by Don Shift
Marco was focusing on a fist fight between a driver and a looter when he felt and heard someone drop into the back of his truck. A man with a pair of bolt cutters had hopped over the tailgate and was trying to cut the cable lock that held two fuel cans in Marco’s bed. This infuriated Marco beyond words. He dismounted, turning off his truck and pocketing the keys as he got out.
The thief noticed the loud thrum of the diesel engine stop and looked up to see Marco pointing his .45 caliber Glock in his face. The muzzle looked very large.
“Get out of my truck.”
“Screw you, man,” a voice said from his right. Marco didn’t see the man with the cocked baseball bat hidden behind a sedan at first. Hearing footsteps, he swung his pistol and faced the man with the bat. The thief in the truck moved and drew Marco’s attention. Marco ducked just in time to avoid the swing of bolt cutters directed at his head. Marco fired two rounds into the chest of the gas thief before turning back to the guy with the bat. He had to duck again as the bat swung over his head and smashed out the window of a sedan. The woman driving the sedan screamed and Marco fired twice more at the bat swinger, making solid hits.
Thankfully the gas thief’s body happened to fall out of the truck when the thief was shot. Marco quickly got back in his truck. The three cars that blocked his way moved forward to get away from the shooting. Looters were running in every direction. Marco started his truck and tossed his pistol into the cup holder and pulled out into the intersection, colliding with a shopping cart. A big-screen TV—clearly a display model as it wasn’t in a box—fell out as a jumble of video games and assorted items flew into the air. The man pushing the car reached under his over-sized white t-shirt and pulled a black pistol from his pants. There were gun shots and the truck bed rang with their impact.
Marco stepped on the gas and floored it out of the intersection, going the wrong way but getting out of harm’s way. For a minute or two, he drove fast and as far away from the trouble as he could, only stopping behind an empty building to get his bearings. Adrenaline surged through his body. He was unusually excited. No remorse, just tired and grateful to be alive. It was a much different feeling than the apprehension and sense of doom that serious fights on-duty brought.
Once he got back on the street, he made his way to Erika’s place. Blacks were outside milling around. None of the diverse ethnicities that lived in the complex the last time he was here were anywhere to be seen. While this wasn’t unusual in and of itself, the groups clustered together and walking around were not the usual folks barbecuing or neighbors having a chat. Since the complex was in a mixed area on the border between majority black and Hispanic areas, the Section 8 office did a good job of keeping the area from being a single-race ghetto.
At the end of the cul-de-sac, Marco made a U-turn and drove up to the curb in front of Erika’s building. Everyone looked and saw two bullet holes in the side panel and a smear of blood down the bed side of the truck. He got out, put his backpack on over the chest rig he was already wearing, slung his rifle, and headed for the door.
“Hey Rambo.” A man stepped in front of Marco, flanked by two other men. The man wore a dirty ‘Fairplay Chevy’ t-shirt and baggy jeans. He had to be in his late-thirties and too old to be dressed like that. “Where you going?”
Marco raised his rifle to the low-ready position. “Back off!” he ordered.
“Whoa, who do you think you are pointing that gun at me?” The man and his friends began walking forward.
“Back off and get away from this apartment! I will not tell you twice.”
The ‘leader’ threw up his hands and quickly walked away. Marco tracked them with the aiming reticule of his scope hovering over their center of mass until they were fifty feet away.
“We’ll be back!” one of them yelled. “We’ll mess you up good.”
“No you won’t, or you’ll be dead men!”
Shame hit Marco pretty hard for warning off the men like that. Scared of black people now, what would Nana say? Of mixed race himself, he felt that he should have been a bit more tactful. Even so, he was still instinctually afraid; no, that was the wrong word. He was wary of them knowing that in times of crisis humans tended to revert to their tribal instincts.
Marco slowly approached Erika’s apartment, looking around him carefully, making eye contact. A blonde woman was peeking out through the blinds. He felt relieved that she was both safe and here. Erika quickly opened the door and Marco went in, not before hearing an older woman call out a warning: “You better watch out.”
Marco set down his backpack and rifle to give Erika a good, long hug.
“I probably should have told you I loved you when you were still interested in me.”
She smiled. “I didn’t know you fell in love with me.”
“I was afraid to say it. You knew how things were between us. The last time I saw you, I nearly told you, but you seemed a bit distant.”
“True.” For a few weeks, things had deteriorated between them until Erika had decided that she was finished with Marco and needed to move on. “Remember what I told you that night you called a couple weeks after we broke up?” Erika asked.
“‘I don’t want to see you again unless it’s the end of the world.’” She smiled at the irony. “Why do you think I came for you? I’m getting you out of here. Let’s pack up. You’re never coming back here again.”
As she packed her things, she told him about a burglary a few days ago, where she came home to find her small collection of jewelry gone. In tears, she told them how the three men tried to grab her last night, presumably to rape her. She fought them off only with pepper spray and by wildly waiving around a small pocketknife.
“Why didn’t you buy a gun like I told you to months ago?”
“Because I didn’t need one then.” Erika shrugged at him.
Glass shattered and voices cheered. Marco ran to the front window and saw flames in the cab of his truck. The men he had confronted were burning it. The emotion he felt was a mix of homicidal anger and helplessness.
“Those scumbags!” The need for instant reaction overpowered the incredible sense of indignant anger within. “Erika, where is your fire extinguisher?”
“Under the sink.”
Marco grabbed the extinguisher and slung his rifle. As he stepped out in front of the apartment, he was pelted by a shower of rocks and bottles that drove him back inside.
“What is it?”
“I don’t think they’ll let me put out the fire. Savages, animals. I ought to shoot them for this.” He looked at the growing flames, doubting there was much he could do. He cursed himself for not watching the truck more closely and shooting the son of a bitch who did it. The thought of wasting any of the fools within range was tempting, but outright murder was a little too much.
Where is this coming from? he wondered. His entire professional life had been centered around restraining the use of violence, but today it had flowed—in deed and thought—freely. Part of its was Sam’s fault for the long discussions of man’s inhumanity towards man and how the law of the jungle was now firmly in play. A switch had been flipped. Men like Marco and Sam were men who were accustomed to the need for disciplined violence and using it appropriately like a tool. As cops, they knew what evil lurked in the heart of man and that the saying “there’s more folk that need killing” held much truth. The mental shift surprised Marco.
When Erika had finished packing, dusk was falling. At least no one had bothered him when he loaded several boxes into her car half an hour ago. Now, a small group of men armed with various bludgeoning devices were milling around in front of the apartment, obviously waiting for them. They knew that Marco and Erika were packing to leave, and it was only a matter of time before they both had to come out to the garage.
“Ready to go?” Marco asked.
“Yeah. What are we going to do about them?”
“Don’t worry about them. I’m going to get the car ready.”
He too
k the keys and stepped outside, his pistol held behind his right leg.
“Where you going?” one of the men asked.
“I don’t want any trouble. Back off and leave us alone and no one will get hurt.”
“Oh, somebody’s gonna get hurt.”
Marco saw the man’s arm slightly tense up as he raised what looked like a two-by-four. I don’t want this, Marco thought. There were three men all within fifteen feet of him, he was not confident enough in his pistols skills to kill three men charging at him from such a short distance. The better option was to run back inside. He had just made it inside the door and locked it when the two-by-four guy body slammed it, jarring the cheap doorframe loose in the wall and cracking the casing. Marco shoved Erika down behind the couch as he took aim at the front door. It would give away under a second blow. He sorely wished for a shotgun.
The second blow never came. The first sounded pretty painful, but the attack wasn’t over yet. The two-by-four crashed through the front window, tearing a hole in the blinds. Marco fired six times at the two-by-four and was rewarded with a scream. The smoke alarm blared from the smoke of burnt gunpowder. Threats were yelled by the bad guys, but the attack stopped. After a few minutes, he got up and peered out the hole.
“Erika, how did it get this bad?”
“I don’t know. No one was like this before.”
“When did you last see those two old ladies, the white ones?”
“I don’t know. I went to check on one of them and it looked like her door had been kicked open. She didn’t answer.”
“Have you noticed the attitude change around here before Friday?”
“Yeah, since Trump got elected.”
President Obama was supposed to be the president that ended racism in America, but one way or another he encouraged it, most likely by refusing to hold minorities accountable for their contributions to their own unfortunate situations. Illegal immigration and disrespect for the law was practically encouraged by the Democratic Party building fractures in American society that were waiting for one volatile event to explode. Well, the gas had now been dumped on the fire and the fear and uncertainty of surviving the EMP fed on all the hate and negativity that had gone before. Since there was no emotional relief in blaming a near-magical disaster from space for the weekend’s troubles, the only outlet for the fear-turned-hate was in whatever tensions had already been simmering. It was all tribal now.
“What are we going to do?” Erika asked. She was trying her best to be brave, but the quivering in her voice gave away the fact that the stress she had been feeling for the last several days was about to break.
“Don’t worry sweetie, we’ll get out of here just fine. Just next time you look for a place to live, listen to me when I tell you where not to move and get a place with a garage you can reach from inside the apartment.”
Marco looked out the window and planned his exit. Only the two original attackers remained. He guessed that these guys were trying to take over the complex and this afternoon was their way of demonstrating their competency to the remaining neighbors. The guys who owned guns must be elsewhere. A few teenagers appeared interested in joining in but were shooed away and hung back across the street.
“We have to leave now. Are you ready?”
She nodded. “Gather your things.” Erika picked up her handbag. Most of her possessions were already loaded into her car. She took a last look around her home and sighed wistfully. It hadn’t been a very good home, but it had been hers for the better part of two years. They ran out the door to the garage. Marco lifted the garage door open and Erika backed her car out. They quickly switched places once he lowered the door.
A crowd of residents, who disappeared after the first shots, had come back out and gathered around the fallen bodies. Several of them looked and pointed at Marco.
The residents of Pacific Pines forgot how they had been united with their white and Hispanic neighbors by poverty. Students eating Ramen and pregnant women on food stamps notwithstanding, years of isolation and turmoil had made them into nothing more than strangers in close proximity to each other. The crowd around the bodies began to walk towards the stopped Honda.
Marco had forgotten what his field training officer had told him. Crooks were not stupid, even if they were only street smart. Over the months, they had caught glimpses of Marco’s pressed pants, a slip of his gun, and his neat haircut. They knew he was a cop. From the other day in Sylmar, he knew that the former kings of the urban jungle were now on the menu.
Erika looked at Marco, fear in her eyes.
He spoke without bidding. “Just stay calm and trade places.” She did as she was told, shutting the door and snapping her seat belt.
“Take your belt off in case we have to bail out fast. Don’t stop running until you are behind solid cover.” Marco shifted the car into forward gear and slowly creeped towards the street. He stopped when the bumper tapped the shins of a young man.
“Yo, where you goin’?”
Marco honked and waved his hands in a parting motion.
The man cursed Marco. “I ain’t movin’ and you ain’t gonna run my ass over neither.”
Marco put the car in reverse and backed up a few feet until people moved in behind and blocked his way out. Two more men joined the first in blocking in the front.
“What are we going to do Marco?”
Marco said nothing. He shifted into drive and honked the horn. His breathing was fast, and his eyes were locked on those of the first man in front of him. Marco revved the engine. With a loud smack, a fist hit the side window, startling both him and Erika. Marco floored the gas pedal. Two of the men were knocked over, the Honda’s right wheels rolling over a foot or a leg. The third landed on the hood, scrabbling to find a handhold. He eventually found the windshield wipers.
Marco stopped the car as suddenly as he started, forcing the man on the hood to hang on tighter. He was only a few yards from the crowd and men armed with bats and rocks began to run towards the car, raising their weapons. Ignoring the man on the hood, Marco accelerated again. A small rock shattered the back window as the Honda hatchback turned the corner and accelerated onto a main street.
The man on the hood was pounding on the side of the car with his free hand. Pedestrians stared in shock as the little Honda rocketed down the street. Jerking the wheel violently from side to side caused the man’s legs to slide and dangle over the side, where his feet dragged on the pavement. Somehow, he managed to get his legs back on the hood and into a spread-eagle position. Marco straightened the car out and accelerated to 70 miles per hour. He abruptly stepped on the brake pedal while pulling the handbrake. The car shook violently and wobbled back and forth as it panic stopped.
Marco’s hard braking maneuver paid off and sent the young man flying forward off the hood. While the car lost its inertia as it braked, the man on the hood kept his. The body rolled for about fifty feet before stopping. In a few seconds, Marco released the brake and was driving around the body. He looked over and saw Erika bent double in the passenger seat, hands pressed against her ears.
Even though the traffic lights were out and had been for some time, Marco kept his speed up, but slowed down at each intersection, scanning for cross traffic, never fully stopping, even when another car came. It wasn’t long until he was on the freeway and heading for home.
It was amazing how quickly things could fall apart. Marco felt nothing. During the incident, something within him had changed. When Erika had suggested that he shoot the arsonists, he refused out of—what? The fear of being caught was the most he could come up with. The moral aspect was what he gave as his main motivator at the time, but he doubted that feeling now. Had he not just done the same thing only minutes ago?
Watching the car burn, he felt the same kind of rage that Erika felt. He hated those men, he hated them for destroying his truck for such a silly matter of ego. Life as they knew it was forever changed and here, they were trying to destroy in a time when ev
eryone desperately needed to come together. It was done out of futility and spite. An in-your-face kind of “we’ll all burn” mentality. It had made him so angry at the time, yet he had tempered that with a feeling of guilt that prevented him from shooting them as they danced around his flaming vehicle.
Sometime during the night, the images of the men dancing around the flames worked on his mind. It was too easy to imagine them gloating over the dead and mutilated bodies of Erika and himself. Men who thought nothing of arson would think not much more about rape and murder.
Taking Off and Moving In
David caught a friend at the Wednesday morning shift change. His buddy was exhausted as he came in early the night before. All night something had been shaking. Three domestics, two prowler reports, and a foot chase of a burglary suspect on top of patrolling the empty stores and quieter neighborhoods. Plus the dead body calls and the hospital runs, which were just background noise for the night shift. Tensions were starting to flare in the heat. Coastal Ventura didn’t dip below 80 degrees last night, which was unusual. Most homes didn’t have air conditioning to begin with, but without fans, cold drinks, or electronic distractions the heat was all-consuming.
“Gas is running low, FYI. We ended up parking and taking turns sleeping. I’m not sure I can keep this up anymore.”
“Tell me about it. The Park n’ Ride looks like a friggin’ gypsy camp,” David said.
“Everyone’s coming up to escape the heat and the…the violence down there. People are starting to put up tents in the parks. You’ll get complaints about that for sure.”
David shrugged. “Not much we can do about that.”