The Zone

by RW Krpoun

  For cooking and drinking I preferred bottled water over what ran through the old pipes in my place, so I took my little cart along, carrying it folded up. It was a bit cloudy and cool, but otherwise nice; my street was fairly deserted, offices being closed on weekends. I cut over a couple blocks to a dollar store I frequented for minor trips; as I suspected, the town was still standing. There were a couple windows being boarded up at the gas station where I exchanged propane bottles, the shattered glass getting swept up by a bored looking Hispanic teenager wearing a mp3 player, and half a block down a tired-looking wrecker driver was winching a crumpled Audi onto his flatbed, business as usual.

  There were a couple streamers of yellow plastic crime scene tape fluttering from light poles in the buck mart parking lot, and a chunky Paki girl in an employee smock was trying to hose off what looked like a large puddle of dried blood; a workman was putting up sheets of plywood over a big window (actually, the now-empty place where a window should go) while the manager watched. I knew the manager from my patrol days, a short chunky guy from Pakistan (odds were the short chunky employee with the hose was a daughter or niece) named Malsomethingsomethingkin. He was a bit gray-faced and unhappy looking.

  “Morning, sir,” I greeted him. “Vandals?”

  “Ah, Seer-jah-ant, how are you?” he tried to smile at me, but it didn’t really come off very well. His white shirt under his polyester manager’s vest was grimy and ripped at the left cuff, and his left ear was bandaged. “No, we have trouble in plenty for ourselves. Last night your policeman shoot a miscreant in our parking lot, and this morning as I arrive there is a trouble with the bums, the home-less. My cashier is at the clinic getting the stitches, and my shirt is ruined. The window, I’m not sure how it broke during the trouble. I think a cart hit it when my assistant manager hit the bum with a stick.” He was sweating, and his sing-song accent was competing with phlegm.

  “You’re all right?”

  “Yes, indeed, I am fine, just some scrapes from the blacktop.” He tended to pronounce ‘the’ as ‘thee’. “But I am getting the flu. Good thing the cold medicine is on sale, yes?” He did better with the smile, but his heart was not really in it.

  The store was busier than usual and carts seemed to be fuller than normal; I put two 24-packs of water bottles into my cart and balanced a third on top; after paying I would use my bungee cord to strap it down. It was more water than I really needed, but what the hell; I would drink it eventually, and they were the last three cases left. I picked up Friday’s and today’s paper at the checkout.

  Dragging my cart home I heard more sirens than usual for Saturday before noon, but it was a busy week. More gang trouble, I decided. I detoured a block and picked up a bucket of wings (half & half: spicy/crispy); they had a dispenser with the New York Times in front that was hung up so I helped myself to a free issue, having long ago sworn never to give that rag a cent of my money after they had bad-mouthed my old unit.

  As I limped home, arms full and the scent of deep-fried breading making the world a better place I considered calling one buddy or another to see about the shooting Malsomething had mentioned, and the whole madhouse week in general, but decided against it; everyone would be working extra hours, and I didn’t want to chance ruining the all-too-short sleep periods for working cops in this sort of week. It could wait until things quieted down.

  The papers were full of not much; there was a big crisis between India and China and adjoining states, some sort of border clashes or border war or secession of provinces or something. Each side was issuing radically conflicting statements regarding what they were doing and what was being done to them, and none agreed with anyone else’s, while the few media sources in the zone were even more confused. The crisis in Turkey was prompting the accelerated withdrawal of Coalition forces from the Middle East, but I didn’t know what the ongoing crisis in Turkey was, and really didn’t care. Mexico City was under martial law and a failed coup was rumored but no hard data was available; the President had ordered forces from the Pacific to California in case Mexico got worse; this included most overseas USMC forces and the last combat brigade in South Korea. The US elements in Europe were also coming home temporarily in case a border crisis emerged. It looked like the White House was using various troubles as an excuse to radically realign US troop deployments without the usual domestic fall-out about appeasement and abandonment. All in all, nothing terribly exiting.

  Riots had been reported in big urban sprawls on the East and West coasts, and violent crime was spiking in a lot of cities; Guard and Reserve units returning from overseas were already being alerted for state duty, and our governor was ordering the call-up of several battalions. The talking heads were throwing around the usual excuses: racial tension, the prison culture, prison gang influences, the severity of the US justice system, the weakness of the US judicial system, corporal punishment, the lack of corporal punishment, the welfare state, the shoddy state of American education, the economic crisis, unemployment, violence in pop culture, violence in music, and so forth.

  My practical observations from a life spent at society’s weak points was that messed-up people produced messed-up children, and since everyone lived longer despite their best efforts, that meant the pool of screws-ups was growing by leaps and bounds.

  What I learned in specific was that our urban area had a healthy little gang/drug conflict going on, and that avian flu was making the rounds. A curfew was going into effect tonight from 1900 to 0600, as the primary problems were occurring at night.

  That last gave me a twinge that I couldn’t put my finger on, but I shrugged it off and settled down to eat wings and watch a DVD of John Wayne riding into Mexico with a red lockbox.

  I opened my eyes, completely alert; I hadn’t awakened like this since a year after leaving the Army: one second asleep, the next wide awake and alert. I was lying on my sofa, the room illuminated by the blue box that was the DVD screen saver bouncing around the screen. I must have dozed off-last I remembered Lee Marvin was training the Dozen.

  The noise that woke me repeated itself: the knob on my front door turning. There was a Colt Combat Elite on the black plastic milk crate near the couch, along with my remotes; I grabbed it and eased towards the door, thumb on the slide safety, index finger on the hot switch for the laser sight/flashlight mounted under the frame. There was a blurry shadow cast onto the butcher paper from the street light outside, and the knob turned a third time; this time a shoulder hit the door frame surprisingly hard. Very surprisingly hard-that had to hurt.

  It wouldn’t work-the dead bolt at the center door was two inches of stainless steel extending into concrete. I kicked the sliding bolt at the base of the door and shoved up the one at the top of the door: now you would need a vehicle ram or a cutting torch to get through the door. “Beat it, asshole.”

  A noise somewhere between a scream and a howl made me jump and the door rattled as the intruder threw himself into it full force. A tweaker, no doubt.

  “Beat it, nimrod: I’m not in the mood.” The door rattled again.

  Muttering, I turned on the pistol’s flashlight and headed upstairs, pausing to light up my back door: fully locked and barred. My phone was still in my vest, and completely dead; I couldn’t remember when I had last charged it, or how many battery bars had been showing last time I had used it. I plugged it in and listened at the head of stairs: the tweaker was still banging on my door. Asshole.

  I got my mop bucket and filled it three quarters full of water before climbing to the roof. It was a nice clear night; I paused to look at the stars before limping to the front of the building, stopping abruptly at what was clearly the rattle of small-arms fire to the north. Not a few pops of some jerk-off throwing a few rounds at the sky to impress a girl or scare a foe, nor the sudden wild inaccurate spray of a drive-by, but the deliberate crackling roll of several shooters who knew their business firing for both and speed and accuracy. It continued long enough that at least two shooters stopped t
o reload. From the sound it was one group, not a firefight. What the hell could it be? Buildings made sound tricky but I would put it at a half mile away. There were sirens, there always were on this area on a Saturday night, not all that many. There were helicopters, though, military birds flying in formation, only their red lights showing, maybe a dozen.

  What the hell? The skyline looked normal, one good fire going off across the access way, but fires weren’t that uncommon, lots of empty buildings and meth labs over that way. Another rattle of fire, this time to the east, further out, ten or so shooters putting out maybe a dozen rounds each. A squad-sized element, I thought, and wondered at the thought: I wasn’t overseas. There was a curfew on, I remembered, so those could be checkpoints, but what sort of situation called for that kind of fire? Plus, those were long guns, and the department only had a few. Patrol had one shotgun per three officers, but those weren’t shotguns.

  The ass-munch was kicking my door, so I positioned myself carefully and poured most of a gallon of not-very-clean water down onto him. There had been an awning shading the sidewalk in front of my building once, the brackets were still in place, but it had been discarded long before I got here.

  The tweaker shrieked and charged into the street, tripped, and thrashed madly until he regained his feet. He must have heard me chuckling, because he looked wildly around, literally turning in a full circle twice like he had forgotten how to turn his head. No matter how much he looked, he never raised his head above the horizontal despite the fact that I was laughing so hard at this point I had dropped the empty plastic bucket on my foot.

  By the time I got my breath back he was staggering around the side of my place, across the law office parking lot, still looking for who was laughing at him, a poster child for the dangers of drug use.

  I gathered up my bucket and went inside, making sure the roof hatch was bolted before crashing.

  It was nearly noon when I woke up Sunday having slept well for the third day in a row; I worked out, showered, and nuked what was left of the wings for breakfast. Kicking on flip-flops I checked my front door, which was undamaged but blood-spattered-the tweaker had really gone at it. I splashed some bleach on the blood and then hosed the area off.

  The water pressure faltered twice while I was hosing off the sidewalk; it had faltered once while I was showering; I was thinking about that and not much else, my thumb cold where I had it clamped over the hose opening to get the pressure up, when I heard someone yell. Actually, more a shriek like when a woman who sees a mouse unexpectedly, the kind where they slap a hand over their own mouth in mid-yelp.

  I turned and saw a woman in her early thirties standing in the middle of the street which intersected with the one my place faced; she was wearing a brown polyester skirt and a white blouse with a gold name tag hanging by one peg; her hair had been up but half was loose and straggling everywhere, and her hose were dirty and running above sensible shoes. She stood there with her hands clapped to her mouth, eyes wide, a smudge of grime across her forehead. I stood on the sidewalk with the hose hissing water past my thumb into the gutter and stared back at her.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” I finally asked, feeling kind of stupid.

  She shook her head, hands still at her mouth.

  “Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance? Are you diabetic?” Old habits.

  “I…I…I,” she lowered her hands, which were dirty. “I was in…”

  That seemed to be a starting point. “Were you in an accident? Did someone hurt you?” She was sweating and her blouse was dirty, but she looked like she had been clean, tidy, and respectable when she got up this morning.

  “My car,” she shuddered. “My car…I was…”

  “OK, you’re OK now.” I turned off the faucet and unscrewed the hose. “Lets get you some help. My name is Martin, I’m a retired police officer. Who are you?”

  “They…they are coming,” she was staring back the way she came.

  I snapped the locking cap on the faucet into place. Leave it unguarded for a minute in this berg and you’re buying drinking water for half the dopers in a fifty mile radius. “Who’s coming?” Keeping my hands in plain sight but down at my sides I walked across the cracked and buckling concrete to the corner and looked down the street. Two blocks to the east the elevated concrete access road loomed like a castle wall. I noticed that the building across the alley from mine had bright sparkles of shattered glass under the windows, but I didn’t see anyone. “Looks like you lost them. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll call for an ambo…ambulance and contact anyone you need to talk to. Were you on your way to work?”

  “Yes…yes…work, I work at the Ryecroft Hotel, the Airport Ryecroft.” She was twisting her hands, but at least they were at her waist.

  “I’ve seen it.” I stepped into the gutter. “Are you hurt?”

  It was a cry, a moaning howl, a sort of inflection-less call, emotionless and full of import at the same time. I have heard people making noise from every sort of physical pain and mental anguish and nothing I had ever heard sounded like that. It spoke straight to my spinal column, though: I crouched, hands in fists, keenly aware that I was unarmed and outside my place. It came from the direction she had come from. “You better come inside…”

  She was gone; I spotted her a half block to the west pelting down the center of the street as fast as tired legs that hadn’t done any serious running in years could carry her. With my knee there was no way I was going to catch her; glancing back to the east I saw people coming down the street at a purposeful trot, and headed back to my front door, leaving the hose where it lay.

  The front door locked and barred, I headed up the stairs, grabbing a riot shotgun I kept in a corner at the top in passing. Up on the roof I gimped over to the east and saw the people in question already crossing the intersection. They were a mixed bunch, dirty, disheveled, a couple bloody, all moving with a purpose in the same direction the woman had taken. There were about a dozen, an odd mix of races and ages; I yelled, but none faltered, continuing to move west as if in pursuit of the woman I had seen.

  Cursing my knee I scrambled back down, careful to shoot the hatch’s bolt on the way, and got to my phone.

  911 rang and rang; I counted thirty-five rings before I got an answer, and I hadn’t starting counting right away. A harried operator interrupted me before I got my entire address out. “Are you under personal attack?”

  “What? No, but there is this woman…”

  “Sir are you in a building or vehicle?”

  “Yeah…I’m at home.”

  “Lock your doors, cover all windows, like a blackout, use cloth or tape. Do not engage strangers. Stay indoors. Utility service may be interrupted, do not call if it does.” Click.

  I set the phone down, shocked, then picked it up and checked that I had in fact called 911. The operator had said that last bit in the fashion of someone repeating something they had said over and over.

  Lock your doors. Blackout. Stay indoors. Avoid strangers. What the hell was going on?

  I called my ex, and got voicemail; I tried my daughter and got the same. I had never bothered to program many numbers so I had to find my address book to start calling friends in the Department. I kept getting voice mail, but finally I reached Fred Jackson, a guy I had served with in Tactical. He was fading in and out, the signal popping and clicking. “Fred? This is Martin D’Erin, can you talk?”

  “Martin? Hey-I can barely hear you. Where are you?”

  “At home-where are you?”

  “Home! Good Lord, are you still in town? Damn, Slick, get the hell out! I’m two hundred miles north and still driving.”

  “What is going on? I’ve been out of touch.”

  “Its crazy, just crazy. The Guard arrived…today’s Sunday…Saturday afternoon, and I think Regular Army a few hours later. Around twenty-two hundred they said martial law, use of force now verbal command, then deadly force. In writing, slick. I think about twenty officers are dead, m
ust be a hundred injured, the hospitals are a mess, everyone is going crazy, slick, I mean insane, big bunches of people. Around five I said to hell this and headed home, got my family.”

  “What? You quit your post? Fred, you’re Tactical.”

  “Martin, Patrol has had guys fading since yesterday afternoon; the desk jockeys were fading even sooner. Hell, my whole team packed it in; we were almost out of ammo in any case. Martin, we were killing people, and the orders from the brass is just call in the time, place, body count, and badge number into the automated recorders we used to use to dictate reports, remember? The ones you could get from any pay phone?”

  “What is wrong with people?”

  Static buzzed and then Fred cut in “…lost a substation, I mean over-run, Slick, like the freaking Alamo …you better …never seen anything …good…family…” the connection died.

  I sat on my cot. Fred wasn’t one to joke, not like this. He was a Sergeant, a good cop. An entire Tactical team packing in, deserting their posts? Patrol officers bailing? This wasn’t Louisiana for crying out loud-police officers don’t just run off in the face of an emergency. Oh, sure, the sort of losers who go into Training or Internal Affairs slots, screw-ups and cowards and the terminally useless, but not line officers. Not real police. And Fred was the real deal.

  And shooting people with just a verbal report? What the hell?

  But it explained the gunfire I had heard last night; military units with low-velocity rules of engagement. But why were they shooting people? Rioters were something I had experienced: the dregs of society trying to get even, cowards who would break and run when the gas was followed by batons. Brave at burning cars and smashing windows, but otherwise punks grandstanding for a photo and ten-second news clip. Looters were just thieves. Neither was worth the price of a bullet.

  Then I thought about the single-minded crew I had seen running past: they seemed different. They might need a bullet to stop.