Quarantined

by Joe McKinney

  Chunk frowned under his mask. “I don't know.”

  “And how does he get her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck without Hernandez knowing it?”

  “Well, Hernandez is sleeping, right? So he doesn't notice.”

  “Maybe.”

  Chunk checked his watch. Still forty minutes till Laurent's due back.

  “What about this one?” I asked. “Wade and Bradley are jumped by those looters in the GZ.”

  “Maybe,” he said. I could tell he liked that one. A light switch turned on behind his eyes.

  “A small group of them surprise Wade, and he shoots them,” I said. “Or at least two of them.”

  “The two you found next to the garage?”

  “Right.”

  “And then there are more of them? Enough to beat up Wade and take his gun?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Then they kill Bradley?”

  “That would explain why she's naked.”

  He frowned, doesn't get it. He looked at me. What are you talking about?

  I said, “When they were chasing me they knew I was a woman. They said things. What they wanted to do when they caught me.”

  “Oh,” he said. And then, as it hit him, “Oh. Lily, I'm sorry.”

  “It didn't happen, Chunk. Thanks to you.”

  “Yeah, but...”

  “Of course the ME told us there was no sign of forced sexual activity, post-mortem or otherwise. And remember, she was shot while she was wearing her space suit. I think that kind of clouds up the looter theory.”

  “True,” he said.

  “And that still doesn't explain how Bradley's body ended up at the morgue. Those looters wouldn't have brought her here.”

  “True.” Chunk leaned back in the seat and crossed his arms. I could see the muscles shifting beneath his shirt. “So where does that leave us?” he asked.

  “I don't know,” I admitted. “Stuck, I guess.”

  A few minutes later, Chunk's cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the caller ID, and frowned.

  “Treanor,” he said to me, and accepted the call.

  Chunk didn't get to do a lot of talking. Most of what he said was “Yes, sir. Twenty minutes, maybe. Ten? Okay, well we're ... Yes, sir. Ten minutes. Yes, sir.”

  He hung up and dropped the car in gear.

  “What's up?” I asked as he wheeled us toward the gates, mashing down on the gas hard enough to throw me back in the seat.

  “The shit's hit the fan,” he said.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 18

  News of the shortage spread fast.

  By the time Chunk and I made it to the Bandera Road Food Distribution Center, a large, anxious crowd had already gathered in the parking lot outside the center, and more were pouring in every minute. I saw a thousand desperate faces, maybe more, and I imagined rumors and misinformation spreading through the crowd like a lit torch dragged over dry grass.

  Treanor was there. He ordered us into riot gear.

  “What happened?” I asked him. “Is it true the drop didn't come?”

  “It came,” he growled. “It's just short. That's all. There's not enough for these people.”

  I said, “What are we supposed to tell them? Is there another drop coming?”

  “Get in your riot gear, Harris. They ask you anything, you tell them to get back to their homes. They don't like it, give them the stick if you have to.”

  “Nice,” I said, the sarcasm in my voice obvious.

  “You have a problem with that, Harris?”

  “No, sir.”

  He stared at me. “You need to watch your tone with me, Harris. You're pretty damn close to being insubordinate.”

  “I'm not being insubordinate, Lieutenant. I just don't think you have anything to say worth listening to.”

  His eyes went wide inside his black riot helmet, then narrowed to little slits.

  “Get into your riot gear right now.” His voice was amazingly subdued considering he probably would have liked nothing better than to rip the windpipe out of my throat with his bare hands. “Do it now and report to me in five minutes.”

  With that he stormed off, barking orders at anybody unlucky enough to cross his path.

  There goes a major asshole.

  “Why you gotta do that?” Chunk said.

  “The man's an asshole.”

  “I know that. Why do you have to throw it back in his face like that?”

  “I'm sorry,” I said, though only for making things hard on Chunk and not for what I said to Treanor.

  “Yeah, well, if he gives us a crappy post because you can't keep your smart assed remarks to—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Riot gear.

  We changed into black BDUs with reinforced knees and elbows, black jackboots, black padded gloves, and a black riot helmet made to fit over a gas mask, plus a clear plastic shield that the manufacturer guaranteed was bulletproof and a thirty-six inch black riot baton made of hickory wood.

  With practice, it takes about three minutes to get dressed.

  While I was putting myself together, I heard Sergeant Jennifer Langley talking to a patrol officer I didn't recognize. Langley's duty assignment was the food distribution network, so I figured she knew what she was talking about.

  “We only got six boxes on the last drop,” Langley said, referring to the intermodal containers that the city's food stocks came in.

  The containers are basically railroad boxcars flown in by helicopters that never land inside the walls, and once they're unloaded, they're placed on the backs of trucks or on trains and hauled off to someplace.

  Six boxes was a pretty light shipment. My own food distribution center, which served a much smaller area than the Bandera Road Center, got thirty-five boxes each week. The usual drop for a station Bandera's size should have been something like sixty boxes per week.

  I was lacing up my boots when the other officer asked, “What are they going to do? Are they bringing in more?”

  “I don't know,” Langley said. “We've been emailing them all morning and haven't gotten a response yet.”

  “Jesus,” the officer said. I was thinking the same thing.

  Langley said, “We can't even bring in stuff from other centers. Everybody got shorted.”

  That sent a chill through me. I went outside and made my way to the front of the center. There I saw the mass confusion of an angry crowd of at least fifteen hundred people. Streams of people were coming into the lot from the street. Chants were starting up here and there. They were feeding off each other's anger, bearing down on our position at the gates to the Food Distribution Center. The noise was deafening.

  The Bandera Road Center was in the shell of an abandoned HEB, San Antonio's dominate grocery store chain before the quarantine. Most of the HEBs were gutted by looters in the first few weeks of the quarantine, and this one, with its boarded up windows and ring of concrete barriers around the front doors, looked nothing like the proud red and white store it had once been.

  The parking lot was huge, though it didn't seem so right then with all those people crowding it. And more were coming in from every side even as I stood there. I shook my head in disbelief.

  Earlier, when Chunk and I drove into the lot, most of those people were still in line, though that system quickly broke down, the crowd pressing inward on the half circle of concrete barriers that separated us from them.

  “Chunk,” I said.

  “Stay close,” he said.

  A dozen SWAT officers stepped up to the concrete barriers, the rest of us in a line behind them, shoulder to shoulder with our batons in both hands. The SWAT guys were armed with a tommy gun-looking contraption called a pepper ball gun. The pepper balls looked like gumballs, only each one was loaded with oleocapsicum resin—pepper spray. Mean stuff. Police departments all over the world used it to disperse large crowds like this one. But the only time I had ever seen it used first
hand was on gang fights. I couldn't believe they were about to use it on regular civilians.

  A man in khaki slacks and a gray polo shirt carried a bull horn up to a platform in front of the crowd.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, though even with the bullhorn's amplification it was hard to hear him over the noise of the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “My name is Bob Prentice with the Metropolitan Health District.”

  Maybe he thought telling them he was with the MHD would buy him some credibility with the crowd, but he was wrong. Rather than quiet down, the people in the front started shouting questions up at him, and the urgency of their demands seemed to completely derail him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “More food is on the way.”

  A sea of voices shouted him down. “When? How much?”

  “You all need to return to your homes,” he said. “Another drop will come later this evening. Please return to your homes and wait there.”

  That didn't even come close to mollifying the crowd, and as I remembered what I'd overheard Jennifer Langley saying in the women's locker room, I couldn't say I blamed them for being so upset. They were being lied to, and they knew it.

  A panic erupted somewhere in the crowd and spread. It was like somebody had dropped a stone into a pool of water and I was watching the ripples spread from that. The energy of that panic shot outwards and I saw people pushing each other, some running for the edges of the crowd and the exits, others violent out of desperation. They all pushed toward the concrete barriers.

  I drew a breath in between my teeth.

  “Easy,” Chunk said.

  The crowd broke on the barriers like a wave.

  Prentice yelled into his bullhorn for calm, but no one listened.

  Only Treanor seemed to keep his composure. He marched down the line, barking orders at the SWAT officers, all of them raising their pepper ball guns to their hips.

  “Fire.”

  The SWAT guys started firing, the thump thump thump of the pepper ball guns reminding me of those deposit capsules being sucked through the overhead tubes at the drive-thru of a bank.

  Orange splotches the size of dinner plates appeared on the chests and shoulders and backs of the people closest to the barriers, and then people started falling. Smoke filled the air, and even with the protection of my gas mask I could feel a slight burn in my sinuses from the pepper spray.

  Earlier, there had been anger and desperation, but now there was fear and panic and pain. People ran every which way trying to escape the burning in their lungs, and I'm sure a few of them were trampled in the exodus.

  Treanor ordered the SWAT officers over the wall, and they immediately jumped the barrier, directing their fire into wide arcs over the crowd.

  At first it didn't look to me like they were aiming their shots, but then I realized what they were doing. They were directing their fire at areas away from the exits, and when the people ran from the smoking corners of the lot where the shots landed, they found themselves at the exits, where they could flee to the streets and the neighborhoods beyond.

  Treanor stood on top of the wall and yelled for the rest of us to come over.

  We did. We formed a skirmish line, and with our shields and our sticks we forced the few remaining stragglers to run for the gates.

  My eyes watered, as much from the pepper spray smoke in the air as from pure, blinding fear. My head was soaked with sweat. It ran down my face and the back of my neck. My stomach had turned into knots.

  Treanor was still yelling—hadn't stopped yelling since all this began—and I wondered if the man wasn't secretly enjoying this. He was like some little brass general, sending the troops in to beat some ass.

  “This is us,” Chunk said as Treanor's shouts drew closer to us.

  Treanor read off a list of ten names that included mine and Chunk's. “Those names I just called will secure the west entrance to the lot,” he said, the west entrance being the main one off Bandera Road. “Establish your perimeter and lock it down tight.”

  We advanced on the west entrance and set up a defensive line across the driveway. I looked down the row, but I couldn't tell who anybody was behind their riot gear. I did get the sense that most of them were as scared as I was, which didn't make me feel any better about the situation.

  A long white wall stretched along the roadway to my right, and I could see Chunk eyeing it suspiciously, like it might prove to be a problem later on. Across the street was an abandoned building that had once been a pawn shop, now without any front windows, its cinder block walls pocked with old bullet holes. Beyond that was a long row of store fronts and a strip mall. All the shops were closed now, and damaged by looters.

  Behind the store fronts was a tall stand of oaks, and through the occasional gap in the foliage I could see the roof of a house or two.

  People walked through the scene, though they gave us a wide berth, for which I was grateful. I could still feel the tension in the air. Those people, all of them, were on the edge of something, their patience stretched too far.

  Not for the first time I wondered what the outside world must think of us. Did we still seem like Americans to them, fighting in the streets, eating the nation's charity, our buildings crumbling, our streets still littered with corpses in places? It didn't look like America to me.

  We stood there in the glare of the midday sun, the temperature mounting beyond the ninety degree mark and everyone's nerves becoming more and more frayed as the day marched on. People yelled at us, raised their fists and shook them in defiance. A few threw stones.

  I was soaked through with sweat, every part of me sticky, my underarms and my crotch feeling like a swamp, and I was continually shutting my eyes, hard, to clear them of runoff sweat.

  I was wondering how long I'd have to stand there when an explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.

  The building across the street had been hit with some kind of homemade bomb. It was a sloppy job, but powerful. Dust and bits of rock crowded the air, and soon flames and smoke roiled upward.

  The crowd, which had never really stabilized after we ejected them from the parking lot, panicked. Everyone was shouting at once, running without any idea in their heads except to move.

  I watched a terrified mass of people running right at our line like they were refugees fleeing some African war on TV. The ground beneath my feet shook, and the smoke in the air turned my world to a blur. Some of the people running at us looked back over their shoulders, others were blind with terror, but all of them came down on us at once.

  When the first few members of the crowd reached us we hit them with our shields and pushed them back. A rock glanced off my shield, and then a fist. Through the clear plastic I saw the face of a man, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, teeth barred in an expression too primal for me to name.

  I punched his face with the shield. He grabbed the top of it and pulled it down. I stroked him in the leg with my baton, but he was too far gone for the pain to register. A weird stuttering growl came out of him, and then he was clutching at my knees, trying to pull me down, his hands grasping at my gas mask.

  I screamed for Chunk, still trying to smack the guy in the legs with my riot baton.

  Chunk was on him in a second. He grabbed the guy with one hand and threw him back into the crowd. Then, with the same hand, he grabbed me and shoved me behind his massive bulk.

  The crowd broke apart under a hail of rocks thrown by young men across the street. The rocks hit our shields with enough force to shake my whole body.

  Over the screams of the people caught in the crossfire, and through the clouds of smoke drifting across the street, I heard the echoing crackle of gunfire.

  A bullet struck the white wall to our right. Our line at that end fell back automatically, shields up to provide as much cover as possible. Somebody shouted for all of us to fall back, and the line moved quickly after that, breaking apart and reforming in the parking lot behind the relative protecti
on of the white stone wall at the edge of the pavement.

  Everybody moved but me. Through the crowd I saw a child, a girl, Connie's age by the looks of her, five or six maybe, standing next to a crumpled body in the grass. The girl was screaming for help.

  I ran to her. Chunk, who only just then realized I wasn't part of the reformed skirmish line, yelled at my back. I kept running. When I reached her I put my shield up to ward off the barrage of rocks raining down on top of us. The girl said something in Spanish, and I was pretty sure she was telling me her mama was hurt. Her face was smudged black with dirt and grime, warped by fear.

  I looked down at the woman in the grass. Her forehead had been busted open by a rock or a fist, and she was groaning painfully. I tried to lift her, but I couldn't get a grip under her shoulders and still keep the shield up to protect us.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Chunk said. He was standing beside me, his chest heaving.

  “Help me,” I said.

  More rifle fire, this time kicking up dirt and bits of grass next to us.

  Chunk put his shield toward the gunfire while I got on the radio and called for cover. I heard a bullet whistle over my head, and I pulled the little girl against my chest.

  Another shot rang out and a little patch of ground next to Chunk's feet exploded. Chunk dropped his baton and picked up my shield, holding both of them side by side in front of us.

  “The shooter's on the roof,” he said, pointing at the line of shops across the street with the chin of his gas mask.

  “I can't move her,” I said.

  The little girl squirmed in my arms, trying to touch her mother.

  The shooter's aim was better on the next shot. It struck one of the shields Chunk was holding and shattered it. The blow knocked him backwards, and he almost landed on top of me. At the same time I heard the screeching wail of a police car's tires sliding on the pavement as a SWAT unit pulled up on us. The driver slid the car to a stop between us and the shooter.