He was drenched, hair plastered to his head, breathing hard, his thin white t-shirt stuck to his check, rucked up at the back, exposing two long, bloody scrapes, and a patch of angry red skin. He jumped over the side of the boat, and then somehow managed to lift another man out behind him, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of wet cement. The moment he saw me, he started to run through the water in my direction.
“Don’t just stand there, Lang. Come on. Rally.” Grabbing me by the arm with his free hand, he started dragging me out of the water after him. I tripped and stumbled, barely kept up, but then I was on my knees in the sand, ears full of water, and Sully was taking my hands and placing them on the lifeless man he’d laid out in front of me.
“Like this,” he said. “Link your hands together and compress. Up and down, up and down. Don’t stop until I get back.”
I pumped my interlinked hands up and down on the guy’s chest like he showed me, stunned, unable to breathe a word, and Sully ran back the way we’d come. His shoes were gone, feet bare. Had he taken them off in the boat? Had he lost them in the ocean? There was blood on my arm. Blood on the sand next to me where he’d just been standing.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
I kept up with the compressions, not daring to stop. The roar of the boat’s engine shuttered into life again, and when I twisted, looking back over my shoulder, Sully and Linneman were already lifting the boat on their shoulders again, heading back out past the break.
“They’re going back out?” I looked around, searching for someone to tell me what the hell was going on, but the people on the beach were frantically running to cars, carrying blankets, carrying bodies, administering CPR like I was, and no one heard me.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
One, two, three, four.
I looked down into the man’s face lying before me. His lips were blue, parted, showing white teeth. His skin was worn like leather. Late sixties? Early seventies? How many storms had he weathered out on these waters? How many times had he nearly lost his life and won it back?
I fell into a trance. I kept pumping my hands up and down on the stranger’s chest until my arms burned and ached, and I felt like I couldn’t go on another moment, and then I carried on some more.
Another ambulance arrived, and then a sound, like the beating of a drum, like the racing of my heart, a paddle thumping at the air, everyone looking up, looking relieved. An air ambulance, bright red and white, descending from the heavens like a wrathful archangel. EMTs poured out of the chopper, jump bags over their shoulders, scattering across the beach.
“Ma’am? Ma’am, thank you. If you could step back for a moment, I can take a look at him now.” The young guy standing in front of me didn’t look old enough to professionally save lives. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, though, as he dropped to his knees and began checking vitals.
“No pulse. How long have you been administering CPR, ma’am?”
The sky seemed to break open, and a bright, white light lanced down through the grim morning, illuminating the beach briefly before the clouds pressed in again.
“Ma’am?”
“Hmm?”
“How long have you been administering CPR for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Was he awake when he was brought out of the water?”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. This man’s dead. Can I check you over? Have you been in the water?”
“No, no, I’m fine. I—” My brain wasn’t working. Everything was snapshots, stills, shunting and jumping around, hard to focus on. The EMT wrapped a blanket made of a silver, crinkly material around my shoulders and sat me down on a bench by the pier.
“Stay here, ma’am. Someone will be over to check on you in just a moment, okay?” The young EMT raced off, and I sat, trying to piece together what was happening.
It was a long, long time before the boat came back again.
When it did, I watched as Sully and Linneman dragged another five men from the boat, through the break, and onto the beach.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” one of the EMTs said. “The guy in the white shirt swam out for all of them. He went in after every single one of them.”
“That’s Sully Fletcher,” another said.
“Ronan Fletcher’s brother?”
“S’right.”
“Huh. I guess heroics runs in the family.”
I didn’t hear anything else. I watched as Sully raced back and forth up the beach, trying to coordinate everyone, brushing his wet hair back out of his eyes, ripping his wet shirt off over his head to hold the drenched material to an elderly guy’s forehead, applying pressure. I watched him secure the boat, pulling it into shore, the muscles in his back straining and popping as he worked—he was hurt pretty badly, his skin scraped and red and bloody. I watched as he helped lift a guy onto a stretcher, and then I watched as he buckled at the knees and fell to the ground, his eyes rolling back in his head.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Good Samaritan