Children of Paranoia by Trevor Shane Page B

piercing the skin on my arm. The cabbie couldn’t move the knife fast enough through the water to do too much damage. He soon realized that stabbing wasn’t working, so he began to saw into the back of my hand with the knife. The pain was intense, the newly opened wound immediately becoming flush with salt water. After only a few strokes over the skin on my hand, I could feel the knife scraping against bone. Unfortunately for the cabbie, the pain helped to keep me focused. As the pain increased, I simply pulled my arm in tighter, knowing that the sooner the cabbie died, the sooner the pain would stop. I closed my eyes as tight as I could and bit down on the inside of my cheek. The sawing became less intense. Then it stopped altogether. The body in my arms went limp under the water. The cabbie was dead.
    I let the body go and it began to float away from me in the darkness. In a heartbeat or two, the body vanished in the blackness as if it had never existed. Then everything came back to me and I remembered where I was. I was underwater. I had been underwater for a few minutes now and I needed to breathe. There were still two people above the surface trying to kill me. I was bleeding and tired.
    During our struggle, the waves had pushed me and the cabbie even closer to the shoreline. When I kicked my feet to try to swim to the surface, they began knocking against the ocean’s sandy bottom. I pushed myself up off the sand and headed toward the water’s surface. When my head cracked through the surface, I took a deep gasp of the cool night air. I was spent. I breathed in and then I simply leaned back and floated for a moment in the water. I had floated to within twenty feet of the beach, to within twenty feet of the man on the beach with the gun who wanted to kill me. I couldn’t move. After only a second’s respite, I felt a hand grab my hair. The hand began pulling me toward the shore. I was glad to get away from the dark water, glad to get away from the waves. Dying on the beach seemed pleasant by comparison.
    The dark-haired agent stopped swimming after a few minutes and began walking in the shallow water. I was still too tired to budge. I simply floated on my back as he dragged me along the surface of the water by my hair. It didn’t hurt until my body hit the beach. When we got to the beach, he just continued to drag me along the sand by the clump of my hair that he held in his fists. Now there was pain. The pain helped me to regain consciousness. Still, I didn’t fight. It was pointless now. I was trying to conserve energy. I was hoping there would be one last chance for survival. I just needed an opening.
    Eventually, the dark-haired agent let go of my hair and dropped me back down onto the sand. A moment later, the gray-haired leader was shining a flashlight in my face with one hand and pointing his gun at me with the other. The light from the flashlight was blinding. My eyes had gotten used to the darkness. “Where’s Trevor?” I heard a voice behind the light say to me. I assumed Trevor was the cabdriver.
    â€œShark food,” I mumbled.
    â€œYeah?” the leader spoke, barely acknowledging that his colleague was dead. “Well, you’re next.” Then I saw a shadow move quickly into the light. It was the heel of a shoe. Before I even had time to process the information, it smashed hard into my nose. I was dazed for a second. They flipped me over. Someone pushed my face into the sand, pulled my hands behind my back, and tethered my wrists together with a plastic ring. This was all done in one motion, in about five seconds. They had done this before.
    Once my hands were secured behind my back, the gray-haired man flipped me over again. I spit the sand out of my mouth and tried to get a good look at him. I’d never seen him before, not in person. Maybe I’d seen a picture. I couldn’t remember. He glared into my face as if he were trying to read