by Joe McKinney
“I’ve got something to show you,” Billy said, and crossed the room to the bookshelf, where he took down a few books and carefully removed what looked like a cigar box he’d hidden back there.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Something I’ve been working on,” he said. “Out in the shed while Connie’s in here reading.”
He pulled out a bird and handed it to me. It was hand carved from oak wood, polished smooth, painted with exacting and loving detail. It was a blue jay, a perfect likeness, right down to the wrinkles on its claws.
I took it in my hands delicately, like it was made of glass.
I could feel a tear threatening to break loose.
“Her favorite right now is the gray barn owl. I’ve already got one of those made too, but it’s too big to put in the box. I have it out in the shed. I’m gonna start on a nest for it tomorrow.”
I looked up at him, and the tear fell.
“Hey,” he said, kneeling next to me, taking my face in his hands. “Hey, it’s all right. We’re all right.”
I closed my eyes and lost myself in his hands. Such wonderful hands.
“I love you so much, Billy. God, so much.”
“I love you too, Lily. Always.”
Chapter 8
I kept a journal of the flu. It wasn’t anything as organized as a diary, more a collection of random thoughts and feelings, and sometimes news clippings. But peppered throughout the entries were little flashes of inspiration, things I thought were as powerful as a wildfire, and just as temporary. I felt I had to put them down on paper, else they’d become ashes, flavorless and without meaning, only the echo of something that had once burned hot within me.
In looking over it now, I see a lot of those flashes, all of them written in an urgent, slashing hand, like I was trying to carve them into the paper. Yet it pains me to realize that nothing of the desperate need that prompted me to write them down survives.
One passage reads:
This morning, through the fog and the clean, brisk smell of Vespers Creek, two deer. A mother and her baby. Must tell Connie about this. When she’s older. Nature can be kind and beautiful, too. Death is not all there is.
I can only guess at the emotions that prompted me to write that, for I no longer have them readily on tap. Like the memory of the scene, the words are no longer vivid and vibrant in my mind. Only gray survives.
# # #
H2N2.
My journal is filled with my thoughts and observations about this killer version of the influenza virus. I realize, as I read the journal over again, that I’ve studied it, taken in details of its killing spree, in the same way that a condemned man might read about the mechanical operation of the gallows. It is both good and horrible to talk with Death when you know he’s sitting at your table.
The bird flu is not something that just happened one day in rural China. Every version of the influenza virus, and there are literally millions, regardless of its particular arrangement of hemagglutin and neuraminidase, finds its natural home in the intestinal track of wild aquatic birds. Very rarely does a mutated strain make the jump to the human respiratory system.
Several years back, it was the H5N1 version of the flu that the news told us to fear. We were told rural China, with its millions of chickens interacting with wild migratory birds in abominable conditions, would be ground zero for the worst influenza plague the world had ever seen. Bigger even than the pandemic that wrote the year 1918 on fifty million tombstones the world over.
Few thought of H2N2, for it had already had its time on the world stage back in 1957, and had been eradicated, or so, to our folly, we believed, by the 1968 influenza bug.
Few thought that H2N2, with only the smallest change in its genetic material, could open the door to hell.
We were wrong. My God, we were so very wrong.
# # #
A man from the Center for Disease Control had the unfortunate task of addressing my unit at roll call, and anybody who has ever had the misfortune to address a room full of cops on any topic knows what a miserable time of it that poor man had. The containment walls had already been put up around the city, and many of us had lost friends and family to H2N2. It was that poor man’s unenviable job to explain to us why, and how, it all happened.
He told us that, like many things that seem to happen overnight, the epidemic decimating our lives was actually a long time in the making.
H2N2 never completely went away when the 1968 version of influenza took over. It survived for nearly seventy years in the colons of a common San Antonio pest, the Mexican grackle. Every November, millions of the birds descend on San Antonio, blanketing the city in bird shit so white and plentiful that you might actually believe it was snow--that is, if it weren’t still ninety degrees outside.
But the November before the plague epidemic actually hit, that snow was loaded with a virus bomb.
A few people got sick that winter. There were, maybe, five hundred cases. All of them minor. None of them even a blip on the radar of those who track coming plagues.
And then, six months later, ground zero exploded. A woman named Reina Villarreal owned a large, weather-beaten home near the Produce Terminal on San Antonio’s shallow west side. Ms. Villarreal rented out her spare rooms to ten illegal immigrants from Coahuila, Mexico. These men worked hard, and made little. They spent their days in the Produce Terminal, where almost all of the commercial farms in South Texas sent their harvest for national distribution. They spent their nights at Cattleman’s Square, the Tejano music capitol of the world.
These men also ate freely of the chickens Ms. Villarreal kept in her backyard. These chickens ate their feed off the ground, the same ground that the winter before had been blanketed with grackle snow.
Beginning in May, things started happening quickly. On May 3, Southwest Baptist Hospital reported twenty-three cases of SARS-like symptoms, including scorched lungs, rampant secondary pneumonia, and even, horribly, the blue footprints of cyanosis.
On May 4, there were five hundred and thirty-three cases reported to the CDC.
On May 7, a state of emergency was declared in San Antonio and the surrounding regions.
On May 13, every one of San Antonio’s forty-three hospitals had exceeded their maximum capacity and started turning people away at the door.
On the night of May 17, the military put up the containment walls around the city.
Death was everywhere, and we were locked in with it.
# # #
All schools, public and private, were closed by order of the Metropolitan Health District, as were most businesses. FEMA promised to keep the flow of supplies coming into San Antonio, even though most everyone was out of work by that point and couldn’t afford to buy anything.
The closing of the schools wasn’t a bad thing for Connie. For weeks before the start of her first year, Billy and I had been trying to ease her fears of the big change.
“It’ll be just like going to daycare,” I told her, though that didn’t convince her. She grabbed me around the waist and told me she wouldn’t go.
Then, three weeks after that messy scene, I told her she wouldn’t be going to school after all. “Mommy and Daddy will be teaching you,” I told her. “How do you feel about that?”
“That’s fine,” she said, and shrugged, like it was no big deal and why was I making such a fuss about it anyway.
But as she was walking away, I saw her reflection in the glass door of the oven, and she was smiling.
The little devil.
# # #
It was Thursday, May 18, around eleven o’clock at night, less than a day after the military had begun installing walls around the city, effectively locking us into a prison.
Officers of every rank, from every unit on the Department, had been mobilized to help maintain order. I had been teamed up with two Traffic officers. The three of us were working a road block on Highway 90 West, turning back cars that were packed with scared and angry
people.
Military helicopters, like giant angry hornets, sprinted up and down the length of the wall, still under construction in some places.
A man’s voice, recorded, for the same words were repeated over and over again in the same threatening monotone, warned the scattered crowds not to approach the holes in the wall. The voice warned that deadly force would be used. The message played in both English and Spanish.
The two Traffic officers argued back and forth with each other as to whether or not the military would actually do such a thing. One of them was in the Reserves and he said no way. You’d never get a U.S. soldier to fire on Americans. It would never happen.
In the bluish glow of the floodlights mounted on top of the wall, I could see four young men, teenagers really, ignorantly defiant the way teenagers feel they have to be, sprinting across an open field to my right. They ducked behind cactus and stands of cedar, but they were constantly making their way toward a gap in the wall.
A nearby helicopter dipped its nose to the ground and raced to the patch of sky above the boys.
A spotlight hit the ground, lighting them up.
The boys kept running.
An amplified voice from the helicopter ordered them to turn around. They didn’t.
They were almost to the wall, not stopping, and everyone in the assembled crowds held their breaths.
The helicopter rotated, turning its flank to the boys. The scene was frozen for the thinnest of moments, and then four quick bursts from the helicopter’s guns dropped the boys.
The assembled crowds drew in a collective breath. They were quietly horrified. Then, like a wave, a tumultuous roar of protest erupted from their ranks. Angry shouting filled the night. Volleys of rocks were thrown at the helicopter.
I realized then that I was still holding my breath.
A few words about the wall.
If you’ve ever wondered just how badly the Government can fuck with you if it wants to, look at the wall around San Antonio.
The wall is made up of interlocking plastic blocks, most of which are red, though some are white for no particular reason that I can figure out, and a few, bleached of their color by the ferocious South Texas sun, have faded to a pink the same color as a mountain laurel blossom. In the first few days of the quarantine, the wall was nothing more than hurricane fencing laced with razor wire. In some places, there wasn’t even that. But then, and it was done with shocking speed and efficiency, they brought in the interlocking plastic blocks.
Now that it’s complete, the wall forms a giant circle around San Antonio. This circle is one hundred and ninety miles in circumference. The total area inside the wall is two thousand eight hundred and thirty miles.
Each block is twenty feet high. They are twelve feet wide at the base, seven feet at the top. Each block weighs seven thousand five hundred and twenty-five pounds.
Each block is forty feet long.
There are, on average, one hundred and thirty-two blocks per mile. The total number of blocks is twenty-five thousand and eighty.
Reportedly, each block cost three thousand dollars to make. The total cost of the wall was therefore seventy-five million two hundred and forty thousand dollars and change.
Rumor has it that the government started building the pieces to the wall years before the epidemic in San Antonio--not as a means to quarantine a city, but to keep the Mexicans from jumping the border.
# # #
“Mommy, what’s Mr. Wilkerson doing?”
Connie was on her belly, face pressed against the living room window, looking at the house across the street.
I got down on my belly next to her and nudged her playfully in the ribs. Even in late June, I’d still been able to manage a smile.
Looking through the window, I saw Bob Wilkerson hanging black bunting on his front door. Further down the street, two other doors had bunting on them, but Connie hadn’t seen them yet.
I watched Bob Wilkerson. His shoulders were stooped, his walk slow. Even from across the street I could tell his eyes looked swollen and dead.
I wondered if it was his wife Susan or one of his two sons.
“What’s he doing, Mommy?”
How could I explain that to her? My God, how?
“Honey, that black ribbon means he’s lost somebody he loves very much.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Mrs. Wilkerson. Or maybe Bobby or Anthony.”
“How did they get lost?”
I drew in a breath through clenched teeth. “They died, honey. That’s what the ribbon means.”
She thought about that. Turned it over in her mind the way bright children do when they discover something strange about the world. I wanted her to be free of that knowledge. I wanted her to be five years old, untouched by the horrors of the world. But at the same time I knew that was both unpractical and unwise.
“He looks sad, Mommy,” she said.
“He is, honey. Very sad.”
“Does the ribbon make him feel better, Mommy?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
Connie watched Mr. Wilkerson. Watched him watching the bunting.
She turned to me suddenly, and in a conspiratorially quiet voice, she said, “Mommy, I don’t think it does.”
# # #
Somebody sent me a forwarded email a few months after the wall went up. It showed a picture of one of those bumper sticker ribbons, like the ones that say SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, only this one said REMEMBER SAN ANTONIO.
I thought about my job at the Scar, thought about all those bodies crammed into unmarked mass graves, and I thought, Ain’t that a great notion. Remember San Antonio. How quaint.
# # #
Chunk was raised by his maternal grandmother, a woman about one-third his size, but twice as tough. She took a big black boy who was destined to become yet another east side gangsta thug and whooped his ass daily until he’d finally had enough and joined the police department.
On a brutally hot morning in early June, we were called away from the Scar to the Medina Health Clinic on the east side. Chunk’s grandmother was there, dying by slow strangulation. The inside of her lungs had been scorched by acute respiratory distress syndrome, and her body was being eaten alive by its own immune system. Her skin was covered in blisters, and as she moved, feebly, upon the floor of the hallway, for every inch of that small clinic had been packed with the dead and the dying and the grieving, the blisters popped. She made a crackling, popping sound as she rolled over to say goodbye, and the sound reminded me of a child playing with bubble wrap.
That woman, that great, good soul, had become yet another canvas upon which H2N2 had painted death.
# # #
Later, we stood on the white brick steps of the clinic, not speaking, for there were no words up to the task.
Chunk couldn’t afford a grave site, or even a coffin. He dreaded taking that beautiful woman to a mass grave at the Scar.
Billy made a coffin, his first.
That evening, as a warm breeze blew through the oaks near the back of our property, Billy and Chunk hacked into the ground with picks and shovels.
Chunk’s voice faltered during the prayer. Billy finished it for him.
At that moment I thought of the deer I wrote about in my journal, and the rather cryptic message that death is not all there is, and I remembered what it was that I had to tell Connie.
It is not so horrible that we die. The horror is when we allow the fact that we must die to rob our lives of meaning, for they do mean something.
Even in the quietest moments, they mean something.
Chapter 9
I got to the Scar early the next morning, but Chunk was already there. He was on the phone, muttering and grunting.
When he hung up, he wasn’t happy.
“What’s wrong?”
“I spoke with the sergeant in charge of security at Arsenal Station. Kenneth Wade’s truck hasn’t moved since yesterday when he arrived to escort Dr. Bradl
ey.”
“Oh.” That is bad news. “What about Treanor?”
“That was him on the phone.”
“And?”
“Nothing. He hasn’t heard from Wade either.”
That really was bad news. Chunk had the same sinking feeling in his gut that I had in mine, I could tell. We’d investigated a cop once before, a twenty year veteran who got drunk and ran over his neighbor with his truck, then dumped the truck and tried to call it in stolen. Making that arrest had been one the worst assignments of our careers, almost as bad as the Scar.
“So what do you want to do now?” I asked him.
“Let’s go to Arsenal first. Then we can go into the GZ and try to find that van.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But today, you drive.”
# # #
On the way to Arsenal Station, Chunk had to steer with one hand and wrestle with his surgical mask with the other. They never made the tie straps long enough for big guys like Chunk, and the thing was always threatening to pop off his face.
Finally, when he got it to where it was comfortable, he said, “Okay, Kenneth Wade.”
It was the opening move in an old game between us, but one that we hadn’t gotten to play much since we started working at the Scar.
“Kenneth Wade and Emma Bradley are lovers,” I said. “But they have to keep it under wraps.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it’s bad for her at work if their relationship gets out. Them being lovers would explain why Bradley called and requested him yesterday morning. Even after the fight.”
“Maybe. But why the fight?”
“Wade doesn’t care if the others know. He’s drunk. He’s horny. He wants to go back to her place for some fun.”
“Why wouldn’t she go? Because she’s not happy with the way she looks naked?”
“Ha ha. She doesn’t go because she thinks that’s going to give them away.”
“So after the fight, what, Wade storms out?”
“Yeah. When she’s had some time to think it over, Bradley calls him. Says, let’s make up.”