When the Devil Dances

by John Ringo

  "I gave up on that one," Wendy admitted. They generally worked out once a day for about an hour switching between strength and cardiovascular sessions. Lately, though, they had been concentrating more on weight training; Wendy was trying out for a "professional" emergency services position and Elgars was backstopping her training. Today Wendy had stuck to warm-ups; when they were done she was going to go to the tryouts and she didn't even want to think about going through that SOB after a full workout.

  "You ought to start at a lower weight and rep," the captain said. "It's good for the wrists."

  "I can see that," Wendy admitted, looking at the captain's; the woman's forearms were starting to look like a female Popeye's.

  "Makes it easier to climb ladders among other things, most of the stuff in your PPE."

  "Yeah, well, time to go to that now," Wendy said nervously.

  "One of these days I will figure out the purpose of a fire department in this place," Elgars said, wiping off her face with a towel and wrapping the towel around her neck. "Every fire that has broken out was extinguished before the crew arrived; that is what sprinklers and Halon are for. I think they're just a very overtrained clean-up crew."

  "Well, at least it feels like you're doing something," Wendy said sharply.

  "And caring for screaming children is not doing something?" Annie asked with a thin smile.

  "Do you want to do it the rest of your life?" Wendy asked.

  "No," the captain said, leading the way out of the gym. "But, then again, you don't get the desire to disembowel the little bastards."

  "You get along with Billy," Wendy said with her own tight smile.

  "That is because he doesn't say anything."

  "Well, there is that," Wendy snapped. "You weren't in Fredericksburg; you can't know what it was like."

  "No, I can't," Elgars said. "Thank you very much for pointing that out. I was not in Fredericksburg and I wouldn't remember anyway."

  Wendy stopped and looked at the officer for a moment. "When did we start fighting?"

  Elgars stopped in turn and cocked her head. "I think when I complained about the fire department."

  "Okay," Wendy said. "It's something to do that helps. Yes, I'm tired of the daycare center. I was tired of it when most of this damned place was open cavern and it was just a couple of hundred shaken up Virginians. I'm sick and tired of it now. I've watched those kids grow up without sunlight or anyplace to play but a few rooms and I just can't do it any more.

  "I'm tired of wiping noses. I'm tired of not making a contribution. I'm tired of being treated like some sort of brood mare, especially since the only guy I'm willing to be one with is NEVER HERE!"

  "Okay," Annie said, raising a hand. "Gotcha."

  "As to Billy," Wendy continued, leading the way down the corridor, "Shari was the last person out of Central Square. Billy . . . looked back."

  "I don't know what that means," Elgars said with a sigh. "What and where is Central Square?"

  "It was the big shopping center outside of Fredericksburg," Wendy explained patiently. "The Posleen dropped right on it. Shari just . . . walked away. Carrying Susie and leading Kelly and Billy. Billy . . . looked back. He's never been right since."

  "Okay," Elgars said patiently. "I still don't understand. Looked back? At the shopping center? Whatever that is."

  "The Posleen were . . . eating the people there."

  "Ah." Elgars thought about that for a second. "That would be bad."

  "And they apparently were . . . spreading out towards Shari. She says she doesn't really know because she wouldn't look back. But Billy did."

  "Okay," the captain said with a frown. "I guess that would be bad."

  "You don't get it, do you?" Wendy asked. She'd noticed that sometimes the sniper was sometimes almost inhumanly dense about stuff.

  "No," Elgars replied.

  "It was like one of those nightmares," Wendy said with a shudder. "Where something's chasing you and you can't get away no matter how fast or where you run. The docs think he's sort of . . . locked up in that. Like he can't think about anything else; he's just replaying the nightmare."

  "I still don't get it," Elgars opined. "I don't have that nightmare."

  "You don't?" Wendy asked. "Never?"

  "I did once," Elgars admitted. "But I turned around and killed the thing that was following me." She shuddered. "It was one of the octopuses again."

  "Octopuses?" Wendy stopped and turned to the captain. "What octopuses?"

  "You don't dream about giant purple octopuses?" Elgars asked in surprise. "I do. Usually I'm watching from the outside and they're pulling out my brain. It's like it's all squiggling worms and they lay it out on a table and hit the worms with mallets to get them to quit squiggling. Every time they hit one of the worms, I can feel it in my head. You never have that dream?"

  Wendy had gone from astonishment to wide-eyed shock and now turned back towards their destination shaking her head. "Huh, uh. And, friend that you are, I have to admit that that falls into the category of TMI."

  "TMI?" Elgars asked.

  " 'Too Much Information.' "

  "I wouldn't have run, for that matter."

  "Even with three kids that were your responsibility?" Wendy asked.

  "Ah . . ." Elgars had to stop to think about that. "I probably would have fought anyway. I can't imagine running from the Posleen. It seems like a losing proposition."

  "Shari's alive," Wendy pointed out. "So are her children. All the other people, adults and children, who were at Central Square are dead. Unless you've got the force to hold ground, staying is a losing proposition."

  Elgars shrugged as a double set of high blasplas doors, similar to an airlock, retreated into the walls. The room beyond was large: high-ceilinged, at least sixty meters across and even taller than it was wide. The walls were covered in white tiles and there were large fans on the distant ceiling.

  In the center of the room was a large structure made out of vitrified stone. It looked something like a small, separate building, about six stories high, but it was covered in black soot and had dozens of different pipe-ends sticking out of it. The numerous windows were all unglazed, with edges cracked as if from hammering or, perhaps, really intense heat. A series of catwalks led off of it to lines arrayed up to the ceiling.

  Arrayed along the base of the walls were hundreds of small openings. As Elgars and Wendy entered, the overhead fans kicked on with a distant howl and a faint draft came out of the nearest opening. The fans were drawing the air in the room fast enough to slightly reduce the pressure; if it was not for the hundreds of air-vents along the floor wherever the air did enter would be a hurricane.

  The walls were lined with lockers and rescue gear and near the structure in the middle were some of the "fire-carts" that the rescue teams used for transportation in the Sub-Urb. The carts were sort of like a large golf cart with a high pressure pump and racks for rescue gear on the back. With the pump removed they could double as ambulances.

  There were about twenty people gathered in the room, most of them females in good to excellent condition. Elgars had met a few of them when Wendy went to her EMS meetings and the captain had to admit that Wendy was in the middle range from a physical perspective. Wendy worked out every day, but she wasn't very well designed for high-strength, especially upper body strength; among other things she had parts that got in the way. It also appeared that a once a day workout was not quite enough; more than half of the women waiting to try out looked like female triathletes; their arms were corded with muscles and their breasts had shrunk to the point where they were practically nonexistent.

  There was a group of emergency personnel confronting them, ten of them in a line. They were wearing the standard day uniform of the emergency, a dark blue Nomex jumpsuit. All of them were female and most looked like ads for a muscle magazine; Elgars had the unkind thought that they probably opened doors by chiseling through with their chins. In front of them was an older female in a bright
red coverall. As Wendy joined the group, she glanced at her watch and nodded.

  "Okay, I think everybody's here that's going to try out," the firechief said. Eda Connolly had been a lieutenant in the Baltimore Fire Department until she received a politely worded order to leave Baltimore as "excess to defense needs." She had found herself one of the few fully trained emergency personnel in this hole, but in the last four years she had built a department to be proud of. And she was fundamentally uninterested in lowering her standards.

  "You all know what you're here for," she continued, gesturing behind her. "You want to join this line. You want to be in emergency services instead of whatever hole the powers that be have stuck you in.

  "Fine," she said with a nod. "I'd love for you to be in emergency services too. I think that if we had three times the number of emergency personnel it would be grand; too many times we find ourselves being run ragged because we don't have enough hands. But every single hand that we have can do every single job that needs to be done. And that's not always the easiest thing in this hole.

  "There are two million people in this hole. Two million people that, every, single, day, seem to find a new way to get hurt. Arms caught in drains, knifings, shootings, industrial explosions. There are grain elevators that catch on fire, a situation where if you turn off the ventilation the whole thing just blows up. There's chemical plants and showers to slip and fall in and four thousand foot vertical air shafts that kids manage to climb out into and then panic.

  "And all there is keeping them alive, half the time, are these gals," she said with another gesture behind her. "Every one of them have passed this test. And then, within a week or two, found something harder than this test that they had to complete. Or someone, probably themselves, would die.

  "So today you get tested," she said with a sigh. "And if you complete the course in time, making all the requirments, you'll be considered for inclusion. I've got seven slots to fill. My guess is that only five or six of you will pass. But . . . I'd rather have five that pass than seven that don't."

  One of the group behind her stepped forward and handed her a clipboard. She glanced at it and nodded. "As I call your name, step forward, join up with one of the officers behind me to draw bunker gear and get ready to start your evaluation." She looked up one more time and smiled thinly. "And good luck. Anderson . . ."

  * * *

  Wendy threw on the bunker-coat and buckled it up. Once upon a time she had heard that there were multiple ways to put on a bunker-coat, most of which could get you killed. It had always seemed silly to her; like having a gun that shot you if you loaded it backwards. The gear was heavy and hot, but it had its purpose. On the wall above the lockers was a sign: "Like a rich armor, worn in the heat of the day." She'd tried for years to find the source of the quote, but the firefighters weren't telling and she'd never been able to find it anywhere else.

  She reached into her locker and pulled out the breath-pack, spitting into the facescreen and wiping the saliva around to prevent condensation. There were various products to do the same thing, but strangely enough saliva was the least unpleasant at high heat conditions; you could use baby shampoo but it had a vaporization point well below that of the lexan visor and the fumes were unpleasant. Saliva had a low vaporization point as well, but it just smelled a bit of burning hair. Which, if you were vaporizing it off your faceshield, you were already smelling.

  She checked the air and all the rest of the gear. There weren't supposed to be any booby traps built in at this point, but she wasn't willing to go for "might"; among other things, for part of the test the firehouse would be filled with smoke and she'd need the air.

  Everything appeared to be right, though, so she donned the breath-pack, put on the respirator, put on her helmet and turned around.

  By that point, the smoke was already streaming out of the smokehouse. The smoke was generated—there was no actual fire involved in the event—but it looked real. It looked as if the smokehouse was going to billow with flames at any moment.

  She was supposed to be the fifth person to take the test, but there was only one person in front of her. As she noted that, the first testee exited the smokehouse on the roof and started the rope portion. The various lines above the smokehouse, which stretched around the room in a spiderweb, were an integral portion of the event. The Urb had some awesome chasms in it and emergency personnel never knew when they might be dangling over a two thousand foot drop. Being able to do specific rope work—and more importantly, being fundamentally unafraid of heights—was an important portion of the test.

  Wendy shivered. She was not fundamentally unafraid of heights. Quite the opposite. But she could still do the job.

  "Cummings."

  She shook herself and tore her eyes away from the testee who had just jumped across a small gap onto a swaying platform. "Yes?"

  "You're up," said the firefighter who had led her through the preparations.

  "Okay." She knew the firefighter; she knew most of them. But at the test it was all supposed to be totally impersonal. She knew why; she understood why. But it would be nice if somebody acknowledged her; acknowledged that she'd been a reserve ER for four goddamned years and this was the first time she'd managed to even make the pre-quals for the PPE. She paused a moment, but there was nothing else. Then she stepped forward.

  "Cummings," Chief Connolly said. "Eight events. Ladder move, ladder raise/lower, high-rise pack, hydrant manipulation, the Maze, door breach, vertical environment, hose drag and dummy drag. You are familiar with each test?" she asked formally.

  "I am," Wendy answered just as formally, her answer muffled behind the faceshield.

  "At each station there will be a firefighter to direct you to the next station. Each station is timed. Movement from station to station is timed. If you 'bump up' on the person in front of you, you may wait and rest and the time does not count against you. The entire course, method and time, is graded and you must make a minimum grade of eight hundred points to qualify. Do you understand?"

  "I do."

  "In addition there are specific items that are automatic fails. If you lose the high-rise pack, it is a fail. If you skip a step of the door breach or misevaluate it is a fail. If you enter the smooth tube in The Maze instead of the corrugated it is a fail. And if you drop the dummy, it is a fail. Are you aware of these fail points?"

  "I am."

  "Do you fully understand the requirements to pass the evaluation?"

  "I do."

  "Very well," Connolly said. She looked around for a moment then leaned forward and whispered, very definitively, "Don't. Drop. The dummy." Then she straightened up, looked at her watch, pointed at a rack of ladders and said: "Go."

  Wendy trotted over to the ladders at a fair pace. She could have run, but this evaluation was as much about pacing as capability; she'd seen women in fantastic condition wear themselves out halfway through.

  Three ladders were racked on the wall, hung vertically. Beside each one, to the left, was a spare, empty rack. The test was simple; lift off each ladder and move it over one rack.

  The ladders weighed forty-seven pounds and were awkward in addition; it was quite a test of upper body strength and balance for a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound female to lift and move one, much less three. Add in forty pounds of bunker gear, a breath-pack and all the rest and it was a challenge. And only the first.

  She managed the ladders in good time. And managed the second evaluation which was to fully raise and lower, "extend and retract" one of the ladders. Harder than it sounded, it had to be done hand over hand, maintaining control, or the ladder simply "dropped." A drop was not an automatic fail, but it would count heavily against her.

  The third evaluation, the high-rise pack, was the first that she knew was going to kick her ass. This involved carrying an "assault pack," two fifty foot sections of 1¾-inch attack line, a nozzle, a gated Wye valve and a hydrant wrench, to the fifth floor of the smokehouse. Forget that the smokehouse was liv
ing up to its name, with thick black smoke belching from a generator on the ground floor and billowing up through the stairwells. Just lifting the pack—which was about a hundred pounds, or more than seventy percent of her body weight—off the ground was a struggle. The requirement was to move "expeditiously" up the stairs, but in reality nobody managed so much as a trot. Each step was a struggle and by the time she reached the third level she knew that if she paused for even a moment she could never get going again. But finally, panting in the heat from the suit and gasping for air, she saw the firefighter at the top. It was through a haze of gray that was only half to do with the smoke, but she'd made it. She carefully lowered the pack to the ground and just rested on her knees for a moment until the red haze over her vision cleared. Then she stood up and, following the pointed finger, went back downstairs to the Maze.

  The Maze was the confined spaces test chamber on the third floor. A plywood and pipe "rat-maze," it filled only one room but encompassed a total of a hundred and sixty-five feet of linear "floor." The Maze was multi-level with a series of small passages and doorways, many of which could be slid open or closed at the whim of the testers. None of the passages permitted so much as crouched movement; the entire maze was done on the belly, sometimes crawling at an angle or twisting through three (some suggested four) dimensions to reach a new passage.

  Strangely, Wendy had never had a problem with the Maze, even when it was blacked out. Perhaps being buried alive in Fredericksburg had some compensations; she had come out of it with a fundamental lack of claustrophobia. Much the same could be said for Shari, who had waited out the weeks awake. If she had tended to claustrophobia, she would have put herself under like the firefighter who was trapped with her.

  That didn't mean it was easy. The movement method was difficult. But Wendy didn't have a problem, including remembering not to take the smooth tunnel. The plastic tunnel was greased after a few feet and anyone who went in wasn't backing out. And it dumped them out right at the feet of the grader.