by James O'Neal
“Do they cause trouble?”
“That’s why we stay hidden. They raid the settlements, kidnapping and killing.”
“There are more settlements?”
“Sure, dozens, maybe a hundred.”
“Have they ever found your settlement?”
“Once. At our last location about eight miles south on the banks of a river.”
“What happened?”
“They killed three men and took four women and two children. We moved the next day to where we are now.”
“Why’d they take women and children?”
“Don’t ask. There are places in the zone that have uses for them.”
Johann considered this disturbing information then said, “How can you let that happen?”
“What can we do? We’re not fighters. I was a college creative writing professor, Sean was an IT guy, Duane ran a small newspaper in Philadelphia. We’re not prepared to fight.”
“But you’re prepared to let your women be sold into slavery?”
“Do you have any ideas?”
Johann nodded. “I do.”
Wilner kept looking down at the second name on the list, Janos Dadicek. The one report listed him as a twenty-eight-year-old plumber from another, now forgotten town named Deerfield Beach. Wilner searched every database and found only a few references to him. He had paid into Social Security until the program was eliminated and all records sealed. He had been listed on a watch list for his travels to Europe but was never arrested and there were no specific charges against him. He could find no photos and his last address was in the district thirteen years ago. That was the sum total of the man’s life: a few cryptic references in questionable government databases.
To Wilner it sounded like a man trying to keep a low profile. It could also be a man who had changed his name. Maybe more than once.
On one report, in a hand-scrawled note in thick blue ink next to a paragraph about talking to Dadicek, someone had written: This guy is a crooked freak.
That was enough for Wilner.
Leonard Hall smiled at Mrs. Martinez, the science teacher, as she moved her giant mass of flesh and bones down the outside hallway. She always had a wide smile for him. He wondered if she thought, since she was only in her thirties, Leonard found her attractive. He did not. It was not her size but her shape. He had liked many large women over the years but Mrs. Martinez’s girth gave her too many chins, which in turn covered anything that might be considered a neck.
He nodded politely and went back to his newest undertaking at the school: replacing the outdated and dangerous wiring system that ran through all the exposed hallways. He wondered if they wouldn’t be better off with gaslights instead of the cumbersome, ambient light panels that had been on the roof since before this was a Quarantine Zone.
He really did like it here in the first few days. It was a new adventure and the young women all impressed him with their manners and attitude. He knew that Mari was responsible for most of that. Some of the girls even called him Mr. Hall. He was glad that was the name he had chosen all those years ago when he moved south from what was then Broward County. He always liked the name Leonard and Hall was easy to remember. It had taken him much longer than he had thought to get used to answering when people called him Leonard or Mr. Hall. Perhaps the hardest part was getting his mother and aunt to go with it. They didn’t see why name changes were necessary. He didn’t want to go into detail but they agreed regardless. Now he felt like he had a complete identity. Leonard Hall, maintenance man.
He liked the free meals at the school. It didn’t occur to him that they would make enough for him to join them at lunch. This was the most interaction with people he had experienced in his whole life. He also liked the little smiles and waves the headmistress threw his way during the day. Why not? He had proven helpful and he liked his little trip into the district with her. Especially because he didn’t have to meet her cop friend face-to-face. Now if something happened to Detective Wilner he’d never be suspected. At least not by Mari.
He was surprised how much his little romp with Darla and Lisa had done to satisfy his desire to use his combat spike. He still relived the actions in Darla’s house. Just the startled last second look on Darla’s pretty face, or Lisa’s surprise at what their “date” was capable of, gave him shudders of excitement.
As he focused on the rat’s nest of wires while standing halfway up on a folding ladder he heard a shout then a scream come from Mari’s office. He didn’t hesitate to rush to the front of the building and barge through her door.
He skidded to a stop as all the men turned to him at once. They started to laugh as the man in the middle, their leader, said, “And what do you want, old man?”
Then Leonard noticed the pistol in one man’s hand.
TWENTY-THREE
Tom Wilner started with a worker’s hall, which was as close to a union as existed now. He wondered if there could be any clues as to the origins and current whereabouts of Janos Dadicek. As a plumber in the twentieth century he probably belonged to a union of some kind. Wilner remembered his father belonged to some kind of welder’s union in New Jersey. Once many of the union’s strong-arm tactics and wage inflation had been blamed for several recessions, and then the all-out meltdown of the economy during the first Iranian war, unions had fallen out of favor. It was really just public perception, but they started losing political clout and then membership dried up as the unions endorsed candidates that were union friendly but stood against the values of most union members. The result was one state after another moving to a “right to work” status and any reliable way to find skilled laborers faded.
Wilner had nothing else to work with so he now found himself inside the small administrative offices of the New Florida Hall of Labor in the former city of Boca Raton, now just the southern end of the Northern Enclave.
The attitude of the man behind the counter was imported from New York. Many of the transplants had mellowed and adapted since they were forced to flee the shattered city, which was now a Quarantine Zone of its own. But this fifty-five-year-old man clearly had not wanted to lose the attitude it took him a lifetime to build in the former northern big city.
The heavy man said, “What do you want?”
Wilner was surprised and said, “Is that how you address people in your job?”
“That’s not a question I have to answer. You a carpenter? You look like a carpenter. Kinda big and strong but not too bright.”
Wilner shook his head.
“You ain’t no steelworker because there’s no work for you down here. I doubt you’re an electrician because you look too damn stupid.” The man leveled a tough stare at him. “So unless you want me to dump your ass out on the street you better tell me why you’re here.”
Wilner casually flipped open his identification. “UPF. What’s your name, sir?”
The man swallowed hard. “Sorry, Officer, I didn’t realize—”
Wilner cut him off. “I don’t care what you realized or not. I asked you your name and the next words out of your mouth better be your first and last name.” He gave the man his own stare.
“Anthony Perelli.”
“Now, Mr. Perelli, first, I don’t like rude people. There was no reason for you to be rude. You’re not in New York now. Second, I need to look at some records.”
“What kind?”
“Old union records. I was told you guys incorporated most of the individual unions.”
“Is this for a case?”
“Mr. Perelli, normally I’d be friendly and chat and tell you. But you were a dick so what I’ll do now is tell you. Take me to the room where you store records and do it right now. Understand?”
As they trudged back through a maze of halls that didn’t seem possible by the size of the outer walls, Wilner felt guilty for being tough on the man but he was sick of seeing civility disappear because people accepted rudeness.
With a little effort Wilner found himself in f
ront of a row of file cabinets that covered all the union records back to the 1960s. That was some impressive record-keeping.
He settled in and started in the first cabinet. His mind wandered as he flipped though files of records on carpenters and refrigerator repairmen.
Leonard hadn’t hesitated to burst through the door. He had no intention of being subtle or using stealth. He wanted these punks’ attention on him, not Mari.
He stopped in the doorway with a hammer in one hand and a long, straight screwdriver in the other. This was also a ploy. His blood was up and he wanted to release the animal in him. But not with a rusty claw hammer and screwdriver. Where was the fun in that? Mostly he didn’t want Mari to have to see any of the things he wanted to do with these men.
Mari shrieked, “Leonard, no. Run.”
Leonard didn’t yell, he didn’t have the voice for it. He growled instead. “What is your business here?”
The man with the gun in his hand turned to Leonard but didn’t raise the pistol. “The school is way behind in its taxes.”
“This is the zone. There are no taxes.”
The man smiled. “That’s what we’re working out here, old man. Miss Mari can pay cash or trade. Since you guys seem short on cash we’re taking it in trade.”
Leonard felt an anger rise in him. A fury he had not felt in years. He smiled at all the things he intended to do to these men. Leonard took a moment to look at each face in the group. He recognized most of them. Then the man in the corner stepped from behind a tall black man. It took a second but Leonard knew him. The eye patch and limp. It was the man he left alive from the old North Miami city hall.
Johann Halleck had tried to obtain as much information as possible about the raiders these settlers called “Zoners.” They came in groups of up to eight, were heavily armed men and showed no regard for life. Usually they trashed camps and took women. The last time they had entered Victor’s camp they took a sixteen-year-old girl and killed her parents.
Johann had no problem with the idea of killing men like that. He listened as he started to formulate a plan.
Tom Wilner sat at his desk with the moldy, smelly files that Besslia had recovered piled all around him. He knew things were different fifty years ago when there were cops in every city. He had seen movies and read history books about the painstaking detail detectives went through to arrest the right person in serious crimes. He couldn’t imagine having resources like that. The files related to the murder of this one girl, Mary Harris, were almost equal to the whole department’s reports for a year now. He knew that oversight was different. That people wanted to know how things were investigated and how the police came to the conclusions they had reached. That was before the world had spiraled out of control. Even before the big terror attacks the public had grown weary of street crime and violence. The movement to find and punish offenders had its own head of steam by the time jihadists came into the picture and started stirring things up.
Now Wilner’s problem was using his common sense to see how the detectives back then approached the problem. His first question was still why, if they had a fingerprint and suspects, didn’t they just fingerprint the suspects?
His next question was why they released someone like Dadicek who they clearly thought was involved in the crime. That question probably had a lot more to do with the climate at the time.
His next concern was that with the collapse of unified databases, how would he find a man who might have changed his name ten times since the crime? He tried to thumb through one file of reports on a separate subject but the years and moisture had fused the pages together. All he could see was a brief question-and-answer sheet and something about a school. He tried but couldn’t find any more readable text.
He also had a single sheet of paper from the worker’s hall. It showed that a Janos Dadicek was in the plumber’s main union as late as fourteen years ago. His listed address was in the northern section of then Dade County. What was now part of the Miami Quarantine Zone. Wilner thought he might be on the right track. He leaned back in his chair and thought about Mari. He wondered what she was doing at that moment in the Miami Quarantine Zone.
His boss said he couldn’t go there on official business but Wilner didn’t think that prohibition applied to his personal time. He could go over as a civilian. He had to if for no other reason than to see Mari.
Leonard focused his attention on the man with the gun. The other three showed no weapons. But the man with the eye patch stepped closer for a better look.
Then, without hesitation, Leonard heaved the hammer at the man with the pistol, then turned and darted down the hallway, slowing enough for the men following him to see where he was going. He galloped through the main hallway and out the side door. Cutting across the rear courtyard he paused to make sure all the men had joined the chase. The man with the pistol barreled out of the door followed closely by the others. Leonard noticed the man with the eye patch limped at his own pace, giving the men a chance to catch and subdue Leonard first.
The leader raised the pistol and fired one shot while on the run. A bullet thumped off the vine-covered rear wall a few feet from Leonard.
He concealed his smile as he slammed the handle of the rear gate and ran out into the empty side street toward the vacant apartment buildings that had lost their roofs and windows in the last hurricane nearly fourteen years earlier.
He waited near the first building until his pursuers clearly saw him.
The leader took another wild shot. This one pinged off a lifeless metal streetlight pole.
Leonard knew this building and the catwalk between this one and the one next door. There were also several rear exits. He couldn’t risk letting the man with the pistol getting too close. Even an idiot like that could get lucky.
He bounded up the stairs on the inside of the dreary cement building.
The gang piled in and then spotted him at the top of the stair.
He stepped through the doorway to the hall and waited. He felt the heft of the screwdriver and decided that it would do.
TWENTY-FOUR
Steve Besslia could tell where pavement remained even though he couldn’t see any. The grass, weeds and vines had covered anything that was left of the old city floor except a few places where the blacktop bulged in the center of the street.
Victor said, “I think this is where the old police department used to be.”
Besslia stared at the two-story cement structure but saw no indication that it had ever served any purpose.
They had made sure no Zoners were around and the settlers had been smart enough to post pickets at strategic points to see if they headed back in this direction.
As they slowly walked through the deserted streets, Victor said, “Are the aliens still coming?”
“Yep.”
“They don’t know what they’re in for.”
Besslia looked at the shorter man. “How long have you guys been out of touch?”
Victor shrugged. “I started thinking about finding a new empty frontier before the ban on immigration. The problem was that there weren’t any. Once Florida started to empty out like a milk jug with a hole in the bottom, we knew this was the spot to be. It was after the Quarantine Zone was set up. Maybe six years.”
“Long time.”
“We still at war?”
“Yeah, but not with the same countries as we were when you went underground.”
“Where are we fighting now?”
“Syria, Somalia and closing down operations in Nicaragua.”
“What did Nicaragua do?”
“Jihadists took them over and used the country as a place to launch attacks into Mexico.”
“Central America has Muslims now?”
“Not too many. That’s why we stepped in.” Besslia added, “Oh, yeah, Germany invaded Poland a few months back.”
“Where are they now?”
“Still there.”
“The Poles put up that much resistance?
”
“No, not really. A nuke went off in Tehran and it spooked the Germans. By the time everyone figured out it was an Iranian nuclear test gone bad too many Allied troops had been moved up to block the Germans. Now it’s all negotiations.”
“Any more 9/11 attacks?”
“Every year.”
Victor shook his head. “That’s why we came here. Same old shit every year.”
“I’m not questioning your logic.”
Now they were next to the building looking for a way in. Several of the windows were exposed but an empty doorway would be better. Finally they found a way in. Johann stepped up to go inside with Victor and Besslia. The others stood guard outside.
Johann said, “Victor, you really need to find a way to stand up to the Zoners.”
“That’s easy for you to say. We’re not fighters. That’s one of the reasons we came all the way out here.”
Besslia listened to their conversation as they used radiant tube lights, a form of depleted nuclear waste that kept the small lights running for more than a year of continuous use. The building looked completely cleared out until a stairway into the lower levels revealed a storage room.
Besslia could hear the rustling of rats and other animals that had made a home in the dark, dank room. Some wire mesh ran along part of the room but time and possibly vandals had taken their toll on the building. Besslia wiped off a sign with the palm of his hand. The square wooden placard apparently hooked into the screen and he could only make out the first few letters: EVIDE.
Johann said, “Evidence.”
They were on the right track.
Leonard took several deep breaths as he waited for the first man to come through the door. He tried to get in the mood for this so he could derive some form of pleasure, but it had happened too quickly for the buildup to really kick in.
He knew that he could take his time with the others and hunt them down. That would give him something to occupy his mind until he went back to deal with the cop. Leonard also knew he shouldn’t let the man with the eye patch get away on the chance he might tell someone what he saw and who killed the men in North Miami city hall.