Blood filled his throat like warm, salty wine. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t scream. He thought, This is it. This is where I die, in a borrowed car on 134th Street.
The first bullet shattered the side mirror. The second punched through the driver’s door. Then came a symphony of cracks—nine millimeters spitting fire. Curtis didn’t hear the shots so much as feel them: a hammer hitting a brick wall, over and over, inside his body. A round tore through his left hand, another lodged in his forearm. A third ripped into his chest, collapsing a lung. But it was the fourth—the one that struck his left cheek, just below his eye, and exited through the back of his mouth—that sent the world into slow-motion chaos. 50 cent gunshot wound
Curtis noticed the car slow down. His instincts, honed by years on the block, screamed before his brain could catch up. “Go,” he said calmly to his friend behind the wheel. But it was too late. The Camry’s windows rolled down, and the night erupted. Blood filled his throat like warm, salty wine
At the ER, nurses later said he walked in on his own, spitting blood onto the linoleum, refusing to lie down. “I’m not dying today,” he slurred through a shattered jaw. The doctors counted nine entry and exit wounds. They told his family he had a six percent chance of survival. A bullet had missed his carotid artery by a millimeter. Another had passed through his tongue without severing it. He was a medical oddity—a man turned into Swiss cheese who refused to leak out his last breath. He thought, This is it