The Girl in the Maze

by R. K. Jackson

  The officer looked in the backseat again, and Vince followed his gaze. Martha huddled in the back corner, frozen, silent, her gaze like steel. The large man brought his face closer to Vince, spoke softly. “Is she dangerous?”

  “She’s just delusional,” Vince said, trying to keep his voice low against the rain. He’d have to tell him who she was, but that could wait. “She might resist getting into your vehicle.”

  “All right,” Morris said. “I’ll get some restraints out, in case we need them.”

  “I’ll talk to her—” Vince said, but the officer had already turned away, headed back to the cruiser. Vince closed the window, then turned and looked at Martha.

  “Martha—”

  She leaned forward, reached over the seat, and put her hand on his shoulder. She pinched his flesh through his shirt, hard enough to draw blood. “Vince—listen to me. That man out there—he’s the one. That’s the man. He’s the one. He killed Lydia. He wants to kill me. He’ll kill both of us.”

  Her face was fierce, determined. Martha had confided in him—the trust was still there. How could he do this, without breaking the one thing they had left? He turned and looked out the windshield. He could see Morris in the headlights, now headed back toward them, carrying the restraints.

  “Vince,” Martha continued, “I know I’m sick, I know…but you have to believe me about this. If we get in that car, we will die.”

  “Martha, remember what happened at college? There were things you believed then…they weren’t true. The same thing is happening again. This man doesn’t want to hurt us. He just wants to help us.”

  Martha shook her head violently. “He will kill us.”

  Vince decided to try another tack. He could leverage his status, remind her of his authority. “Martha, here’s what needs to happen,” he began, firmly. “I’m going to come around to your side of the car. Then I’m going to open your car door, and take your hand, and you’re going to come with me. Then we’ll both get in that other car. You will not resist me. We will do this together.”

  Vince pulled the keys out of the ignition, opened his door, and stepped out into the downpour. Water rose up to his ankles, filling his shoes. As he rounded the car, a gust of wind shoved him from behind. He gripped the frame of the car to keep from stumbling and made his way to Martha’s side and pressed a button on the key fob to unlock her door and opened it.

  “Come on out, Martha!” Vince shouted against the rain, holding his hand out to her. “We’ll only be in the rain for a second.”

  She nodded slowly, then took hold of his hand and stepped out of the car, her eyes darting. She planted both feet into the stream, looking unsteady. Vince reached behind her to grab his jacket from the rear compartment, and in that instant, Martha jerked her hand out of his.

  Vince lunged, hoping to tackle her, and caught nothing but an armful of rain-filled air. He stumbled onto his knees in the streaming water. He stood up, drenched, cursing his own stupidity. He looked up and down the causeway, trying to guess in which direction she had run.

  Then, a shriek. He saw an electric spark in the darkness behind the Passat, followed by another scream. He ran toward it, sloshing, and could see the shape of the sheriff in the dim taillights of the Passat. He was shining his flashlight on a shape thrashing in the wash.

  Vince reached them and tried to grasp Martha’s flailing arms, groping for her in the dark. She was weak and her arms were like tentacles splashing and squirming in the river of the road. How had it come to this? Would she ever trust anyone again?

  “Stay back.” Morris blocked Vince with his arm.

  “No, not again!” Vince shouted, but too late. Another flicker in the dark from the Taser, a buzzing sound. Martha screamed like a wounded animal, then was quiet. Morris brought Martha’s limp wrists together, and then there was the zipping sound of the plastic restraints.

  Vince propped Martha up from behind. Her body was subdued, limp. He felt a sickness in his heart.

  “All right!” Morris shouted over the rain. “Let’s get her inside the cruiser.”

  Morris took hold of Martha’s shoulders and Vince put his arms under her legs, and they lifted her up out of the water and carried her toward the SUV.

  Chapter 33

  Vince rested against the hard plastic seatback, drying his face and hair with a towel Morris had given him. A dim green light cast a sallow glow in the compartment. The windows were steamy and he could see very little outside. He could still hear the steady drum of the rain on the roof, the ripping sound of water spewing along the undercarriage. At least they were safe now.

  Martha was quiet, very still, possibly catatonic, her wrists bound with the plastic restraints. To Vince’s relief, Morris hadn’t seemed to recognize her, at least not yet. She was slumped against her door, soaking wet, staring at him with an expression Vince couldn’t quite fathom. Fear? Anger? Accusation?

  Vince reached over with the towel to dry Martha’s cheeks and arms. She tightened, pressing herself against the door frame, resisting his ministrations. “I’m sorry, Martha. I’m so sorry that it has to be this way.” She stared at him, then looked pointedly toward Morris. The folds on the back of the officer’s neck were visible through the Lucite-and-mesh barrier.

  “Doin’ all right back there?” Morris’s voice issued from a small speaker.

  Vince nodded. “I didn’t know we could talk to you.”

  “Yep. Two-way system. We got these fancy cruisers about a year ago. I really had to twist the arm of the commissioners on the requisition.” Morris’s voice sounded metallic.

  Vince noticed a small red light on the steel seatback, and below it an engraved label: CABIN UNDER SURVEILLANCE.

  “My name’s Vince Trauger.”

  “Where from?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “You picked a hell of a night to visit the coast.”

  “I’m afraid so. I want to thank you. You saved our lives tonight.”

  “Just dumb luck. I was about to clear out of town myself. I decided to make one last patrol of the causeway to make sure no one was stranded out here. Intuition, I reckon.”

  “Very fortunate for us.”

  “Yep. Very fortunate.”

  Vince wondered about the burly man in the front seat. Their rescuer seemed affable enough, and intelligent. Hardly the stereotypical bully of many a Deep South drama on late-night TV.

  He glanced at Martha. She glared back intensely. She nodded emphatically toward Morris. Her behavior put him on edge, caused questions to bob to the surface of his mind like swamp gas. Why did Morris make Vince ride in the back with a potentially violent patient? Regulations forbade that Vince ride in the front, that’s what Morris had said. But in a case like this…And why didn’t Morris recognize Martha? Her picture had been in all the papers. And if he didn’t, why wasn’t he asking more questions about her?

  “Where are we going?” Vince asked.

  “Back to Amberleen,” Morris said. “There’s a weather monitoring station up on Abbott Hill. Not much of a hill, actually, but it’s the closest thing we’ve got around here. Low country, you know. It’s made out of cinder-block walls, built like a bunker. I’ll make us some coffee, and we can wait out the storm.”

  Vince nodded and sat back in the hard seat. He didn’t want to distract the man with too many questions. There would be plenty of time for that later.

  Vince ran his fingers through his wet hair. Relax, relax. Everything was back under control. He glanced at Martha. She was doing something with the window, holding up her bound hands and using an extended forefinger to trace shapes in the fogged glass. Vince was relieved. She was no longer focused on him, but instead had wandered off on some new psychotic tangent. Maybe, once she was back on medications, she wouldn’t remember any of this.

  Vince felt the vehicle change direction. A salmon-colored lozenge of light slid across the interior. A streetlight. They were no longer on the causeway. He looked through the rear window and cou
ld make out vague, dark shapes along the roadside. Buildings.

  He glanced at Martha again. She was focused on her task, which seemed to be writing characters in the fog on the window glass. She had exhibited this compulsion before, drawing magic figures to protect herself. Martha paused, stared at him.

  Her eyes were sharp as razors in the dim light of the coach. They bespoke focus, not delusional preoccupation. They passed under another streetlamp, which illuminated her words in the fogged glass—NO RADIO.

  Vince wondered what might be going through her disordered mind, what meaning that cryptic message might have, understood only by her. Martha pinned him with the directness of her gaze. She pointed with her bound hands in her lap, index finger extended, toward Morris. She looked at her message, then back at Morris again.

  Her movements had a clarity of purpose that was atypical of the psychotic state. An unsettling sense that something was amiss tickled at the fringes of Vince’s consciousness.

  He looked through the barrier at the front console, the large black block, a coiled umbilical leading to a microphone attached to the dashboard. The console was dark. And even though they could hear sounds from the front through the intercom, there was nothing to hear. No squawks, no static. Indeed, the radio was apparently turned off. Is that what Martha wanted him to notice?

  Vince thought about it. Here was an officer in uniform, performing a rescue operation. There was a hurricane. Shouldn’t he be in communication with headquarters? Why hadn’t he radioed for medical assistance for Martha? Why hadn’t he reported this incident?

  “Not a good night to be out at all,” Morris said, turning onto another boulevard. Lightning flashed, and Vince glimpsed a field of gravestones. Where the hell were they going?

  Vince was aware of the hardness of the seat under his butt, the impermeable solidity of the barrier between them and the front seat. This wasn’t really the backseat of a car, he thought. Not at all. This was a cage. Martha’s earlier words flashed through his mind: He’ll kill us both.

  Vince leaned forward in his seat. “Problem with the radio?”

  “How’s that?”

  “I just noticed your dispatch is off.”

  Morris chuckled. “No one else in the area. Our whole unit had to clear out for the storm. I’m the last one out here in this cell.”

  All at once, Vince grasped the psychology of what was happening. There was a clinical term for it—paranoiac contagion. Martha was terrified, and her fear was infecting him with cascading thoughts of doom.

  Vince sat back in his seat, letting out a sigh of relief. Take it easy, Trauger. Somebody has to be sane around here, and it better be you. Haven’t you made enough mistakes already?

  They passed under another streetlight. The halogen rectangle swept through the car. The glow slipped across Martha’s face, illuminating the remnants of her scrawled message, which was already fading. Her eyes shone like gray marbles, burning into him with recrimination, and Vince wondered if he had lost her forever.

  Chapter 34

  Mud fizzed in front of his face. A collection of dun-colored bubbles, frothing and piping from his halting breaths. And water everywhere, flowing alongside him, streaming over his skin in countless rivulets. He was floating, disembodied, boneless, his existence defined by a geography of pain.

  Jarrell tried to lift his head out of the mud. His muscles tightened, but his broken bone surfaces shifted and ground. His vision went midnight blue. One more move like that and you will pass out.

  He sucked in air mixed with mud and water, coughed. Another spasm of pain. You are broken. You are drowning. What the fuck—

  Something massive nearby. Something vibrating, growling. He rolled his eyes up, trying to see it. He twisted his neck a fraction of an inch, setting off more waves of pain and nausea. In his peripheral vision, a dark shape towered over him. Some building. What building? The lighthouse. The base. And the moments that brought him here drifted back in fragments….The sheriff. The stairs. The fight. Then—

  He coughed mud out of his throat. He felt like he was lying in a bin full of broken glass, with every muscle contraction causing the shards to impale him more deeply. He was lying at the base of the lighthouse, on his side, in heavy rain, in mud so saturated that it was near liquid. But why does your body feel like it’s been run over by a truck? Because you fell, that’s why. Fat-ass heaved you off the lighthouse balcony like a sack of garbage and you fell—what?—six stories, maybe. But you couldn’t just die, could you? No, that would be too fucking easy. You had to survive, just enough so you could lie here and drown.

  Jarrell’s diaphragm lifted, and he sucked more watery mud into his lungs and nostrils and coughed. More seizures of pain, and a thousand sparklers ignited behind his retinas. Fuck this. You were born in the water. You’re not going to lie here and just drown. No goddamn way.

  Jarrell explored the wreck of his body with his mind, like a tourist. His thoughts roamed from one limb to another, checking things out. His legs were useless, really messed up. Back might be broken, too, he couldn’t be sure. Maybe even his neck. Are you paralyzed? He was on his side in the muck, one arm sunk deep in the mud. But the other one…he moved his fingers, then his hand. No, not paralyzed. Not completely. He raised the arm slowly, careful not to engage any other muscles. And it moved normally, like the freak survivor of a plane crash. He inched his hand toward his face, then sank his fingers into the muck and scooped it away. He sucked in a quick breath before the soupy muck rushed back.

  You’ve got to get out of this. Get out of this now, or you’ll drown.

  He tried to focus his entire consciousness into the muscles of that arm. He eased his hand outward to explore the rain-filled air, reached out as far as he could without moving his torso, seeking, probing. But his hand found nothing.

  He reached behind his head, toward the groaning, vibrating shadow, and this caused his body to shift again, caused grinding agony. He lowered his arm, scooped mud away from his face, took a breath, and rested.

  He wondered for a moment if he was truly alive, or just a corpse, imagining that he still had a chance. He’d read a story like that once in English class. What was it? “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

  What a stupid fucking thing to remember when you’re half-dead and drowning in shit. And what a stupid thing—to drown after surviving a fall from an eighty-foot tower. Fuck it. Fuck it all.

  Jarrell reached out again toward the vibrating wall, stretched his arm, winced at the agony it caused. This time, his fingers brushed something—a rough texture. A curved cement surface. His fingers slid back and forth against it. Useless. Nothing to get hold of. He swung his hand back and forth, and his fingers grazed against something else, cold and smooth. A narrow pipe. A conduit.

  That’s all she wrote. He’d have to try to grab the fucker. He might kill himself with the effort, the pain alone might render him unconscious. Fuck, you already died, anyway.

  He scooped the mud away from his face, took a deep breath, and extended his arm again toward the pipe, wrenching his shattered body to reach just a little farther. He felt as though razor wire were uncoiling under his skin, but his fingers got hold of the pipe, locked on. He focused every ounce of remaining willpower into a tight ball, pulled hard.

  The mud protested, tried to hold on to him, sucked at him like candy, but his good arm was a powerful, defiant instrument—and he screamed in agony as his arm did what he told it to do, separated him from his adhesive grave. The mud let go and his body skidded forward and his head slammed into the cement.

  And he lay there in deepening misery, head cocked against the wall, the rain trickling over his face.

  And then, he was no longer there. Not exactly. He was floating somewhere a few feet above, looking down on his own body. It looked like a waterlogged scarecrow, something somebody had dropped from an airplane. And a half-assed scarecrow, at that. The right foot was all wrong…pointed backward. But the chest was moving. Breathing. It was the
last thing he noticed because he was floating farther away now, merging with the canopy overhead, the borderless continuum of rain, sea, and clouds.

  Chapter 35

  Seeing his face was the worst. The sheer nightmarish horror of it had jolted Martha—worse the weapon he used against her, the electrical thing that drove the wind out of her lungs, that caused her to bite hard on her tongue and turned her legs to jelly. She could taste the blood on her tongue, but showed no reaction. She would reveal nothing she didn’t choose to.

  Martha struggled to pull together the fluttering ribbons of her thoughts. Yes, Morris had control. Even the storm was on his side. People disappeared in hurricanes. Death to come death to come death to come

  His face—and in the rain, the searing white-hot pain—had jolted her to a place that was sharp and clear, cleared the voices out of her head like a sudden winter wind blasting through cobwebs. Morris had them captured. Bugs in a jar. They were going to die die die die the child is going to die

  Now, after days of silence, Martha wanted to scream, rip, claw, fly. Do everything in her power. Vaporize. Disappear like mist through the car vents. But she was silent, mute, her wrists bound tightly by the nylon restraints. The microphones, recorders, the man in the front seat—agent of those who wanted to destroy her—would hear every word she spoke. So, messages…the one on the glass still there, flashing as they passed under each streetlight, the letters fading—NC PADIO. Martha swabbed the glass with the side of her head. Erase the evidence let no one—

  As Martha moved, her cheek flattened, slid across the cold window glass. It was a cold, fast jerk, and she was pushed against the seat belt, her head tossing forward, the straps gripping her, clutching like fingers, pinning her against the hard plastic seat as a wing of water rose up outside her window. The tires squealed wetly, the cage fishtailed.