Overfall

by David Dun

  It was plain the dogs would stay on the beach.

  “I don’t think I can do it. That damn wave.”

  He whirled and held her close. “You’ve gotta do it. Period.”

  “You could kill them.”

  “Right behind them will be guys with guns.”

  She was trying to concentrate. To summon her will against the fear.

  He put his face close to hers. “You can do this. I won’t leave you, but you gotta swim. Get your shoes off. Tie them.”

  She struggled, but got them on her belt.

  He did a surface dive. She hesitated, then followed, and raised her head when she got beside him. The current wasn’t strong.

  Go, she told herself. When they were near the middle they were considerably downstream, and the current was rushing toward the jaws of the wave. Doing the crawl, she swam vigorously until her arms ached, breathing maybe every other stroke. Suddenly she once again heard the faint roar and it was growing closer, maybe a couple of city blocks away. And she was being pulled by a whirlpool. Her clothes felt as if they were lead-lined. Sam was strong and was leaving her behind. She swam harder. Then he was behind her—she felt his hand pulling on her fanny pack.

  “Go!” he half shouted. “Go!”

  Her arms and legs were losing strength. She seemed to be flailing. A gulp of water had her choking. The roar was now clearly audible.

  “Swim!”

  Then she felt slime everywhere, heavy and horrible, miring her down. It was like swimming through wet towels.

  “Grab the kelp, you’re drifting.”

  Reaching out, she grabbed a handful of slime. Then she could feel the water pulling on her. It was fast! Looking over her shoulder in the distance, she saw the white of the foam. It was the wave. Once locked in the current, she would go there. The thought of the black water and its secrets put her on the verge of panic. Pulling with all the strength her near-dead arms could muster, she tried to make headway. She couldn’t. In truth she was sliding slowly backward through the kelp, headed for open water and the wave.

  Sam lowered himself backward through the matted vegetation, reached around her, grabbed her belt, and used one arm to pull her to him and the other to hang on to the kelp. He knew how her body would respond to the cold of immersion. Water lowered body temperature approximately twenty-five times faster than air. In water temperatures of fifty to fifty-five degrees, given her prior exposure to cold, it would take only five to ten minutes for her body to experience cold shock. Struggling would become a reflex as her brain, befuddled by cold-induced neurological impairment, told her body that she needed air and her respirations escalated into harmful hyperventilation.

  All her instincts would be telling her to thrash. Movement would push the blood to her extremities cooling it, in the fashion of a radiator. Her motor control would go and her limbs would feel detached and spastic. As her blood cooled, it would lower her vital core temperature bringing on a loss of consciousness. She would begin to take in water and die.

  He clung to the kelp for both of them. “Put your hands on my shoulders, your legs around my body,” he screamed. She did it. “Lie back.” She did that. Her arms were straight; her hands gripped his shoulders like talons, communicating her fear. Now he used both his hands to pull them through the kelp, pushing her body as if he were a tug moving a barge. As he methodically grabbed kelp, some of it gave way and some of it held. Even as they inched toward shore, they were pulled downstream. Over his shoulder the roar in the blackness created a palpable vibration in the air. The ocean wanted to feed its young.

  Sam could feel himself start to gasp, and forced a rhythm to his breathing. Desperate, he reached down with a foot and felt for the bottom. Nothing. It cost him mentally, and he slipped a few feet downstream in the attempt. It was hard to concentrate. He had to get them out of the water. Pulling and kicking like a man possessed, he sensed the shore but couldn’t see it. “More, more, more,” he grunted as he pulled. His body had nothing left to give and he moved it by sheer strength of mind.

  Then a toe hit a rock; he reached down and stood. Two more pulls and a stride and he was dragging her up the boulder-strewn beach toward some trees. As they neared the trees the helicopter neared them. Sam stumbled up the bank, carrying her, just as a brilliant wand of light encompassed them and they fell into the brush.

  Through her chattering teeth she tried to talk. “Did they see us?”

  “Don’t know.” The chopper was turning back. “They overshot us if they did.”

  Sam urged her farther under a dense tree. There was no way they could now be seen from the air. When the chopper returned, it hovered, and its brilliant spotlight hit the uppermost portion of the tree and lit the area of the nearby beach.

  She shivered uncontrollably. Sam knew this was going to be a bad night. “They may have seen us but there’s no place to land.”

  Sam pulled her tight to his body for warmth, and she welcomed it. Her teeth chattered as if they might crack. In moments the helicopter moved off. They pulled on their shoes over bloody feet.

  “They aren’t sure or they wouldn’t keep moving like that. Let’s go,” he said as they stumbled through the trees to another smaller expanse of fast-moving water.

  “What’s th-th-tha-that?”

  “It’s the last little stretch of water. We’re on Insect Island. It sits in Mosquito Channel and goes most of the way across.”

  “No.” She shook her head, backing away.

  Sam grabbed her and put his face close to hers. “Do you want to live?”

  She nodded.

  “You have enough left. If you want it bad enough you can do it. You can live. But if you give up, you’ll die. You’ve never given up.”

  Sam wondered if he really believed she could make it. Her breathing had become more regular, there was less gasping. Maybe she could get most of the way before he had to push her. They needed to make it to the kelp on the far side. Once again they went through the frustrating task of using shaking fingers to tie their shoes to their belts.

  Taking her by the hand, he hobbled in the moonlight down the beach and into the second channel.

  Sam felt the cold go straight to his innards—worse than he thought. Once again they swam and to his relief, she did not lose her nerve or her will. On this side of the island the current was less and the overfalls smaller, but still lethal for Anna.

  As they swam, he watched her constantly. They had covered about ninety feet, with only ten more to the kelp, when she began completely losing her strength. It was as if her coordination left her and her muscles spasmed crazily. Sam could begin to feel his own arms turning to butter. Grabbing her belt beneath her fanny pack, he sidestroked with the last of his energy and managed to get a hand in the kelp and to begin hauling her. The first giant strand pulled its anchor-rock from the bottom, but the second two plants held.

  But he wasn’t strong enough. They couldn’t make headway. All he could do was hang on and prevent them from drifting with the current.

  “You gotta kick,” he said.

  She thrashed, but it wasn’t enough. The kelp snapped. Floundering, he grabbed again. The plant held, but he was getting weak fast. Before he realized it, he began gulping air.

  “Damn it,” he screamed at himself.

  There was splashing from Anna. She was trying to swim.

  If he let go of her he might swim, but if he continued to hold on, they were both going down. He tried in vain to sidestroke and hang on to her, but was too weak.

  “Swim,” she said.

  So he let go and began moving ahead. Without the extra weight it was barely possible. He hit the rocks. Making his legs work, he moved through the water thigh-deep. She was drifting, struggling in the kelp’s edge, but moving down toward the wave. The white froth from her struggles was all he could see. He couldn’t let her go any farther.

  “Hang on,” was all he said as he leaped and grabbed her. Now they were drifting fast, but she had moved closer
to shore and his feet were banging rocks. Suddenly the bottom came up and he found purchase. Scrambling, he heaved them into shallow water, where he hung on to a large rock with one hand and held her with the other.

  Black water swirled around them. Normally he could have yanked her ashore in an instant, without a second thought, but now nothing worked. She splashed uselessly. The water was an inch from his gasping mouth. He fought with his body, but couldn’t move up the beach.

  His arms no longer felt attached. His legs seemed to move around on their own. In an instant he knew they were about to drown. Focusing all his concentration on his left arm, he tried to contract it. They moved a few inches. Somehow he managed to make it reach again and contract again. He got his upper shoulder out of the water. Still he clung to Anna.

  “Roll,” he told her. Like an infant she managed to flop over, moving up toward the beach.

  “Grab.”

  She did. He let go and pulled himself up onto rocks in the shallows. Looking back, he saw that she was floundering but going nowhere. He tried to make the beach by crawling on his belly. Finally, his nose was on the dry pebbles that made the beach. He looked back. One of her arms was waving in the air. She was coughing and spluttering. She had swallowed water. It would take only a quart and a half to kill her.

  “Hang on,” he groaned. By getting his shoulders in the air, he slowed the cooling process, but the shaking was so bad he was nearly convulsing. He had to get control of his body. Forcing his palms under him, he managed to worm up the beach.

  He looked around and found a long stick. Crawling back to the water, he flopped in and held out the stick. She was able to grasp it, but was too weak to pull or even hang on. Her choking grew deep and agonized. He slithered toward her and managed to put his arms around her. He got his feet on a rock. With all his strength, he rose up and fell with her toward the beach. He hit the rocky ground with a bone-cracking thud.

  The chopper was coming back up the island, the edge of its beam just nipping the shore on which they sat.

  “Come on,” he said, trying to stand but unable. “You gotta crawl.”

  Even as he said it, he felt a tiny spark of strength returning. He managed to get up, put his arm around her belly, and lift her trembling body to stand next to his. They struggled up the beach and stumbled barefoot off into the trees as the copter whizzed past.

  Once in the trees, Sam knew that their lowered body temperature was critical.

  He was still breathing hard from the cold.

  “We have ten miles,” he gasped as if running. “Over rough ground. Got to get to the resort.” He doubled over, and it occurred to him that maybe age was affecting him. But he shoved the thought from his mind. He was only forty-two, still young. The hopeful message pulsed through the structures of his brain. But his ever-present self, the thing that cowered at age, answered back: Your dad killed himself at thirty-seven. “We have to get away from the water.”

  They stumbled and meandered through the woods for maybe an hour, the cold feeling slightly less extreme as they dried in the night air. The helicopter was an occasional buzz in the distance as it patrolled the other island. He knew the angry bird would soon have to leave for fuel.

  He turned on his light. Trees and brush everywhere.

  “I just need to sleep.” She wobbled and he grabbed her.

  “No way,” he said. “You sleep, you die.”

  He pushed her ahead of him by the belt.

  She started to fall, and he gently shook her. When that didn’t work, he shook her harder.

  “This is awful. I’m gonna die.” She was shaking and her legs looked weak.

  “You forget about the paperwork. I gotta keep you around.”

  It took him another thirty minutes to find what he needed. It was a house-sized rock with nearly sheer faces. They put the rock between themselves and the water from which they had come. There was a cleft in the rock and a niche maybe two feet deep.

  “Help me,” he said. “You can’t be a lazy movie star out here. Pick up sticks, like this.”

  He began grabbing any wood he could find. Although she stumbled and fell repeatedly, she worked alongside him. Hollowing out a small area in the middle of the woodpile, he put in twigs and dry needles.

  Then he took out one of the wax-dipped matches, cleaned off the wax, blew on it for two minutes, prayed, and struck it on the rock face. It lit.

  “First time, every time.” He looked down. When she sat down, she went immediately to sleep and appeared unconscious. Snapping on the light, he pried up a lid and saw her eye rolled back in her head.

  “Damn.” He began slapping her and shaking her to wake her. She groaned. The fire was burning. He nurtured it with more small sticks, then shook her some more.

  “Wake up.” He put her back to the meager flame and began rubbing her as if to warm her skin with the friction. As he fed the fire, the flame grew larger and began to put out genuine warmth. Now she began to groan in earnest. That was good. Her body was coming alive, starting to sense pain again. With all the bruising, she would soon feel as if she’d rolled down a hill in a box of rocks.

  He began to clear an area of the forest duff. He found some stones the size of softballs and began stacking them next to the fire. He put some in the fire. He broke boughs on nearby trees and placed them in a pile. Next he took a stick and began digging in the dirt. It was rocky but not impossibly hard. As he pulled up more rocks, he also placed those in and around the fire, which by now had a three-foot flame.

  The helicopter continued patrolling over the water, a mile or more distant.

  Sam was pretty sure that they wouldn’t see the smoke at night, and the flame was invisible from three directions. It was unlikely that their pursuers would fly out over a black forest searching for people on foot. And even if they did, the forest was so heavy they probably wouldn’t see the fire. It took him ten minutes, but he found a long log that he dragged to the rock face. He put one end of the log in a notch in the rock next to the cleft that housed the fire. The log stood directly over the shallow trench and about three feet off the ground at the high end. Knowing he had what he needed, he set the log aside.

  Now he dug pockets in the trench, put a hot rock in each pocket, and covered each rock with an inch or two of dirt. Soon the entire bottom of the trench was filled with hot buried rocks. Next he stacked on about six inches of fir boughs and placed the log against the rock over the boughs. He leaned dry, stripped, arm-sized branches against it and then piled the boughs along the branches, making a tent of the boughs.

  Anna was huddled by the fire with a bad case of the shakes. “Let me help. You’re doing all the work.”

  “Stay right where you are. Keep warm.”

  He figured it had taken two hours to complete the tiny hut.

  “It’ll be warm enough.” Sam doused the fire, hoping no one had spotted it.

  Without hesitation he stripped off his clothes. She stared, obviously warn out and fumbling for some way to make the sleeping arrangements workable.

  “Leave on your underwear and let’s get in,” he said. She retained her bra and panties, but Sam was happy naked. Apparently she had a thing about her fanny pack, or its contents, because she kept it by her side. He put their clothes under some spare hot rocks and watched with satisfaction as they steamed. He and Anna crawled into the tent, where he wrapped himself around her back as they sank into the warmth of the bough-lined trench. Heat from the rocks radiated through the boughs on which they lay, and as their bodies soaked up the warmth. It felt luxurious.

  “You are quite a guy,” she said. “Not a real diplomat, though.”

  “Maybe you know too many guys with their nose up your ass.”

  “You seem to be hanging on pretty tight.”

  “That’s for warmth.”

  “Thank you for clarifying that. I’m going to sleep.” True to her word, she was gone in less than a minute.

  They slept fitfully.

  “My butt
is too hot,” she said after a time. By now they had become partially unentwined and sprawled on their backs.

  “Actually, my backside is fried too. If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” Sam muttered, crawling out to get more boughs to put over the rocks. Gray dawn filtered through the trees. Birds were starting to flit and chirp.

  Weary beyond words, he muscled the boughs beneath them, spread them around, and once again curled up tight against her back.

  Just then there was barking in the distance.

  “Damn. They dropped them on this island just in case,” Sam said. They probably went for jet fuel and left the dogs and a couple men to go after us. Come on.”

  Sam pulled her out of the lean-to, snatched up her clothes, and tossed them over her shoulder. She scrambled to pull them on.

  Sam listened carefully. The dogs were coming too fast to be on a leash.

  “Shoes now,” he said, pulling on his own clothes in seconds, then his sneakers. Nothing was buttoned. She had done the same and put her fanny pack around her waist. “Climb,” he said.

  She tried, but was obviously not a rock climber.

  Sam sprang up on a small ledge on the rock. From there he climbed around her, got above, and pulled. Twice he repeated the process. Now ten feet up, she spread-eagled on the rock using her fingers and feet. Sam looked up to a ledge at least two feet deep. He had to get her there. The hounds were running in a meandering course, no doubt following Sam’s and Anna’s wandering of the night before.

  “Lift your right foot.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  The dogs were close and barking, and then they were beneath them. One of them limped, but they both looked crazy with blood lust. They charged the wall, trying to climb.

  “Don’t look at them. Just move the foot.” With momentum the dogs were climbing the wall, their jaws snapping within a few inches of her foot. She managed to raise it.

  “Now your hand up here.” He pointed. Painstakingly, she worked her way up the face until he could pull her to the ledge.

  “I gotta kill them,” Sam said. There were no rocks. No clubs. “Sit right here,” he told her, and began to climb. The top of the rock was a good sixty feet, but he was there in five minutes. The opposite face was not steep. Even the dogs could have made it up. It was only about fifty feet down the backside to soil and trees. He hurried down the rock, still able to hear the growling dogs, knowing the handlers could be nearby.