Crumbling Foundations
Flinging myself out the back door, I skip all four steps on my way down. My bare feet hit the ground hard enough that I feel the impact all the way up to my knees. Ignoring the sharp pain in my ankle, I race toward where Veronica’s sandbox stood seconds ago on a layer of wood chips.
“Veronic—!” I call out, even as I slide downward into a lake of mud. Patches of grass, wood chips, and dry dirt tumble in around me, instantly turning to muck.
I’m going to be buried alive!
Mud closes around me like a sucking vise, but I don’t stop. Grabbing a willow branch that droops and grazes the ground, I pull myself up, lunging toward the swirl of white beach sand in the mud, just beyond Veronica’s sunhat.
I rake my fingers through the slop, feeling, searching. Something hard—her toy shovel. Another object slices my palm, but pain means nothing; the only thing that matters is saving Veronica.
Please, I beg the sleeping God. Please, send me help. Take me instead. The thoughts in my mind are unspoken, but in my desperation, I don’t realize I’m screaming.
I plunge my hands through the mud and water, up to my armpits. Nothing. Then, my fist skims wood from the broken sandbox. I heave it toward me, piercing my skin with a protruding nail before I shove the remnant aside.
She’s got to be close!
Somewhere, a screen door slams. “Miss Maeve, can I—?”
Except for the scuffed cowboy boots, I barely notice Ronan walking toward me. He stops, locking eyes with me. He doesn’t understand what’s happening either but spins and runs for the far side of his house where Mr. Casey is pushing a lawn mower in the opposite direction.
“Papa! Papa!” he yells until I can no longer hear him over the motor. He disappears out of sight.
Trying again and again, I dig and pull through the muck. Nothing. Nothing! My arms tire, but I can’t stop. Not now.
Alone once more with my frantic excavations, I sink deeper into the mire, each grasping swipe finding only cold emptiness where warmth should be.
I take another step deeper into the mud and plummet to my waist before my feet land on something curved and solid. Metal. Ice-cold water rushes over my toes just as the ground gives way again around me.
The quicksand-like mud pulls at my legs with living malevolence.
But nothing is permanent in this hell. As icy water rises, the first crack sounds below me like a knell. I hang onto the willow branch and perch on the underground pipe as dry dirt folds over my lower body.
Everything stings. Everything hurts.
The pipe shatters, and down I drop once more, this time landing on the other half of the water pipe.
The willow branch breaks in my grip. Falling forward into the rising water and muck, I dip my hands again and again below the surface, feeling for Veronica. Mud fills my ears and nose, a vile clogging precursor to being buried for good. Half-blind and drowning, I thrust my torn hands in a frenzied search. As I raise my shoulders for a desperate breath, I touch something warm.
“Aw, Ronan, what the hell?” Shirtless chest covered in sweat and fresh-cut grass, Mr. Casey jogs around the corner after his son. He gasps. “Maeve? Oh, my God, Maeve!”
Rushing water hits my feet again. A split second later, the remainder of the pipe crumbles under my weight, and I sink to my chest. Then to my chin.
Freezing cold water. Warm earth. It smells like a grave.
Somewhere in the primal struggle, instinct sparks within. I kick and pull with every shred of will against the numbness spreading through my body. Somewhere below the surface, I touch something warm again, soft, barely moving.
Veronica.
My fingers find hers and wrap around her wrist. Her palm closes over mine.
“Maeve! Catch!”
I try to pull Veronica to me, but I have nothing for leverage. My mouth dips below the wave of mud as I slide sideways. The sludge clogs one ear and then covers one eye. I glimpse Mr. Casey on the other side of the fence, huffing and puffing like the old man of fifty he is. He gestures wildly as he tosses one end of a green garden hose toward me, the other end still attached to the spigot next to his back porch.
Behind me, the ground disappears. Instead of jumping the fence to come closer, Mr. Casey turns and runs for his workshop behind his house.
I take a deep breath as I go under. Veronica’s wrist tight in one hand, I push my other hand to the surface and find the hose. Looping it around my wrist, I pull myself upward, choking and gasping a prayer as I break the surface. Eyes squeezed shut, I coil the hose tighter around my arm, taking up the slack.
With every ounce of strength I have, I haul myself closer to the surface, Veronica trailing behind me, breaking the surface in my wake.
Mr. Casey emerges from his workshop with an oversized ratchet and a pair of pliers, and just as soon vanishes out of my sight. Two seconds later, the ground around me seems to settle, and the water seeps away. Kicking upward, I roll onto my back, dragging Veronica with me, yanking her onto my chest as if I’m her life raft.
She isn’t moving. Or maybe by comparison, I’m heaving in oxygen and she seems so tiny and still.
“Ronan!” Mr. Casey yells, voice hoarse. “Get in the house and find your mama.” He scrambles over the fence, but it takes him two tries. His gold wire-rimmed glasses fall to the ground before he can stand up straight. Grabbing them, he makes his way toward us, holding onto the hose like a lifeline across dangerous terrain.
My thoughts blur. I lose all track of time as he carries the two of us to his pickup truck and sets us in the passenger seat. The drive to the Wiregrass Hospital emergency room is mostly a gaping black hole for me, somewhere between lasting an eternity and skipping over it entirely. Everything in my world shrinks to snippets.
Me, whispering, “Peanut, wake up. Peanut, wake up.”
The blaring of the truck horn as he takes the corner into the hospital parking lot too fast. The grinding wheels against the curb.
The jostling of the speed bump, shaking us from side to side as Mr. Casey squeals to a halt and then jumps out the driver’s door.
Seconds later, he pries Veronica from my arms, leaning so close to my face that I can smell his preference for cherry chewing tobacco.
“Maeve,” he says urgently, “let go. She’s breathing. Maeve! She’s still breathing!”
His words shake me back to reality.
Or am I dreaming?
How could she still be breathing? Whether she had been buried alive for minutes or hours, how could she have survived except through divine intervention?
“Maeve? Honey, let go!”
More from exhaustion than willpower, my arms relax. Mr. Casey scoops her up in his arms. He half runs, half limps away, met quickly by two orderlies in blue scrubs.
Two nurses in white dresses and starched caps come out, trying to coax me from the truck, but all I can do is stare after Veronica and the door she disappears through. My knees are shaking. My hands, trembling. I feel like I’m going to throw up. My pulse thunders in my ears.
“Miss? Are you okay?” one of them asks from deep within a far-off well. Or maybe I’m the one in the pit, disconnected from the world. “Miss? Let’s get you inside to check out your injuries. You’re gonna need a tetanus shot and some bandages.”
I don’t move.
“Miss, please. You’re bleeding.”
I don’t notice. They’re talking about me now, but not to me. I have a deep laceration on my arm where I brushed against an exposed nail. I have cuts on my hands and feet, and my ankle is swollen. I have mud in my ears and matted in my dark hair. And for a few seconds, I’m out of my body, floating overhead—something I’ve rarely done, even in my lessons with the priesthood.
“Wait,” someone says. “She’s saying something.” I feel the heat of their faces as they bend close to my mouth to listen. “She’s just repeating, ‘She’s alive.’”
“Poor kid,” the other one says. “Mr. Casey says we nearly lost both of them.”
I let them help me out of the truck, but the second my right foot touches the ground, my ankle gives way. A minute later, I’m strapped to a rolling gurney, the lights above in my eyes as I’m speeding down a long corridor with walls painted a deep shade of green. Grayness seeps in behind my eyes, and everything fades away.
After that, it’s only sounds and sensations. Voices pierce the haze as someone undresses me and then washes the mud from my hair and face and wounds. The sheets on my gurney feel soft, dry. The brisk scrape of fabric slides from bruised skin, followed by the burn of antiseptic. The inside of my elbow hurts where an IV needle is taped down. The scents of cleansers and medication make me too dizzy to open my eyes and sit up.
My senses reach out beyond all this work around my body, out to where a doctor and several nurses are working on Veronica, maybe ten feet away in this room that’s too bright to open my eyes. One is praying to her own God. Another frets that we’ll know soon enough if the little sweetie will make it.
“Take me instead,” I try to whisper to any deities present, but nothing leaves my lips. But if my sleeping God takes me, then Veronica will be all alone, discarded by everyone who should have loved her. She’ll be left behind by me as well. “Or if you must take her, let me go with her.”
“What’s she saying?” The two nurses pause over me, shadows moving between the lights above and my lips. She must think I can’t hear her.
Words fade in and out.
“. . .Don’t know, but did you see that tattoo on her wrist? I didn’t know we had any of them in town. Especially not in Country Club Estates. . . .”
“. . .Do you think the little girl is hers? Must take after her father with all that white hair. Sure doesn’t look like this one. . . .”
“. . .Who knows? Might be a good idea to talk to the sheriff, see if there are any children gone missing. I’ve heard about them before, but it was from my grandpa. Illuminati, he called them. But Grandma said they were devil-worshippers. . . .”
“. . .I don’t know, but watch this. . . .”
I feel the heat of a flashlight on my wrist and flinch as the mark on my wrist makes a guttural sound. Not that they would know the Chaldean words spoken in my Initiation vows or captured in my bind rune.
“Illuminati,” the other one whispers knowingly. “Grandpa was right. When you illuminate that tattoo, it makes a sound like it’s invoking all the devils in hell. That’s why they’re called illumin-nati.”
Snickering.
“. . .Yeah, I don’t think that’s where their name comes from but who knows. . . .”
“. . .Her and that baby don’t look anything alike, and Illuminati or not, I just have a gut instinct that that little girl isn’t hers. . . .”
“. . .Me, too. Something weird about this whole thing. I hardly ever see them out in town and sure not at church. This one here is hiding something, for sure. . . .”
“. . .New World order. They’re trying to secretly take over the governments of every country in the world. My grandpa used to say it wasn’t about God but about politics and power. . . .”
“. . .Yeah, but who really knows? Nobody who’s gotten close to one of them has lived to tell about it. Anyway, she’s still in shock. The doctor’s gonna want her overnight for observation. . . .”
Their intrusive echoes make me feel uneasy. They’re partly right, but they have no idea which parts. Details float disjointed on the current of their disparaging speculations about mysteries too easily misunderstood. Idle gossip, yes, but their folly is ominous in their ignorance. We can’t afford their attention.
If they find us too interesting, we won’t be able to stay here.
I summon all my strength. Veronica’s name tears from my throat in a howl.
A tiny gasp answers me.
My eyes fly open. Both nurses jump back, one of them knocking a tray of tools clattering to the floor.
I flail against the IV in my arm to look beyond the nurses to the gurney in the next stall, but one of them wrenches the curtain closed.
“Well, hello, sweetie,” I hear the doctor saying on the other side of the curtain. “You’re looking much better. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
For a moment, every soul in this place holds their breath, waiting for her answer. When she finally finds her tiny voice, I don’t recognize the dead language, but the words are clearly curses.
Then she takes a deep contemplative breath, as if everything just fell into place and she remembers who she is.
“Jaryx! The queen who walks with wolves!”
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