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 and frustration, and he kicked where he thought ribs would be, which hurt him almost as much as it hurt the broken man who received the blow, because Joe was only wearing Nikes, not hard-toed shoes, so he tried to stomp the guy’s throat and crush his windpipe, but stomped his chest instead—and would have tried again, would have killed him, not quite realizing that he was doing so, but then he was rammed from behind by a third attacker.
Joe slammed facedown onto the beach, with the weight of this new assailant atop him, at least two hundred pounds pinning him down. Head to one side, spitting sand, he tried to heave the man off, but this time his breath was knocked out of him; he exhaled all of his strength with it, and he lay helpless.
Besides, as he gasped desperately for air, he felt his attacker thrust something cold and blunt against the side of his face, and he knew what it must be even before he heard the threat.
“You want me to blow your head off, I’ll do it,” the stranger said, and his reverberant voice had a ragged homicidal edge. “I’ll do it, you asshole.”
Joe believed him and stopped resisting. He struggled only for his breath.