by Roy Freirich
Now in sunlight, there’s the milky, unseeing eyes of the drowned woman, her blue-white skin torn, open in narrow gashes to darker, stringy insides.
The doctor guy, the chief, with their bland faces both trying to act like they don’t blame her for it all, an orphaned child and the pitiless waste of a life. Grief rises like a thick sob in her throat, swollen. How did she fail everyone so soon and so completely?
Even the stupid contest: she’s lost that too, taunted, quit, cut off. Madison and Sioux’s faces: she can see them both standing motionless side by side like sick twins, staring unblinking with their filthy hair and greenish shadows beneath their eyes, nooses jutting sideways from their necks.
She pushes away the thought, back into her old somewhere else of other thoughts, the bad ones where her hated self lives to hate herself, the selfish, lazy slut liar. Pushing away, away, the pureness of their need frees her.
The press of Tay’s fingers on her shoulder, the whisper of her name like something cherished, her own upward thrust against him: each sensation surges to shake her. His mouth lifts and disappears, his breath shuddering against her neck before stealing hers again.
There is no way back from this exquisite burning, no way forward but deeper into this rich darkness.
His lips are a doorway she passes through to float beyond into their waking dream of each other and the secret world only they can inhabit now, the roof gone and the night theirs as they rise, even as the ocean surges far below, moonlit windblown waves and spindrift, beautiful, to the edges of the turning sky.
The sound of the static rises and falls, and with Tay’s deepening touch, she understands the sound is the sea and the dark is now filled with stars, parting to let them pass even as Tay’s eyes fill with those same stars. In the spectral night his hair floats slowly now in tendrils around his head as her lips part as if to whisper, and she wonders: how do you wake up when you’re already awake?
21
Where is there air to fill his stopped lungs, a sane thought to start his stalled heart beating again? Sam’s head pounds as if some pressure within has built to bursting.
At the end of the clinic hallway, which is another hallway now, narrower, in that bright momentary room at the end of it, there are spots on the dirty wooden floor which are drops of blood around and on legs splayed in spattered cargo pants, boney bluish-white feet flopped outward: Gabriel Thomas, second year Australian student, half of his upturned face still recognizable.
Closer, closer to see now the cell phone in one dead hand, the gun in the other, the fingers given up their grip. Like the thin, bloodless line first left by a razor, so pure, so exact: the truth of this failure, deep and cold to the bone.
The sound of static comes like something burning, and from within it the noise of words rises up from the dark bulk always suddenly there somehow, huge, the same cop in dark blue the dark of a fly’s wing, white round face split by crooked, laughing lips as he smirks at another cop:
“—thinks he can save—”
Sam spins as it all flickers back into where he is, into Paula beside him in their bright clinic hallway, finishing her panicked shout: “—everyone!” She clutches at his arm, her eyes bulging and bloodshot raw with fear.
He looks past her to the waiting area, past where the Boy cringes in his chair, past Sleepless flapping their hands in furious autistic panic, surging back from a blow against a shutter making the inside glass quiver.
This is where it begins and ends, so perfect somehow, his every evasion leading him more inexorably to a final accounting. Again, the slam of some blunt heaviness shakes his house of poor stone, his beautiful lost sinecure.
From outside he hears his name again, the name of the accused, shouted in a rhythm, as if by an audience impatient for the headliner to appear: “Carl-son! Carl-son!”
Images split and scatter: a floor-to-ceiling glass pane spider-webs and sags into opacity; Sam’s hand closes on the Boy’s thin bicep to yank him upward and into his arms; Paula’s shout bursts free above everything deafening—the chattering cries of Sleepless within and without, the pounding of crowbar on splitting shutter, pulse of blood through knotted heart—“Go!”
Sam feels his feet moving, but so heavily as if through a tide of water surging against him, time moving so much faster than he can, as his Sleepless cover their ears and cower back.
Torn wood and voices shrieking.
Like a blue-black comma, the head of a crowbar appears between two planks of a shutter and staves in the rest of the glass, hesitating before twisting and screeching back out.
Through the split shutter and broken glass of a window, the barrel end of a shotgun pokes through now, blindly, inquisitively, and a Sleepless in flip-flops and basketball shorts cries out unintelligibly and grabs it, pulling.
BLAAAM! In this room of hard surfaces, the explosion is a blade piercing every other sound, ripping into ears already crackling with distorted noise.
Things fly through air, unidentifiable, as the man falls into his own flung blood and more screaming begins. Across a row of salmon-colored plastic seats, bits land, patches of dark, short curled hair attached to yellowness.
The Boy writhes in Sam’s arms, fighting with his eyes closed and his mouth wide and soundless.
Back, out, down the linoleum into the wide lighted hall that was dark and narrow moments ago, to a doorway once again to hesitate a panicked heartbeat’s worth. Now with the Boy clutching his hair, Sam plunges across the threshold, and with one hand flings aside spare medical supplies, scrabbling wildly to topple a wobbly shelf-unit to clear the unused rear emergency exit. He claws at the latch and bolt and twists the lock, yanking hard to budge the heavy door where the damp has swollen it shut, to open it finally on the dark little fenced patio of trash bin and recycling and the big dead HEPA filter he meant to have hauled, to run, the Boy clinging for life, a frightened animal, eyes shut tight and face half-buried in his neck.
Quick steps carry them banging through the little latched gate and into the side lane, seemingly unseen, but how to know? How to hear a footfall or a shout above his own gasping and his own pounding blood as he runs?
“You’re okay,” he whispers into the Boy’s ear. From behind, the night pales toward the lane’s corner and rushes them into the shadow of a row of other low buildings, onward, to anywhere else.
Back to the boat and Kathy and off this island.
The Boy answers him with a brief squeeze on his shoulder and a pull on his hair, a reply that stings his eyes with sudden tears.
−−−
Paula has led her room full of tourists back away from the broken windows where the Sleepless from outside clamber through, wielding pieces of lumber and golf clubs, feet crunching on broken glass as they surge forward. Fleisher is nowhere to be seen, and Paula shouts above the din of fury and panic, “What are you doing? How—”
A shoulder catches hers, pressing her hard against the admittance desk in the crush, as Sleepless yank open drawers, rifling through.
“Pills, lady. Now.”
“You—” A shove from another Sleepless pins her back, and her footing fails on something slippery.
She clings to the desk edge as she falls to a knee hard on the scuffed linoleum. “Just—” An elbow connects with her cheek, stunning her as another Sleepless squeezes by toward the hall and the stock cabinets there. A foot crushes her hand and she cries out, unheard, as the throng bunches and swirls, the room packed, deafening with unintelligible shouts and another thick blast of the shotgun, farther away now, but the high edge of it ringing.
On her hands and knees, another knee to her temple stuns her, a blinding glare of white spots swimming. The legs around her sway and press in, stifling, rank against her face, feet shuffling, heavy, implacable as cattle’s. Syllables—broken bits of them without meaning, “hawl,” or “vawl,” “gat”—rise from the din like
the hands of the drowning from the ocean. Her own too, finally slipping beneath.
22
The first footsteps are faint, like the scrabbling of rabid vermin. The first shadows are fast and long and flung by some trackless wedge of dim light from between the outbuildings of the boatyard.
Chief wants to run, just give in and bolt and leave the pieces of the world to land where they may for anybody else to sort out, but if these weekenders make it to the mainland, his Linda’s eyes may not close and she won’t know why. She might think it’s the heat or more noise again from the street outside her dorm, and maybe it would be, from others awakened by others awakened—not so different than here, this night, with everyone blinking dim and dull as drunks, which many seem to be anyway, maybe trying to put out their own lights any way they can.
Why not, after the days that go on and on and the dread that they may never stop? The whispering of those approaching is nonsense now:
“You know it’s sick.”
“Hello.”
“Get gone, is what. I’m out.”
Chief edges up, checking his sight line out between stacks of ship-to-shores and old yellow life vests. “Far enough,” he shouts. Let’s just—”
“Fuck you, Chief,” one of them offers.
The stock of the Benelli presses into his shoulder, barrel grip smooth and warm in one hand, etched trigger guard light and cool beneath thumb and middle finger of the other. His index finger nudges the nickel trigger lightly, a questioning touch. Making sure is making sure, but the stock kicks and his finger has already jerked to pull and shoot a round into the stunned air, exploding.
The blast is a longer sound than he remembers, echoing with a fizzy, spitting finish off the far dark buildings across the yard, and a clamor of shocked cries and tossed shadows from the Sleepless, dodging and cursing in disbelief.
“Motherfucker!”
“Yow-ow!” one actually laughs, worst news of all, suggesting Chief has somehow still failed to convey the gravity of the situation.
“Bluff hand, poker face!” another yells, demented, past reason.
The Zippo feels warm and smooth. The metal click of it brings a small flame, leaping blue to the soaked rag flapping from the beer bottle half-full of diesel, one of his six impromptu Molotovs. He waits, counting, as the flame climbs.
“Now,” another whispers, as if to Chief’s hand clutching the crackling, burning bottle.
Chief pulls his arm back and flings it forward, hard, fingers letting go to spin the smooth hot glass from their tips as the bottle spirals, fluttering light, woosh out over the gravel lot between gate and boatyard.
“It’s—” The next syllable drowns as the bottle breaks and bursts ripely into burning fuel, lit spatters flying. Small blotches of flame litter the ground, shadows again flung twisting as the Sleepless stumble and run, footsteps and frantic whispers fading.
Silence descends again across the broad quay until there is only the sound of his own pulse beating in his ears and his breath slowing as he wills himself to calm.
He counts, he sings to himself, he rehearses his reasons. Sleep is the land of every childhood, his ground to hold, so that all may return there. He drifts back to his own, to all the hours of sweet oblivious floating, back to the early evening hours of summer, to the distant sounds of a lawnmower, a dog barking or a plane droning; or back to the forward berth under the dank bow on his and Dad’s first sails to the island, up at dawn to cross the great Sound. The loops of rope swaying from hooks, first sun flickering through the hatch on the brightwork, low unending throb of the engines. All the innocent safe pleasure of it. Sinking into a world as warm as the palm of God’s hand, to dream of the faces of loved ones and the soft music of their speech.
More shouts echo from the dark now: “Get Carlos!”
Who?
“Chief, you crazy, man!”
“You’re gonna die, okay?”
23
Over the last dunes of Ocean Beach, Sam runs, staying low. The Boy clutches his hair and a twist of his shirt, and Sam realizes the Boy has dropped his little handheld game somewhere, his fantasy quest of rescue lost, his escape and refuge gone.
Bonfires have sprung up along the beach. In and out of the dark, everywhere voices call out as tourists and islanders alike emerge from houses and motels to gather, desperate for sense or purpose. Some seem merely dazed, wandering from group to group. Others, drunk, shout their fear and wonder:
“It’s terrorists! I heard a guy had a radio!”
“I heard they’re quarantining!”
“—whole eastern seaboard!”
A studious-looking young man cups his hands to his mouth, megaphone-style, exhorting anyone, “Everyone? Let’s gather our batteries, and please fill your tubs, in case there’s some interruption in water service. Hello? Excuse me!”
Others laugh, aping him. “Excuse me!”
The young man frowns peevishly, but continues, undaunted, “Does anyone have a transistor radio of any sort? So that we can figure out if—”
A kid holds a boombox aloft, an eighties power ballad blaring suddenly with surging electric guitars and flanged tom-toms, but he’s quickly tackled by another and the sound stutters and snaps off.
Confused shouts echo, more laughter, unreal.
A skinny old couple glides by on a golf cart. No clubs in back, but a big wooden instrument—a cello?—and what looks like a picnic basket, as if on a pleasant Sunday’s outing.
A woman tears off her clothes and stamps on them, loose paper-white flesh juddering. “Get them off. Off!” she shouts. She tears at her face, and even in the darkness there’s darker spots of blood from her fingernails.
Sam slows and stares in disbelief, the Boy clinging, wide-eyed.
Nearby, two more men take turns striking each other in the face with their fists. They laugh and then cry, and finally both, as one falls to his knees, shakes his head and then climbs back to his feet, blinking and swaying to swing at the other again, feebly.
Wearing dishwashing gloves, a tourist runs by, shouting in Russian or German, sidestepping a flabby naked kid who crawls on hands and knees in the loose sand, lighted by the flames. “My contact! They knocked it out!” he bawls, turning his wet gleaming face to them.
But there is light again, stagey and lurid as two middle-aged men in surgical masks carefully touch a homemade torch to the eaves of a one-story beachfront. Brightness leaps, snapping, sibilant, climbing the dark slanted roof. Blackness blots out the stars. Is there a scream from inside?
Someone in the next lane, or somewhere else, running to somewhere else?
Past a shuttered Sunglass Hut and the Marine Supply and Ben’s Bait ’n Tackle, over a triangle of municipal gravel, Sam carries the Boy onward, feet and heart pounding. From beyond these low buildings, a generator-powered security lamp sends a wedge of dim light, enough for Sam to guess that the edge of the boatyard lies somewhere ahead.
He pauses, gasping, slowed by muffled footfalls ahead, motion in the darkness. Has he been flanked? Have some faster pursuers passed them in the dark to cut them off? Right, left, he peers into the night, the shapes of storefronts shifting and fading as he turns his head.
From behind him comes the sound of breathless running and more quick footfalls, and he glances back to see the first shadows gather and then more collect and crowd in, a group shoving each other into the faint slant of light, their faces gibbering, jittery with fury and panic again—one or the other, it always seems.
From between Andrew and a grizzled local, Fleisher steps forward in his surgical mask and rubber gloves, cool, unhurried.
“You’re making a tragic mistake.” His voice floats out, melodic, calm: “Be reasonable. We need answers, the Boy has them. Let us have him. You can do it, Sam, you can, you can save everybody.”
It’s an idea from a bad dream, counterf
eit coinage of the values of wise and kind men, of devoted servants of the common good. A joke only the joker gets.
The Boy presses in against Sam’s hip, hands gripping like claws at prey.
Sam squeezes back, their private dialogue.
Suddenly, a new sound reaches him: the flutter of something thrown, a small skittering across the square’s gravel.
His eyes fix on tiny, pale movement in the shadowy gravel, and the idea comes to him, chary as doubt, but then with a kind of awe as he remembers the bubble pack of Ambesta samples he left behind with Kathy, now flung to land bouncing among the small sharp stones.
Across Pine Beach’s little public space with its brass anchor and kiosk, she steps from the shadowy colonnade of shops: “That’s what you really want!” she calls out. “Take them!”
A second’s confused hesitation, and Fleisher lifts a hand to stop the others, who bunch up gawking behind him. He strides forward with prissy dignity at first, but then abandons it all, dropping hard to his knees with a faint sob to shove aside his mask and another Sleepless to claw at the ground, to grab up and rip apart the bubble pack, and shove both doses blindly into his mouth, face to the ground.
He rises slowly, chewing furiously, his eyes feral, all animal fury, searching the darkness for Sam and the Boy and Kathy.
He makes a show of spitting. “More fakes! Get them!”
But Kathy has already stepped from the colonnade to grasp Sam’s shirt—everyone is pulling his shirt, it seems—to yank him and the Boy stumbling into the dark of the colonnade, behind its wide posts and around a corner into a narrow, hardscrabble alley.
Again the gasping and pounding of his own body drowns the sounds of pursuit, but they must be there, who knows how many or few steps behind them, vengeful and terrified, crazed as Furies.