The Dead Circle (11 page)

“You have until the count of three to open fire or I will fucking grease you and do it myself!”

Lawrence put his finger on the trigger of his rifle and put his sight on the largest, most aggressive-looking man in the crowd. He was wearing a denim jacket and a Detroit Tigers hat. He was shouting at the soldiers behind the barricade, foaming with rage. Spit rained out of his mouth and collected on his scrabbly beard as he demanded to be let through.

“Three!”

The barrel of the pistol felt alive with the promise of pain, like a hornet’s tiny feet crawling down his neck. It was a completely unnerving sensation—that it could sting him at any moment. If he tried to swat it away, he would definitely be stung, but there were no guarantees that remaining frozen would keep him safe either. And in this scenario, the sting would be fatal. Reluctantly, Lawrence took a deep breath.

“Two!”

In that instant of indecision, Lawrence thought of his family.
Were they in the quarantine zone?
They were a half hour drive out of the city center, but he didn’t know where the military considered ‘ground zero’ so he couldn’t be sure. Either way, he knew he couldn’t help them if he was dead.

He took a deep breath.
Jesus forgive me
. The man wearing the jean jacket—the man he was seconds from shooting—hesitated for a second and looked down. There was a little girl pulling on the pocket of his jeans. The man knelt down and hugged her. She was obviously his daughter and he was quietly comforting her.
Lord, I can’t do this
.

“One!”

The last thing Lawrence heard was the gunshot that sent a bullet into the back of his spine. He didn’t feel pain, just surprise. He only realized that he had fallen to the pavement when he noticed that he was looking straight up at the sky as the first hint of dawn approached. He had never looked directly up as the sun rose or set. He had always just looked at the horizon.  This new perspective was beautiful really. On one side of the sky, it was still fully night-time. Clouds were blocking the stars so it was pitch black. On the other side, the hint of light, the hint of color peeked into the periphery of his vision. Between horizons is an expansive slow gradation of dark to light that seemed to be increasing in intensity as if the day were an electric range slowing cycling up. The irony of watching the day powering up as he powered down made him grin for a moment. If he read this in one of his student’s creative writing assignments, he would have told him or her that the thought was a little ‘on the nose.’

Lawrence listened with dull, fading ears to gales of automatic gunfire as the other Guardsmen opened fire on the crowd. The last thing he thought was
‘is it starting to rain?’

Chapter 6

The sun begins to rise over the city as the rain tapers off. It’s a Saturday. The warm light fights its way through the clouds to illuminate the quietest rush hour in history. There’s still gridlock up and down 94, but it’s not moving. Tens of thousands of cars sit abandoned on the highways and streets. A garbage truck rests up against a park bench. It had rolled over the curb after its driver suddenly opened the door and stepped out of the cab. A torn remnant of a filthy green shirt remains on the steering wheel. The engine has been idling all night, its endless low rumble joining hundreds of vehicles that were left running, creating a strange monotone chorus. Their occupants never bothered to turn them off when they abandoned them, intent on getting to the circle. One by one, the engines eventually sputter and die as they finally run out of gas.

The vast network of streets is littered with countless discarded articles of clothing. Shoes of all shapes and sizes dot the pavement. Briefcases, eyeglasses, watches, rings and even a few wigs lie in filthy puddles of rainwater.

The last of the precipitation comes from the tail of a large weather system working its way from the southwest to the northeast, depositing rain as it goes. Water vapor gets sucked up from Lake Michigan and heads high up into the clouds to mix with moisture from all over the Midwest. The trillions of molecules of hydrogen and oxygen eventually become too densely populated and re-combine as water. Soon they plummet down in droplets of rain, falling over a large part of the country. The rainwater runs into puddles, streams, rivers and lakes from which the whole process begins again.

From above, the streets of Detroit appear completely abandoned. There are no lights. No cars, buses or trains are moving. Normally at this hour pedestrians and vehicles would be constantly moving through the grid like blood through arteries. Not today. But the streets are not completely abandoned. Every once in a while, a solitary naked straggler can be seen headed for the center of town.  Not everyone got exposed at the same time of course, so the few people who might have had a cold and had gone to bed early, blissfully unaware that the city was falling around them, are exposed by drinking their morning coffee, washing a dish or brushing their teeth. They may have stepped into the rain to retrieve a morning paper that was never even printed. However the story plays out, the last one percent of the once-great city gradually joins the circle. 

At 10:07 AM, as the sun burns through the last of the clouds, the tall man Lawrence the National Guardsman died to avoid killing arrives at the horde. He had been able to duck under the bullets, but he could not avoid the rain. The man, now sans his customary Tigers cap—and everything else—merges smoothly with the parade of feet.  His daughter would get there twenty minutes later, slowed by her shorter legs. The circle has grown so large that the five empty blocks can barely contain the masses. Some people on the edges of the horde run into the corners of the surrounding buildings causing pileups. The pressure from all of the arms and legs and torsos causes the bodies in front to be mashed into the obstacle and break into pieces.

At the corner of Cass and Columbia, Bookies Bar and Grille sits alone in the desert of pavement. It’s so isolated that its owner decided to run a shuttle bus between itself and the sports stadiums and theaters a few empty blocks away. The two-story brick building now finds itself flush with customers in the ever-expanding pathway of the circle. Bodies begin to pile up as they crash into the dingy exterior walls. The facade had been adorned again and again with hand-painted advertisements for Coca-Cola, General Electric or smaller local businesses for nearly a century. Now it is painted with blood. As more and more bodies push against the brick, the force increases and increases until the building itself shudders, raining dust and bits of plaster onto the people below. Eventually, Bookies Bar and Grille gives way, collapses onto itself, and is over-run by the naked ‘dancers’. Their feet continue up and over the rubble, eroding the mound of brick until it crumbles into dust. In time, the building will merely be a bump in the pathway of the population of Detroit.

And the circle continues its slow, inexorable rotation.

***

When morning comes to the library, Sarah has returned to her post on the windowsill watching an occasional nude person blankly stumble by. She did not sleep. She wonders when she might ever feel safe enough to sleep again.

Chris arrives from the kitchen and hands her a can of Diet Coke.

“It’s not coffee, but it’s caffeinated and it’s probably not contaminated.” He opens a can of his own and sits down at the piano.

“There weren’t any cold ones?”

“No power, no fridge. Remember?

“Right. Duh. Thanks.”

Chris begins to play a Chopin etude. It’s a beautiful and sad piece. His fingers dance up and down the keyboard with uncommon dexterity, but the music sounds flat and dull. Chris stops playing. His heart is not in it.

“So.” He puts the cover down over the keys and turns to face Sarah.

“So.” She replies.

“I suppose we should figure out what to do. This is what we know: something has contaminated the water. The city water, the rain, pretty much anything wet.”

“Well not everything. We drank the soda and we seem to be OK. So, let’s say any water that wasn’t self-contained when whatever happened… happened.”

“Right.” Chris pauses for a moment. “So, if we trust that website we assume that when people get exposed to water, they start acting crazy. Take off all of their clothes, go outside and do a, what did you call it? Zombie krump?”

“Don’t forget the eyes. Their eyes go white. I guess they roll up?”

“Yeah, and they’re non-responsive.” Chris sets down his drink. “So is it fatal? Are they going to die?”

“I’ve never heard of anybody coming back from something like that.” She hears the stupidity of what she just said. “I mean, I guess I’ve never heard of anything like this at all, so how would I know?”

“So if you touch the contaminated water, you turn into a zombie.”

Sarah shoots him an eyebrow. “What I said was a joke. We’re not in a Romero movie. They’re not zombies. They didn’t look interested in eating anybody’s brains.”

“You have a better name for them?”

“I don’t know. These are people… I don’t want to write them off like that. ‘Zombies’ sound evil or something.”

“‘Fred and Gingers’ then?” Chris mimes putting on a top hat and dancing with a cane.

“Really?”

“They seem to like to dance?” He plays a little bit of ‘Cheek to Cheek’ on the piano.

“You’re an idiot. But at least it’s better than ‘zombie’. OK. So do you think they are dangerous?”

“They didn’t pay any attention to us last night. But we have no way of knowing how they are going to react to us if we meet face to face. Besides, we don’t know if they can spread the disease or whatever. They might be infectious. If we’re smart, we assume they’re dangerous until proven otherwise. Let’s steer clear of them as much as possible.”

“Yeah,” Sarah sits down at the piano with Chris. “OK, so water is bad, Fred and Gingers are creepy at best, dangerous at worst. What about the police, the government, the CDC? When are they going to rescue the uninfected?”

“You’d think they’d try and get a message to us. Over the emergency broadcast system or something? Even if we are quarantined, they’d want to give us instructions right? But they turned off all communication and power.”

“But what about the battery-powered radio? They might broadcast to that.”

“Makes sense to me. But then again nothing has made sense in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Hold on, let me get it.” Sarah climbs the ladder to the balcony and carries down the small radio that she had been listening to when she was painting. When she turns it on, they hear nothing but static.

“Try the other stations.” Chris says helpfully.

“You think?” Sarah says with a touch of annoyance. She spins the dial. Nothing. She switches to AM, still nothing.

“Either the radio is broken or nobody is broadcasting.”

“It worked yesterday. I don’t like this at all. The AM broadcasts pick up stations as far away as Cleveland. You don’t think they’re affected now too?”

Chris noodles on the piano while he thinks. “We have contto assume that, at least for the time being, we’re on our own.”

“Shit.”

 “Yeah.” He continues pushing the conversation ahead. “So let’s take stock of what we have.”

“We have some food, not a lot. We should have gone to Costco last weekend after all. More importantly, we don’t have a lot of water. Safe water at least. You
had
to talk me out of using bottles.”

“It’s incredibly wasteful.”

“True. And now we have almost nothing to drink.”

Chris improvises on the piano for another moment then stops. “We have plenty of water to drink!”

“Huh?”

“We know the city water is compromised. And so is anything that’s exposed to the rain.”

“Right.”

“But we’re not hooked up to city water!”

“Our water tank! On the roof! It’s weather-proof right?”

“It should be. We’ll have to check it carefully for leaks before we can trust it, but it should be OK!” Chris gets up and starts pacing around the room. He starts laughing at the absurdity of it. Soon Sarah is laughing too.

“So we’re saying the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the Detroit zoning laws that made it impossible for us to hook up our building to city water might have just saved our lives?”

“Looks like it.”

“Well fuck. I don’t even know how to process-”

A loud rumble rolls through the city. Sarah stops talking.

“Thunder? That’s weird. I thought the storm had passed. The sun is out.”

Chris listens closely. “Doesn’t sound like thunder to me. The pitch is off. ”

“Well that’s ominous. It doesn’t matter right now. We need to go up to the roof and check our water supply.”

“OK. But we better be damned careful.”

*

Wearing a poncho tied tightly around his face with a pair of eye goggles, Chris slowly pokes his head up through the trapdoor that opens onto the roof. He carefully surveys the roof for any puddles or water droplets that might have been trapped after the rain. Thankfully, the drainage is good and the mid-afternoon sun has dried the black tar surface. Not that Chris and Sarah are taking any chances.

“We look ridiculous.”

“We look like people who want to survive. Of course I’m already sweating my balls off.”

They climb out of the trapdoor both wearing ungainly improvised rain gear. They only had one poncho, but they fashioned another one—and improvised wading boots—with heavy-duty trash bags and duct tape.

They do a survey of the skyline looking for clouds that might have accompanied the thunder. The clouds they discover are black and billowing up from several spots on the ground.

“Look, smoke.” Sarah points to the north. “Looks like it’s coming from the highway. Accident?”

“Over there too. Must be a pretty big fire. That’s a lot of smoke. At least it’s a ways away. Let’s keep moving.”

Looking carefully before taking each step, they work their way to two large water tanks. One of them is the type of classic round wooden water tower that can be seen dotting the rooftops of many buildings in cities across the country. It’s roughly the size of a mini-van and looks like an overgrown wine barrel turned up on its end. Chris always liked the old wooden towers because when he was a kid, he was obsessed with GI Joe comic books and his favorite character Storm Shadow—a badass ninja—kept a secret lair in a fake water tower on top of a skyscraper in Manhattan.