Page 93 of Theta

I imagine us alone on a beach somewhere, naked and gasping together.

But in the end, the darkness wins.

17

Roma Will Have To Wait

It's the most excruciating run of my life.

Now, I'm not a runner, to be clear. I'll do a few miles once in a while, but I prefer to get my conditioning in other ways. That said, I have had my share of brutal runs—be it from the distance, heat, humidity, elevation, or incline. I've run through charley horses and cramps in the side and a twisted ankle, once. But the run— although that’s a generous term for it— that takes me from the pier to the hostel is the longest, hardest, most painful ten minutes of my entire life.

When I told Story the other wound was a creased bicep, I was being…conservative. It's actually a round straight through the meat of my bicep and tricep and another that bounced off my shoulder bone and for sure broke something. Plus the wound to my side. Plus the blood loss. Worry for Story. Fear that I won’t make it. I'll miss him, and we’ll be stuck here, and in our states, we won’t be able to fight off the next wave, assuming we don’t bleed out by then.

I need a phone. I need to call Mom and Dad. I'm running out of…everything. Strength. Courage. Resolve. I just want to go home.

But then I hear Story’s scream of pain, and I realize that she rarely shows physical pain. One summer, she got stung by a jellyfish. She was thirteen, I was eight or so, and I remember vividly seeing her face tight with pain as Selah tended to her, but Story never made a peep. When she broke her ankle playing beach volleyball, again, she never made a sound—didn’t cry, nothing. Not so much as a single F-bomb. Which tells me how much pain she must be in, and that spurs me onward, wakes me up, forces me to gut through my own discomfort.

I long to stop and catch my breath, but I dare not. I round a corner and shuffle to a halt—the hostel is just there, roped off with caution tape, although the cops and ambulances are all long gone by now. I have no phone, no watch, no way to tell the time, but it feels like it's been less than ten minutes.

I have to have made it.

Have to.

I slump against the corner, panting, scanning. There—down at the end of the dead-end street, a lump of darkness pulls away from the wall and saunters this way.

"American?" A voice, pitched low, familiar. "That is you?"

"Yeah," I mutter. "My name is Killian." I realize belatedly that I probably should have given him a fake name, but I’m woozy, exhausted, in pain, scared, and worried—not thinking straight.

"I am Dante." He's still just an outline in the darkness. "Come-come. Where is your girlfriend?" Girl-FREN.

"Pier. Hurt."

"Ohhhh, merda. All of that shooting? That was you?"

“Yeah."

“You win?"

"Alive, so yeah."

A white spot of light flares to life—a cell phone flashlight; he waves it over me, scanning me. "Cazzo! Mio Dio, you are not so good, huh?"

"Been better. She’s worse.”

He shoves his shoulder under my armpit. “Okay, okay. Mio tio, he will help you. He is parking his boat not far from where you are shooting."

We make our way back toward the pier, and still the local law enforcement is suspiciously absent from a full-blown, extended firefight. I remember hearing sirens in the distance, and then…nothing.

"Is it normal for the cops to not respond?" I ask as we reach the pier, where all is still dead silent.

Poor choice of words, I suppose.

Dante just laughs. "I should think no. Olbia is not having many crimes like this." He grunts in surprise as we shuffle to a halt at the cluster of SUVs and the dead bodies scattered around them—and it's a lot of dead bodies. "Whoever you are, they wanted you very dead."

"Sucks for them."

He barks a laugh. "Sì sì, very big suck for them."