I've heard gunfire in movies. I've never felt it in my chest before I even understood what it meant.
I don't think I'd fully understood, until that morning, how loud silence could be in the half-second before you register what a sound actually means. The crack of gunfire hit me before my mind caught up to the fact that it was gunfire at all — just noise, sharp and wrong, a physical jolt that traveled straight through my chest before my brain supplied the word for what had made it.
The sound cracked through me like something physical, a jolt that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to instinct, and before I'd consciously decided anything at all, I was out of the car and running, the careful distance I'd maintained all morning collapsing in an instant. The ground was uneven, rutted
