[center][h3]March 15, 2018 - Framingham, Massachusetts - Walmart Parking Lot[/h3][/center]

[i]Never count your wounds…[/i]

	A lifetime ago, a flippant colleague of Isaac, who suffered the tiresome but common condition of an overabundance of wealth and severe starvation of humility, bestowed his twice-daily, broken-clock wisdom as he sat solemn-faced with his dimpled chin resting on the edges of his pressed fingers. He spoke four prescient words with an uncharacteristic whisper, face half-lit by the red embers of the dying fire, “Never count your wounds.”

	He was accompanied by four men, two at each side of him, all weary and recently unburdened of their climbing equipment. Isaac sat across the fire from the man a short distance away. He was lying, sprawled on the grass and rock, while staring at the bespeckled night sky. It was a simpler world, then. Or at least, it would be for the next few days and nights, though he did not know it then. Back then, Isaac’s pains were more abstract. Spiritual.  But they were, what the youth of his day liked to call, First World problems.

	Perhaps it was the elevation, with only half a day's hike left to the mountain peak. Or maybe it was the third-person perspective of hindsight that often accompanied the memory of days before a disaster. But it seemed, to Isaac, that the moon and stars were closer in those days. Almost reachable. And so, while his worn and weary colleagues grumbled about this ache or that pain, Isaac found himself pinching out with his thumb and index finger to pluck Dubhe, the heart of the bear, out of the night sky.

	It was the icy breeze on that Thursday, March 15th morning that made Isaac reminiscent of his former colleague’s unusually sage advice. The wind that rushed into the truck brought a fresh, prickly perspective to the discordant choir of Isaac’s pains. Not just the pains of the recent few days; drugged to unconsciousness, choked with smoke, punched to the ground, thrown from a tumbling vehicle, and forced to hike through a forest in freezing temperatures; but also the pains of the past few months since he was suddenly alone, trapped in a ranger’s cabin at a mountain’s peak. The amalgamation of hurts he felt as his chilly damp clothes clung to the scabs and bruises of his battered form mixed with the numbness he felt, inside and out, could only be described as post-apocalyptic - a term that long since manifested from the threshold of science fiction into empirical fact.

	Isaac’s addled mind and body operated as if on auto-pilot following Skullface, Gomez, and between the two burly extras he would posthumously refer to as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Thing 1’s statured form blocked Isaac’s view of the boarded doors and windows. Isaac peaked through the crack of daylight between Thing 1’s trunk of an arm and the flak jacket that hung loosely on his upper form. Through it, he caught a glimpse of Skullface pushing ahead to the makeshift barricade, gesturing to his lips for everyone to be silent. A command that was immediately and petulantly ignored by his companion.

“Knock, [i]knock[/i], fuckers!” Gomez cackled and squished her expired gum with a squeak. She glanced playfully at Skullface, “Not going to ask ‘who’s there?’” 

	Skullface let loose an audible growl and gestured hurriedly to the door. Stealth was out of the question now. This had to be a raid. In a rush that caught Isaac immediately off-guard and forced him into a stumble backward, Thing 1 stiffened up straight and charged forward. Before Isaac could recover, Thing 2 pushed forward and knocked Isaac aside, sending him sprawling like a concussed ragdoll into the snow. Fresh blood trickled into the thin layer of snow that blanketed the Walmart parking lot and Isaac felt a new fresh sting join the choir like an overeager freshman tenor.

	Isaac rolled dizzily onto his back and stared up at the snow-speckled sky. Every inch of him was too painfully numb and weary to bother with the cascade of succeeding events.

“Never count your wounds,” whispered the voice of an asshole. For all of his properties, accounts, degrees, and investments, those four words contained the richest sum for the short remainder of that man’s existence.

“[color=goldenrod]Rest in pieces, Nate,[/color]” Isaac muttered. He reached a hand up to the floating specks and snatched a large snowflake from the sky.