When Sean recovered consciousness, he was lying on the floor of a dark room, with no sound to be heard but his own difficult breathing. His mouth was open and his lips painfully dry; the tubes in his nostrils, which should have supplied him with oxygen, were now empty, and seemed to hinder rather than assist him.
He raised his hand and pulled them away.
There was dried blood upon his face. In feeling for its source he discovered a cut across his forehead, partly crusted over, but elsewhere swollen and so tender that the pressure of a finger sent a sharp pain down his back. He supposed it was infected; yet, having neither light by which to examine it nor anything with which to treat it, he could gain little by dwelling on that supposition.
He tried instead to recall his circumstances. His name was Sean, and he had been admitted to a hospital with pneumonia after a spearfishing expedition at Pacifica. Those events, unlike the circumstances of his present situation, were only too distinct; he could recall what he had chosen to do, what he had failed to prevent, and what, despite all his efforts, had been beyond his power.
He and his friend Jacob had gone out during the season for great white sharks. The fishing was particularly good at that time of year, and Sean had been willing to accept the danger. The danger had not been denied; it had been considered, admitted, and then set aside, because the pleasure of the expedition was near, while the harm, though possible, could still be imagined as something that would happen to other men. He understood the mistake now.
Jacob was about thirty feet from him when a shark struck. It was a great white, some sixteen feet long, and his friend's large body in its black wetsuit might have been mistaken for a seal. After one bite the creature left him. Whether it had discovered its error Sean could not know; he saw only that it went away, and that Jacob could not help himself.
Before he reached him, both men were being carried out by a rip current. Jacob was unconscious, either from pain or the loss of blood; his left leg was almost severed, held by a narrow piece of muscle and what remained of the wetsuit. Sean put his arms round his friend's torso and began kicking across the current, knowing that to swim directly against it would only spend the strength on which they depended.
Jacob stood six feet two; Sean, five feet eight and a hundred and fifty pounds, had neither the height nor the muscular strength of his friend, and, having generally been overpowered by other boys throughout childhood, had reached manhood without any particular expectation that strength would carry him through a difficulty. Perseverance was another resource.
For nearly an hour he continued, with no certainty that the effort would succeed, but with the knowledge that to cease would leave Jacob wholly at the mercy of the water; at last he dragged his friend on to the beach, and fell exhausted beside him. A group of Chinese fishermen from Pacifica found them there and called an ambulance; but Jacob died of blood loss before it arrived, and Sean himself was hypothermic.
In his own condition there was an element of avoidable folly. Anxious to save money and pay off his student loans, he had refused to rent a thicker wetsuit, and had worn the short one bought for skin diving in San Diego. There was nothing wrong in the wish to save; the error lay in permitting that wish to answer a question to which it had no relevance—for the water would be no warmer, and the suit no thicker, because he had debts to pay.
He remembered being taken to the hospital, hearing the doctors speak of pneumonia and fluid in his lungs, and receiving visitors. After these recollections there was a blank. He could recall neither leaving his bed nor injuring his head, and knew only that he had awakened in darkness upon the floor.
Before attempting to stand, he made himself sit up and examine what he could of his body, moving first his toes, then his feet and legs, and passing his hands over chest, torso, and arms in search of some injury which the shock of waking might have concealed. There was none that he could discover.
He needed water.
Feeling about him, he reached the base of a table and followed its leg upwards. With the support of the edge he was able to stand, though a sudden dizziness obliged him to remain leaning there until it passed. Hunger, no less urgent than the thirst once he attended to it, gave him another reason to suspect that he had been unconscious a long time; yet neither sensation could tell him how long, and there was no advantage in trying to force certainty from them.
An IV line remained in his arm; he had overlooked it when searching for injuries. He traced the tube to an empty bag, removed the line, and pressed the small puncture until the slight bleeding ceased. Then, finding the wall behind the bed, he resolved to follow it round the room, so that he might at least form an orderly notion of his surroundings.
The bed prevented him from turning left. He moved to the right instead, keeping his hand upon the wall; after bumping against a rubbish bin he reached the corner, turned, and came upon a sink.
This discovery gave him more immediate relief than any recollection could have done. He searched for the handle of the tap, failed to find one, and then remembered that hospital sinks were sometimes worked by pedals.
His right foot found a pedal beneath the basin, and he pressed it.
The pipes answered with such a creaking and spluttering that he almost stepped away; it seemed the water had not been used for some time. Presently it began to flow, and he bent to drink directly from the spout. It tasted of rust, but his need was too great for him to refuse it; he drank until he could take no more.
“What the hell is going on here?” he wondered.
He was not ordinarily given to swearing. The words arose less from anger than from an inability to understand what had happened to him: first Jacob's death, then his own illness, and now this apparent abandonment. Where had everybody gone, and why should the lights have failed throughout the room?
He had been in hospitals before, and knew that even at night some movement or distant conversation was usually to be heard. This silence was of another kind. It made him fear that his neglect could not be explained by a single careless attendant; yet he had no evidence from which to decide what other explanation might be true.
Beyond the sink he found a cupboard, and then a door. He considered opening it, but thought it better to seek a window first; if he could obtain some light, he would be less likely to overlook anything useful or dangerous in the room he already occupied.
The window was halfway along the next wall. Its blind had been drawn, and he pulled the cord to raise it, only to find that the darkness remained. On touching the glass he discovered cardboard secured over it with tape.
He worked at an edge until he could remove one piece.
A narrow beam of light entered, and for a few moments he could do little but blink. When his eyes had adjusted, he turned to examine the room. Dark stains were visible upon the white walls; almost at once he became aware of a smell he knew.
His father had practised taxidermy as a hobby, and the smell of blood was familiar to him. Looking down, he searched himself for some injury he might have missed. The light showed that he had lost weight: his ribs could be counted, and his stomach had flattened considerably. But there was no wound upon his body to account for so much blood.
A mirror fixed to the cupboard attracted his attention. Something had been written upon it, and he went nearer to read the words.
“Don't get bit.”
The writing had evidently been done with a finger dipped in blood. That somebody had feared a bite was plain enough; from whom, or from what, and why the warning had been left in this dreadful manner, were matters upon which he possessed no evidence, however strongly fear might press him to supply an answer.
He drew several slow breaths and tried to confine his attention to what he could actually see. In the mirror the wound in his forehead looked less severe than he had imagined. It would probably leave a scar, but did not appear likely to prevent him from helping himself; his torn gown and bare feet, on the other hand, were inconveniences to which he might find a remedy.
He opened the cupboard. His diving things had been placed inside: the wetsuit, mask, snorkel, fins and speargun; the spandex shorts and shirt he usually wore beneath the suit; and a pair of booties. The sheath of his dive knife was also there, but the knife itself was missing.
He searched for it with some concern. After a reef shark attacked him, several years earlier, he had bought the six-inch titanium knife, with a sheath to be strapped about the ankle; and though the expense had troubled him at the time, he had afterwards regarded it as a necessary precaution, and had never gone spearfishing without it.
Now the sheath was empty. To find the other equipment intact and this one item absent was particularly troubling.
He removed the remains of the gown and put on the shorts and shirt. At first he thought of leaving his feet bare, but the debris on the floor made that unwise; the booties would provide a little protection and better traction. Among the fragments were pieces of sheetrock, with edges so irregular that they appeared to have been chewed rather than cleanly broken.
Before closing the cupboard he took the speargun. He could not explain the state of the room, and it seemed imprudent to leave behind anything which might afford a means of defence.
From where he stood, only the space immediately to the left of the bed remained out of sight. He went back to the window and removed more tape and cardboard. With the additional light he could distinguish a hole in the wall, about the size of a small door for a dog; its edges had the same gnawed appearance as the fragments on the floor.
Halfway through the opening lay a corpse.
Sean's knife was buried to the hilt in its head.
“Oh my God!” he cried.
He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and for a moment could scarcely move. Then he approached the body, covering his nose against the smell of decay, which brought on a fit of dry retching. The person appeared to have been crawling into the room when someone struck through the back of the head, preventing them from getting clear of the hole.
He could not tell who it was, or even be certain at first whether it was a man or a woman. What he saw was someone who had died in a dreadful position; he imagined the effort to escape from between the walls and the blow delivered when escape seemed near, and was horrified by the thought of it.
“Did I do this?” he asked himself.
He believed he had not; but he had to acknowledge that his memory was incomplete. The knife was his; beyond that fact, he knew nothing. To accuse himself because no other person was there to be accused, or to claim innocence merely because the act had left no place in his memory, would equally be to make his ignorance serve the conclusion he happened most to fear or desire.
For the present, there was something he could do. He took hold of the knife and pulled it free of the skull. A wet sucking sound accompanied its withdrawal, and tissue clung to the blade; he wiped it on the bed, retrieved the sheath, and fastened it to his ankle. Whoever had killed this person might still be nearby, and he wished to have some protection if approached.
He returned to the window and pulled away the remaining cardboard. The view showed him that he was in San Francisco, on the fourth or fifth floor; he must have been transferred from Pacifica, though he could remember nothing of the journey.
Cars stood in the middle of the streets, and some buildings appeared to have burned. At first he saw no movement anywhere. Looking beyond the nearer buildings towards the Bay Bridge, he was met by a tangle of wire and broken concrete where the crossing to Treasure Island should have been.
He stared at the wreckage.
The bridge was completely destroyed.
“Were we attacked?” he wondered. He tried to think of circumstances which could explain both what he saw outside and the room in which he stood; but no account he could devise seemed sufficient, and for several minutes the distant destruction occupied him so entirely that he failed to notice the people below.
They were moving between the abandoned cars. There was something peculiar in their gait: a jerking unevenness, combined with a rhythm that seemed common to them all. Nevertheless, they were people, and he tried at once to open the window and call for help.
The window would not open. He shouted, “Hey! I'm up here!” and waved his arms; though the double panes appeared to keep his voice from passing, the movement was seen. One by one the faces turned towards him, and the people began approaching the hospital.
He continued to wave until they were near enough for him to see them properly. Then his relief gave way to terror.
Their eyes were deeply sunken, their hair missing in patches, and their mouths hung open. Some had open wounds, some had lost limbs, and others seemed little more than skeletons covered by tightly drawn skin. In his eagerness for assistance he had taken the mere fact that they were walking to mean that they could help him; now, with their injuries plainly visible, and their faces turned towards the place he had been so anxious to reveal, he could not understand how they walked at all.
He stepped away from the window and sat upon the floor where he had awakened. “Oh God, what has happened?” escaped his lips. For a few moments he remained silent, attempting to consider what ought to be done next.
Then, from the other side of his door, he heard a gurgling moan.