The Dead Circle (12 page)

Alas, there was no Ninja in this water tower. In fact, upon closer inspection, it’s clear that it contains nothing but probable death. Its old wooden top has corroded with time and the dark murky water inside is exposed to the rain.  The water is not only useless, but dangerous.

This does not surprise or concern them. This tower is only hooked up to the unnecessary and expensive sprinkler system that was mandated by the Detroit building codes. They fought the zoning board hard on this one because it cost them almost thirty thousand dollars in extra expenses to have it installed and it broke their hearts to cut holes in all of the original molding to run the pipes. The only good news was that they were able to re-use the original water tower to supply it even if it was too old and leaky to be safe to use as their drinking supply.

They were also forced to install a high-tech fire alarm system with emergency strobe lights (in case of a power outage or deafness), and a computerized fire box that automatically called the fire department if smoke was detected. Chris and Sarah joked that at least they had the most fire-proof house in all of Detroit. It was small solace for the unanticipated loan they had to take out, but they eventually accepted that it was all part of wanting to live someplace unique.

 What they are actually here to check is the large hard-plastic water tank that sits beside its older wooden counterpart. This tank is also round, but it is made of thick black polyethylene standing almost six feet high. It is designed to hold 2500 gallons of clean water to use for cooking, cleaning and showering. Each month or so Chris slipped the parking garage attendant next door twenty bucks to connect a hose to the garage’s water supply and fill up the tank. It took about four hours to fill, but it was a lot cheaper than retrofitting the plumbing to commercial code and connecting it to the city water directly.

“Looks like it’s about three quarters full. Should last us for a while if we’re careful,” Chris says, tapping the side of the plastic tank.

“Not until we check every inch of it for cracks or leaks. If any rain got in last night…”

“Right.” Chris slowly works his way around the exterior of the tank. “Hopefully we’ll find a way to get out of the city long before we use this up.”

“I’m not sure how. We don’t have a car and I don’t think Megabus is running today.” Sarah carefully checks the connections on the pipe that runs from the tank into the building.

“Look out there. There are thousands of abandoned cars. We can take one of those.”

“Duh. Of course. I keep forgetting to re-adjust my Western ethics for the apocalypse. But let’s not forget the possibility that we’ll run into the military trying to keep quarantine.”

“We’re obviously not infected, they can’t turn us away.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

From a distance, they hear a whooshing rumble. The sound reminds them again of how unnaturally quiet the rest of the city is as they both look up to find the source of the noise. In the horizon they see a dot. It’s a plane. They rush to the edge of the roof which gives them a pretty good view all the way to the river.

“A rescue plane? Looking for survivors?” Sarah says hopefully while shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun.

“I doubt it. It’s too small, too fast.” He squints. “Oh shit. It’s a fighter jet. F18 I think.”

“How do you just know that? You play piano. You don’t know anything about planes.”

“Comes with the penis. All men think fighter jets are awesome.” Sarah rolls her eyes as he continues. “But it does beg the question, what do they need a jet for?”

The question is answered when one side of the Ambassador Bridge explodes in a huge ball of flames. The four-lane suspension bridge—built in 1929 connecting Detroit to Windsor, Canada—shudders and begins to collapse into the river. Another missile streaks across the sky and slams into the Canadian side. The second explosion lights the sky and an entire mile of bridge falls into the water. It disappears into a cloud of fire and dust never to reappear. Chris and Sarah see the explosions before they hear the noise a split second later. It is terrifyingly loud. 

“Fuck.” Chris says quietly.

“What the hell!?” Sarah says a lot less quietly.

“So that’s what we were hearing before. It wasn’t thunder. They’re blocking off all access to the city.”

“They can’t just- Why would they do that? That’s crazy!” Sarah is shouting without realizing it.

“Yeah. They’re scared shitless.”

Sarah has a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach, feeling a sense of permanence for the first time. “Do you know what this means?”

“They’ve finally found a way to stop Obamacare?”

“It means they’re serious about stopping infected people from escaping. Dead serious.”

Chris nods. “If we want to get out of the city, we should do it now before they find a way to cut off everything.”

 “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We can’t go up against the freaking military.”

Chris looks at Sarah incredulously. “What do you mean ‘go up against’? Look, they might want to check us out or do a screening, but they’re not going to stop perfectly healthy citizens from leaving. They’re there to keep us safe. They’re going to help us. They’ll listen to reason.”

“Reason?! They just blew up the bridge with a fucking missile! That website said they were killing innocent people!”

“Come on, that was one random conspiracy blog. Look, whatever they’re doing, it will make sense once we understand. It has to. It will be OK.”

They are silent for a moment. Chris looks at his feet. Sarah stares in the direction of the smoke rising from the bridge, but she’s not actually seeing anything. She’s deep in thought.

Finally, Sarah breaks the silence. “We are at the mercy of everything. The military, the water, the… whatever the hell happened to the people. I think you vastly overestimate the amount of control we have right now.”

Chapter 7

“OK. Look this over and see if I’m missing anything,” Sarah passes the ‘shopping’ list to Chris.

TARPS

RAIN GEAR

WEATHER STRIPPING/SILICONE

DUCT TAPE

NON-PERISHABLE FOOD

BOTTLED WATER

FLASHLIGHTS/LANTERNS

BATTERIES

DEODORANT

CONDOMS   

Chris looks the list over. “Condoms?”

“Well, I don’t think they’re going to mail me my next batch of birth control pills. You think me getting preggo is going to help things?”

“Oh, duh.” He stops and looks Sarah in the eye. “So we have a deal right? Before we go after supplies, we see if we can get out of the city.”

“Yes, and when we can’t get through, we find a store, get provisions and get our ass back to where it is safe.”

“They’re going to let us out. Have a little faith in my shining oratory.”

“We do this carefully or not at all. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, of course. We’ll be very careful, I promise. We will be safe.”

Sarah frowns, but eventually nods. They don’t have a lot of options. “We should get some sort of weapons.”

“Weapons? What for?”

“For whatever. I don’t see a lot of police around. There must be other people who haven’t been infected and they might not be as interested in law and order and rational oratory as you are. I’m not sure calling 911 would do us much good.”

“Did it ever? I bet the police response time is about the same now as it was last week.”

“True enough. We’re better off safe than sorry. You understand me husband?”

Chris nods then looks out the window, staring at the sky for a while.

“I wish we had a better sense of the weather. There aren’t any clouds, but if a storm comes through, we’re dead.”

“I think we’re probably not going to hear a weather report for a while. We’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way.”

“How’s that?”

“Just what you’re doing. Meteorology by eyeball.”

*

Looking like they’re dressed for a hurricane, Chris and Sarah emerge from the library. They’ve lived on this street for the last year and half, but today it looks and feels completely unfamiliar. Without people walking by, without cars fighting through traffic, without stoplights and meter readers and all those things that used to fade into the background of city life, the street might as well be the moon. It’s motionless, unexplored, unfamiliar territory.

In Sarah’s mind, it feels like a corpse. She finds herself thinking of her favorite uncle who died when she was eight. She loved him dearly but at the end of his slow death from cancer, her parents had stopped allowing her to visit him in the hospital. They thought she would be frightened and confused by the beeping monitors, tubes and wires poking out of him, the IVs slowly pumping several different colors of fluid into his brittle body and the machine breathing for him. She didn’t understand why they were keeping her from Uncle Tim. It was confusing and seemed mean, like she was being punished for something and she didn’t know what she had done wrong. When he eventually died, despite her sadness, she was excited to see him at the funeral. She looked forward to seeing her friend again even though she understood it would be for the last time.

When she got to the viewing, she knew that he would be dead and she was only going to see his body. She knew he wouldn’t be able to talk to her or tell her stories like he always did. But she was horrified to discover that the person she used to know, the person who had thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams, who always kept candy in his right pocket for his favorite niece, was truly gone. Without the blood being pumped through his arteries, without the thousands of neurons firing imperceptibly fast, without… life, his body didn’t resemble the person she knew at all. It was just a mound of room temperature flesh. It
looked
like him, but it was not him. It was a perversion. It was disturbing. It hurt her feelings. She wasn’t able to figure out who she was hurt by… her parents? God? Nature? But she felt like his body continuing to exist without
him
was wrong. It was a violation of life.

Now, her neighborhood felt like another cadaver. It looked like their street, but it definitely didn’t
feel
like their street.

“Sarah! Puddle!” Chris shouts.

“Shit!” Sarah narrowly avoids stepping in a pool of water that had filled one of Detroit’s labyrinth of potholes. She stops for a second to allow her heart to stop racing. “God, we need to be so careful.”

Moving more slowly than before, they continue down the block looking for a suitable car. They eventually come across a pickup truck that had run into a newspaper stand after being abandoned while still in gear.

“That would help us if we have to go off-road,” Chris says.

“And carry a lot of supplies.”

“Right. Let’s check it out.”

After walking around to the driver’s side, they discover that since the truck had idled all night, it had run out of gas.

“Shit. Not a lot of pickups in the city.”

“Hold on,” Chris looks in the bed of the truck and finds an emergency gas can. “Not a lot here, but certainly enough to get us there and back. See if you can pop the gas cap for me.”

She finds the lever next to the driver’s seat. There is a click as the door opens. Just as Chris starts to reach for the gas cap, something also clicks in Sarah’s mind.

“Wait! Stop!”

“Huh? Why?”

“Look and make sure there isn’t any moisture trapped in there before you touch it! Without much ventilation, it’s going to dry slower than anything else.”

Chris, who hadn’t even been looking, pulls his hand back as if it was on fire. “Holy crap. You’re right. We need to slow down and think through everything before we do it.”

There are indeed still a few drops of water clinging to the lip of the door. Sarah hands Chris a pair of thick rubber gloves she usually used when cleaning the stove. Chris puts them on, carefully twists open the cap, and begins fueling the truck.

After emptying the can, he throws his hockey stick in the back of the truck and joins Sarah in the cab. She is in the process of getting rid of a torn pair of tighty-whiteys that she found at her feet. Grimacing, she wishes she had another set of rubber gloves.
Ugh
. She reminds herself to pick up Purell at their first stop and starts the engine.

The radio had been left on when its previous owner bailed, and they nearly jump out of their skin when loud static starts. Her heart racing, Sarah mashes the power button more forcefully than necessary.

“We should check and see if it picks up anything.” Chris turns the radio back on and spins the dial back and forth but he gets nothing but monotone static. There aren’t even little spikes of static that come from picking up radio signals from too great a distance to be coherent. There seem to be no signals whatsoever.

“Wait a minute.” Sarah starts to fiddle with a small electronic box on the dashboard. “This truck has satellite radio! They’ll still be broadcasting.”

Chris switches inputs on the radio to the satellite receiver. The white noise is replaced by silence. Chris flips through a few stations and is greeted by Bruce Springsteen belting out ‘Jungleland,’ then a section of Yo-Yo Ma playing the ‘Bach Cello Suites’.

“Oh man, that’s a relief,” Sarah says, putting the truck in gear and navigating around a taxi cab that had run into a planter in the median.

“Let’s check one of the news stations,” Chris uses the touch-screen to flip out of the music channels into the news and talk stations. They find nothing but silence. “That’s weird. Why are the talk stations down, but the music stations running? The Feds again?”