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There was nothing. No familiar thump and whoosh. No gurgle of lungs struggling to breathe as they filled up with blood.
I felt my own heart begin to beat faster, so fast in fact that I could hear it pounding in my ears, making it harder to be sure that it wasn’t Bayer’s. Instead, I sat up and put my fingers to Bayer’s neck, over the big vein that ran down from below his jaw, the vein I had seen pulsing with anger just a few minutes before.
There was nothing there.
I felt a sickness rise up inside me.
“Joel,” I called. “Joel, can you come here for a second?”
Joel came hurrying over, his face anxious, and I pulled him down next to me and said very quietly, “Joel, I think… I think Bayer is dead.”
He went white.
“You’re kidding me?”
“I wish I was. Can you hear anything?”
Joel pressed his ear to Bayer’s chest, closing his eyes. There was a long, long silence, broken only by the sound of Angel’s quiet sobs from the other side of the cabana, and Conor hawking and spitting blood into the sand. When Joel raised his head, there was a fear in his eyes that hadn’t been there a few minutes before and, very gently, he shook his head. I felt my stomach drop.
Angel must have sensed something about our interaction, because now she stood up, her expression wary.
“Bayer? Lyla, is he okay?”
“Angel, I—” I stopped. How the fuck did you say this?
“Is he okay?” she demanded, more forcefully, stalking across the decking towards us. I stood too.
“Angel, he’s— I think… I think Bayer is dead.”
Her scream echoed around the clearing, sending the birds shooting up into the clear blue sky with alarm, and the fruit bats shifting uneasily on their branches.
Conor had turned and was looking at us, perplexed. It seemed like he hadn’t heard what I’d said—and perhaps he hadn’t, with his ears still ringing from the fight. The front of his T-shirt was running with blood, and he was pinching the bridge of his nose as if trying to stem the flow.
“Angel?” he asked, as if confused. “What happened?”
“You fucking monster!”
She ran at him, slapping and hitting and screaming. Conor didn’t try to fight back or restrain her, just fell back, his arms up, protecting his face, and it was Joel and I who had to run to try to hold Angel back, prevent her from scratching out Conor’s eyes. When we finally had her, she was panting and weeping, and Conor’s face was adorned with several long scratches in addition to his bloody nose.
“Tu es un monstre!” she was sobbing. “You have killed him. You killed him.”
“It was an accident,” Joel said helplessly. “Angel, please, I’m so sorry, but it was an accident.”
Angel yanked herself out of our grip.
“Leave me alone. Leave me fucking alone. I am going to get us out of here. I am going to leave.”
And then she turned and ran, away from the cabana, down the path to the staff quarters and, presumably, the radio.
The rest of us looked at each other, our expressions silently reflecting the unfathomable horror of what had just happened. Bayer was dead. Dead. I didn’t think I was the only person having trouble processing the realization. Dan looked like he was going to throw up. Zana was sitting on the edge of the cabana steps next to a bleeding Conor, and her face was completely colorless. I thought she might be going into shock.
“You’d better go with Angel,” I said to Joel, who was standing at the end of the path, looking at the clump of trees where Angel had disappeared. “Show her how it works.” Keep an eye on her was the unspoken message. There was a sick feeling in my stomach, and I was having unpleasant mental images of Angel stomping on the radio receiver in a rage if she couldn’t get through to someone. Joel nodded, turned, and walked after her, and then I turned back to Bayer’s body, wondering how the hell it had come to this.
WE BURIED BAYER at sunset, and I’d expected that Angel would be weeping, but she wasn’t. It was as if she had cried out all her tears, and now she simply stood, stone-faced, as the rest of us threw handfuls of sand onto his sheet-shrouded body in what was fast becoming a sickly familiar ritual.
I knew from Joel that the radio call had come to nothing, as had all the others, and that it had taken him a long time to persuade her to put down the handset and conserve the battery.
For the rest of the day she had simply lain in the villa, her face to the wall, refusing to talk to anyone or gather coconuts, or do any of the other tasks that we had divided up to try to eke out the rations—fishing, picking fruit, and rigging up a crude rainwater collection system over in the staff quarters.
