For the Dead (14 page)

“Over?” he pants.

“Over.”

On the other side, visible through the wire, is a weedy field, and in the center of it is a chunk of concrete blight, the asymmetrical ruin of an abandoned hotel that was partially demolished and left to mildew in the rain seven or eight years ago. As she swings a leg over the top of the fence, she hears the men shouting behind her.
She shoves herself free, lands loosely, rolls, and comes up running again, with Andrew right beside her.

“Those men—” he says. It’s all air.

“
Yes
. The last few pictures on the phone. The ones in the hotel room.”

“Where to?”

She risks a glance back and sees the two short men struggling to climb the fence. “There,” she says, indicating the ruined hotel. “Come on.”

Andrew ups the pace just a bit, but she stays with him, the weeds whipping at her legs. The men are shouting to each other, but then, suddenly, she and Andrew are at the hotel, and she leads him around the shell and through a gaping wall into the ruin of a lobby that’s been stripped to the concrete. Across the room, a long rectangle cut into the gritty tiles shows where the reception desk once stood. Beyond that a dark doorway leads to the offices. At either side of the lobby, corridors lead right and left.

The last time she was here, it was dark, but she remembers,
left
, and she grabs hold of Andrew’s slender wrist and charges into the corridor as fast as she can haul him, and then he’s even with her and pulling his hand free so he can pump both arms.

Miaow says, “Room one-sixteen,” and breaks off, almost stumbling as she sees that there are no room numbers. They’ve been stolen, pulled off, put to use elsewhere. Gone.

She slows, time stuttering to an end. Without the room numbers to guide her, the hallway is a dead end. She’s led him into a dead end.

Andrew says, “Ummmmm,” looking behind him, almost dancing in his eagerness to move, and Miaow spots the ghost of a number on the nearest door, just a shadow where the paint beneath the missing number hasn’t faded. It says
107
.

“That side,” she says, pointing at the opposite side of the hall. She points at the door almost directly across from 107 and guesses, “One-oh-eight, come on,” and they’re hurrying together.
“One-ten, one-twelve, one-fourteen, one-sixteen.” She stops and peers at the ghost number, not really readable, and pushes the door open anyway, and there it is: at one corner of the empty room, a hole kicked in the wall to the right, a jagged frame of plaster surrounding darkness.

She motions Andrew into the room, hearing the men’s feet scraping over the lobby floor like grit between teeth. One of them calls out, the words distorted by echo, and is answered by a voice she somehow knows belongs to the golden man. There’s the sound of running feet, which she places in the lobby, and then nothing.

The men have fallen silent, and the silence is more frightening than the noise.

Andrew stands loose and bewildered in the center of a room that was once white, but now is the faded pale of long-exposed bone, its cracked windows milky with dust. A heap of plaster and small floor tiles at the door to the bathroom announces that the toilet and sink have been pulled out and hauled away.

Miaow is listening so hard she can hear the thin whine of her blood. From the direction of the lobby, shoes scuff on the gritty floor. Two, as far as she can tell. Getting nearer.

Without a word, she puts an arm on Andrew’s shoulders and pulls him toward the hole in the wall. Then she drops to her hands and knees, thinking,
What if I don’t fit? What if I’ve gotten too big?
Andrew, still standing, is looking down at her, his glasses askew, his eyes so wide she can see white all the way around the irises. He shakes his head,
no
.

She whispers fiercely, “Yes,” and crawls in.

It feels much smaller than it did before. She’s shaped differently, wider in the hips. Her hips brush the walls on either side of the air duct and her spine touches the top. Andrew’s zipped kit hangs down from her neck and drags over the grit.
It’s too tight
, she thinks, but when she tries to move forward, she discovers that she can. There’s enough light coming through the hole behind her that she can see that the duct seems not to have rusted, even though it’s
filthy and cobwebbed and pebbled with rat shit and smells like the bushes near her apartment where all the cats piss. But at least it doesn’t feel like the bottom will disintegrate beneath her weight. She crawls forward, listening for Andrew, and hears him suck in his breath in what sounds like disgust. Then his hands slide over the floor of the duct and his knees announce themselves with soft thumps.

She freezes as an adult male voice echoes down the duct in front of her. No, she thinks, he’s just in one of the rooms between them and the lobby, one of the rooms this duct serves. The ducts carry sound, making it important that she and Andrew move silently. There are at least three ducts on this floor, she knows, and each of them branches off into multiple rooms.

But this is
her
duct.

About two months before she met Poke, this duct had probably saved her life. The man who’d been chasing her then, through a moonless Bangkok night, had been crazed on amphetamines and trying to do something to her she couldn’t even imagine.

The men who are after Andrew and her may not pay attention to the hole in the wall. The man chasing her hadn’t noticed it at night. But even if these men
do
see it, they’ll never be able to fit. And they’ll have no idea where the duct comes out.

All she needs is to do the disappearing trick once more: to vanish from room 116 and then move invisibly until she emerges into the light on the far side of the building.

She’s crawling again, coming up on the first turn, and she’s soaking wet. The sudden perception of danger, the chase, and now the fear, purifying and reducing itself into something like terror:
Andrew
is in danger, too. She can smell herself even over the stink of the duct. She slows and stops until she knows that Andrew is right behind her. Then she whispers, so softly she can barely hear it herself, “It’s going to get dark.”

“Where are we—” Andrew begins, but she shushes him and begins to crawl again. She reaches the four-way intersection and starts to
take the left turn; straight ahead leads to other rooms, and the branching to the right leads to a gentle drop down to where the heating unit once stood in the basement. The turn to the left, assuming the bottom hasn’t rotted out of the duct and that the metal rods that secure it to the floor above them haven’t pulled loose, will lead to a venting grill at ground level.

She
can’t get around the corner
.

She’s too big now, she’s too wide, she’s too long. She gets part of her torso angled for the turn, but there isn’t room for her to crawl all the way in. Her spine won’t make the turn. She can’t work her hips around the sharp angle.

A drop of sweat runs down her forehead and into her left eye. Suddenly the duct seems to be smothering her, swallowing her, suffocating her. What she wants to do—what she
needs
to do—is crawl backward into room 116 and take her chances with the men.

But Andrew’s behind her.
She
might be able to deal with them; she dealt with terrible people all her years on the sidewalk. But Andrew, with his big glasses and his tiny neck and his protective parents and his spotless blue apartment, Andrew is as defenseless as whipped cream.

She reaches back with her foot and finds Andrew’s arm, taps it twice. “Back up,” she whispers, barely a breath, but the duct will carry it to him. “Just a little.”

Andrew whispers, “I need to get out of here. I’m going to be sick.”

“We’re going to get out. I just need a little space for a second.”

He doesn’t say anything, but when she explores his space with her shoe, there’s nothing but air.

“It’s a corner,” she breathes. “You’re skinny, you’ll be able to get around it, but I can’t.”

“What do you
mean
, you—” On the one word, his voice breaks through his whisper.

“I can, I can. For you, no problem. Don’t worry, we’re almost out.”

Hating to do it, she lowers herself all the way down onto her
stomach, the dirt going ropy beneath her hands as she slides them forward. She turns on her right side and pulls herself, forward, facing left, the direction she wants to take. When she’s pulled herself far enough forward, she bends her waist and then drags her legs behind her, still lying on her side. Once she’s around the corner, she rolls back onto her stomach and up on hands and knees again, saying to Andrew, “Okay. Just follow me. Left, left.”

But now, with the turn behind her, cutting off the light coming in through the hole in the wall, it’s completely dark.

Her T-shirt and jeans make a raspy whisper as they slide over the metal sides of the duct, and she can hear Andrew’s breathing, fast and shallow. She wonders whether the men can hear it, too, through the vent in whatever room they’re searching, and realize that she and Andrew are on their way out. Their only hope is to get out of the building and well away while the men are still searching inside.

A spider web plasters itself on her face and its occupant, feeling as big as her hand, scuttles over her cheek and down her neck and—she’s going to
scream
—inside the opening in her T-shirt and up her shoulder toward the center of her back. She stops and says, “Guuhhh,” and tries to swat at it, and can’t get her arms up, but the scratchy feeling of its legs scrabbling over her skin is all she can think about, so she twists and smacks her side and back against the wall to smash it, hitting the wall harder than she’d realized, and suddenly the entire duct is trembling, swinging back and forth very slightly and making a deep creaking noise.

Even her heart stops. She’s completely immobile, no longer feeling the spider, no longer hearing Andrew’s breathing, doing nothing at all except willing the duct’s supports to hold, praying to the spirit of the duct not to let it fall and trap them deafeningly in a crumple of metal with no way out.

It’s impossible for her to estimate how long she’s been motionless when Andrew whispers, “Please, gotta get out. Gotta get out. Please.”

The duct stops moving.

And Andrew sneezes.

It’s an explosive sneeze, enough to set the duct vibrating beneath them, and it’s
deafening
, and then he sneezes again, and again.

It’s shockingly loud. The duct is all metal, and it grabs each sneeze and amplifies it, bounces it back and forth, drapes it in echo, and broadcasts it to the world. He sneezes a fourth time, and a fifth, and Miaow is scrambling forward now, not bothering to feel her way, not trying to be quiet, just moving as fast as she can, trying to get the two of them ahead of the sound.

Then the sneezing stops, and the two of them are clawing their way like crabs through the dirt and the darkness and the rat droppings, trying to get as far as they can, and Andrew whispers, “Allergic,” and he’s sneezing again.

The darkness seems to solidify just in front of her. She puts a hand in front of her as Andrew stops again. She feels the end of the duct wall, and there’s a slight flow of cooler air from her left.

“Turn left,” she says aloud. “Put your hand on my foot and turn where I do.”

His hand touches her ankle gently, and she suddenly envisions his face, the crooked glasses and skinny neck and the eyes that have never seen any of the world’s bad things, and she feels like weeping. He sneezes once more and whispers, “Sorry,” and she says, “We’ll be fine” in a sharp whisper, and starts crawling again.

This time the turn is only 45 degrees and she slips around it easily. A moment later, Andrew says, “Okay,” and she thinks it’s good she hasn’t got room to turn around because even in her panic she wants to kiss him for that single word. She says, “One more turn,” and a moment later she reaches it, a zigzag right, another 45-degree angle with pale gray light coming through the shaft, and she hears Andrew draw the longest breath yet—he’s been panting between sneezes like a dehydrated dog—and without willing it, she begins to crawl even faster.

Then he’s sneezing again, even louder than before, it seems, but at the same time the light brightens, and then at what must be the end of the duct there’s a glare that hurts her eyes, squares of light like a quilt, that resolve themselves into the openings in a grate, square holes about an inch on a side, small enough to keep out rats. The two of them will come out, she knows, on the other side of the building, with the fence they climbed far behind them, facing a weedy stretch of open ground and another fence they’ll have to navigate before they’re someplace with a lot of people, someplace where they might be able to flag a taxi or hide in a restaurant and call someone to come get them.

As she nears the grate, she slows to listen, but Andrew knocks urgently on the sole of her shoe. His breathing has quickened again, hot-sounding, shallow, with a kind of ratchety wheeze as though his throat is closing up.

It makes her hurry. She puts an eye to the grate and looks as far left and right as she can, sees no one, puts both hands against the inside of the grate and pushes. It resists, sealed by a layer of rust, but the fear inside her crests and breaks, and thinking
Andrew
, she puts all the strength she possesses into it, and the grate gives way with a squeal and falls out onto the dirt. Miaow squirms, gasping, out of the duct and into the brightness, and instantly a hand is clapped over her mouth and an arm goes around her throat and she tries to kick the hotel wall in warning as Andrew crawls out, wet and wheezing, right into the arms of the golden man.

“H
OW DID THAT
make you
feel
?” Rose says out loud. Then she says it again, a bit differently: “How did
that
make you feel?”

The American man on the television, a doctor of the head, according to Poke, looms vividly on the huge screen standing in front of Poke’s poor little desk, now completely hidden from view. The doctor seems to like that question. This is the second time he’s asked it, and when he does, he leans forward, blinking through his squarish eyeglasses. Rose knows what the question means, but she doesn’t understand why the doctor asked it, since the woman he asked has tears rolling down her face.