Shapeshifted

I motioned with the flashlight for her to come nearer. She threw up her hand against it and withdrew. “Sorry, Grandmother,” Olympio said.



She was huddled up, wrapped in a black blanket. Her eyes were hollow, and she had sparse white hair in greasy ringlets around her face. “Can she come out to me?” I asked Olympio while keeping my eyes on her. While I doubted I was going to become part of a horror movie right now, I’d seen enough of them to know better than to look away.



She said something, and Olympio translated. “She says her ankle hurts.”



“Can she show me her ankle?”



Olympio asked her, and she did so, putting it out and pulling up the blanket to expose it while making little cat-like hisses and cries.



It was swollen and red. Cellulitic for sure. “Shit.”



She spoke some more. “She says she can’t walk.”



I swallowed. It stank in here, and we’d walked so far, and there was no way this little woman was going to be able to walk back out.



“Oh, no. You aren’t even thinking that, are you?” Olympio asked me.



“I am.” Suddenly, despite the heat, I wished I was wearing long sleeves and jeans. Isolation gear. Maybe a full biohazard suit. I handed the flashlight over to Olympio. “It’s going to be a long walk back.”



“You’re telling me.”



I came nearer to her, where she sat in the one spot of shade. I gestured for her to stand as best she could. And then, despite the stink and my rising horror, I reached out for her.



Her blanket, where she’d been sitting on it, was damp. I didn’t know if it was water, or urine, or worse. “Oh, God,” I said, for strength, and then closed my mouth to keep out the smell. She scrabbled at my neck with her bony arms, fingernails clawing me. I took a shuffling step, and—by pulling down on me, my back already screaming from crouching in the tunnels all the way down here—so did she. She yanked my neck, and pulled herself forward, and exhaled what I knew was a curse word.



* * *



While the tunnel had seemed long enough going into it … walking back out, helping to hold up someone who stank and was damp and was climbing all over me … the only thing that stopped me from gagging was the horror that in doing so, she might get something into my mouth, a corner of her blanket, a piece of stringy hair. So I suffered in silence as Olympio led us back out, step after laborious step, as the dirt ground into me and the woman’s dampness soaked through my clothes.



The last turn, and we were facing the tunnel’s exit. The circle of sun looked so sweet, and with the fresh air rushing in, I didn’t care if it was piping-oven hot. Freedom was so, so near.



“No quiero ir por ahí.”



“She says she doesn’t want to go out there,” Olympio told me, forcing me to finally speak.



“Tell her she’ll die in there,” I muttered out of the safe side of my mouth, hauling her forward one more step.



“Odio el mundo, me dará la bienvenida a la muerte.”



“She says she’s okay with that. That she doesn’t like the world.”



I couldn’t agree with her more right now, but letting her die in a storm drain was not an option.



“Tell her I’m horrible and mean, and I’m going to carry her leper ass out anyway. Only make it sound nicer when you say it.”



Olympio snorted, and presumably did as he was told. She didn’t stop fighting, and I pulled her, still struggling, out into the sunlight.



Thank God—we were free. I stood there for a bit, breathing the fresh air as carefully as I could. I didn’t drop her, not because I was afraid she’d crawl back into her storm drain cave, but because I knew if I did I would never manage to talk myself into picking her back up again.



“What now?” Olympio asked.



What now indeed. The walls of the storm drain were steep. I was tough, but I wasn’t strong. “Got any bright ideas?”



“Wait here.” Olympio pocketed the flashlight and scurried up the wall.



She was talking—nattering even, I’d say—to herself. I wondered how old she was. Old people could get dehydrated easily, and then they’d become demented from sheer dehydration. Or urinary tract infections—those could take an old person from normal to demented in no time. There was nothing to do for that but get in an IV line and give fluid—but not so much that her questionable lungs or kidneys got flooded. Treating old people was hard, and there was nothing I could really do for her down here.



Olympio returned, rolling a shopping cart down from over the horizon. It careened down, with the rubber on his shoes barely braking it from slamming into the cement floor. Then he rolled it, with one wonky wheel, over to us.



“Put her in here, and then we can take her up.”



She fought me—she fought us, since Olympio started to help. We got her in, and then it took me pushing and him pulling and us going up the hill at an angle to finally reach the flat top. We rolled the woman toward the clinic, where I prayed to God that Dr. Tovar had not gone home for the day.



CHAPTER NINETEEN



Luckily for me, he hadn’t.



Olympio told him the story after I’d set the woman inside and run in back. I didn’t have an extra shirt to change into, but I washed myself up as best I could in the clinic’s small bathroom. I soaped myself up to my armpits, and washed my face, and splashed my neck. She had clawed me, dammit, when she’d slipped on the tunnel’s curved bottom, oh, every other step. I couldn’t tell what was friction burns on my neck and shoulders, and what was claw marks. The whole area was bright red. I washed with soap and water, and soaped and rinsed again. I didn’t want to put my old shirt on—I wanted to burn it.



There was a knock outside the bathroom door. “You want an extra shirt?” Hector asked from outside.



I opened the door up fractionally and stuck my arm out. “Yes, please.” He handed it over, and I pulled it on. It smelled lightly of men’s deodorant, like it’d been worn before, or had been packed near something that had. It wasn’t a bad smell.



I came out, feeling slightly cleaner, and found him waiting in the hall. “Thanks.”



He nodded, as if he loaned shirts to employees all the time. “We’re waiting for an ambulance. She’s significantly dehydrated, and she needs antibiotics now. And I’m not taking her in in my car.”



“I don’t blame you.” I put my fingers to my neck where she’d clawed me, and felt the raised edges of the wounds, like speed bumps on my neck.



“Let me look at that—you cleaned it, right?”



I didn’t answer him, I just gave him a look.



“Sorry. Had to ask.”



“Hmmph.” I did feel better showing it to him, though. This way, if I died of something tragic and curable, like cat scratch fever, someone would know how and why.



“What on earth made you go down there?” he said, stroking his fingers along the edge of the wound on my neck. I shivered, surprised by his touch, and then crossed my arms, trying to pretend that I’d somehow taken a sudden chill in July. “It was foolish of you.”



I looked at him. His warm brown eyes were familiar—I recognized the same compassion in them for me that I’d seen him have for his patients.



What could I tell him? That I needed to save someone, because it was looking like I couldn’t save my mom?



I looked away, conscious of how near he was. “I thought I heard someone.”



“In the storm drain? But of course.” His voice was light and teasing.



“It just sounded like someone was down there. And then Olympio heard it too.”



Hector shook his head in dismissal. “I already talked to him. Told him he should have more sense next time. That’s a dangerous part of town. You both could have been killed.”



I rolled my eyes. “Thanks, Mom.”



“Your life may not mean much to you, but Olympio’s whole family relies on him.” I didn’t have anything to say to that. My cheeks flushed in shame. He finally stepped away. “Anyhow. The ambulance is on its way.”



* * *



I followed him back into the waiting room, where the old woman sat. She clutched her black blanket around her, despite the heat, and I could only imagine how badly the seat she was on would need to be disinfected on Monday.



“Are we done here?” Olympio said, looking back and forth from Hector to me.



“Yes. Thank you.” Hector pulled out his wallet and handed Olympio a ten-dollar bill. Then Olympio came over and looked at me. I found a ten and gave it to him. He looked me up and down, and hmmphed. I fished in my pocket and gave him the rest of my flashlight change.



“You want to know how I knew we wouldn’t die?” he asked me as he pocketed my money.



“How?”



“La Llorona couldn’t be a grandmother since she killed all her kids.”



“Ha.” I grinned at him. And then our shared moment was broken by the sound of water dripping—from the woman’s chair onto the floor. She was peeing herself.



Olympio blanched. “You don’t pay me enough for that, though.” He sprinted for the door.



* * *



The paramedics lifted her onto the gurney. She fought, clawing at them like a wildcat. Without the black blanket, she was naked—they covered her up with a sheet from their ambulance. I knew they were driving her over to County, the only facility that would take someone like her. Even now that health insurance was becoming more common, hospitals weren’t exactly going out of their way to open up their doors. And old habits died hard. Ambulance drivers who’d driven the sickest or meanest people to County for half their careers weren’t going to change overnight.



Once she was gone, Hector threw her blanket away. I felt bad watching him trash what was probably her only possession in the whole wide world, but there was no way we could keep the thing; it was a petri dish. I promised myself I’d buy her another one, if I ever saw her again—but I bet she was going to stay a few weeks someplace with IV antibiotics, sedatives, and possibly restraints.

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