Chapter 23 Maria

Chapter 23

?Maria

The internal air-conditioning system is thin, tight, and hot: a never-ending metallic coffin, disappearing around bend after bend.

Maria has processed this horror at some level but after the last six days she has learned to put aside what is not immediately necessary: and what is immediately necessary to her immediate survival is finding the way out to open air and freedom. She has blocked out everything else, not through strength of character but through sheer focus on need—she is not going to die here.

She knows what she's looking for. She sees it so clearly in her mind's eye, at the end of all these vents an external air-conditioning grate high on the property's wall, beyond its slats the lush garden.

She visualizes it in her mind: she will kick out the external grate, the fresh Caribbean breeze will hit her, it will cool her sweat-soaked skin, and she will leap or tumble down from the opening high on the wall onto the springy grass and she will run. She will run as fast as she has ever run toward the beach. She will take the beach stairs two or three at a time, down and down and down. She will splash into the sea and she will swim, in great arcing strokes, around to the public cove and she will flag down the people there, the few after-work sunset swimmers, and they will see her and run to her. And wide-eyed they will pull her, bruised and throbbing, from the water, and she will cry hot tears that it is all finally over. They will wrap her in soft towels and the police will arrive and she will finally know that it is really, truly over.

But it is not over yet, because tight in the ducts Maria cannot find her way out to that grate that she sees so clearly in her mind.

She crawls on fast and determined, slipping on her own sweat as she squeezes around another bend in the crawl space. As she rounds the corner and looks up ahead, there is no hoped-for sliver of natural light in the dimness.

The only luck she has experienced so far seems to be that the sound of the alarm system is still covering her movements as she thumps and bumps through the crawl spaces of the property.

She has a head start on them at least, though she expects they might have entered the bathroom now and are beginning to search the room vents for signs of motion. She doesn't have long. But then she's never had long in this house, and she has adapted to that with worrying necessity.

As she careens on, she thinks of the feeling of wind on her face again, she thinks of running across the grass, splashing into the water, pushing through the waves, then the hands of her rescuers pulling her from the water, the relief she will feel—and that is when the deafening sound of the house alarm cuts out.

Maria stops moving instantly, ringing silence filling the gap that the piercing wail of the alarm has left. She is exposed. They will be able to hear her now, find her. And as if in answer to her fears the duct around her lets out a sad groan of its own, the metal straining with her slight weight.

Maria tries to muffle her snatched breath, but she is exhausted and her body needs every rasping inhale. A sound in the rooms beneath her, movement in there. She strains to listen. A muffled voice. The men must be talking. Footsteps moving away—and then the sound of one of the terrace doors being opened. One of the men must have made his way outside to search there. She remains stock-still. The metal of the duct creaks once more but this time farther back behind her. Her eyes flash back into the darkness, suddenly aware that someone is crawling in the darkness toward her. But there is nothing there, just the dim sheen of more metal tunnel. The duct groans again and everything in Maria clenches just in time as the entire structure gives way beneath her and she slams down eight feet onto the marble of the kitchen counter, still encased in a section of duct.

Her eyes flash up to the shocked figure now standing across from her, a large stretch of living room between her and the man who, back-footed by the unexpected crash, pauses for a micro-second to process the scene—but Maria does not need to pause.

With wild desperation she heaves herself from the broken section of duct, scrambles onto her knees on top of the counter, fumbling for the first object at hand from the chef's-grade knife block across from her. And as the man runs full-tilt at her, she makes a decision: whatever happens next is going to be okay.

He barrels into her, wrestling her off the countertop onto the floor, all the while she kicks, bites, and wildly swings with the blade, knocking everything from the counter to the floor as she goes.

On the floor he straddles her, tries to wrest the knife from her. She fights him, but then changes tack; she releases the weapon, using his suddenly released momentum to force the stranger's head back hard into the side of the marble island.

His eyes flash shut on impact, he's dazed but not incapacitated. He does not lose his grip on the weapon, but his brief loss of focus is enough.

In the micro-second the man takes to reorient himself, Maria reaches for what was knocked from the counter in the scuffle: the wooden knife block itself. And with all of her body weight she heaves the heavy block over her head and into the side of the man's skull.

His head whips sideways, hard, smacking back into the island once more. His body then slumps into the unit, momentarily immobilized.

Maria does not exhale, or relax, or smile a little smile of triumph; she scrabbles immediately up, grabs a large blade, and drives it repeatedly into the man's body with the unrelenting fervor of someone who has learned the hard way that things are not over until they are truly over.

It is only the clank of another loose duct section high above her dropping that snaps her out of her purpose.

Maria sobers instantly, she looks down at the man, the overview of the situation coming to her in one burst of thought: she needs to go, there are more men here somewhere and the cameras are watching everything she does. Others will come for her—because her getting out of here alive is clearly not part of their plan. She needs to go now.

She drops the knife, rises from the blood-soaked body, and runs, bare feet skidding in blood, as fast as she can toward the open terrace doors.