Sean had been accustomed to think that a man admitted to a hospital might reasonably expect to wake in a bed. His present situation, when he became sufficiently sensible of it, offered little encouragement to that opinion. He was on the floor, in complete darkness; and the only attention he appeared to be receiving was from a pair of tubes which, having ceased to supply oxygen, continued to inconvenience his breathing.
He removed them. His hand, in falling against his cheek, encountered something dry and rough; and though he had no wish to extend the examination, the discovery that it was blood, and that a wound across his forehead could account for some of it, obliged him to proceed until a sharp pain convinced him that he had learnt enough. One end had scabbed; the rest was swollen. An infection seemed probable. For the present, however, there were difficulties whose claims were more immediate.
He must remember where he was, and how he had come there. His name presented no obstacle; the circumstances which had lately made it necessary for doctors and nurses to ask it were less agreeable to recover.
He had been spearfishing at Pacifica with his friend Jacob. It was the season when great white sharks might be expected along that coast; but the fishing was excellent, and Sean had possessed that degree of confidence which allows a known danger to become, by familiarity, almost a recommendation. He had considered the risk. He could no longer take much credit for having considered it.
Jacob had been thirty feet away when the shark struck. A large man, in a black wetsuit, he might have offered the appearance of a seal to a creature sixteen feet long; at any rate, one bite had apparently been sufficient to correct the error. The shark went away, leaving consequences which required rather more attention than its own.
By the time Sean reached his friend, a rip current was carrying them both out to sea. Jacob was insensible, whether from pain or loss of blood could not be known; his left leg remained attached by a small portion of muscle and the torn material of his suit. Sean caught him about the body and began to swim across the current.
For such an undertaking his appearance recommended him very little. Jacob, who stood six feet two, was a large and muscular man; Sean, at five feet eight and a hundred and fifty pounds, could remember no period of his life, from the schoolyard onwards, in which somebody of his own age had not been ready to demonstrate how easily he might be overpowered. He was not strong.
Persistence was another matter. He had learnt to continue after the likelihood of success had become obscure; and for nearly an hour, with no encouragement but the necessity of continuing, he struggled towards the shore. He brought Jacob on to the sand at last, and collapsed beside him.
A party of Chinese fishermen from Pacifica found them there and summoned an ambulance. Before it arrived, Jacob had died of blood loss. Sean was hypothermic.
His economy had certainly done him no service. There were student loans to discharge, and, as he already possessed a short wetsuit bought for skin diving in San Diego, the expense of hiring a thicker one had been resisted with a firmness which would have been admirable, had firmness in the shop supplied any warmth in the sea. It had supplied none. He remembered the hospital, some talk of pneumonia and fluid in his lungs, and the visits of people whose presence had then seemed quite ordinary. How gladly he would have welcomed the least interesting of them now!
Beyond those visits there was nothing. His memory carried him no farther than the bed from which he must somehow have been removed.
He sat up, and examined the rest of his person with as much care as darkness permitted. Toes, feet, and legs could be moved without pain; his chest and arms seemed sound. The wound in his forehead, and a thirst more urgent than any he remembered, were his principal complaints.
A table stood within reach. By following its leg upwards he found the edge, and raised himself; but the experiment of standing was so immediately attended by dizziness that he remained leaning against it until he could trust his balance. Hunger now joined thirst. He must have been unconscious for a considerable time; how considerable, he had no means of deciding.
In searching his arm again he discovered an IV line, which had escaped his earlier notice. The bag to which it led was empty. He drew the line out, pressed the little puncture, and waited for the slight bleeding to stop. There seemed very little left in him to spare.
His next proceedings were more methodical. Having found the wall behind the bed, he resolved to follow it round the room; a complete account of his surroundings might suggest some means of improving them. The bed obstructed his passage to the left. To the right, after an encounter with a rubbish bin and a turn at the first corner, he found a sink.
No discovery could have been more welcome. For a few seconds, however, its promise only aggravated his thirst, for he could find no handle to the tap. Then he recollected the foot pedals used in hospitals, searched with his right foot, and pressed one.
The pipes creaked and sputtered so violently that he almost withdrew. Presently water began to fall into the basin. He bent to drink directly from the spout; and though the taste of rust would ordinarily have furnished a very sufficient objection, he found himself capable of overlooking it. He drank until he could drink no more.
“What the hell is going on here?” he thought.
It was not his usual language. Had any of his visitors remained to hear him, he might have felt obliged to excuse it; alone, with Jacob dead and his own survival rendered increasingly difficult to understand, he was less inclined to regret the expression than the absence of an answer.
Where was everybody? Why were the lights out? A hospital at night might be quiet, but never, in his experience, quiet in this manner. There should have been a footstep, a distant conversation, some sign that the arrangements on which he depended were still being made.
He continued along the wall. Beyond the sink was a cupboard, and beyond the cupboard a door. Though strongly tempted to open it, he thought it prudent to seek a window first; light might make the door, and whatever lay beyond it, a less uncertain proposition.
Halfway along the next wall, he found the window with its blind drawn. To raise the blind without admitting any light was a disappointment for which he had not prepared himself. His fingers presently supplied the explanation. Cardboard had been fixed over the glass, its edges secured with tape.
He loosened a corner and removed one piece. A thin beam entered, painful at first to eyes so long unused to it; then, as he turned towards the room, shapes began to distinguish themselves from the general darkness.
There were dark patches upon the white walls. He had scarcely asked himself what they could be when their smell answered him. His father had practised taxidermy as a hobby; Sean knew the smell of blood too well to misunderstand it now.
He looked down in apprehension at his own body. He had certainly grown thinner. His ribs were plainly visible, and his stomach had lost its former shape; but there was no injury, apart from that on his forehead, to explain what he saw about him. His eyes moved to the cupboard, where a mirror caught the little light. Something had been written upon it.
A step nearer made the words legible.
“Don't get bit.”
Blood had served for ink, and a finger for the instrument of writing. The writer had plainly been in earnest; but whether the warning explained the empty hospital, or the empty hospital explained the warning, and how either could be reconciled with the visits he remembered, were questions to which the greater certainty of the message afforded no answer.
For a moment he felt himself close to panic. He forced his breathing to grow slower, and considered his reflection with an attention he would willingly have bestowed on anything else. The cut looked less serious than it had felt; a scar was likely, but it was not so terrible a wound as his first fears had made it. His gown, on the other hand, was so torn as to perform scarcely any of its office. His feet were bare.
The cupboard contained his possessions. There were the wetsuit, mask, snorkel, fins and speargun; the spandex shorts and shirt usually worn beneath the suit; and a pair of diving booties. His knife sheath was there also, but empty.
The empty sheath distressed him. Since an encounter with a reef shark some years before, he had never gone spearfishing without the six-inch titanium knife then purchased; and though it had cost more than he had liked to pay, and required a sheath fastened about his ankle, neither price nor inconvenience had afterwards been thought sufficient reason for leaving it behind. It was to have made him safer.
Now, when he could have wished to be better assured that his precautions were sufficient, it was gone.
He discarded the remains of the gown and put on the shorts and shirt. They were little enough, but afforded an improvement. The proposal of going barefoot was soon dismissed; for the debris scattered about the floor, which he could now see but could not conveniently avoid, gave the booties an immediate usefulness, both in protecting his feet and in securing his footing. The fragments appeared to be broken sheetrock, with edges so irregular that something might almost have been trying to chew it.
Before closing the cupboard, he took the speargun. His acquaintance with the room had not produced a corresponding confidence in its safety.
Only the space immediately to the left of the bed remained hidden from him. He returned to the window, removed more tape and cardboard, and admitted enough light to examine it.
There was a hole in the wall, about the size of a door intended for a dog. Its edges had the same gnawed appearance as the scattered fragments. Halfway through it lay a corpse; and in the head, driven to the hilt, was his missing knife.
“Oh my God!”
He had not meant to speak aloud. The abruptness of his own voice in that silence frightened him afresh, though there was now a cause for horror which needed no assistance from imagination.
Approaching the body, he covered his nose, and could scarcely prevent himself from retching. The person appeared to have been crawling into the room, and to have been struck through the back of the head before getting clear of the opening. Of the identity, even the sex, he could not at first be certain. He could only imagine the dreadful position of somebody trapped within a hospital wall, brought so near escape and killed in the attempt.
Could he have done it himself?
He rejected the idea. The knife was certainly his; the act was surely not; but memory, from which he wanted the plainest confirmation of that distinction, remained obstinately silent, and the very eagerness with which he assured himself that another person must have done it revealed how much he feared the contrary.
He took the handle and drew the blade out. It came with a sucking sound, and some tissue clung to it. He wiped it on the bed, recovered the sheath from the cupboard, and strapped it to his ankle. Whoever had killed this unfortunate person might still be at hand; he could not depend upon receiving kinder treatment.
The rest of the cardboard came away from the window. He was in San Francisco, four or five storeys above the street. There must have been a transfer from the hospital in Pacifica; he could remember none.
Cars stood abandoned in the roadway. Several buildings appeared to have burned, and the city seemed entirely without movement. Beyond the nearer roofs he looked for the Bay Bridge, and saw instead a confusion of wire and broken concrete where it should have carried traffic towards Treasure Island.
The destruction was complete.
“Were we attacked?” he wondered. No supposition he could form seemed adequate to the sight, and for several minutes his attention was so wholly occupied by it that movement immediately below the hospital escaped him.
People were passing between the cars. Their steps were jerky, yet possessed a strange correspondence, as if each were moving to a rhythm which all the others understood. Sean tried to open the window. It would not yield.
“Hey! I'm up here!”
The double glass appeared to prevent his voice from reaching them, but his waving arms were seen. One face turned up; then another. They had seen him, they understood that he required help, they were coming to the hospital; and Sean, whose whole desire for some minutes had been to discover another human being, continued to beckon with a gratitude which left him little attention for the character of those he invited.
As they drew nearer, gratitude gave way to a terror greater than his loneliness had produced. The faces were scarcely human. Eyes lay deep in their sockets; hair was missing in patches; mouths hung open. Some bore wounds which should have made walking impossible, others had lost limbs, and some seemed no more than skeletons thinly covered with skin.
He had been so eager to attract their attention. It was too late to consider whether their attention was desirable.
Sean stepped back and sat upon the floor where he had awakened. “Oh God, what has happened?” escaped him in a whisper. For a few moments he remained quite still, endeavouring to determine what he ought to do.
Then a gurgling moan sounded on the other side of the door.