7 DAYS Book 1

 

The hydraulic fitting had been fighting him for days and he was finally on the verge of winning. Chris Olson lay on his back beneath the Number Seven stamping press, his shoulders wedged between a concrete pillar and a forest of grease-blackened cables, working a crescent wrench into the gap where two hydraulic lines joined. The fitting was seized, corrosion having bonded the threads together sometime in the fifteen years since installation, and three days of penetrating oil hadn't loosened it enough to budge. With no room for air tools and no time to disassemble the unit to get them in, it was up to Chris and his muscle alone.

“Get your degree… you'll be behind a cushy desk… you'll be in a nice chair… yeah, sure.” Chris muttered to himself as he squirmed around, trying to get a better angle of attack on the thing.

Above him, the press itself loomed like a mechanical cathedral, forty tons of hardened steel suspended on rams thicker than his thigh. The die set mounted in the press bed could punch through quarter-inch steel plate like it was paper, forming the complex curves of a door panel in a single stroke. When the press cycled, the entire floor shook – but it wasn't cycling now.

The wrench slipped and his knuckles cracked against a junction box. Chris let out a string of loud curses intermixed with yelps, flexed his fingers, and repositioned for another attempt. Somewhere behind him, past the concrete barrier of the pillar, the production floor hammered on without him. The rhythmic crash of the other presses formed a steady bass note, punctuated by the higher whine of conveyor motors and the pneumatic hiss of transfer arms moving finished panels down the line.

The fitting finally gave, a quarter-turn that sent a shock up through the wrench and into his palm. Chris grunted, adjusted his grip, and worked it another quarter-turn. Dark fluid began to weep from the joint, old hydraulic oil the color of black coffee, and he reached for the catch pan he'd put down earlier and slid it into place beneath the drip.

“Olson!” A voice cut through the factory noise, close enough to hear without shouting. Pete Nowak, one of the shift supervisors, had crouched down to peer under the press. His face was upside-down from Chris's perspective, his hard hat dangling by its chin strap. “Dale's looking for you. Something about the coating system in Building Three?”

“You guys realize I'm not a tech, right?”

“Yeah, but with so many people calling out today—”

“Pete. I'm. Not. A. Tech. Anymore. Dale needs to hire some new people.”

“I know, Chris, and I'm sorry you're back under there, but—”

“Sorry doesn't fix bloody knuckles, Pete.” Chris sighed, rolling his eyes. “It's fine, I don't mind. Walking around with a clipboard gets old after a while. You'll learn that one day.”

“I… yeah, I mean, I guess?” Pete's eyebrows, upside-down, scrunched in confusion. “So… are you….” Pete's tone suggested he was just the messenger. He was a nice enough guy – young, relatively new, and not a total jerk like some of the supervisors in other parts of the factory.

Chris worked the fitting another turn. “Tell him I'll be there in twenty. Got to get this back together first.”

“Uh, he said he wanted you over there now, though….”

“Tell him,” Chris said with a grunt, “that if I don't seal this fitting, it's going to leak ten gallons an hour. The line can wait twenty minutes. Unless he wants to deal with another shutdown.”

Pete's upside-down face considered this for a moment, then he shrugged. “Fair enough. I'll tell him.”

“And remind him that I'm not a tech anymore!”

“Will do, Chris. And thank you!”

Pete retreated, and Chris returned his attention to the fitting, working it the rest of the way free, inspecting the threads for damage. “There you are…” Chris whispered, using his pinky to pull out the O-ring inside that had gone hard and cracked.

He fished a replacement from the kit bag wedged beside him and pressed it into place with his thumb, then threaded the fitting back into place and snugged it down, adding just enough torque to seat the new O-ring without crushing it. After watching the fitting for a moment, satisfied that the leak was gone, Chris began collecting his tools, fitting each one back into its designated pocket in the kit bag.

Chris had just reached for the flashlight he'd clipped to a cable tray above his head when the overhead fluorescents out on the factory floor flickered once, so briefly he almost missed it, and the status light on the underside of the press controller across the aisle seemed to pulse brighter for just an instant. Chris paused, his hand still on the flashlight, and leaned out, looking up at the lights above him. They hummed steadily, same as always, the presses around him continuing their rhythm.

“I need a vacation.” Chris mumbled, shook his head, retrieved the flashlight, and began sliding out from under the Number Seven… when the world turned white.

Every light in the building – the overhead fluorescents, the status LEDs on every machine, the red glow of exit signs, the yellow warning flashers on doors and equipment panels – all of them flared at once. Not brightened, but flared with an intensity that physically burned and turned the shadows under the presses into blazing negative space, the entire factory floor looking like the inside of a flashbulb.

Chris threw his arm across his face, banging his arms on the underside of Number Seven, his eyes already watering from the intensity. He could hear shouts from across the floor, the sounds of tools clattering as people dropped them, the thud of someone falling.

The brightness lasted for two seconds, maybe three, then darkness rushed in to replace it. The overhead fixtures that had glowed white-hot were dead. The LED indicators on the presses were dead and the exit signs that had glowed steady red for the last twenty years he'd been working the factory floor were black. Along with the darkness came the strangest thing of all – complete silence. The stamping presses and conveyors had stopped. The pneumatic hiss and the hydraulic whine and the constant industrial heartbeat of the factory floor had simply ceased. In the sudden silence, Chris could hear individual voices. There were a few confused shouts, someone crying out in pain, the clatter of a hard hat hitting concrete, the voices growing in number and volume.

Then he smelled smoke. Not the familiar hot-metal tang or the oily residue or the paint-booth chemical bite. This was different. Acrid and sharp, the smell of melting plastic and overheating copper, of insulation melting and wire coating igniting.

Chris scrambled out from under the Number Seven press, banging his shoulder on a support strut in the darkness, and got to his feet. His eyes were starting to adjust after the oscillation between extreme bright and extreme dark, enough to make out vague shapes against the faint daylight coming in through the high windows on the east wall and the skylights installed every fifty feet or so on the ceiling.

Against that gray half-light, he saw the first flames, orange tongues licking from an electrical panel twenty feet away, the fire already spreading along the conduit that fed into it. Smoke was also pouring from outlet boxes along the wall in thick ribbons and a series of sparks suddenly showered from a junction box near the ceiling, a constellation of bright points that fell like deadly rain onto the floor below.

More fires were catching, a control station for the Number Four press burning, the plastic housing of its touchscreen bubbling and blackening. The main disconnect panel for the overhead crane was shooting flames three feet into the air and smoke was rising from half a dozen different points around the floor, each one a separate ignition point, each one spreading.

“Get out!” Chris shouted, his voice cutting through the confusion. He could see workers, their forms silhouetted against the growing firelight, some standing frozen and others stumbling in random directions. “Move to the exits! Go, go, go!”

He grabbed the nearest person, a young guy in a blue work shirt, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, standing with his mouth open and his eyes tracking the spreading flames like he was watching television. Chris spun him around and pushed him toward the faint glow of daylight from the east wall doors. “That way! Run!”

The young man stumbled, caught himself, and started moving. Chris turned back to the floor. The fires were spreading fast, too fast, the conduit that ran along the ceiling acting like a fuse, the flames racing along its length toward the back of the building where finishing chemicals were stored. Drums of cutting oil, tanks of lubricant, and pallets of solvent-soaked rags were waiting for the daily hazmat pickup, each of them flammable or explosive in the extreme.

“Move! Everyone out now!”

He pushed through the smoke toward a cluster of workers near the Number Four press. Two women and a man were standing there, all of them coughing, one of the women bent over with her hands on her knees. Chris grabbed the bent woman's arm and hauled her upright. “Can you walk?”

She nodded, still coughing.

“Then go, that way.” He pointed toward the east wall. “All of you. Go!”

The man in the group hesitated, looking back toward the offices on the far side of the floor. “My phone, I left my...”

“Forget the phone, just go! Run!”

The smoke was thickening, dropping from the ceiling like a gray curtain, cutting visibility in the building to mere feet. Chris pulled the neck of his shirt up over his nose and mouth. His eyes were streaming, tears cutting tracks through the soot that was already coating his face, but he moved deeper into the building, against the tide of workers now streaming toward the exits. Someone had pulled the manual release for one of the loading dock doors and hauled it open, but the influx of fresh air was feeding oxygen to the flames even as it gave people a clear path out. The fire near the chemical storage area was growing, a wall of orange that lit up the smoke from within.

A woman ran past him, her hard hat gone, her hair singed on one side of her head and Chris caught her arm. “Hey! Is there anyone else back there?!”

“I don't know! I don't... there was...” She was hyperventilating, her words tumbling over each other. “I think Pete went toward the tool room, I don't know, I couldn't see...”

Chris released her and pointed toward the light. “Go! Get out. Don't stop!”

She ran and he turned back toward the smoke. There was an auxiliary tool room on the west side of the building, past the forklift maintenance bay, accessed through a heavy fire door. “Dang it, Pete…”

Chris continued forward, and a section of conduit somewhere above him gave way with a shrieking groan of tortured metal, and a shower of embers and sparks rained down. Chris threw himself sideways, feeling the heat of burning debris pass inches from his face. The smoke was so thick now he could barely see his own hand in front of him and the roar of the fire had become a constant presence, not a sound so much as a pressure, a weight against his chest.

“Anybody here?!” Chris shouted through his shirt, the thin material not doing much to filter the smoke, making him cough and choke. “Hey! Anybody in here?! Do you need help?”

He heard it, faint, almost lost in the roar of the fire – a pounding, the repeated thud of fists against metal, coming from the tool room door. There might have been a voice as well, but he couldn't tell and didn't care, he just ran for the tool room, using his decades of memory of the layout of the place to guide him through the smoke.

He reached the tool room seconds later. The door was steel, set into a reinforced frame, with a small window of wire-reinforced glass at head height. Through the smoke-smeared glass, Chris could see faces. Three of them, maybe four, were pressed close together, mouths open in shouts that were barely audible. The door opened outward, toward Chris and it should have swung free with a push of the panic bar from inside, from the weight of all the people leaning on it. But when Chris grabbed the handle and pulled, it moved half an inch and stopped dead.

Chris scanned the area through the deepening smoke. The forklift bay was fully engulfed now, a wall of flame forty feet wide that was eating its way toward the tool room. His gaze landed on a maintenance cart ten feet away, its contents scattered across the floor. Among the debris he spotted a length of steel bar, three feet long, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. He grabbed it, ran back to the door, and wedged the end into the gap between the door and the frame. The steel bit into the painted metal, finding purchase and Chris braced his feet against the base of the wall and threw his weight backward.

The door groaned but didn't move so he repositioned, getting the bar deeper into the gap, angling for better leverage. A fire that had been creeping along the wall was close enough now that he could feel individual waves of warmth rolling over him and sweat ran down his face.

“Push!” he shouted at the window. “When I pull, you push!”

He threw everything he had into it, his legs, back, shoulders, every muscle working together in a single coordinated heave. The bar bent slightly under the strain as Chris's shoulders screamed. The door moved, just an inch or two, and he heard something scrape on the other side, the debris shifting, whatever had jammed the door giving way to the combined force. Chris repositioned and heaved again, and this time the door swung wide and bodies spilled out, a total of three people including Pete Nowak, all of them coughing and gasping, their faces blackened with soot, their eyes wild.

“Go!” Chris grabbed at the nearest person and pushed him toward the middle of the factory. “That way! Don't stop for anything!”

They ran. Stumbled, really, a ragged group of four people with Chris bringing up the rear, navigating by glimpses and muscle memory. The ceiling above them was invisible now, lost in the gray murk, but Chris could hear it groaning, the structural members straining as the fire heated the supports, threatening to bring the whole place down atop them. A section of roof somewhere behind them collapsed with a thunderous crash and the shockwave of hot air and debris hit Chris's back like a physical blow, shoving him forward.

The loading dock door materialized out of the smoke, a rectangle of daylight framed by silhouettes. Chris pushed the injured woman through first, then the heavyset man, then Pete. He was the last one out, diving through the opening just as something else gave way behind him with a shriek of tortured metal, and a gush of smoke and embers blew out through the doorway, wrapping around them in vortices that billowed out and dissipated into the afternoon air.

Chris bent over, hands on his knees, coughing until his vision swam and his head throbbed, and when he finally straightened, he looked around. The small parking area had become an impromptu gathering space for those who'd escaped the factory. Dozens of workers milled about, some sitting on the asphalt, others lying down on thin strips of grass separating the lot from the sidewalk that ran up and down in front of it. After he'd recovered some, Chris moved through the crowd, checking on people as he went. A man sat against the wheel of a pickup truck, clutching his arm against his chest. A woman had wrapped her jacket around another woman's hand, the fabric already staining red and two men from the loading dock crew were supporting a third between them, the man's face ashen and his breathing shallow.

“You.” Chris pointed at a young man standing nearby, looking lost. “What's your name?”

“Derek.”

“Derek, I need you to get that man sitting down. Lay him flat on his back, keep his legs elevated. Can you do that?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I got it.” Derek's voice steadied as he moved, grateful for something concrete to do.

Chris continued to work his way through the crowd, checking on people as he went, the panic and fear continuing to grow among the employees as the factory continued to burn. The building behind them was fully engulfed now, flames visible through every window, smoke pouring from the roof in a dark pillar that rose straight up before flattening in the upper winds. People had started moving farther back, clustering near the fence line on the far side of the lot that separated their building from the other factory buildings in the complex.

A woman pushed through the crowd shouting, her face frantic. “The fire trucks... someone said the company fire trucks are in the garage by the security station! We should—”

“I'll go!” A man Chris didn't recognize broke away from the group and jogged toward the security station, followed by two others.

Chris walked down the length of the parking lot, away from the other people, until he reached a strip of overgrown grass along the perimeter fence. The chain-link rose eight feet tall here, topped with three strands of barbed wire. Beyond the fence, the access road curved away toward the public roads, and beyond that, Detroit spread out to the west and south.

He gripped the chain-link with both hands and stared, his throat and chest growing tight as he realized that the smoke he was seeing wasn't just from the factory complex behind him. Dozens of plumes were rising against the sky, scattered across the cityscape as far as he could see. Some were thin and gray, barely visible wisps but most were thick and black, churning pillars that rose hundreds of feet before flattening into dark smears against the blue, cloudless Michigan afternoon.

A massive column dominated the skyline to the southwest, toward downtown. The smoke was so dense and dark that it looked like a thunderhead anchored to the earth, its base hidden behind buildings and its top spreading into an anvil shape that blocked out a section of sky. The downtown column was still growing, its base hidden but its mass increasing by the minute. A new smoke plume had appeared to the northwest while he watched, thin and white at first but darkening rapidly.

There were no sirens, though, just the crackle and roar of their own factory burning behind them, then a loud pop of something exploding inside the wreckage, and several people yelping in panic, moving farther from the building, out into the open lot. Other workers gathered around him, a loose cluster of thirty or forty people standing at the fence line while their factory burned at their backs. They didn't look at it though, but out at the city as from every direction, as far as any of them could see, smoke continued to rise.

The cab of the little white mini-truck rattled and bounced as it followed the rutted path through the back portion of their property, the beefy suspension on the small vehicle performing admirably on the years-old furrows that were still present on much of the ground. Izzy Olson kept both hands on the wheel, steering from the right side of the truck's cab around the deeper ruts where rainwater had carved channels into the packed earth over months and years. Dust rose behind them in a lazy plume, hanging in the still summer air before slowly dissipating across the meadow grass and shoulder-height weeds that bordered the path on both sides. The weeds were allowed to grow in the field intentionally – they offered concealment for local wildlife, they encouraged a diversity in growth among the fauna on their property and each year a new species of weed took dominance, giving them something new and wondrous to look at instead of the same thing over and over again.

Beside her in the passenger seat on the left side, John had one arm braced against the door, absorbing the jolts. His dark hair was matted with sweat, and a streak of dirt ran across his forehead where he'd wiped at it with the back of his hand. At fourteen, he was nearly as tall as his mother now, lean and long-limbed. Behind them, visible through the rear window of the cab, Steve and Ally occupied the jump seat that had been bolted into the truck's small dump bed. They sat shoulder to shoulder, their legs drawn up to avoid the cargo that slid and shifted with each bump. Empty black planter buckets stacked three deep knocked against a pair of shovels caked with fresh soil, and a gas-powered two-stroke auger whose spiral bit was still crusted with the dark earth of the back orchard rattled against the tailgate. Dirt-covered cups, an insulated water jug with only an inch of liquid sloshing in its bottom, and other planting odds and ends filled the remaining space.

The truck took a turn along the path through the field, and as the weeds vanished from beside them, their home came into view. It wasn't a traditional farmhouse – whoever had owned the property had been building a custom home, run out of money three-quarters of the way through, and had to sell it at a loss. It was large, three stories and over thirty-five hundred square feet of off-white vinyl siding with dark green shutters that rose against the afternoon sky, the southern sunlight coming down across it, casting a long shadow over the backyard. A large pole barn sat off to the left of the house, covered in the same vinyl siding as the house, the man door on the northern side that faced them wide open. Inside of the barn was where Izzy always parked the little truck, out of the sun and out of the rain, tucked away alongside the riding mower, tractor, implements and the other tools and odds and ends they had.

Izzy's floral-print overalls were streaked with dirt and sweat from the afternoon's labor, the fabric stiff in places where soil had dried against it and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail that had loosened through the day, stray strands escaping to stick against her neck. She squinted against the glare, one hand briefly leaving the wheel to shade her eyes.

“Oof, I cannot wait to get a shower.”

“At least you get to take one now,” John said from beside her, groaning. “I've still got to help those two with the rabbits.”

“Mhm. Perks of being an adult.” Izzy grinned.

The truck bounced through another rut, and something metallic clanged in the bed behind them as one of the shovels slid against the auger. Steve's voice drifted through the rear window, muffled but audible. “Ally, move your elbow.”

“You move your elbow, Stevie!”

Izzy rolled her eyes and kept driving, the barn growing larger before them, its shadow stretching out across the wide expanse of grass and flowerbeds that surrounded their house and barn. Grasshoppers scattered from the path ahead of them, launching themselves into the tall grass on either side as they transitioned off of where the old field used to be and onto the yard proper, the ride suddenly growing smooth. Izzy angled the truck toward the barn's open doors, slowing as they drew closer. The engine hummed beneath them, rattling at idle. The children had named the Hijet mini-truck ‘Tic-Tac’ years ago, when Chris had first brought it home, insisting with giggles that it looked like a giant breath mint on wheels. It was tiny, true to its name of ‘mini’ truck, but it was the perfect size for working on the property, the cab was heated and cooled, the rear bed had a dump function and it was not only four-wheel-drive, but raised as well, so it could handle going through mud, snow, ice and anything else that they might encounter throughout the year.

John leaned back in his seat. “Man, my back hurts.”

“Take an Advil when we get inside, okay?”

“Yeah, I will. What do we have left back there? Anything else?”

“Nope, that's the back orchard pretty much done now. Pears, apples, cherries, and these peaches were the last of it.”

“How many trees do you think we've got back there total now?”

“Total? Uhh… a couple hundred. I don't think we can fit much more back there.”

“Thank goodness for small fa—” John was in the middle of replying to her when a high-pitched buzzing came from the speakers, and every light in the cab blazed to impossible brightness.

The dashboard gauges surged past their limits, needles slamming into the stops, then went all the way back down again, then back up. The speedometer, which had been hovering around fifteen miles per hour, buried itself past the hundred mark before dropping back to zero. The fuel gauge swung from half-full to empty to full and back again in a heartbeat. The headlights, which weren't even switched on, flared white, illuminating the side of the barn before fading out. The indicator lights for turn signals, high beams, oil pressure, and every warning the little truck possessed burned with a searing intensity. Alarms began wailing, warnings for everything that could be alerted for inside the vehicle and the horn sounded on its own, a sustained blast that made John clap his hands over his ears.

“What…” Izzy yanked her hands from the wheel, covering her ears as well.

The surge lasted two seconds, perhaps three, then everything died at once. The engine cut out mid-revolution, stopping without so much as a sputter or a cough. The lights went dark and the alarms fell silent, the horn stopped mid-blast, and the dashboard gauges dropped to zero, needles hanging limp.

The truck continued rolling forward on momentum alone, slowing to a halt in the grass just inside the shadow of the barn cast by the sun overhead. John lowered his hands from his ears, staring at the dead dashboard. “What was that?”

Izzy didn't answer. She turned the key, but nothing happened and she tried again, twisting harder before she noticed the smell that crept into the cab, faint and acrid, like burnt electronics and melted insulation.

“Mom?” John leaned forward. “Is that… is something burning?”

“Stay here.” Izzy popped her door open and stepped out onto the grass. She walked around to the front of the truck, then stopped when she remembered that the engine wasn't in front. “Oop, right.”

She returned to the driver's door and reached inside for the release lever. In the Hijet, the engine sat beneath the cab, and she pulled the lever and heard the seat unlatch. The driver's seat pivoted forward, exposing the engine compartment beneath where thin wisps of smoke curled up from several points within the cramped space. The wiring harness had spots where the insulation had melted away, revealing copper wire darkened from heat. One of the fuses, visible in a small box near the back of the compartment, had blown with enough force to crack its plastic housing. The smell was stronger with the engine exposed, but there were no open flames.

“Hey, what happened to Tic-Tac?” Ally called from the back of the truck.

John was leaning over from the passenger seat. “Is it bad? Can you tell what's wrong?”

“I don't know.” She studied the damage. “I don't really know what to look for, but I'm pretty sure these wires aren't supposed to be black and burned and smoking like this.”

“Maybe look it up? There's probably a video or something.” John pulled out his phone, then frowned at the dark screen. He pressed the power button, but nothing happened. He tried again, holding it longer. “Hey, my phone's dead.”

Izzy pulled out hers and got the same result. The screen stayed dark no matter how long she held the button. “That's strange. I charged it this morning.” She looked at the phone, then at the ruined engine. “Well, your dad will know what to do when he gets home tonight. Or we can look it up on the computer inside.”

A knock on the cab's rear window made both Izzy and John turn, Izzy jumping slightly. Steve and Ally were pressing their faces against the glass, staring at them, then they both hopped out of the bed of the truck.

“Mom, I asked what happened to Tic-Tac!” Ally said as she pushed in, trying to see what her mother and brother were looking at. “Whoa. Is that supposed to smell like that?”

“Definitely not,” Izzy shook her head.

“What's going on? Why did we stop?” Steve said, peering over the tops of his sister and mother's heads.

Izzy lowered the seat back into position, covering the engine compartment, then she sat on the edge of the seat. “Tic-Tac broke down. Not sure why yet.”

“The lights went crazy.” Steve raised an eyebrow. “And the alarms, too.”

“I thought we got hit by lightning or something at first,” John nodded at his brother.

“The sky's clear, guys.” Ally rolled her eyes.

“Well then, you tell us what it was.”

“Hush, all of you.” Izzy cut through their escalating ‘conversation.’ “Come on. Let's head up to the house.”

They left the truck where it had coasted to a stop, walking out of the barn's shadow and into the day's heat, toward the house a few hundred yards away, up a sharp hill that the house stood upon.

John fell into step beside her. “This doesn't make sense, Mom.”

“I know.”

“Well… what are we going to do?”

“I don't know.”