Page 21

Chapter 21

?Maria

Maria is barely conscious when the siren begins to sound.

The deafening hazard warning tone, reverberating back through the house she has repeatedly very nearly died in over the last six days, rouses her.

She tries to shift her starved, trembling body and using the wall behind hauls herself up to face whatever fresh hell is coming her way.

Maria knows how incredibly lucky she has been to survive this long, how her past, her childhood has helped keep her alive down here. And in a vague way she knows that all of this must somehow be inextricably linked to that past.

Her parents changed their family name after they got to America. Venezuelan refugees descended from Armenian refugees.

But in order to get to America, a four-year-old Maria Yossarian and her parents had made their way on foot across the brutal mountains, mud, rivers, and unmapped lawless rain forest of the Darién Gap, to eventually seek asylum in America. Others had not survived. It had almost broken them too, but it was that or risk worse by staying in a city that had pulled itself apart.

The Darién Gap—a five-thousand-square-kilometer strip of rain forest connecting South and Central America, one of the most dangerous places on the planet—had almost killed them. But somehow they made it out alive where others had not. And they arrived, starved, exhausted, caked in mud, and barely able to speak, in Panama and later on in Texas, where they applied for asylum on the border with hope of a better life.

The trip hadn’t killed her parents but their health had never been the same after it, and when they had gotten sick in their late fifties they had gone suddenly. And left her alone but for a quiet, traumatized uncle.

She alone survived. It seems almost ingrained in her now, that ability. She knew how to survive.

The siren blasts on through the rooms and panic, like an old friend, pumps life back into Maria’s jittery muscles. An urgency she feared she might no longer possess roars to life inside her.

Something is happening. She shifts her weight in preparation for whatever is coming. The warning siren grows incrementally closer, less muffled. She swipes away the blood trickling dangerously close to her eyes, knowing she will need all her senses operational for what is going to hit her next.

It isn’t that the house is getting harder; she knows she is getting weaker, slower, less sharp. She looks down at her hand, post-wipe, a brilliant red smear, her most recent, most severe injury clearly not yet healing. Sepsis is one of her biggest concerns, and has been for days. She saw her reflection a day ago: a large lacerated, green-black hematoma on her left temple. Her injuries are substantial, she knows, but she is still able to function. And as far as Maria is concerned that’s all that matters right now.

She managed to bandage her arm with the torn hem of her top and cauterize a cut on her thigh in the other room, but her lips are dry and cracked, her energy low—she has had water but hasn’t eaten now since day two.

Across the stifling heat of the room, the door panel light flickers, then fades out completely. Maria blinks hard, unable to believe her eyes, unable to trust the reality of what she is seeing as the door slowly, undoubtedly, begins to roll back to reveal the previous room. Beyond it, the previous, and then the previous, all their doors opening, on and on.

She has only a moment to take in what’s happening before all the lights go out and she is plunged into darkness.

Her breath and the blaring siren the only sounds in the pitch black, Maria tries to remain calm. She tells herself to focus, to breathe. She has gotten used to doing that. Her eyes will adjust to the darkness, she tells herself, if she just gives them a moment.

Eyes wide open Maria waits, blindly staring in the direction of the door, hoping for some sliver of light to become apparent. She blinks again and again until the darkness slowly begins to graduate, though part of her mind is conscious that this is all just wishful thinking. Or a trick. But as her eyes adjust, the vaguest outlines of the open doorways become evident.

And with her last available jolt of energy, Maria springs from her resting place and begins to move.

In the darkness she shifts around the walls of the room until her fingers find the door’s opening and she stumbles through.

The next room is harder, larger, the floor still slick with water. She slips and skids across it, her hands desperately trying to grip, palms clammy, on to the smooth walls.

But time not being on her side, she begins to rush and a moment later sprawls across the wet floor, landing headfirst into the half-open door to the next room. The pain is intense as she holds in her yells, its initial waves and throbs flowing over her and passing, then scrambling up, she continues.

Maria slips through another doorway and another and to her absolute, unbearable joy, she begins to see a lift in the darkness several doorways ahead. Risking everything, the alarm system blaring bass-y and slow around her, she takes a final risk, pushing off the wall behind her and propelling herself full-tilt toward the light.

—

With a primal scream, Maria barrels out of the rooms and back out into the hallway, her clothes ragged, her eyes wild, her face blood-smeared and bruised.

—

Back in the main house, she propels herself toward the stairwell, half collapsing onto its steel banister. Her eyes, crazed, snap back on to the half-open door she just flew through.

She hangs on the banister momentarily, her breathing coming in high, tight, inhuman rasps as she clings to the stairwell, knuckles white with tension, watching to see if anyone else, anything else, will emerge after her and pull her back.

A clang, from deep within the basement, snaps her out of her reverie and propels her once more up the stairs into the natural light.

Twilight sky is breaking through the vast windows of the living room. The natural light almost blinds her after only artificial light and darkness for days.

Maria skids and skitters across the marble living room, desperate to get to the terrace doors, but she slips, her hand saving her but leaving a smear of pure red on the once immaculate white bouclé sofa as she passes.

Then, as she nears the doors, she pulls up sharply. Someone is there. She isn’t going to make it.

Two men approach the house. She sees them, one from the terrace, the other from the garden, backed by a bright pop of frangipani trees.

Thinking fast, Maria turns on her heels to bowl back toward the main wet room—the only room in the house that she is certain has a manually locking door.

As Maria flies into the marble bathroom, the sound of another alarm joins the siren from downstairs as all the lights in the property flick back into action.

Maria slams the bathroom door, slides the lock, and drags anything and everything she can move in the room in front of the door before backing away from it until she bumps hard up against the wet room screen.

She spins and jumps, catching sight of her own bloody, haggard face in the floor-to-ceiling mirror beyond it. She holds her own gaze, breath coming hard and fast.

Maria knows she needs to get out of here, dead or alive. Going back downstairs is not an option.

She knows the men will take her back down if she lets them and she will die there. Better to fight up here and risk death than to go back down and continue the game.

After six days in the basement, Maria’s mind is functioning on an entirely different level than the men’s outside this room. She has an advantage, however small.

She has been fighting for her life for 118 hours.

She listens for the men beyond the door. Under the blare of alarms, she hears their footsteps. There are only two of them. There are only two, but two is more than one; Maria knows this.

The only other sound in the bathroom is the gentle white noise of the air-conditioning system above her.

Maria looks up. The sound is coming from a supply-and-return vent in the ceiling. She takes note of the little screws holding it in place, remembering movies where plucky heroes escape baddies through ceiling panels. She studies the one above her, with its small rectangular shape. An idea forms and she swallows hard.

A gentle knock on the bathroom door, and her attention is ripped away from the ceiling.

“Ms. Yossarian?” the man’s calm voice asks with a degree of politeness in his warm American accent that Maria finds truly terrifying. “Would you mind opening the door?”

Maria muffles her breath and stares at the bathroom door, frozen.

Another rap comes, and Maria jumps. Then without a second thought she grabs the small hand mirror from the edge of the sink unit and smashes it onto the floor. She quickly grabs a shard, climbs up onto the toilet cistern, reaches up, and begins to quickly loosen the screws on the vent grate above. The screws tinkle one after the other down onto the bathroom floor.

Another gentle rap on the door but Maria is undeterred.

“Ms. Yossarian. We will remove the door if you do not open it.”

The sirens blare on as Maria wedges her fingers under the grate and pries it from the ceiling to place it gently onto the floor beside the toilet.

Then after a moment’s hesitation, aware she needs both of her hands free to climb, she places the large sliver of broken mirror between her teeth, wincing as the edges of the glass cut into the sides of her mouth, parallel streams of blood now giving her face the appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Maria inhales deeply. Then, with a hand on each side of the vent opening, she hauls herself up, with trembling effort, onto her elbows, and from there pulls herself fully up into the shaft that snakes away from the bathroom, the sound of the property’s alarms covering her muted grunts.