The Fire and the Anvil

by Michael Galloway

  “Oh, come now. It’s part of the game, don’t you see?”

  “This isn’t a game. You’re putting people’s lives in danger.”

  “Perhaps it would be best to get to the heart of the matter. It’s one thing to save a life...but what about many? That’s heroism of the highest order, is it not? Do you feel heroic today, Jim?”

  Before Dr. Ferganut could respond the call ended. After a click there was nothing but a dial tone to fill the room.

  “Okay. You’ve both gone too far,” John said. “I want to know what you’re hiding. In the downstairs lab. What is he after? Tell me now.” He bolted over to the basement door and punched a few buttons. The doorknob glowed red and buzzed, but denied him entry.

  “I…can’t,” Dr. Ferganut replied.

  “Why?” John felt the anger rising in his chest. He marched over to stand just in front of Dr. Ferganut. He spread his hands out as if Dr. Ferganut was going to hand over an invention to him. “Don’t you trust me? I’ve spent a week with you and I’ve been dating your daughter for almost a year and this is what I get? If something happens, I need to know. I think we all need to know. Is that what I was working on last night?”

  “I can’t say.”

  Stunned, John clenched his fists. “I don’t know if I believe anything you’ve told me this week.”

  “You’re welcome to your opinion,” Dr. Ferganut stammered. “If you want to go home, go ahead. I’m sorry if I wasted your time.” He started to head back toward the laboratory down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” John shouted.

  “Contrary to what you believe, I have a plan. And I know what I’m doing. I’ve prepared for this day for many years. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to make sure everything is in order.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Madeline stood at the checkout line of Abernathy’s grocery store with a cart full of food. She initially intended to buy just enough for lunch for all of them, but after flipping through the weekly store ad and remembering how empty her father’s refrigerator looked, she thought better of it. As she unloaded the groceries onto the conveyor belt, she caught a glimpse of the sky through the front doors of the store. An eerie dark orange glow filled the parking lot and bathed all the carts in the store entrance with a sickly hue. Just as she unloaded a few cans of tomato soup onto the conveyor belt, her cell phone rang out.

  “Where are you?” John said in a frantic voice.

  “At the store. I’m almost done. What’s wrong?” Madeline said.

  “Is everything okay where you are?”

  “I think so. The sky looks funny, though. Kind of a weird smoky orange.”

  “You need to get out of there. Like now.”

  “I have to pay for the groceries first. Then I’ll leave.” She reached over and picked out a Snickers bar from a nearby shelf and set it on the conveyer belt. She smiled at the cashier who was a man in his early twenties with wavy black hair and freckles. He wore a maroon long-sleeved shirt with black dress pants but did not look confident in his role.

  “Okay. Call me when you hit the road,” John said urgently.

  “John, what’s happening?”

  “The weather’s changing. Fast.” At that, John abruptly hung up.

  Confused, she finished unloading her cart and waited for the cashier to scan all of the items. When the bill was rung up and paid for, she packed the groceries into brown paper bags. She took another glance at the sky and felt a chill wash over her as the orange color shifted to an orange-brown hue. She set the paper bags into the cart and steeled herself for the walk out to her car.

  As the automated exit doors parted before her an overpowering stench of wood smoke struck her full force. The entire sky was a dark flickering orange as if the heavens themselves were on fire. From one side of town to the other columns of black and gray smoke churned skyward. In between the corkscrewing towers of smoke to the north the crisp outlines of rising bright white cumulus clouds could be seen. For a moment, Madeline thought the town had been struck by a nuclear blast.

  She shoved the cart as fast as she could until she arrived at her car. The gunmetal-gray plastic basket of the cart crunched into the trunk of her car but she did not care. She unwrapped a roll of paper towels and tore off a few sheets to turn them into a makeshift mask for her mouth. As she lugged each bag from the cart to her trunk, her hands tingled and her heartbeat drummed in her ears. She rammed the cart in the general direction of the nearest cart corral and ducked into her car.

  With a squeal of tires she drove off and called John on her cell phone. “I’m leaving town. Everything around me is on fire.”

  “The whole town?” John said in dismay.

  “I don’t know. There’s tons of smoke all around me. Like it’s just outside of town. I’m going to try to blast south to get back.”

  “Can’t you take another route?”

  “There’s no time.” Madeline felt lightheaded as she rolled down her window despite the drifting waves of smoke. The highway back to her father’s place remained open for the time being and she became irritated at the slow exodus out of the city. “There’s smoke to the north, to the south. It’s everywhere, John. Pray for me.”

  “I will. I will,” he said in an unsettled voice. “But I’m coming to get you.”

  “No, don’t. I’ll make it.”

  “I can see the smoke from here. There are towers building up around you. Stay on the line until I can escort you.”

  She rolled up her window and circulated the air in the interior of her car until the odor became nauseating. Two miles south of Valentine the visibility on the highway dropped to near zero. Cars turned on their headlights in front of her and she did the same. Smoke boiled up around her as bright orange lines of flame torched the hills around her and left charred earth in their wake.

  Up ahead the red-and-blue lights of a police cruiser illuminated the smoke. A police officer began setting up a roadblock ahead of her by using white sawhorses and orange road construction barrels. As a result, traffic came to a complete stop and she went into a full panic.

  “I’m going to punch through,” she said to John, not caring if he reacted or not.

  “What?”

  She stomped on the accelerator and swerved around a pair of trucks and skirted past the roadblock. Ahead of her she saw a few pine trees engulfed in flames but no vehicles coming toward her. She opened up a bottle of water and doused some more paper towels. She swallowed hard and wiped the smoke from her eyes with the moistened towel. Further along the highway the smoke became nearly impenetrable and so she slowed her vehicle to just over ten miles per hour.

  As she crept south, she mumbled prayers for her escape. A bolt of lightning hammered the ground a quarter mile behind her and the resulting thunder rattled her already tense nerves. Seconds later, another bolt sliced into a pine tree twenty feet ahead and to her left.

  Half of the pine tree crashed onto the highway in front of her in a shower of sparks and smoking bark. She jerked the steering wheel to the right but left the road as a result. Her car rocketed onto the shoulder and caught the edge of a ditch.

  She smashed her brakes instinctively but could not avoid hitting a boulder that jutted out of the ditch. The car lurched to the right and she hit her head on the steering wheel.

  After clipping a birch tree the car rumbled to a stop. She panted uncontrollably and ran her fingers through her hair but found no blood. She searched around for her cell phone but was unable to find it. In a daze she opened her driver side door and staggered out. She flinched when a flash of light lit up the smoke and was followed a second later by an earsplitting blast of thunder.

  Smoke rose from the hood of her car like a flag of ultimate defeat. One of her headlights popped out of place with a crackling sound. “Great,” she muttered to herself. She tried to fix the headlight by kicking it back into place. She soon gave up and covered her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt only to wander back toward the driver’s
side of the car.

  A swarm of silver-colored metal beetles scampered through the ditch and swarmed over her right shoe. The beetles clicked as they ran and collectively they sounded like pebbles hitting a tiled floor. She leapt back but then tried to stomp as many of them as she could as they raced toward the town.

  She ran frantically on foot back up toward the highway. A swarm of her father’s robotic bees buzzed overhead toward Valentine. Fifty feet later the bees tumbled from the sky and hit the ditch as if they were being picked off by an invisible gun. She ran up to one of the bees, picked it up, and held it up to her face. Its wings remained motionless. High above a black box drone whirred and departed.

  Smoke soon obscured the view of her car but she heard a pickup truck approach on the highway. It stopped on the road and although she hollered out to the driver he appeared not to notice. The truck soon drove off and sprayed gravel at her car.

  By the time she made it up to where the truck stopped, she was nearly in tears. She tried to scream out to the departed driver but her throat was so parched every word came out as a squeak. For the first time in a long time, she felt lonely, powerless, and paralyzed with fear. She wandered along the edge of the highway until a bout of dizziness set in. The world spun in an array of orange, black, and choking smoke. Somewhere a tree cracked and crashed to the ground with a bang.

  She sat down on the edge of the road, unsure of where she was heading, and watched as the flames across the highway consumed a pair of birch trees. The bark of one of the trees curled up and then exploded in a burst of splintered wood. For a moment, she thought she saw a hideous face with dark hollow eyes mocking her from the flames. Shaken, she called out to God. At the same time she wondered if He was even listening anymore.

  Chapter Thirteen

  John jetted out to his truck with his laptop computer under one arm and a box of wireflies under the other. Just as he slammed the driver’s side door shut, Captain shouted out to him from inside the house.

  “Here, take this, too!” Captain held out a white cardboard box and ran up to John’s driver side window.

  “What is it?” John said.

  “It’s the suit.”

  “You think I’ll need it?”

  Captain took the lid off the box. He pulled a jacket out and held it up. “It’s pretty stylish, don’t you think? Oh, look, I got gloves, too. No boots, though.”

  Captain put the jacket back into the box and pushed the box through the window. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  John took the box and set it on the passenger seat. He peeked inside and saw a set of silver aluminized pants, a jacket, and a hood for protection against high-temperature environments. He waved goodbye to Captain and drove off.

  * * *

  The first ten miles was relatively easy with little smoke and no rain. To the north, a roiling bank of brown and black smoke churned horizontally, while up above four large cumulonimbus towers loomed in a line. He checked the latest radar update on his laptop but the signal seemed to be getting worse the further north he drove. Finally, the signal was lost altogether and he tried calling Captain on his cell phone. The call barely went through.

  “What’s the latest on the radar? I can’t get a good signal over here,” John asked.

  “It’s not looking good. Three hot cells lined up just to the north and northwest of Valentine. The fourth one looks like trouble. I’d give it about ten minutes before they hit. The left middle one’s got a nasty velocity couplet going on the south side already. I’ll shoot you a text with a list of escape routes along the way.”

  “Thanks. Keep me updated.” John disconnected the call and plunged under the edge of the smoke cloud. He pressed on despite everything in his mind screaming for him to turn around. Up ahead he could see the spinning red-and-blue lights from a police cruiser and so he steeled himself for the conversation yet to come.

  Several cars and trucks ahead of him turned around at a roadblock and came back down the other side of the highway. He scanned either side of the road to see how deep the ditches were and mapped out a path in his mind about how to swerve around the roadblock. When it was down to one car between him and the roadblock, he swung into the ditch to the right and drove along the grass for a few hundred feet before powering his way back up onto the highway. He looked back and watched as the shouting officer disappeared behind a wall of shifting amber-colored smoke.

  He toggled his headlights on but knew they would be useless at some point. All around him the hills were crawling with snakelike lines of flame. Tongues of fire leapt up from the ditches at his vehicle but he plowed on steadily as far as he could. The external temperature on his truck’s thermometer climbed to just over 100 degrees as beads of sweat formed on his neck and forehead.

  The sky morphed from a muddied orange to a pulsing dark red and was occasionally punctuated by flashes of light from above. He rolled down his window a crack to listen for any sounds of vehicles or people yelling. All he heard was the crackling of the fire, an occasional clap of thunder, and the growing force of the wind. His heart raced and more than once he had to wipe the palms of his hands on his jeans.

  He checked his laptop and snagged one last radar update before it stopped working again. There, like Captain said, on the left middle thunderstorm was a bulging hook echo and a velocity couplet. He estimated there was already a twister on the ground and likely on the outskirts of Valentine. What he dreaded most was blindly driving through the smoke only to have the twister drop down in front of him.

  He felt like an idiot now for the way he treated Madeline before she left. He alternated between doubting and believing that her father really had reformed his life. If something happened to Madeline would he endlessly second-guess his own decisions for the rest of life?

  The temperature monitor on his dashboard continued to inch higher. The wind gusted suddenly and stirred up a blizzard of orange sparks. The wind spewed embers at his truck until one of them got stuck on his windshield wiper. He turned the wipers on high speed in a frantic effort to dislodge the burning twig. With a few squirts of wiper fluid it flew off but left behind a windshield full of smeared ashes.

  In the distance he heard a faint waterfall-like sound and was unsure if it was a potential tornado or just the wind accelerating around him. He checked his cell phone and found Captain had sent him a list of escape routes from here to the town. Realizing he left his atlas back at the house, he winced. Soon, his phone lost all signal.

  The smoke grew so heavy that he began to have serious thoughts about turning around. He breathing became labored as the smoke and airborne particles choked the oxygen out of the cab of his truck.

  It was then that he saw a bright yellow object up ahead and off to the side of the road. He stopped his truck and dug out his high-power flashlight from the glove compartment. He stepped out and put a rag over his mouth to have a look.

  There, down below in a shallow ditch, was Madeline’s canary-yellow Volkswagen beetle. He winced as steam rose from the hood of her car. Worse, he did not see any signs of her. He coughed hard and then called her name at the top of his lungs.

  Intense heat radiated up from the ground so he ran back to the truck to don the proximity suit. Once he put on all the gear, he raced back to the ditch and swept the area with his flashlight. All around him snake-like lines of fire popped and crackled in their relentless march to consume all available fuel. He still felt the heat through the bottom of his sneakers and he worried about the soles melting.

  Several times he took off his hood and called out her name. When no response came he began to run along the length of the ditch. Out of the corner of his eye, near the shoulder of the road, he spotted the turquoise shirt and white pants she wore this morning before heading to town.

  “Madeline!” He shouted. He ran over to her but she lay curled up in a ball and motionless. He knelt down and checked her over for signs of injury. Ashes covered part of her face and her pants were blackened with soot. Her skin
was warm to the touch as he brushed her long brown hair back behind her ear. He shook her shoulder and called out her name again.

  At first, her response was nothing more than mumbled words. It was then he saw an elliptical red mark across her forehead. He picked her up in his arms and braced himself for the walk back to the truck.

  Madeline spoke up but her words were labored along with her breathing. She coughed several times in between each sentence. “Thank you for walking with me in the…fire. Is there four of us here?”

  John wondered if she was dreaming. Perhaps she thought she was in the fiery furnace story from the Book of Daniel. “I’m here. I’m here,” he said in a calming voice. “I’m going to get you to my truck.”

  Madeline suddenly awakened. “Wait. Who are you? Captain? Is that you? Put me down I can walk.” She struggled hard against John’s grip, but he did not let her go.

  “Stop struggling. It’s me.”

  “Who’s me? If it’s Captain, put me down.”

  John stopped and set her down next to his truck. He flipped off the protective hood and gave her an exasperated look. “Will you calm down? Here, get in the truck. We gotta a long ways to go to get back.”

  Instead Madeline reached up and threw her arms around him. She pulled his suit up against her body until it crinkled. She then planted a kiss on his lips and did not let him come up for air for a good twenty seconds. “We gotta get the groceries out of my trunk.”

  He gasped and threw his hood into the backseat of the truck. He tore off the jacket but kept the fire pants on for good measure. The soles of his shoes felt tacky and he prayed they would not fuse to the pedals of the truck.

  He helped her into the passenger seat and then got in. He glanced over at her Beetle again and grimaced. Then he saw the bashed-in headlight. “What happened to your car?”

  “I hit a rock and went into the ditch. Here, let’s go get the groceries.”

  Just as John began to leave the truck, a fountain of flame spewed up between him and her car. The heat made his face flush. “Forget it,” he called back to her. “We gotta go. Now.”