The Steel Ring

by R. A. Jones

  Wiley trotted up to the top of the hill over which he had seen the other volunteers disappear moments earlier.

  He stopped at the top of the rise, gaping wide-eyed at the horrific scene spread out before him. Even the imagination of Dante could not have matched the reality of the inferno raging over the land.

  Multiple walls of fire, like blazing curtains, rippled and danced at breakneck speed over every contour of that land. They had left nothing in their wake save blackened dirt and death.

  To his left and probably five hundred yards away, the American saw a three-story structure on fire. As he watched, its roof collapsed inward and the upper floor exploded outward as if a mortar shell had hit it.

  Between his position and the hopelessly damaged orphanage (for such he was sure it was), Wiley saw a handful of adults and a score of children desperately fleeing from a towering sheet of fire that had seemed to simply flow around the building like water around a partially submerged rock and had reformed into a single wave that pursued those fleeing its awful wrath.

  Without another moment’s hesitation, Wiley bolted down the hill. Within seconds he caught up with the other volunteers, who had paused, unsure of what to do.

  “Come on!” he yelled at them, not bothering to even slow down as he raced past them. Looking back and forth at each other for a second, they then instinctively followed the American.

  When Wiley reached the first of the fleeing refugees, the pursuing wall of fire was no more than 300 feet behind them.

  “Go there,” he snapped at the middle-aged man he took to be the likely headmaster, pointing toward the pinnacle of the hill. “Get the kids over that hill.”

  Face twisted with fear, still the man nodded his understanding and began to shepherd his wards in the direction Wiley had indicated.

  “We have to buy them some time,” Wiley said to the other volunteers as they finally caught up with him.

  At his direction, they formed a line directly in the path of the onrushing flames, a few feet apart. The blades of their shovels bit into the earth and they began desperately pitching dirt upon the leading edge of the conflagration.

  When Wiley finally felt it was safe to risk a look over his shoulder, he sighed with relief, seeing the last adult member of the fleeing party top the hill behind the scrabbling youngsters and disappear beneath its crest.

  “Let’s pull back,” he shouted to the other firefighters. Against the full wrath of hell licking out at them, seven men with shovels were virtually useless. Better to fall back and hope to join forces with another band of volunteers.

  Wiley had just turned to run when he froze in his tracks. A sound had come to his ears that was something other than the crackle of flames and the roaring of heated air.

  The sound of a child, shrieking and crying in terror.

  He turned back and dared to approach the flames, so close that he could feel its heat blasting through his clothing.

  “Holy mother of God,” he gasped.

  He could now see a thin break between two sheets of fire – and standing in the middle of that pocket was a little girl, no older than three years of age. So close were the flames to her that wisps of smoke were beginning to rise up from the faded jumper she wore.

  “Come on!”

  Wiley turned to see that one of the other volunteers had come back and was now tugging at his arm.

  “There’s a baby in there!” Wiley shouted, so as to be heard over the thunder of the wildfire.

  “Doesn’t matter!” the Aussie replied. “We can’t reach it!”

  “The hell we can’t!” Wiley yelled.

  With a short running start, he dived forward as if it was a waterfall he needed to penetrate rather than a wall of fire. He had both arms crossed before his face to protect his eyes. He was through the flames in an instant, hitting the ground and tumbling forward.

  He then rolled quickly back and forth in the dirt, extinguishing several small fires that had ignited his clothing. He ignored the sting of the scorched flesh beneath them, scurrying forward on his hands and knees.

  The toddler yelled in fear as the big American scooped her up in his arms, but his smiling lips and the soothing words he crooned as he rocked her back and forth brought a measure of calm to the little girl.

  Wiley turned and retraced his steps. The column of fire through which he had leaped mere moments before had risen higher now. On the other side of it, he could see the other volunteer firefighter was on the verge of breaking and running for his life.

  “Stay where you are!” Wiley commanded. “I’m gonna toss her to you!”

  Cupping the infant in his two large hands, Wiley kissed her softly on the cheek. She returned his smile.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” he assured her.

  Faster than could register on the child, Wiley swung his arms and released her. The tiny body sailed up and, thankfully, over the curtain of fire.

  Her screams had resumed, though, as gravity seized her and pulled her down – into the arms of the waiting firefighter.

  “Go on!” Wiley shouted. “Get outta here!”

  “What about you, mate?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be right behind you!”

  As he was saying the words, Wiley believed them to be true.

  He took a few steps back to give himself a running start. But as he leaped forward, a swirl of blistering air plucked him from the air, spun him around like Dorothy in the twister and slammed him with breathtaking force to the ground.

  As he struggled to rise, a column of fire seemed to rise up beside him, then collapsed, splashing down right on top of him.

  The Australian firefighter, clutching the baby girl to his chest, flinched as blood-curdling screams of pain carried through the flames. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the American staggering to his feet even as the flames spread outward to his limbs.

  A burst of air fed greater life to the wall of fire separating the firefighter from Wiley, hiding the American from his sight and driving him backwards with a blast of heat.

  Horrified by the sight that would plague his dreams for years to come, the firefighter turned away. He was crying as deeply as was the infant in his arms as he stumbled to safety up the hill. Long before he reached its crest, the screams coming from behind him had ceased.

  Rex Wiley’s body would never be recovered.

  CHAPTER V

  Newspapers all over the world would carry the news of Rex Wiley’s heroic death.

  Press releases skillfully crafted by Dexter Cooper would relate in lurid and only slightly exaggerated detail how the matinee idol had selflessly given his own life while saving tens (or was it hundreds?) of innocent children.

  Upon its release, “Ghost of the Barbary Coast” would set box office records.

  Rumors flew that Gary Cooper had been signed to play the title role in a biopic of Wiley’s life.

  If anything, the way he died had made him even more famous than had the way he had lived.

  Only … he wasn’t dead.

  As he staggered once more to his feet, his screams of pain briefly grew louder, but there was now no one near enough to hear them. Such was the roar of the flames rising around him on all sides that he could not even hear them himself.

  Wiley clawed at the top of his head as his hair caught on fire and began to burn away. As his clothing did likewise, his skin began to bubble and in places to run like melting wax.

  Direction meant nothing to him, but he forced his legs to carry him forward in a mad, desperate hope that he would be able to break through the wall of fire.

  Instead, the flames seemed to follow him, swirling around him like playground children playing Tag.

  As he stumbled forward, burning arms flailing about, his vision starting to fade, his screams suddenly stopped.

  Not because the pain was gone.

  Because his air was.

  Every particle of air around him was being sucked away by the greedy and still growing wildfi
re, needing as it did ever more air to feed and sustain its increasing size and hunger.

  Without air, the screams died in his throat. As his collapsing lungs bellowed in and out desperately, all they sucked into his body was superheated air that began to cook him from the inside.

  The next moment, the earth seemed to vanish beneath his feet.

  In reality, his blind flight had carried him over the lip of a small creek bank. His upper body pitched forward as his right foot fell away under him, causing him to somersault as he fell.

  When Wiley’s flaming body hit the relative coolness of the creek’s water, it was as if he had been plunged naked into a snow bank. His limbs convulsed and jerked. The water bubbled and hissed as it lapped at the fire around him.

  Mercifully, the shock of his immersion raced straight to his brain, rendering him unconscious.

  Like a cork, he bobbed to the surface of the creek, face up. Oblivious now to the fire, the water, the pain, he was carried on the current of the creek.

  Some time later, he knew not how long, that current washed him to shore. The scraping of its pebbled shore along his burnt and lacerated back stirred him from his stupor. With great effort and pain, he managed to roll over and began to drag himself out of the creek.

  His nostrils were assailed by the scent of burnt meat that he knew was his own skin, but there was no smell of smoke, no sound of crackling flames.

  The cooling current had carried him away from the slavering and insatiable jaws of the fire.

  He did hear a noise, though; the sound of something moving through the tall grass rising up before him.

  Like a stage curtain, the grass parted. A shadow fell over him and with great effort he raised his head.

  His eyelids were swollen nearly shut and his vision seemed to come and go. He could just make out the shape of a man.

  A man dressed all in black, save for a red mask that hung down over the front of his face. This mystery man swore softly as he dropped to one knee before Wiley.

  “Help … me,” the actor croaked weakly.

  “I’ll try, son,” the masked man known as the Clock replied gently, in a sad and weary voice.

  It was the last thing Rex Wiley heard before he again lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER VI

  January 24, 1939

  The air was brisk and cold enough to burn the lungs as the two men trudged up a narrow path in the Andes Mountains. To the west could be vaguely seen the unwelcoming granite and mica tableland of the Costa Cordillera of Chile. To the east rose even higher peaks than the one they were now scaling, including the volcano known as Llullailaco.

  “It’s beautiful up here, isn’t it?” the young man walking in front said in English that was perfectly pronounced but with the slightest of Asian accents.

  “Si, Senor Aman,” replied Paco, the guide and companion young Aman had hired to accompany him on this leg of his journey. The Chilean native had asked Aman to speak English with him, that he might better perfect his own grasp of the language.

  “Please,” Aman said, “call me ‘John’.”

  “All right, John,” Paco replied, though pronouncing it ‘Juan’.

  When Aman had first left the protective walls of the Temple of Enlightened Anguish more than six years ago, he had decided that he needed a first name to go with the surname he had carried since infancy. ‘John’ seemed like a good, strong name, especially in the English-speaking country for which he was bound, so John he had become.

  The years since he had left the monastery had seemed almost to fly past. In large part this was because his unquenchable search for knowledge kept him always moving forward, always probing for ways to expand both mind and body.

  He had graduated from Oxford with highest honors and a degree in philosophy. Brother Tang back at the temple seemed to take equal delight and pride in the many trophies Aman had won in sporting events such as rowing and football.

  During breaks from college, when he was not back home in Tibet with his mother, he had followed the Great Question’s advice and traveled the world. He had spent time on every continent save the Antarctic.

  He had spent equal time with the high and the low, enjoyed experiences and adventures the details of which he dared not share with Prahmasung for fear of shocking her sensibilities and perhaps drawing her displeasure down upon himself.

  He was now fluent in a least three dozen languages and was always seeking to add more to his verbal repertoire.

  He had attended the ballet with exiled members of the Russian royal family, and brawled with drunken seamen in Hong Kong dives, for one of the things he had learned and accepted quickly was that the ascetic life of the monks who raised him was not for him. He was convinced that elevating the mind need not mean one needed to totally subvert the lower pleasures of the flesh.

  The young man had at times wondered if he was cursed in his travels, however. Though physically he chose primarily to travel alone, it sometimes felt as if he always had trouble as an unseen but sorely felt comrade.

  There had been the train wreck in Canada, for instance. Some would say it had been fortuitous, though, that he had been aboard the passenger car that inexplicably jumped the rails, for it was his quick thinking and continually increasing strength of body which had enabled him to drag the car to a halt before it could slam head-on into a tunnel entranceway.

  It was his equally accelerating strength of mind that had saved the day in Italy, when the pilot of the small passenger plane on which Aman had been flying had unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack. While fighting with the bucking control stick to keep the plane aloft, Aman in mere minutes had literally taught himself the rudiments of piloting by simply studying the craft’s control panel.

  For this action, which also saved the lives of nearly fifty others on pilgrimage to Rome, Aman had been offered an invitation to meet the Pope, an invitation he gladly accepted.

  Because of these and other near catastrophes he had averted, Aman began to achieve a degree of fame that he neither sought, nor wanted, nor even fully understood. In his own mind, he had simply done what needed to be done at the time, nothing more. Others thought differently.

  Such were his exploits that he had even begun to enjoy a certain amount of notoriety. When he had foiled an attempted bank robbery in London by single-handedly capturing four armed bandits, one of the British tabloid newspapers had labeled him with yet another fabricated name:

  Amazing Man.

  Even though this was an obvious play on the name he himself had given the boy, the Great Question was not amused by either the title or the sensationalized accounts of his pupil’s alleged exploits. The first chance he got, the lama had sought to restore the proper balance of humility upon Aman by volunteering the boy’s services to the herders of the village of Oobang. Cleaning dung from stable floors, he felt, would teach his charge a lesson as important as any he might have learned at Oxford.

  The high monk was less pleased when he saw that Aman not only accepted this job with great humor and humility, but by doing so he made himself beloved by the villagers. The Question soon discovered that Aman could derive as much pleasure from a barn dance with simple peasants as he could from a costumed ball with the Vanderbilts.

  Aman had most recently been enjoying the comforts and delights of Rio de Janeiro. A wire from the Great Question had suggested that a worthwhile counter to this might be obtained among the villages of the poor Araucanian Indians of Chile.

  Aman had agreed, nor did it pain him in the least to leave the pleasures of Brazil behind him. They had been but one more experience and now he was ready for others.

  He had taken ship around Cape Horn, through the Strait of Magellan, then up the coast to the Chilean city of Valparaiso. It was through contacts there that he had enlisted the services of his guide Paco. Together, they had been hiking through the rugged mountains for nearly three weeks.

  Aman paused now to look down into the lush valley below him. To his left sat the
tiny village wherein he had spent the previous night. He could make out most of the men toiling in their nearby fields.

  Like half the population of this narrow country known as “the shoestring republic”, the people of this nameless village depended on the land for their sustenance. This particular native band cultivated both beans and the vitally important maize.

  Aman let his eyes drift to the right, following the meandering path of the narrow river upon whose eastern bank the village sat. Less than a quarter mile away, he could see the earthen dam that both created a small lake upstream from the village and served to tame the river so that it fed the fields of the Indians without flooding them.

  A movement caught his attention, pulling his eyes back to the village. Half a dozen women, some accompanied by children, were heading down to the river to do their laundry. Baskets of clothes were balanced expertly on their broad hips.

  One of the children, a little girl named Estrellita, glanced up and spotted the two men on the trail high above her. Smiling, she whipped a swatch of red and white checked cloth from around her shoulders and began to wave it like a flag.

  At every stop he had made in this journey of discovery, Aman had made sure to bring gifts to exchange for the hospitality of the villages he had visited. Last night he had bestowed many such on these poor Indians: seeds, knives, machetes and axes for the men; for the women, sandals, cooking utensils, bags of spices.

  And bolts of cloth, such as the piece of checkered cotton he had bestowed upon Estrellita when he saw her tiny round face light up at the mere sight of it. She seemed even more delighted by it than she was with the peppermint sticks Aman had handed out to her and the other children of the village.

  Smiling, he raised his right hand and waved back at the little girl.

  And then the earth moved.

  So sudden and forceful was the quake that it felt as if a giant hand had reached out of the ether to grab the planet and stop its spinning on its axis.

  Paco was plucked up off the ground and sent hurtling off the narrow mountain path. He screamed fearfully as he flew over the edge of the cliff and began the plunge toward certain death.