True-Life Adventure

gaining on us.
    Freddie got up and made retching noises while Sardis and I examined Susanna. Sardis slapped gently at her face, but it was no good. She’d passed out.
    Sardis took her arms and I took her legs, but we couldn’t really pick her up. We were coughing too hard and our eyes were tearing too much and we were weak from not getting enough air to breathe. We had to drag her as best we could, Freddie stumbling along behind us, apparently unable to see anything at all now, because we kept hearing him bounce off one wall and then another.
    Bits of ash and embers flew around in the thick air— or atmosphere— it wasn’t really air at that point. Sometimes the embers landed on us and burned little holes in our clothes and shoulders or backs or wherever they happened to fall. The flames licked us and now and then our clothes caught fire and had to be swatted.
    When we got to the window Koehler had knocked out, Sardis heaved Susanna up. But she got only halfway. She dropped her. That wouldn’t have been so bad— Freddie and I could have managed— but Sardis’ nerves had hit their outer limit. She screamed once, and then started sobbing, sitting down where she was, apparently forgetting Susanna. The flames caught her hair. I had to drop Susanna and beat them out, with Sardis’ arms and hands grabbing at mine, trying to flail them away. I should have remembered Sardis’s trick for calming hysterics, the way she’d touched Lindsay’s face. But I didn’t till Freddie leaned over and hit her.
    I whirled around. “You son of a bitch.”
    I went for him, but he caught my wrist. “Easy, man. You get her and I’ll get Susanna.”
    I saw the wisdom of it and reached for her. Suddenly she snapped out of it, or recovered consciousness after being hit, or something. She put her arms around my neck and let me help her stand up. With her face close to my ear like that, she said something into it. “I love you, Paul,” she said, coughing out the syllables.
    I guess she said it because she thought we were going to die. I thought we might, too, and at that moment I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything.

CHAPTER 24
    Once
compos mentis
again, the three of us lifted Susanna through the window and onto the deck. And then my knees buckled and all of a sudden I was lying down, trying to take in all the air the cool gray city of love had to offer. Freddie and Sardis seemed to be doing the same, and Susanna suddenly made a huge gulping sound. She rolled over on her side and threw up. She made more gulping sounds and pretty soon all four of us were more or less all right, except maybe a little weak.
    Freddie apologized to Sardis for hitting her and she said it hadn’t really hurt at all and thanked him for it, and about then we remembered we were aboard a burning boat with a murderer. I thought I heard sirens in the distance, but I wasn’t sure.
    The fire was still crackling and smoke was boiling out of the broken window, but it seemed oddly safe on the open deck after what we’d just been through. Koehler had to be somewhere out there, but it was shadowy and we couldn’t see him. We joined hands and ran, single file, to the bow, to see if we could climb down somehow. I got there first and looked over the rail. I could see someone, I thought, in the shadows on the pier. The others joined me.
    Marilyn Markham stepped out of the darkness and raised her right arm. “Freeze or I’ll blow her head off,” she said. She was holding a pistol, pointing it at Sardis. In retrospect, I’m not sure we were in handgun range, but the effect was very impressive at the time. We froze.
    In fact, we stayed frozen for a few seconds, just staring at her. Then I heard a noise like unnnh right beside me. I jerked my head around and stared into a pair of terrified brown eyes. Sardis’s. Koehler was holding her from behind, a knife at her throat. Not a switchblade or a Bowie knife or a machete. A crummy Swiss army knife. But at the risk of repeating myself, the effect was impressive.
    Koehler backed Sardis out of range so that none of us could try any funny stuff. He spoke to Freddie: “Dump the camera in the water.”
    Marilyn trained her gun on Freddie. “No.”
    Freddie looked from one to the other, like someone watching a tennis match. The sirens I thought I heard were loud and clear all of a sudden.
    I heard something else. A thud, like something hitting the deck behind me. It was Sardis. Koehler had pushed her,