But the driver had already driven away and she was stranded at the side of the road in the town that didn’t deserve her.
She walked away from the sign, around the back streets until properties spread out, landscapes came into view in the fading light. She found a bus shelter and decided to wait to see if another bus came at this time of night. The skies grew dark, the temperature fell enough that she dug out the blanket she’d put in her suitcase.
She huddled beneath it, clutched it tighter and tighter as the darkness surrounded her. Nobody else came to the bus stop, nobody bothered her; it was deserted. Maybe it wasn’t even an operational bus stop at all.
Whatever it was, she fell asleep in it.
Maya woke up to the sound of a distant car horn and realised it was gone midnight. Her body was stiff, she was hungry, she shivered. She knew she had to move. She hadn’t brought much money with her, she had no food, but how could she go home?
Maya wasn’t sure how long she kept walking. Going around another bend, her rucksack on her back, dragging the suitcase behind her, she saw a sign: The Whistlestop River airfield.
She drew closer to the airfield and when she reached a metal barrier, she threw her suitcase over, then her rucksack, and then climbed over herself. She hoped they didn’t have guard dogs here and almost turned back but as her heart thumped and no beast came barrelling towards her, she put one foot in front of the other to head for the building a couple of hundred metres away.
She reached the ground adjacent to the airbase building. It was the middle of the night now and she watched as someone dragged the helicopter from its helipad back into the hangar. She felt a sense of calm, a sense of peace. She didn’t care about being cold and hungry in this moment; she was watching something she envied and longed to be a part of.
She stayed in the shadows. She thought the air ambulances operated 24/7 but she must have got that wrong because the hangar door was closed by whoever was in there.
She left her suitcase and rucksack in the bush at the very edge of the field and ran closer to the airbase building, hid behind a car. Crew members emerged one by one.
She heard a couple of them yell goodnight and as soon as another car left and she couldn’t see anyone else, but the lights were still on inside the building, she ran to the door. It was open. She crept inside as quietly as she could. A few weeks earlier, she’d read in the newspaper that the airbase was fundraising for a new hi-tech CCTV system, which hopefully meant their security wasn’t great now. She’d worn a hoodie tonight for warmth and pulled up the hood just in case, making her harder to recognise if someone did catch her at it.
She slinked up the stairs at the side, into a room that had a couple of really small beds. She heard nobody and after ten minutes had passed, gradually all blocks of lights around her disappeared, one by one, until she was in total darkness. She heard the big door at the front close and the sound of it being locked but she waited another twenty minutes, until she knew the coast was clear.
She wasn’t going to do anything bad. She didn’t want to damage anything or steal, but she needed warmth, shelter, food. That was it, then she’d leave.
She went down the stairs on her bottom in the dark but there was enough moonlight filtering in that she could find her waythrough reception and to the kitchen. She found cheese in the fridge, some bread in one cupboard, chocolate in another. It had taken the edge off. She could go now, no harm done.
Maya made her way from the kitchen and into reception but with the door locked from the outside, it was hopeless. She was stuck. She looked around for a spare key but couldn’t find one and the drawers in the desk section were locked.
She went back up the stairs, searched in the kitchen but found no sign of a key there either. She was trapped.
She took a big knife and a smaller one back down to the reception. She managed to force the top drawer, then the second, where she found a cash box.
She looked at it. Was she a thief?
She wasn’t, but she had to survive.
Before her conscience could talk her out of it, she forced open the box, took all the cash from inside, the notes, the coins, every last bit. She swore she’d pay it all back when she could: when she got herself sorted.
She forced open the third drawer and it was in there she found a keyring with two keys on it. One of them had to be the right one, surely.
But neither of them were.
She tried one of the keys in a door at the far end of the reception, a side entrance, but no luck there either.
And then her head went to the hangar and its huge doors to let the aircraft be brought in and pulled outside.
One of the keys fitted the internal door. She let herself in, the smell of engine oil letting her know how close she was to the helicopter. She tried the other key in the padlock used to secure the hangar doors and it worked. She had it off in seconds but froze – was it alarmed? The main building obviously wasn’t, she’d been walking around inside and there hadn’t been a sound, but perhaps they’d saved it for the external doors.
Only one way to find out.
She yanked open the door at one side, putting all her weight behind it. She’d planned to make enough of a gap to squeeze through, but no alarm sounded.
Relief washed through her.
All she had to do was run, grab her bag and suitcase and disappear. Nobody had to know she’d been here.
But as she turned to close the hangar door again, she caught sight of the helicopter.
