Jun had not expected to come into work today and find a madman racing through the hospital, brandishing a knife. The madman used to be a comatose patient, and now he was wide awake, streaked with the blood of the patients and nurses he had stabbed. As a psychologist, he was no stranger to mental illness, not even the dangerous kind, but this was beyond anything even he had trained for.

The ex-comatose man had snatched a young blond, someone he recalled who checked on his sickly mother every week, and he held two blades—a scalpel to the boy’s throat and a knife to his stomach. He screamed, pressing the blades closer, and the boy whimpered. All the staff in the room lifted their hands higher in the air, trying to placate the man long enough for the authorities to arrive.

With blood rushing in his ears, Jun spoke to the man, drawing his wide eyes to him, and he tried not to flinch. When the man yelled about taking the boy to his “real mother”—whatever that meant—and raised his knife, ready to plunge it through the boy’s stomach.

Jun flinched at a loud bang, and blood exploded from the boy’s shoulder. The man dropped the blades out of shock, and as the boy tumbled forward, clutching his wound, he could see the hole in the man’s chest. Doctors and nurses in the room rushed to help the boy, the man’s only living victim, and the man.

Jun finally looked outside, where he spotted the police car. The man muttered more things about angels and “Mother,” and he collapsed, chest heaving as his lungs filled with blood.