Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  Downstairs, I found Achara sitting in a chair in the watch office, Donovan alongside, Stephanie in the corridor doorway in the sundress Allyson had picked out for her. Achara had a briefcase and papers laid out on the table beside her. As I walked into the room, we all heard a car door slam outside, a child chattering away. Britney.

  “Thanks for the call,” I said sarcastically.

  “What call?” Donovan asked.

  “The one telling us you weren’t going to be able to make it by nine as arranged, but that you’d be here by . . .” I made a production of looking at my watch. “Twelve-twenty.”

  “We called,” Donovan said, “but your lines were busy.”

  “I have two days left, and you show up three and a half hours late.”

  The room grew deathly quiet. Donovan didn’t hold my gaze, turned to Achara and then Stephanie for succor. I’d been getting angry at people all morning, more surprised with each episode.

  The voices outside grew louder, and then the front door opened and Wes and Lillian Tindale burst in. My daughters ran past them and into my arms. Smothered in kisses, I held them in my arms for a few moments, and then let them slide to the floor.

  Sensing the tension they’d walked into, Wes said, “We got them back in time for lunch.”

  “It’s nice to know somebody’s punctual.”

  After they left, Allyson whispered to me. “Grandpa said he had to go to the rest room, but he went to the tavern instead.”

  “Thanks.”

  Achara introduced herself to the girls and said, “Would you two like to show me around? I don’t know that I’ve ever been in a fire station.”

  After they left, I turned to Donovan. “So what the hell’s going on?”

  “We were late. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Not for you.”

  “We’ve been working on it. I’m sorry if we weren’t in touch the way you would have liked. I remember this from Chattanooga. People get emotional. I should have been on my toes. I’m sorry.” Donovan turned his blue eyes to Stephanie, as if she were an ally, or as if he wanted to make her one. “I was at Canyon View at five this morning. Achara was there all night. I brought her up to speed on everything we’d done in Tennessee, and after that she wanted to do some records searches. She’s a better chemist than I am—I’m mostly administrative these days—and she wanted to go over the list of chemicals we’d come up with in Tennessee to see if there were any that might have produced your symptoms. After that we were waiting for phone calls, mine from London, hers from Hong Kong. With the time differences and everything, it took a while.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Unfortunately, not yet. We have two more people back at the plant going through the lists of chemicals we know were involved in Tennessee. We’re doing everything we can think of as fast as we think of it.”

  “And what about Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc.?”

  “I still haven’t been able to find out if they were involved in Tennessee.”

  My cell phone rang. “Yes?”

  It was Olefson, one of the county chiefs from our committee. He told me they would be organized and working by Monday morning. “Fine,” I said. I should have told them all at the meeting that I had the syndrome. Everybody was working in slow motion while I was dying at sixteen frames per second.

  “Look,” Stephanie said, sensing how irritated I still was. “Why don’t you go break Achara free while Mr. Donovan and I compare notes.”

  “Sorry I went off on you,” I said.

  “Call me Scott. And don’t worry about it. One thing, though. We’d like to see as many of the victims as possible. That would certainly help a lot.”

  “Mary McCain is expecting me this afternoon.”

  “Who is?”

  “Her husband’s got it. She’s expecting only me, but I think I can get you all in.”

  I found the three of them sitting in the front seat of the tanker. When I opened the door, Britney giggled and leaned past Achara, who was on the outside. “We were hiding.”

  When Achara smiled, it was clear her heart was breaking for me. I could only surmise what spending five minutes with my daughters had done to her, because either one of them could have charmed the scales off an alligator.

  “We’re finished in there,” I said.

  “Everything resolved?” Achara asked.

  “More or less.”

  “Achara thinks we should get our hair cut,” Allyson said.

  “So do I.”

  “Really, Daddy?” Britney was so excited she was about to burst.

  “Yes.”

  “Grandma said short hair wasn’t ladylike.”

  “Grandma has short hair,” I said.

  “That’s what we told her,” said Allyson, still indignant about it.

  “You want out?” I said to the girls, who both shook their heads.

  “You want to come over for dinner tonight?” Britney blurted. Allyson elbowed her and whispered in her ear. Britney added, “Stephanie won’t mind.”

  “Thank you, but I’m afraid I’ll be busy,” Achara said. As I helped her climb down out of the rig, she said, “Maybe we should sit down and talk one-on-one about what’s happening. I have some ideas.”

  “Sure.”

  “Later?”

  “Yeah.”

  43. JOKESTERS WHO PUT ZOMBIES IN MOVIE THEATER SEATS

  We caravanned to Joel McCain’s house, Stephanie navigating the route by memory, having followed the fire engine there earlier in the week. On North Bend Way, in the middle of town, we passed a couple of high school girls in shorts and halter tops holding cardboard signs for a car wash. I figured this was where Donovan’s Suburban had gotten wet. The thought made my blood boil all over again. They seemed helpful enough and indicated that they were working on the problem day and night, but every little thing was making me irritable.

  Stephanie parked the Lexus in front of the McCain homestead while Donovan pulled his Suburban into a spot behind us in the cul-de-sac. The neighborhood was resplendent in the June sunshine, the lawns green and manicured.

  A perplexed expression on her face, Mary opened the front door while we gathered at the end of her walkway. “Listen,” I said. “Let me go first. She wasn’t expecting all of us.”

  “No, it’s fine!” Mary shouted. “Company will be good. I’m sure he’s ready to see people. Whoever you want to bring is fine.” As we drew closer and I made the introductions, Mary said, “If Dr. Riggs was here to treat Joel, I would veto it, but this is a matter of public health. Scientists always want to cooperate with the medical authorities. It’s in the manual. Mrs. Eddy was very explicit.”

  I wondered what was going on with Joel that Mary wanted him to have this many visitors. Was it possible the syndrome really was transitory, that Holly was going to get better, and that Karrie and I weren’t doomed? That Stan had killed himself for nothing?

  “Thank you, Mary.” My daughters were behind us in the cul-de-sac, Allyson walking across the street toward a girl her age, Britney lagging behind. “You two going to be okay out here?” I shouted.

  “I’m going to play with Crystal, Daddy. We’ll be okay.”

  “Don’t lose track of your little sister.”

  “I’m not going to get lost,” Britney said, annoyed.

  The four of us crowded into the McCains’ foyer, our numbers, my height, and Scott Donovan’s girth making the rooms smaller. The last time I’d been here, Joel had looked like a CPR dummy, but today Mary was so buoyant and confident, I began to get my hopes up.

  Mary escorted us into the stripped-down living room, where Joel lay on a tall hospital bed. His eyes were open, but other than that he looked like a man who’d just been thrown by a bull elephant, limp, dazed, broken. He wore a white T-shirt, a bedsheet obscuring whatever else he might have had on. To my great disappointment, he was pretty much the same glassy-eyed Joel we’d left four days ago.

  Stephanie walked over
and spoke his name, took his pulse, temperature, blood pressure, felt his brow, and began checking his extremities for signs of conscious or reflexive movement. I thought about trying to speak to him but couldn’t get myself to do it in front of this many people. Anything I said would only make me look fatuous and show Joel off for the zombie he’d become. In fact, all I could think about was how full of life and humor Joel had been only weeks earlier.

  I slipped out of the room and stepped onto the front porch, gently snicking the front door closed behind me. Across the street my girls were running in circles with two other children. Coming so soon after Stan’s funeral, seeing Joel again had been ruinous, his twisted body dressed by somebody else, his facial muscles slack, the part in his hair crooked.

  It would be a good many years before Joel got a funeral or the accolades Stan had received that morning. Not unless his mother-in-law fed him another apple. By the time they buried him, he would have spent a decade, perhaps several decades, lying in musty rooms by himself. It was the worst way to die.

  A day at a time.

  Alone.

  Forgotten.

  Joel and I had joined the fire department the same year. After my divorce he used to tease me about my dating habits, joking that I’d never met a woman I didn’t want to dump. He claimed I had a pathological need to make each woman in the room fall in love with me so I could break her heart. It wasn’t true. At least, not to the extent he claimed.

  Standing alone on his porch, I thought about what he’d been trying to tell me. Joel had been relentless in trying to force me to see myself from a different perspective.

  What hurt was that all those years I’d treated his comments as jokes and all those years he’d been right.

  Joel had seen through me.

  He’d said once I must have been a lonely child. How he’d come up with that diagnosis was beyond me, because everybody else in the department thought I was a happy-go-lucky guy, assumed I always had been.

  Now, standing on his front porch, for the first time in years, perhaps ever, I was able to look at myself as an outsider might. I had been a sad kid. Life at Six Points had been infinitely depressing and had worn me down physically, while suppressing my spirit, too. One only had to look at my choice of reading material during those years.

  I’d spent hours each day in the school library or the downtown Seattle Public Library, usually when I was supposed to be out on the streets proselytizing. The Sixth Element and William P. Markham had the longest list of banned books on earth, essentially any book Markham hadn’t written, yet once I broke the tenet and began reading from outside sources, once I discovered the library, I found a whole new world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new worlds.

  I absorbed as much information about the universe outside our religion as possible.

  I loved reading about war pilots, from the First World War right through Vietnam. There was something immensely compelling about the thought of being up in the wild blue while the rest of the world fought like barbarians below.

  In addition to flying stories, I read every WW II escape memoir I could lay my hands on. I read about fliers slipping out of POW camps, about soldiers escaping from the Wehrmacht, about Jews, Communists, and gays escaping from the Gestapo. I read with relish and identified completely with men and women relating tortures at the hands of the Nazis, and swore that if I was ever tortured, I would do everything in my power to survive and exact my revenge. What I hadn’t realized until years later was that I had been tortured every day of my young life, and that my pitiful reprisals would eventually be launched against an old man in a nursing home.

  Ironic that I should identify with prisoners of war so completely. Ironic also that I should dream incessantly of escape from a prison camp. It was my spirit that had been in prison.

  Cultists lived in a fantasy world, and according to Joel I’d fallen into a fantasy world after my divorce, too, seducing and discarding women like a fisherman seducing and discarding trout in a “catch-and-release only” stream. What an incredible bastard I was. It had probably been one of my exes who’d made the anonymous call to Shad and Stevenson accusing me of blowing up Caputo’s trailer.

  I was still thinking about all my exes when the front door opened behind me and Achara stepped outside. “He was like that when you saw him before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly like that?”

  “Not exactly. When we saw him, he was choking on an apple.”

  “Oh, God. How many others are there?”

  “Two still alive in Tennessee that we know about and two more up here. Stephanie’s sister and a woman over in the nursing home. Joel makes three. I’ll be the fourth. Karrie? The young woman at the fire station? I don’t know if you saw her. She’ll be the fifth, although I doubt she’ll talk to you about it.”

  “I suppose it’s possible Joel is the way he is because of his fall?”

  “It’s possible, but that’s not what happened.”

  “So you expect to be . . . ?”

  “By Sunday.” I dropped my hands limply, made my facial muscles go slack, and feigned brain death. It was fun to watch the look of horror in Achara’s eyes. Then, in case one of the neighbors thought I was mocking Joel, I relaxed the pose.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I thought it was hilarious.” Her brown eyes held my gaze. Somehow during our explanations yesterday at Canyon View, the magnitude of the tragedy had not impressed her. For all of his scientific distance, Donovan actually seemed more attuned to the personal impact of the syndrome, perhaps because he’d seen it up close in Tennessee. I’d sensed all along that he knew my pain.

  “I feel dreadful about this.”

  “Join the club.”

  “No, I mean . . . If there was something we could do right now, this minute. I just . . .” She was whispering now and the ringing in my ears forced me to lower my head to hear.

  “What are you two conspiring about?” Donovan had opened the door without a sound.

  “I was just telling Jim I’ve turned down two offers to teach at Stanford.”

  “Don’t worry, Jimbo. We’ll figure this out.”

  Donovan’s arrogance was almost as comforting as Achara’s deception was puzzling. Why lie to Donovan? Weren’t we all working on this together? I was beginning to wonder if she had her own agenda, if she was really committed to this quest.

  “How can you say we’re going to figure this out when there’s so little time?” Achara said.

  “Don’t you worry. You’re good at what you do. I’m good at what I do. Don’t forget. I went through this once before and got stumped. It’s not going to happen again.”

  Gazing across the immaculate lawn at the black Suburban, I said, “Nice rig. You stop to get it washed on the way into town?”

  Donovan said, “On the drive out here some idiot teenage kid threw a tomato across three lanes of freeway and just about took out our windshield. I tried to get his license, but they took the exit to Highway 18 right after that.”

  When she spotted me watching her from across the cul-de-sac, Allyson jogged halfway across the quiet street and shouted, “Do we have to go now?”

  “Not yet.”

  She ran back to the game, laughing. I found myself looking to see whether her hands were clear, but my vision was blurred, and at this distance I would have needed binoculars even if it wasn’t. Jesus. My kids might have it. Somebody was responsible for this. I didn’t know who, but somebody had to be. Thinking about my kids getting it made me want to kill whoever was responsible.

  Eight minutes later Stephanie came out of the house deep in conversation with Mary McCain, their sudden camaraderie odd, considering Stephanie was a doctor and Mary had always taken pride in the fact that she’d never visited a doctor in her life.

  A few minutes later, Donovan and Carpenter were locked into a heated discussion in the Suburban, the windows rolled tight.

  44. YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO MEMORIZE THIS: 75401824
18630846

  Positioning the vanity mirror so that I could watch the argument in the Suburban behind us, I missed all but the gist of what Stephanie was telling me, something about how much faith Mary had that her religion would bring Joel back to his old self. Despite what Mary thought, Joel was gone. He was an idiot and would be for the rest of eternity. Just as I would be.

  The speed limit was thirty-five, but we were doing closer to forty-five; behind us, the Suburban quickly matched our speed.

  Without warning, the Suburban swerved across the yellow line and nearly struck an oncoming vehicle, overcorrected, and went off the road on the right, a sheet of dust flaring up as it crossed the dirt.

  “Achara had an accident!” shrieked Allyson, who’d been watching the Suburban with me.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “What?” Stephanie glanced into her mirror and pulled onto the parking strip, reversing until we occupied the stretch of roadway directly opposite the accident. The Suburban had center-punched a small tree. The vehicle the Suburban had so narrowly missed was backing up, too.

  “You girls stay inside,” I said.

  “Can’t we go see?” Britney asked.

  “No.”

  The tree, about five inches in diameter, had creased the front bumper of the Suburban. Other than that, there wasn’t much damage. The windshield was intact.

  “Oh, God,” said Donovan when I reached the vehicle. He was cupping his nose with both hands, blood leaking through his fingers. The deployed air bag had popped him good. I reached inside past Donovan and turned off the ignition.

  As I moved around the vehicle to see how Achara was doing, one of our volunteers, Andre Stiles, climbed out of the pickup across the street, still wearing his uniform from the funeral.