Page 183 of The Bone Code

How long can a person survive without oxygen? One minute? Three?

A rational fragment of my spiraling mind reached out.

Don’t panic!

Futile. Terror was overriding all logic.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t thrash. Nothing existed but a desperate need to pull air into my lungs.

How long had I been under? A minute? Ninety seconds?

Bizarre images flared. My body in a blue plastic shroud inside a polypropylene bin. A confused fisherman reeling me in.

I lost all sense of time

Two minutes?

Black clouds began gathering behind my closed lids. Coalescing. I was slipping over the brink into unconsciousness.

Then the instinct to survive won out. Turning my dread inward, I bucked ferociously with my upper body. An arm popped free. I thrust it into the pool, oblivious to the pain of skin lost to stone.

Huger pushed my head deeper under the surface.

Feeling around blindly with my semi-numb fingers, I located an indentation six inches below the coping. The skimmer. Planting my palm on the box’s horizontal surface, I thrust upward with all the strength I could muster.

This time, the element of surprise was mine. Caught off guard by the re-angling of my torso, Huger relaxed the pressure on the back of my skull. Taking advantage, I drove upward, twisted my limbs, and jerked my head wildly. The sudden movement pitched my attacker sideways onto the decking.

I raised my head above the water and sucked air into my throat. Desperate for breath. Desperate for life.

Huger grabbed my hair and tried clawing me back. Gasping and blinking water, I lashed out and caught him with a thumb to one eye. He recoiled, yelping in pain.

Forcing down a wave of nausea, I levered myself up onto all fours and scrabbled backward.

Far off, a siren wailed. Or was it an auditory illusion, the product of oxygen deprivation?

One gaggle of neurons was still receiving and processing input.

The gun! Where’s the gun?

My eyes swept the deck. No Glock.

I struggled to my feet and, legs rubber, bent to search under the closest of the chaises. No gun.

Realizing what I was after, Huger sprang up, bore down, and headbutted me in the gut. Arms pinwheeling, lungs in spasm, I stumbled backward, Huger again clinging like a leech. A flailing hand brushed one of Anne’s potted ferns. I wrapped my fingers around the stem, roundhouse-swung the plant, and clocked Huger on the temple.

He cried out but held tight. We both went down. My head took dual blows, front and back. As my occipital smacked travertine, Huger sledgehammered his forehead into my frontal.

My vision blurred. Shards of pain sliced through every lobe of my brain.

Conjoined as before, Huger and I rolled in a turbulent mess of broken terra-cotta, scattered soil, and torn fronds. I was in good shape. But he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds. And, though older, was fit.

After much sweating and grunting and thrashing, Huger muscled himself topside, planted a knee on each of my arms, and wrapped my throat in a viselike grip. I looked up into his face. A vein snaked one brow, bloated and throbbing. Below the vein, his eyes were dead and soulless. Not human eyes. Malevolent eyes. Black hole eyes.

Desperate, I clamped both hands onto Huger’s wrists. He wriggled one arm loose and brought the side of his hand down on my larynx. I elbowed him in the gut, then, pumping my arm viciously, forced him off with a series of fist blows. Wheezing and trembling, I rolled sideways, then scuttled away.

The gun!

My gaze darted wildly.