Sole Survivor

with each footfall.
        The scarlet sun had bled into a grave on the far side of Japan. The sky and the sea to the west were raven meeting crow, as feathery smooth and sensuous and inviting as death.
        Rose was already at the head of the stairs.
        Following her, Joe found two flights that led down fourteen or sixteen feet to the beach.
        As dark as Rose was, and darkly dressed, she all but vanished in the black geometry of the steps below him. When she reached the pale sand, however, she regained some definition.
        The strand was more than a hundred feet across at this point, and the phosphorescent tumble of surf churned out a low white noise that washed like a ghost sea around him. This was not a swimming or surfing beach, and there were no bonfires or even Coleman lanterns in sight in either direction.
        To the east, the sky was a postulant yellow overlaid on black, full of the glow of the city, as insistent as it was meaningless. Cast from high above, the pale yellow rectangles of light from the restaurant windows quilted part of the beach.
        Joe did not try to stop Rose or to slow her. Instead, when he caught up with her, he ran at her side, shortening his stride to avoid pulling ahead of her.
        She was his only link to Nina. He was confused by her apparent mysticism, by her sudden transit from beatific calm to superstitious terror, and he was furious that she would lie to him about Nina now, after she had led him to believe, at the cemetery, that she would ultimately tell him the full truth. Yet his fate and hers were inextricably linked, because only she could ever lead him to his younger daughter.
        As they ran north through the soft sand and passed the corner of the restaurant, someone rushed at them from ahead and to the right, from the bluff, a shadow in the night, quick and big, like the featureless beast that seeks us in nightmares, pursuer through corridors of dreams.
        “Look out,” Joe warned Rose, but she also saw the oncoming assailant and was already taking evasive action.
        Joe attempted to intervene when the hurtling dark shape moved to cut Rose off-but he was blindsided by a second man who came at him from the direction of the sea. This guy was as big as a professional football linebacker, and they both went down so hard that the breath should have been knocked out of Joe, but it wasn't, not entirely-he was wheezing but breathing-because the sand in which they landed was deep and soft, far above the highest lapping line of the compacting tide.
        He kicked, flailed, ruthlessly used knees and elbows and feet, and rolled out from under his attacker, scrambling to his feet as he heard someone shout at Rose farther along the strand-“ Freeze, bitch! ”-after which he heard a shot, hard and flat. He didn't want to think about that shot, a whip of sound snapping across the beach to the growling sea, didn't want to think about Rose with a bullet in her head and his Nina lost again forever, but he couldn't avoid thinking about it, the possibility like a lash burn branded forever across the surface of his brain. His own assailant was cursing him and pushing up now from the sand, and as Joe spun around to deal with the threat, he was full of the meanness and fury that had gotten him thrown out of the youth-boxing league twenty years ago, seething with church-vandalizing rage-he was an animal now, a heartless predator, cat-quick and savage-and he reacted as though this stranger were personally responsible for poor Frank being crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, as if this sonofabitch had worked some hoodoo to make Frank's joints swell and deform, as if this wretched thug were the sole perpetrator who had somehow put a funnel in Captain Blane's ear and poured an elixir of madness into his head, so Joe kicked him in the crotch, and when the guy grunted and began to double over, Joe grabbed the bastard's head and at the same time drove a knee upward, shoving the face down into the knee and jamming the knee up hard into the face, a ballet of violence, and he actually heard the crunch of the man's nose disintegrating and felt the bite of teeth breaking against his knee cap. The guy collapsed backward on the beach, all at once choking and spitting blood and gasping for breath and crying like a small child, but this wasn't enough for Joe, because he was wild now, wilder than any animal, as wild as weather, a cyclone of anger and grief