T. Bunn - Winner Take All

He did not know how long he continued with the gasping, weeping effort. Aeons. But he did not stop until the sand which formed their outermost cover was utterly dry, a frosting that shimmered in the moonlight. He remained on his knees above her, swaying slightly. Mouthing her name. Begging her to wake up.

She groaned.

The sound was so soft he could scarcely believe it at all. Then she shifted slightly, and took a deeper breath. Shuddered. Groaned again.

Only then did he realize his head was throbbing worse than his arms. The pain seemed to sweep up all at once, a wave so strong it could divorce itself from the sea and still be capable of crashing him to the beach, thrusting him down, then plucking him away.

He awoke with a cry of pain. Everything hurt him. Even opening his eyes was a gritty torment.

The sun was a vexatious flame, magnified by the ocean to torch the entire eastern sea. A tugging pulled at his stretched and torn shoulder. He cried out again.

“Your hands.”

The words were more shivered than spoken. He blinked against the sand and salt caking his face. Kirsten was seated by his side. She held his left arm in both hands, and she gnawed at the knot with her teeth. Her entire frame shook with almost constant tremors. But she worked the knot like a ferret.

“So cold.”

But it’s blistering hot, he wanted to say. Yet when he could not make his mouth form the words, he decided it really didn’t matter. She was there, she was awake. Her hair was matted and bloody, her face powdered by white sand like a broken Kabuki doll. Her eyes were red and watering, her limbs and body filthy with dried mud and seaweed. But fully there.

“I was dreaming,” she said.

I know, Marcus wanted to say. But he found it difficult even to nod.

“It was awful.” A more violent tremor ran through her. She paused at working on his knot long enough to stare directly into the sun. Her face looked sugar-frosted. Gradually the tremors subsided. She looked back at him. A single tear tracked its way unnoticed across her sandy pallor. Her voice rasped with thirst and wear. “You were there, Marcus. In my dream. You made the bad ones go away.”

She went back to work on his knot. Seabirds scissored across the gold-blue sky. Their caws threatened to split his skull. The waves worked his brain like liquid drills. Even the sun’s heat was noisy.

She spat out a length of rope. “There.”

The pain in his fingers was so unexpectedly fierce he reared his head back and howled.

She gripped the hand to her chest and pummeled the swollen digits. “Marcus, oh Marcus.”

He wanted to beg her to stop. But before he could manage the words, he heard his name called again. In the distance. A faint hallooing almost lost to the waves and the rising wind.

Kirsten rose then, staggering and falling back to her knees. “Here!”

“Marcus!”

Dale was the first over the dunes. Followed by a pair of patrolmen, one of whom stopped long enough to call and shout back behind them.

Kirsten was crying as Dale raced over. “His hand.”

Dale stared at them. The stricken look he shared with the oncoming policemen was enough to make Marcus hurt even worse.

This time Kirsten shrieked the words. “Cut the ropes!”

Dale dropped to the sand beside them. “Give me a knife.”

She was sobbing so hard now she could not make the words. She made do by pushing Dale’s hands away from her and toward Marcus. As he cut Marcus’ three remaining bonds, Dale kept glancing over at her, sitting there beside him, her powdered face streaked and mottled, her own bound hands and feet of no concern whatsoever.

When the bond was cut to his right hand, Marcus had no choice but to give himself over to the shrilly piercing agony. He would have begged Dale not to open two more wounds at his ankles, but he could make no audible plea. Then it was too late.

When he managed to refocus, he saw that a policeman had dropped to the sand beside Kirsten and sawed off her own bonds. Marcus crawled the distance between them on his elbows and knees. She met him with an embrace even the agony of his joints could not diminish. Her sand-encrusted lips scraped across his face. He felt the pressure of her fingertips on the wound to his forehead. Not even this pain mattered. Not then.

In the distance there was a faint halloo. Dale called back, “Over here!”

More footsteps and huffing breaths signaled the arrival of others. The first words out of Wilma Blain’s mouth were “Bring this pair a drink of water.”

Only then did one of his other pains separate enough for Marcus to give it a name. He groaned beneath the sudden weight of his thirst. Kirsten trembled in his arms and whimpered.

Wilma Blain’s voice rose to where she sent the seagulls soaring and calling their alarm. “ Now! ”

Kirsten let Marcus drift while they were poked and prodded by the medical team. At Wilma Blain’s command, they had been settled into the most secure corner of the Wilmington hospital’s ER unit. When they asked where she hurt, Kirsten had to smile. Her face felt as though it would crack beneath its shell of sunbaked salt and sand. Everywhere, she wanted to say, but that would only slow them down further. And the clock was marching on.

The police strutted along the corridor, their radios crackling. Just beyond the cubicle’s curtain Wilma Blain talked on her mobile phone. She waited while the nurse swabbed Marcus’ forehead and the doctor injected a local anesthetic and began stitching. The doctor snipped away the unused thread and dropped his utensils into the metal pan. He inspected his handiwork, then turned to Marcus’ hands and feet. The pain was obviously diminishing, or perhaps it was merely that his fatigue offered a comfort all its own. Whatever the reason, Marcus watched the doctor’s actions with the detached disinterest of an onlooker.

“Can you make a fist for me, Mr. Glenwood? Excellent. Let’s try this hand. Good. Does that hurt? Yes, I suppose it must.” The doctor moved down to Marcus’ legs, thumped the filthy pant’s leg with his little hammer, nodded at the response. He lifted one foot and ran the hammer’s handle up from the heel and across the arch. The doctor’s pale features and scraggly goatee only accented his youth. “Curl your toes for me. Good. Well, there’s no evidence of severe atrophy so far as I can tell from a cursory examination.”

He dropped his hammer into the pan and said, “I’ll just go see if they’ve got the scanner free. We’ll want to have a look inside, make sure they didn’t scramble you with that blow.”

Marcus did not speak until they were alone. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

It was all the impetus she required. Understanding what Marcus needed and giving it to him was such a rush. She had never known anything like this before. The concept itself jarred against all she had known, all she saw herself as being.

None of those gathered outside knew it yet, but she was about to take control.

Kirsten pushed herself up from the gurney, then had to stop and wait for the dizziness to pass. She kept her hand on the railing as she rounded the cabinet and pushed through the dividing curtain.

Everybody in the lobby stopped and stared-police, the DA, nurses, patients, visitors, the works. Everyone save Dale. The big man sat in the far corner, hunched over his hands. His agony was ignored by all.

She called over, “Dale.”

He started, dragged from a nightmare he assumed was hidden from all but himself.

She tried to offer him a smile. It was the least she could do for the man who had just saved their lives. “It’s time.”

Her fatigue struck more fiercely once she had showered and dressed in clothes from the hospital’s Goodwill closet. She felt divorced both from her surroundings and herself. Time swept past, leaving her stranded. Then the weariness diminished to where she could pull things back into shape once more.