by Nova
The other part of it was dealing with people who had been turned back at the Zone checkpoints due to their IDs not being in order. Since we were on one of the main roads, and a half mile from the border, they would often bounce back into our laps. If they decided to hang around, we would move them on. We had not had a real problem yet with anyone deciding they didn’t want to be moved. Max stood up, stretched, and asked me, “Feel like going for a walk?”
“Yeah, sure.” I stood up and looked over at Aly. “See you later, big guy.” Aly was maybe five foot four.
“Okay, you guys be careful out there,” he replied, and laughed. He always said the same thing and he always got the same response from us: nothing, except maybe a grunt. It never stopped him. We started walking over to the market. The sun’s heat reflected off the asphalt. The morning sun had warmed up the asphalt of the parking lot enough that it was only just noticeable, not the inyour-face heat that was only hours away from becoming another day’s reality.
“You ever think Aly’s head is running the same Bollywood movie in an endless loop?”
“No, he’s a Muslim from Pakistan. They don’t usually watch Bollywood movies,” Max replied as he casually scanned the area for anything out of the ordinary.
“Paki? Damn, I always thought he was Indian.”
“That’s what he wants you to think.”
That made perfect sense: Pakistan was about as popular now as Germany was circa 1946. It also made sense why he never went into the Zone. Not only was his ID lacking, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be coming back.
The parking lot was still used as parking for cars. There were never a lot of them, but people were still driving, just not as much as they had before. Gas had not come down a lot after Tel Aviv and the Israeli retaliation. It probably never would. The government was talking about another stiff gas tax to fund “green” projects. This wasn’t the first government green project. Every administration had them. They never seemed to amount to anything, at least not for anyone I knew
We split, each going to one side of a burned-out BMW whose charred body had filled a parking spot for months now. People coming out of the Zone tried not to drive their high-end automobiles too far from the Zone nowadays. They had a tendency to catch fire. I was never sure what bothered Zone people more: the realization their car was toast or that they were now on foot in the badlands. At first it would be watching their beautiful car—burning. This always drew a crowd. Once they got a look at the faces of the crowd, they usually got past their anguish about their car turning into an insurance claim in front of them rather quickly. Things had gotten ugly a few times when an owner with an inflated ego and zero sense of self-preservation decided to scream obscenities at the crowd. County tried to respond quickly to these calls now. The people who owned the cars usually paid taxes and knew how to complain—or their next-of-kin did. Because when someone from the Zone started screaming at a non-Zone crowd about their burning car, it usually ended with that person burning along with it.
We almost always started on the end of the block that the stores were on and then worked our way down. The market was built around a small, abandoned strip mall. Every store in it was gone, except for the Dollar Store. It was still run by the same Korean family, although the mall no longer had power other than what was sometimes provided with generators by the market sellers. Most of the store windows were boarded up. They had been covered with graffiti thirty minutes after the work crew had put them up and climbed back into their truck to go to their next stop. They were still covered with crap, except for a few that had been painted over in the last couple months. These now advertised the name of the seller who set up shop in front of them during the day. Instead of just using words, they painted symbols and words. The area was ethnically diverse—a little United Nations, with more than a few people having suspect paperwork.
The white couple that had a connection in the Shenandoah Valley orchards featured a nice picture of an apple. The Korean woman who repaired clothes had a sewing machine painted on her plywood. Many folks, including me, only vaguely understood what she was getting at when it first went up. Nobody used the actual storefronts; they stunk inside. All it took was one asshole peeing on the drywall to make it unusable, and the lack of electricity didn’t help. Also, no one wanted to store anything in there—if it didn’t get stolen that night, there was always the fear that the “owner” would come back and claim it.
Sometimes, a working girl or boy would use one of the nicer ones for quick tricks.
We discouraged that. It drew the wrong kind of people, whom we had defined without talking about it as strangers, strangers being anyone who wasn’t a local and whose face we didn’t see on a regular basis. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of other abandoned buildings they could use. A red-light district of sorts was springing up down the road from us in the old Northern Virginia Real Estate Association building. Yes, the inevitable jokes sprang up. Max and I both knew there was a grain of truth in them. When the hookers were seen showing up for work in their minivans with the “I’m a Realtor” license plate frames still attached, well, that was a bit obvious. Since it was in city jurisdiction and never bothered, we figured the kickback was feeding the patrol officer’s families.
We walked, stopped, and chatted with each stall owner. Usually, it was just a “Hi, everything okay?” and Max would chat them up while I did a quick walk-through of the empty store behind them. We were going to need to do a cleanup in these someday. Often I would have to remind someone not to use the back as a urinal, or at the very least to set aside some plastic buckets for it.
It didn’t pass unnoticed that I was doing most of the work as we did our rounds so I asked Max, “How come I got to do this and you get to do the chitchatting?”
His reply? “Because I know what I am doing, and you don’t.”
That was kind of hard to argue with.
I was in the back of the store behind the Apple Couple when I heard car doors slamming and a male voice yelling something I couldn’t quite hear. I drew my pistol and headed back to the store entrance. I held the gun straight up beside my head and thumbed the hammer down, listening to that beautiful clicking sound. I paused at the door, standing to one side. It was a good thing that I did. Apple Couple would have knocked me down if I had been standing in it. They came busting through it, faces frightened, the man pushing his woman, telling her, “To the back! To the back!” As they went, he struggled to dig a handgun from his pocket. The hammer spur had snagged on the fabric of his pants, and his haste and fear were not helping him.
“Stay here!” I hissed at him—the asshole had scared the crap out of me busting through the door like that. “Hey, look at me!” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. Talk to me: Where and who?”
“Three guys—they are robbing everyone!”
“Where?”
“The Dollar Store.”
“Deep breaths, okay?” I looked at him.
He nodded. “I’m okay.”
“Good, go look after your woman.” All right: Think and go, I told myself.
The Dollar Store was in the center of the strip. I was two stores down. Usually, by now, Max would be at the last store, which was really just a guy with a table. He did leather repair, and I was thinking about having him make me a cartridge belt. Max liked talking to him. Leather Man was a former marine who had done his time in Vietnam. He was old.
He also liked to spit—big nasty lungers, too—which was why he was at the end.
I changed sides and eased a bit out the door. I could hear a bunch of hollering to my right; it sounded like Korean. I could see a young Asian male standing by a yellow Honda Civic in the parking lot. They had pulled directly in front of the Dollar Store. He had some kind of assault rifle, kind of cool looking, with a wooden stock. A remote part of my brain approved of his choice: no plastic crap. Another man was standing about three feet in front of the door to the Dollar Store. Both men were focused on what
was happening inside. I didn’t know where Max was, but I wasn’t worried about it. I knew he would be in the right place at the right time. I heard a woman scream and I stepped out the door.
Stepping out that first second was like what I imagined stepping into space as a skydiver would be, or getting up to speak in front of thousands of people: a lightness that wasn’t disturbing. Actually, it was pleasant. I liked it. I walked toward the door to the Dollar Store. My movement caught the eye of the man with the assault rifle, and he went into motion, shouldering his weapon. The boom of Max’s Colt was unmistakable. The rifleman’s eyes widened. He jerked forward and began to fall, propelled even faster by the second boom. The other man reacted to the sound of Max’s gunfire, turning to his friend. For a precious second he processed that his friend had been shot and that another man was walking toward him with a pistol. He turned to me, his face contorting into a grimace as he realized that he was going to be too late. He was right: I shot him twice in the chest, then once in the head, just as I had been taught, drilling again and again on cardboard silhouettes. It sounds like overkill, but Max explained to me that we were not the only people wearing vests.
My peripheral vision caught Max’s movement as he approached the man he had shot by the Honda. That is when the guy in the Dollar Store decided it was time to go. He came out the door holding as hostage the elderly Korean man who worked there.
Damn, this is turning out to be like a bad TV show, I thought.
Then it got worse: Max decided to be a hostage negotiator. Somehow I doubt he had learned that in the Marines. He told the hostage taker, “Okay, man, we can work this out. Let him go, and we will let you go. Let’s make this easy.”
“Fuck you! Get away from my car!”
“Okay, okay. Chill.” Max started backing up, away from the car.
“You! . . . You too. You back up!” This was directed at me.
I estimated the range and the probability of blowing his head off. The odds were pretty good that I could do this. Then again, if I missed or the old man twitched at the wrong time—well, it would be sloppy. But so what. I never liked him all that much anyway. I blew the side of the hostage taker’s head off. Max was moving toward him as the old man fell to his knees babbling. Hostage Taker dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Well, that was easy. Mama-san came rushing out the door to cradle the old man.
Max walked up to me, touching my shoulder briefly, “You okay?”
“Yeah. You?” He nodded.
“I guess we are going to have to clean up this mess.” It was more like time to hide the mess, not that there were a whole lot of people who cared.
“I knew you would take the shot.”
“How’s that, Max?”
“Did you really care if it worked or not?”
I wasn’t going to lie; why bother, I knew he already knew.
“No.”
I went over to collect my share. The rule was, if you killed them, you got their weapons, plus any personal belongings of value. Max was right: I didn’t give a damn, never had. With Max, it was a relief not to have to pretend. He also knew I didn’t care for the old man.
I had come by the Dollar Store looking for a donation from them to show their support of the local police force. The old man had given me a battery-powered nose- and ear-hair remover. At first I thought he was telling me I was missing something in my daily grooming. I went back to my room, and spent some time peering into the mirror. Nope, all clear. I decided what the hell, I would try it anyways. It worked for about two seconds, then it broke. I was not happy.
I told Max about it the next day. “He gave you what?” and then began laughing his ass off.
“What?” A dim light went off in my head. “What did you get?” He just laughed more. He never did tell me.
One of the things that some people—especially older folks who had lived well for so long—had a problem adapting to was how raw life could be. Nasty was how women usually described it; men, well, we just pretended it was nothing. Some of us actually believed that, although a lot depended on your age and how you had come up.
Life was messy now and getting messier, like this. Violence in real life was not like a video game, TV, or the movies. It was infinitely more real. It smelled, and the smell was never good. Left to ripen, a human being became incredibly fetid. It was a stink that got into your nose, into your clothes, and into your mind—and it never left.
Messy also described the way many of us were eating. Chickens were bought live, then killed, and gutted. Squirrels, dogs, cats—they all had to go from recognizable animal to dead meat. There wasn’t a lot of money available to be spent on professionally chopped and wrapped meat anymore. Then what you got had to be transformed back into something that was palatable. Well, sometimes it was palatable. This, I figure, is why they made hot sauce. A little Tabasco made anything edible as far as I was concerned. Then there was the problem of disposing of all the fluids and inedible parts. It took water to clean up, and you needed to dump it all somewhere where you knew it would go away soon. Back then people didn’t know about composting. Everything was still supposed to be magic. You put it in a trash can, and the trash fairy came and got it—until they quit coming because no one was paying them.
Just like these bodies: In the movies a bunch of blinking, flashing lights would show up. The bodies would be dumped onto gurneys and then—after sitting somewhere and being identified or not—they would go into the ground, usually first being run through a crematorium. If they were unclaimed or the families were too poor, well, an urn’s worth of ashes would be buried in a hole at the county’s potter’s field off of Germantown Road. A lot of paperwork would be generated; Max and I would need lawyers—it would be a big deal.
That was the old way. Now no one in power really cared all that much, especially if the people involved were poor or, like these guys, just out-of-area losers. No ID in the pockets or wallets. Max’s guy by the car had a Costco card that was expired. None of them had Zone IDs—no surprise there. Not a lot of cash either. Mama-san had brought out a wet cloth to wipe off the old man, who had been spattered a bit. He grabbed the cloth from her angrily and finished cleaning himself. He missed a few places, I noticed—not that I was going to point them out. The old man was showing with angry body language and bursts of Korean that he was not happy that I had shot the hostage taker while he was being held. I hid a smile in a cough behind my hand.
They had a cat that lived in the Dollar Store. Sometimes I would see him sitting in the old lady’s lap as she listened to her Korean radio station. The cat had come out to see what was going on. He brushed against Max’s leg, sniffed at the blood, and began to lap it up with delicate little cat licks. Mama-san got all excited, picked it up, smacked it lightly, and grinned embarrassingly at us before disappearing back into the store. We had started to gather a crowd.
Leather Man was telling everyone in listening range how Max had taken them out. The Apple Couple were adding their little bits of color. I looked around. Nobody had whipped out a cell phone to make calls or take pictures. If they had tried—well, they wouldn’t. We weren’t looking for our fifteen minutes of fame. No money in it anymore, just trouble.
Max came over to me. “There’s more here than meets the eye. They targeted the old man. I asked him how he wanted to handle it. He said he would make a call. We are going to drag the bodies into the empty store next door. The Korean Business Association is going to take care of the bodies.”
I guffawed. “They aren’t going to make barbecue out of them?”
“You eat Korean barbecue?”
“I did once, Max, that was enough, and kimchi is disgusting.”
“So then, what’s the problem?”
Max was right. The reality was they would probably end up in a hole somewhere—or as koi food. “I also called the chief. He wants the AK since I told him there was less than thirty dollars between all three of them.”
“That’s your weapon,” I prote
sted.
Max waved his hand dismissively. “I’m okay with it.” Not much I could say to that. “You can have the one by the door’s gun if you want.”
“Okay.”
It was over except for dragging the bodies into the store. Mama-san had come out with a bucket, a brush, and a dustpan. She was splashing the water on the blood pools. The chunky parts would be swept up. The guy had come in by front door. Now what was left of him would be going out the back door. I checked out the gun from the door guy: It was an older-looking, chrome-finish Taurus 9 mm. I’d have to ask Sarge what I could get for it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MARKED
Max had a cell phone but I didn’t. I realized a while back that I didn’t need one. I had no one to call. The time I was spending online was dropping—real life was now far more interesting. Plus, I was mad at the Internet. Yeah, I know how silly that sounds but it was still true. Virtual friends I had known for years turned out to be worthless. When I needed them, they were there. The problem was where there was: inside a computer—nice, but essentially worthless. Even stuffed animals would have been more useful. At least they would have been huggable.
The entire Internet experience had begun to seem like nothing more than a dream. Much of the time I had spent in it was already forgotten. So much of my time had been wasted there. What I did remember were short fragments, all of little or no substance. Life wasn’t always about killing people online or offline. This was probably a good thing. Eventually, you would run out of them, and then who would you have to talk to? Or kill, when the need arose? That would be pretty damn boring—not that it was going to happen anytime soon.
I guess it was my attitude that made Max decide to pull me aside a few days after the Dollar Store shooting. He was a little uncomfortable talking to me about it. I can always tell when someone is dancing around what they want to say. He was dancing.