LITMIR.BIZ

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protection, however, I’d had the wind briefly knocked out of me. I scrambled to regain my footing and lean back out. My bare feet could get little purchase on the wall and I scrabbled in vain for what seemed like minutes until I had my balance again. Good thing. Just as I got my footing, Tom let out another length of rope. I jumped and landed, this time with my feet hitting the wall. I jumped, landed, jumped, landed. I looked down on the next landing. I’d come a fairly long way. I needed another 6 feet and I could reach.

      The work light was doing its job, though it made looking up difficult. Looking down I could still see part of the hand on the congealing surface, but it was still, as though imprinting the jellied skin like some hideous parody of the plaster molds the kids had made of their hands in kindergarten.

      Two more jumps and I was hovering about a foot above where the body had landed. My hands burned from the rough rope, but this would not be a good time to lose my grip or I’d fall into the same suffocating muck.

      I shouted up to Tom to stop letting out rope. I hoped to hell he heard me.

      I was now almost horizontal to the surface and above the arm. I had to tie the rope around the person’s wrist with one hand while not losing my grip on my part of the rope with the other. I felt the rope around my waist. It seemed secure. I let go with one hand and picked up the trailing end of the rope. We’d cut it close with this rope. There wasn’t much left.

      I made a loop and tried to lasso the hand as it sank deeper into the sludge. This wasn’t working. I needed two hands. Could I risk letting go with both hands for a second? Would the coil around my waist hold me? It was now or never. I was going to have to dig the hand out of the surface as it was.

      I let go with my other hand and reached into the slimy concrete. I felt the hand. It was freezing cold. I held on to it with my left and wrapped the rope around the wrist with my right. I had her. For it was a her. The hand I held above the surface was manicured with long red nails and several rings. Rings that had scratched me when I’d reached under the surface to grab the hand. I tried to make a secure knot and sickeningly felt myself slide closer to the surface. My torso was now only inches from the glistening veneer that appeared to be a floor but was really a death trap. If I slid further, the floor would swallow me whole.

      “Pull up!” I shouted as loud as I could. “Pull up about twelve inches.” I was now about fifty feet below where Tom was straining with the rope and the part looped around my waist was tightening. My thin teddy had already shredded and the rope was cutting directly into my skin.

      There was no response. I frantically pulled the knot tight around her wrist, prayed it would hold, and screamed again, “Pull up! Pull up!”

      At first there was no motion and I felt panic start in my chest. Then the rope started to move. I was rising.

      As I started to rise, I bent my knees and inched my now bleeding feet into an opening about just over a foot above the clotted surface. My feet slid in and I bent my knees more to get my whole body into the indentation left in the shaft for another elevator door opening. It was only eighteen inches deep and a plywood board met my feet as I slid into the crevice. I could feel countless splinters pierce my scraped feet. It hurt like hell. I scooted my butt sideways into the opening and slid in as neatly as you would slide a corpse into a medieval wall burial. Well, nice image, I thought.

      When I could sit up, I yelled to Tom to just hold on. There was an answering yell that I took to be assent. I tried to quickly shrug out of the looped rope around my waist, but its concrete encrusted surface resisted my efforts. Finally I got it off me. For a minute I felt the panic again. If I fell off this narrow shelf, I would be drowning in concrete too.

      I took a breath and let go of the rope. I yelled to Tom to pull up. Pull up hard.

      The rope started to ascend more quickly and the hand came out of the slime. She had sunk some while I was getting the rope off of me. Then came the arm, a shoulder and a torso, the concrete seeming to pull back on the limp form, resisting letting go of its prey. The body moved slowly upward, past where I crouched on the ledge, in a hideous parody of the resurrection of the dead.

      4

      They are thrown away

      The trash people

      People Nobody Wants

      They picked up the trash today

      Dwayne Moorehouse, #2165

      “Trash Man”

      StreetWise

      Wednesday, May 17, 9:00 p.m.

      A few minutes after the body disappeared over the edge of the shaft, the rope was lowered and I grabbed it. I looped it around my bleeding waist and yelled again, “Pull up!” The rope tightened, I pushed out from the crevice, and I made a painful ascent, my abraded feet leaving bloody footprints up the wall.

      When I’d climbed to about a foot below the edge, I was startled to see Commander Stammos above me. He reached down and lifted me under the arms like I was a child who had just fallen off her bike. When we’d both stood up, I topped him by a head, but the strength in those shoulders and arms was impressive. I am no lightweight. Tom had not helped pull me up; he was with two paramedics about twenty feet away, bending over the prostrate body of the young woman. Mel Billman, a campus cop I knew well, was handling the rope, pulling it completely away from the shaft opening and coiling it up out of the way.

      Mel nodded to me, looking unsurprised at finding me barefoot, nearly naked, bloody and smeared with concrete. Mel’s features rarely ever registered emotion, and he and I had been through a hair-raising event in the fall that hardly put a crack in his carved features. Alice Matthews, my campus cop friend, was often partnered with Mel and when we happened to be all together, she and I teased Mel, trying to get a rise out of him. If this act of mine didn’t do it, I thought I’d have to tell Alice nothing would. I looked around, hoping to see Alice, but she didn’t seem to be here. Two guys in campus cop uniforms were visible and a third was just coming up the stairs on the outside wall leading two city cops.

      Mel wordlessly held out my ruined dress to me and turned his back. I stepped into what was left of it, wincing as I eased the zipper up along my scraped waist.

      “Thanks, Mel,” I said and he turned around. He reached down and handed me my shoes as well. No way I was going to be able to get them on my swollen feet.

      We both looked over at Stammos who was standing near us. He was looking toward the body. His craggy face registered absolute fury. I thought again what a passionate guy he was, though he had clearly taught himself to keep it under control. Mel, on the other hand, was banked down and you couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling. Stammos’s face was so darkened with rage you could practically hear distant thunder. I hoped his anger was only for what had happened to this young woman and did not include me and my jumping into an elevator shaft to pull her out.

      I was suddenly exhausted and I turned away from them. I saw my dirty cape lying next to the pile of lumber where I’d found the rope. That moment seemed like days not hours ago. I picked up my cape, pulled it around my shoulders, sat down on a stack of boards, and shivered.

      Mel came over and pulled off his own jacket, putting it around my shoulders for additional warmth. I would have thanked him, but my teeth had started to chatter.

      “You hurt in any way?” he asked.

      I shook my head no. All I was capable of at the moment. Sure, my feet, my hands and my waist were bleeding, but that was nothing compared to having your every body orifice filled with concrete. I shuddered. A waking nightmare. I was still cold, but Mel’s jacket was helping.

      I looked over at Stammos, still fixed like a hawk on the medical personnel working over the body.

      “Is she alive?” I called to him, braving having him turn his hawk’s eyes toward me.

      He came over and I decided to stand. I figured I needed every inch of height to talk to him.

      “Wasn’t breathing. CPR now for . . . ,” he paused and looked

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