Anarchy (41 page)

Dry land wasn't far. She could see it. When the vicious spray let her, she could see individual trees shaking their tops in the sudden wind. Out of the water. Her story contracted to that single point: she wanted to be beyond the sea's reach, otherwise it would have her, and then no more Goose, no more story. She tried to steady herself and time a few deep breaths to match troughs between the breakers. She became aware of her existence balanced on the point of a pin. Struggle in the water for the keys, struggle to reach the boat, or force herself across the fifty meters of tossing grey to the nearest of the solid islands? It didn't feel like a choice. Only one end was in sight. She gritted her teeth, gulped air, and let go. The first wave rolled her over, capsizing her, blotting out all sound for a second beyond the weird hushed wallowing of underwater currents. She kicked up against rock, found air, glimpsed for a moment the crown of trees marking safety ahead, and began windmilling her arms.

It was a contest of effort against pain. She knew all about those. She'd won hundreds of them. She won again, eventually. There was even a strangely sweet moment when she knew she was going to win, when she came into the lee of the scattered landmasses and felt the sea calming, and looked ahead as she took another painful breath and saw the evergreens filling most of her view. She emerged out of the wind, dragging herself on scraped and bloody hands and knees until the numb hooks of her fists were tearing at leaves and bark. She collapsed in a hollow among driftwood above the top of the tide, and lay there, alive, not finished, listening to herself breathing: alive, cold to the bone, hungry, all but naked, and utterly marooned.

29

I
t rained a tantrum: violent and short. She cramped herself beneath a contorted overhang of ancient deadwood. Everything afterward smelled of pine.

• • •

After the storm the sky seemed brighter and farther away. Later on it flaked apart and the sun came out.

Her undershirt had been scratched to shreds. She peeled it off and discarded it, a heap of artificial seaweed. She could hear the wind still but not feel it. Her little hollow was sheltered, and faced south, into the strong light. The stripped and barren wood warmed fast. She pressed her back against it. She couldn't remember the last sunshine she'd seen. It turned the world as bright as a postcard and fell on her skin like an eager lover.

• • •

A while later she found she could sit up. Her hands could flex. Her heartbeat was thin and rapid, but it no longer felt manacled by chains of ice. The sun had risen higher. One long flat stone near her hand was actually warm to the touch. She clasped it between her feet until they stung.

Across ten kilometers of glittering water the low top of Vancouver Island was a finger's width of fresh green. There were roads there, and people, and phones, connections: Highway 1, stringing the whole of Canada together. A little later still, when the yellow warmth had gone deep enough that she could stand and walk, she made a circuit of the island where she'd landed. She had the mysterious feeling that somewhere on it she'd find those things, Canadian things. A secretly hidden, well-stocked marina, perhaps, or a solar-powered emergency phone with a connection to the coast guard. It seemed necessary, somehow. The idea that she was cast away on a tiny speck of untouched and uninhabitable rock in the middle of the Inside Passage was peculiarly unthinkable. It could only be a bad joke. There were places where she had to climb up through narrow defiles in cliffs and skirt the prickly undergrowth of the trees, but she went all the way around the island until she reached her little sun-washed haven among the fallen trees again, having found nothing, of course, but what was actually there.

She found herself hoping for things. A spring of fresh water. (She pecked rain from tiny crevices like a bird.) A passing boat. No, a passing helicopter. No, Jonas arriving in his boat, with a big smile, a thick blanket as big as a comforter, and a bag of warm almond croissants from Au Pain Doré. It was the kind of hope that hurt, physically, the kind that makes you short of breath and sick to your innards.

That finished, eventually. Afterward she had other thoughts, involving things like bird's eggs, or actual birds killed by well-judged stones, or rubbing sticks together, or piling up stones to make a cairn visible across the Passage, or lashing logs together with seaweed.

Other kinds of things too: what-ifs. These were also exquisitely painful. If she hadn't thrown the stupid paddle out of the stupid boat so she wouldn't have had to swim to get the stupid keys. If she'd made herself swim after the boat instead of to dry land. If they'd asked someone else to come and replace Fitzgerald instead of her. If she'd never listened to the thing from hell, if she'd stayed at her post. If she'd just ignored Kalmykov. How many times had she, a fit young blond woman in the police force, ignored or shrugged off that sort of crap? A hundred? So why not a hundred and one?

All that finished too, so then she thought about dying.

For some reason she'd never expected the thought of it to be so frightening. It had always just seemed like one of those things that happened (to other people, that is). It was going on all over the place. She'd assumed that when her turn came it would feel ordinary, unexceptional. Instead it turned out to be like the worst fear she'd ever had magnified by a factor of a thousand. She'd do anything not to die. If God came out of the sea and told her she could live but a hundred happy children would starve in her place, she'd have wept with gratitude and said
yes, thank you, let them starve, save me.

She remembered the way her grandmother's old TV used to turn off. No remote or anything: you pushed in the knob,
snick
,
and then the screen shrank suddenly in on itself to a point of light, and then,
wink,
nothing. When Goose thought of that she gibbered in terror. She pulled herself into a ball and fell on her side in the sunlight and her mouth went
ahh non, ahh non, non non non
.

Some inward voice told her that she ought to be ashamed of such cowardice. (Her mother?) The accusation felt weak. Shame needed witnesses. Shame was public. She was alone. The island didn't care about courage or cravenness. It didn't care about her at all. It had no interest in providing her with food or means of shelter or escape. It didn't want to listen to her memories or her complaints about unfinished business or the things she wanted to say to the people who'd miss her.

There must be something I can do.
Dying was ridiculous, impossible; it couldn't happen. So, something else. It was just a question of figuring out what it was.

The problem was that she was so weak with hunger she could barely think.

• • •

She narrowed it down to three things: food, warmth, escape.

Like a juggler's batons, they refused to stay in her grip together. She had to toss one away to grab another. She could maybe try to find two small logs to lash together with the remains of her shirt, and float out on the raft when the tide began to rise to fill the Passage, letting the current carry her south and east, maybe lying flat on her stomach and paddling with her hands; but she'd have to start right away, while there was daylight left, because soon she'd run out of energy, and then it would be night and she'd be naked at sea in the dark. Or she could look for something better than seaweed to chew on, maybe gather enough to get her through the day, but then she'd still be stuck. Or she could stay here in her suntrap where it was pleasant to soak up warmth, and be comfortable, and starve while she hoped for something else to happen. Or make herself some kind of shelter so she'd be warm through the night, which would give more time for the miracle to come along. It was the age of miracles, after all. She'd seen a demon on the neighboring island; why not an angel on this one?
N'ayez pas peur, Séverine
. Choral music and harps.

She noticed the sharp-edged shadow of a branch above angling differently across the shoreline. Lengthening, just a fraction. Pointing, cruelly, toward the water. The sun had started its descent.

Her hands began to shake.

• • •

She remembered Jennifer saying something about the larger island, people living there, a house, a hearth. She thought she remembered catching a faint whiff of smoke. (Jennifer. Why couldn't she have left the girl alone? Why couldn't she have done what Cope had made it so clear he wanted her to do: colluded with her boss's neglect, pretended the whole damn thing hadn't happened? She was a junior officer; she was trained to do what her superiors told her to do. Why? Why?)

She scrambled around to the side of her island that faced into the bay where she'd come with the boat. It was in the shade. As soon as she wasn't feeling the sun on her skin she was assaulted by clutching, withering cold. She looked across the small expanse of calm water, wondering whether it was shallow and still enough that the suddenly glorious day had warmed it a degree or two. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad. Thirty seconds, max, then out again on the shingle where Jennifer had pulled up her kayak, and she could race around to the south-facing shore and get herself warmed up again. If only she wasn't so hungry. Her limbs felt like sticks.

Am I making a good decision? she thought, as she shuffled down to the edge of the tide. Mustn't make bad decisions. Hungry and panicky and tired. Think. But don't think too long, because the sun's going down.

She clenched her hands into fists and ran in. As soon as the ice of the water hit her she had her answer:
This is stupid. You can't get cold again
. Too late. She'd told herself not to stop so she didn't stop. She hopped from submerged rock to rock until she could plunge in. The cold hit her breasts and belly and crotch. She swore breathlessly and swam hard, keeping her head up because she couldn't bear the idea of submerging it. She swam badly, horribly, like a novice, like the kids she'd laughed at in school swim lessons. (They were all somewhere now with food in their stomachs and roofs over their heads, and she was going to be dead by the morning. Ha ha ha.) She staggered out onto the hard beach, still swearing. Her body temperature had plunged. She found she couldn't swear properly even through clenched teeth. Her jaw was shaking too violently. The sun, she thought, the sun. She turned left. This island was wooded closer to the shore but the tide was still low enough to leave eaves of rock above the water. She limped around until she was out of the shadow of the trees and spread-eagled herself over sun-warmed stone. She felt small breaths of air over her back, hints of the sea breeze: each one was like being doused with ice shavings. She remembered thinking, just an hour or two ago, that whatever she did she mustn't let herself get cold again. How had that just happened? How had she voluntarily immersed herself in North Pacific water, knowing she had nothing to dry herself on and no clothes at all beyond her soaked underwear, nothing to cover even a patch of her body? She huddled herself close, waiting for the sun to work its magic, imploring it.

A shiver attacked her. It wasn't like the shiver of fear or the tremble of a draft. It was a different beast entirely, a thing with an iron fist and a will of its own. It rattled through her as if it had determined to shake her loose from herself.
That's enough of you
. It took over her muscles and turned them against herself. She whimpered in helpless pain until it let her go. Clothes, she thought. Blankets. Quick. But there were no clothes or blankets. She got to her hands and knees to crawl somewhere where the mild caress of wind couldn't touch her. It hit her again, dropped her and doubled her up. It was like retching, an irresistible exhausting grip. In the middle of it she thought, very clearly—perfectly clearly:
C'est ça.
This is it.

She struggled nevertheless, as living things will. When the shiver subsided she inched herself up toward the undergrowth, looking for some kind of shelter, but the forest was cool and soaked with fresh rain on top of its own permanent damp. Her truant muscles were barely capable of moving her at a crawl. Farther along the sunny slope of rock, a long white log lay beached. She was halfway there when the breeze crawled over her naked flesh again and another spasm of shuddering took hold, curling her up but denying her rest, racking her from top to toe. She tried to tell herself to fight but she had no weapons. The shivers were an enemy within. It was all she could do to keep breathing, long shuddering gasps through rattling teeth.

The sun began to go down.

• • •

Within a few unspeakable hours the entire world had reduced itself to a square meter of rock. Her chin was tucked to her chest, her ankles locked over each other to squeeze in the last fraction of warmth, her arms bent fetal. She breathed in small soft huffs. She waited to fall asleep permanently. From time to time she caught herself sliding to the brink of it, dipping a toe in the dark, but it would only happen when she wasn't watching. There'd be no one to watch. Her body pushed in on itself, groping for a comfort that wasn't there.

She was too tired to be frightened now, and too cold. She'd given up. She'd stopped thinking about moving. If she admitted the slightest cranny of air into her cocoon, the feverish shivering would follow it at once and savage her up and down.

Night fell patiently, as always, drawing the blinds gradually. The scoured stone under her eyes turned from yellow-gold to grey.

A few flutters of grief came with the thought:
I'll never see anything else again.
Some of the multitude included in that
anything
swam up before her mind's eye. There was less pain there than in the compressed misery of her flesh, though. The shivers had squeezed like an old mangle, spread her flat and empty for the coming night to get to work on.

Not too much longer, she hoped.

• • •

Death came when it was fully dark. It arrived with a swish of surprised air, and then scraping footfalls,
tchok tchok tchok
. She stirred at the sound. Only the smallest tremors quivered through her now. She felt the dullness of relief. She must have dropped over the elusive edge at last, fallen accidentally into a final delirium. If her eyes were open, they were looking through its veil. They saw a delicate glimmer over her tomb of rock, a mild failure of darkness, like the most tentative echo of moonlight.

Death moved to stand right over her. It was shapeless and fully black.

“Someone here,” it said.

Death bent. Its breath was a warm gust.

“Not her,” it said. “Wrong girl.”

The brush of warmth passed. With a feeble ache of disappointment Goose saw Death retreat from her, returning some of the wispy starlight it had blotted out. Its outline wavered, making a stiff rustle.

“Too late,” Death said, in its skeletal voice. “Missed her.” It withdrew farther. The unbearable cold came back and pressed in. She tried to move her lips to plead with Death not to go: impossible. Something else answered instead, another shape forming and approaching, not Death itself but Death's unknown and unexpected companion. The shape came close and bent over her with no sound at all, since Death's companion was a barefoot boy.