Ryan Westfield - Final Panic

Jim had two choices. He could resurface and return fire. Or he could dive deeper.

He chose to dive deeper.

A third, fourth, and fifth bullet hit the water.

Jim didn’t know what kind of gun Andy had, or how many rounds it held.

Ideally, he’d wait until Andy emptied his gun, and then resurface.

But that wasn’t likely to happen. Andy was clever. A clever thief.

Jim swam down another two feet.

He was already feeling like he needed to take a breath. He wasn’t used to swimming, let alone holding his breath underwater.

He needed to think fast.

He needed a plan. A better one than just waiting and then resurfacing to get shot.

Jim could see the hull of both boats above him. They weren’t far away.

He didn’t think. He just started swimming. Instead of continuing down, he started cutting across.

If he could make it under the boat, he could resurface on the other side. Maybe take Andy by surprise.

If he was lucky.

He didn’t know how much longer he could last without air. It was getting rough. His head felt light and strange. It wasn’t just another symptom on top of the normal exhaustion. This symptom was impossible to ignore. Impossible to simply push through. This symptom would kill him sooner rather than later.

He swam as fast as he could.

Bullets pounded through the water all around him. There was nothing he could do about them.

He just had to keep going.

Somehow, he got to the other side.

Ideally, he’d have liked to get some distance between himself and the boat.

But he wasn’t going to make it.

His body was screaming for air.

Desperately.

It was all he could do to simply resurface. He didn’t even reach for his Ruger.

His head pierced the surface of the water and he gasped loudly for air, his lungs finally receiving what they’d been screaming for.

He’d barely taken three breaths when the paddle swung through the air towards him.

The wide part of the paddle hit him in the head.

Pain flared through his skull.

His vision blacked out for a moment.

He sunk back down into the water, too filled with pain to move his arms or his legs.

He was sinking.

“They didn’t seem interested,” said Julia, Liam’s longtime partner.

“No,” said Liam, shaking his head, and sitting down on the edge of the bed in their RV.

Liam and Julia were staring at the same thing. On a small built-in coffee table, there was an ornate wooden box with the lid open.

They’d gotten the box on one of their trips to China, during one of their first summers after graduate school, where they’d met.

Inside the box were the last remains of their opiate stash.

They had the good stuff. Pharmaceutical pills. The real ones, right from the factories.

Liam had never messed around with the street stuff. Julia had. Just once. She’d said it had felt dirty. Totally unclean.

They were high-class people. Professors at a good school. And they considered themselves high-class.

Swinging, or whatever you wanted to call it, was just something that the lower classes didn’t understand. It was common at the universities. At least among the more open-minded professors.

They’d pursued their lifestyle all their lives. It was what they’d wanted. Educating and partying.

Sure, educating often had taken a back seat to partying. To having fun. To finding new partners. New excitement.

Opiates were rolled into their lifestyle.

They wouldn’t have been able to untangle one from the other.

They both knew that they couldn’t stop. They didn’t want to.

Before finding opiates, they’d both been depressed. Depressed with that academic spiritual ennui that was almost like a job requirement. For the humanities departments, at least.

The opiates had rescued them from that depression.

They’d allowed them to live.

To pursue their dreams.

To pursue other partners.

To pursue pleasure.

Together.

There wasn’t any turning back now.

The world was over.

And their lives were over.

“We’ve just got to make the best of it,” said Liam, speaking without looking at his longtime partner. “We’ve got to have as much fun as we can, while it lasts.”

“That’s what we’ve been doing.”

Liam reached forward and grabbed the box. He shuffled through the contents.

“There’s not much left,” he said, taking out a bottle and shaking it. “We’ve got a week at most.”

“There’s got to be some other way to get the stuff,” said Julia.

“Another way? Are you crazy?”

“It’s not that crazy. I mean, there’s always a way, right? That’s what we used to say when we were seducing someone together. That there was always a way. And it was usually right. Almost always.”

“We’ve already stopped at all the pharmacies we could find,” said Liam. “Opiates were the first things that were raided. We were weeks late.”

“But…”

“But what?”

“There’s got to be something natural we could try…”

“I think the slight withdrawal you’re experiencing is making you stupid. You know as well as I do where the poppy plant grows and where it doesn’t grow. And it’s not like we can get anywhere, start a crop, cultivate and process it, within time. And especially not with all the violence… I mean, hell, you taught a two-semester course on the opiate trade and its history…. Here, you really need this.”

Liam opened up the pill bottle, shook out a single pill. He tossed it to Julia, who caught it and swallowed it within a second. And without water.

“Feeling better?”

“Give me a moment.”

“I’d better take one too,” said Liam, shaking out another pill. And he shook out a second one, surreptitiously, so that Julia wouldn’t notice. He swallowed them both, throwing them back from the palm of his hand and opening up his throat the way he’d trained himself to.

Ten minutes later, the pills had started to kick in.

They were both feeling better.

“So what’s the plan?” said Julia.

“We’re going to go out with a bang.”

“A bang?”

“Yeah. We don’t have that much longer left. So we’re going to do what we do best.”

“And what’s that?”

“We’re going to have fun.”

“With who? We’ve already been with everyone else here hundreds of times. It’s lost its luster, you know? And no offense, Liam, but there’s nothing new if it’s just the two of us.”

Liam nodded. “Don’t worry, kid. We’re thinking along exactly the same lines.”

“So who is it then?”

“Who? Who better than that attractive pair that visited us earlier today.”

“They didn’t seem interested.”

“We’re going to have to make them interested. After all, it’s a new world. That means new rules.”

It was almost a full minute before Jim got a grip on himself. The pain was still there. Throbbing. But it wasn’t as all-encompassing and overpowering as it had been.

He was still sinking.

The water was cold and dark.

He fought against the pain and moved his left foot first.

Then his right.

Now his arms.

He kicked with his feet and churned with his arms.

He was rising, rising towards the surface of the lake.

The air had been knocked out of his lungs when the paddle had hit him.

But he was going to make it to the surface before he suffocated.

He knew he could do it.

He didn’t know how or why.

Or why he was continuing. It was if there was some resolve burning deep down inside him that couldn’t be snuffed out no matter what his body went through.