by Joe McKinney
And while all that was happening, I was going to have to sit in a windowless little room at headquarters, waiting for some detective to take my statement and wondering what everybody else was saying about what I had done. Was I gonna get sued? Was I gonna be looking for a new job?
It was going to be rough for me, but not nearly as bad as what was happening to Chris. He was going to have to do the same thing I was, except he was going to do it from a hospital bed.
It occurred to me that I didn’t even know his wife’s name. But whatever her name, she was going to get that call from the sergeant, saying Chris was hurt and he was at whatever hospital he was at.
Yes, she could come see him as soon as she liked.
No, she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to him until the detectives got his statement.
And then I thought of April and Andrew, sitting at home and going through the whole bedtime routine, totally unaware of what just happened.
April would put Andrew to bed, make herself a sandwich, and turn on the TV to watch the news.
She would learn about everything from some talking head, and because the investigation was still going on, they wouldn’t say the names of the officers involved or how badly the officer at the hospital was hurt.
The news would say something like “His condition is critical” or “He’s in stable, but guarded, condition.”
But those words don’t mean anything when you need to know how your husband is doing. They’re meaningless, too full of ambiguity to answer the desperate questions. They’re sterile and confusing and totally useless and God! Why did I have to beat myself up over this? Why all the doubts?
I just wanted to sit there and rock myself to sleep. As uncoplike as that sounds, that’s all I wanted to do.
I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes and I thought, Perfect.
My sergeant was supposed to be on the way. He would open up the door to the EMS unit and find me there crying my eyes out.
I wondered who was going to have to be the one to come in and talk to me. Stevenson was the junior sergeant, so it would probably be him, even though he wasn’t my direct supervisor. They always get the junior man to handle the unpleasant—
Gunfire.
I could hear a roll of pistol shots that sounded like firecrackers through the metal walls of the EMS unit.
They were coming from several different directions at once. Screaming and yelling erupted all over the place, though I couldn’t hear what was being said or recognize any of the voices making the noise.
More gunfire.
The shots were coming so fast and so close together that I couldn’t count them. I recognized the crack of the Glock—lots of them—and the booming authority of the shotgun punctuating the pistol fire like an exclamation point.
I jumped off the gurney, forced my way out of the EMS unit, and into the street.
The EMS techs had parked with the doors of the unit away from the scene, and when I ran around the side of the ambulance I was bathed in red and blue strobes.
There were people everywhere, running, yelling, fighting with each other.
Two EMS guys had a third man down on the ground. They were struggling to keep his shoulders pinned to the pavement, and he was doing everything he could to bite them.
Another man in a firefighter’s uniform was facedown on the running boards of a fire truck. He wasn’t moving.
I saw one of the guys from my shift on his hands and knees, swaying back and forth like he was about to fall over. His hands were soaked in blood.
A frantic crowd of civilians were running past me, but there were others walking toward the scene with that same staggering walk I had seen earlier.
I saw several small mobs coming down to the street from nearby lawns.
The red and blue strobes cut through the yellow glow of the street lamps, giving everything and everyone they touched a strange, pallid cast.
Off in the distance I could hear more sirens, but they seemed to be heading away from us.
Two other officers from my shift were taking cover behind a police car and firing their handguns into an approaching crowd of people.
Even as I reached for my gun and ran over to join them, I couldn’t believe we were shooting unarmed people. It went against everything I was trained to do and everything I had been brought up to believe was sacred.
But no matter how I felt about it, I still went down right beside them and pointed my weapon at the approaching crowd.
The officer to my right glanced over at me when I crouched down next to him. “What the hell is going on?” he yelled.
“I don’t know.”
“What are those things? I shot one in the chest six times and he still kept coming.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond. He stood up and started firing over the hood of the car. He emptied the entire magazine, ejected it, and dumped in another with such speed I thought there was no way he could be aiming his shots.
The slide dropped back into place on his Glock and then he was firing again. Brass casings went flying through the air, bouncing off the sides of the police car and rolling toward the curb.
“They won’t fucking die.”
And then they broke through our lines.
Through the smoke and strobe lights I saw shadows move. The shadows turned into badly torn and abused bodies, still moving and still walking.
They came through gaps in the cars and attacked a policeman who was firing at them from behind a car door. They collapsed on top of him in a writhing mass of arms and faces. I could hear him screaming for help even though pistols were going off right next to my ears.
An officer named Flores ran into the open to help him.
Several of the people who had overcome the other officer got up and shambled toward him.
Flores was a wiry, tough little guy and a crack shot—I knew that from shooting next to him during in-service. He could empty an entire magazine into a target the size of a dinner plate at twenty-five yards and make it look like anybody should be able to do it.
He aimed at a man in a sport coat and slacks and fired three times.
I could tell he hit the guy because the impact stood him straight up. But the man kept walking toward him, seemingly unafraid and unconcerned by the bullets smashing into his chest.
Flores stood his ground, though. He raised his gun again and fired three more shots.
When the man kept coming, Flores fired a single shot into his forehead, and that dropped him to the ground.
A moment later, Flores was firing single shot after single shot into the crowd, and bodies were dropping with every trigger pull.
It was disgusting to watch, and beautiful, in a way. His speed and accuracy were unbelievable.
But even as he leveled the crowd in front of him, more and more people were approaching through the darkness and smoke. They didn’t make a sound, which was the eeriest thing about them. With the rest of us yelling all around them, the only noise they made came from their shoes dragging on the pavement.
I couldn’t tell how many of them there were or even where they were, because our visibility was next to nothing. And the part of the mob we could see wasn’t giving us a chance to regroup and organize.
I turned and saw more people walking toward us from the rear.
There were already more people than I could count walking between the cars in front of us and to our right. Flores was still firing like mad, and when he fired his last round, he holstered his gun and began to fight with his nightstick.
He had one of the old-style black hickory batons and he was swinging for their heads.
He knocked one of them over and brought the baton down so hard on the back of the guy’s head that the nightstick snapped in half.
He threw away the pieces and reached for his collapsible metal baton.
The crowd closed in around him. There were just too many of them for him to take them all, and they managed to pull him down to the ground.
I didn’t see him die. I couldn’t stand there and watch that happen.
It was no use shooting anymore. There were so many of them and they were so close to each other and to the other officers that I couldn’t fire and be sure I was hitting the right people.
Most of the officers around me had gone to fighting hand-to-hand.
I saw an officer pin a man to the ground and try to handcuff him.
One of the officers who went to help Flores was surrounded by the mob, his back up against a fire truck. He climbed up the side and landed on top of the hoses. The mob reached up to grab him, clawing at the chrome valves and dials just below him, but they couldn’t get at him.
Through the smoke several officers and firefighters came running back up Chatterton. I ran in the same direction, figuring we could regroup and call for more cover.
Getting through the wreckage was like navigating an obstacle course. There had to be more than twenty cruisers up and down the street, and most of them looked damaged—some only a little, others completely torn apart.
I couldn’t believe that all that destruction had happened so quickly, that we had lost control so completely and in such a short period of time.
As I scrambled through the cars I could see people everywhere. An officer named Harner was maybe twenty yards off to my left, fighting with a group of three men.
I turned in that direction to help him, but never made it.
There, in front of me, was the man with the torn face, that horrible mud-encrusted flap of skin still dangling from his neck like a thick cut of fabric.
He had a hole in his jawline where I had fired the head shot that took him down. I saw three blackish-red holes in his chest, and I knew I had put those there too.
But I didn’t see recognition in his face. His eyes seemed empty. His mouth hung open hungrily.
He grabbed me.
Out of instinct, I knocked his arms away, backed up, and pulled my gun.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said.
I pointed my Glock at his forehead and squeezed the trigger. In that moment, the world around me slipped away into silence. The only thing I saw was the brass casing tumbling out of my gun and landing somewhere off to my right.
It was a clean shot, right on target.
His head snapped back, and he folded to the ground in a heap.
I was in a daze. Over and over again we practice the shooting drills—keep your weapon up, scan left, scan right—but when it comes right down to it, nothing ever goes like the drill. All the skills the Department taught me melted away and there I was, a bare, exposed nerve, overloaded with shock.
And then there was a rush of activity as the world came crashing back on top of me. The colors, the sounds, the confusion—all of it hit me at once.
The mob kept coming and coming, and as I stood there shaking off my haze they began to close in around me.
I told myself to run, to fight, to do anything but stand still. But my feet were frozen to the ground.
I felt a hand grab my shoulder.
It was like cold water on my skin and, in that instant, I found my feet. There was a hole in the mob in front of me and I took it. I ducked my shoulder and knocked a man in a denim jacket to the ground.
I got through the cars and hit the grass running.
The houses on the north side of Chatterton share a common stone wall that separates their backyards from the neighborhood greenbelt. I went around the side of a house and through the backyard, over the back wall, still running as fast as I could go, and I didn’t stop until I was out in the middle of the greenbelt.
Once there I stopped and caught my breath. I hadn’t run since I was a cadet at the Academy and I was out of shape.
The cold night air burned my throat. Shots were still being fired out in the street, but there were fewer now, with long pauses in between. Tall oak trees and houses blocked my view, but I could still see the glow of the emergency lights and the smoke rising up into the air.
I needed to get to wherever our shift was going to regroup, but I had no idea where that was. And there was no one around to tell me. I was alone, cut off.
The greenbelt was a mostly flat, open swath of undeveloped land about forty yards wide where the runoff water from the subdivision collected and channeled away after heavy rains.
Wind whipped through the tall grass. The hurricanes that had decimated Houston for the last four weeks had brought almost daily rains to San Antonio, and the grass was lush and thick. It buzzed with mosquitoes.
A few months earlier I had chased a couple of kids through that greenbelt, and I had seen wild strawberries growing everywhere. Blackberry bushes clustered around a few large blocks of milky white limestone outcroppings. It had been peaceful then, after the chase, and it might have been so while I stood there were it not for the frantic desperation ragging inside me.
I watched as the wind pressed the grass flat, and it looked to me like an enormous piece of glistening black velvet.
I wondered what I was supposed to do.
I knew I had to find a car. Without a car I was a sitting duck, just waiting to be swallowed up by that mob.
But to find a car I would have to go back into the street, and I really didn’t want to do that. I had no idea how far this riot had spread and there was no way I was going to rush headlong into something I didn’t understand.
Being cut off and alone made me intensely aware of how quiet it was. I was so used to the noise and activity of patrol that I had developed the ability to talk on the phone, talk to complainants, and listen to my radio—
I looked down at my radio and realized that was why it was so quiet. I guessed that the EMS guys had turned it off while I was in the unit. In all the commotion I had simply forgotten about it.
When I turned it on I heard something unbelievable. The radio was a mass of overlapping voices and emergency tones. Officers were screaming for help, pleading for backup, and it seemed like all twenty dispatchers were trying to talk at once.
Nothing made any sense because I was only getting half of a sentence before an emergency tone would kick in and somebody else would start talking.
Whatever was happening wasn’t just on this little street on the west side. There were desperate calls being sent out all over the city. It sounded like a meltdown.
South Division was being hit hard with fires and mobs and gunfire popping up on almost every block in their service area.
The Downtown Division dispatcher couldn’t get any of her officers to answer their radios.
Every available officer in the Northwest Division was being called to the hospitals at the Medical Center.
The world was collapsing all around me and it was happening too damn fast. I was absolutely mystified how destruction on that kind of scale could happen so quickly, and no matter how I tried to comprehend it, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
Then it hit me, so hard that I almost collapsed, and I let out a moan.
My family. My wife. My baby.
I had to get to them. Now.
I turned my radio down and crept back to the wall that separated me from the line of houses. I decided to use the wall for cover and to cross over as soon as I reached a point where there was as little activity as possible.
From there I’d grab the first available patrol car I found.
If I couldn’t get out of the subdivision through the main entrance, then I would cut through the playground of the elementary school.
But I had to find a car first. And soon.
Chapter 3
I crept through one of the backyards to the east of all the commotion. Plastic toys and basketballs were scattered around the yard. A tricycle lay on its side on the porch. A rickety metal swing set off in the corner looked like some kind of giant insect in the shadows.
What little light there was came from inside the house, casting long pale streaks across the yard. My flashlight was somewhere near my car, maybe in the grass or out in the s
treet somewhere. I doubted I’d be able to find it again, even though I needed it almost as badly as I needed a car.
I made my way over the fence and out into the front yard.
The sound of gunfire rolled away into the distance like thunder. People were still shouting and I could hear the wailing sirens of fire trucks off in the distance, but I was far enough away from the scene that I thought I could risk entering the front yards again.
But there was no way I was going to risk going back into the middle of that mob. I planned on coming back to the original scene from the east—that way I could stay out of sight of any mobs that were still there and could move in to get my car when it was all clear.
My guess was that the original mob Chris and I encountered would have moved west toward all the lights and sounds of fighting, which would make getting to my car easier.
I worked my way through the front yards, trying to stay out of the light and keeping under the cover of trees whenever I could.
The air had grown unusually cool as the night breezes picked up, and I didn’t have my jacket with me. San Antonio usually has high eighty-degree weather all the way through the middle of October, and I hadn’t figured I’d need it. When I left for work that afternoon, it was sunny and eighty-six degrees, but it felt more like fifty while I was standing in that yard.
There were no dogs barking. I thought that was really strange. The only thing I could hear was the noise of the crowd from the top of the hill, and then that died away too.
I stopped and listened to the quietness that had descended on the street. Strobes filled the sky, but everything had grown very still and the only noise at all was the wind washing through the leaves of the trees above me.
The further east I went down Chatterton, the heavier the tree cover got.
The houses closest to the elementary school were a little larger than the rest of the subdivision, and they had the biggest lots with the largest trees.
Those houses were still pretty close to where I had left my car, and the cover they provided made them seem like a natural place to observe the street before I made the final dash to my car.