Ring of Fire

by David Agranoff

Kendra and Gonola shared a horrified reaction.

  “The canyon brush as far west as Del Mar and along the 163 freeway are toast. The whole city is surrounded. But you know what, forget the fire. I know you are thinking, Will, you are out of your mind. I can’t forget the fire. The county is burning down. It is. But there is a war on your streets. You hear the screams, and I am told the gunfire is everywhere. Your neighbors, some of them anyway, drank the water, ate perishable food after the mayor told ‘em not to do it, or they just didn’t hear the warning. What I am telling you might sound incredible, it sounds unbelievable, but it is true. Whatever is in the water is turning people rabid. That is the real reason the military is deployed in your neighborhoods. They call them berserkers and ferals. No cure. Once you are infected your brain turns to mush. They have shoot-to-kill orders, so if you are hearing my voice, San Diego. Defend yourself.”

  “Motherfucker, this dumb jock son of bitch scooped us.” Gonola threw his notebook on the floor. Will Goldberg kept talking, but Gonola was on a roll. “That was our story! We had Bingham on the scene. He heard the orders directly, not by hearsay.”

  Kendra shook her head.

  Sally groaned on the couch before rolling over. “Are you listening, Gonola?” It was a struggle for her to speak. “I’m dying here. For real dying. The city is dying.”

  “He scooped us.” Gonola pointed at Kendra. “We need to get on the air now.”

  “You’re not listening not really.” Kendra came around the desk and saw Sally’s blood red eyes. She heard Gonola stomp out. The more she stared she saw the pupils yellow tint.

  “You’re not dying.”

  Sally smiled at her boss. They were not close friends but enjoyed working together. “I appreciate your confidence.” She let a blood red tear run from the corner of her eyes. “Don’t let me go crazy, OK?”

  Kendra was newswoman, not a soldier. She couldn’t promise to kill a co-worker. What the hell had happened to the world? It happened so fast. She had a normal morning, a normal day planned. She turned to the radio. Goldberg was yelling now.

  “I REPEAT, STAY THE FUCK INSIDE!”

  ***

  The van stopped at the edge of the alley. Andrew and Scott were still in the front. This same alley brought them all the way out of downtown going uphill.

  “We didn’t see one checkpoint,” Andrew argued for the alley.

  Jake crouched down between the front seats. He kept his voice low.

  “I know, but we can’t take Sky 7 without water. We don’t know how far we have to go or where.”

  Andrew squeezed the steering wheel. “We can get water when we get to the station.”

  “Can we?” Jake whispered. “People were dropping like flies at the station. We don’t know what the hell we will find.”

  “Why don’t we go a few blocks and see if we find a store?” Scott suggested.

  “He is burning up now, he needs something.” Jake looked back at Victoria with Damian in her lap. He was shaking slightly. She didn’t need to say anything, they were married long enough, he knew she was silently begging him.

  Andrew sighed and turned the van onto the next street. They moved slowly through the haze. They drove past two blocks of houses before they passed a feral woman standing behind a parked car. She ran behind them trying to catch up. Andrew turned them onto a street with a Target Express. Jake remembered many in the neighborhood fought the corporate giant from taking over an old abandoned grocery store.

  The van turned. Andrew wanted the lights on the front of the store. They all gasped. The giant front windows were shattered. The ground was covered in broken glass. The parking lot was filled with ferals and uninfected locked in battle. It looked like a cross between a mosh pit and a wrestling tournament. Blood was everywhere, some ferals had rolled in so much glass that they looked like razorbacks.

  “Get us out of here!” Victoria yelled from the back.

  Andrew cut the lights to spare them the sight until he had them turned around. They headed back toward the direction they came and Tiffany screamed. Jake looked out the back window. The sight was faint as it faded into the haze. The ferals came in mass for them.

  ***

  Martin watched Lewis talking to one of the soldiers who had been guarding the exit that lead to the elevator and main stairwell. What they didn’t know was that city hall had a second staircase, the emergency stairwell that was closed. Pretty much the only people who used it were the mayor and city council members when they were leaving controversial meetings.

  The mayor was in the bathroom cleaning up. Lisa and Mitchell were setting up a camera in the communication center. Lewis just needed to go into the conference room and he was off. He put on his suit jacket and waited with his backpack just inside his office door. He packed it with two water bottles, Mitchell’s instructions and his laptop.

  The soldier stepped back into the reception area and Lewis stepped into the conference center. He caught and glimpse of Shea working at the desk. The door shut and Martin moved right away. He swung his pack over his shoulder and ran to the back stairwell.

  Once he was in the stairwell he was hit by a smell. It smelled like the inside of an ash tray, the smoke had leaked in from somewhere. Martin ran as fast as he could down the steps for the first three floors. Twisting downward, he realized that he had eight floors to go and slowed down. He thought about going out to catch the elevator but if the soldiers were watching they would see the numbers changing.

  Martin put his hand on the door. A feral screamed beyond the door. Footsteps on the other side pounded along the floor toward him. He stepped back as the feral ran full speed into the door. The feral wasn’t sure it knew how to open it, but Martin was not waiting for him to figure it out.

  He jumped almost the whole next flight of stairs and then the next. His lungs heaved the dirty air as he made his way down to the bottom. He never looked back, the screams echoed in the stairwell but from the other side of doors on several different floors.

  Martin pushed the double doors that let out into the lobby. The small cafe was empty. The security guards at the body scanners were gone. The lobby was full of smoke like a bar in the 80s. The large glass windows were long gone.

  In seconds his eyes, nose and throat were burning. He thought about running back into the stairwell. He pulled his backpack off and was relieved that his gym bag was still in there. He had a T-shirt that he wrapped around his nose and mouth. Nothing he could do about his eyes.

  He only had a few blocks to go. Now that he was here and about to step out into the world after hiding in city hall he felt panic. Something inside him was screaming to turn around. He could hear the screams continue to echo in the stairwell.

  Heart racing, breath sped up Martin ran across the broken glass into the courtyard. The smoke was thick, he could not even see the bottom of the steps at the front of city hall. He froze at the top of the steps when he heard the sound of machine gun fire. It was not far away and echoed around the building. He got to the bottom of the steps and his heart jumped.

  A person, a woman stood at the bottom of the steps wearing a gas mask.

  ***

  Austin jumped back, shocked by the sight of a man standing at the steps of city hall. She could barely see and followed the trolley tracks across downtown trying to make it to the address Robbins had written down for her. When she saw the man, her first urge was to run. She locked eyes with the man and saw he was more scared than she was. He had a t-shirt wrapped around his face, but a suit and backpack on. Looked like one of those Mormons that ride around on bikes, not a feral.

  “I work for the city, it’s OK,” the man said.

  Austin laughed, unsure how the sound came out of the mask.

  “Nothing is OK,” she said in the robotic voice that the gas mask produced.

  Austin shook her head and kept walking. She turned around to see the man run. He was heading out to Broadway. She looked up at city hall. None of it was visible in the smoke. She w
ondered what the hell those assholes were doing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jake nervously watched the back window. The screams of the ferals faded as they sped down the road.

  “Faster!” Victoria screamed from the back.

  “I can’t see a thing!” Andrew yelled back as he swerved to miss a crashed car in the road. He slowed down as they came around a corner. He hit the brakes and they all slammed forward. Only the kids were belted in. After all the yelling and commotion Jake looked up.

  “Shit,” Scott cursed from the front seat. A Humvee was parked across the road. Three soldiers with rifles raised ran at the van. “Everyone, hands up! Palms out!”

  The soldiers slowed a bit as they got closer to the van. They were all wearing gas masks, and full camouflage.

  Scott lowered his hand to crack the window, letting in a little smoke.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We are glad to see you. We need water desperately.”

  One of the soldiers opened the passenger side door. The kids screamed as the soldier grabbed Scott by his jacket and pulled him into the open air. The next soldier opened the sliding door to the back of the van letting in the full smoke. Everyone screamed.

  Jake jumped across the seat “Hey, you can’t—.”

  The soldier pulled him out. Jake felt the nasty air coalesce around him, it was so thick he almost felt it would catch him. It didn’t. He hit the pavement with his hands out. He knew his palms were scraped. He could see his brother on the ground beside him.

  Somewhere out of his sight, he heard his wife yelling. He heard his children scream. He wanted to get up, to yell but his lungs filled up with carcinogens. His chest and eyes burned under the pressure. The helplessness overwhelmed him.

  “This is a state of emergency, you’re breaking curfew,” a robotic sounding voice spoke through the gas mask. “Stay down!”

  Even through the distortion Jake heard fear creep into the voice.

  Scott yelled. “General Redcrow! I have orders!”

  The soldier yelled louder, his voice cracking in the mask speaker “Shut up, you’re under arrest.”

  Jake tried to get up. He felt the end of a rifle push into his back. He fell back onto the pavement, his face against the concrete. With all the stress there was a small part of Jake that felt relief at being flat on the ground. The pavement actually felt cool on his skin. It might have felt good if that smoke wasn’t entering his mouth and nose. It felt like a drain snake pushing its way through a pipe. The acrid smoke wormed through his body. He coughed, rejecting the nasty air but it kept coming back. He couldn’t breathe. He heard his brother struggle to breathe.

  They led Andrew out of the van and pushed him on to his knees.

  Victoria screamed “We are American citizens!”

  “Get down!” yelled the soldiers.

  Scott let out a choked and tortured screamed. “General Redcrow! Ask—.”

  It was easy in the chaos to miss the sound. The sound had begun to blend into the environment. The ferals screamed, but no one heard them. Jake was the first to see. They came through the haze in a pack that stretched across two lanes. Time slowed as panic overtook Jake’s whole body. They were close enough that he saw the blood red eyes. He looked up. Two soldiers were trying to pull Victoria from the van and she was fighting. The third focused on Scott.

  “Look!” Andrew yelled before Jake could get out a warning.

  The soldier standing over Scott saw them first. He fired his rifle unleashing thunder. Jake felt Scott’s hands grab his arms. In seconds, Jake felt himself being pushed into the van. He looked back and saw the soldiers lining up to fire at the crowd of ferals.

  Scott pushed the sliding door shut. Andrew jumped over the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. He was in the driver’s seat quickly and he shifted the van into drive. Thanks to their belts the screaming children never left the van. Victoria was already in the back hugging Damian. Tiffany stared out the window in stunned shock.

  The van couldn’t reverse or run into the feasting ferals. The soldiers couldn’t shoot enough of them, it looked like Wal-Mart opening on Black Friday. The ones who didn’t take bullets moved over them so quickly it was like they were swallowed. It was a rough ride, but Andrew took them up over the side walk to get them away past the checkpoint.

  Jake turned back to watch. You could hear a chorus of screams but there was no pursuit. He thought he knew what happening. They were picking the soldiers’ bones clean. Fighting over every morsel.

  “Keep moving, keep moving,” he heard Andrew whisper to himself in the front seat. He looked in the rearview mirror at his son. Adam was in tears. Jake fell back in the seat. His tears were coming, he tried to hold them back to show confidence, but he had none to show.

  ***

  Martin had never had so much trouble running. Even with the shirt over his face the filtered smoke filled his lungs. He didn’t make it a block before he felt the pain of his aching lungs. He realized only after a moment that he stood on Broadway, a street that normally was filled with four lanes of busy traffic now devoid of any movement. He felt like a child walking through the dark grasping for a lit switch.

  The smoke moved gently with the breeze revealing an overturned bus. The fading broken sign flashed route 923 to Ocean Beach and switched to a flashing Go Padres. He tried to orient himself and figure out which direction was west. If the bus was headed to OB then he was looking east, the direction he needed. He used the bus light as a beacon and walked toward it.

  The glass window at the front of the bus was shattered but holding. As he got closer, he saw the bus was filled with people. They were piled on top of each other, the ones in the front scratching at the window, trying to get out. The light inside the bus flickered but was mostly dead. Their eyes glowed yellow. They weren’t people anymore, they had become monsters.

  Martin froze, staring at them. It was a man at the front. He had been bald with a ring of short hair above his ears. A woman beside him in an MTS uniform, she had driven the bus when alive. A black woman. She had broken nails that looked expensive. The rest he couldn’t make out. It was an awful sight up close with time to take it all in.

  These were people, this time last night they had lives. A poison in the water, a stray prion in their food and now everything they lived for was eaten away.

  The glass on the bus cracked enough to cause more of it to spider-web. It wouldn’t hold long. No matter how much it hurt Martin took off to the east.

  The NBC building was not far now. The street lamps glowed orange but all that did was provide the smoke with an unearthly glow. Martin almost fell on his face running into the curb. He walked with it, turning back praying he didn’t see the bus driver coming after him with wild hunger in her eyes. He only saw closed restaurants and the front of the Spreckels Theater. The marquee on the theater had enough of a glow to cut through the haze. SAN DIEGO OPERA PRESENTS remained intact but the rest of the sign was gone, it had been smashed and the florescent light bulbs that lit the sign exposed.

  Martin made it to the next cross walk and knew he was getting close. He looked up, the smoke obscured it, but on a clear day he would have seen the NBC and peacock at the top of the all-glass exterior. Coming through the haze he saw a loaded shopping cart up against one of the street lamps. As he walked past it, he saw a pair of legs beyond the cart. A man was on the ground. His eyes were wide open and his mouth frozen in death.

  Was it the air that killed him or something else? Martin didn’t have time to think about it now. A lot of ugly things were going to come to light about this city when the smoke finally cleared. When the water was safe again.

  The front door was open. The window was cracked but not totally broken. The security guard that normally sat at the front desk was gone. Martin had been here before when the mayor did an in-studio interview. The newsroom was through two folding doors. He pushed them open.

  His jaw dropped when he saw the state of the newsroom. Beyond the bank
of static filled TVs most of the desks were empty. He only saw three reporters at their desks working despite the three rows of cubicles. Two water fountains were marked off with caution tape and a hand written sign that said, ‘Don’t drink.’ Two large plastic bags sat inside the door filled food to be thrown away.

  Martin untied the shirt around his face and was surprised no one had noticed him yet. He walked deeper into the newsroom and saw a woman who had her head resting on her desk, a puddle of red drool collecting under her.

  “Hello? Can I help you?”

  Jeff Gonola, the anchorman stood in front of him. A stunning, well dressed black woman in a pant suit came up behind him. Martin instantly knew she was the boss, she carried herself that way.

  “I’m Strickland, uh, Martin Strickland I’m—”

  “The mayor’s new baby-faced chief of staff,” The black woman said. “Hell of a first day.”

  Martin nodded. “And you are?”

  “Kendra Ryan, News Director of the most watched newscast in your city. I am disappointed you don’t know.”

  “Rook,” Gonola said and he hung his reading glasses between two buttons.

  Martin looked around the newsroom. “You’re in pretty bad shape.”

  “Probably in better shape than your city,” said Kendra

  Martin nodded, knowing she had a point.

  “Look, I don’t have time to waste. I’m assuming you would like to be reporting the news, right?”

  “How you going to make that happen?” Gonola asked.

  Martin walked toward the elevator. “The mega-Wi-Fi towers universal put up downtown for Comic-Con.

  Kendra nodded. “Satellite back up, we know about those but how to link up is beyond our techs.”

  Martin held up his instructions and smiled. “I’ve got directions and the mayor is waiting to make a statement.”

  “If we go on the air we’re talking about what the government is doing. No spin. The truth. You can’t stop us.”

  Martin thumbed the elevator call button and he held the door. “Trust me, we are on the same page.”