While Drowning in the Desert

Chapter 25

When I started to come to, heinz was carrying me on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

Which aptly described me: I was lumpy, bumpy, beat, whipped, mashed, and about as useful in a fight.

So I was looking at the world upside-down and backward as we headed up the dirt road up and behind the opposite knoll.

I didn’t much care, though. I was sick, dizzy and hurting in body and soul. I was a miserable failure who couldn’t protect myself, the people I was supposed to look out for, or the person I loved more than anyone in the world.

Why Heinz hadn’t done me the favor of just shooting me back by the shack, I didn’t know.

I was going to find out, because a few minutes later he stopped and dropped me to the ground.

It took all of what little I had left to swallow the scream.

“Ja, this will do,” I heard Heinz say.

He grabbed me under the arms and picked me up like a rag doll.

He stuck his face into my mine and said casually, “Sorry to do this, but I have only so many bullets, ja? And you made me waste two, so…”

A revolver. Six bullets; two fired, leaving four. Nathan, Hope, Sami and Karen.

“What…”

“Mine shaft,” he said. “Boring hole. Fifty feet deep, perhaps. So you won’t suffer long. And soon you have the company of your friends, ja?”

And he dropped me.

I slid down some dirt and then felt myself in open air. I fell and fell and waited for the smack at the bottom that should end this.

I didn’t exactly smack.

I splashed.

I plunged feet-first underwater, didn’t hit bottom, then struggled with my one good arm to the surface.

A circle of light tantalized about thirty feet up. The hole was about ten feet in circumference and God only knows how many scant desert rains it had taken to leave this much water.

I tried to grab the side and my hand slipped. I tried again. Same thing. I couldn’t even feel my left hand, never mind raise it or grab anything. All I could do was tread water, and that just barely.

So there it is, I thought. There’s no way out, no way to help the others, and nothing to do but tread water with one arm until I wear out. Nathan and Hope were beyond help, Karen would die, and I was drowning in the middle of the desert.

A while later, when I heard the distant, hollow thump of the shots, I decided that drowning wasn’t so bad.