Waves broke over me, and I disappeared into the dirty foam. Gritty water stung my eyes and clouded my vision. The sunlight streaming from above cooked my back. I scrambled across the silted bottom and groped for deeper water. At last, my skin cooled. The riptide pulled me from the beach toward darker depths.
I expected the water to refresh me, but instead I felt my strength ebbing. I kept my face down and floated across the sandy bottom, limp as the sargassum clinging to my body.
My shattered left leg dragged through rocks and sand. I let out a howl of pain. My scream became lost in the cloud of bubbles blowing out of my mouth. I clutched at my leg, but moving only made it hurt worse so I let it dangle.
I was spent, down for the count.
Goodman’s ambush, my wounds, and my loss of protection from the sun had sapped my will to fight. The current pulled me around the southern side of Hilton Head Island. My kundalini noir lay slack inside my belly.
I didn’t know where the current would take me. Bermuda? The Canary Islands? I didn’t care, just as long as I never came back. I only felt the now. Time lost meaning.
I was filled with a miasma of apathy. At least when you’re desperate you thrash about in panic, because you think you have a chance to save yourself. But I had no chance. Hope had been crushed out of me.
I retreated over familiar emotional ground, harsh, forbidding, desolate, to a shuttered place in my past.
When I was a sergeant in Iraq, in the early months of our invasion before the war deteriorated into a complete fiasco, my platoon lost two men when their Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb. That evening, I couldn’t find the words to console their team leader, my own soldiers, or myself. There wasn’t anything-other than clichés-to explain the sacrifice.
Three weeks later we ambushed a family we had mistaken for insurgents. I had arrived in Iraq ready to fight against terror and injustice. Instead, what we did that night was slaughter innocent civilians. The blood of the youngest victim, an adolescent girl, stained my hands and my soul. The tragedy sent me hurling to the emotional bottom. When I hit it, it was then that an Iraqi vampire turned my remorse and desperation against me and converted me into one of the damned undead.
My mind wandered even further back. To my childhood. During one of those episodes of estrangement between my parents, my mom got tired of my dad’s drinking and bullying and struck out on her own. We lived in a tiny cinderblock duplex and I know my mom fretted about money. One afternoon she got after my sisters and me to pack our things. My mom yelled at us to hurry, as if we were fleeing a fire.
We took only what we could cram into her car and then drove to my aunt’s house, where we would live for a couple of months.
It rained a lot, off and on for days, and our mood remained as dark as the gray skies. When the clouds broke, I borrowed my cousin’s bicycle and sweated my way across town to see what happened to all the stuff we had left behind.
Our belongings had been heaped in front of the duplex: our clothes, mattresses and bed linen, dishes, furniture, photos in broken frames. There wasn’t much grass, so the days of rain had turned the tiny yard into a muddy puddle.
The wet pile stank of mildew. My mom’s Formica table rested there, the chrome legs ripped loose. A dresser lay on its side, the drawers open, disemboweled, with my mom’s bras, panties, and stockings strewn about in the mud. Our frayed and tattered picture books looked like the carcasses of decayed birds.
Our possessions were now garbage. Our hopes and ambitions deserved nothing better than to lie rotting in the sun. The neighbors could gawk at our shame and hopelessness. Had we stayed put, would my mom and sisters be lying out here in pieces, like broken dolls? Would I?
For a week afterward, I felt hollow, like a bottle made of fragile glass. I expected at any moment to be smashed and swept aside. My existence didn’t matter.
Now I felt like that again.
Insignificant.
Impotent.
Helpless.
A failure.
Worse, others depended on me: Carmen, the Araneum, Gilbert Odin, the Earth women, and I had let them all down. I deserved nothing but oblivion.
The sun set and the sea around me turned inky black. Blurry red auras circled close, nibbled my skin, and darted away.
Something grabbed my torso. I couldn’t struggle or resist.
Two hands clasped together over my chest and heaved upward. A silky head with an orange aura pressed against mine. A woman’s soft lips kissed my cheek.
Together we rose from the bottom, ascending in rhythmic jerks as she scissored her legs.
We broke the surface. The clear water rinsed my eyes. Thousands of stars dotted the night sky. A breeze cooled my wet face.
I bobbed on the surface, indifferent to what happened next. My rescuer towed me by my collar. We stopped beside a motorboat floating in the gloom.
“Jack, help me lift him.” It was Carmen.
A second set of hands, belonging to a big man, grasped my coat and hauled me over the gunwale. He slid me onto the deck.
I lay on my belly, too weak to move. A human with his red aura stood beside me. He had a bandanna around his neck. A chalice. Carmen climbed into the boat. She wore a cropped T-shirt and bikini bottoms. Water rained from her hair. She sat on my butt, pressed her hands against my shoulder blades, and pushed.
I puked mouthfuls of water. When I stopped coughing, Carmen rolled me onto my back and pulled my head into her lap.
She smoothed my hair and whispered, “Get a grip, Felix. You can drown later. We’ve got work to do.”