It was his own breathing that recalled Sean to consciousness. Harsh, broken, painful to hear, it travelled through a darkness which concealed ceiling and wall alike, and returned to him without the comfort of a footstep, a voice, or even the stir of someone whose sleep his distress had interrupted. He lay upon the floor. No hand helped him.
His lips were dry and parted. A pair of tubes pressed into his nostrils, maintaining the appearance of assistance after the oxygen itself had failed. With an effort he raised one arm and pulled them free. The air entered more readily; his fingers, falling against his face, encountered dried blood.
Across his forehead was a wound. At one end a crust had formed; elsewhere the flesh was swollen, and the slightest pressure sent a keen pain down his spine. He thought it must be infected. The thought alarmed him; but what remedy was within reach, what help could he call upon, when the very place in which he lay, and the means by which he had come to lie there, were hidden from him?
Who was he? Where had they left him?
His name was Sean. That certainty stood alone for a moment; then others emerged, reluctantly, from the confusion of his mind. A hospital; pneumonia; the sea at Pacifica. And Jacob.
He shrank from the name, though there was no one to hear it. Jacob was dead.
They had gone spearfishing when the great whites were known to be off the coast. The fishing was good at that season, and Sean had persuaded himself that a danger accepted was in some measure a danger mastered. Now the folly of that persuasion appeared nakedly enough. It had afforded his friend no protection.
Thirty feet had separated them. Across that brief distance, too great for help and far too little for ignorance, Sean had seen the sixteen-foot shark strike Jacob's large, black-clothed figure; seen the single bite, the torn body, and then the creature's departure, as though what looked like a seal had proved unworthy of a second trial. Sean remembered the swiftness of the attack and the still more intolerable indifference of its ending. The sea closed about the shark. Jacob remained.
Before Sean could reach him, the rip current had caught them both. His friend was unconscious; pain or blood loss had overcome him, and the left leg hung by a narrow piece of muscle and the remains of the suit. There was no time to consider what such an injury meant. Sean caught him round the torso and began to kick across the current, towards the possibility of shore.
In bodily strength he had never been Jacob's equal. Beside that six-foot-two frame, his own five feet eight and hundred and fifty pounds seemed scarcely a man's full measure. Childhood had taught him the humiliation of being easily overpowered; he had carried the knowledge into adult life. But submission had never followed quite so easily as defeat.
He would not let go.
For nearly an hour that refusal was all he had; and while the water bore against him, while the shore withdrew and the weight in his arms grew heavier, it persisted, unreasonable perhaps, but stronger than any argument by which he might have excused surrender. Still he kicked. At last sand came under his feet, and he dragged Jacob clear of the water before falling beside him.
A group of Chinese fishermen from Pacifica found them and called the ambulance. By the time it arrived, Jacob had bled to death. Sean was hypothermic. He had preserved his friend through the current only to lie powerless beside him on the beach.
There had been an economy, too, which returned now to reproach him. Student loans remained unpaid; the short suit, bought for skin diving in San Diego, was already his; and by these two facts he had justified refusing to hire a thicker one, as if the necessity of saving could change the temperature of the water into which he meant to go. It had been so reasonable, so easily defended, on land!
The next recollections were of the hospital. Doctors spoke of pneumonia and fluid in his lungs. Visitors came to the bedside; he remembered their presence more distinctly than their words. After that, memory failed. No passage led from the bed to this black floor.
He forced himself upright. Terror might exhaust him; it would not examine his injuries for him. First the toes, then the feet and legs were moved. No pain answered. His hands travelled over chest, torso, and arms, finding no hurt except that in his head. Thirst, however, possessed him so completely that the word water seemed to contain every comfort he had ever known.
Searching beside him, he touched the foot of a table. He followed it upwards and drew himself to his feet; immediately dizziness seized him. For several moments he clung to the edge, afraid to loosen either hand lest consciousness should leave him again.
It passed. Beneath the thirst he now perceived hunger, acute and strange. How long had he lain neglected? The question had no answer; yet his body seemed to know something of the interval which his mind could not recover.
An IV line was still in his arm. He had overlooked it in his first examination. Following the tubing, he found the bag empty, and pulled the line from the vein. A little blood warmed his skin; he held the place until it ceased. Then he began to feel his way about the room.
The wall behind the bed offered a means of keeping his direction. The bed itself barred the left; to the right he could proceed, one hand extended. He struck a rubbish bin, passed it, turned the first corner, and found a sink.
His relief was almost painful. Fingers searched eagerly for the tap's handle and found none. He had nearly abandoned the search when recollection supplied what his hands could not: a pedal, such as hospitals used, must be somewhere below; and his right foot, searching the unseen space, found and pressed it. The pipes burst into creaks and sputters.
The sound made him recoil. In such silence, even the promise of water could speak like a threat.
Then it flowed. Bending to the spout, he drank without a cup, without pause, hardly troubling to swallow before taking more. Rust gave the water a bitter metallic taste; he was grateful for it nevertheless. When he could drink no longer, he remained bent over the basin, listening.
Nothing.
“What the hell is going on here?” he thought.
The words were foreign to his usual habits, but restraint had grown difficult. His friend had been killed; his own life had nearly followed; now the place to which he had been brought for care seemed to have cast him out while still retaining him within its walls. Where were the nurses? Where was anyone?
He had known hospitals before. Even in their quietest hours there was movement somewhere, the subdued assurance that another human being remained awake. Here the stillness seemed entire.
Beyond the sink his hand found a cupboard, and then a door. To open it was his first impulse. He resisted it. Before exposing himself to what lay beyond, he would seek a little light; surely there must be a window.
He found it halfway along the next wall. The blind was lowered. Raising it should have ended the darkness; instead his face remained turned towards the same unrelieved blackness. His fingers met cardboard, taped over the glass.
Somebody had taken pains to shut the daylight out.
He loosened the tape and drew a piece away. A narrow brightness pierced the room. He blinked, turned, and waited while the objects around him slowly acquired their proper shapes. The white walls were blotched with dark stains.
At almost the same moment, he recognised the smell.
Blood. His father's hobby had been taxidermy; that iron odour belonged to recollections too familiar for him to mistake it. He looked down hastily, as though his own body might have confessed some dreadful injury unreported by his nerves. The light showed his ribs with a new distinctness; his stomach had flattened, and flesh was gone where flesh should have been. Yet there was no wound to explain those stains.
A mirror fixed to the cupboard held a dim reflection. On its surface were words. He advanced until he could read them.
“Don't get bit.”
A finger had traced the warning in blood.
He felt the room draw closer about him. The stained walls, the carefully covered window, the empty tubes still attached to his body when he woke—each had been dreadful in isolation; now, gathered beneath a warning which someone had known to be necessary, they oppressed him with the conviction that he alone had been left ignorant of what threatened him.
He must not lose command of himself. He breathed slowly, and compelled his eyes to examine the reflected wound. It was less grave than his fears had pictured; it would scar, perhaps, but need not disable him. The torn gown and bare feet were troubles he might actually amend.
He opened the cupboard. His possessions were there: wetsuit, mask, snorkel, fins, speargun; the spandex shorts and shirt he wore beneath the suit; a pair of diving booties. There was also the sheath for his knife, empty.
That absence disturbed him more than he could at first account for. After a reef shark had attacked him some years earlier, he had bought a six-inch titanium dive knife. It had cost much, but he had regarded the expense as a debt owed to his own safety; thereafter, whenever he went spearfishing, the sheath was strapped to his ankle. Why should the other things have been returned, and the blade withheld?
He shed the remnants of his gown and put on the shorts and shirt. For a moment he considered leaving his feet bare; then the litter on the floor persuaded him otherwise. Pieces of sheetrock lay scattered there, with edges oddly bitten and broken. The booties would give him a firmer footing, as well as some defence against the debris.
He took the speargun also. He could not yet name the danger; he would not for that reason refuse the means of resisting it.
One part of the room remained concealed, immediately to the left of the bed. At the window he removed another piece of cardboard. The added light reached the space, and showed him what had lain there all the while.
A hole had been torn or gnawed through the wall, scarcely larger than a door cut for a dog. Halfway through the opening lay a corpse. His knife stood in its head, buried to the hilt.
“Oh my God!”
His voice broke the stillness with such violence that he started at his own cry. He approached, holding his nose; the smell of corruption brought on a spasm of dry retching. Whoever the person had been, they appeared to have been crawling into the room when a blow from behind arrested them.
The thought of that imprisonment appalled him. What had that person endured? Shut within the wall, cramped and struggling, with an opening at last before the eyes, and beyond it the room in which Sean himself must have been lying—then the blow, delivered from behind, when freedom was so near! He could scarcely bear to consider it. Another thought was worse.
“Did I do this?”
No. He refused it. But refusal could not fill the vacant hours in his memory; and the blade, which he knew as well as any possession, remained before him as a witness whose evidence he did not understand.
At last he bent and seized the handle. The knife came free with a wet, reluctant sound, and some tissue clung to it. He wiped the blade on the bed, retrieved the sheath, and strapped it to his ankle. Whoever had used it might return. Horror had not extinguished his desire to live.
The last of the cardboard yielded to his hands. Beyond the glass was San Francisco.
They must have transferred him from Pacifica. He stood on the fourth or fifth floor, looking down on streets where cars had stopped in the roadway and buildings bore the black marks of fire. No ordinary movement disturbed the view. Farther off, where the Bay Bridge should have extended towards Treasure Island, wire and broken concrete lay in a ruin so complete that for a moment he could not make himself acknowledge what it was.
He stared. It was not the bridge as it had been damaged; it was the place where the bridge had ceased to be.
“Were we attacked?”
He could invent no account that would gather the room and the city into one comprehensible disaster. For several minutes he remained absorbed by the distant wreckage; then movement in the street beneath him caught his eye.
People were walking among the cars. Their steps were broken and jerking, yet a common rhythm seemed to govern them. He tried the window. It would not open.
“Hey! I'm up here!”
The double panes imprisoned his voice. He waved both arms, and a face turned towards him; another followed, then others. They were coming. After the vacant room, the unanswering passage, and the city laid waste beneath his window, here at last was movement towards him, a response to his need; and in that first rush of relief he almost mistook being seen for being safe.
As they approached, he saw them clearly.
Their eyes were sunk deep; hair hung in scant patches; mouths remained open. There were wounds uncovered and limbs absent. Some bodies seemed stripped of everything but skin drawn tight upon bone. The resemblance to people was still there; it was that resemblance, persisting where so much else had been lost, which froze him.
He stepped back from the glass. They had seen him. No movement he could make now would restore the ignorance in which they had passed below.
Sean sank to the floor, to the very place where consciousness had returned. “Oh God, what has happened?” he whispered. He sat striving to collect his thoughts, to find one act that remained within his power.
From the other side of the door came a gurgling moan.