The Dead Circle (30 page)

“Wait here. Let me find something we can use as a crutch.” Chris helps her down to the floor and leans her up against the cement wall.

He dashes up the ramp looking into the cars he knows are unlocked. Last week, while searching the cars looking for supplies, he marked those he was able to get into with spray paint. He wasn’t about to try breaking into any locked vehicles for fear of setting off the alarms, but there were a handful of folks who, inexplicably, left their cars unlocked or had been exposed in the garage and dropped their keys. He opens doors and goes through various backseats before he discovers exactly what he needs on the roof of a Subaru Outback he had first disregarded because it was locked. Atop the roof sits a ski rack with two sets of downhill skis and, more importantly for Chris’ purposes, two sets of ski poles. Chris takes a set of poles down and duct tapes the bottom of them together tightly. Then he spreads the tops about eight inches apart and uses duct tape to create two handles. He puts one handle in the middle for her hand and another higher one for her armpit. His work is crude, but the design is sound. Her weight will pull the poles in tight on her shoulder and give her enough support to get inside at least. He returns to Sarah and presents his invention.

“Well done MacGyver.”

“Thanks.  Let’s get inside Tiny Tim.”

With his help, Sarah is able to get back to her feet and upright. They slowly start limping their way through the garage. About halfway up the second floor, she stops him.

“Are you OK? Is the pain too bad? I can try and carry you.”

“No, no. I’m fine. Just wait a minute. Listen.”

“To what?”

“The baby. I don’t hear it.”

They quietly move closer to the car that the baby is trapped in. Listening carefully, they hold their breaths—but there is no sound. Chris instinctively steps between the car and Sarah.

“Could it have escaped?”

“I don’t think so.”

They cautiously walk up to the car and look in the window. The baby is motionless.

“I think it’s dead.”

“It was dead a long time ago. But I think you’re right. It looks dead dead.”

They both can feel the intangible presence of death, that pit of your stomach instinct that tells you the thing you are looking at is not asleep. That the electrical impulses that cause brain activity, as limited as it may have been in this case, have ceased.

Chris carefully opens the door and they stare at the baby for a moment before he dares borrow Sarah’s crutch and gently poke at it. What they see initially horrifies them. Then it fills them with a recently unfamiliar feeling: hope.

When the pole touches the baby’s arm, it starts to crumble before their eyes, as if it had been mummified for a thousand years. Dust puffs out as several dried chunks of skin fall off and disintegrate like old plaster. It is no longer even a body, just a dried husk. And it is, completely, dead.

“How could it have dried out so much? Shouldn’t it take years to look like this?”

Sarah thinks for a second. “Maybe the parasite or whatever consumed all the water?”

Chris shakes his head. “Eek. It makes my skin crawl. It’s so disturbing.”

Sarah takes a short intake of breath. Her eyes flash with excitement. Her expression is almost rapturous. “No it’s not! Holy shit! Don’t you know what this means?”

“What?”

Her smile is wide. After all the fear and exhaustion that Chris has felt, her smile is healing even if he doesn’t understand why she is smiling yet. She takes him by the shoulders. “They’re going to die! They’re going to starve to death! Or dry up! Or whatever. But these fuckers are going to die.”

Chris is stunned. Then he lets out an unconscious yelp. He hesitates for a moment and says the slightly obvious but sobering truth.

“We just have to make it long enough…”

“Right. But if this one died already, the adults don’t have long!”

Chris looks into her eyes. They are tired, bloodshot and obviously still in a great deal of pain, but they look as happy as he has seen them since this all began.

“Holy shit. We’re going to survive.”

*

Sarah lies on the couch reading a novel. Her injured ankle is elevated and splinted as well as a well-intentioned but distinctly amateur husband can accomplish. The dirty magazines have been replaced with the air cast that Chris picked up at the drug store. He returns from the upstairs office store room with a bottle of pills.

“OK. Are you sure these are the right antibiotics?”

“Yeah. Those are the ones. I doubled checked the book.”

“I wish I knew better how to tell if your ankle is set properly.”

Sarah gives him a comforting grin. “It is. Remember, this is the third time I’ve broken this bastard. It feels alright. Hurts like hell. But alright.”

“Keep drinking the water. You don’t want to get dehydrated.”

“I know. But we don’t have an unlimited supply. We barely have enough to get through the winter.”

“We’ll worry about that later. Now I have to find a way to keep you warm. You look like you’re freezing.”

Sarah pulls the blankets up to her chin. “I’m fine.”

Chris sits down beside her on the couch and puts his hand on her forehead. “Bullshit. You’re shivering. I’m pretty sure you’re running a fever. Are you sure you don’t want the big kid pain meds?”

“Nah, I’m fine.”

“Ok, but take the ibuprofen to keep the swelling down.”

“Yes nurse.”

“Now, it’s time we got ourselves out of the Stone Age. The generator is just about ready to go. I think it’s time to get it some fuel.”

After the incredibly difficult and dangerous job of acquiring the tanker, the final task of hooking up the generator seems simple by comparison. He heads through the passageway onto the third floor of the garage. Chris takes three ten-gallon gas cans out of the bus and sets them next to the generator. Then, he carries a fifty foot hose to the open side of the garage and drops one end of it down to the street, on top of the tanker. On the other end of the hose, he attaches a foot pump.

Because Chris had remembered to swipe the tanker manual from the cab, he knew it was useless to attempt to connect his garden hose to the industrial nozzles on the bottom of the tank. So his plan was to open one of the smaller access holes on the top of the tanker and put the hose into the tank directly. If he secured it carefully, he could leave the hose hooked up to the tanker and pump gas all the way up into the garage as the winter went along.  

Chris walks down the three levels and emerges out the side door. He carefully surveys the alley for Fred and Gingers. With the coast clear, he quickly walks to the tanker and climbs the ladder. The end of his hose lies across the truck where he had dropped it. His best access point is at the vapor vent located on the top back of the tank. When he opens the vent, he can smell the sickly sweet smell of gasoline. Much to his relief, his hose fits into the pipe and he feeds in six or seven feet until he hears it make a watery clank on the bottom of the reservoir.

Chris then uses silicone caulk to fill the extra space between the inside of the vent and the hose to make it water-tight and covers the whole thing with plastic sheeting and duct tape.

A small part of him is disappointed that Sarah isn’t there to see his act of manliness. He always felt that he could never quite live up to the manly image of her father. His father-in-law was a large man who had been hardened by decades of farm work. His body seemed to creak and pop with every movement. He used to complain that his joints were tired from all of the repetitive lifting and hauling, but to Chris it always seemed like the complaint was also partially a boast and partially a judgment of those who hadn’t done as much physical work in their life.

The main thing that always made Chris feel insecure around his father-in-law was the differences in their hands. Her father’s hands were huge. They were callused and scarred from years of toiling outdoors. His left pinky stuck out at a slightly odd angle from a break that never healed correctly. They were gnarled and ugly but incredibly strong and Chris’ hands seemed small and delicate in comparison. As a pianist, his hands were his life, so he took very meticulous care of them. He kept them protected from the weather, moisturized them regularly and kept his nails neat and trimmed. When they shook hands, Chris felt weak. And even though he was annoyed at himself for such a sexist thought, it made him feel womanly.

Sarah’s father never directly made mention of Chris’ lack of farm-toughness, but he noticed that when her father took Sarah and her brothers out to the barn to show off the new tractor or to go out snowmobiling or fix their fences, Chris often didn’t end up on the invite list. He didn’t think his lack of inclusion was meant to be mean. They just figured he wouldn’t be interested. In truth, he wasn’t really interested, but he would have appreciated being included. Heading back into the garage and walking back up to the generator on the third level, he imagines his father-in-law giving him a quiet nod of approval.

As he starts working the foot pump, he has to restrain himself from cheering when gasoline starts pouring out of the hose and into his gas can. He fills each of the cans carefully and then fuels the generator. He hesitates before pressing the start button. On the box, the generator promised to be the quietest on the market but the prospect of it sounding like a lawnmower makes him nervous. He begins to think of various ideas to dampen the noise, but pushes the thought away, at least temporarily. Right now they need heat.

He presses the starter and the engine sputters for a second, then purrs to life. It’s not silent, but at least it is consistent. He hopes the drone of the engine will eventually blend into the ambient noise and not draw too much attention.

He plugs a heavy duty extension cord into the bank of electrical sockets on the side of the generator and begins to un-spool the long orange cable.  He goes through the makeshift door they installed to keep their passageway weather-tight, and carries the cord onto the upper ring of the library. He leans against the railing and looks triumphantly down at Sarah. She smiles back up at him.

“How’d it go mighty hunter? What have you killed and brought back to your wife’s cave?”

He tosses the cord down to where she is laying on the couch. “Plug in your space heater and find out.”

She does. The power light turns on brightly and she can feel the heating coils starting to cycle up. She gratefully applauds him as he slides down the ladder like a firefighter.

“You did it. You’re a badass.”

“We did it.”

Chris plugs the cable into a power strip, reattaches the heater and plugs in a lamp. When he sits down next to her and switches on the light, they take a moment to silently bask in the cheery glow. The sixty watts thrown off by the bulb are a welcome return to normalcy and combined with the warmth being provided by the space heater, it’s almost cozy.

Chris puts his arm around his wife. “Power! Now was that so hard?”

Sarah swats him playfully. “Not funny. You can be cute when my ankle is healed.”

“Bah. So… how long is it appropriate to wait before I hook up my Xbox?”

Chapter 13

Chris only played one truly great performance in his entire piano career. He played more technically perfect shows than he was able to count, but there was only one concert he truly played as well as he knew he could. After his meeting with Professor Granden when he was twelve, he knew that if he wanted to be successful, he would have to develop a love of playing. And, in his secret practice room in the basement of his high school, he did.

The problem he was never able to solve was that despite this love of playing, he was never able to love performing. As soon as an audience was present, something in Chris’ brain shut off his feelings. As if the spell created by the music that allowed him to access his emotions could only be in effect when he played in solitude. He felt trapped in a perverted version of Cinderella where the clock stuck midnight the minute someone was listening—even Sarah. Perhaps in the deep dark recesses of his mind, he knew that his relationship with music was just too private to share, that to be witnessed while he was emotionally entwined with his playing seemed voyeuristic and invasive.

The spell was broken only once. It was the concerto he performed on the night his father died.

It wasn’t supposed to be a special performance. He was scheduled to play Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra. The theater was run down and the attendance would be sparse, but it was a gig and he and Sarah needed the money.

That evening while Chris was showering in their hotel room—before putting on the same old tux he wore the night he met Sarah—the phone in their room rang. They had only been married for two years and she still traveled with him to all of his concerts. He kept telling her there was no reason for her to sit through a concerto he had performed countless times, but she always insisted on going. She was putting on her earrings when the call came in. It was Chris’ mother.

“Oh, Hi Rita! Chris is in the shower, do you want me to have him call you back when he gets out?”

“No, no. No need. I just wanted to get him a message.”

Sarah didn’t really want to be on the phone with Chris’ mother without him there. She was a difficult person to talk to one-on-one. She always seemed slightly off, slightly distant. “Oh OK. Are you sure I can’t get him? He just went in.”

“No, it’s fine. I just thought he should know that his father died this afternoon.”

Sarah was silent. She’s wasn’t sure how to respond. Rita had just announced that her husband had died in such a completely matter-of-fact manner, she might just have been reminding them to wear hats because it was going to be cold that day.

“Oh my God, Rita, I’m so sorry. I-… let me get Chris!”

“No, it’s alright. He wasn’t well. It’s a good thing.”