Walking Through Fire Read online

  A sudden rapping on her window made Rachel startle and cry out. A man in a green camouflage uniform and a beret stood there, an automatic weapon strapped across his chest.

  “National Guard, Ma’am. You need to get off the street.”

  She swallowed. “I … my son. He has cancer. The hospital is waiting. Er … the doctors at the hospital are waiting.” She gestured at the building.

  “The Secretary of Defense has declared a state of emergency. Go straight there.” He stepped back. “And Ma’am?”

  Rachel met his gaze.

  “I’d hurry if I were you.”

  Hands shaking, Rachel drove the last two blocks and turned into the Orleans Street garage. The gate stood open. Instead of regular security, two National Guardsmen stood on each side of the entrance. One of the men jumped forward and yelled at her, “All citizens have been commanded to take cover!”

  Rachel’s limbs shook, the car rolled forward. She jammed it into park and was sliding her arm through the hospital bag when her door was wrenched open. The soldier yanked her out of the car.

  “Leave the car and get to the bomb shelter in the basement.”

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked.

  “Mom,” Adam called from the back seat.

  Rachel’s focus returned to her son. One thing at a time. Get Adam into the hospital. Don’t worry about anything else.

  “Come on, buddy. We’ve got to hurry. You can rest when we get there.” His hand, hot, reached for hers. She slipped an arm around his waist and adjusted their bag on her shoulder.

  “Ma’am, the front doors to the hospital are sealed. You’re going to have to walk up the stairs to the fourth floor and cross over the glass bridge. From there head to the basement.”

  Rachel nodded. “Near the OR recovery room. I know how to get there.”

  Adrenaline pumping, Rachel half-carried her son up the stairs, counting them out loud, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and turn, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and turn, repeat until they reached the fourth floor. At the opposite end of the bridge, the entrance to the Children’s Center, Rachel saw shadowy movements, a line of people in wheelchairs with attached IV poles moving toward the elevators. Hospital personnel stood there, keeping order, pushing the lines along.

  Rachel stepped closer to the glass sides of the bridgeway to look out over the city. Her breath fogged the glass. Blackness overhead was broken up with patches of sickly greens and purples. Not a single star shone white. Instead, the red sparks had arrived, grown to the size of snowflakes as they pinwheeled down faster and larger, each flake glowing with terrible beauty. Craning her neck, Rachel could see the gash was still in the sky, opening to some other place. While Rachel stared, another fireball pushed through the gash, plummeting toward Baltimore.

  The glass bridge’s walls began to shake. Rachel watched in horror as the meteor came closer, elongating its shape until it resembled a descending tornado of orange, gold, and angry red. Banging on the glass, Rachel screamed. She thought of all the people of the city asleep, unaware of what was coming.

  “Mom?” Adam shrugged away from the arm she’d been using to support him. He placed one hand over his heart and the other one against the glass. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  A sound like rushing water filled the glass bridge. The funnel shape descended on Baltimore at an uncanny rate, growing in height and breadth as it tracked closer and closer. Rachel could see rocks and flaming debris circling round and round the eye. The road underneath buckled from the heat. And then the tornado touched down mere blocks away, moving east toward the hospital and leaving disorder in its wake. Houses burst into flames, buildings imploded on one side of the street while the opposite side of the street remained intact. People appeared at their windows and doors, some ran for their cars. Air thrummed inside the glass walls of the bridge. The tornado was only two blocks away.

  Rachel grabbed Adam and stared into his hazel eyes.

  She had to yell over the noise outside. “I don’t understand either, but we’ve got to run across now.”

  The eleven-year-old shook his head, unable or unwilling to tear his gaze from the nightmare outside.

  A siren, air raid or fire department, wailed into the night from somewhere to the north.

  Burning heat, smelling like sulfur, permeated the glass and singed Rachel’s nose hairs. Chunks of burning rock flew off from the tornado, terrible harbingers of what was coming. The stench was so strong she coughed. Sweat broke out on her forehead and under her arms. Rachel imagined the glass of the bridge melting, oozing and crinkling like Styrofoam in a microwave. Below, running through melting manicured landscaping, a man in uniform was on fire.

  “There’s no choice, Adam.” She didn’t know if he could hear her over the sound of the firestorm. “Now!”

  She shoved him off balance and they ran, hunched over inside the glass walls as if to make smaller targets. Outside, lamplights, neon signs, restaurants all went dark, as if a breaker had been thrown. The picture windows—intended to showcase a panorama of Baltimore’s downtown—framed chaos. Debris fell and people crawled from the wreckage of houses, mouths open in screams as they tried to hide from the fire, covering their bodies with pieces of housing. Wind whipped the flames higher.

  Coughing and choking, Rachel pulled Adam toward the hospital door. They were only halfway. Her throat was raw and her skin burned as if she were under a magnifying lens. The tornado passed the stop sign at the end of the block. We aren’t going to make it. Smoke undulated toward the purple sky. Then, a face appeared from inside the havoc of the fire tornado, wavering with the flickering of flames, but still recognizable: a dragon’s head. The body burned red, the tip of the tail thrashed. The dragon extended its neck until one great eye met Rachel’s through the glass. Green iris with yellow striations around a vertical black pupil.

  Sweat broke out on Rachel’s forehead. This can’t be real.

  An awful weight crushed Rachel, the air pressed against her bones. She couldn’t move out from under the gaze of the beast, and her vision was filled only with its terrible light.

  Black spots dotted Rachel’s vision as if she’d stared at the sun. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

  The dragon retracted its head, raised fiery wings and brought them together. The force cracked the glass of the bridgeway. Rachel used her body to shield Adam, but they fell to the floor, tumbling head over heels.

  THREE

  Rachel was disoriented as they tumbled, but she kept herself wrapped around Adam until they rolled through the door and into the hospital. Turning around to look behind, Rachel saw the glass bridgeway melting from the middle as the tornado plowed through where they’d been only seconds before.

  An Asian nurse saw them on the floor and waved at the stairs. “Move, move!” she shrieked.

  Blinking away her blindness, Rachel grabbed Adam’s arm and ran down the stairs and through the heavy door at the bottom that opened into the basement bomb shelter. Rachel knew this area as the waiting room for surgical recovery. No windows to see out, the paint a somber gray. Patients and their families—a hundred, maybe more—sat on the chairs or huddled against the walls. Down here, at least, the sounds from outside were muffled. Instead, there was the sound of children crying and a general whirring sound from air intakes on the ceiling. Generator, thought Rachel.

  A father pushed a wheelchair holding a girl in a hospital gown guiding her IV pole around the corner from the elevator hallway. Behind him was the nurse who’d shouted at Rachel to hurry. “That’s the last of the patients we were able to move,” she told a white-haired doctor wearing a hospital badge that read ‘Dr. Abramson.’

  The heavy door opened again and one of the guards from the parking garage came in escorting a group of teenagers: two boys and a girl holding a whimpering toddler. Pink beads tied at the end of each of the toddler’s braids made a clicking sound whenever she moved her head. One of the boys, hair in rows and wearing a white T-shirt, tucked the loose corners of a blanket back around the little girl. All had cinder burns on their clothing and skin. They’d been out in the storm. Now they stood by the door, seemingly unsure where to go in this room of brisk hospital protocol when all the center seats overflowed with patients and admitted families.

  “My arm’s burned, ben dan.” The teenager in the white shirt scowled at a nurse. “I need help.”

  Rachel recognized the slang insult from one of the vids that Adam sometimes played.

  “We’ll get to you. Take a seat, please.” After the nurse turned away, the girl with the toddler, who looked no older than sixteen, moved to a section of wall near Rachel and Adam and the boys followed her.

  Rachel mustered a smile of acknowledgement for the group. “I’m Rachel. Do you need me to scoot over?”

  “Jackers.” The teenager in the hoodie folded his arms across his chest.

  “Did you see the tornado?” She wanted to ask if he’d seen the dragon.

  “We were at my house around the corner and the lights went out. Happens sometimes when my old man doesn’t pay the bill. We went outside and it was like something you’d see on a vidscreen.” He shook his head. “Unbelievable. We covered our heads and ran, so we didn’t see much of anything else. There was a soldier at the door of the hospital. He waved us in, so we came.” Jackers leaned his back against the hospital wall and slid down.

  An overweight woman in a wheelchair on the other side of the young group leaned into the conversation. “There was a tornado? Is that why we’re down here?”

  Rachel’s stomach clenched. She realized that the people already in the hospital hadn’t seen any of the firestorm and the people outside, like Jackers and his friends, had only seen the last part. She and Adam were the only ones to witness the full power of the meteors and the resulting tornado. Including the dragon. If she told what she’d seen everyone would think she was crazy. Maybe she’d imagined the whole incident.

  “Yeah,” said Rachel. “That’s why we’re down here.”

  The pungent smell of sweat hung in the air. Adrenaline was wearing off and Rachel began to feel numb instead. She looked at her watch. 12:20 am. An hour since she’d left the house. It felt like so much longer.

  Adam put his head in her lap. Rachel patted his leg. Her mind spun with images from the picture window. Flaming rocks falling on Baltimore. People screaming for help. Where was Craig? Had he seen the firestorm coming and gone back to their house or had he driven north towards Boston? She tried to make sense of the past hour. The United States, maybe other countries too, were being attacked by powerful weapons all at the same time. But that didn’t explain the dragon. Or, maybe she hadn’t even seen that part, just imagined it in the stress of the moment. It was confusing, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces.

  She’d just shut her eyes when she felt pressure and saw that a nurse had covered them with a blanket.

  “My son has cancer,” Rachel said. “We came because he has a fever. He needs antibiotics.”

  The nurse nodded. “We’ll bring around juice in a moment. And cool washcloths. I know it’s hot in here.”

  This isn’t an airplane ride. Will you bring peanuts too? Rachel bunched her hands into the blanket, tried to calm her thoughts. Don’t lose it. Breathe. Like in yoga, in through your nose, out through your mouth.

  The nurse had already moved to the next group. Rachel pulled out her phone to call Craig’s cell. Still no signal. Rachel shook her head, brushed her hair back.

  Flickering from the corner on the right caught her attention. A television was on, tuned to a news channel. Smallish by modern standards, but the technology was working. White on black closed captioning lagged across the bottom of the screen. A blond-haired man sat at a desk talking to a reporter in some unnamed city.

  “The first storm fell over Florida. Satellite pictures show more firestorms moving across North America. Loss of life is impossible to gauge at this moment.”

  Rachel wanted to scream. Why did they keep saying ‘storm’? It was raining fire. This was an attack. Something was inside each meteor. Then the meteors turned into tornadoes.

  A map of the United States filled the screen. Swirling firestorm clouds tracked south from Canada, the edges touching Montana through Michigan, and moved down to Oklahoma. Another storm swooped down the east coast. According to this satellite loop, Baltimore was on the edge of the firestorm. The main push was over New Jersey, Delaware, and eastern Pennsylvania moving south. This must be the meteor she’d seen falling in the background behind the police officer. Her whole body shook. The meteor that hit Baltimore was moving west. Her house was right in the middle. Maybe it could survive one firestorm, but not two.

  The reporter came back on the screen. “We have images coming in now.”

  Grainy photos filled the screen from live satellite feeds, but Rachel’s mind was able to fill in the gaps. Just like what she’d seen outside the glass: fiery tornadoes crashing into buildings and starting fires so hot they burned the roads, random in their violence.

  “While the precise nature of this crisis is unclear, we do have some information coming in from geologist Evan Rouche.” The camera moved out to show a thin man in a brown suit twitching in the station’s guest chair.

  One more fidget and then Rouche said, “Something is impacting at different sites, something so powerful that it spawns tornadoes of fire. For rocks to be on fire, to be flaming, they’d be close to 400 degrees Celsius. They’ll be triggering forest fires all around. We’re going to see irreversible changes.”

  “What kind of changes, Dr. Rouche?” The anchorman leaned forward.

  Rachel leaned forward too, although the TV’s volume was all the way up.

  The geologist looked at the man and then the camera, shaking as if he couldn’t stay in his seat. “400 Celsius is 752 Fahrenheit! The majority of plant life on land and sea is dying right now. There’s too much kinetic energy looking for an outlet. No telling how it will alter any organism that survives the next twenty-four hours.”

  Dr. Rouche’s voice went on, but Rachel found it difficult to follow the scientific jargon.

  A voice off camera interrupted, “Looks like it’s snowing outside. Little red flakes.”

  Rachel clenched her hands. That’s how it had started before the gash opened and released a meteor.

  Dr. Rouche had left his chair. The camera continued filming the empty seat. There came a short scream. Just one.

  Rachel’s stomach heaved. She stroked Adam’s hair in a rhythmic pattern and tried not to think.

  She didn’t want to look again, but she couldn’t help it. A new camera had taken over the broadcast. Flames around the Statue of Liberty. Central Park burning down. Gray ash piling up on the streets.

  The screen went to electronic snow.

  A man stood up and clicked the remote from channel to channel, but there were no more transmissions.

  “Oh, God. Oh God in heaven,” Rachel said, gasping as she swiped at her phone. Sunday school teachings from childhood came back as Rachel panicked, wishing there was a loving deity to save them all.

  No signal.

  Dr. Abramson stood in front of her, a black yarmulke on his head. He cleared his throat. “I understand your son is an oncology patient and is presenting with a fever?” His voice was deep, soothing, and his dark eyes were comforting.

  The geologist’s scream kept repeating in her mind.

  “What’s happening?” Rachel whispered. She heard the break in her voice. “Are we safe?”

  “I’m a doctor, Mrs. Deneuve. I don’t have answers to your questions, but we do have supplies down here. Please let me help your son.”

  Rachel looked around at the people huddled in fear, hiding in the basement of Baltimore’s hospital. She nodded her head. “Yes. My son. Please help Adam.”

  The nurse from upstairs came forward as Dr. Abramson moved away. She pushed a rolling IV pole and the hanging bag of medicine. Adam pulled up his shirt so that the lump under his skin was exposed. His expression was composed, resigned to a familiar routine. The nurse snapped on purple gloves and began cleaning the site. Sometimes nurses not used to oncology patients weren’t as thorough, but this one did fine.

  “I’ll push on three,” the nurse said. The needle went in and produced a blood return. The nurse hummed as she attached the antibiotics to his tubing. “Do you want it to go in over thirty minutes? I can push it up to fifteen.”

  Rachel nodded. “Fifteen, please.”

  “Okay. I’ll send over a nurse to flush it and then take his temperature in about twenty minutes. We won’t be able to run labs, but we can use broad spectrum antibiotics and hope for the best.” She placed a hand on Adam’s head. “May I pray for him?”

  Rachel cleared her throat. It couldn’t hurt and maybe it would help. “We’re not really religious, but yeah.”

  The nurse tilted her head to the side. “If there’s a better time to get religious, I can’t think of it.” She placed her hand on Adam’s head, closed her eyes, and mouthed words that Rachel couldn’t hear.

  Then she moved to the group of teenagers. “Those burns look painful. Who wants to go first?”

  “It’s getting worse.” The young man in the sleeveless white shirt groaned. “Spreading.” He held out his arm. Black skin puckered and split, revealing pink tissue and scabs along the edge.

  “Me too. On my neck.” The teenage girl whimpered. She pulled her hair to the side and exposed a small mark. “Like it’s burning all the way through my body.”

  “Okay, we’re going to take care of this.” The nurse called out for someone to bring over a privacy screen.

  The screen wheeled into position around the young man.