carry me home - jorja smith
"Reid!" Derek Morgan yelled, but it was too late. Reid charged into battle alongside the night-clad SWAT team. Reid had been bouncing off the walls, which was a comical idiom for an utterly comic-less occasion. Morgan should have known, did know, really, there was no way the kid would be held back. Not when it came to Maya. So Morgan's call was half-hearted and immediately followed by him rushing to aid Spencer.
They had him in a second. The same brown hair, pale skin, and blank dark eyes as in the passport photo Garcia had dredged up from the tar pits of the internet. Daniel Long. Two SWAT guys pulled him out of an office in the Ledger Animal Processing Plant, empty since 1999. Morgan followed Long with his eyes as the officers hauled him, his feet dragging on the floor, to the police car out front. Then Morgan snapped back to attention.
He told himself he was looking for Maya, to help her as soon as possible in case she was hurt. At least, he told himself that in the hazy and distracted way one talks to themselves in moments when adrenaline sets the world at an uneasy angle. Another part of him, a demon perhaps, had a message for him too. The demon clamped an icy hand on his neck and whispered in his ear.
Find Maya before Reid sees her dead body.
Hotch was right beside him. Morgan wondered absently as he burst through door after door, peering around dusty machines, gun and flashlight crisscrossed by his rigid arms. He saw bare assembly lines, empty metal racks. The ceiling bore overlapping metal rods from which several silver contraptions hung like metal skeletons. Morgan didn't want to guess what those were originally for.
Reid saw them too. He didn't want to think of how they had been repurposed since the factory shut down. Ahead of him several members of the SWAT team tried to open another door. It stuck close, heavier and far more solid than the other doors, behind which they had found nothing. The door held a small bronze sign that resembled an office nameplate. MEAT LOCKER. Reid held his breath. SWAT tried again, unsuccessfully, and then a third time. The door burst open.
~~~~~
Spencer was inside before anyone else had blinked.
There she was. In an overturned chair on the cement floor on the meat locker. Her face was mostly obscured by greasy tendrils of her hair, but what he could see, and what he saw more of which every step closer, was horrible. Dried blood and bruises blooming like paint dropped in water. Her top shoulder curled toward its opposite in a position reminiscent of that of a fetus. Reid rushed to her though it felt like his movement were slow motion. He put a soft hand on her shoulder and used the other to brush the hair out of her face. Maya's eyes opened with the speed and deliberateness of taking a deep breath. Oh, thank God. Reid had never felt relief like this, so strong it was like a cold bucket being poured over him.
"Are you alright? Are you hurt?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said. Her voice sounded exactly the same as usual. Why did he think it would feel unfamiliar? Was he expecting it to sound as distant as the voice that had sung to him on the phone?
"Did you get him?" Maya asked. He looked into her eye, trying to gauge whether or not she had any head trauma that may have affected her brain. Surprisingly, her pupils betrayed no sign of this. Reid had been expecting a concussion as soon as he saw the chair of its side. That could not have been a smooth ride down.
"Hotch is reading him his rights now," he said, responding to her question a beat late. She nodded and studied him with as much curiosity in her eyes as he had worry.
~~~~~
"You look like a mess," she told him. She attempted a smirk but her lip hurt like hell. It was going to take a lot of Chapstick to fix that.
Reid did look a little out of it. His hair was crazier than usual. The circles under his eyes were dark enough to give the zombies from the Walking Dead a run for their money. Scarier than that was the nervous energy he exuded, as if the worst of it was somehow still ahead of them.
"You really want to go there?" he teased with a small smile. She gave a weak laugh that turned into a cough and watched Reid stiffen at the sight.
"Anything broken?" he wanted to know.
"No, just bruised." Please don't let them put me on a stretcher, Maya thought. She couldn't stand the idea of being strapped down again. Reid gingerly felt her ribs and collar bone to make sure.
"Let's get out of here," he said resolutely.
"I don't think I can walk," she told him.
"That's okay. Don't worry." Then gently, softly, sweetly, he picked her up carried her out of the house and down the driveway into the waiting ambulance. She wrapped her arms around his neck. A police officer offered to lend a hand but Reid waved him off.
It was dark outside. They hit a wall of warm air like walking out of an airport on a humid day. Maya pressed my head against Reid's shoulder. In a moment of strange euphoria, she realized it was over. She had spent her last night is that hellish freezer, taken her last breath of its stale air. She was positively sprung from her prison. The ebullience soon faded as her fatigue resurfaced with a vengeance. She'd leave to joie de vivre for another day. Right now she just wanted to sleep.
"I want to go home," she mumbled into Reid's jacket.
That brought a wry smile from her savior.
"Soon." They crossed a large lawn and into the street where Reid set her down in the open back of an ambulance. She grabbed onto his arm like a child, beckoning for him to sit next to her. Dutifully, he complied. When you awake from such long a nightmare, Maya thought to herself, the real world feels like a dream. She had no concept of time, so it felt like the two of them sat there for hours. Eventually, a first responder tapped her shoulder.
"Miss," she said, "You need to lie down so we can assess the damage. We're going to get you to the hospital as soon as possible." Maya was still clinging to Reid's arm. She didn't mean to look so panicked when she glanced at Reid, but he saw it right away.
"I'll be right here the whole time," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."