Finally, screaming in terror, I hurled myself out of the chair and started to run away. My legs worked fine. What the hell had I been doing in the wheelchair? Elated, I sprinted for safety. But my feet started sinking in the sand.
With each step, I sank deeper. Pretty soon, the sand reached my waist. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't wade any farther. I was trapped. It hugged me like tight, heavy trousers.
I was terrified.
Now, he'd catch me. He would come running up behind me with his ax or machete or . . . chainsaw.
It'll be a chainsaw, I suddenly realized.
I couldn't hear it, though. Not yet.
Had he given up the chase?
I listened. Ocean sounds, bird sounds, bug sounds, but no cough, sputter and roar of a chainsaw.
I smiled with relief.
All of a sudden, down deep in the sand, hands caressed my legs.
I woke up with a yell of night and a splitting headache, and that was the end of my odyssey through a hundred dreams and nightmares at the bottom of the chasm.
Some of my worst nightmares, though, were more pleasant than what I found on my return to reality.
I was sprawled on my back, my head pounding with pain. I felt as if every bone in my body had been hammered. In some places, I felt numb. In others, I itched. In still others, sharp pains stabbed me.
Above me, swarms of flies and other winged bugs zipped this way and that. Some landed on me, while others were happy to circle.
A vulture suddenly flapped up into my line of vision, startling me.
I saw the chasm walls towering above me on both sides.
The gray sky above the chasm held a promise of sunrise -- or night.
Beneath me, I felt Matt.
Waking Up Is Hard To Do
Matt felt like lumpy, warm goo.
I shouldn't complain, though. Without him, I would probably be lumpy, warm goo.
Still, he disgusted me.
I had been napping for at least a couple of days, probably longer, on top of a naked, decomposing corpse.
I, at least, wasn't naked. Thank God I had my shorts on. Where my bare back pressed against him, we seemed to be stuck together. My skin, there, itched like crazy. Also, I felt squirming, crawling things; various critters that had apparently gotten sandwiched between us.
Let's not dwell on all that.
I won't even mention the smell.
The moment I realized where I was -- and what was under me -- I let out a cry and rolled off him.
It made quite a sound when we came unstuck. You might get a similar effect by dropping a large, hot pizza on the tile floor of your kitchen and letting it stay there for a couple of hours before you peel it off.
When you peel it off, that's when you get the sound.
Rolling off Matt, I took some of him with me. I could feel gop and stuff glued to my back.
I started to crawl away from him. Then I threw up. Then I crawled farther. It's a wonder I could move at all. Aside from all my other complaints, I felt like a passenger on a twilt-a-whirl. I kept crawling, though, wanting to put miles between me and Matt.
I probably made ten feet before I collapsed.
I lay there groaning, sleepless and full of agony.
The next time I lifted my head, the chasm was dark. I sat up and leaned back against a curving surface of rock.
The full moon, directly overhead, shone pale light down between the steep walls. It lit most of the chasm's floor. Including Matt.
My silent partner.
He seemed almost like an old friend.
A long-lost buddy I might've shared some good times with once, but who had recently undergone some major changes for the worse -- especially in the personal hygiene department.
I had no idea who he might be.
Gazing at his moonlit corpse over there, though, I found myself fancying him as an old prospector. He was Walter Huston. I was Bogart. We'd run into some tough luck -- his a lot tougher than mine.
"Reckon we won't be buying no rabbit farm, Lenny," I said to him.
Wrong movie. Wrong characters. But it's what I said, anyway.
"Shit happens," I told him.
I thought about crawling over to him and taking a look at his face. For all I knew, I might recognize him.
Could he be Keith?
Maybe Wesley and Thelma had disinterred Keith, brought his body here to trick us . . .
No.
Matt was too large to be Keith.
He couldn't possibly be Andrew, either. Again, wrong size. Besides, they would've had to fish his body out of the sea.
So who the hell was he?
Or she? Matt might be a female. After all, I'd never seen the body's frontal areas. She couldn't be a woman from our group, though; all of ours had been up at the top while the body was down here.
Not that I'd actually seen Thelma up there. But I figure it must've been Thelma who attacked us from the rear.
Anyway, Matt seemed too large to be Thelma, and his shape was all wrong.
His shape seemed wrong, in fact, to be any woman at all.
Not that he couldn't have been one. Kimberly and Billie had looked at him, though, and they'd assumed he was a man: Wesley, in fact. Though we'd had doubts about his identity, none of us had doubted that the body was a he.
I wondered, though.
Matt was probably no Matilda, but I was curious.
Would I recognize him -- or her?
Only one way to find out.
I didn't want to move, though.
I especially didn't want to take a good, close look at the stiff.
A. It stank.
B. His or her face was bound to be a wreck.
C. He or she was a critter magnet.
D. If I got any closer, I might start getting the creeps.
E. Or throw up again.
F. All of the above.
So I stayed put.
Then I squinted up at the top of the chasm and wondered what had happened.
Obviously, I'd been knocked out cold and dumped into the chasm. What about the women, though?
They hadn't won the battle, that was for sure.
If they'd won, I wouldn't have found myself waking up at the bottom of the chasm, days later, alone except for a corpse.
They would have taken care of me.
Not necessarily, I told myself.Suppose they won the fight, but only after I'd gone over the edge? Someone climbs down to check on me. Kimberly. She mistakes me for dead, so they go off and leave me here.
That didn't seem likely.
Not being an idiot, Kimberly would've noticed that I was alive.
Thinking about Kimberly, I recalled the last time I'd seen her. She had been climbing down a rope into the chasm. She'd just dropped out of sight below the edge moments before the attack came.
She wasn't down here, now. I had already looked around. Nobody was down here except for me and the corpse. I scanned the moonlit bottom again, anyway. No sign of Kimberly, or anyone else.
She'd most likely scurried back up the rope to join the fight.
A losing fight, almost for sure.
The last I saw, Wesley had been hot on Connie's tail. Seconds after I went down, he'd probably whacked her head off with one of those machetes. Then he and Thelma had probably made quick work of Billie.
So Kimberly, late in joining the fray, would've found herself standing alone against those two.
She was tough enough to win.
If she'd won, though, where was she? Why had she left me down here?
They're dead, I thought. All of them. Kimberly, Billie and Connie. Dead.
Then I almost went nuts, but I kept a grip on one thin thread of hope: that they had somehow won the battle. They'd thought I was dead, and left me. And they'd gone on back to our camp at the beach. If I could get out of the chasm, I would find them there, alive and well.
God, they'd be so glad to see me!
Not half as glad as I'd be, though, to see them.
We would have a great celebration.
I knew they were dead.
Sometimes, though, kidding yourself isn't the worst course of action. Instead of self-destructing, I got myself out of the chasm.