The Survivor

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Number Two’s mask was stretched at the mouth—he was screaming—and his arms were trembling. Nate watched the bore winking into view like a black eye, and he stared back, his thoughts pounding a suicide urge:

  Steady your hand. Hit me.

  But the barrel jerked left, right, bullets framing Nate’s silhouette. Nate replayed the man’s growled threat—You’re gonna want to listen now, girlie—and anger sharpened his focus. He felt the Beretta kick and kick in his hands until the flight suit’s fabric did a little dance above the man’s chest and he fell down and away.

  Sometime in the past second or two, the saw had paused, leaving the pop of the bullets suddenly naked, and Nate turned quickly to face the vault door. A man emerged carrying the circular saw, hood pushed up atop his head, wearing an expression of mild surprise. Nate shot off his ear in a spray of black blood. The man swung his head back, and Nate put a bullet through the puzzled furrow between his eyes.

  Really? That’s the best you assholes can do?

  The back-strap checkering on the grip had bitten into the web of his thumb. The scent of cordite spiced the air, dragging him almost a decade into the past, to burning sand and blood in his eyes.

  He blinked himself to the present. Four down, two to go.

  Moving again behind the teller line, he looked down at the automatic rifle on the floor, contemplating an upgrade. But he couldn’t spare the time untangling the sling from the body, so he walked swiftly toward the vault door, stepping across workers’ quivering bodies. “Sorry, ’scuse me, sorry.”

  Sobs and gasps answered him. A wail of sirens grew audible, faint enough to be imaginary.

  A pistol reached around the vault jamb, firing blindly. Nate drew a careful bead on the gun hand and kept on, swift and steady, not because of courage or heroism but because he hadn’t a thing to lose. He fired once, the round clanging off the vault door, and then he adjusted and fired twice more, a whirl of muscle memory, reaction, and instinct. The pistol flipped back, the fingers spreading comically wide, as if waving, and the hand vanished intact.

  Five more steps brought Nate to the vault door, and he strolled through without hesitation. A man sat in the far corner, aiming at the doorway, locked elbows resting on the shelf of his knees. He took a clear-as-day shot at Nate’s head, but the wind of the bullet kissed the side of Nate’s neck, the slug bouncing around the vault more times than seemed plausible. Nate swung the pistol, figuring he was too close to bother with the sights, and unloaded two shots into the guy’s gut. Simultaneously he heard the scuff of a boot in the blind spot behind him. He sidestepped, the coolness of metal brushing his neck and turning to a dagger of flame in his trapezius. Twisting, he shot, but the hammer clicked dryly—marking the fastest fifteen rounds he’d ever spent.

  The blade tweaked the muscle down the length of his arm, barbed wire tugged through a vein. Heat poured into his little finger. A half turn of his neck brought the handle of a sleek metal letter opener visible, sticking up out of him like an Indian brave’s feather.

  He said, “Ouch.”

  His eyes tracked to the man who had stabbed him. The ski mask was still on, the mesh patches of the eyes shiny under the fluorescent glow of the vault lights, but from the man’s bearing Nate recognized him.

  Number Six.

  Up close the crew leader seemed slight—slender-hipped and wiry, built for maximum efficiency. He couldn’t have been more than five foot nine, shorter than his associates. Nate’s eyes were drawn to a band of exposed flesh, the white skin striking against the comprehensive black getup. The man had peeled back the glove of his right hand, the meat at the base of the thumb pink from where Nate had shot the pistol from his grip. He held the palm up and at an angle, babying it, which gave Nate a flush of schoolyard pride.

  They faced each other from a few paces, the masked man bare-handed, Nate holding a bulletless gun, Nate realizing with some disappointment that no one would be killing anyone else at the moment. He lifted his good shoulder in a half shrug, then drew back the Beretta and threw it at the guy’s face. Number Six barely flinched, the gun clipping his forehead. He touched a hand to the black fabric at the point of impact, then rolled his fingertips together, a man accustomed to checking for his own blood. He gave off nothing resembling emotion.

  The sirens, now louder.

  That dead-calm voice again, the faint accent. “He will be greatly angered by you.”

  Nate said, “Tell whoever he is to take a number.”

  The man pointed at him. “You have no idea what you have done.”

  These words—even more, the gravity behind them—cut through Nate’s exhilaration, an arctic chill. For the first time since climbing in off that ledge, he felt fear, cold and pure.

  The man took a step back and then another, those patches of mesh trained on Nate. “He will make you pay,” he said, “in ways you can’t imagine.” Then he slid past the vault door, his footsteps pattering off.

  Dazed, Nate looked around, getting his bearings. Aside from the imposing wall of safe-deposit boxes, the vault was disappointingly ordinary. Concrete walls, file cabinets, the few freestanding Diebold safes no more impressive than airport lockers. A cardboard legal box on the floor held overflow holiday envelopes and stray staplers; Nate figured it to be the home of the letter opener protruding from his shoulder. One safe was cracked open, and the deposit boxes had been attacked. Thick metal hinges protruded in V-shaped ridges, bordering each column of boxes. Most of the hinges had been sheared off by the saw, leaving the metal door of each individual box embedded, its dead bolt still thrown. Red rectangular handle magnets, the kind used to lift sheet metal from a stack, remained adhered to the closest set of boxes, floating. Nate could see where someone had used them to pry off some of the little doors. A few freed boxes lay open on the tiles, foreign currency, jewelry, and legal documents scattered by the dead man’s boots. A neat little scheme—attack the hinges, yank off the doors, and voilà—unearned wealth.

  Muffled cries from the bank floor jarred Nate from his reluctant admiration. He thought of the kill order—Put her down—and his stomach roiled. One dead or twenty—it carries the same sentence. Human lives weighed against a cold efficiency. The terror that those people must have felt.

  He walked back out to the bank floor. All of them still lying on their stomachs. Quiet sobbing. A few heads beginning to stir. The squeal of tires carried up from the street.

  He cleared his throat. “It’s okay now, everyone. Those guys are gone. Or dead, I guess. You’re all safe. You can get up.”

  But they all stayed on the floor.

  Nate wondered briefly if this was actually real and not some bizarre dream. “I promise you,” he said, “no one’ll hurt you now. Please don’t be scared anymore.” He took a pleading step forward, a lightning bolt of pain electrifying his left side. Wincing, he tried to reach back to grip the handle of the letter opener, but the movement just made it bob away from his fingertips.

  Now came more sirens, the chop of a helicopter, a megaphone bleat. The phone on the New Accounts desk rang and rang. Nate stared at the motionless tableau, all those people, too afraid to rise.

  The little girl crawled over to her mother, still unconscious from the kick to her face. Nate crouched above the inert woman, laid two fingers on her neck. Strong pulse.

  “She’s okay,” he told the girl. “Your mom’s gonna be fine.”

  He stood again, his knees cracking, and announced to no one in particular, “I’m gonna … um, go get some help. Medics. Okay? Everyone okay?”

  More stunned silence.

  The girl held up her arms. He looked down at her, the familiar pick-me-up gesture twingeing his heart in a place he’d thought had long ago gone brittle and blown away. One of her pigtails had pulled loose, freeing a cloud of hair. The blood on her earlobe had hardened, a black crust. Both cheeks glimmered with tears, but her face remained blank with shock. He crouched and lifted her, grunting against the pain, trying to use his legs i
nstead of his arms. Her wrist brushed the letter opener, sending through him a wave of nausea so intense that he thought he might vomit. But he kept on toward the door, blood warming the back of his shirt.

  The security guard had landed faceup, his head corkscrewed unnaturally, white eyes aimed over at them. Stepping into the waiting elevator, Nate turned so the girl was pointed away from the death sprawl. She took his cue, bending her head into the hollow of his neck, the scent of no-tears shampoo bringing him back to Cielle at that age in the bathtub: We don’t splash!

  The elevator hummed its descent. His skin tingled—the afterglow of that invincibility he’d felt staring down the hail of bullets. How long had it been since he’d felt like that? He’d cheated something in that room, sucked a last taste of marrow from the bone.

  The elevator slowed, the girl’s weight pulling at the crook of his arm. Her face was hot against the side of his neck, and he realized he’d been talking to her, whispering a quiet mantra: “—everything’s gonna be all right everything’s gonna—”

  The doors peeled back, exposing the empty lobby. His footsteps grew heavier as he neared the tinted glass of the front wall. Beyond, cop cars, SWAT vans, ambulances, and fire engines crammed the street. Barricades and gun barrels alternated, a pattern of impenetrability. Sniper scopes winked from awnings and balconies.

  The girl made a fearful noise and buried herself deeper in his neck. Firming his grip around her with one hand and raising his other painfully overhead, he shoved through the revolving door, staggering out to a reception of countless muzzles and the bright light of day.

  Chapter 4

  When Nate entered the emergency room, flanked by cops like an escaped convict, the TV in the lobby was already rolling footage from outside the First Union Bank of Southern California. Despite the bandages, blood trickled down his arm, drying across the backs of his fingers like an ill-advised fashion statement. The letter opener, removed from his trapezius and encased in an evidence bag, was handed off to a venerable triage nurse, who looked from it to Nate with an impressive lack of curiosity. She led him through a miasma of familiar hospital smells to Radiology, then deposited him in a room the size of a walk-in closet.

  The doctor came in, scanning Nate’s chart as Nate crinkled on the paper sheet of the exam table. “So you got stabbed with a letter opener.”

  “It sounds so unimpressive when you say it that way.”

  She hoisted her lovely eyebrows.

  “Sorry,” Nate said. “I just joke so people don’t notice my low self-esteem.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “It’s a long-term plan.” He exhaled shakily. The adrenaline had washed out of him, leaving him unsteady and vaguely drunk. Beneath the dull throb of a headache, a jumble of images reigned—a burst of red mist from a hooded head, patches of black mesh in place of eyes, the blood-sodden blouse of the bank teller whose hand he had clasped as she’d died. He was rattled, all right, but given what he’d just been through, he was surprised he didn’t feel worse.

  A page fluttered up. The doctor’s pen tapped the chart. “Your liver enzymes are elevated. Taking any meds?”

  “Riluzole.”

  She looked at him fully for the first time, her gaze sharpening behind John Lennon glasses. “So that’s…?”

  The familiar image flickered through his mind—Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man on the face of the earth, against the packed grandstands of Yankee Stadium, his head bowed, cap clutched in both hands to rest against his thighs. “Yes,” Nate said.

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And so you’re … acquainted with your prognosis.”

  His prognosis. Yeah. He was acquainted. He knew he would soon have trouble gripping, say, a pen. Then one day he wouldn’t be able to pick it up at all. He knew that his tongue would start to feel thick. Some slurring on and off, at first merely troubling, and then he wouldn’t be able to communicate. Or swallow. He knew that he would in due course require a feeding tube. That his tear ducts would start to go, that he’d need eyedrops and eventually someone else to apply them. He knew that he would feel some general fatigue, at first inconvenient, then debilitating. That he wouldn’t be able to get a full breath. At some point he’d need a CPAP mask at night. And then he’d go on a ventilator. He knew that the cause of the disease was unknown but that there was a significantly increased risk among veterans. There were no answers, and certainly no good ones.

  “I am.”

  “Where are you in the course of illness?” the doctor asked.

  “I was told I could expect six months to a year of good health.”

  “When?”

  “About nine months ago.” He couldn’t help a dry smile—it so resembled a punch line.

  “Any symptoms?”

  “A little weakness in my hand. It goes in and out. The symptoms are intermittent. Until they’re not.”

  She touched his forearm gently, a technique he employed now and again in his own job. “There are some experimental treatments.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay.” She moistened her lips. “I won’t say anything comforting.”

  “Much appreciated.”

  She slotted the chart into an acrylic wall rack above a torn-loose People cover sporting an elegiac portrait of Elizabeth Taylor and wormed her pale hands into paler latex gloves. After poking and prodding at the edges of the stab wound, she slotted an X-ray into the light box and regarded it, chewing her lip. “You’re lucky. The point bounced off your scapula instead of punching through to your lung. Mostly muscle damage. You current with tetanus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then just antibiotics and Vicodin, you’ll be back to form in a week”—she caught herself. “On this front, I mean.” Chagrin colored her face, and she busied herself opening a suture packet. “Should we stitch you up now?”

  Nate smiled wanly. “We could just let me bleed out on the table, save us all the aggravation.”

  “L.A.,” she said, threading the needle. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

  He sat quietly, enduring the pinpricks of the local anesthetic, then the tug of his numb skin.

  “Everyone’s talking about you,” she said. “The bank. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

  “The army.”

  “You don’t seem the soldier type to me.”

  “I’m not. Just signed up for ROTC to pay for college. It was 1994. I was never gonna get called up to active duty.”

  She made a faint noise of amusement. A metallic snip as she cut the last stitch. “How’d that work out for you?”

  “Not so hot,” he said.

  WHAT WAS LOST

  There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

  –Unknown

  Chapter 5

  At UCLA the National Guard is not about training soldiers; it is about olive drab T-shirts, jumping jacks, and shooting-range practice one weekend a month. Nate enjoys the sense of belonging and participates with gratitude, if not the hoo-ah earnestness his superiors might prefer. The choice is primarily a financial one; he is on his own here. In high school he buckled down and studied hard, aware that that was the best way out of a house that had been lifeless since his mom had succumbed thoroughly, brutally, to cancer when he was in third grade. After her funeral his father vanished into an effluvium of scotch, a still life in a frayed armchair, the eternal microwave dinner resting on the eternal TV tray at his side. There will be no parent weekends for Nate in college, no palmed-off cash to help cover books.

  Most of the time, Nate is a normal student. His roommate, a fellow ROTC cadet named Charles Brightbill, is pathologically relaxed and full of childlike wonderment. Charles has an unsurpassed appreciation of all things everybody else noticed five minutes ago, marveling at planes overhead, a classmate’s cleavage, the color of his just-blown snot in a Kleenex. “Hey,” Charles says. “Look at that rainbow in t
he sprinkler mist.” Despite Nate’s best efforts, he loves the guy. Charles who is incapable of deception, who dispenses the occasional nugget of inadvertent wisdom, who sleeps in the hall when he forgets his key rather than wake Nate, no matter how many times Nate tells him to bang on the door.

  After a particularly soul-destroying exam in their junior year, Charles drags Nate out of bed, beach towels in hand. “Rise ’n’ shine, podnah. Moping’s like listening to Iron Maiden when you’re hungover.” That’s Charles; he can boil down the world and put it in a fortune cookie. Nate relents. Ten minutes later he cranks open the window of Charles’s Datsun 240Z and lets the salt-rich breeze wash over him. Sprawled on the hot Malibu sand, he basks, feeling the life creep back into him.

  A distant waterlogged shriek startles him upright. A flailing feminine form, out beyond the break. Then a young man about Nate’s age is disgorged from the sea, landing on all fours on the wet sand before them, surf seething up his forearms. He heaves up salt water, and then his hoarse voice croaks at the beachgoers—“Riptide. She’s got a cramp.”

  There is a moment of utter stillness, people frozen on their towels. A few heads swivel to the lifeguard station far along the beach. And then Nate is up and running, dried seaweed pods crackling underfoot. Charles is bellowing after him, but Nate hurdles a wave and strikes out for the break. The undertow grips him, sweeping him toward the woman, who sputters and dips from sight. Muscles on fire, he strokes into a forceful current, and then, finally, her rubbery arm is in his grasp. He sweeps her into him, spinning her so her spine presses to his chest. She spits and struggles, and the back of her head cracks his eye. He lets go, and she goes under the green-black surface and bobs up again, choking. He says, “Stop fighting.” He reaches for her arm once more. “Look at me. I got you.” She stares at him, drops clinging to her eyelashes, and it occurs to him that she is quite beautiful. They are being swept along, the backdrop of the beach whipping by, and she gives a quick, youthful nod. He spins her like a dance partner, and she surrenders into him, her muscles going limp. Clamping an arm over her shoulder and across her flat chest, he lets them drift with the riptide, reading the water. Then he paddles, offsetting them slightly from the current. They reach the sand a half mile up the beach, with Charles, two lifeguards, and a cluster of onlookers sprinting to meet them. They both cough water and pant, and she rises first, tugging him to his feet, and then they are helped and dried and checked to the point of claustrophobia.