The Dead Circle (10 page)

***

Chris has fallen asleep on the couch again. He snores lightly, leaning up against Sarah’s leg. She’s still awake, deep in thought, but her mind is confused and chaotic. She tries to wrap her head around what is happening to them, tries make plans, but her thoughts are filled with jumbled questions without answers, conflicting emotions and upsetting memories. She looks at her phone. It’s still at least an hour before dawn.

She carefully gets up and sits down on the window seat to stare out into the blackness. Not only is the street unnaturally quiet, it is now completely pitch black. All of the lights in the city have gone out. Streets that haven’t been truly dark since the invention of streetlights have been erased into inky blackness. All the porch lights, the headlights of cars, the neon ATM sign in the deli window, the dingy billboards lit from below… all those millions of light sources she no longer even noticed are gone.

The only sound is the persistent rain pounding the pavement.

Sarah has an intense sense of claustrophobia. Even in the large room, even in a vast and seemingly empty city, the silent darkness surrounds and envelops her. A single candle burning at her side is the only thing that prevents the oppressive void from swallowing her whole. She hears a rapid tapping below her and nervously looks around for the source of the noise until she realizes that it is her own foot nervously knocking the wooden trim.

Knowing it is a waste of batteries but not being able to stop herself, she turns on the large flashlight beside her. The light now seems incredibly bright. Sarah has never been afraid of the dark but she is immensely grateful for the beam of illumination she holds in her hand.

She thinks of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, not just light, but a powerful weapon against evil. She remembers the real belief she had as a child that light could protect her from all evil. The monster under the bed, the ghosts in the closet and even the
nothingness
from her favorite movie ‘The NeverEnding Story’ could all be held at bay with the single flick of a switch. The pink flashlight she kept under her pillow had magical powers. She wasn’t afraid of the dark—even as a little girl, she was too rational for that. But she was afraid of the unknown, the danger she couldn’t see, the doom that crept in shadows. The dark couldn’t hurt her, but ignorance could.  She no longer believes that her flashlight is magical of course, but nothing in the known world could pry it from her hands this evening.

She pulls the curtain back and shines the flashlight onto the street one story below. The light catches the rain illuminating each droplet for a fraction of a second as it plummets to the ground. Sarah spotlights a crosswalk sign, a parked Hyundai Elantra, a blue mailbox that she had forgotten was there. Then, directly below the window, a face.

“Shit!” Sarah shouts much louder than she means to. She scrambles back from the glass. The flashlight drops to her side.

“Wha? What’s going on?” Chris snaps awake at the sound of her cry. He immediately grabs his hockey stick and stands up, banging his shin on the coffee table again. With panic coursing through his body, he doesn’t feel the pain, but somewhere in his subconscious he knows he’ll have a pretty impressive bruise tomorrow.

“There’s someone out there!” Sarah shines the flashlight back out the window, but the face is gone. She arcs the beam down the street to her left, nothing. Then she turns it to the right and spotlights the somewhat flabby naked body of a middle-aged woman walking down the street towards midtown.

Chris scrambles to her side straining to see. “What the hell is she doing?”

“I have no idea! Jesus, why is she walking in the middle of the street completely naked? In the rain!”

Chris shouts towards the woman through the glass. “Hey! Lady! Are you OK?”

The woman does not respond. But as she continues walking down the street, her arm snaps out to the right. A few steps later her shoulder twitches.

“This is so freaking weird. What is she doing? Is she having convulsions? Dancing? Maybe she couldn’t hear me?” He starts to open the window.

“Are you crazy?!” Sarah pushes him back forcefully. “It’s raining! You were just going to stick your head out there? Jesus Christ! You’ve got to be smarter than that!”

“Fuck. Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry.” He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Look. I know this is weird. I know you’re scared-”

“Hell yeah I’m scared! I’m scared about whatever the fuck is happening, but I’m even more scared that you’re not scared enough!”

“Sarah, I know things are confusing, but we’re safe. We’re here in our living room. I don’t see anything trying to attack us. There’s no gun to our heads.”

“The water.”

“What?”

“The
water
is the gun to our heads. If there’s some sort of virus or contaminate in the water that is so dangerous the US Government would abandon an entire city…”

Sarah trails off not knowing exactly how to formulate the thought, not knowing what the true implications may or may not be.

“Maybe, but that lady was in the water and she seemed OK.” Chris looks out the window trying to see the woman again, but she’s long gone.

“OK!? Walking completely naked down the street in the pouring rain, twitching like Urkel being hit with a taser?! Does that seem ‘OK’ to you?”

“Well, no. Obviously not.  But, I mean… I don’t know.”

“Exactly. We don’t know. We have to be smart. We agreed on this. Dangerous until proven safe. You got it?”

“Fine. I got it.”

They stand silently looking at each other for a moment before Sarah goes back to the window and shines the light out into the street again.

“Look! Someone else is out there!”

What used to be a teenage boy walks down the center of the street. Naked, blank-faced, he slowly works his way down the road. His right elbow jerks out then falls back to his side.

“Hey! Hey you!” Sarah calls at the boy through the window.

He does not respond. Sarah shines the light in his face, trying to get his attention. No response.

Chris leans toward the glass. “Shit. Look at his eyes! They’re all white. What the fuck happened to his eyes?!”

They watch in silence as the boy walks down the street and out of sight.

Chris shines his own flashlight out the window. He can feel a part of him still trying to avoid the gravity of the situation. A part of him doesn’t want to look like an idiot when this all turns out to be nothing, so he wisecracks.

“So this is what happens when you get exposed to the water? You take off all of your clothes and boogie down Broadway?”

Despite herself, Sarah grins. “It’s more like zombie krump don’t you think?” She thinks maybe he’s right to try and diffuse the tension a bit. It’s too easy to be paralyzed by fear. She’s embarrassed by being so scared. She’s annoyed with herself for shouting at Chris. There is another beat of silence. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

“I get it. I was being stupid. We’re going to have to be a lot smarter to…”

“Survive.” Sarah says flatly.

“Fuck, that’s bleak.” Chris shakes his head and lets out a sigh. “But yeah I guess so.” He sits back down on the couch and turns off his flashlight.

Sarah takes one last look out the window and chokes back a horrified sob. “Oh no!”

“What is it?”

“It’s a kid. A toddler.”

Chris gets back up and joins Sarah. Together they watch the solitary child unsteadily totter through the rain.

“We have to do something!” Sarah says. A tear of desperation begins to form in her eye. She already knows what Chris will say. And he will be right.

“You know there’s nothing we can do. You said it yourself. We have to be smart. Whatever is happening to these people, we can’t help them. Not while it’s raining. And probably not even after it stops. We don’t know shit about viruses or whatever this is. We also don’t know what
they’re
going to do. They could be dangerous.”

Sarah does not reply. Her lack of action is her response. Chris takes her by the shoulder and sits her down on the couch, then slowly closes the curtains. They sit together in silence. Dawn is right around the corner.

Chapter 5

This can’t be happening. I am not a monster. I will not do this.

When Lawrence Thomas joined the National Guard out of high school in 1990, he envisioned directing traffic during a power outage or stacking sandbags during a hurricane. ‘A couple of weekends a year,’ they said, ‘It will help you pay for college’. And it did. He spent three years serving in the guard before attending Michigan State. It wasn’t too bad. Basic training was hard, but after spending most of his two years of service working in the kitchens, his obligation was only a couple of weekends here and there. He was technically in the Individual Ready Reserve for five more years, but after he was officially discharged in 1999, he was free and clear. Not a bad deal, he thought. He graduated college with a degree in English and history and taught sophomore English at a public high school just outside of Detroit. When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started, he was pretty nervous that he might be re-called, but by then he was already thirty and was teaching full-time so he was low on the list for deployment. By 2015, Lawrence hadn’t thought about his National Guard duty in years. He was forty-three and pudgy. Curly grey hair had sprouted out of his temples and he had settled in nicely to his suburban life with his wife and seventeen-year-old son. It occasionally made him shake his head with wonder that his son was now only a year younger than he was when he joined the Guard.

The night the water turned, Lawrence was headed home after moderating a student debate competition at the school. It was already eight o’clock and he was tired and hungry so he was trying to decide how he could convince his wife Dianne to let them order a pizza when the call came. She would tell him that he shouldn’t be eating pizza at his weight and blood pressure, but if he were able to craft the right charm offensive, he might be able to pull it off. He had decided on singing “let’s get a pizza” to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ when his cell phone rang. He looked down at the caller ID and it was a restricted number.
Damn, did I forget to pay Comcast?

“Hello?”

“PFC Lawrence Jones?”

“Uh, yeah. Who is this?”

“You are hereby recalled and ordered to report to Selfridge Air National Guard Base.”

“Huh? Sir, I was discharged sixteen years ago. I’m retired.”

“This is an emergency recall. Report to Selfridge.”

“When?”

“Immediately. This is a top secret mission. If you have any communication about this engagement with a civilian you will be subject to a court martial.”

“Uh… What’s going on?”

“Code Orange.”

“What? Is this a joke?”

Lawrence did not get a response. The line was dead.

*

“Private! You will fire your weapon or you will be shot yourself!”

Ten hours later, Lawrence found himself in full combat gear holding an M15 assault rifle. His flak jacket was too tight—maybe he had gained more weight than he thought. He felt dazed by the flurry of activity that greeted him when he got to the base. He was barely out of his car when people started throwing equipment at him and shouting orders. Somebody roughly pressed a rifle into his hands and ordered him to get on a bus.

Most of the men he rode with were just as confused as he was. Charles, who sat next to him in the third row, was sixty-eight years old and hadn’t even thought about the guard since he was discharged in 1975 after Vietnam. They were all trying to ask question of their C.O.—who looked to them like he had just started shaving—but he refused to answer. They were told to ‘sit down and shut the fuck up’ until they reached their posts.

Their post turned out to be the northbound lane of Route 5. It was still dark. Dawn was coming soon, but they were lit from behind by huge arc-sodium flood lights. Lawrence was pressed up against an improvised road-block that consisted of an armored personnel carrier and a Dodge minivan. The National Guard had blocked Route 5 fifteen miles outside of Detroit and was on orders to prevent anyone from leaving the city by any means necessary. He stood there for five straight hours while he listened to his superiors argue with each other. They were getting more and more disturbing orders over the radio and he could tell they were frightened.

Lawrence stood there until his legs felt like jelly. He was shouted down every time he tried to ask what was happening, why he was there, and why his orders were getting more and more drastic. He knew the situation was barbaric, but eventually the fear hidden behind the eyes of his commanders made him keep his mouth shut. He had no choice but to remain silently standing there becoming more and more confused and more and more afraid.

Now he was being forced to kill or be killed.

This can’t be happening. I am not a monster. I will not do this.

“Private! Do I sound like I’m fucking joking!?”

Lawrence hadn’t really believed that there even was such a thing as a ‘Code Orange’. It had been whispered about when he was enlisted, but it seemed like one of those rumors that got started to scare rookies. Code Orange was a complete, permanent quarantine to be maintained with lethal force. They were abandoning anything and everything within the hot zone. And tonight, the hot zone was the entire city of Detroit.

He heard a click behind his ear. It was the unmistakable sound of a pistol being cocked. He felt the cold barrel on the back of his neck. In front of him, a small crowd had gathered on the road. About twenty-five men, women and children stood looking back at him demanding to be let through. Some of them shouted curses at the soldiers, while a couple of others had tearfully fallen to their knees. They were begging to be let out. They were innocent civilians and they were pleading with them… with
him
. Lawrence tried to avoid eye contact with the desperate and—
Jesus help me—
innocent people on the other side of the line.