William Bell - Fanatics

And Raphaella would be among the dead.

“Hey!” I called out.

He stopped about ten paces from me. His broad shoulders bunched. He turned slowly, his dark eyes hard and calculating.

What to say next? I scrabbled for words. Blanked. Stood like a fool, mouth open like a startled fish.

“Er, have you seen Mary?” I blurted, my heart battering my chest wall. “I… she told me this was her cabin. Number… whatever. But nobody’ll answer. See?”

Moronically, I demonstrated by rapping on the screen door. I ransacked my brain for a way to delay him, but I had run out of ideas. He took a step toward me. He still hadn’t uttered a word. Behind him in the distance I heard the opening cymbal bash of the overture for Merrie Olde Orillia .

“Don’t,” I pleaded. “They have nothing against you. They’re innocent.”

His eyes flared. His fingers tightened on the looped handles of the bag. Something came over his face-a shadow-and I could almost hear him asking himself how I knew that he was about to make the auditorium an inferno of gunfire and smoke. The dark unyielding eyes widened again. Did he realize I was the intruder who had come upon him and his followers in the forest outside Orillia, who had caused the arrest of his accomplices and the destruction of his plans?

“Think about it,” I said desperately. “You can’t do this.”

He strode determinedly toward me. The hand gripping the shovel’s handle relaxed and allowed the tool to slip through his palm until he could grasp the end of the shaft. I readied myself to shift quickly at the right second. But he fooled me. In one lightning-fast circular motion he flung the shovel. It whickered end over end across the space between us, small lumps of earth flying off the blade as it spun.

I flinched instinctively, twitching my head back and to one side a split second before I heard the sickening pang of metal on bone. Light exploded inside my head and I dropped like a stone to the platform. He was on me in a second, snatching up the shovel, lifting it high, and striking down toward my skull. I rolled onto my back and he grunted as the shovel crashed into the plank beside my head. He snarled, eyes smouldering with hatred and frustration. I brought one knee to my chest, and as he raised the shovel overhead, I gathered what strength I could and jabbed my heel into his balls.

He cried out and fell to his knees, desperately groping for breath. The shovel clattered to the planks. I scrabbled away from him and, struggling dizzily to my feet, stood swaying like a drunk, my vision blurred, my head ringing. Something streamed down the side of my face like hot syrup.

The terrorist fell forward onto one hand, the other clutching his crotch, choking as if the air around him had been sucked away. He turned his head, fixed his eyes on the gym bag. As if in slow motion I picked up the shovel, stumbled out of his reach. I had no doubt that if he got the tool I’d be dead in seconds.

“Don’t move,” I croaked.

Gasping and groaning, he crawled toward the bag.

“I said stop.”

Still he fought his way across the bare ground, his fingers scratching at the soil. I raised the shovel and slammed the rounded side of the blade down on the back of his head. There was the clang of a frying pan hitting a stovetop. The terrorist collapsed and lay still.

I stood beside him, panting, searching for balance. Threw aside the tool and fell to my knees. Pressed my fingers against his neck. Found a pulse. Crawled clumsily across the dirt, blood dripping off my cheek, leaving a trail. Unzipped the gym bag and pulled it open. A machine pistol similar to the one in his photo lay on a bed of full bullet clips, a cluster of grenades at each end.

I staggered back to him as if struggling through thigh-deep water, my legs continually swept from under me by the roar of surf in my ears. I leaned close, caught the faint rasp of his breathing. Heard playful music in the distance, and crashing waves. Zipped up the bag, dragged it to a tree, and dropped it behind the trunk, desperate to hide it from him. Slogged back toward the cabin platform. Lowered myself to the planks to rest, just for a minute. No. Can’t rest. Gotta find Raphaella. But I couldn’t get up. I teetered on the edge of the deck, then toppled into the waves. Plunged beneath the water and down, the tiger-striped green bottom of the lake shimmering, lit by bursts of coloured light.

I WAS STARING into the face of a monster.

Dark hair, spiky and dishevelled. A shaved patch across the skull from the right temple past the ear, a vivid stitched-up slash not quite hidden by a bloodstained bandage. A black eye swollen shut, puffed cheeks bruised and discoloured. Fresh scabs on nose, left cheek, and chin, bright red against pale skin.

I handed the mirror back to the nurse. “Call Hollywood,” I croaked. “Tell them to hold off on the screen test.”

I didn’t remember much more of my semi-conscious ride in the ambulance than the banging of doors, being lifted and lowered, prodded and jabbed, but I recalled waking up briefly to tsunamis of pain rolling through my skull. Later-hours? days?-brain fogged by dope, I saw light in a window. My hands had sprouted needles attached to tubes leading aloft to plastic bladders of liquid-one clear, one dark red-suspended from a rack. A tall nurse stood beside my bed, unclipping wires from my head, removing sticky patches, pushing a machine out the door, coming back with a little white paper cup.

“Take these,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

“Raphaella,” I mumbled.

Something squeezed my upper arm. I heard my father’s voice beside me.

“She’s fine. No one was hurt,” he soothed. “Thanks to you.”

Later, pain-wracked, I floated in a dream-like state. A small black-robed man drifted past. The odours of earth and moss wafted from the shore. Gunfire crackled in the distance. Something thick and wet was smeared on my face around my eye and over my nose and chin and cheek. Gentle fingers smoothed warm paste on my skin.

A commanding voice in the background. “Here! Who are you? What do you think you’re doing!”

A face in the dark above me-the features, I would have sworn, of Raphaella’s mother.

Now things seemed normal-almost.

“You’ll be your regular, handsome self in no time,” the nurse announced merrily, returning the mirror to the drawer in the nightstand beside the bed. “Let me prop you up a little straighter. You’re drooping.”

A motor hummed, then the nurse bashed enthusiastically at the pillows behind my head for a few seconds. “Comfy?” Without waiting for an answer she headed out the door.

“You have visitors,” she called over her shoulder.

I had been in Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital for two nights, and this morning I was beginning to feel almost normal, although the mirror had hinted otherwise. My head, still aching a little, had cleared. I was hungry. I guessed that was a good sign.

Raphaella came through the door first, a vision more healing than any medicine, wearing a fire engine red T-shirt and black jeans. My parents trailed behind her, smiling, wearing that parental expression that said “We’re not worried about you; we just look like we are.”

Raphaella leaned over me. I could smell her hair and her skin, and I felt tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

“I want to kiss you,” she said. “Where’s your mouth?”

AS THE MORNING PASSED and we waited for the hospital’s grinding bureaucracy to release me officially, Mom, Dad, and Raphaella brought me up to date.