The Dead Circle (32 page)

Chris desperately tries to reach it, but his arm is too short. The paper alights with a crackle and the fire starts to spread at an alarming rate.

“Fuck, I can’t reach it! Hand me your crutch.”

They can smell the acrid smoke coming from a Sears catalog. They only become truly alarmed when the curtain that drops down between the couch and the window begins to catch fire too.

“Forget the crutch, move the couch!” Sarah pushes herself up with her one good foot and hops around their coffee table to get out of the way. She picks up a blanket from the floor, ready to hand it to Chris.

He yanks the couch aside exposing the fire and releasing a cloud of thick black smoke that billows up from where the fire was attempting to burn the flame-resistant fabric. Sarah tosses him the blanket and he smothers the flame before it can spread. Once the mail is extinguished, he flips the couch and pats out the last small tendrils still trying to consume the bottom.

He coughs a couple of times and rubs his eyes. The smoke is still hanging around in a grimy haze, but the fire is out.

Sarah’s heart is still racing. “Jesus. That was close.”

“Right? Now that we have power, maybe we should give all the open flame a break.”

“That sounds like a good idea because you sir, are a total spaz.” She smiles at him affectionately. The excitement has not made her forget his kind gesture. “A very sweet total-”

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

The shrieking noise startles them so much they don’t speak for a second.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

The fire alarm is screeching bloody murder. This is not a home smoke detector. This is a heavy-duty commercial system. It is loud. Really loud. Strobe lights start flashing from the emergency fire boxes hung throughout the building. Chris and Sarah need to shout to be heard.

Chris stares dumbly at the flashing red box. “How could the alarms work? They don’t have power!”

“Battery backup! Fire alarms can’t stop working just because the power is off.”

“I thought the batteries would have run out by now! Fuck, I should have thought-”

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

“Does it matter now?! We have to turn it off! We’re going to draw in every fucking one of them for miles!”

“You’re right. The control box is in the basement. I’ll go kill it!” Chris starts running towards the rope ladder leading downstairs.

“Wait! Stop! We have a much bigger problem.”

“What could be a bigger problem than this?!”

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

Sarah struggles to her feet. She grabs her make-shift crutch and starts to hobble towards him as fast as she can.

“The sprinklers! They turn on automatically after five minutes. And they use the water from the exposed tank! We’ll be infected!”

The gravity of the situation finally hits Chris. He cuts her off. “OK. There must be some sort of way to shut them off.”

“I’m sure there is but I have no idea how. I’ve never had a fucking sprinkler system!”

“There must be a valve on the roof. Let’s go. Even if we can’t shut it off, we’ll at least be safe up there.”

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

“I can’t climb fast enough! Besides we need to shut off the alarm too. Water or zombies. Either way we die.”

“But-”

“I can go down a lot faster than I can go up. I’ll try and deal with the alarm, you shut off the water. We have maybe three minutes left. Go!!!”

Chris runs up the ladder to the balcony and heads towards the trap door that leads to the roof. His heart is pounding and his ears are ringing from the shrieking alarm but his mind is laser-focused on the task at hand
. Stop the water. Save Sarah.
He is halfway up the second ladder to the trap door when he realizes it’s going to be pitch-black on the roof and he needs a light. He lets go of the ladder and drops back down to the floor. He races back to the doorway that leads to the balcony. He silently thanks Sarah for having the forethought to insist that they leave a flashlight in every doorframe for emergencies.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

*

Sarah reaches the rope ladder leading down to the kitchen. Ignoring the searing pain in her ankle, she swings her bad foot over the edge and puts it on their homemade rung. It’s dark in the hallway below but her vision is overwhelmed by the dizzying combination of flashing strobe lights and the stars she sees every time she puts weight on her broken ankle. Her stomach lurches but she knows she must keep moving. Or die.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

*

Out in the dark quiet streets of abandoned Detroit, the shrieking
alarm cuts through the silence with the subtlety of a chainsaw. The strobe lights flash from the second and third floor windows of the library. It’s like a beacon.  

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!! The sound ricochets through the city like a homing signal. In a radius of over a mile, countless Freds and Gingers turn their heads and look up. They hear the alarm. They can sense the flashes of light. They can’t see it but they can feel it, like the light that gets turned on while someone is sleeping. They start walking towards the library.

*

Chris throws the trap door open and climbs out onto the roof. After spending what seems like twenty minutes, although it is less than ten seconds, frantically searching with his flashlight, he locates the old wooden water tower. He sweeps the beam of light back and forth looking for the pipe connecting the water tower to the sprinkler system. Of course all of it is buried under the tarps they put down and he has to tear through them with his bare hands. There is no time for gloves or weather gear. He has no choice but to ignore the fact that if there is a pocket of water trapped in the plastic, he’s completely unprotected. Sweating despite the cold, he starts yanking them back.  There must be a shutoff valve. There must be.

*

Sarah unconsciously cries out in pain as she steps off the ladder and runs toward the basement door. There is no time for crutches. There is no time for limping. She puts her full weight on her broken ankle with each step, hearing sickening crunching and grinding noises from the mess that her foot has become. She can feel shards of bone grating together but she snags the emergency flashlight from the kitchen and shines it at the door down to the basement. The batteries are almost dead, but she can see the bench they pushed in front of the door to remind them to
never
go down there.

“FUCK!” She throws the worthless flashlight aside and starts to push the bench out of the way. They intentionally barricaded themselves out of the basement when it became flooded with contaminated water. They did this as a safety measure. The fire alarm and sprinkler system were supposed to be safety measures. The irony of them being put in mortal peril by two layers of safety precautions is not lost on Sarah.

“Damn it! Why didn’t we think of this?!”

*

Chris locates a pipe sticking down from the bottom of the water tower’s wooden base. It’s old, rusted and probably made out of lead. He frantically looks around for a valve, but there is none that he can see.

“Where is it?! Damn it!”

Shining his flashlight at anything that looks like it might stop the flow of water, he begins to follow the pipe along the roof.

*

Sarah throws the basement door open with a grunt. It’s heavy and thick, obviously original, not a thin cheap modern door. It creaks and shudders on its unbalanced hinges.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

Sarah looks down the stairs and sees nothing but inky blackness. The strobe lights are making it impossible for her eyes to adjust and she knows she’ll be blind down there. Flash. She is relieved to see that there is another strobing alarm box in the basement. With each dazzlingly bright flash of light, she sees images of the stairs leading down, the large red fire alarm control box, and the two feet of standing water covering the entire basement floor up and over the first two stairs. The strobe gives the illusion that she is actually looking at still photographs shown one at a time. Every second, the flash refreshes the image. She sees that she’s going to have to reach out over the water to access the box. One slip, one toe in the water and she’s dead.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

What she does not see is the object perched on top of the red box. Tucked and forgotten behind the wiring pipe by the fire code inspector two years ago, sits a large industrial flashlight covered in a thin layer of dust.

*

Outside the library, thousands of bodies move towards the noise with a singular purpose. Less than thirty seconds after the noise begins, the first few zombies start trying to break through the front of the building. They don’t distinguish between doors and walls and windows. They can’t tell the difference. They just want in. Blocks away, more and more turn down the streets and head towards the library. They don’t all arrive at once, but they are coming.

*

“Shit!”

Sarah works her way down the stairs. Unnoticed tears trace their way down her face on tracks first laid by pain sweat. With great effort, she gets to the third step from the bottom. It’s the last step not submerged in the scuzzy standing water. She is dizzy from the incessant flashing lights, the agony from her foot, and her own fear, but she holds tight to the railing and leans out over the water.
The fire box is right there, just focus, Sarah, focus!
She opens the access door revealing a glowing LCD panel that displays “FIRE DETECTED: TO CANCEL ALARM, PLEASE INPUT CODE.”

“Code?! What fucking code?!”

*

Right before the pipe angles straight down and into the building, Chris sees what he’s looking for: the shutoff valve. It looks rusted and corroded, like it has been sitting outside in the elements for decades. Chris is dismayed to see that it is a twisting knob like in a shower instead of a straight lever.

“Shit.”

Thinking ‘righty-tighty, lefty-loosey’ he tries to turn the knob to the right. It does not budge. Eighty years of dirt, rust, corrosion and lack of maintenance has practically welded the valve open.

“GODDAMNIT!!”

*

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

Sarah frantically mashes buttons looking for some way to subvert the fire department cancel code. She thinks there must be some sort of ‘false alarm’ button. It’s no use. The box stubbornly waits for a code that a helpful fireman will never input. She knows she has less than a minute before the sprinklers turn on. There is no time.

“Goddamn it! Fuck you!!!”

She starts to smash the box with her fists. She puts her entire weight behind each thrust showing no regard for her hands. She is once again reminded of a lesson her father taught her. Not how to swing a bat, but how to throw a punch.
‘It’s the same principal, kiddo. It’s about transfer of energy. Plant your feet, turn your hips and put your entire bodyweight into your fist. Almost like you aren’t punching with your arm, you’re punching with your torso and your fist is just along for the ride.’

 The screen snaps. Buttons fly off and land in the water. She hears a suspicious crack from her pinky. Her hand starts to bleed.

*

The veins in Chris’ neck bulge out from his effort to try to get the valve to turn. He’s desperate to get more leverage, but his hands can only do so much.

“FUCKASSMOTHERFUCKER TURNYOUFUCKINGSHITFUCKER!!!”

He screams with frustration and considers trying to break the pipe.
It’s lead so probably not that strong. Of course I would probably be showered in the water and killed, but maybe Sarah would be safe?

Finally, after a knuckle-cracking surge of desperation, the valve starts to turn. Crunchy bits of rust fall from threads that are being used for the first time since the Depression. Once loosened, the valve turns quickly and Chris closes it as hard as he can.

He screams a wordless cry of triumph to the sky and falls onto his back.

*

More and more zombies start pushing on the walls of the library. The first few have been joined by ten more. Within minutes, they are joined by a hundred. Mindlessly pushing. More coming. So many more coming.

*

Sarah’s pinky finger is clearly broken, sticking out at a ninety degree angle. It’s a sickening sight, but she has no awareness of it.

BRRREEETT!  BRRREEETT! BRRREEETT!!!

She smashes her way through the keypad and LCD screen. There is a now a hole in the panel exposing the wiring and she doesn’t understand why the alarm hasn’t stopped yet. She reaches her hand into the hole and starts tearing out the wires themselves. Sparks start arcing out of the box and Sarah is hit with a series of small electrical shocks. Undeterred, she exposes the motherboard, a flat rectangular piece of circuitry covered with sockets and microchips. She knows this is the brain. She reaches back for one last hit and with all of her might smashes the motherboard into pieces.

Two things happen with that punch. One, the alarm finally ceases, though the strobe lights continue. Two, the flashlight on the top of the box finally slips off its perch and starts to tumble. It plummets down, pulled by the inexorable force of gravity, toward the flat dark body of water. It takes two flashes of the strobe light to tip, fall and make contact with the surface. Sarah sees them both, like two Polaroid pictures. In the first flash Sarah sees it just starting to tip and slide over the side. In the blackness, unseen by anyone, the flashlight has time to rotate two full revolutions on its axis. In the second flash of the strobe, she sees it hit the murky black water.

When the flashlight hits the surface, the impact is especially violent because the water had been so calm. It had sat undisturbed by currents or rain or wind. There were no fish or frogs moving around in its depths. It had been completely placid like cool dark glass.