by Nova
She looked up at me and smiled. “Hey.”
“What’s happening? Who set them off?
She whispered to me without taking her eyes off the screen. “You know the Safeway on Wilson Boulevard?” I nodded—it was the only grocery store left in that part of the Zone. All the mom-and-pop ethnic ones failed for one reason or another in the past year or so. A lot of people thought it was part of a conspiracy to make the populace dependent on one easily managed location. I thought too many people had way too much time on their hands when I heard the theory. “Well, a Latino woman—I know her sister, Rosario—she was caught by security for stealing food,” Carol said. “Anyways, she made a run for the door and made it. She was running through the parking lot—store security was just yelling at her—when some guys from Homeland Security pulled up. They saw her running and heard security yelling, so they started yelling. She didn’t stop, so they shot her. Then someone in the crowd started shooting at them, but one of the officers managed to shoot a couple bystanders, including a pregnant woman, before they went down.”
“Jesus,” I shook my head. The rules were: If you made it out the door of a grocery store and off store property, then you were home free. The security guards knew why people were stealing food. They also knew they had to go home after their shift. They never put any effort into it once people made it out the door.
That part of Arlington was packed. A lot of people were afraid to leave the Zone because they knew they wouldn’t be able to get back in. It had been a hot area during the real-estate boom, but that was long past. A lot of Hispanic families lived there, two extended families to one small 1950s red-brick house. Work was hard to come by, especially for the males. Many people spent the day and night standing around outside in that area. Usually, there was a group by the Safeway parking lot. Most of them were angry about something, and if they weren’t angry, they were probably high or drunk. There were also some hard-core gangs around there. Yeah, this was going to be interesting.
What made it even “better” was that the Homeland Security patrol had been white. They needed only one more thing to make this really flammable: a video of them shouting racial slurs as they shot the women. It turned out they didn’t need it. Arlington County police were the first responders. They were generally good, professional officers who were not known to reach for the baton or gun without being provoked. Homeland Security also responded. The name Homeland Security was really an umbrella covering a lot of agencies. The officers who were now lying dead or wounded on the asphalt belonged to one, the Federal Protective Service. Their original job of building security had been changed to providing security in the Zones. The local police hated them. Government agencies like the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. marshals looked down on them as wannabes who couldn’t get into a real agency. They liked kicking ass. They thought the Zones were war zones, not special security zones. They had managed to alienate everyone they’d come in contact with, in an amazingly short time.
They responded in force; Arlington County police almost had things under control when four FPS vehicles arrived and disgorged four officers apiece. The crowd saw them and everything amped back up. Meanwhile, the crowd of TV watchers at the shelter was growing restive. One of the Hispanic women—Maria I think—shouted at the screen, “Kill the white motherfuckers!” Since the residents in the shelter were white, black, Hispanic, and other, someone was bound to find that offensive. Somebody did.
It was a woman I mentally called “Fat Ass Annie.” Annie was three hundred pounds of lard stiffened with peanut brittle, stuffed into pants that were so tight that you could see the cottage cheese ripples on her ass. She was bleach blonde and bellicose. My guess is she was born in a double wide and had ascended for a brief, shining moment to a tract home in Manassas Park before life cruelly deprived her of what was rightfully hers. Then she washed up on the shore of the shelter—another American whale brought down by the harpoon of adjustable-rate mortgages. “What the fuck do you mean ‘Kill the white motherfuckers,’ Maria? It’s your goddamn fault that the country is so fucking messed up!” Like an oil tanker in a crowded harbor, Annie was steaming toward the diminutive Maria. The crowd moved out of her way, some with grins of anticipation at the show that was just seconds away from starting. Others, depending on their race, were nodding in agreement with Fat Ass Annie. Some were changing positions in the crowd, getting ready to come to Maria’s aid.
“You goddamn lying Mexicans bought them houses with your liar loans and then walked away! That’s why the economy sucks! That and you took all the good jobs from real Americans. Now you won’t fucking go home!”
Normally Carol and her staff would have been on this like white on rice, defusing the situation before it got out of control. I looked at them: Like the residents, they were a mixed bunch. Carol’s main enforcer was Theresa. She was obviously struggling with mixed emotions. Tito was still outside, looking in. I could feel the rage and ugliness, like an electrical current, shoot from person to person—feeding on each contact and growing in strength.
Maria and Fat Ass Annie were face-to-face now. The room, which previously had not been divided by race, was rapidly rearranging itself. Shit, I thought, looks like it’s me. I pushed my way over to where the two women were screaming at each other. Annie was spraying spittle everywhere—I have always found that attractive in a woman. Maria was waving her hands, screaming back. I stepped up and put my face in the midst of them.
“Both of you, shut up—now!”
“Fuck you, Gardener!” Fat Ass Annie replied.
Ah, thank you, God, I thought. I had been hoping she would be the one to push it. “Annie, listen to me carefully. If you don’t shut up right now, I am going to take my Ruger out of my holster and jam the muzzle so far down your mouth that I will be scraping your hemorrhoids off the barrel. Do you understand me?”
She opened her mouth. My hand, which had been resting on the butt of the holstered Ruger, moved down so I could grip it better. I began pulling it out of the holster as I whispered, “Say something, Annie . . . anything.” The anger went out of her face like a candle flame extinguished by a cold breeze. I felt a hand gently brush my arm.
“Hey, it’s okay. Back off, please.” It was Carol, probably the only one in the world who could have done what she just did.
The screens went blank. Someone, probably Theresa, had cut the power to them. “C’mon. Let’s go outside.” I let her guide me out the door. I couldn’t take my eyes off Fat Ass Annie. She hadn’t moved. She just stood there, rooted, and then she burst out crying, and then moved on to full-out wailing. Tito had moved inside, probably when he had seen them go face-to-face. Alone outside, Carol and I stood there for a minute, looking at each other. Then she stepped closer, reached up, and hugged me. For a brief second I buried my face in her shoulder and hair. She smelled good, like fresh bread with a trace of shampoo and old cigarettes. She let go before I did and stepped back. “Thanks.” She smiled, turned, and was gone. I sighed. I stood there for too long, turned around, and walked through the gathering darkness toward my empty room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AN INVITATION
I woke up the next morning to find Max sitting in my one and only chair, just sitting there, staring out into space. “You know, one day I am going to catch you slipping in here, and I am going to squash you like a bug.”
“That is as about as likely to happen as me slipping in here and finding you sleeping double.”
“Asshole.” I swung out of the bed, pulled a semifresh pair of pants off the floor, and slid into them. “So why am I honored with your presence this early in the morning?”
Instead of answering he reached into his backpack, which was at his feet, and pulled out a silver Thermos. “You want some coffee?”
“That sounds good.” I found a cup that didn’t have anything crusty in it and handed it to him. He popped the Thermos and the smell of coffee flooded into my room. It smelled real good and real strong. I poured it into th
e cup and knocked it back. Damn, it was hot. I held out the cup, and he poured me another one.
“So what’s up?”
“The chief wants to see us bright and early.”
“Any idea what his little brain has coughed up?” He had never done this before. We were pretty much left alone. Max tithed him from what we made. If I did anything on the side, I tithed Max, who took care of everything upstream.
“No, but I guess we are going to find out. We’re leaving in five.” He stood up and scratched himself. “See you in the car.”
I dressed, got my gun belt on, threw a couple of bottles of water in my day pack, and followed him out the door. I was surprised: No Camry—instead he had an old Ford F-150.
“Where’s the Camry, Max?”
“In the shop, where it has been sitting for the last three weeks waiting for parts. It will probably be there another three weeks too. The guy at the shop told me their whole supply chain is falling apart.”
“Damn, I thought you had gotten it fixed. Where did you get the truck?”
“A friend.”
I wasn’t going to tell him, as he seemed kind of cranky this morning, but I liked the truck better than the Camry.
We walked into the Fairfax City Police Dept. headquarters about twenty minutes later. There was only one car in the parking lot, a silver Lexus. We let ourselves in and walked down the hallway to the chief’s office. The door was open, and the chief was sitting behind his desk, staring at something on his computer’s flat screen. His feet were propped up on a corner of his desk—he didn’t move them.
Without looking away from the screen, he said, “Thanks for coming by, boys. Just give me one more minute.” Max and I looked at each other and I rolled my eyes. “I saw that,” he said. I just laughed.
The chief dropped his feet to the floor. “Sorry about that. Thanks for coming by, men.”
Uh-oh, I thought, we’ve been promoted from boys to men. This must be some serious shit.
“Okay, let me be frank with you. I am probably going to ramble a bit, so please bear with me.”
We both nodded, and I relaxed my face muscles into my “listening to management with rapt attention” mode—something I had learned in high school and had polished to perfection on all the crappy jobs I had worked since then. I scanned the chief’s office while he talked. I had only been in it once. It was what you would expect: an American flag behind his chair; wooden plaques stating what a wonderful cop, man, and Elk he was; a lot of “grip and grin” photos with other white guys.
One picture caught my eye. It was him, much younger and leaner, in some kind of striped fatigues, standing with a couple of guys—one was shirtless. They had a number of AKs on the ground in front of them and a RPG. That’s right, Max had said he was a marine a long time ago.
I tuned back into his monologue when I heard him say, “. . . and I know I can trust you two with this information.” No doubt, this had to be the buildup to whatever pitch he was going to make. I was right.
“One of the advantages of this job is that I get the daily Homeland Security Threat Analysis. I have also been doing this job for a while and have made a few friends here and there.” He paused, went for full eye contact and maximum gravity. “Gentlemen, the shit is about to hit the fan in this country. I don’t mean cat turds either; I mean elephant-sized ones. Even worse is they are going to keep coming.”
He paused here—I knew what he wanted and so did Max. We bobbed our heads in enthusiastic agreement with this strategic analysis from our “general.” He liked that—they always do. Too bad it had never gotten me anywhere. He went on and he lost me again. It was the typical refried, right-wing cant: We had a black man, and it hadn’t worked out. The one that we elected after him had not turned out all that much better. He was a good man and all, but it was time for us to face the facts. America as we knew it was going down and it was going to be ugly. . . .
The reasons he listed were not unknown to me. I may have even known more about it than he did. I wasn’t going to mention that, especially as he had not mentioned anything about the collapse of the dollar and the Chinese efforts to replace it as the world’s reserve currency.
He pulled me back into the flow of his monologue when he said, “So I and other members of the community have made the decision to bug out.” I think he was taken aback by my startled expression. “Yes, I know”—here he raised his right hand—“it does not seem very noble, but we also have a duty toward our families and our country. Yes, our country!” He came down hard on this. We must be nearing the end of this grand experiment in democracy. “We will come back, when it is time, and rebuild this great land, which is why I need you two. I need you to run a shipment to where we have begun to build a ‘gathering place’ in West Virginia. I am also confident that after you see it and listen to the colonel that you will want to join us in this great endeavor. We would be honored to have men of your caliber.”
The last part was directly addressed to Max, I noticed. Max stood up. “Sure, chief. Not a problem. Just let us know when and where.” I stood up also and began edging toward the door. I was just waiting for Max to wrap it up so we could get the hell out of there.
Then the chief came around his desk, stuck out his hand, and said, “Gardener, you’re a good man . . . you don’t mind if I talk to Max for a few minutes alone, do you?”
I grinned. “No, not at all, chief, not at all,” and I pumped his soft white hand three times, thinking, You are a fat fucking asshole. I looked at Max and said, “I’ll be out front,” and left the office.
I sat around the front office and listened to the phones ring at empty desks. There had to be a door somewhere linking these offices with dispatch, the holding cells, and the locker room somewhere. I wasn’t in the mood to look for it. I tried reading one of the American Police magazines that were stacked on an empty desk. They were all three years old or more. They were kind of funny and also kind of sad. It seemed so long ago, the world and threats they described. I was just sitting there, reading the posters on the wall for the tenth time when Max walked by me. He didn’t even break stride. “Let’s go.”
Okay, that must have been an interesting meeting. When we climbed into his truck, he was still not talking. I knew him well enough by now to know that it was for a reason.
“Did you know the outside of the station was miked?” he asked.
“No.”
“I thought it might be. I just wasn’t sure until now.” He didn’t enlighten me as to how he had figured this out. I thought there was more to come, so I just stayed silent. “Don’t be pissed about being left out. He doesn’t trust you for a couple of reasons.”
“Okay, and they are . . . ?” Jesus, I hope I wasn’t going to have to drag everything out of him.
“Well, you’re hard-core enough, that’s for sure. He just doesn’t like that you were never in the Corps, or at least the army.”
I interrupted him. “Yeah, well, I was a Boy Scout.”
He sighed. “You saw the photo of him? The one when he was in Nam?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He was Force Recon. He probably killed more people in a week than you have so far in your short and pathetic life.” I just shrugged. It was ancient history to me. He might have been the man once, but that was the key word, once. “He is also worried about your political reliability.”
“My what? That has got to be a joke. I don’t have any politics to be reliable about.”
“Yep. That’s what I told him. I also told him you would have been a hell of a marine.”
I knew Max well enough to know that he had just paid me a very real compliment. Maybe the highest compliment he knew.
“Thanks, Max.” I waited a beat, “And you would have made a fine Boy Scout.”
He looked over at me and grinned. “Always the asshole, Gardener, always.”
“So what’s he want from us?”
“He wants us to deliver a truck—and its cargo—to West Virgini
a.”
“Let me guess, the ‘gathering place’?”
Max nodded. “Yep. Been to West Virginia lately?”
“No. I can’t say I have been missing it either. So when do we start? What’s the pay? What’s the cargo and is it just us?”
“We leave in two days from city hall. We each get an ounce of gold for going up, payable upon delivery of the truck. I am not sure what the cargo is going to be, but my guess is weapons and ammo in front, food or supplies in the back by the door. I’ve got to look at a map and make some calls, but I figure it will be four hours up, unload, return the next day. Not a big deal—oh, and it’s just you and me. That answer all your questions?”
“For now, I suppose.”
“Where you want me to drop you?”
“My place for now. I’ll see you later—say noon at the market?”
We made plans to meet up and do our regular foot patrol of our little section of town. It turned out to be another uneventful day except for the smell of smoke in the air. The riot in Arlington had spread. People were stoning law enforcement vehicles on sight. Spontaneous protests had broken out in D.C. but nothing violent was happening in the main downtown federal zones themselves, at least not yet. Arlington was still crazy: burning cars, burning buildings, and people with a burning desire to whack any FPS officer or vehicle they came across. Someone finally wised up and pulled all uniformed FPS personnel out of the area.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
NIGHT
I was sitting in my room, staring at my laptop and a copy of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. I was trying to decide which one I wanted to pick up. The book cover was rather unappealing. Seneca looked a lot like the chief. The book itself was interesting and I had already read about twenty pages. One of the changes I had noticed was my ability to concentrate for longer periods of time, once I stopped surfing the net for hours. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing yet. I heard a knock on my door. I didn’t recognize it, and it wasn’t the pattern the ninjas and I had agreed upon.