The Dead Circle (15 page)

“But insects. Not people, not even animals.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. I’m just saying that if there was some sort of new parasite in the water… a parasite that infects humans?”

 “So do they die? Do the parasites kill the insects?”

“I think so. There’s no cure as far as I remember.”

“What you remember from the musings of an eight-year-old hopped up on candy canes.”

Sarah puts her hands up as if to say ‘this is what I got, take it or leave it.’

Now back downtown, Sarah turns a corner off Elizabeth St. and on to Grand River Avenue. She abruptly slams on the brakes.

Neither one of them is able to say anything because they have no words for what they see.

Passing before their eyes is a wall of flesh. Only ten feet in front of them, an endless moving mass of naked bodies marches past, teeming with motion. There is a staggering number of bodies, a tangle of torsos and limbs. The wall spans the width of the entire street, like an incredibly dense protest march. Chris and Sarah can’t see how large the group is because they can’t see a beginning or an end, just countless forms passing in front of them.  

“Back up.” Chris says quietly.

“What?”

“Back. Up.”

The truck idles right on the perimeter of the lot, but the circle is continually changing size as the people start to clump, then disperse. It looks like a great flesh-colored organism, an enormous round creature, expanding and contracting as if it were breathing. It seems to take a deep breath and begins to swell, sending a large wave of former humanity spinning toward them.

Sarah sees the tide starting to grow, threatening to envelop them. She feels the sinking feeling of inevitability. It reminders her of being caught in an undertow—knowing she’s about to be sucked under, but being powerless to do anything about it. She knows she needs to move but she is paralyzed. She’s not thinking clearly.

“Fuck. Look out!” Sarah starts to lay on the horn. It’s loud, but none of the horde seems to pay any attention.

“Stop! You’ll draw more!”

“More!? How could there possibly be more?!”

“Reverse! Back up! Back up!!” Chris is now shouting. Sarah stares dully at her hands and feet, not remembering how they are supposed to work together.

They are enveloped by the bodies. Arms, legs, torsos and faces start to pound the truck. There’s no intent behind the impacts, merely that the truck is an obstacle in their journey around and around. Inside the truck, the hits are teeth-chatteringly loud. The bodies start to climb over the truck. The pounding horde is so dense that it’s instantly dark in the cab. Sarah is frozen in a scream while Chris tries to put the truck in reverse from the passenger side.

A crack appears on the windshield. The weight of the circle is becoming too much for the glass.

“Sarah!!”

She is finally spurred to action when an elbow hits the driver’s side window and it explodes inward, showering them both in shattered glass. Still screaming, but having regained motor control, she slams the truck into reverse and starts backwards.

The tires spin and the engine roars. The truck starts to move in a jerky motion as if they were going over huge potholes.

“Oh God. We’re running them over!”

“Fuck it! Keep going!!”

The truck eventually catches traction and peels back away from the crowd. The spot where they just were—and the people they ran over—are immediately enveloped by the circle. As if they had never been there at all.

Sarah keeps driving backward as fast as the truck can go, bouncing up onto a curb and running into a mailbox, showering them with letters and magazines that will never be delivered.

“Stop! Stop!” Chris tries to grab the wheel. “They’re not following. Stop.”

The truck comes to rest about fifty yards from the circle. They sit in silence for a minute watching the nude people march by. It almost looks like a demented parade.

“Are you OK? Are you injured?” Chris asks.

“I’m fine. You?”

“I’m alright.”

They both take a deep breath and wait for their hearts to slow down. Or at least slow enough to feel like they’re making individual beats instead of a frantic blur of pumping blood.

“I guess we found the Fred and Gingers.”

Chris is relieved to hear his wife’s voice sounding almost normal. He’s never heard her really scream before. An actual scream doesn’t sound like it does in the movies. A real scream is a terrifyingly alien sound. It doesn’t sound human at all. Her scream tapped directly into some sort of instinctual panic that couldn’t be replicated by anything other than a loved one in true danger. It shook him to hear that sound come out of her.

“Well I’ve seen enough to know that we are fucked.”

Sarah looks at him. Her eyes are wide. She looks like a child.

“Is this the end of the world?”

Chris considers the question. He’s heard the phrase ‘it’s not the end of the world’ more times than he can count, and it’s never really been up for discussion. He always said ‘Of course it’s not the end of the world.’ But today, he is forced to really think about it. He knows he is not qualified to answer it, and that it was probably rhetorical anyway, but he knows he has to say something. And as he says it, he knows it’s the truth.

“Not for us. Not today. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”

PART 2 – THE LIBRARY

Chapter 8

June 25, 1967

Things had gotten completely out of hand.  This was not a demonstration. This was not a protest. This was not a disturbance or even a riot. Sammy found himself in the middle of outright warfare.

When the shooting started, Sammy dove to the ground and tried to get under a 1964 AMC Rambler. Its windows had already been smashed out but he hoped the large engine block would provide some coverage from either the sniper’s bullets coming from behind him or the National Guard returning fire in front of him. Sammy could hear bullets whizzing over his head like a flock of angry hummingbirds. He closed his eyes and tried to pray, but the only thing he could think about was the fact that he was hiding under a car assembled in Wisconsin and Canada. His father, who had spent most of his life working on the Ford assembly line, would have been pissed. He knew it was a silly, if not insane, thing to have needling his consciousness when he was just a stray bullet from death, but he could not rid himself of the thought:
What was a Rambler doing here in Detroit? What am I doing here?

When he left his home an hour before, it had been against the tearful protests of his mother.

“No, Sammy, no! It’s too dangerous. Half of the city is on fire! You can’t go! Please!”

“Mom. I have to. David is out there. He’s going to do something stupid. He’s going to get himself arrested… or killed. I have to find him.”

“You’re only sixteen. You’re just a child. It’s not safe! If your father were here-”

“He’s not. So I have to be the man of the house. David’s out there all alone. I’m not going to let him die out there. I’m sorry Mom. I love you, but I have to try.”

As he listened to the echoes of the screen door slamming and his mother’s muffled sobs, he scanned the horizon. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the action was. Countless sirens pierced the air. He could smell the smoke and see the orange light glowing in the sky coming from the fires that were tearing through the streets and neighborhoods. Fear gnawed at him, but his fear for his little brother outweighed his fear for himself.

David had already been an angry kid when their father was killed while trying to stop a robbery at their corner deli. It took the police four hours to respond to the shooting. David sat there with his father’s body, watching as a pool of blood slowly spread over the dirty linoleum in the snack aisle. He held his father’s hand as it grew cold knowing that nobody cared that he had died. In fact, officially, nobody even knew they existed. Like many of their friends, they had been left off of the 1960 census entirely. David was tired of the racial epithets. He was tired of being harassed by the police. He looked down the road at his future and saw no opportunities, only poverty and racism.

Over the years David had hardened. His outrage turned icy, cold and unpredictable. Even though Sammy was the older brother, he was a bit frightened of him. His younger brother was so smart, truly gifted with intelligence and wisdom beyond his years. In a fair world he would have had unlimited potential—far beyond his own, Sammy thought. But after their father died, David stopped going to school. To Sammy it seemed like he had given up on the idea of his own future. David would not participate in a game he knew was rigged. It broke Sammy’s heart.

He begged David not to go out into the streets that night, but it was impossible to stop him.

“David! You can’t go out there!”

“Why not!?”

“They’re destroying our neighborhood!”

“We got to make then listen! They don’t give a shit about us. We’re people, not rats!”

“But-”

“We gotta fight man! How long do they expect us to live in this segregated shit hole? Terrible schools, no jobs… police beat us for no reason and nobody gives a fuck!”

 “I know. But there’s a better way...”

“How? By shuffling along with a big smile, playing their little game? They don’t want nothing to change. It’s the same racist shit it’s always been.”

“David, you’re right. Of course you’re right, but-”

“Don’t you ever want it to get better? You want to be an old man someday and look back to see that nothing’s different but the code words? They’re not going to give us anything. If we want to be free, we got to take it by force.”

Before Sammy could say another word, David was out the door and gone.

Wishing he had come up with something better to say to David, Sammy worked his way down 12th
Street in a haze. It was no longer a street, it was a battlefield. The previous night’s rioting had left most of the stores completely looted and destroyed. Several of them had been hit with Molotov Cocktails and burned to the ground. Twenty-four hours later, the rubble still smoldered because nobody had bothered to put out the flames. So much of Detroit was on fire that it had run out of firefighters.
Besides, this is a black neighborhood and the fire department has priorities,
Sammy thought bitterly.

He walked over broken glass, rubble and burning trash. Most of the surviving buildings had been boarded up with spray painted signs that read ‘black owned’ or just ‘black.’  Sometimes the signs prevented the arson and looting. Sometimes the rioters didn’t notice, or care.

As Sammy walked south, he caught up with the rioters. The firebombing seemed to have picked up where it left off the night before; growing, metastasizing, consuming blocks like a cancer made of flame. That night, the warfare had continued to spread south in three different paths that formed a triangular wedge of inferno and destruction that pointed straight at Downtown Detroit like a burning arrow.

Within minutes, he was swept up by the angry mob. Hundreds of men and women advanced down the street screaming and throwing rocks and bricks at the police who had set up barriers further down the road. Fighting his way through the crowd, Sammy scanned their faces. He saw sweat, blood, dirt, fear, sadness and rage. He saw the fury and desperation that he had seen simmering just behind the eyes of his friends and neighbors for years finally escaping.

He did not find what he was looking for. He didn’t see David anywhere. But it was so dark, so loud, and so confusing he may have walked right past David without noticing. Sammy couldn’t be sure he wasn’t in the mob. He had to keep searching.

On the next block, Sammy looked to his right down the cross-street and saw an image that he thought only existed in the news reels from Vietnam that he saw in school. The street was engulfed in flames—an entire neighborhood of neat brick homes was burning to the ground. Gouts of untamed orange and yellow fire belched fifty feet into the sky. The heat was oppressive even a hundred feet away.

Where are the fire trucks? Isn’t anybody going to try and save them? These are people’s homes!

Almost as if to answer his question, someone pushing through the mob knocked into his elbow. Stunned, Sammy gaped at him. The skinny man wearing a sweaty yellow bandana was struggling to carry at least a dozen mismatched rifles.

Sammy backed away quickly.
What is going on?! What the fuck is going on!? This can’t be happening.
He backed into an alley and started to run. He wanted to circle around to get ahead of the rioters, to a place where there was still law and order. He wasn’t sure if the police would be a friend or an enemy, but he knew he didn’t want to be in that mob.

He ran down a deserted alley for three blocks and re-emerged further down 12th Street. He assumed that he would now be behind the police lines, but instead found himself smack dab in the middle of no-man’s land between the police and the advancing rioters. He stood there frozen, staring at the huge pack of white-helmeted cops. Sometime during the day they had been joined by a squad of National Guardsmen called in by Governor Romney. They were standing on the bed of a large green military truck. Mounted on its back was an enormous and fierce-looking machine gun. When the flickering glow from the fires in front of them lit the men’s faces, Sammy saw the mirror image of what he had seen in the mob. Sweat, fear and hate.

To Sammy, it seemed that hundreds of years of history and context had been dissolved by violence. In that moment the righteousness claimed by both sides seemed irrelevant. Perhaps all of that would matter again in the morning, but all Sammy cared about was survival.

“Hands up nigger! Make a twitch and you die! You hear me?! We’re not fucking around!”

It took Sammy a moment to realize it was he who was being shouted at through a bullhorn. He raised his hands high above his head and froze.

That was when the shooting began.

He watched as a bullet shot from behind him tore a hole through the shoulder of a very surprised-looking cop. The injured man abruptly sat down on the pavement in a way that would be comical were it not for the blood.