The Girl in the Maze (20 page)

Martha rested her chin on her knees and pushed a strand of ratty hair from her eyes, imagined what waited for her. Warm food. Soup, maybe. Painkillers. A soft, clean place where she could rest for a long time.

She was still filthy from her night in the marsh, a ragged beast covered with ugly pink welts. She didn't understand why this crisp, starch-clean young police officer was here, why he had taken an interest in her well-being.

Lenny tossed his cigarette butt into a pool of dank water near the curb.
That's 'cause he don't know what you really are. Ugly beast, killer. He'll know soon enough.

Tanner's face was steady, implacable. “Why don't you talk? Were you in some kind of accident?” Behind him, dark clouds hunched like toadstools. A raindrop landed on the plastic bill of his hat.

Martha knew she mustn't speak, but maybe her eyes could communicate. She tried to
think
messages to him. Maybe her eyes could say how much she wanted his help.

The radio on his belt squawked. “Forty-five…come in?”

Tanner stood up and pushed a button on the radio pinned to his shirt. “Ten-sixty. Go ahead.”

“Ambulance en route to River Street.” The female dispatch voice had a faint Southern accent. “We've got a ten thirty-one—looter inside Field's Department store, corner of Fifth and Abercorn. Car sixty-three has arrived and requests backup. Can you report?”

Tanner tucked his chin and pushed a button on the radio. “Is there another car in the area? Please advise.”

“Negative, ten seventy-four.”

“I'd rather not leave this girl here alone. What's the ETA on the ambulance?”

“Uh…should be there in about five to ten minutes. All other units are busy. Please advise.”

Tanner crouched low and looked at Martha. “I hate to leave you here, but we're spread pretty thin today. They'll be here in just a few minutes. You aren't going to wander off anywhere, are you?” Martha returned his gaze.
Don't leave me.

“It's all right. You'll be in good hands.” Tanner stood, spoke into the radio. “I don't think she's in any shape to get very far by herself. Subject will be seated on the curb in front of Ambrosia Coffee, Forty-three River Street.”

“Additional description?”

“Wearing what looks like a white dress…hard to tell. No shoes. Looks like she's been lying in the mud. Brown hair, matted. Maybe homeless, maybe in shock. Tell them to prep for hypoxia, anemia…some minor lacerations.”

“Ten-four.”

Tanner put his face very close to hers and peered straight into her eyes. “Now, you listen here. I've got to answer a call, but an ambulance is on its way. They're going to help you. Do you understand?”

Martha let her eyes speak for her. They said,
Don't leave
.

“Don't be afraid, they'll take good care of you.”

Stay here with me
.

He touched her shoulder tenderly. Even though she was filthy, and he was clean. She wondered how there could be such people in the world, people who were strong, yet caring and gentle.

“Just stay right here. Don't go anywhere, everything's going to be all right.”

Tanner turned, scuffed down the sidewalk, and got into the cruiser. The car rumbled down River Street and turned a corner. The roof lights came on and the siren echoed against the buildings, fading.

She was alone in the street again except for Lenny, who sat next to her on the curb, lighting a fresh cigarette.

Sorry about that, Lovie
.
They leave you every time, don't they? They have to. If you listened to me, they wouldn't hurt you so much. I'm the only one you can count on, innit?

Martha put her face into her knees.

So what's the plan?

“I'm going to wait, like he said.”

Lenny stood, brushing flecks of ash off his legs.
C'mon, girl, now's our chance. Let's do a bunk. That meat wagon is going to take you back to hospital. Weren't that fun? We said we'd never do that again, didn't we, Lovie? They're going to fuck with you in there
.

Martha rolled her head back and forth over her arms. She wanted to give up, to relinquish herself. Let others sort out her fate. She just wanted to rest, that was all. But she also knew what Lenny was saying was true.

Get your ass moving, girl. They'll truss you up like a pig. Stick needles in your ass, your arms, and your face. They'll cut out pieces of your brain and your soul. They'll have you forever, end of story.

Martha remembered the last time…how sick she felt.

That was supposed to be a one-time deal, right, Lovie?

Martha could hear a wail in the distance, another siren. This one was different—shrill, piercing. A scream of panic. It was getting closer.

She put her palms against the curb and pushed. She shifted her weight onto her feet. Her vision went black and she leaned over and struggled to keep her balance. When the dusky film began to clear from her eyes she rose up, steadied herself, and limped toward the cobblestone alley.

The alley connected with a narrow street that ran behind the stores and restaurants of River Street. The street slanted down toward the middle, where there was a shallow cement gutter. On one side was a high palisade wall that gave the area an enclosed feeling. Trash cans overflowed, and Dumpsters sat at random angles along the wall. The air smelled of sour milk.

Martha heard the ambulance pull to a stop on the other side of the block, followed by the squawk of radios.
Hide, Martha. Vanish.
She gripped the edge of a Dumpster and hopped around it and lowered herself to the pavement.

Black plastic garbage bags were bunched on the pavement, attended by bloated flies. She sank herself among the bags, merging into their creases. Something wet and sticky seeped along the pavement underneath. Her own smell—caked mud, moist vegetation, moss—mingled with the stench of the garbage. She reached into an open bag and scooped detritus over herself—a flattened milk carton, tin cans specked with coffee grounds, eggshell remnants, a blackened banana peel. She found two paper plates stuck together and pulled them apart to reveal a brown paste. It was full of squirming maggots. They writhed, danced, celebrated.
They celebrate your death, Martha.

Martha's chest spasmed.

Control yourself, Lovie. If you retch, they'll find you.

She dry-heaved.

Don't fight the garbage, Martha. Accept it. Become part of it. Become
of
it. You are nothing. You
are
garbage.

She relaxed, accepted the foulness, sank into it, vanished. Her spasms slowed.

Around the corner, demons chanted:
You kill, to die. You kill, to die. You kill, to die.
She also could hear the squawk of radios, voices, footsteps in the alley. A loudspeaker was moving along the main street, projecting messages. Some of the messages were incomprehensible, but all were about her, the terrible danger she had brought.

Things were crawling on Martha's skin—the tickle of footpads, the writhe of segmented bodies. She resisted the urge to move, to scratch. Instead, she focused on the sounds of the street, the messages, the chanting.

Evacuation order…
she kept hearing that phrase in the din, and she liked the sound of it, the idea of it. If she could only stay still and hide long enough, there would be no one left to find her.

She heard the EMT voices get closer. Footsteps in the alley approached the Dumpster, paused, moved on. “I'm going to check down by the waterfront,” someone said. The footsteps and voices receded, heading in different directions. A quiet, understated rumble of thunder was the last thing she heard before sinking into an exhausted oblivion.

Martha was in the marsh again. This time it was high tide. She was in the water now, being swept along by a river current. She was floating on her back, like a raft or log, and above her the sky was gray and turbulent. The sky was sobbing, hurling thousands of teardrops, dissolving the boundaries between air and water. She was swept along, knowing she had no other choice. The water had plans for her.

The river tumbled into the ocean and she was swept out to sea, subsumed by sea foam, rolled under the waves and carried into twilight depths, sinking toward murky structures of coral and stone.

On the floor of the ocean she saw a car—her parents' old Saturn. Martha could see the pale faces of her parents through the front windshield. She swam toward them.

The car was full of seawater. Inside, her parents' faces bobbed like mushrooms, hair billowing around their faces.

Her father was banging his fist against the window, pointing at the door handle. He opened his mouth and made a garbled sound, bubbles escaping. He banged on the window again, pointing. Martha grabbed the handle and yanked. The door was stuck. Floating, she braced her feet against the door and pulled with all her strength. The car shifted. She looked down and saw a chasm opening on the seafloor, releasing an orange glow. Her father opened his mouth again, saying something she couldn't understand. She jerked again and again. Her father kept banging. The fissure widened and the Saturn tumbled into the vortex, dragging her along.

She was lost in an upward surge of bubbles. Then the bubbles cleared, and she found she was floating again, suspended, no longer in seawater, but in something thicker, some biotic fluid. It had a dark reddish tint. She heard a dull hum that was both inside her head and outside of her.

She had lost the car, her parents were gone, and she was floating in a glowing red cavern, crisscrossed with great tubes, like blood vessels. Amoebae floated through the vitreous fluid, dozens of them, wheeling and drifting.

One of the amoebae landed on a vessel. It bent its translucent ectoplasm into an L shape. Martha thought it was looking at her…or
would
be looking at her, if it had a face.

“There isn't anyone coming here, you know,” the amoeba said, crossing its pseudopodia. “You have to help yourself.”

“How? I don't even know where I am. I can't do anything sensible.”

“No, you can't. You need help.” The amoeba wrinkled a dark, jellied mass near its top. Martha thought it might be an eye. But amoebae don't have eyes, she remembered. What was that part called?
The contractile vacuole.

“But who can help me?” Martha asked. “They all want to put me away. There's no one I can count on. No one.”

“No one at all? Think hard.”

The amoeba's upper region contracted into a different shape. Cilia clustered around its chin, or where its chin would be, offering her a clue.

“Yes, that's right. Think of your friends. Who can you trust?”

With that, the amoeba oozed back into an amorphous shape and rolled forward, peeling itself from the vessel. “Who can you trust?” it repeated as it rejoined the others, which were drifting like snowflakes toward the impenetrable murk below.

There was a loud
BOOM,
a thunderclap, and Martha surged upward, rushed violently toward the surface.

Martha woke to see a river of water streaming across the pavement, carrying bits of debris: cigarette butts, leaves, pine straw. Her skin was wet and she smelled ozone in the air. Above her, the gray metal canister of a transformer smoked. Wind howled in the alley, and the wires connected to the transformer swung and twanged. The streetlights were out.
It's the transformer,
she thought. The transformer had blown. The light was darker now, gray, not quite night.

The rain beat down, drumming on the Dumpster lid, tapping on the dark green plastic around her head. An eave above the Dumpster poured out water in a gush.

The image of Vince, from the dream, lingered in her mind like a bulwark amid the chaos. His office phone number, burned into memory, marched through her head. Maybe that's what the amoeba meant—
the answer is within
. If she could find a phone, she would call him, and he would take her someplace safe and dry, someplace warm, and they would talk. She would explain what really happened, about Lydia's murder, and he would believe her. She listened to her own thoughts inside her head. The demon chants had disappeared, replaced by the hissing and drumming of the rain. She had a chance, an opening.
Yes, yes.

Martha grasped the edge of the Dumpster and pulled herself to her feet. Her wet clothes stuck to her body, and she was shivering. She stepped around the corner and headed back out toward the main street.

She reached the sidewalk, held on to the masonry, and glanced up and down the dull gray waterfront, looking for someone she might borrow change from to make the call, but River Street was deserted. No one in sight—not even a car.
CLOSED
signs hung in the shop windows, many of which were crisscrossed with tape or boarded up with plywood.

The rain pattered steadily on the cobblestone street and prickled her skin. She started down the sidewalk.
This is a tourist area,
she thought.
There must be phones somewhere
….

She rested against the wall of a T-shirt shop, sheltered from the rain by a canvas awning. Behind the taped glass, a T-shirt read
GEORGIA: SQUEEZE MY PEACHES.
She shifted her weight to rest against the sill, and heard something crackle beneath her feet.

She hopped backward, leaned against the wall, and picked two small shards of glass from the bottom of her foot. The dots of blood mingled with the rainwater and flowed through the creases in her sole.

She looked up and saw the source of the glass fragments. Broken triangles hung like dinosaur teeth inside the window to a second-story office. They dangled from tape strips.

Looking at the sidewalk, Martha noticed larger pieces of glass in front of the shattered doorway to a store. The sign above the storefront read
MITCHELL'S CAMERA & ELECTRONICS
. The door stood partway open, the jamb busted. Splintered wood. The shelves behind the window were disheveled and empty, the display merchandise gone. Security cords dangled like umbilical cords.