Sole Survivor

probably couldn't see the action on the dark beach.
        Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.
        Joe shouted, “Rose!”
        The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”
        “Rose!”
        “Shut up and turn around.”
        Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle.44 Magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”
        The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was dizzied by this turn of events.
        The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it'll do to your head?”
        Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”
        “Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it'll do,” said the new arrival. “It's a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”
        The storyteller hesitated.
        “Now.”
        Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe's feet.
        The saviour with the.44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”
        As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he ploughed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the.44-a black man dressed entirely in black-stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.
        The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.
        The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”
        More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where's Rose?”
        “This way, we've got her.”
        With the disabled agent's sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.
        He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.
        Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.
        He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.
        With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form-except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.
        Joe said, “Rose, are you all right?”
        “Just got… battered around a little,” she said in a voice taut with pain.
        “I heard a shot,” he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn't sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.
        She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. “I'm fine, Joe. I'll be