The Postmortal (24 page)

It’s not just my subconscious that delights in torturing me about her, even after all this time. It’s been long enough now that my brain has started to wonder, independent of my own commands, what our relationship would be like if she were still alive. Sometimes I wonder if we would have grown bored of each other. Sometimes I think the fact that she died is the reason I’ll never stop loving her. She wasn’t around long enough for me to grow tired of her personality or her appearance. Every relationship seems to lead to that end. She said it herself. She left me just as my mind had perfected her. The prime condition of love. A simple glance from her was enough to send my body into a frenzied state. There was never enough time for that feeling to go away. Sometimes I wonder if that’s a good thing. I despise myself for thinking that.

One of the drawbacks to conducting exit interviews is that the subjects are often all too eager to participate. These things are, after all, a matter of public record. There’s some measure of posterity involved. And so people will talk. And talk. And talk some more. From the beginning, Matt urged me to never let the conversation slip away from my control. There’s a certain skill to cutting subjects off and steering them back on topic. Mastering it is not unlike learning to be a good TV anchor. That way you don’t waste time or money. Matt dislikes it when we waste time or money. As the head of the company, he’s free to do it all he likes—and he does. I’ve never seen him actively engage in business at the office. Most of the time, he’s either trying to buy an old car part or to sell one. You can do things like that when you own the joint.

Matt also has a more compassionate reason for demanding that exit interviews remain as brief as humanly possible: He doesn’t want Ernie and me to get stuck somewhere far away after dark. Until yesterday we had been successful at this. We hadn’t had many appointments slip past dusk. Not in bad areas, at least. By dark we were either back home, at the office, or in the plug-in in a safe neighborhood. The only time we ever failed was on a call in Great Falls, Virginia. The interview went well past 10:00 P.M. But that’s Great Falls. Not much fear of D36 there. We slept in the plug-in, inside the town gate.

Four days ago we had a call at a housing tenement in Southeast DC. The subject was a man with a bad back and a cure age of seventy-eight. He’d had several operations on his lumbar region and was more than happy to discuss the finer aspects of each and every one of them. I tried to get a word in edgewise, but I had slept poorly the night before, and I was still mentally discombobulated from seeing my son a week earlier. I wasn’t sharp. Nothing I could say was going to stop this man from talking about his sciatica. I saw the last vestiges of sunlight collapse outside the window. I tried to give every visual cue I could to get the guy to wrap things up. I yawned. I looked at my watch. Ernie grew impatient and took out the dose before the man had even signed anything. Still he prattled on, nightfall becoming ever more pronounced outside. Once the clock struck nine, the look on Ernie’s face turned from annoyance to fear. My mood followed suit. Southeast is not Great Falls. Finally, I told him we needed to stop.

“What?”

“We need to stop, sir. We can come back tomorrow.” Ernie kicked me. “But we must go now.”

“But I was ready for this to be done tonight,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. We simply don’t have time left to finish.”

“Well, then I’m gonna call DES. Maybe they’ll be able to get this done.”

“If that’s what you think is best, then we’re happy to turn over your case to th—”

Ernie stood up. “Shut up. Both of you.”

We heard commotion coming from outside. Down the street, a woman screamed. Ernie had the WEPS expanded up on the wall. He opened a population-monitor app on the screen. It mapped a 3-D layout of the boulevard down below. Two parallel streets ran along either side of the building and past the abandoned warehouse on the opposite block. On either side of the warehouse, I could see two thick red masses slowly advancing in our direction.

Ernie grimaced. “Shit.” Then he lunged for his duffel bag. He looked up at the old man. “What kind of security system does this building have?”

“Security system?”

“Double shit. Well, Thomas, today is your lucky day. You won’t be needing to call DES to finish you off. The folks coming toward us will be more than happy to take care of the job for you.”

“Should we call the police?” the old man asked.

“In Southeast? That’s a joke, right? You’re joking.” Ernie turned to me. “We need to reach the ground right now. We can’t be stuck up here, or else we’re dead. Go.
Go!
”

I grabbed the Texan’s gun from the back of my pants and flew out of the old man’s apartment. The door was situated directly in front of one of the building’s two massive stairwells. We saw people poking their heads out of their doors as we began to descend the stairs using that brisk stutter step everyone employs when they feel the urgent need to reach the bottom of a staircase. We jumped over a handful of vagrants who were sleeping on the steps. A black woman in a bathrobe met us at the third floor. She demanded to know what was going on.

Ernie answered her without breaking stride. “They’re coming. Get out. Everyone get out!”

News traveled up the stairwell instantly. Every apartment door above and below swung wide open, and bodies began pushing into the stairwell like an emptying arena. Ernie and I got held up in a tangle of people just as we reached the bottom. Ernie began nodding and turned to me. “This is good,” he said. “Lotta people. Big crowd to handle them. Are you a good shot with that handgun?”

“I don’t know.”

“For our purposes, that counts as a no. Put it away. Take this instead.” He handed me a shotgun from the duffel. “You said you’ve fended off these jokers before?”

“Groups of two or three. One look at the gun and they scattered. Nothing like this.”

“Okay, then here’s the deal. That’s pump action, that shotgun. You get six shots. Five pumps. Count each shot. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. By the time you’ve gotten off that sixth shot, you better have cleared a path for yourself out of their way.”

“Fire directly at them?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t.”

He looked into my eyes (the only part of my body not shaking at the time) and knew instantly that I had never shot and killed anyone. Even outside the Swift’s house, I deliberately aimed too high. Ernie patted my shoulder. “Brother, trust me. When a bunch of these jokers start coming at you, trying to claw off your face, you’ll be able to do it. I promise you. I’ll have the WEPS up in front of us as we go. Just run where it isn’t red.”

“What if they’re armed?” I asked.

“Some of them will be. Just shoot and don’t get shot.”

We reached the glass doors at the main entrance and burst onto the street. The center of the boulevard quickly filled with tenants, many of them armed. Otherwise everything was quiet. The side streets, where the rovers were displayed on the WEPS, showed no trace of them. The plug-in was parked twelve blocks to the west, on the twenty-seventh level of a garage. We immediately booked it in that direction. A handful of tenants followed us. We reached the cross street and I looked to the right, down the side of the block. I saw a massive crowd of homeless people walking in our direction. When I was a kid, my father told me to never establish eye contact with a burn on the street. Once they have you engaged, he said, they target you. Same thing here. We all looked squarely at the mob, which was the wrong thing to do. Immediately, a bunch of them quickened their stride and made for us. A wine bottle came hurtling in our general direction and picked off a slender man running beside me. He dropped straight to the asphalt. Ernie and I kept running up the boulevard. I heard a shot ring out behind me and I reflexively ducked my head as I sprinted. I felt my hands curl around the shotgun in an industrial vise grip. I was hanging on to the thing more for moral support than protection.

As we approached the next street, another group of them came around the corner. Now we had them in front of us and behind us. We crisscrossed the boulevard, and they followed suit. I yelled over my shoulder to Ernie, “Where do I shoot?”

Ernie extended the WEPS as we ran. I could barely make out the details on the screen. Everything in my line of vision had become shaky and blurry with panic. Then a speck of dust got in my right eye and I had to shut it violently.

“Forward!” Ernie shouted. “Shoot
through
them! Aim at the center!”

Our little group fell into a makeshift shoulder-to-shoulder formation. I saw the drunk and angry mob in front of me prepare for us—a gaunt collection of mostly grown men, dirty and unkempt. There may have been a hundred. Maybe two hundred. I’m bad with head counts. The only clean spots on them were the gleaming steel blades a handful of them gripped in anticipation of our arrival. Ernie fired the first shot toward the scrum. I followed suit but lost my nerve again and fired over their heads.

One.

Another shot rang out from behind us, and I saw a tenant slip down to the ground, as if a trapdoor had opened underneath him. Ernie fired again. We were now ten yards away. I saw a small path clear in the middle, in our line of fire. We began to funnel toward it, right into the center of the mob. Two other tenants fired at the same spot, clearing more room. The pack lost some of its density as those on the periphery began to look for less-feisty action. My shoulders retracted into my torso as I grew terrified of coming into direct contact. Ernie fired again. Now they were on either side of us. One of them grabbed my arm, but I wrested it back, firing in the grabber’s direction.

Two.

I saw my target fall immediately. I couldn’t help but stop to make him out. It looked like a younger one. He was still alive. He may have been in his twenties, but who the hell knows how old he really was. My hesitancy cost me. I was grabbed from behind and pulled down onto my back. A monstrous three-hundred-pound man sat right down on my gut and began pressing his fingertips into my sternum. I saw blood caked on his moustache, forming a dried trail down the center of his gnarled beard. I wore the horror right on my face, which seemed to delight him. He flashed his brown teeth at me, his mouth like an open wound.

“I’M GONNA FEED YOUR HEART TO MINE.”

He pressed deeper into my chest, and I began to feel the skin break. Then I heard a shot and saw his face explode like a pumpkin shot from a catapult. He fell on me like a lead blanket, and I wriggled out from beneath him, his stench attaching to me as I got up and saw Ernie standing there, fourth shot freshly discharged. The thugs and tenants were now completely intermingled. I saw another man being held down and knifed by a group of them and I fired at the group out of principle.

Three.

Ernie grabbed me and steered us back in the direction of the garage. “Don’t waste shots. Make a path.”

None of the killers seemed interested in touching us, as we were the most heavily armed members of the group. Instead they focused their appetites on people who couldn’t help themselves: women, children, the elderly. Ernie and I both fired again to fully clear the way in front of us. I could make out the WEPS screen better now, and saw a thick black opening in the red mass. I kept running forward. The crowd thinned toward the end of the block.

Ernie told me not to look back, but I had to. I glanced over my shoulder and saw heaps of filthy street guerillas bringing down people in their pajamas and nightshirts. I saw them rushing into the old man’s building to claim whatever food and water was inside. I saw a five-year-old kid being tackled, the thug sinking his teeth into his leg. I turned and ran for the kid. “Get off of him!”

I unloaded.

Four five six.

The man fled, untouched by the buckshot. I rushed to the boy and helped him up. When I turned back to run up the boulevard, the path in front of me was blocked once more. I pumped the shotgun, even though the chamber was empty now. They began to disperse. Ernie fired at them from behind and suddenly I had a way out again. Six shots for me. Six shots for Ernie. We had nothing left. I carried the boy as we ran west, away from the melee. I could hear more random gunfire and people yelling. With each block, the chaos began to fade away out of earshot. We heard helicopters arriving. Once we reached the garage entrance, the sound of the riot was gone, a world away now. We pushed the elevator button. It failed to light up. I began the slow, brutal ascent of every floor with the kid on my back. The stairwell was dead empty, which only made the experience more rattling. Ernie and I took turns carrying the boy, switching at every fifth floor. At last we reached twenty-seven, chugging air with every step. I breathed a sigh of relief and rested for ten minutes, slumped against the ice-cold cinder-block wall.

Ernie opened the door to the garage. We walked out. A gang member jumped in front of us and came at Ernie with a knife, wild violence blazing across his face. With one move, Ernie reached into his pocket, grabbed the dose he had never gotten to give the chatty old man, and stuck it right in the thug’s breast. He died as quickly as he had appeared.

I stood there, barely able to process any of it. “Jesus.”

We drove the kid to a hospital close to Matt’s garage and checked him in. I’ve tried to sleep since then, but I can’t. The giant man’s ghastly odor has leached into my body through my pores, so that my very insides feel like they’ve been dragged through a field of manure and left to ferment. I reek like a piece of raw hamburger left out of the fridge for too long. I feel infected, as if a real zombie has bitten me and turned me into a walking, decaying cadaver. Every time I close my eyes, there’s a large, smelly man parked on my stomach, trying to claw his way into my heart. We’re never going back to Southeast.