by James Cook
Beyond the wide stretch of open ground known simply as The Strip stood a distant chain-link fence. Past the fence was an empty field of crumbling houses, burned-out businesses, and abandoned vehicles of every sort, all slowly sinking into the ground. The grass was head high, trees and bushes competed ruthlessly for space, and the chatter of birdsong and the buzzing of insects was audible even at this distance. No building permits were ever issued by the city for this area. It was a dead zone, a no-man’s-land where any kind of development was forbidden. The official reason for this was that eventually, once the area had forested over, it would be turned into a large public park. But I knew better. The field was a barrier, a screen preventing the wealthier parts of the city from having to gaze upon the results of their selfishness and desire for exclusivity.
I had once lived beyond that field when The Strip was still being bulldozed and the fences around it built. Back then, the government had not bothered with explanations. They hadn’t needed to. People were too frightened to ask questions in those days. I know, because I was one of them.
Past The Strip and the fences and the field was a warren of shipping containers and other detritus converted into living quarters. I remembered being there when it was first constructed. The containers were placed on the foundations of abandoned houses that had been ripped apart and hauled away by work crews of terrified refugees. Little did they know, those refugees were clearing land for the place they would soon call home.
The government gave them assignments and soldiers took them to their designated spots. Minimal public services kept piss and shit from running in the streets and provided a couple of gallons of fresh water per day, per household. Most of the people the government dumped off in the district never left.
I looked toward the refugee district, the place where I had once built a life with a young woman I loved, a woman who later died giving premature birth to a child that also did not survive, and thought about how the subconscious mind is a mysterious and powerful thing.
It had not been my intention to visit the refugee district. It had certainly not been my intention to align myself directly with the street that ran in front of the blue shipping container I had once shared with Sophia. I had not been thinking about my old life when I got dressed to go out to dinner. But now that I considered it, I was wearing pants I had found on a salvage run that looked like casual wear, but were actually designed to be tactical. I was wearing a plain brown button-down shirt over a white t-shirt. It was a little warm to be wearing layers.
My hands searched my torso, and sure enough, my Beretta was in a shoulder holster underneath the over-shirt. There was a Sig Sauer P225 in a concealed holster at the small of my back. Both pistols had threaded barrels. Suppressor slots were connected to the shoulder holster, one for each gun. I touched my ankle and discovered a short-barreled Ruger .357 five-shot revolver.
“And just in case…”
I felt along my beltline past where the Sig was holstered. A SOG combat knife rested comfortably across my lower back. I did not remember donning any of the weapons. I did not remember tying my shoes either. It had been a product of habit, my mind elsewhere while my body went on autopilot. Except normally, a pistol and a knife were all I carried. It was rare I needed anything more in an urban environment with a strong military and police presence. Furthermore, in the nicer, more genteel parts of Colorado Springs, it was considered crass and unfashionable to carry weapons of any sort, even concealed. Open carry was simply unheard of.
Not that the people here were unaware of the dangers facing the world. The inhabitants of the Springs were Outbreak survivors, after all. They knew the realm outside the city’s defenses was a dangerous place. However, they considered their little corner of the earth one of the last bastions of true civilization. A place where people could live in peace and not be afraid to walk the streets at night. Instruments of death were an ugly reminder of a cataclysm they wanted to forget as much as possible. I did not blame them, nor did I think less of them for their attitude toward weapons. In all honesty, I wished everywhere could be like the merchant district. But that was not the world we lived in.
And I knew now why I had armed myself so thoroughly. I had not realized it at the time, but the course of action I was about to take was like a command hidden in my subconscious mind, an executable program dormant in the code. I was not sure what set it off, but I knew with unflinching certainty there was no stopping what was about to happen.
I was going to the refugee district. Alone.
ELEVEN
The street looked much the same as it had the last time I saw it.
The shipping containers were still there, albeit rusted and more heavily modified. People sat outside on buckets and salvaged lawn furniture as well as hand-made chairs and benches slapped together with whatever materials were available. Makeshift canopies of tarps and discarded fabric hung from poles and rooftops to provide shade from the merciless sun. There were no trees to be seen, nor lawns. Only pale clumps of stunted weeds poking up amidst lifeless patches of barren ground.
Large plastic containers stood in silent ranks in front of each residence: red ones for urine, black ones for shit, and tall green ones for garbage. The sight brought back a strong memory of the stench of the shitwagon coming around every week to carry waste to the fertilizer yards, and the public works trucks delivering precious gallons of fresh water.
Most men were shirtless in the heat, their tanned skin overlaid with a thin sheen of sweat. The women covered themselves enough to maintain modesty, if only barely. Barefoot children dressed in rags ran like flocks of birds from one street to the next, screaming for all they were worth. Not one person I saw possessed any excess body fat.
The double-doors of most containers stood wide open to allow the afternoon breeze to flow through sweltering interiors. People only went inside if they needed something. Otherwise, they stayed in the open air where it was cooler.
At a glance, the district did not look so bad. Poor maybe, but not hostile. Neighbors talked and laughed, people arriving home from other places shouted greetings to friends and family, and the smell of wood smoke and food cooking permeated the air. There was a general sense of community and good humor about the place.
But that was only at a glance.
If one looked closer, the subterfuge did not hold. At several homes I passed, people laid on cushions with elongated pipes held over strange, cone-shaped pieces of glass with fires burning within.
Opium lamps.
The lamps sat on simple metal trays arrayed with a wide variety of hand-made tools: pipe bowls, spittoon shaped pots the size of shot glasses, thin metal rods similar to needles, little pairs of scissors, brushes made from animal hair, and what looked like narrow putty knives in a myriad of shapes. I watched as people extracted stamp-sized rectangles of a black, gooey substance from wooden containers the size of ammo boxes.
As I passed one doorway I saw an old man using the little tools on his tray to roll the black substance—opium, obviously—into a ball about the size of a pill over the opium lamp. His fingers worked skillfully and deftly, and he seemed to be taking special care not to overheat the little black ball. There were three people around him, all lying down. He was the only one handling the drug paraphernalia.
From what I could tell, the smoking of opium was a somewhat complex process that required a certain amount of practice to accomplish skillfully. The goal seemed to be to shape the black stuff into a small sphere, heat it to the right temperature, and then inhale intoxicating vapors through the long stem of a pipe. The people lying around the lamps did not seem stoned to the point they could not move. Rather, it appeared they chose to recline because it was easier to put their pipes over the lamp that way. If anything, the drug users seemed mildly energized by the experience. The old man doing all the work must have been an attendant of sorts.
The more residences I passed, the more I realized this theory was most likely correct. There seemed to be
a place every couple of blocks—dens, for lack of a better term—where people gathered to smoke opium. No effort was made to conceal the actions of the people within. Each den seemed to have at least one person tasked with assisting the smokers, and at least one other person tending to their other needs. The dens were dimly lit, cloth hangings keeping air movement from disturbing the opium lamps.
I came to within a few blocks of where I once lived in this district. My steps slowed involuntarily. I kept my face blank, but maintained a high level of alertness. Since arriving in the district, I had noticed groups of young men covered in crude tattoos standing on corners conversing, usually under a shade of some sort. Young boys and even a few girls approached them and handed them small cloth bags. One of the young men took the bags, disappeared into a shack, and came back out with the bags empty. He gave each kid a small box, an empty bag, and sent them on their way.
Street gangs selling opium.
Booze was also a common theme. Not everyone seemed into the drug scene, but those who weren’t had no problem drinking moonshine. I saw children as young as ten or eleven doing shots with their parents. Troops of teenage girls giggled and squealed around packs of teenage boys with bottles in their hands and leers on their faces. Many of the boys had similar tattoos to the young men hanging out on the corners. It did not take a genius to grasp the neighborhood dynamic.
My old place was a few lots up around a curve in the street. I walked toward it until I was staring at the doorway. My feet felt rooted to the ground.
The container had some rust on the outside. Someone had painted it with illegible symbols and pictures I could only assume were gang tags. Four young men were sitting around a plastic table under a wide patio umbrella playing cards, bottles of clear liquor at their elbows, the smell of marijuana thick in the air. A couple of girls who could not have been a day over fifteen sat with the boys, both of them on someone’s lap. The boys treated them like accessories, something to be displayed. I wondered how long it take the girls to wind up pregnant.
Looking past them, I saw the interior of my old home. Gone was the bed, the chairs, the small dinner table, the cookware hanging from the ceiling. There were a few ratty couches and boxes of various trade items. It was clear the youngsters at the table did not live here. It was a place to hang out and store trade, nothing more.
I thought of all the nights I had spent here with Sophia, the two of us sitting by the light of a single candle trying to convince each other things would work out somehow. I thought about all the exhausted evenings listening to Sophia make a meal of whatever meager food we had, and her gentle hands as she tried to massage the soreness from my back after hours spent working on the city’s outer wall. I thought about how we had shared a bed in that cramped space, my hand cupped around her pregnant belly at night, a small new life moving under her skin, and dreaming about a future that would never come to pass.
And now, the place where all these precious memories had been created was nothing more than a clubhouse where street punks drank, got high, and fucked underage girls. My gaze shifted back to the boys at the table. They seemed to have noticed me. One of them got up and began walking in my direction.
“You looking for somethin’?” he asked. Not hostile, just curious.
“I thought I was.”
The young man’s eyebrows came together. He was about my height, slender as a cane, covered in tattoos and scars, and had bright hazel eyes turned old by hardship and violence. I guessed his age at nineteen or twenty, just a kid when the Outbreak happened.
“The fuck does that mean?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
He looked at the other guys at the table, then back at me. “Whatever you need, son, we got it. Shine, dream, smoke, pussy, whatever.”
“Not here for that.”
He surprised me by laughing. “You must be new here, son. I seen you watching us play cards. Gambling your thing? We got places for that too. Craps, blackjack, hold ‘em. Hell, there’s motherfuckers around here play Russian roulette.”
I stared at him and said nothing. The pounding of my heart was loud in my ears. A slow coldness started in my belly and spread outward through my limbs. The young man in front of me stepped closer, head tilted, looking at me like a particularly interesting bug.
“Hello? Anybody home?”
My fists clenched.
A hand waved in front of my face. “Yo, you fucking retarded or something?”
This elicited a round of laughter from the table. The girls looked at me condescendingly, their soft faces twisted in youthful scorn.
I don’t know why the next few sentences came out of my mouth. Maybe it was old, nearly forgotten pain coming to the surface after being submerged for so long. Maybe it was the irrational anger I was beginning to feel toward the kid in front of me and his buddies for desecrating the one place in this whole damned town I had ever had a moment’s happiness. Or maybe I just needed an outlet and I didn’t care who caught the heat.
I said, “I used to live here a couple of years ago. Neighborhood was a lot nicer back then. No drugs, no little shitbags like you lording over the place.”
The kid’s face went blank, his skin reddening. “The fuck you say?”
I met his eyes. “You heard me.”
The boys at the table put down their cards and bottles. They didn’t even bother telling the girls to move, they just stood up. The girls took the hint and scrambled away. The three gang members produced knives as if by magic and fanned out as they approached.
“You just fucked with the wrong one, son,” the kid in front of me said.
His hand moved toward his back. The others were within ten feet now. I did not have much time. Nevertheless, I felt a smile crease my face. My heart rate increased even more as I felt the warm flow of adrenaline hit my veins. The world seemed to slow, the movements of the gangbangers impossibly sluggish.
“Let’s see about that,” I said.
My feet were planted firmly. The swing came up from the ground, through my hips, and out my shoulder like a whip. My left arm shot out straight, all two hundred and twenty pounds going into the punch. There was a meaty thunk, and the kid talking to me went down like he’d been shot. The other three stopped.
“Anyone else?” I said looking at the others, still grinning like a madman.
They came as one, trying to encircle me. I went straight at them. The first one, a short little guy no older than eighteen, tried a deft little upward thrust at my groin. I sidestepped it, caught his hand, and nailed him in the orbital socket with an elbow. Bone crunched and skin split, splashing both of us with blood. The kid screamed, dropped his knife, and went down clutching his face.
The other two were faster. One came high, the other low. I leapt sideways, rolled, and popped to my feet. When I came up, I had my knife in my hand. The boys hesitated, then came on again. Rather than wait, I threw my knife at the closest one’s face. I am no expert knife thrower, but I usually hit what I’m aiming at. This time was no different. The knife hit pommel first just above the gangbanger’s upper lip. He stopped, spit out a tooth and a mouthful of blood, brought his hand to his mouth, and ran in the other direction. The other boy paid no attention and attacked, probably figuring I wouldn’t be able to handle him barehanded.
He figured wrong.
His blade came at my face, then switched directions toward my arm. I dodged sideways and lashed out with a kick at the side of his knee. He was off balance, too much weight on the leg. There was a crunch and a scream before he fell. By the angle of his leg, he would probably never walk right again.
I drew my Sig, screwed on the suppressor, and calmly walked away.
*****
The girls must have run straight to the gang member’s friends.
There were eight of them positioned along a cross street as I headed southward. Looking past them, I saw no other enemies waiting. That did not mean they weren’t there, but I had a feeling whatever gang I had jus
t offended had decided to wait for me at the edge their territory. And unlike the punks at my old hovel, these shitweasels had guns.
To their credit, they tried to keep it low-key. There were no shouts, no challenges, no tattooed thugs running toward me shooting wildly. I had been kind of hoping they would. Dangerous for the residents around here, but the commotion would work in my favor. When bullets start flying, chaos ensues. People start running. A panicked crowd of bystanders would make it easier for me to slip away. Sadly, the gangbangers weren’t that stupid.
When I was half a block away, I decided to force their hand by turning left through a yard full of people getting roaring drunk. A few of them looked about to say something until they saw the gun in my hand and the expression on my face. Whatever they saw there caused them to raise their hands and back off.
“Hey, easy man,” someone said. “Don’t want no trouble.”
I ignored them and kept walking. The crowd watched me pass. I turned right again, double-backed the way I had come, and hunched down behind a heap of junk piled against a container’s metal wall. Angry voices and rapid footsteps approached. I let them pass, turned back, and ran to the next block over, glimpsing between containers as I went. People noticed me, but so far no one was shouting. That wouldn’t last long.
When I finally found a spot where I thought no one could see me, I tossed the Sig on a rooftop and followed it up. Then I lay flat, gun in hand, waiting.
“Hey, you. Where the fuck did he go?”
“What?” The voice sounded drunkenly confused.