing masks, thanks to COVID-19. Otherwise, they would never have let him through the front door in one.  Emmit watched himself fidget with it, pulling it up over his nose and tucking it beneath his glasses to keep them from fogging. His shirt bulged awkwardly in the back, poorly concealing his new gun.  Watching it unfold now, he realized how much luck he’d actually had to not get busted as soon as he stepped inside.

  The memory faded from sight and Emmit searched for another one, finally looking down between his dangling shoes to find another multicolored cloud of images and sound cohering together.  Focusing on what he could only assume was his life flashing before his eyes helped keep his mind off the pain.  It did nothing to ease it, but made it less urgent, less dominant in his mind.

As his untied shoelaces flailed like living things, Emmit watched himself prowling into the bank, the folded note tucked between the fingers of his right hand. He had glanced around at the desks; lines everywhere, with more than one person waiting in each one. His breaths were heavy and rapid as he hurried up and waited, blowing the Joker mask out from his mouth and then sucking it back again. Emmit saw himself looking around the lobby, trying to act bored and not like an anxious criminal. His memory-self stared at the calendar on the wall, flipped open to July and displaying the huge neon firework explosions above the New York skyline.

Inside the tunnel of light Emmit felt pressure on the back of his head now, the caress of something soft but wholly uncomfortable. He reached up and felt nothing but his own fluttering hair.  Now he could feel it on his back and on his ass too, stiff but also squishy. It felt like a bad mattress, or maybe the bizarre bedding inside of a casket. Groaning and pressing a hand to his chest, he prayed it wasn't a casket, that this wasn’t what it felt like to be dead. Aware and yet unaware, gone yet still distantly present.

  Above him, at the top of the spinning tunnel, the shimmering image of two blurry people peered down at him.  They were looking up to speak to one another, their movements and gesticulations prompt and serious, and then staring back down to him.  They were frantic. He could see their bodies bounce and sway, as if the world they existed in was in constant motion.

  It was like floating just under the surface of a clean and crystal-clear pool, looking up through the gently lapping ripples at the world above and beyond. When the pushing and slamming into his midsection started again after an unmercifully brief pause, he saw that it was coming from the arms and hands of one of the mysterious figures.  The faceless figure was hunched over, really putting force into it, looking over his shoulder and yelling something that echoed across the fabric of reality itself, something that sounded like words but reached Emmit's ears as garbled nonsense.

  Are they angels? he thought dazedly, now so out of it that he was growing oblivious to the pain. Gods?

  There was a sound coming from behind the strange figures, or possibly from high above them. It was a long and warbling sound that began at a low note and then hooked up to a shrill high note, then scooped back down again. It repeated the pattern in several long brays, and then it picked up the tempo.

  That sounds like... a siren... am I in an ambulance?

Thinking of ambulances triggered a fresh flashback, one that he didn't need to locate and watch in the tornado of light but one of his own organic memories finally coming home. It struck with such ferocity that Emmit thought it might explode his head like a firecracker in a watermelon. Suddenly, the ache in his chest made terrible, terminal sense.

Emmit could remember selecting the teller he’d planned to rob based solely on how short her line was. He wasn't sadistic enough to try to pick out someone who looked weak and helpless. He simply wanted to get to the front of the line, get a decent amount of money that he could use to save his apartment and maybe find a cheap car, and get out again before a S.W.A.T. sniper took his head off from the roof of a building across the