The Dead Circle (19 page)

“Yeah.” Chris replies without looking up.

“Secondly, obviously you’re right about all of the danger. Do you think that I of all people am not aware of what can go wrong when we venture out?”

Chris swallows. Of course she knows. He feels stupid for not handling the subject with a little more tact. It’s been a long time, but some wounds will never truly go away.

 Sarah continues. “But there are short term dangers and long term dangers. If we starve to death, or freeze to death, we’re still just as dead. We’re running out of supplies and we’re running out of options. We don’t have a safe choice right now. We just have dangerous and more dangerous.”

Sarah pauses and waits for Chris to respond. He doesn’t. She keeps going.

“We have to move. Soon. Tomorrow. Even if it’s cloudy. We’re playing Russian Roulette waiting for a bright sunny day when we might not get another one before we’re buried in snow. A generator, food, water. Maybe some fresh books. OK?”

Chris mumbles a reply.

“What’s that?”

“Well, even if the TV isn’t broadcasting anymore, if we have electricity my Xbox will work.”

Sarah smiles. “Now you’re talking.”

Chapter 9

The morning the water went bad, Sam Jones—who stopped going by Sammy decades ago—woke up knowing he was going to have a good day. It began much like every other Friday for him, but he knew this one was different. He woke up at 7:45 AM and snuck into the shower as quietly as he could so he wouldn’t wake Helen up. After thirty-seven years of marriage, he knew better than to wake her during his morning routine. She worked second shift at the Super Associated grocery store and didn’t get home from work until after midnight on weekdays. So they made a deal; he wouldn’t wake her up when he left for his job, if she didn’t wake him up when she got home from hers. They had been on this routine for almost twenty years and it worked just fine. But Sam knew that this would be the last time he would have to sneak out in the morning.

He put on his Detroit Department of Transportation uniform in their small but cozy living room. He stopped for a second to look in the mirror. There he was, Sam the number 125 bus driver. He’d softened in the middle and his temples had turned grey but he was still just as tall as he had been as a gawky twelve-year-old standing in a crowd of 25,000 people to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Cobo Hall in 1963.

Sam had driven the same route six days a week since 1988. He never made more than thirty-five thousand dollars a year and he never made a speech or changed the world, but he was proud of the career he had chosen. And more importantly, he had earned the respect of the people in his life.

He’d developed long friendships with his regular passengers. He would miss Josh the bike repairman who always wanted to talk about the Pistons but never seemed to get any of their names right, and Mrs. T who would take the bus to the market for a bagel and a paper every single morning. Sam told her one day that she could have her paper and a bagel delivered if she wanted, especially after they had celebrated her eightieth birthday. She scoffed and said that the day she couldn’t go out and get her own breakfast was the day she should curl up and die.

He wondered if Josh or Mrs. T would even recognize him out of his uniform. Would they know it was him if he wasn’t behind the big wheel? Would he recognize himself? He pushed the thought down.
Retirement starts tomorrow, this is a good thing. This is a happy day.

There was a card from Helen sitting on the counter next to his lunch bag. He opened it and as soon as he began to read, he was interrupted by a voice coming from behind him.

“You worked hard for forty-two years. I’m proud as hell of my handsome husband. I can’t wait to spend the next forty-two with you all to myself. Happy retirement, old man.”

Sam turned and, through the film of tears in his eyes, saw Helen standing behind him with a tiny cake in the shape of a bus.

“You realize in forty-two years, I’ll be a hundred and six?”

“I’m game if you are. Get out there and drive safe. I’ll be here with a bottle of champagne when you get home.”

Sam smiled and put on his cap. Feeling a little self-conscious, he surreptitiously picked up a napkin and dabbed his eyes. He started to discard it, but then thought better. He folded the napkin and tucked it into his shirt pocket figuring this probably was not the last time he was going to cry that day.

It wasn’t. Josh handed him a bottle of scotch when he got on the bus on Fort Street. Mrs. T brought him a bouquet of flowers that she had picked from her own garden. By five o’clock, his dashboard was covered with gifts from his regular passengers. He subtly used his napkin on at least five occasions to discreetly wipe tears out of his eyes.

At six o’clock, Sam finished the 125 loop for the final time and pulled the bus over on a side road overlooking the Fisher Freeway. It was time to hand the bus off to Brett, the evening driver. As always, he was sitting on a bench waiting for Sam with his customary mug of coffee. Sam collected as many gifts as he could carry into a plastic bag. He had to leave some flowers, but he figured maybe Brett could take them home to his husband. With one last glace at his old seat, he exited the bus.

“Pretty good haul you got there.”

“I had no idea. Wow. People really came out of the woodwork for my last day.”

“Congrats my friend.” Brett held out his hand and Sam shook it. He was surprised to feel something in Brett’s hand.

“What’s this?”

Brett had given him what looked like a DDOT GoPass card that passengers swipe to get to the bus. But this one wasn’t white, it was silver.

Sam turned it over. “Wait a minute! Is this a free-for-life pass? I didn’t even think these were real!”

“They’re not… officially. But you should never have to pay for the bus. You’ve given the city enough. Enjoy your retirement Sammy. You’re a free man.”

Before Sam could say anything else, Brett hopped onto the bus and drove away. He watched as the green and white 125 bus disappeared down the street for the last time. He remained sitting on the bench for a moment unsure of what to do. He had the rest of his life to spend however he wanted and now he couldn’t think of anything to do next. Obviously he was going to go home, Helen was waiting, but he felt like he should do
something
to commemorate the moment. Nothing came to him, so he did what he’s done after his shift every day for the last forty-two years; he walked over to the Mobil station across the street, bought his after-shift doughnut and used the restroom.

Because he didn’t have any opportunities to take a leak other than his lunch break, he always had to pee after his route. There was a time when he could wait until he got home, but now that he was in his sixties, his bladder didn’t hold out like it used to. So every night he used the bathroom at the gas station before hopping on the 160 bus to take him home.

After saying hello to Kendra the attendant like he always did, he grabbed the key and walked behind the building to the dingy unisex bathroom. A single florescent light flickered and buzzed over the toilet and a small rusted sink. A cracked mirror hung over the ancient porcelain basin. The decrepit state of the bathroom never bothered Sam that much. He’d seen worse. He was old enough to have lived through the time when—just a few states to the south—people his color had separate bathrooms that were lucky to have running water. When he finished his business, he washed his hands thoroughly while staring at himself in the mirror.

“What are you gonna do now Sammy old boy? You made all sorts of plans for how you’re going to get to retirement, but didn’t make any plans for what you’re going to do
after
retirement.” He grinned at himself and made a grunting noise. “Well, I guess you can sleep in tommorroooouhhhh…”

He never finished his sentence. The air continued out of him like a groaning sigh, but the words were gone. The face looking back at him in the mirror went slack as the expression drained out of his eyes. His mouth went limp leaving his features blank and masklike. His eyeballs started to look up as if he was rolling his eyes, but the pupils did not come back down. They continued to roll up and into his skull until they were turned almost completely backwards. The mirror showed only bright white sclera with red veins running through it. Sam’s eyes were just a bright white wall. Empty.

His leg abruptly kicked out and hit the small trashcan below the sink. It made a loud clanging noise as it crashed into the grimy wall. A tile shattered and rained bits of porcelain and plaster onto his shoes. Shoving the door open with his shoulder, he stepped into the light of the sun which had just begun sagging in the sky. His green cap lay abandoned on the edge of the sink. His bag of gifts sat on the ground outside the bathroom door ignored. His arm twitched sideways as he began to walk northeast.

Sam’s Detroit Department of Transportation shirt hit the pavement ten yards from the bathroom door. The uniform that Sam had maintained with pride for years now dangled green buttons that had been roughly torn from the fabric. The seam in the shoulder ripped open as Sam violently removed it. His white starched undershirt was next. He always ironed his undershirts even though Helen teased him about it. This too was torn off and discarded, exposing his large belly. He carried his weight pretty well, but forty years of sitting behind a steering wheel all day had helped him acquire an extra thirty pounds around his midsection. He had been embarrassed by the fact that his stomach protruded over his belt so he always wore a shirt a couple sizes too large to make it look like the shirt was just ‘poofing’ over his belt and not filled with his love-handles. When he removed his belt, his stomach settled down, causing a small crease between his belly button and his penis.

 His pants fell down with a clang. He had always carried a lot of change in his pockets. It was just one of the things that made his day easier because it allowed him to make change for passengers who sometimes came on the bus without their monthly bus passes. It was against policy to make change, but his riders appreciated it.

He stepped one foot out of his pants and left a shoe on the sidewalk. For a while he dragged the pants along the ground streaming coins and keys behind him. Then, he was only wearing his faded white briefs. In a moment, the briefs were torn off too and were left on the ground with the pants and the other shoe. Sam was completely nude—even his watch and wedding ring fell to the ground, discarded. His penis, which was normally tucked neatly into his briefs, swung lazily from side to side as he walked down the sidewalk. His testicles, which dangled lower than they did when he was young, tightened and crept back up in response to the slight chill in the late afternoon breeze. There was a loud honking noise as he stepped off the curb and into traffic.

“Watch where you’re going you fucking lunatic!!” a driver in a Mercedes shouted as he swerved to avoid Sam.

The naked man paid no attention to the cars honking at him. He just steadily headed Northeast. As he traveled, there were more confused, frightened or angry shouts from the people driving by or crossing the street to avoid passing him on the sidewalk.

“Jesus man! Put some pants on! That’s disgusting.”

“Mommy? What is that guy-”

“Look away Kelly! He’s just a homeless junkie.”

He did not seem to notice the shouting as he made his slow journey through downtown Detroit. He continued to twitch and spasm as he walked, every five or ten seconds flailing an arm or a leg out. It took him fifteen minutes to reach the abandoned lot. When he arrived, on the other side of the open space, Shirley had just started her first lap.

***

High above the silent city, a tiny speck of dust flies through a cloud. It comes in contact with a miniscule amount of water vapor which freezes and crystallizes. The weight of the ice crystal is soon too much to sustain flight and the first snowflake of winter begins its long gradual descent. Flitting and twirling out of the clouds, it looks down on the dark grey skyline of Detroit. The snowflake makes a lazy circle down and down until it is caught in a draft rising up the side of the Marriott building. It picks up speed as it is sucked down and around the tower before being set free to gently float northwest on a breeze off the river. It flies over the immaculately manicured divide of Washington Blvd. and almost lands on the roof of the Leland hotel before a tiny gust of wind pushes it over a pipe and around a chimney. The snowflake flies into the open air and looks down over a sea of twisted, crumbling bodies.

The circle is now nothing but a fetid landscape of horror. Bodies that were once young, virile, and attractive are now gaunt, bruised and bony.

Sammy, or Sam, looks a lot different than he did when he discovered the lot on a horrible night almost fifty years before. In fact, he looks a lot different than he did a month ago when he returned to the lot after being exposed. His features seem to have been sucked into his face. His eyes retreated further into his skull as they dried out. His skin has contracted so much that despite having been relatively heavy-set when he died, the outlines of his bones now visibly protrude through the cracked leathery skin covering his frame. Much like normal cadavers, it appears as if Sam’s hair and nails have continued growing, but it is just an illusion. His drying skin had merely shrunk around his follicles exposing more of his curly graying hair.

The snowflake meets its demise when it is stepped on by what now could only loosely be described as a foot. The skin and muscle have worn down and hang in shredded pieces like a sweater that has started to unravel. Protruding bone takes most of the weight, and it too is showing signs of wear. What used to be clean white bone is now scarred and grimy. It is blackened by the unspeakable slurry that coats the ground. Human slurry.

The people are weaker now. Even without pain, fatigue or consciousness, the human body has limits. They have become frail. The former citizens of Detroit are now intensely dehydrated and malnourished. The circle has been revolving for almost two months. They can no longer be considered human. In fact, no reasonable person would even consider them alive. But some new sort of programming, either instinctual or parasitic, has taken over. And now the programming has finally changed.