by Don Shift
Mika looked at her feet. “I don’t know. The department has been good to me and I feel you were being a little bit cynical. It’s unfair for you to talk about me that way too.”
“You know what, my entire career I’ve seen ‘unfair.’ Guys getting ahead for arresting drug addicts for 11550 up the wazoo, never mind that they were booking the same people day in and day out. Guys who take the time to do community policing get crapped on by the sergeant because they don’t have the arrests that their partners do for putting the same dopers through the revolving door.”
Sam felt very strongly about how the department seemed to reward and promote people for that kind of behavior, rather the ones who actually made a difference on the street. From the day he started in Booking and saw the same lazy deputies making the same lazy arrests of the same drug addicts, he was disgusted by it. His complaint was that the brass and sergeants spent far too much time looking at stats and spreadsheets than actually understanding what was going on.
“How did you make SWAT in less than ten years then?”
“Prior military and yes, my Silver Star opens a few doors. But I’m a hard worker. All five-out-of-five on my evals that I earned.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve seen female trainees lionized only to show up in the jail salty as heck and fail because they didn’t have what it took to do the job, but just enough to pass the tests. I’ve seen the department turn its back on some good people. And you know what? They turned their back on you too. What in the heck were they thinking allowing a woman to interact alone with violent felons who do nothing but work out all day? Doesn’t that piss you off?”
She stopped and thought about what he was saying. Sam was implying that the department had a responsibility to protect her and they failed. They knowingly allowed a weaker person—as much as she might want to deny the limits of her petite, but muscular, frame—in an isolated environment with a larger, angry, violent criminal. This was the first time that she confronted that idea and felt the anger that came with it. Her partners had let her down by deserting and so did management by allowing the jail to become so short-staffed. “Maybe, a little,” she admitted, her anger building
“You know why I got so pissed, now? And I apologize for flying off the handle, but you’ve only had good experiences on the department until now. You had plenty of support getting into and through the academy. Everyone was invested in your success in the jail. It’s good for you, but it’s not right for me. My buddy Palmer got into the academy on his third try and he’s a heck of a cop. Call me misogynist or whatever, but they allowed this to happen to you and that makes me mad. Don’t get me wrong, I love the job, but when it bites you in the butt, it leaves one nasty mark.”
Sam took a deep breath.
Mika was silent for a moment before responding. “I had a boyfriend in college who said the Army was like that as well. He would tell me how much he missed it in one breath, and in another bitch non-stop about it.”
“The ways of the paramilitary lifestyle, it’s a double-edged sword.”
“Or like alcohol. Great only while you’re having fun.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Sam sat his chair back up and took a seat. “Why do they call you Freaky Fischer?”
“When I broke up with that loser, he started spreading rumors about me.” IA had investigated and her ex was severely reprimanded, but not after all the rumors, some true, and plenty of photographs had leaked out to most of the jail staff. “You have anybody ever hurt you like that?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Her name was Ashley. I met her in the Marines. We were together for years. We loved all the same things: Jeeps, camping, guns. We were engaged. Out of the blue, she tells me she’s going to go to Officer Candidate School. Just like that, it’s over. Wasn’t even cheating on me, but she wasn’t committed to me. For her, love was just a feeling and that little spark had gone out. When you’re in love, you’re in deep. But when you’re out, you’re out.”
“Runs a little parallel to your feelings about the department?”
“Yeah, well I never have gotten over my first two loves,” Sam wisecracked.
He got up and went into the house. In the reflection on the sliding glass door, he saw that Mika’s eyes had followed him across the patio. The question of whether there would be a third love, in the form of Mika, flittered uncomfortably in the back of his mind.
Two Weeks After the EMP
Zombies
Palmer didn’t like riding alone anymore. Villareal had ordered men to double up in two-man cars. No such order could last forever. There just weren’t enough bodies to go around. Gas was too precious for guys to make it to work to man their shift. Even one man in one car for every 100 square miles was a luxury now.
With the bulk of the looting over with, things were fairly quiet. Had the phones been operating, non-stop suspicious subject calls would be coming in. Check the well-being, request for a deputy, subject disturbance—he could hear the dispatcher reading the calls off in his head. All things neighbors should be doing for each other in a time like this. They should form a neighborhood watch and patrol their own streets. Check on the elderly folks, challenge the strangers walking down the street, handle your own trouble. It was pretty simple. Modern police had become a crutch for Americans to give up any responsibility for public safety.
One person was looking out for himself when he shot at two burglars that attempted to get into his house. Both of them got peppered with birdshot and ran, getting into their car just as the reload was completed and lead flew again. Somebody got hit by buckshot. Major Crimes should have responded, but instead Palmer bagged a couple pieces of broken safety glass and took pictures of the scene. His report, including witness statements, was pushed to a generous three pages, all handwritten neatly in pencil.
No good guys got hurt, so there was no priority in investigating the crime. Even the murder of gang members or known dirtbags were just getting cursory investigations now. Half of what was done was simply for documentary purposes as the department ran on bureaucratic inertia. It wasn’t like the beat car, now just one for the entire headquarters area stretching from Port Hueneme to Santa Barbara County, was going to somehow get the call-in time to make a difference. Not most of the time, anyway.
In a stroke of backhanded luck, Palmer got a call of a suspicious subject that had “just” broken into a home and was covered in blood. Some citizen had the brains to find a ham operator by the large antenna sticking above his house and got a message to Dispatch.
Rolling Code 3 across Ventura was just for show now and to warn the occasional bicyclist. Bike accidents were up, so Palmer let the siren scream as a warning to the two-wheelers who thought they owned the road now. Gas was too precious to waste. Bicycles were suddenly popular again with more than just the fit, hipsters, or repeat DUI offenders. Bike stores had sold out their stock or were looted.
The neighbors and the victims met David as he arrived on scene.
“Is anyone hurt?”
“No, but he sure is,” a baseball bat wielding neighbor said.
“He crashed through our sliding glass window. Just ran right through it. Cut his head, his arms, his back. There’s blood everywhere,” the victim said.
“Did he hurt anyone? Steal anything?”
The woman shook her head. “He scared the crap out of me and my kids. My husband chased him out of the house with the base of a lamp. He hit the guy a few times and he ran out the back.” The suspect had headed towards Saticoy, last seen about twenty minutes ago, qualifying under the new standards as a hot call.
Palmer didn’t have to chase long. Towards the end of Telephone Road, a bloody man in already filthy clothing was limping east. Palmer recognized the backpack. The suspect was a schizophrenic transient named Hector who lived with his aunt in Saticoy when he wasn’t on the streets. Lately, Hector had been doing pretty well with haloperidol injections every month that his public defender dragged him to.
A
s he approached, Palmer noticed the vague look in Hector’s eyes that darted back and forth as if scanning for danger.
“Hector, hold up. You got a second to talk?”
It looked like Hector spun his head backwards like an owl, only he had stopped and turned his whole body while his head moved. The visual effect was that of predator homing in on its prey. Palmer couldn’t quite tell if the desperate look on Hector’s face was one of being the hunter or the hunted. From seven yards down wind, the stench was incredible. Underneath the blood, Hector’s skin was black and sunburned in several places. His aunt must have kicked him out, something any sensible person would do with an unmedicated and violent schizophrenic.
Staring Palmer in the eye, Hector licked his lips. “Looking good Rick, looking good.”
“My name isn’t Rick, it’s Deputy Palmer. Remember me from Ojai?”
At the mention of Ojai, Hector snorted. His parents lived there and kicked him out of the house. For a while, their son slept in parks and panhandled in town until the local homeless community tired of his “trick” of peeing on sleeping people. After he went and finished his rounds through jail and the mental health system, he calmed down a bit and even held a job for a few weeks.
“Rick, it’s the end of the world. Don’t you know it?” He started to sing an off-key version of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as we Know It.” Palmer was impressed he knew all the lyrics.
“Hey, you’re bleeding. Why don’t I take you to the hospital and get you fixed up?”
“I remember what happened the last time you took me to the hospital. No thanks.” The 72-hour 5150 hold had turned into a lengthy stay in a mental health facility. “How did you get out of the hospital so soon? Where’s Shane?” It clicked finally. Hector was obsessed with “The Walking Dead” and was associating Palmer with the main character, the deputy sheriff known as Rick.
Hector started mumbling to himself and ignored the deputy for a moment. Palmer cautiously edged forward until Hector’s momentary trance broke. “Stay back, I’m gonna bite you. I’m turning into a walker.”
“Hector, you’re not a zombie.” For one, he talks way too much.
Suddenly Hector’s face turned malevolent. “Rick! Rick, I’m gonna bite you!”
The imagined zombie ran forward with his jaws open wide and emitting a deep, gurgling groan. Palmer hadn’t created enough room to draw his gun when the charge began. He stood his ground and dodged left at the last second, intending to draw his baton for a mahogany shampoo. Hector stopped and turned on a dime, startling Palmer who had never seen anyone so nimble. Now he was in a fix; too close to shoot, too close to swing his baton, and too close to run.
Instinct told him to put up his hands and fend Hector off. A canine handler once told him “If you’re gonna get bit, give the dog your arm.” He meant that if the dog couldn’t grasp the bite sleeve, he was going to bite the upper thigh, which hurt badly even through the protective coveralls and risked a nut shot. Palmer thought Why get bit somewhere worse? and held out his left arm.
Hector ignored the proffered limb and bit down instead on David’s right forearm that had been guarding his pistol. Even though he was delusional, he did not bite the neck like on film, conceivably because biting someone on the neck seemed too much like a kiss. Palmer was surprised that all of this was actually happening and that the bite hurt worse than he had expected. His right arm now in Hector’s mouth, David was unable to draw his gun.
In moments of extreme danger, the mind switches into a hyperactive mode that many have described as time slowing down. What really was happening was that the mind was processing things far faster than normal, grabbing every bit of sensory input it could and pushing out answers and solutions to stay alive.
In this strange twilight of dilated time where the seconds seemed to stretch into minutes, Palmer saw Hector’s dark brown skin. Although Hispanic and often well-tanned, Hector had never appeared like the color of rich soil. Flecks of dirt and tiny rolls of dried skin clung to his forehead. His matted hair seemed to squirm with unknown parasites, even if only in Palmer’s imagination. He noticed Hector’s revolting smell again, this time even more pungently in his nose. Blood, Palmer’s blood, was pouring out around yellowed teeth and black, tobacco stained gums.
A dog’s mouth would have been cleaner, he thought. Yeah, but Hector doesn’t lick his butthole, the other half of his consciousness answered. Are you sure? Doesn’t look like it matters. David was surprised at how much time he had for such ill-relevant thoughts.
The spell broke as quickly as it began. Palmer fumbled across his body, his left hand searching his right side for his flashlight. With a tug, the light came free of its pouch. He lifted and swung it, driving the aircraft aluminum “crenellated strike bezel” (or teeth, as they appeared) hard into Hector’s skull. The small light, barely longer than a fist, had little mass to it, but focused and amplified the strength of a human arm into four sharp points. Palmer delivered two more monster blows, but Hector kept biting.
Is he chewing on me?
Palmer drove the flashlight at a downward angle into Hector’s jaw, ripping the cheek wide open and exposing teeth, all the while the chewing continued. As the fourth blow descended, the flashlight slipped out of Palmer’s sweat and blood slicked hand. Instantly he fumbled at his side. Hector was too absorbed in his meal (Please God, don’t let him swallow) to notice.
David was desperate and couldn’t reach around his body to grab his gun. Instead, he jammed two fingers into Hector’s left eye, sticking them deep inside until his knuckles met the forehead, then, despite the screams, rotated his fingers once around, and with his thumb pinching, pulled out the eyeball. The zombie-obsessed schizophrenic broke out of his psychosis. Palmer pulled his arm away and hardly noticed Hector had stopped biting him.
The cold steel of David’s Sig Sauer P226 touched Hector’s head and a single 180 grain Gold Dot hollow point ended the attack. The shot was peculiarly muffled as the gun gases expanded inside the brain cavity. Palmer, slightly dazed, re-holstered and made it back to his unit. I shot a zombie in the head, he thought. I’m going to need rabies shots. He fainted.
After his brief blackout was over, David pulled himself up and drove to the hospital, leaving Hector’s corpse where it lay. Ventura County Medical Center was still functioning, in technical terms. Dedicated doctors and nurses, ones with nowhere else to go, were still fielding emergencies. Anyone who required hospitalization was out of luck unless they were a very special case. At the north end of the campus, bodies were being burned in the parking lot of the medical examiner’s building.
Conditions inside the hospital were primitive. “You’re lucky he didn’t get very deep,” the doctor said. “Did you hear about that guy in Florida who was high on bath salts and ate the other guy’s face?”
David felt sick. “Please stop.”
“My apologies, just trying to give you some perspective.”
Palmer endured the cleaning and closing of the wound without anesthetic. The drugs were too precious to waste it on such a “minor” injury. The pain of the cure was worse than the bite itself. They had plenty of antibiotics to give him. He was lucky that Hector was a known schizophrenic and thus could avoid rabies shots.
One he was stitched up, David went over the medical examiner’s office. The investigator he spoke with showed a weary concern for Palmer’s well-being, but flatly did not care about picking up the body for an autopsy. The apathy in what would have been, a few weeks ago, a life-changing event for David, was dumbfounding. The ease with which he accepted it himself seemed odd as well. The last two weeks had inured him to a lot of difficult things.
Palmer coasted into the back of headquarters on fumes. He was the only deputy who had an operating vehicle in West County. Could he get an easy well-guarding assignment? Of course not. He got bit by a crazy guy, needed sutures, and even had to drive himself back to the station. Next to the gas pumps was an ersatz setup to pull fuel from the under
ground tanks. Bite or not, Palmer was not going to leave the Tahoe on empty. David tapped the side of the 55-gallon drum and heard a hollow ring. It was empty. He tried the manual pump to pull up more from the bulk tank, but nothing came up.
By now, the command camp had been broken down and what little operations were left moved inside. Due to the lack of staffing, someone had snuck in overnight and spray-painted black x’s over the badges painted on the lobby doors and windows. Palmer found Sheriff Villareal himself manning the front desk and monitoring the radio.
Villareal looked at the bandage. “I thought zombies only ate brains.”
“You’re thinking of Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ zombies.”
“Well, I’m still going to have to shoot you in the head.”
“Thanks, I didn’t hear that a million times at the hospital. How are we going to handle the investigation?”
“The investigation?”
“I just shot someone, sir.”
Villareal shrugged. “Write it up.” The sheriff himself had driven to the shooting scene to take photos after David called it in and went to the hospital. As far as he could tell, his deputy was telling the truth. It was in an isolated area with no witnesses, so unless someone was hiding in the brush, there was no point in starting a canvas. The bite wound was enough to establish a clear case of justifiable homicide.
Palmer, who had been expecting a legion of detectives waiting for him in the lobby, was stunned at how casual things had become. Just three days after the EMP, Sam got the full works for a deputy involved shooting. The look in Villareal’s eyes seemed to say that he could not quite believe things had reached this point either.
“Chief, uh, Sheriff, I wasn’t able to pump any gas from the tanks. Is there an alternate source?”
Villareal looked up and shook his head. “Went dry this morning. Everybody and his brother have been sneaking gas out. You’re going back out again?” he asked in surprise.