The Seventh Wave. Episode 47.

Episode 47

There’s a blackout. The power lines are down. They are in the living room, in the darkness. The eye of the storm is right overhead; there’s not even a beat between the lightning and the thunder. With each flash the dunes appear, then disappear. The sea is huge tonight. The tide is in and the force of the waves is like nothing either of them have seen before. They smash into the house like train crashes. Like an express train crashing into the house over and over again, wrecking itself, getting up off the floor, coming at the house again, and wrecking itself again. The house is shaking. As the minutes go by, and then the hours, the battering of the waves continues, relentless, undiminished. The house may not be able to take a whole night of this. They will just have to hope it can.

The wind shakes the windows. They are kneeling on the floor amid the ruin of the Manhattan jigsaw, holding each other, shivering, lost in fevered madness.

“Who’s out there,” he asks Anna. “Are they out there? Are they coming for us? Who are those guys.”

“I’ll tell you what they aren’t,” she says. “They aren’t sharpshooters. They’re just muscle. Gorillas from the gorilla house.”

“So instead of picking you off from a distance, they come in and beat you to death.”

“Yeah. But there’s something they don’t know.”

“Which is.”

“Which is who they’re dealing with here. Gunslingers. With degrees in gunplay from the fucking MTA. You and me. Butch Cassidy and the fucking Sundance Kid.”

“Did Butch Cassidy love the Sundance Kid?”

“They shared a brass bed in Bolivia,” she says. “With Etta Place in between. And it wasn’t even a queen-sized mattress.”

“And after Etta left it was just the two of them.”

“Yes.”

“So it was love.”

“Until death did them part.”

“Let’s not get parted by death just yet.”