Authors: Jamie Quaid
“Linens in the cabinet,” Andre stated tersely, punching up numbers on his cell phone. Cell phones worked down here?
I don’t know who he had meant to order about, but Tim was the one who obeyed, not me. After being deemed a Saturn’s daughter, I’d checked out Saturn, and sure enough, Capricorn is ruled by the planet Saturn. If you want to believe astrology, my late-December birthday means I’m goal-oriented, pessimistic, and cautious. And I don’t do orders.
Still suspended between drunken disbelief and fear, I whipped out my phone, too, intending to warn my friends not to come to work in the Zone for the next few days.
I verified that Milo was still with me. From my bag, he batted my hand with his head. Reassured, I ignored a rattle on the stairs.
As I punched buttons, a space suit clattered into sight. My eyebrows probably met my hairline, but I had a sleepy Cora on the other end of the line and
couldn’t manage to question and yell at the same time.
Still on his phone, Andre joined me in the hall, seemingly unfazed by Space Man. So I yelled at Cora to stay away, kept Milo in my bag to keep him from being stomped on, and pretended I was on a
Star Trek
set.
Since Cora lived outside the Zone and could count on a functioning phone, we’d worked out a telephone tree by the time Andre finished yelling at his flunkies to batten down the hatches. He had a right to be short-tempered if Acme was gassing his employees.
The level of his rage expanded the dimensions of my fear, but I was still having a hard time accepting that Disney clouds from a regulated company could kill me. Wouldn’t the plant be sounding warning alarms and the police and medics be swarming down here if there was a chemical disaster?
Stupid, I know, but Denial is my middle name. I hadn’t grown up in the Zone, as Andre had. I was still looking at this as a normal problem to be approached with reasonable solutions, even though I knew that tactic wasn’t common in the Zone.
Andre and Space Suit hurried to the tunnel door at the end of the hall, and I tagged along, trying to keep Milo in my messenger bag. He wasn’t kitten size anymore. I needed a larger bag.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Clancy?” Andre snarled, stopping at the door and glaring at me.
“To fetch a nurse for Sleeping Beauty?” I suggested.
Andre in Special Ops mode was intimidating. He glared as if he would snap off my head, which meant I’d succeeded in crawling under his skin. Score one for the girl.
“You can’t go out without a hazmat suit,” Space Man said, sounding like a mechanical Schwartz. He kept hazmat suits in his apartment?
“So where do I find one?” I asked politely, figuring Andre was heading for a storage room already well supplied for any conceivable emergency.
“The gas is spreading. Until we know what we’re up against, we’ll need trained nurses and emergency personnel using our limited number of suits, not lawyers,” Andre said snottily. Women generally didn’t reject his advances, so he was taking mine personally. “Stay here and man the phones.”
I didn’t like it, but he had a point. “Lawyers are trained to communicate,” I reminded him. “Use me as communication central. Do I need passwords to get into your computers?” I nodded at his technology room.
Andre looked as if he’d rather eat flesh than agree with me, but just as I was forced to admit I was useless outside, he had to admit I’d be effective inside.
He sent Schwartz through the tunnel while he backtracked to the communication room. Powering up servers, a small generator—I raised my eyebrows again—and an entire array of networking devices,
he typed in passwords and opened windows on the world.
Score two for the girl.
I didn’t even have the money to buy a small PC, and he had a duplicate Pentagon. The why of this over-the-top preparation remained unclear.
The generator appeared to vent outside, I cautiously noted. One thing you learned when spending a childhood in strange places was how to check for potential hazards. Carbon monoxide from generators could be deadly.
“Ventilation down here?” I asked.
“Filtered. This is an old bomb shelter. We can house forty if we have to. Food storage in the warehouse, but if the gas reaches as far as the hill, you’ll need hazmat suits to get it. There’s another suit in the closet, but it’s only for chemical spills, not gas. I don’t recommend using it unless necessary.”
If he and Schwartz don’t return
went unsaid. The seriousness of the situation was finally harshing my buzz. I’d been treating the smoke cloud as just another of the Zone’s eccentricities, like the blue buildings. I was playing along with the default script, not really thinking.
But if the gas cloud was truly deadly, all hell was about to break loose. The last vestiges of alcohol fled my brain—I was totally in the Zone now, physically and mentally.
My ex-boyfriend had spent weeks in the outer rings of hell, yelling at me through a mirror, so I knew hell existed. Or limbo. Or some fiendish dimension beyond
this one. I’d seen enough of the afterlife to know I didn’t want to experience it again.
Fear got me focused. Setting Milo and my bag on the floor, I sat my butt in the desk chair and listened intently as Andre gave curt instructions about websites, networks, and e-mail. Apparently all his businesses were connected. Terrified messages were already pouring in—although a good third of them came garbled or as advertisements for pork rinds in Georgia . . . which are toxic in their own way.
The Zone had a sense of humor. I didn’t. Not if lives were at stake.
Milo crawled out of my pouch and prowled the room. Apparently tired of playing nursemaid, Tim wandered in and shifted nervously from foot to foot. I gave him my cell phone and told him to start calling everyone on it. There weren’t that many names. I’d been too busy to have much of a life.
“We’re survivors, Clancy,” Andre said as I opened the first of the obscenity-laced rants on the screen. “Just keep your cool . . . and your boyfriend out.” With that reassuring pep talk, he hurried away, leaving me to the silent cellar.
Max. Or rather, Dane/Max. He meant for me to keep Senator Dane Vanderventer out of the Zone. Normally, United States senators would not visit a backwater industrial area with few voting constituents. But now that Max’s do-gooder soul was inhabiting his powerful cousin’s body, keeping him out of another environmental disaster was akin to averting it in the first place. Wasn’t happening. I’d have to hope for a terrorist
attack to distract him. Max would have the Zone torn down if he knew how truly weird it was.
“Don’t call the number labeled Max,” I warned Tim. “And come to think of it, don’t call Jane Claremont, either. She doesn’t live down here.”
“Too late.” Tim handed the call to me while I scrolled through incoming messages on the monitor. One e-mail contained video from someone’s smart phone. The gas was spreading downwind, in our direction.
“Tina, what’s happening?” Jane asked sleepily.
I could hear her kid crying in the background. Tim had probably woken them up. Jane is an accidental friend and a journalist—a poor, idealistic one with a two-year-old son.
“Is it a story I can sell?” she demanded, knowing I wouldn’t have called her at this hour for anything less than a good reason.
“First off, don’t come anywhere near the Zone,” I warned. “At dawn, you’re going to see a spectacular cloud over the chemical plant that is spreading onto the streets. We don’t know much more than that. Call Acme and see if they stonewall. Start calling police and fire stations and find out what they’re reporting, and get back to me if they have any real news.” I glanced at the computer clock. Three a.m. No one would know anything yet.
“I might be able to hit the network with this. Bless you!” she exclaimed before hanging up, eager to sell a story.
The possibility of real disaster hadn’t sunk in for her yet, either. We’re all so inured to catastrophe from
watching TV, complete with commercial interludes, that we don’t have an appropriate respect for the reality of ground zero.
Damn, I didn’t have Sarah’s number. The daughter of a serial killer and apparently another of Saturn’s dangerous band, she could be volatile under stress. She’d be out there whacking old men if we didn’t get her somewhere safe. My buzz was safely harshed. I wasn’t certain I had the character to save an entire community.
Without my phone to keep him entertained, Tim had been peering over my shoulder at the #zone Twitter feed scrolling across the monitor. “Hey! That says it’s coming from my boss’s phone but she doesn’t even know how to text. Who’s got her phone?”
Oh, crap, Tim didn’t know about Nancy Rose. I scrambled to divert him rather than break the news now. “Why don’t you scout around, see what supplies Andre has down here?”
I suspected the warehouse above held the bulk of Andre’s supplies, but I needed Tim to stay busy.
I scanned the next few text messages. Bill, the bartender, called to say he was transporting a van of locals upwind. Most people were smart enough not to move into the Zone. But I knew he meant elderly people who had never left their familiar neighborhood, transients who camped in the dead buffer along the water, and the poor with nowhere else to go. Plus people like Paddy who defied explanation. Although apparently he was living up here and not in the homeless camp, as I’d thought.
I monitored wind currents on one computer and local news on another. So far, Jane’s exclusive hadn’t hit the airwaves. Other than a few brawls and the pretty cloud, there wasn’t much to report. Unless there were dead bodies lying in the street, we didn’t rate headlines. They’d do breaking news for the morning TV shows, when they could get good video.
But Andre obviously hadn’t wasted time stirring up the populace. More smart-phone videos started making it through. They showed a cloud that had grown spectacularly ominous—thick and greasy and . . . colorful. Sluggish in the pre-dawn humidity, the chemical fog rolled widespread and low along the harbor. Beneath it, small figures dashed about, either escaping or trying to mug each other. It was hard to tell.
Around four a.m., Frank, the detective who owned Discreet Detection, called in. “We’ve got two geezers behind Chesty’s trying to kill each other here.”
What was it with geezers beating up on each other tonight?
“Where’s Andre?” he asked.
“Chasing vandals out of Bill’s bar,” I told him. “They’re breaking windows already. Want me to send Schwartz your way?” I didn’t know how many hazmat suits they had on the ground, but Frank was apparently in one of them.
“Nah, I’ll just dump one in a Dumpster,” he said. “They’ll wear themselves out trying to get at each other. Nice to know a catastrophe brings out the crazies but not the cops.”
He appeared to be right. Rather than falling dead
in the streets, people in the Zone were becoming increasingly violent—and there was nary an official policeman in sight, despite our calls. Maybe they were unpacking their hazmats.
Andre had to establish a bunker in front of Bill’s Biker Bar and Grill to keep people out of the liquor. I hoped he wasn’t guarding it with his AK-47; alcohol wasn’t worth human life.
Schwartz called to say he was barricading the kitchen at Chesty’s. A cook had caught thieves running out with everything they could lay hands on. They were hauling their loot back to the homeless camp, fighting over it and then dropping like flies.
“Where are your buddies at the precinct?” I asked.
“Acme’s told them the air has neutralized the gas,” he said flatly. “And I’m not inviting mundanes to learn the hard way that Acme lies.” He hung up before I could ask more. I’d never heard Schwartz sound so cynical. He’d be beating up bums next.
On his next call, Andre was shouting. “Clancy, send Tim next door for Paddy and Pearl! You’ve got incoming.”
Incoming?
Andre didn’t talk about his military career much, but I’d seen him crash through locked doors with automatic weapons in hand. Even though I didn’t know what to expect, I jumped when he hit commando mode. And if Andre thought it was safe for Tim to run next door, fine. I couldn’t imagine what crazy Paddy or doddering Pearl could do to help.
By the time I finally heard sirens, it had been more than three hours since we’d first seen the cloud. It was
now practically covering the entire Zone, officialdom was just checking in, and Milo was fast asleep at my feet.
Propping the cell phone against my ear as Bill reported relieving Andre at the bar, I checked the corridor at the sound of pounding on a door. Emerging from the hospital room, Julius waved me away to indicate he had matters in hand.
I liked Julius, but he was a neurotic hermit and not necessarily dependable. I told Bill that the authorities were heading his way, then took a quick survey of the premises, as it had occurred to me that by
incoming
Andre likely meant new patients, not bombs or cops.
Three more cots had been set up in the room with Beauty—who hadn’t flicked an eyelid. She lay there in eerie stillness even as voices shouted from the tunnel and wheels and running feet racketed outside in the hall.
“They were pounding the stuffing out of each other, then
whap!
—just like that, they keeled over,” a sharp, curt voice said from the hallway.
Frank
. Frank was a detective because he had a talent for finding what was lost. Strange, but again, it was best not to question. Not with Frank. Not with Cora, my best friend down here, who conjured snakes. And definitely not with Sarah, who was even weirder, not to mention scarier, than me—and I’d sent my boyfriend to hell.
Life in the Zone was never boring.
I left the infirmary to watch Frank rolling a gurney carrying a frail old man. Julius tested his pulse and checked under his eyelids. I got out of their way.
The patient on the gurney wore the rough clothes
of the homeless encampment. He didn’t move a muscle or make a sound as he was unceremoniously rolled from one mattress to another. Just like Sleeping Beauty, and Nancy Rose earlier, he was stone-cold out of it, and my skin crept with uneasiness.