There was a man breathing in the dark, and for some time Sean listened to him with considerable dislike. The breathing was so rough, and so unnecessarily loud in a room where nobody else was making any noise, that he wished the man would stop. Then he discovered that the man was himself, and wished no such thing.
He was lying on the floor, which was an odd place to have been put to bed, if that was what had happened, and rather an uncomfortable place to have fallen out of one, if that was what had happened instead. There were tubes in his nose. Somebody, at some time, must have meant to look after him.
“They're meant to help me breathe,” he thought, pulling at them. “Only there doesn't appear to be anything coming through.”
The oxygen had run out. The tubes remained, as things sometimes do when the reason for them has gone away. “Well, I can’t breathe what isn’t there,” he thought, and took them off. As his hand came down, it brushed his face, which was sticky in some places, hard in others, and altogether unlike the face he remembered having.
Blood! There was a cut across his forehead, with a crust at one end and a swollen, tender place at the other. He pressed it, and a sharp pain ran down his back.
“I shan't do that again,” he decided. It might be infected; but he had no means of attending to an infection in the dark, and remembering where he was seemed a better beginning.
His name was Sean. That was something.
He had been in a hospital. That was something more. The doctors had said pneumonia, and there had been water in his lungs, though he had certainly not gone into the sea with the intention of bringing any of it home.
He remembered the sea now. Pacifica; a day of spearfishing; and Jacob, who had been thirty feet away when the shark came.
It was the season for great whites. Sean knew this perfectly well; but it was also an excellent season for the fishing, and he had allowed the fish to settle the question. Jacob was bigger than he was, and in his black wetsuit might have looked a more promising meal. The shark was sixteen feet long. It took one bite, then left him, as though it had discovered a mistake.
Sean could never remember that departure without anger. There was something dreadful about the ease with which the creature had finished doing what could not be undone.
By the time he reached Jacob, the current had caught them both. Out they went, away from the beach; and Sean, who wanted very much to go towards it, had to begin by swimming across.
He knew that much about a rip current. Knowing was the easy part.
Jacob had fainted. Whether it was the pain or the loss of blood, Sean could not tell; the left leg was held to the rest of him by a little muscle and a strip of wetsuit. There was no useful way of looking at it. Sean put his arms round his friend's body and kicked.
Jacob was six feet two; and Sean, who was five feet eight and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, had never been able to see why growing up should be called growing up, when some people were allowed to grow so much farther than others. Beside his friend, he might almost have been a boy. The other boys had always been able to push him about. Men could, too.
“But I can keep trying,” he had thought. It was not a very large advantage; just then it was the only one he had.
For nearly an hour he fought to get them out of the current and back to shore. At last there was sand beneath him, and he dragged Jacob on to it. Then he could do nothing more.
Some Chinese fishermen from Pacifica found them and called an ambulance. Before it arrived, Jacob was dead. Sean was so cold that the next part of the day came back to him in pieces.
He had saved money on a wetsuit. “There are the student loans,” he had told himself, “and there’s the suit I’ve got already, and I can’t very well pay for everything twice!” It was a short suit, bought for skin diving in San Diego, where he had been perfectly comfortable in it, and he had somehow allowed being comfortable in one place to stand for being comfortable in another. He remembered being pleased with the saving. That was the worst of remembering it.
The hospital followed: the doctors talking about pneumonia, visitors coming and going, and then a gap. He could not find the end of the gap. It ended here, on the floor, because here he was.
Sean sat up.
First he moved his toes; then his feet, and then his legs. Nothing seemed broken. He felt his chest and arms, and found no fresh hurt there either. Apart from his forehead, the chief difficulty was that he wanted water very badly indeed.
A hand stretched into the dark found a table leg. Following it upwards, he reached the top and pulled himself to his feet. The room immediately seemed to turn round him, although he could not see it turning.
“Wait,” he said under his breath, and held on.
Presently he could stand. There was hunger to be considered now as well as thirst. How long had he been lying there? A day? Longer? His stomach was quite certain that it was too long, but could supply no date.
There was another tube in his arm. He had missed it when examining himself, and followed it to an IV bag, which was empty also.
“Everybody's finished except me,” he thought.
He pulled the line out. A little warm blood trickled from the place; there was not much, and he pressed it with a finger until it stopped. Then he felt for the wall behind the bed.
“If I go all the way round,” he thought, “I shall at least know where the edges are.” The bed wouldn’t let him go left, so he went right, keeping one hand against the wall, and putting each foot down as carefully as possible, which didn’t prevent his first discovery from being a rubbish bin. He struck it with his foot. He would rather have discovered it with his hand.
At the corner he turned, and found a sink.
For a moment the mere shape of it was almost as good as a drink. Then he began searching for a handle, and found no handle at all.
“Now, what use is a sink without—”
The pedal! Hospitals sometimes had pedals. He felt below with his right foot, pressed one, and nearly jumped away when the pipes answered with a creak and an extraordinary spluttering. It sounded as though the water had objections to being called for.
But it came. He bent his head to the spout and drank. There was a rusty taste, which he noticed without being at all inclined to argue about it. He drank until he could hold no more.
“What the hell is going on here?”
He did not commonly swear. On this occasion the words seemed smaller than the question. Jacob was dead, he had nearly died himself, and now somebody had left him in a hospital without so much as a light.
Where was everybody?
He had been in hospitals often enough to know that even when the people were quiet, the hospital generally was not. This one was silent all the way through.
Beyond the sink stood a cupboard; beyond that was a door. Sean found its handle, but did not turn it. A window would be more useful first. At least a window could tell him whether it was day or night, which was more than anything else had told him.
Round the next corner, halfway along the wall, he found one. The blind was down. He drew it up, and was considerably disappointed to find the darkness exactly where he had left it.
“Then what's the blind for?” he wondered.
There was cardboard over the glass, held in place with tape. He picked at an edge until he could peel away a piece. A narrow shaft of light entered; it was such a small piece of daylight that he had to stand blinking at it before he could bear to look round.
The walls were white, except where they were not. Dark splashes marked them in several places.
And there was a smell.
He knew that iron smell from his father's taxidermy, though he would much rather not have known it here. Looking down, he saw how thin he had become. The ribs showed plainly; the stomach beneath them was flat. Yet, except for the cut on his head, he could find no wound to account for all the blood.
A mirror on the cupboard caught the light. Somebody had written on it with a finger. Sean went nearer to read the words.
“Don't get bit.”
He read them again. They were written in blood.
“By what?” he asked.
It was the sort of instruction that left out the part you most needed. He would have been happy to obey it, if only he knew how.
Panic began to rise in him. He took a slow breath, looked at his reflection, and made himself attend to what he could see. The cut was less terrible than it had felt; it would leave a scar, probably, but his forehead was still recognisably a forehead. The rest of his appearance was less satisfactory. His gown was torn, and there was practically nothing beneath it.
In the cupboard were his things—the wetsuit, the mask, the snorkel, the fins, and, which was rather more welcome just then, the speargun. There were the shorts and shirt he wore under the suit, too, and the diving booties, and the sheath for his knife.
The sheath was empty.
“Where's my knife?”
That had been an expensive knife, with a six-inch titanium blade. A reef shark had attacked him some years before, and ever since then he had strapped it to his ankle whenever he went spearfishing. Saving money was all very well; there were some savings he had declined to make.
He put on the shorts and shirt, and considered the booties. Bare feet would have been easier, but bits of broken wall lay over the floor. They looked as though something had started eating the room and found it disagreeable. He put the booties on.
The speargun came out of the cupboard with him. He had no particular explanation for taking it, beyond the fact that explanations of every other kind were becoming so scarce.
He could see nearly all the room now, except the space to the left of the bed. Back at the window, he stripped away another piece of cardboard.
There was a hole in the wall.
It was about the size of a little door made for a dog; but nobody appeared to have used tools to make this one. The edges were ragged and gnawed. A body lay halfway through it, with the upper part inside the room.
His knife was buried to the handle in its head.
“Oh my God!”
The sound of his voice frightened him almost as much as the sight. It was a real voice, in a room where everything else had been still for so long.
He went closer, holding his nose, and retched at the smell. Whoever this person had been, they seemed to have been crawling out of the wall when somebody struck from behind. To be caught there, almost through, and then—
“Did I do it?”
The question came before he could stop it. No, surely he had not. But he could remember nothing about being on the floor, either.
He grasped the knife and pulled. It came free with a wet sucking sound, bringing a little tissue on the blade. He wiped it on the bed, fetched the sheath, and fastened it round his ankle.
“Somebody’s done this,” he told himself, fastening the strap, “and if they come back, I don’t mean to have to ask them for my knife.” He made quite sure that he could reach it.
At last he tore all the remaining cardboard from the window.
San Francisco lay outside. He was on the fourth or fifth floor; they must have moved him from the hospital in Pacifica. Below him, cars stood in the middle of the streets. Some buildings had burned. Nothing moved.
Beyond the buildings should have been the Bay Bridge, running towards Treasure Island. There was a tangle of broken concrete and wire instead.
The bridge was gone.
“Were we attacked?” he thought. But even that question would not arrange what he saw into anything he understood.
While he was trying to make sense of the bridge, and failing, and trying again because he couldn’t think what else to do, people had been moving in the street immediately below him. He had nearly missed them. They walked between the cars with a queer, jerking movement, as though they could agree upon a rhythm, but not upon how a person ought to walk to it.
People! He tried the window. It would not open.
“Hey! I'm up here!”
He shouted and waved both arms. The double glass kept his voice inside, but one of the people looked up. Then another did, and another. They began coming towards the hospital.
For a moment he waved harder.
Then he saw their faces.
Their mouths hung open. Hair had come away in patches; eyes lay deep in their sockets. Some had wounds that ought to have kept them in bed. Some had limbs missing. Others were so thin that the skin seemed stretched directly over bone.
Still they came.
Sean backed away and sat down where he had first awakened. He had wanted somebody to notice him. That part, at least, had worked.
“Oh God,” he whispered. “What has happened?”
For a few moments there was only his breathing again. He tried to think what he ought to do next.
Then, from the other side of the door, came a gurgling moan.