AllFreeNovel
Share Us
After pulling the plastic bags off everything I owned, I held them up over my head as I quietly slipped into the inlet and swam down to the cave entrance. I could have walked out and avoided the pain of the cold and the salt in my wounds, but I would have had to go past the Russian to do that, and my new rule was that I did not look at the Russian.
Hiding just inside the mouth of the tunnel, I held a shiny piece of airplane wreckage as far out as my arm would reach so that I could scan the cliff for signs of danger. It was hard to see anything through the pouring rain, but when my hand wasn’t instantly blown off by a drone, I decided that the coast was clear. But I couldn’t move. What I needed to do would only take a few seconds—a minute at most—but I was paralyzed with fear. The last two times I’d left that cave, I’d been chased off a cliff and nearly shot. But I had to risk it. If I didn’t, I would die of thirst in a few days, and honestly, a machine-gun execution would be a much better way to go.
Motivated by that morbid thought, I pulled myself up onto the ledge, gasping as the rain and waves pummeled me from all sides. I hobbled over to the sloped side of the tunnel—my body so battered from my fall that I couldn’t tell where one bruise ended and the next began—but I managed to climb to the top of the capstone and get to work.
Thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed, causing my heart to stop and my body to involuntarily duck and cover every few seconds, but I pushed through the panic. I had to. After dropping a few rocks into the bottom of each plastic bag to keep them from blowing away, I set them out on the flat capstone and rolled their tops down to keep them open. By the time I was done, I had a dozen little containers set up to collect drinking water, and they were filling up fast.
It was a tiny victory in a sea of grief, but I clung to it like a life preserver.
I’m going to be okay, I thought, wringing out my hair as I crept along the ledge of the tunnel.
I could drink rainwater. I could catch lobster. I had shelter. No warm clothes, but …
Stepping out of the tunnel and onto dry stone, I was so distracted by my own thoughts that I completely forgot about my new rule.
I glanced over at the man.
And nearly screamed.
I’d never seen so much blood in my entire life. It soaked his shirt and jacket, ran down the side of his face, pooled on the rocks beneath his writhing body. He was propped up on one elbow, trying to sit, trying to stand, but his every move, even breathing, seemed to cause him excruciating pain. His teeth were gritted; dry, cracked lips pulled back in a snarl; his dark brows were knitted together; and when he met my gaze, the eyes that stared back didn’t belong to him. They belonged to me. To my imagination. To my very soul. I stared into those molten steel pools as if I’d been forged from them. As if you could cut me and I’d bleed gray.
I knew I was hallucinating. I knew the man writhing in front of me wasn’t really him, but that didn’t make it any easier to stand there and watch my friend die. The one who’d been there for me when everyone else cast me out. The one who comforted me when no one else cared. The one who’d given me the courage to jump. He was a part of me, and his suffering was mine too.
Rushing over, I knelt by his side and brushed the pebbles out from behind him. “Shh. Lie back down. Please.”
He continued to struggle, jaw clenched in pain as those eyes stayed fixed on mine. Begging. Pleading. The intensity of his stare, of those silver irises fixed on mine, was almost hypnotizing. It took everything I had to tear my gaze away and assess the damage.
“I’m going to lift your shirt, okay?”
He nodded, and for a moment, I let myself believe that he spoke English instead of Russian. That he really was who I wanted him to be. Always listening. Never speaking.
Lifting his woolen jacket out of the way, I untucked and unbuttoned his shirt as quickly as my shaking fingers would allow. Then, I pulled the sides open and gasped as a beam of light shone through a shredded hole in the blue-and-white striped fabric. It was the same size and shape as the wound underneath—a mangled, jagged starburst, like something had exploded out of him.
Oh my God.
Reaching around his side, I felt the corresponding spot on his back and immediately found what I was looking for. A few centimeters below his rib cage, on his left side, was a small, mushy hole the size of my fingertip.
My stomach lurched the moment I touched it, and the man sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry,” I muttered, wiping my bloody finger on his navy-blue jacket.
I glanced back up at him, but the words of encouragement on my tongue simply vanished as I found myself face-to-face with the proof of my own insanity. The illusion didn’t falter that close up. In fact, it only became more convincing. More familiar. I knew how soft his hair would feel without ever having touched it. How scratchy his day’s growth of beard was. I knew the exact angle of his eyebrows and soft fullness of his lips before I’d even studied them, but then again, I would, wouldn’t I? I’d put all of those things there in my own mind.
His pupils swelled, and his dry, cracked lips curled at the corners as he drank me in, but the moment he lifted his hand to touch me, his face contorted into a grimace of agony.
“Don’t move,” I begged, tearing myself away from him to go grab my supplies.
I returned in seconds, tossing everything on the ground and trying not to blush from the relief I saw on his face when I came back. The sound of a cap being unscrewed was the only warning I gave him before I tipped Da’s bottle of Jameson over and poured straight whiskey directly into his wound.
The man gasped and grunted and breathed hard through his nose as I pressed a white long-sleeved shirt against his wound and tied the sleeves around his waist to keep it in place. Then, I glanced at the wound on the side of his head.
With his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed shut in anticipation, he nodded his consent.
And I poured the amber liquid over his gash without hesitation. He breathed like a dragon through flared nostrils, squeezing a handful of pebbles in his fist, but I don’t think I was breathing at all. Because the moment he reopened his eyes, they rolled skyward, and his body began to fall. Darting behind him, I caught his shoulders before he hit the ground and guided his head onto my lap with my heart in my throat.
“Stay with me,” I begged, patting his cheek as panic shot through my veins. “Please. Please.”
Grabbing a bottle of water, I twisted the cap off with my teeth and spat it to the side.
