Ring of Fire

by David Agranoff

  “Keep going.” Scott waved them up.

  Jake felt his heart sink as a feral screamed at them from deep in the marketing department. The ferals ran at them and it sounded like a herd beyond the darkness.

  “Go!” Jake yelled and pushed Victoria. She stopped at the landing turned around. She expected Jake to follow. He did the math as quickly as it could be done. He was the one person here that was dying and choking on self-hate. His ladies must live. He dropped to the floor and pushed the dead weight of the man blocking the door. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tiffany pull on her mother. Then Scott pulled her harder. They were gone up the stairs.

  “Jake!” Victoria’s voice echoed through all ten floors.

  Jake pushed the man, barely able to budge him, even as his partially eaten leg snapped. He dropped his phone and the light shined into the office. The ferals were dressed for work, only slowed by the hours they spent cannibalizing each other. They were almost on him when he got the body out of the door way.

  Jake pulled at the door but a feral got the collar of his shirt and pulled him back into the office. He felt fingernails tear at his neck. The ferals were only slowed by their hunger for his flesh. He felt the hot knife feeling of teeth and fingernails tearing at pieces of his skin throughout. He reached out to pull the door shut. He pulled on the mass of ferals like a running back dragging defenders to the end zone. His hand reached up to the door ready to push it shut.

  Jake fell to the floor. The ferals that tackled him fell over him. A feral stepped on his arm going over him. He screamed at the dozen agonies. His last thought was how little time he saved for his family with this sacrifice. He prayed to see Damian again. He hoped he could tell him he was sorry on the other side.

  ***

  Victoria tried twice to go back, but Scott’s grip got tighter. As they fought, it was impossible not to hear Jake’s screams echo throughout the stairwell.

  “He did it for you!” Scott yelled. “Go!”

  Their struggle kept their lights occupied. Scott had to put his phone in his back pocket it, glowed in his jeans.

  “Light!” Andrew yelled.

  Tiffany grabbed the phone from her uncle’s pocket. Victoria saw the 8 on the wall and Andrew was already at the ninth floor. She saw the desperate look in Scott’s eyes. Jake was gone. Damian was gone. All she had was her daughter.

  Scott read her mind. “Move or she’ll be with them!”

  Victoria shined her light back down the stairs as a feral appeared one level below. Now they ran up the stairs together. She reached the door that opened to the roof. Austin held the door open for them. She held her pistol ready.

  Once outside the dirty air hit her eyes and lungs. It was not as hard to breathe as down on the ground but it stung. The breeze off the ocean cleared the air enough that they could see across the roof to the helicopter. Andrew grabbed Scott’s phone to use the light. Once he got to the chopper he unlocked it and turned on the lights, lighting the entire area. Downtown was completely dark. On the horizon you could see the glow of the fire. The only lights were the north end of Coronado, home to the Navy base.

  Andrew was in the chopper. Scott loaded the two kids.

  Boom!

  Victoria turned to see Austin at the top of the stairwell shooting the pistol. Victoria cringed at the explosions. The feral fell, his chest blown apart. The second overtook him as her shot went wide and right. Austin struggled with the feral who screamed, but was drowned out by the engine of the chopper turning over.

  The pistol was out of Austin’s reach. Victoria was about to run to the gun to help when Austin jammed a knife into the skull of the feral on her.

  ***

  Austin screamed in rage and pain. She twisted the knife, feeling the skull crack and break apart. The woman who had turned feral once had long blonde hair that was filthy with dried blood now. Her teeth were inches from Austin’s arm. Austin screamed, as she found strength she didn’t believe she had. She lifted the feral woman like a wrestler over her head. Austin screamed and threw the feral woman over the side.

  She went to the fence and the feral woman reached up hooking a strap of Austin’s backpack. She almost fell with just to grab the bag.

  Epilogue

  She watched the feral woman disappear into the mist. She felt Victoria’s arm pulling her back. Her leg caught on the fence and ripped open.

  “What are you doing?” Victoria begged.

  Austin hugged the backpack. “I can’t lose the book. Robbins’s book.”

  Victoria and Austin turned back to the door, expecting more ferals to pour out of the stairwell. More screamed. Then she heard gunfire in the stairwell. Jake didn’t have a gun

  “Come on, Vic!” Scott shouted from the helicopter. He ran closer guiding them across. He saw the blood on her leg.

  In the stairwell, only one feral still screamed. There was a single thunderous gunshot and then the stairwell was silent.

  “He predicted all this. He has plans for rebuilding.” Austin gritted her teeth to fight through the pain. “You have to take it.”

  Victoria shook her head and hooked Austin’s arm over hers. Scott put his hand on her shoulder. Together they moved her. The helicopter blades spun faster now they could take off soon.

  The general walked through the door. Scott cursed. Victoria and Austin both turned around. The general lifted his pistol and stepped into the light provided by the chopper. His pant legs were shredded, looking almost like a Hawaiian skirt. His legs were ripped and torn. His arms were a scratched and bleeding mess.

  “Rivers, the firefighter . . . I thought I saw you downstairs.”

  “General.”

  “I cut the signal. The young reporter told me it was here on the top floor.” He grinned. He kept his pistol pointed at them. “I can’t let you leave.”

  “This is mass murder, General.”

  He nodded. “True, so very true.” The general coughed. “I didn’t kill them. They were already dead.”

  “Who was?” Austin asked. “The people in the boats you shot? I saw what happened in the bay.”

  The general laughed. He made Austin sick. Maybe there was a little of her mother in her because she hated everything this man stood for in this moment. She shoved the backpack with the book into Victoria’s hands. She was free. She looked at her gun. She had two bullets left if her count was correct.

  “My fire will cleanse this infection. Some day we will return and conquer this land again.”

  Austin lifted her pistol and pointed it at the general. He didn’t expect her to be armed. It gave her the split second she needed. They both fired. It was pure luck he missed. She aimed for his head but the bullet traveled low and passed through the spot where his neck met his chest. It was enough to affect his shot.

  He didn’t die instantly, but Austin enjoyed watching him topple.

  Now the chopper was going full speed.

  “We gotta go,” Scott yelled.

  “We’ll get it out to the world,” Victoria said as she handed the backpack back to Austin.

  Austin was last on the chopper. She saw ferals step onto the roof as she shut the door. She was not strapped in when they rose. For the first time in hours she thought about her mother. How would she find out what happened? Would she call Isiah? Would she worry when she read about or saw San Diego in flames. She had to admit to herself, she never took Robbins seriously. His warnings just sounded like mom. Alarmist nonsense. That is what everyone said when Robbins tried to warn people.

  Sound the alarm, she told herself. No matter what anyone says, keep sounding the alarm.

  She watched out the window at first, but couldn’t look anymore. She thought they had gone north of the city. They followed the path of I-5 from just to the east. The shoulder of the freeway burned red. All the lanes were empty, and she wondered if the road had melted. They kept going north and the fire was still growing all the way to and past Camp Pendleton. Adam and Austin looked out the far window in silen
ce. What could be said?

  It was hard to look at. She looked back at her daughter. She sat in the backseat under her Uncle’s arm trying to rest.

  Victoria reached into Austin’s backpack. She didn’t say anything or stop her from looking at it. She opened it and thumbed through the pages. She noticed chapter titles.

  Entropy and Civilization

  The Chemical Barrage

  Poison in the Air.

  You are What You Eat, Industries of Death.

  She flipped through the pages reading parts here and there. She had a sense they had been traveling for a while. She stopped on the last page. It was not as neatly written as the early pages she remembered seeing him writing back at the Murphy house. He only stopped when Tiffany screamed upstairs.

  I am not a prophet, nor do I have special insight. I merely paid attention. The earth is a small world when you look at the totality of the universe. An island of life in vast space of empty void, we rarely acknowledge how very fragile our existence is. That is one reason we built empires of consumption. When we bought our toys, food and when we used the water. We moved through the world careless of our actions. It is no different than slow-pulling a razorblade across our wrists.

  We act shocked when the air is not clean for us, when the water is not safe. Yet we demand that the world provide for six billion or more of us to live . . .

  That is where he stopped. Victoria looked out past the cockpit. Adam had moved up to sit in the co-pilot seat and watch his father fly. Victoria looked over his shoulder.

  “Where are we?”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  It was Orange County. She could tell by the road signs that were below them over the unmoving freeways filled with smashed cars. In the distance, the horizon to the north where LA lay ahead was blocked by smoke.

  Victoria sat down and closed the notebook and looked at the hand-written title and subtitle.

  Tipping Point: Where the end begins.

  Acknowledgments

  Every author of every book owes many people who help. This story started as a screenplay that I wrote in 2013. I wrote the first draft and then asked my friend and most trusted reader Larry Hall if he would take a stab at a draft. We ended up seeing the story very different. He wrote a second draft that I didn’t use. He did contribute to the story in two major ways. He changed the gender on one of the characters forcing me to open the scope of the various points of view. He thought I had focused the screenplay on the wrong character, instead of changing the focus I decided to use multiple points of view. More importantly Larry often makes promo videos, memes and graphics for me because I have no skill for them. I can’t re-pay him for the hours he has spent. He is my not so secret weapon.

  Jeff at Deadite, Rose and Carlton at Eraserhead for all the normal stuff and seeing strength in what I am trying to do.

  One reason this novel took me a few years to get to was the massive amount of research I had to do before I felt I could tell this story.

  Thank you Tyler Austin who is a former hotshot firefighter who spent hours with me on Skype telling stories and reading over pages to make sure my fire fighters were believable. He does photography in Seattle if you need his services check out taustinphotography.com

  One of the most important sources was David Gibson from the San Diego Water Board who talked on the phone with me about lots of worst case situations and I took pages of notes to work from. I also learned tons of stuff about the local environmental issues and was directed to many leads by Roger Kube of the Surf Rider foundation. They do amazing work.

  Derrick Togerson is a sports reporter with local NBC here in San Diego, he didn’t know it but while we were waiting for a NFL community forum to start I slipped in some questions about how their newsroom worked. I really have to thank Alex Padilla, Scott Kaplan and Billy Ray Smith for hosting me for a day. I had already decided that the fictional radio program would be based on the Scott and BR show on afternoon sports radio here. I knew Scott was my character model for Will, so I spent an afternoon watching them record and saw how the show worked behind the scenes.

  Those connections were made when I was a member of Save Our Bolts. An ill-fated attempt to keep the NFL and our team of 56 years in our city. It also meant I was afforded the chance as a fan leader to meet several times with members of the city council and the mayor at city-hall. As you can imagine that experience also informed this book. I am not sure my contacts at the city want to be in this book but thank you for including me.

  Lots of others helped less directly, Cari for millions of little reasons and being my best friend, Anthony Trevino for editing, being a soundboard and general hangs, My Pioneer co-workers (I was waking at 4 am to work on this novel before coming to work each day), Edward Morris, Ryan C. Thomas, Bryan Killian, Ryan Bradford, Julie Evans and Chad Stroup for being local horror friends. My sister Karen, My step-mother Susan, Local bookstores Verbatim Books and Rob + the crew at Mysterious Galaxy, Jim Ruland, Miguel At HIFF, Matt Lewis, Laura Lee Bahr, Eunice and HWA SD crew, John Skipp, Lisa Morton, and of course Micky and John Shirley. He is my biggest influence. This is my most Shirley influenced book even I did one thing in the story he would HATE.

  Last I want to thank anyone who took the time to read this novel. For many reasons this story means a lot to me. I have serious learning disabilities and there was a time I was too afraid to write because I didn’t think I could. I have worked hard to teach myself to be a better writer. I understand that movies, TV and video games are quicker and easy to access forms of entertainment. I can’t thank the readers, my readers enough. I promise to always give it my all.

  .

  David Agranoff lives and writes in San Diego California. He is an author of horror, bizarro, and science fiction mostly. His short story collection Screams from a Dying World was nominated for a wonderland award for best collection. His debut novel The Vegan Revolution...With Zombies is a hilarious satire that received rave reviews and was even featured in the Journal of Animal Studies. He has a novella called "Punkupine Moshers of the Apocalypse" that was featured in the Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade edited by Cameron Pierce. His novels include Hunting The Moon Tribe, Boot Boys of the Wolf Reich, Punk Rock Ghost Story and Flesh Trade co-written with Edward R. Morris.

  He grew up in Bloomington Indiana, while spending a few years in Syracuse NY, Washington and Portland Oregon he is back home in San Diego. Agranoff has been vegan for over twenty-five years and Straight Edge for even longer. His upcoming novels include and The Sci-fi action novel Godddamn Killing Machines. Besides reading and writing Agranoff enjoys weightlifting, basketball, vegan cooking and astronomy.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

 

 

 
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