Shapeshifted es-3

by Cassie Alexander

The day was completely still. The only other sounds were from people inside the clinic.

  “That,” I said, pointing to where it sounded like it came from, the drain. “Maybe it’s my ghost. Or the Queen.” I gave him a look.

  Olympio seemed like he was trying to listen. He leaned forward, tilting his head. “Nothing.” I heard the moan again.

  “Oh, come on. What good are your curandero powers if you can’t hear that?” I said, but the moaning had stopped, and Olympio shook his head.

  I stood and walked out to look back to where the train was. Could the train be moving air? Or was the sound of it running on its tracks echoing back off a certain spot? The sound began again. I silently pointed at the drain, and Olympio made a face but slowly began nodding.

  “Okay, that is creepy.” He shoved the rest of his chips into his mouth and set his soda down.

  I walked closer and squatted down beside the drain’s mouth. “Is someone down there?”

  “¿Aquí abajo?” echoed back to me.

  “It’s creepy, but it’s not—” Olympio began, coming near.

  “Pero no es—” echoed back to him, from a different voice. And then what sounded like a sob. We both jumped back and heard sounds of actual crying—someone choking back tears.

  “We have to go down there,” I said.

  Olympio shook his head violently back and forth. “Call nine-one-one.”

  I knelt closer. “Can you hear me?” The crying continued. Louder. “Olympio—how do we get down there?”

  He reached for my mouth with his hand. “Don’t tell her my name!”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I stood and dusted off my knees. There had to be some way to get down in there. “Show me where. Please.”

  “We can tell the others,” he said, pointing back to the people in the clinic.

  “I could barely get you to believe me,” I said. “And how often does nine-one-one get people to come down here?”

  He closed his mouth and looked back and forth from me to the storm drain, where the crying kept on. “Fine. I’ll show you, for ten dollars.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  We walked down the street together, a little back toward the station, then to the left before Olympio stopped in front of the pharmacy. “We need five dollars.”

  Not in a position to deny him favors, I handed the money I hadn’t used on breakfast this morning over to him.

  “Good. Wait here,” he said, and went into the store without me. I waited, the sun beating down. Just as I started to suspect that he’d ditched me and run out through the back, Olympio returned. “Here.”

  He showed me a small flashlight, free of packaging, with batteries already in it, and handed me a fistful of change. I shoved the change back in my pocket as he led on.

  * * *

  We went down a few alleys, and then between buildings and behind another alley, before storm drains opened up into one final wide cement ditch in the ground, like a footpath for giants. There were makeshift tarp tents along either side of the open ditch. We wove through these quickly as people slumbered inside. “This is Tecato Town,” Olympio announced. “Tecatos are—”

  “I know what tecatos are.” We started walking down the steep graffiti-covered hill, leaning back as we did so, and I was glad I’d worn tennis shoes today. There were shards of broken glass everywhere—I wished I had my gloves. “Can your grandfather cure them?”

  Olympio grunted in thought. “No. I don’t think so. To be healed, you have to want to be healed. I’ve never met a tecato who wanted to be healed all the way. They’re all a little in love with the drug. Why do you ask?”

  I glanced up at the tents that were disappearing above the cement horizon. “My brother. He could be sleeping up there.” He probably wasn’t—he was probably at a homeless shelter—but I hadn’t asked him where he was staying the last time I saw him. On purpose. My foot skidded, and I almost had to put a hand down. “Gah!”

  “That’s your ghost, then. He’s haunting you.” Olympio reached the bottom, taking a few running steps to land on mud-stained cement. I followed him, much less gracefully. “Maybe you should see my grandfather. Even if he can’t help your brother, he could help you.”

  “Why do I need help?”

  “He’s haunting you—your worry. He’s causing your susto, stealing your spirit.”

  I snorted. “He’s been susto-ing me for years, then.” I almost told him about my mom, then caught myself. He was just a kid; he didn’t need my problems.

  “Why don’t they sleep down here?” I asked as we reached the ditch’s flat bottom.

  “Flash floods. Wash everything away. Us too, if it rains.”

  Huh. It was humid today, as always, but the sun was still out. At the bottom, we started heading toward the three circular metal tunnels that led beneath the street and then down. They looked like the beginning of some joke, where the devil asked you to pick a door. “How come you know so much?”

  “Everyone plays here as kids. When you’re little, you tell each other stories about La Llorona, the stories that your mom told you, to scare you away from here. When you’re older, you take other kids here to beat them up.” We took a few steps into the tunnel. “It dumps out on the far side of downtown. I know where it comes out, but I’ve never gone all the way through.” The entrances to the tunnels were colored with graffiti, the floors strewn with rocks and glass. I saw the orange cap from an insulin syringe.

  Olympio went on. “There’s a lot of echoes in here. It’s haunted, for sure. I did wonder, though, if all those times I thought you heard someone, it was just some other kid getting his ass beaten at the end of the line.” He turned on his light. “Now we just walk back the way we came. Only underground. Watch out for needles.”

  We walked slowly, crouching, shining the flashlight before each and every step. The smell here was metallic, almost like the taste of fresh blood, the tang of wet rust. There were small tree branches—I wondered how far away those had been swept in from; where the hell was the nearest park?—condoms, bent spoons, and the occasional bullet case. Graffiti warned us that this place belonged to the Three Crosses, then the Reinas, then other names I couldn’t read with faded colors—enough different scripts that it was clear no one really ruled here.

  “Why does she cry? In your stories?” I whispered to Olympio, and heard it sussurate around me, like listening to a breathing lung.

  “Someone killed her kids.”

  “The Donkey Lady?”

  “No. The Donkey Lady—she’s under the train station at night. She’s different. Someone shot her donkey, and then she became one—don’t ask me.” He turned to look back, shining the flashlight up at his face, casting it in frightening shadows as he started talking again slowly, like it was an effort to explain things to someone as unimaginative as me. “La Llorona fell in love with someone who didn’t love her back. She killed her children to follow him, but he still didn’t love her. So she killed herself, and now she haunts rivers and snatches children away. And this place can be like a river, sometimes.”

  He swung the flashlight down to the ground and began walking.

  “Isn’t that an old story? Like it happened far away from here?”

  “So?”

  “So—I’m just saying, chances are she’s not haunting a storm drain someplace where it snows in the winter.”

  Olympio glared over his shoulder at me. “I’m not hearing anything anymore—let’s go back,” he said, and then the wailing overtook us, echoing in the small tunnel. I yelped, Olympio jumped, and the flashlight fell to the ground, clanging on the tunnel’s metal floor.

  “Shhh!” I grabbed up the flashlight.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go—” Olympio started pulling at me, his hands scrabbling over mine for control of the flashlight.

  “Hang on, okay? Who’s there?”

  “Una abuela,” came the sound back. “¡Una abuela necesitada!”

  I looked to Olympio to translate for me. “She
says she’s a grandmother who needs help.”

  “Well then.” That didn’t make it any less creepy, but I’d take talking ghosts over disembodied crying any day. I took a few steps farther up the tunnel, and Olympio followed me. When I slowed down, he bumped into my back. We reached a fork in the tunnel, where it branched in two.

  “¿Vas a venir?” said the voice.

  “She wants to know if we’re still coming,” Olympio said. It seemed like her voice was coming from the darker path, of course. Olympio stopped me. He picked up a branch and set it down pointing in the direction that we’d come from.

  “So we’ll know which way to pick when we come back.”

  And then we went into the black.

  * * *

  The woman just kept asking if we were coming, over and over again. It got so I bet I would know those words too, in addition to sangre and mija. I might hear them in my sleep. They might be the last things I ever heard, if Olympio’s imagination was accurate.

  I tried not to let on that I was scared, but my imagination was just as good as Olympio’s; worse, I’d already seen awful things before. Swirling Shadows that tried to suck you down, the teeth of an angry werewolf, vampire fangs, cancer. All sorts of different things that wanted to gnaw on you.

  It got hotter, smelled worse, and suddenly there was light.

  “¿Vas a venir?”

  Sunlight poured in from a grateless storm drain above, but it illuminated only a square on the opposite wall. Hector was wrong about there being guns down here, but there was trash; everything from the street had been swept in. It stank. No clouds in the sky, but somehow water lingered here, in disgusting pools hidden by—or made of—trash. I stepped into the strange room, hunched over so the moldy ceiling wouldn’t touch my head.

  “Usted está aquí.” The woman who’d called to us was in the far corner. The sunlight robbed me of any night vision, making it hard to see her in the shadows. I could only distinguish the crumpled shape of her form.

  Olympio spoke to her first. “¿Abuela por qué estás aquí?”

  “Me perdí y me lastimé,” she answered him.

  Olympio looked to me. “She’s probably from Tecato Town. She got lost and hurt.”

  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 f
ractionally 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.”