No Ordinary Day (27 page)

The clergymen looked at each other in horror, while the mayor held his hands aloft, shouting words of calm that no one heard.

Parents hurried their terrified children away as the elderly attempted to flee the full-blown riot that took place, beneath the very tree that had seen so much life.

The Army National Guard, deployed to help rescue and rebuild, were quickly dispatched to Tree Hill Park, this time to put an end to the stupidity of violence taking place there.

Lucy, who had been standing about halfway down the hill, had been ushered away by Ace at the first moment that a shout went up, and so was several streets away before the actual donnybrook began.

As he hurried her along the streets toward the dry end of town, his hand clutching hers, she turned back to see the people of the town she loved dissolve before her very eyes into madness.

‡

8:17
PM

High Street

A
ce had been
called in for duty moments after he had delivered Lucy back to Mildred’s house on High Street, and had been deployed all day.

Shutting the riot down had actually taken less time that it might have, due the overwhelming exhaustion and despair that was gripping most of the populace. Ace was trying, not particularly successfully, to find the mood and outlook he had possessed for a very long time, the sort of calm, casual acceptance that stupid things happened, and that people could not always be counted on to be reasonable, or rational, or even sane. He had seen this before, time and again, and had learned to have a passive, respectful attitude about sorting it out.

Only now there was a woman he loved in the thick of it, in harm’s way.

And it infuriated him.

The gentlemanly calm he had described to Lucy the night his own personal dam had failed, releasing the flood of words that had brought them together, was more or less gone. He had gone from the short-spoken, mono-syllabic, three-words-or-less-per-sentence Ace of the past to Alex Evans again, a man who had a woman he cared for more than anything else in his life.

And anything that put that woman in jeopardy was a problem.

Words from the past came back to haunt him. He had painful memories of the night in the emergency room after the evening he had described to Lucy, the first time he had intervened in the violence his stepfather had committed against his mother. His wrist had wrung with agony until it was set by the good-natured ER doctor in Albany, but even more painful was the expression on his mother’s face the whole time she was watching him being treated.

When the doctor had left to go about his rounds, promising to return with the X-rays shortly, his mother had risen from the chair in the corner in which she had been encamped and had come to the table on which he lay in the little treatment area curtained off by drapes of fabric.

She stood above him, tears in her eyes.

Alex, I’m so sorry.

Why?
he could hear the fourteen-year-old voice in his memory ask her.
Why do you need him? Why can’t we be rid of him? He’s
mean
to you, mom.

His mother’s words still turned his stomach.

I know you don’t understand this, honey, but I’m doing it for you
.

His mother was still alive, still in his life.

Ace made a mental note as he was physically separating two arguing men in the street on the wet side of Tree Hill Park to talk to her soon and ask her why.

He had been more physically rough than he needed be with both of the men, pushing one off the other so aggressively that they had stopped arguing and stared at him in shock.

“You got a wife? A family?” he had demanded of the one he considered the aggressor.

The man had nodded sullenly.

“You’re a lucky man,” Ace had said harshly. “Get home to her, to them; stop being a jackass.”

The last remnants of the conflict in Tree Hill Park had been resolved by noon, and by eight o’clock that night he was finally off duty again. He hurried to sign out and drove as fast as he could, his spirits rising at the thought of being back in the arms of the woman he could not stop thinking about.

He parked in the driveway at 18 High Street and climbed up the steep, rocky staircase to the door, avoiding the broken doorbell, and knocked twice.

Mrs. Caulfield opened the door. “Yes?”

“Good evening, Mrs. Caulfield. I’ve come to pick up Lucy.”

“Lucy?”

Ace had blinked. “Miss Sullivan?”

Mildred Caulfield was confused. “I know who you mean, Sergeant. But I thought she was with you already.”

“No, ma’am. Could she be upstairs, asleep?”

Mrs. Caulfield shook her head. “I’ll check, but I’m certain I heard her go out earlier. Sadie can’t open the door on her own.”

Hearing her name, the kitten came down the stairs and rubbed up against Mrs. Caulfield’s legs.

Ace bent down to stroke the soft fur while Mrs. Caulfield climbed the stairs. Sadie began purring, but then started and ran under the nearest armchair when Mrs. Caulfield called down the stairs.

“She’s not here.”

“Where could she have gone?” he asked.

“She’s under the chair. Can’t you see her tail sticking out? They all do that, you know.”

“Lucy,” Ace said, trying to remain calm. “Do you have any idea where Lucy is?”

Mrs. Caulfield thought. “She did say something about wedding pictures. She was admiring the picture of my husband and me, and said something about her parents.”

Ace nodded, but his stomach was turning over. “She must have gone back to her house to get the picture from her bedroom.”

Mrs. Caulfield raised an eyebrow. “Her bedroom?”

“Uhm, yes. I facilitated the removal of her personal effects from her home the day of the flood, ma’am. All those bags and pillowcases you had me leave on the front porch?”

“I see. Very well, go find her. And give me a call if you can. So far, the phone still works. Lucy has the number.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ace turned away and started across the porch toward the stairs when he came to an abrupt halt.

Out in the darkness of the flood zone, sparks were flying.

Tiny little fires, some in the air, most likely on power lines, others lower down, were cropping up, turning the utter blackness intermittently orange and yellow.

“Mrs. Caulfield?” he said, his voice shaking.

“Yes?”

“If your phone still works, please use it to call 911.”

Ace drove like
a maniac down the steep hill and through the abandoned streets to the edge of the cordoned-off area and threw the car into
PARK
. He ran to the barricade and saluted the guardsman.

“I’m Sergeant Alex Evans, private. I think you may have a series of fires, electric or otherwise, sparking in the zone. I saw them from High Street. I’m also looking for a civilian, Miss Lucy Sullivan.”

The young guard nodded, looking concerned. “The teacher who saved all those kids? Yes, sir. She requested permission to access her home a few hours ago.”

“And you
let her?”

“A badass like her? Yes, sir. She’s been in and out of the zone with you, sir. I assumed she had clearance.”

“Has she come out again?”

“No, sir, not past me.”

Ace ducked under the rope, noting that the water had receded. The height of the flood was clearly marked on each house in the discoloration left behind. The closer to the lake the house had stood, the higher the water, with some homes still completely submerged in the new, wider lake.

In the distance he heard the sound of the fire siren ramping up.

He took off in a dead run as he could begin to see the sparks in the zone now.

As Ace rounded the corner at Marshall Avenue, he could see the flicker of candlelight in the second story window of Lucy’s house again.

Looking past her house, he could see fire. Not the small, smoky bonfires that had been lit throughout the day by people burning flood-soaked debris, but flames, shooting into the darkened sky.

One of the dark houses in the already hurting area of East Obergrande was on fire.

Ace doubled his speed.

The closer he got to Lucy’s house, the closer the fire appeared to be, until he rounded the corner and skidded to a stop.

An entire block of little houses was aflame.

Ace knew that East Obergrande had propane tanks outside almost every home.

Including Lucy’s.

The conflagration that was about to erupt would be an inferno.

He broke into a run, screaming her name.

Moments later he was pulling open the door of Lucy’s cottage, and sprinting up the stairs.

He met her in the doorway of her bedroom, wrapping her parents’ wedding portrait in a towel.

“I thought you were picking me up at Mildred’s, but this is even better,” she said, confused, as he strode toward her. “You can help me carry the pictures—”

He seized her arm. “We gotta go!”

“But I’m not—”

“Fire! We have to go!”

Shock was setting in. “Let me get my other pictures—”

He dragged her toward the stairs. “Lucy, the only thing I care about in this house is you,” he said as they ran down them. “Everything else is just stuff.”

“But—”

“Your whole neighborhood is on fire,” Ace said as they reached the turn in the staircase. “You, and everyone else, has a propane tank. They’re gonna blow, and we don’t want to be here when they do.”

They raced out the door, Ace holding the portrait under his arm like an over-sized football, Lucy holding a flashlight in her other hand, clear, within seconds, of the house.

When they got outside, it was eerily light. The flickering flames cast shadows against the clouds in the sky.

“No,” Lucy was screaming, choking. “Dammit,
no!
Not again.
Not again!
”

“Hang tight, Badass,” Ace called behind him. “Come on!”

They ran down the street, the smell of smoke acrid in the air.

The corporal was running toward them.

“There are no other civilians in the area, sir. We’ve been given orders to evacuate. The fire department is on the way.”

The sirens were screaming through the air, growing louder.

Ace stopped and let go of Lucy’s arm. “Do you need a ride to somewhere, Corporal?”

“No, sir. I’m to meet the fire trucks.”

“All right, get clear of the houses.”

When they reached his car, Ace tucked Lucy rapidly inside it with her portrait and looked back. The fire was growing now, spreading throughout the entirety of the zone.

There was a deafening boom, and Ace was nearly knocked over by a wash of air.

Followed by more and more explosions.

Lucy was staring, glassy eyed, at the building inferno as he got into the car.

“I forgot to blow out the candles in my bedroom,” she said dully.

Ace recognized the signs of the shock into which she was sinking, so he kept his voice gentle.

“I don’t think it’s going to be an issue, honey,” he said as he peeled out of the zone and drove like mad for High Street.

‡

SUNDAY

The village of Obergrande

T
he next day,
those who were still mobile gathered at the base of the hill in Tree Hill Park, in shock and covered with black soot.

The fire that had erupted from the power lines had been thorough in its devastation, burning the streets in the eastern neighborhoods that had survived the flood, making it seem as if an asteroid had hit the Earth there.

Amid the ruins of the arts and mercantile district, the pretty streets Lucy had admired from atop Tree Hill Park only a few days before with Glen Daniels, stood a rising black structure, reminiscent of the infrastructure of a high-rise building after a skyscraper fire. From a distance it resembled a work of modern art, a single column leading up to large, dark vertical and horizontal lines, otherwise bare.

Immense.

Most people who came into the town in years to come had to squint very hard, or be possessed of excellent eyesight, or be informed by a townsperson, that the immense structure had actually once been a tree.