Sean came to himself with a sound in his ears like another man's suffering. It was his own breath. Dragging through his open mouth, it filled a room in which no other creature seemed to breathe or stir; and the darkness over the floor where he lay was so entire, so close upon his face, that he could not at first be sure his eyes were open.
The tubes in his nose had ceased to give him oxygen. They served only to hamper what breathing he could manage, and he pulled them away with a weak impatience. His hand brushed his face and found blood dried upon it. Farther up, across the forehead, ran a cut, crusted at one end and hotly swollen through the rest. He pressed it; pain darted down his back, and he snatched his fingers away.
An infection, he thought. It could wait. Whatever had put him on this floor had left him other matters to settle first.
He knew his name. The knowledge seemed scarcely sufficient to distinguish him from the darkness. He knew, too, that he had been brought to a hospital after the sea had almost taken him; and with that recollection Jacob returned, as bodily present to his mind as if the weight of him still hung from Sean's arms.
They had gone spearfishing at Pacifica. Great whites were known to be there at that season; the fishing was good, and Sean had wanted it badly enough to make the danger seem bearable. There was no comfort now in remembering that he had not been ignorant. He had known, and gone.
The shark came upon Jacob when Sean was thirty feet away. Sixteen feet long, it struck the large black shape of his friend's wetsuit and then abandoned it after a single bite. Perhaps it had expected a seal and discovered something less to its liking. Of its approach he remembered little distinctly; but the retreat, the ease with which it left the torn figure hanging in the water, the absence of any haste or fear in a creature that had ruined them both—these remained, and filled him with an anger which had nowhere to go.
He swam to Jacob, but the current had already seized them. The beach receded. Jacob's left leg was nearly off, secured by a little muscle and the torn neoprene; he was unconscious, from pain or loss of blood, and his body made no effort to assist or oppose the sea. Sean took him round the torso and began to kick sideways out of the rip.
He had never been strong beside Jacob. His friend stood six feet two; Sean was five feet eight, a hundred and fifty pounds, and had spent enough of his childhood being overcome by other boys to know the limits of his strength. Maturity had not relieved him of them. It had merely given his stubbornness longer practice.
He would not surrender the body. The sea might exhaust him, but it should have to exhaust him altogether.
For nearly an hour he fought the water; then, when there was sand beneath him at last, he dragged Jacob clear and fell beside him, unable to rise even when a group of Chinese fishermen from Pacifica came upon them and called an ambulance. Jacob died before it arrived. Blood had drained his life away; Sean, hypothermic and exhausted, could do no more.
He had endured the current for that end. The thought had no fairness in it, but grief was not disposed to be fair. The current had opposed him honestly enough: it dragged one way, and he struggled another. But the shore, for which he had spent his strength, which had seemed to promise that once reached it must put an end to their suffering—the shore had received Jacob only to let him die, and Sean could not think of it without bitterness.
His own cold had been worsened by a mean little economy. He wanted to pay off his student loans, and would not hire a thicker suit when he possessed a short one already. It had served for skin diving in San Diego; he had chosen to believe it would serve off Pacifica. Now that saving seemed to belong to another man, occupied with a future which the water had swept away.
Afterwards came the hospital, doctors speaking of pneumonia and fluid in his lungs, visitors beside the bed. Those figures withdrew as he tried to hold them in his memory. There was nothing beyond them but the floor beneath him.
He sat up, testing his limbs with a care that was almost resentful. Toes moved, feet moved; his legs gave no pain. His hands found no injury along chest or arms. Except for his forehead, he seemed unhurt. Yet thirst had dried him inwardly, until the desire for water was more distinct than any fear.
A table leg met his searching hand. He drew himself up by it, reached the edge, and stood; the effort brought such dizziness that he thought he should fall at once. He held fast until it passed. Hunger then made itself felt, raw and urgent. How long had they left him?
A line remained in his arm. He traced it upwards, through a dark in which the very position of his hand was known only by the effort of holding it there, and reached an IV bag as empty as the oxygen tubes had been. He pulled the line free; a little blood warmed the puncture. The bleeding was slight. He pressed it with his fingers, waiting, and listened for any sign that he was not alone.
No answer came to that silent demand.
The wall behind the bed gave him something to follow. The bed prevented him from turning left; he went right instead, struck a bin, passed it, and reached the corner. On the adjoining wall his hands encountered a sink.
He searched eagerly for a handle. There was none. For an instant he hated the basin, which promised relief and withheld it; then the recollection of hospital pedals came to him, and his right foot, groping beneath, found something that yielded to pressure. The pipes creaked, spluttered, and made him start back.
Water followed. He bent beneath the spout and drank as if it might be withheld again. Rust tainted it, but the taste troubled him little; he could have borne much worse for the relief of swallowing. When he could drink no more, he remained there, unwilling to leave the one thing in the room that had answered a need.
“What the hell is going on here?” he thought.
He did not ordinarily curse. Now the restraint would have seemed absurd. Jacob was dead; he had come near enough to death himself; and somebody had left him to wake upon a floor, with empty tubes still fastened to him, in a place that should have been full of people.
Where were they? In all his previous acquaintance with hospitals there had been sounds behind the doors, movements overhead or in the passage, the little disturbances by which strangers announce their existence to one another. Here he could hear only himself. His own small noises seemed an intrusion.
Beyond the sink was a cupboard, then a door. He nearly opened it; but the wish to see where he stood held him back. There must be a window, and he continued round the next corner in search of it.
Halfway along the wall he touched the blind. He drew it up, expecting a change, and found the darkness unaltered. Cardboard covered the glass. Someone had taped it carefully enough to keep out every useful ray.
He worked a strip loose. A piece came away, and daylight entered, narrow and hard upon his unaccustomed eyes. For several moments he blinked at it; then he turned and saw the stains on the white walls.
The smell seemed to reach him with the light. Blood: the iron scent his father's taxidermy had made familiar long before he wished to know it. He looked down, searching himself anew. His ribs had grown conspicuous, his stomach flat; he scarcely recognised the wasted body beneath the torn gown. But there was no wound upon it to explain the blood about the room.
A mirror on the cupboard reflected part of the brightness. Words had been scrawled there. He approached until he could make them out.
“Don't get bit.”
They were written with a finger, in blood.
Sean read them twice, and the recollection of Jacob's leg rose against them so sharply that for a moment he could think of nothing else. But the sea was not here; Jacob was not here; and whatever had left those words upon the glass had known a danger that Sean, shut up among the traces of it, could neither name nor understand. What was he to keep from biting him?
Fear began to overcome him. He drew breath deliberately, refusing its urgency, and fixed his attention on his reflection. The cut was less formidable than it had seemed under his fingers; it would scar, but it need not prevent him from moving. His gown scarcely covered him. The want of clothes was a difficulty he could remedy, and he seized on it.
Inside the cupboard lay his diving equipment: wetsuit, mask, snorkel, fins and speargun; the spandex shorts and shirt that went beneath the suit; his booties. The knife sheath was there, too, but the knife was gone.
He searched again, angrily. It had been an expensive possession, a six-inch titanium blade bought after a reef shark attacked him some years before. Since that encounter he had always fastened it about his ankle when spearfishing. Money had been grudged for other things; not for this. Its absence seemed a deliberate deprivation, though he had no one to accuse.
The torn gown was discarded. He put on the shorts and shirt, then the booties, abandoning the idea of bare feet when he looked at the debris scattered over the floor. Bits of sheetrock lay there, broken at the edges as if something had worried them with its teeth. He took the speargun from the cupboard before closing it.
There was one place he had not yet seen: the narrow space immediately to the left of the bed. He returned to the window and stripped away more of the covering. The light reached the place, and he stood motionless.
A hole had been made through the wall, about the size of an opening for a dog. Its rim was ragged and gnawed. Through it projected the upper part of a corpse; and Sean's knife was driven into the head, so deeply that only the handle remained outside.
“Oh my God!” he cried.
His voice struck the silence and frightened him again. He went nearer, holding his nose against the smell of decay, but a dry convulsion caught his throat and bent him. Whoever lay there had apparently been crawling into the room; somebody had struck through the back of the head before the body was free of the hole.
The cramped limbs, the darkness within the wall, the stubborn effort to force a passage where the body could scarcely fit—all these he pictured, unwillingly, as though his own limbs must make the struggle. Then another image followed: a hand, lifting his knife above that head.
His hand?
“Did I do this?”
No; it could not have been he. Yet certainty did not follow the denial. He could not see into the missing hours; they were dark, as the room had been dark, and his denial had no more power to alter them than opening his eyes had had to alter the blackness. The dead person gave no answer. Only the handle was familiar—dreadfully familiar.
He pulled the knife out. It resisted, then yielded with a wet sucking noise, carrying tissue upon the blade. He wiped it on the bed, fetched the sheath and strapped it to his ankle. Pity for the body did not make him willing to join it. Whoever had dealt that blow might yet turn upon him.
At the window he tore away the remaining cardboard. San Francisco appeared beyond the glass, and for an instant the familiar city seemed more impossible than the room.
He was four or five storeys above the street. They must have transferred him from Pacifica; of that journey he knew nothing. Cars had been abandoned in the roadway, and some buildings stood blackened by fire. The streets were still. Farther off, where the Bay Bridge had stretched towards Treasure Island, lay a wreck of concrete and wire.
He stared at it, scarcely breathing. So much strength, so much weight that had always seemed fixed in its place, had been thrown down. His own ignorance of the disaster made it no less complete.
“Were we attacked?” he wondered.
The question would explain too little or too much; he could find no answer that restored sense to what he saw. For several minutes he looked beyond the nearer streets, absorbed by the broken bridge, before noticing movement directly below the hospital.
People were wandering among the stopped cars. Their steps had an uneven, jerking rhythm; oddly, the movement of one seemed to answer that of another. He hurried to open the window, but it was fastened against him.
“Hey! I'm up here!”
He shouted and waved. The double panes held the sound inside; his arms, however, drew attention. One head lifted, another, then several. The people began to come towards the hospital.
He welcomed them at first. Loneliness had made the sight of a moving body sufficient reason for hope, and he continued signalling until their faces were close enough to distinguish.
Then his arms fell.
Eyes were sunk in the sockets; hair had fallen away in patches; mouths hung slack. Some of those approaching bore open wounds, some had limbs missing, and others were reduced almost to bone beneath a tight covering of skin. Still they walked. That they could still resemble people—that the open mouths, the lifting heads, the very turn towards his signal could persist in bodies so wasted and so grievously injured—was worse than if the street had filled with shapes he had never known.
He withdrew from the window and sat down where he had awakened. He could not bear to watch them coming; nor could he bear the thought that, because he had ceased to watch, they were coming all the same.
“Oh God, what has happened?”
The prayer escaped without any answer rising to meet it. He sat a few moments in silence, trying to choose a course, and heard a gurgling moan from the other side of the door.