His head was burning and his chest was racked by pain. The violence of these fits of pain scared him; his teeth clacked together and the whole bed seemed to vibrate. He felt feverishly cold and wrapped himself in blankets, then suddenly so hot he had to toss them off. His throat was parched, and he was desperately thirsty.
Waiting until a shivering spell passed, he sat up, naked. He moved slowly to the edge of the bed and swung his feet to the floor. They fell like dead weights. Using the headboard, he pulled himself up and shuffled across the room into the hall. He managed to make it to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and turned on a faucet. He picked a paper cover off a glass and filled it with water, downing it in one long swallow. Then he took another. He was suddenly exhausted. His eyes lifted to the mirror, and he was shocked by the face that peered back. His eyes were lifeless, two glazed orbs set deep and rounded by blue-brown circles. His skin was loose and pallid; it hung in jowls from his sunken cheeks. His lips were cracked into pink and white strips, flaked with shards of skin.
A wave overtook him again — was it hot or cold? — he couldn't tell. But it was powerful. His knees buckled and he knelt on the floor, the glass falling from his hand and breaking in the sink. He fell and crumpled into a ball, lying like that until he felt the spasm pass. As the shivers subsided, his eyes fastened on a corner where there was a yellow plastic stand for a toilet brush. He stared at it, a fixed point, straining to regain equilibrium. A full minute passed.
He crawled out of the bathroom, sat for a while on the industrial carpet, regained some strength and finally made it to the bed, collapsing upon it. He lapsed into a half faint and then opened his eyes. The sheets were soiled — spots of something. He tried to focus: it was dark, red. Blood. He looked down at his thin, pale legs, his thighs, his arms. There was blood smeared on his chest. It came from his hand, which he had cut on the glass. He held it up and watched the blood drip from his palm.
He looked to one side and saw the side table with a lamp and the phone. He moved across and reached for the receiver and brought it to his ear, pulling the phone off the nightstand. The line was quiet. He saw a folded card of instructions and picked it up, but couldn't read the blurred letters. He pulled the phone up by the cord and dialed numbers at random, and the receiver gave a strange buzzing. It was hopeless. He dropped it and rolled over to the wall, made a fist and began banging upon it. Surely Tizzie would hear him and come to help him. But she did not. He lay back and tried to think. He cocked his arm over his head, then felt the liquid running across his face and sat up and looked: the wall he had been banging had red smears upon it. He saw that it was connected not to Tizzie's room but to the bathroom he had just been in. He thought he heard the water running.
He fell back onto the sheets and drifted off to sleep. It was not a peaceful, nurturing sleep, but a wild, rocky sleep. It seemed to seize him and shake him. He awoke once, saw that the room was darkening, and fell off again. He tossed back and forth in the delirium of nightmares: he was back on the island, pursued by the Orderlies and the dogs. He was racing through the swamp, the water grabbing his legs so that he made little progress as the hunting party got closer and closer. He came to a clearing, and the dogs came at him from all sides. They surrounded him, backed him into a tree, snarling, their fangs bared, about to leap for his throat…. He sat up in bed, breathing heavily and sweating.
He looked around, getting his bearings. The light was on in the bathroom, shining onto the carpet outside and casting long shadows upon the wall opposite. He heard water running. He turned on the bedside light and saw red streaked across the wall, soaked into the sheets, smear-dried upon his chest. He held up his hand and examined a gash caked with thick blood. He must have lost a lot of it. Perhaps that was why he felt so weak.
He tried to stand, felt the chest pain, sat down and tried again. This time he was able to rise to this feet, and he stood there almost motionless for a few seconds, leaning slowly first to one side and then another. He managed to walk to a chair where he had thrown his pants. Painfully, leaning against the wall and finally sitting on the chair and lifting first one leg and then the other, he was able to put them on. He rested for a while, trying to remember what it was he wanted to do. His mind felt waterlogged.
He stood again, still wavering, and walked slowly to the door. It was locked with a chain and he tried to undo it, but couldn't fit the sliding guide into the open track. He turned the doorknob and pulled it, so that the door lunged open five inches and then jammed. Through the crack, he looked out and saw a slice of parking lot and felt a hot, dry wind. It was already growing dark.
He closed the door and leaned against it with his shoulder, using his opposite hand to move the chain slowly away from him. Then he jiggled it, and much to his relief, it fell and swung along the door like a pendulum. He grasped the doorknob again and turned it slowly, stepping backward so quickly that he almost lost his balance. He pulled the door open. The air hit him, hot and heavy. He stepped outside, grabbed a railing and bent over it, holding onto it with both hands and shoving them ahead like a man planing a wooden plank. The railing bent into a banister and slanted down the staircase. He followed it down like a drunkard, one step at a time.
It took him a long time to descend the steps. He stopped three or four times, when he felt faint, and he held on for dear life with both hands, knowing that if he sat down, if he gave in to that overwhelming desire to rest, he wouldn't get up again. He didn't give in, and he made it to the bottom, but then he was confronted with another dilemma. He was there in the open with nothing to hold onto. There was no one around. How would he make it across the parking lot?
He took a deep breath and lunged ahead. He felt himself toppling forward and keep pumping his feet ahead of him to right the balance until he was practically running, bent at an angle like a tree that wanted to crash down. In this curious fashion, he loped across the lot, barefoot and stripped to the waist, covered with blood. He mounted the curb, tore through a line of bushes and came crashing into the motel office, looking up just in time to see the mouth of the receptionist form into a perfect oval. The scream seemed to come from her diaphragm — it didn't come out right away, delayed like a sonic boom, but when it came, it was full-bodied. It was a bloodthirsty yell, and it rent the gathering dusk like an ax.
Chapter 22
"You're sure you checked everywhere? Every crevice? Every hole?"
Jude asked largely just to be asking, to be doing something, to be raking over all the possibilities together instead of sinking separately into despair.
Tizzie, seated upon the metal table, didn't answer. Instead, she just nodded in an absentminded way.
He was walking around the chamber, looking at every object there with a new eye, thinking of how it might be used for some purpose other than for the one for which it was built — for escape. He felt his movements were a little too frenetic.
Above all, he was trying to push out of his mind the idea that would not go away, no matter how hard he tried — the suspicion that breathing was actually becoming a little more difficult, that the oxygen was already noticeably depleting. He wasn't good at taking a mental measure of cubic meters or figuring out how much time they had left. But he knew one thing: they would die of suffocation long before starvation. The image of them thrashing about and gasping for air and pulling long drafts of poisoning carbon dioxide into their lungs was too horrific to contemplate.
He looked at Tizzie, sitting there, her hair tousled, her legs swinging slowly underneath the table. Her eyes rose to meet his, and she smiled a little, at first weakly and then sweetly. He smiled back and walked over and sat next to her and held her to calm himself as much as her. He felt a rush of feeling for her.