Dying had never been on any of Heidi's 'To Do' lists, and her body, as if resentful that she'd had the nerve to do such a thing without consulting it and spending several hours in deep discussion on the subject, took it's sweet, indignant time to rouse itself.
Like a tape that had been rewound, the last few seconds she could remember reeled backwards in her head, clicked to a stop, and played again at an unsteady speed fraught with frame jumps and damaged audio. Her eyes flew at the sound of the gunshot that wasn't anywhere but inside her skull. Her eyelids immediately regretted this mistake, and at the same time her lungs discovered they needed air again.
There was no clearing her head, or her lungs, and she quickly hauled herself into sitting position, though the hand on her shoulder went a ways in making that an easy task. After a series of violent coughs, Heidi discovered the hindrance, and spat a lump of bloodied metal into her hand. It landed in her palm, heavy like realization.