The entire building shook and the roof caved in, spilling 50,000 gallons of water into the room, the torrent sweeping tables and chairs and people right out the windows. He held on tight, the current raging against him. Suddenly, Marty’s rope slipped free of the pillar and he felt himself tumbling across the floor towards the San Francisco skyline and a 90-story drop.
“No!” he screamed, the water carrying him out into the night sky, sending him plummeting in cartwheels to the ground.
Suddenly the piss blankets around him pulled taut, and he was dangling in daylight just a few feet over the doomed 747, stewardess Karen Black staring up at him through the gaping, ragged gash in the cockpit. Her eyes told Marty everything, told him of her desperation, her fear, her need for him. Without him, they had no hope.
Marty looked up, following the string of piss-blankets back to the Army helicopter that was maneuvering him towards the pilotless airliner. He motioned to them to bring him down even closer, until Karen was able to grab him by his belt and guide him inside the plane.
As soon as his feet touched the cockpit floor, he grabbed hold of the pilot’s seat to steady himself and released his urine-soaked lifeline. The helicopter immediately veered off to watch the drama unfold from a safe distance.
“Thank God you’re here,” Karen clutched him like a long-lost lover which, he realized, he probably was. “There’s nobody flying the plane.”
“There is now,” Marty gently pulled himself away from her as her uniform transformed into a one-piece bathing suit. The old lady smelled of coconut oil and held a roll of toilet paper out to him.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll bring this baby down safely.”
Marty settled into the pilot’s seat, only now it had become the driver’s seat of a pick-up truck. He confidently took the steering wheel in his hands, wrenching it hard to the left, barely missing the fireball that shot out of the La Brea tar pit.
The pick-up truck skidded across Wilshire Boulevard, another fireball blasting the asphalt away in front of him. He wrenched the wheel again, the truck nearly rolling over as he skillfully avoided a streaking ball of molten death.
“Hold on,” Marty yelled to Anne Heche, the beautiful, headstrong, presently heterosexual geologist beside him. He brought the car to a skidding stop. “Get out!”
They dived out of the truck just as a fireball slammed into it, blasting it to bits.
“Run!” Marty took Anne’s hand and together they ran through the rain of fire spilling from the geyser of lava that towered over the LA County Museum.
At last, they were outside the reach of the molten spray, safely shielded by a tall building. He squeezed her hand and turned to her. “We made it.”
Only Anne was gone. He was holding her dismembered arm.
Marty dropped it, screaming, and looked back the way he came. And then he saw Molly, trapped in her Volvo, slowly being consumed by the hellfire, her eyes pleading with him…
The sound of the gunshot shattered the image like glass and Marty bolted upright on the couch, eyes wide open, disoriented, frightened, his heart pounding.
Marty was in the lobby of an office. A breeze, and shafts of sunlight, came in through the blown out windows on the eastern side of the floor.
Then it all came back to him.
Where he was. What had happened.
Scattered memories of the nightmare, both the real one of the day before and the imagined one of his slumber, drifted across his mind.
Marty looked at his watch. It was 6:50 Wednesday morning. His mouth was dry, his lips chapped. His skin itched under clothes as stiff as cardboard. His ankle throbbed in the same spot where it fractured in the second grade. Even so, Marty felt a lot better than he did last night.
He reached down to unzip his pack and winced in pain. It felt like he was snapping muscles instead of stretching them, as if he was waking from the dead and discovering his body frozen by rigor mortis. He found a bottle of Evian, cracked it open, and drank it hungrily, letting the extra water spill over his lips and down his cheeks. He was tipping his head back for that last, glorious drop of water when his gaze fell on the chair across from him.
Marty gasped, choking on the water, coughing and gagging as he stared in horrified disbelief at what was sitting there.
Buck was slumped in the chair, his stiff body completely caked in dried mud and flecks of broken glass. The bounty hunter had clawed his way out of the grave to haunt him.
This wasn’t possible. It had to be a mirage.
Marty picked up the empty Evian bottle and threw it at Buck. The bottle bounced off Buck’s forehead and rolled across the floor.
Buck’s eyes flashed open and Marty yelped again, startled.
“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Buck rasped, straightening up in the chair.
Marty stared at him. “Are you for real?”
“Did you just throw a fucking bottle at me”
“It was empty,” Marty stammered.
“Is that how you usually wake somebody up You could show a little fucking consideration, especially after what I’ve been through.”
Marty examined Buck closely. It was unbelievable. Impossible. Nobody could have survived that flood and found him.
“You’re actually here, alive.” Marty said, more as a question than a statement.
“You got a problem with that, Marv?”
“It’s Marty. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Whatever. Give me one of those frog waters. It feels like someone took a shit in my mouth.”
Marty tossed him a water.
Buck caught it, twisted off the cap, and took a big swallow, gargling the water and spitting it out on the floor. He spit a few more times, then drank the rest of the bottle.
Buck stiffened, his eyes widening. “Oh, shit.”
He abruptly leaned over and heaved a stream of vomit that would make Linda Blair proud. Marty scrambled out of the way, taking his pack with him. Buck kept heaving, his whole body spasming with each violent discharge.
When it finally stopped, Buck hunched over, exhausted, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his head sag down between his legs.
“Jesus,” Buck muttered. “I must have swallowed the entire fucking stairwell.”
“You were in the stairwell?” Marty asked.
“How the hell do you think I got in here?”
“I have no idea,” Marty sat on the arm of the couch, looking at him. “It makes no sense to me. I saw you walk away. You weren’t anywhere near me or this building.”
“I doubled back and followed you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re so goddamn helpless. I wanted to make sure you at least got to Cahuenga alive,” Buck lifted his head. “I never thought you’d end up saving my ass.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Marty said. “I didn’t even see you.”
“I was just standing there, staring at that fucking wave, when you bolted right past me. Snapped me out of a fucking trance. I ran after you into the building, but the water caught me just as I got to the stairwell. I couldn’t see a fucking thing, I could barely move. It was like swimming through wet cement. Just when I thought I was gonna drown, I hit a railing, grabbed it, and started pulling myself through the shit, and I mean shit. I got out, crawled up a few steps, and fainted like a fairy. Woke up two hours later beside the fucking woman from Jaws.”
Marty didn’t want to think about the woman in the stairwell again. “Sounds to me like you saved yourself.”
“I followed you,” Buck said. “You led me into the stairwell, therefore you saved my life. Almost makes me
