The Monster Collinswood
an excerpt

The creature coughed out a mouthful of sand. The sudden agony that shot through his chest forced him to stop trying to breathe, and he lay there awhile, face-down, angling his head slightly so the foul seawater dribbled out the gap in his lips. He concentrated on breathing more slowly; visualized tiny sacs in his lungs taking in air. Eventually the pain subsided, only to reveal a more deep seated, numbing ache that ran through his whole body.

It took the creature several minutes to register 'whole body' in his consciousness. When he finally succeeded, the thought almost amused him. It was, at least, the first step toward possibly regaining control of his whole body and moving it from this place.

Wherever he was.

He was on land. The ocean still lingered in his stomach and lungs, and he could hear its rhythm nearby, similar but not identical to the sound of it lapping at the metal sides of a boat. It must have been some distance away, receding with the tide, because he didn't feel wet. Just painfully immobile and covered in sand. Maybe... maybe with time and grim determination he could...

...staying conscious would help. He was cold. Deathly cold. Death wouldn't, well, he wasn't sure what he thought about death. It was a pain-ending option, certainly. Was it an option at all? Could one simply wish one's body dead and make it so? It seemed unlikely. Willing oneself from one form of living to another was the much more viable reality.

That was assuming he could even comprehend reality through all this pain.

He focused on his breathing.... in, out.... in, out.... slow and rhythmic like the waves. The sun shed a cold grey light around him. Salt, and salty decaying things, perfumed the air he still struggled to breathe. Nearby, things moved. Animals, maybe. Birds. He'd always wondered what those birds constantly circling over the boat looked like up close. Were they small or large? He'd never gotten a good glimpse of them from his shadowy hideaways.

Something made a crunching noise in the sand. Before he'd had much time to wonder what it was, it was upon him.

Boots. Boots with a person in them. He saw their tips with his one exposed eye, and then his vision blurred and blanked out as the person made contact and his body felt pain in a whole new set of ways. The creature briefly thought of curling up defensively. But, this time, even that pathetic gesture was impossible.

He resigned himself to whatever was to come. And then the person moved away from him, boots crunching on bits of shell and dried-out husks. From some distance away, he heard the voice shout, "Wilmot!" More crunching, more distance. "Wilmot!" she cried again – the creature determined by that time that it was a woman's voice. The realization made him less uneasy. A woman, for some reason, frightened him less.

But soon she was gone; out of sight, out of hearing range, leaving him alone again with the sand and the pain and the awful cold. The creature considered willing himself to his feet in order to flee. His state of full consciousness and his immobility seemed a cruel trick; by far not the first he'd suffered, and still not enough to actually kill him.

Yet.

There was still time. If he could not move, death would be a physical certainty. If the woman came back for him, she might bring more torment and ultimately a quicker death. Were women capable of torment? The monster drew upon his memories in search of an answer. He found none, but the act of recounting his memories served to pass the time more productively. He assured himself after several minutes that he quite remembered who he was and how he'd gotten there.

And presently, the woman returned. He'd suspected she would. A thing of some size followed behind her; the creature couldn't see it well enough to identify it until they were right upon him. It was a... a cart of some sort. A wheeled cart. With a second person pushing it.

"There," she said.

"Is he still alive?" the companion, a man, said.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. Let me just cover him. Then help me. Careful; he's probably suffering from hypothermia." He found he could understand something of what they were saying. Comprehending speech was a skill he hadn't quite known he had, but he must have developed it somehow. The simplest words, at least, rang with some vague meaning.

A greyish shape flared out and enveloped him, and he felt the woman's hands picking and pulling at him until he was mostly covered. He lay still, utterly helpless, and let the two humans handle him. They lifted him up, one at his head and the other at his waist, and twisted him upward with an excruciating blast of pain.

"Stop, Wil, stop!" the woman demanded. "He's choking! Grab him, yeah, like that. Oh God. Do you know the Heimlich Maneuver?"

The monster felt the man hug him around his chest, the big, solid hands making fists in front, and was sure the man would kill him on the spot with a single violent squeeze.

Seawater spurted out of his mouth, and then the woman said, "He's breathing. He's all right. Let's get him in the wheelbarrow."

"Ugh, sure stinks," the man grumbled. "You sure about this, El? You know what you're doing?"

"Course I do," she said. She pulled the blanket around his legs and put one arm under to support them as the creature was hoisted up and over. "Be gentle! He might have internal injuries."

"Love, if he's got internal injuries," the man puffed very close to the monster's ear, "he won't survive anything short of a trip to the ER."

The monster was dumped into the wheelbarrow. His legs were tucked up against his chest and his arms were wrapped around those. "I know that," the woman said softly. "We'll bring him to the ER later. I'll have to get the boat ready, and what should I do in the meantime? Leave him here? Think he'd survive here?"

The woman rearranged the blanket so that it covered most everything. Everything but his head. He wished they'd take the extra effort to drape his head in shadow. He didn't like the daylight and he didn't really want to see where they were going.

The woman grunted crossly as she gawked at him. "I should've brought more blankets. He's going to smack his head every time he hits a pebble." She tugged at her sleeve and slid her outer garment off. "Wil, here, give me your coat too."

She balled her jacket up and tucked it behind the creature's shoulders and head to make a cushion against the edge of the wheelbarrow. When Wil handed her his own coat, a slick, shiny, knee-length slate brown garment, she placed it over him. The hood fell over his face, but to his great dismay, she pulled it down just enough to give him a window to the world.

He closed his eyes; it seemed to be the best he could do.

Then the movement started; the bumping, halting, jarring journey to someplace he refused to see. He hugged his long, scarred legs tightly to his exhausted chest, ignoring the discomfort of the effort, and concentrated on breathing. His lungs would need a lot of work. Every part of his body would. Nothing worked exactly right, he was sure; one reason for that was that he had no idea what he was doing. Life just sort of happened, and he'd managed to drift involuntarily through it. As a result, when things broke, he couldn't always fix them.

For instance, there was his upper lip. A particularly violent blow to the head had split it wide open, and it hadn't healed properly. One side drooped over his lower lip, and the other side lifted where the scar had formed and created a gap.