Looking Backward in Darkness. Kathryn Ptacek
nurse on the second floor,” Chato said as he took her by the hand, easing her to her feet. She shuffled forward a few inches, then groaned. He realized she needed to lay down right away, but he would have to get her upstairs for that. Maybe they could break into the airlines’ lounge. Surely they had couches in there.
But once he got the girl outside the bathroom and halfway to the escalator he realized they weren’t going to get upstairs. She could barely hobble and kept crying the entire time.
While he had been looking around, he’d seen an area back of the stairs that made a protected nook. He took her there and told her to wait, then searched the lower level until he found a chair for her. She sank into it with a grunt.
“I need to go up and see if there’s a doctor, okay?”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She gripped his hand.
“Look, miss—”
”Gail.”
“Gail,” he said, trying to keep his tone reasonable. He needed to calm her, reassure her somehow that everything would be all right, when he wasn’t at all sure himself that things would be all right. “It’ll just be a few minutes. You’re okay here. You’ve got this comfortable chair and—”
She squeezed his hand harder. “No, please, don’t leave. I think someone’s after me.”
“No one can see you back here,” he said. “It’s out of the way. You can’t be seen from the stairway or the doors or—”
”No, no, no! You don’t understand. I’ve been hearing this voice ever since I got off the plane. Gail, it’s been saying, give me your baby. I want your baby. I need your baby.”
Chato stared down at her tear-streaked face, and knew then that this wasn’t something she was imagining. She had heard the voice.
“Right. Okay. Look, give me a few minutes to scout around.” He held up a hand when she started to protest. “I won’t be long. But I want to see what I can find to make you more comfortable. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Just sit here and be quiet, and if anyone approaches...scream like hell, and I’ll come running.”
She nodded again, pressed a hand to her abdomen. “Thank you. You know, I don’t even know your name.”
“Chato.”
He ducked out of the nook and glanced around the lower level. Empty as before. Or was it? The hairs along the back of his neck prickled again. Someone watched. He had thought that before. Now he knew he wasn’t imagining it.
“Some Enchanted Evening” played on the music system.
That, he decided, could go off any time soon, and he’d be all the happier for it.
One airline counter over he found a door leading into an employees’ lounge. Lots to loot here, he thought with a wry smile. He dragged the seat cushions from some couches back to the nook. He would have brought a couch, he explained, but he didn’t think he could get it through the doorway.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
He returned to the lounge and found a closet full of the lap blankets that flight attendants give passengers, along with a dozen or more small pillows. He took everything there he could carry back to Gail. He tucked pillows around her, and covered her with the blankets, and stacked some nearby.
Just in case, he thought. Just in case when the baby comes, and I have to deliver it. He felt a spike of panic. His shaman training didn’t include lessons in childbirth. This he’d have to wing.
He’d been aware for some time of more noise from above, and it sounded now like screaming and shouting and assorted bumping and scraping. He wondered what was going on, but he wasn’t about to go and investigate. And he hoped whatever was up there wouldn’t make its way down here.
Not for the first time he realized they were virtually trapped in the nook. The safe place could become in a moment’s notice a prison.
But what choice did they have? He didn’t want to settle her in the middle of the deserted level, where anyone—or anything—could see them.
He went scouting again and came back with two fire extinguishers. Not the best choice of weapons, he told himself, but when you have nothing else at hand. Well, that’s not precisely true, he realized. He did have his Swiss army knife. Yeah, that would be a lot of use, wouldn’t it? Besides, if he had smelled something burning earlier, these canisters might come in handy. If the electricity went off, he could always break the windows with them so they could escape outside.
He saw that Gail had fallen asleep, and so he sneaked back to the employees lounge. When he saw the vending machines again, he realized just how hungry he was. He had slept through dinner on the plane, and hadn’t had anything since he’d left New York City that morning. And he knew Gail would be hungry.
He reached into his pocket for change, and thought, what the hell am I doing? He didn’t have enough for two candy bars, much less what he knew they’d need.
He studied the first machine, one for sodas, then took out his pocket knife, selected a blade he thought would fit and inserted it and began jiggling it back and forth in the lock on the front panel. Finally he was rewarded with a snick, and the panel opened. He did the same for the other machines.
Something thudded onto the floor above and he half-expected to see someone or something falling through the ceiling. But it held. For now.
He located several empty cartons and put all the cans of soda in there, as well as dozens of packets of cookies and potato chips and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and candy bars. He threw in what paper napkins and plastic cutlery he found; he opened all the drawers and doors he could find to see what other goodies he could liberate. When he left, he thought the room looked like locusts had swept through.
He winced. Somehow he didn’t like the imagery.
When he got back, Gail was awake and had struggled up to a sitting position. He put the boxes down with the others he’d brought back earlier.
“Hungry?”
She nodded.
He pawed through the contents of a box. “I have ham and cheese, or ham and cheese, or ham and cheese.” She giggled and suddenly she looked much younger than her eighteen years. “Or the ever popular ham and cheese.”
“It’s such a hard decision. Umm. Let me have the ham and cheese, please.”
“An excellent choice. And what will you have to wash it down with? Here we have more choice. Clear soda, orange soda or brown soda.”
“Orange, please.”
Somehow he knew she would choose that. He opened the can and handed it to her. He was sitting on the chair now.
“I’ll be back.”
He went back to the airline counters and hunted around until he came to another fire alarm box. He took the fire axe. A better weapon.
On his way back he grabbed some pads of paper and pens. They might as well keep occupied while waiting for the baby.
He was heading back to the nook when he saw something on the now-stopped escalator. He edged closer. A thin trickle of blood dripped down from the floor above to the first tread of the escalator, crawled along the grooved metal plating, then dribbled down onto the tread below. Tread after tread, the blood dripped slowly down.
He backed away quickly.
“What’s the matter?” Gail said, looking up from her sandwich when he came back.
“Nothing,” he said with what he hoped was a steady smile.
“You’re a bad liar,” she said.
“I know. Sunny—my girlfriend—always says that.”
He