He was bleeding.

He remembers it being so quiet.

The kind of quiet where you can hear your eardrums talking to the synapses in your brain.

There were birds near by and a small mammal in a bush behind him but it was as if they were muted. The branches of the tress were swaying and the leaves were clapping but there was no sound. He rubbed his ears to wake them up.

It was as if he was the last person on earth. He sat there, alone in his stillness wondering what the next few hours would look like. He was sure that they would be horrible and gruesome but that made no difference. His three friends were sleeping about fifty yards with the roots of a tree as their pillows. He loved them. For a second he thought of his mother and how she would lift him and hold him when he was a young boy. He thought of how much his dad had taught him about growing up and about swinging a hammer. He thought about how they would miss him. Then he stopped thinking about these things. He was bleeding. Where was he bleeding? Had a cut himself? He felt like he was crying but he wasn’t.