American Apocalypse (10 page)

Max had spoken to the mayor and the chief of police privately. He told me about it on the way over there. “Chief Grier and I discussed what our duties were going to be. Officially, we are equivalent to security guards working the night shift at an abandoned Wal-Mart.”

“Wow, you really know how to negotiate. I am impressed.”

“Oh, I forgot to mention your personal duties to the mayor.”

“And that would be . . . ?” I asked cautiously.

“You get to blow him every Thursday.” He thought this was pretty funny.

“Gee, I guess you needed a day off to rest those lips.”

He quit laughing and changed the subject. “The official part is to cover the city’s ass in case someone decides to sue us.”

I thought that was pretty funny because “officially” my net worth had a negative sign in front of it the last time I had checked; still, it was probably more than the city of Fairfax was worth and I told Max so.

Max grinned like a shark, “Yeah.”

The swearing in was brief. We were introduced to the remaining patrol officers—well, two of them. The third one was asleep, having worked the night shift. We were issued the official city of Fairfax police patches and told we had to buy the rest of the uniform. The good news was that the city was getting free ammo from the feds, plus other goodies that were military issue, like body armor.

The feds, state, and county people would stop and strip you of it if they saw civilians wearing body armor; they hated it. Legally, they had to tolerate civilians carrying weapons, but no way in hell were they going to be put at any more of a disadvantage in a fire fight.

They told us in no uncertain terms that we were to forget about arresting anyone. If we really felt the need to, we had to call the chief or get one of the regular patrol officers to come by and “evaluate the situation.” As Chief Grier had told us, “Don’t arrest them. County doesn’t want them. There is no room and no money for them.
You boys keep the peace, and let us or the feds do the heavy lifting.”

“Not a problem,” Max had assured the chief. Max had told me before we walked into the building for the swearing in that I was to keep my mouth shut and nod a lot. That was not a problem for me. I didn’t have all that much to say anyway.

So that was how Max and I came to be under the oak tree watching a whole lot of nothing going on. It was our job now. We had worked out our beat, which we walked every day. We patrolled every day from early in the morning until the market closed at sundown. We made sure the merchants, especially the grocery cart vendors, got packed up and down the road safely. We made the rounds of a select handful of functioning businesses in our area.
Select
, because most of the businesses that remained open had made it quite clear they didn’t want us. They preferred to rely on the “real police” or they had their own security. The ones we did look in on were expected to kick something back for the service. Usually, it was a meal or something from their diminishing inventories. One of our main jobs was “moving people on.” We did a fair amount of that, especially in the first week or so. Most of them were people known to us as general pains in the ass.

The other part of it was dealing with people who had been turned back at the Zone checkpoints due to their IDs not being in order. Since we were on one of the
main roads, and a half mile from the border, they would often bounce back into our laps. If they decided to hang around, we would move them on. We had not had a real problem yet with anyone deciding they didn’t want to be moved. Max stood up, stretched, and asked me, “Feel like going for a walk?”

“Yeah, sure.” I stood up and looked over at Aly. “See you later, big guy.” Aly was maybe five foot four.

“Okay, you guys be careful out there,” he replied, and laughed. He always said the same thing and he always got the same response from us: nothing, except maybe a grunt. It never stopped him. We started walking over to the market. The sun’s heat reflected off the asphalt. The morning sun had warmed up the asphalt of the parking lot enough that it was only just noticeable, not the inyour-face heat that was only hours away from becoming another day’s reality.

“You ever think Aly’s head is running the same Bollywood movie in an endless loop?”

“No, he’s a Muslim from Pakistan. They don’t usually watch Bollywood movies,” Max replied as he casually scanned the area for anything out of the ordinary.

“Paki? Damn, I always thought he was Indian.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.”

That made perfect sense: Pakistan was about as popular now as Germany was circa 1946. It also made sense why he never went into the Zone. Not only was his ID lacking, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be coming back.

The parking lot was still used as parking for cars. There were never a lot of them, but people were still driving, just not as much as they had before. Gas had not
come down a lot after Tel Aviv and the Israeli retaliation. It probably never would. The government was talking about another stiff gas tax to fund “green” projects. This wasn’t the first government green project. Every administration had them. They never seemed to amount to anything, at least not for anyone I knew

We split, each going to one side of a burned-out BMW whose charred body had filled a parking spot for months now. People coming out of the Zone tried not to drive their high-end automobiles too far from the Zone nowadays. They had a tendency to catch fire. I was never sure what bothered Zone people more: the realization their car was toast or that they were now on foot in the badlands. At first it would be watching their beautiful car—burning. This always drew a crowd. Once they got a look at the faces of the crowd, they usually got past their anguish about their car turning into an insurance claim in front of them rather quickly. Things had gotten ugly a few times when an owner with an inflated ego and zero sense of self-preservation decided to scream obscenities at the crowd. County tried to respond quickly to these calls now. The people who owned the cars usually paid taxes and knew how to complain—or their next-of-kin did. Because when someone from the Zone started screaming at a non-Zone crowd about their burning car, it usually ended with that person burning along with it.

We almost always started on the end of the block that the stores were on and then worked our way down. The market was built around a small, abandoned strip mall. Every store in it was gone, except for the Dollar Store. It was still run by the same Korean family, although the mall no longer had power other than what was sometimes
provided with generators by the market sellers. Most of the store windows were boarded up. They had been covered with graffiti thirty minutes after the work crew had put them up and climbed back into their truck to go to their next stop. They were still covered with crap, except for a few that had been painted over in the last couple months. These now advertised the name of the seller who set up shop in front of them during the day. Instead of just using words, they painted symbols and words. The area was ethnically diverse—a little United Nations, with more than a few people having suspect paperwork.

The white couple that had a connection in the Shenandoah Valley orchards featured a nice picture of an apple. The Korean woman who repaired clothes had a sewing machine painted on her plywood. Many folks, including me, only vaguely understood what she was getting at when it first went up. Nobody used the actual storefronts; they stunk inside. All it took was one asshole peeing on the drywall to make it unusable, and the lack of electricity didn’t help. Also, no one wanted to store anything in there—if it didn’t get stolen that night, there was always the fear that the “owner” would come back and claim it.

Sometimes, a working girl or boy would use one of the nicer ones for quick tricks.

We discouraged that. It drew the wrong kind of people, whom we had defined without talking about it as strangers, strangers being anyone who wasn’t a local and whose face we didn’t see on a regular basis. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of other abandoned buildings they could use. A red-light district of sorts was springing up down the road from us in the old Northern Virginia Real Estate Association building. Yes, the inevitable jokes sprang up.
Max and I both knew there was a grain of truth in them. When the hookers were seen showing up for work in their minivans with the “I’m a Realtor” license plate frames still attached, well, that was a bit obvious. Since it was in city jurisdiction and never bothered, we figured the kickback was feeding the patrol officer’s families.

We walked, stopped, and chatted with each stall owner. Usually, it was just a “Hi, everything okay?” and Max would chat them up while I did a quick walk-through of the empty store behind them. We were going to need to do a cleanup in these someday. Often I would have to remind someone not to use the back as a urinal, or at the very least to set aside some plastic buckets for it.

It didn’t pass unnoticed that I was doing most of the work as we did our rounds so I asked Max, “How come I got to do this and you get to do the chitchatting?”

His reply? “Because I know what I am doing, and you don’t.”

That was kind of hard to argue with.

I was in the back of the store behind the Apple Couple when I heard car doors slamming and a male voice yelling something I couldn’t quite hear. I drew my pistol and headed back to the store entrance. I held the gun straight up beside my head and thumbed the hammer down, listening to that beautiful clicking sound. I paused at the door, standing to one side. It was a good thing that I did. Apple Couple would have knocked me down if I had been standing in it. They came busting through it, faces frightened, the man pushing his woman, telling her, “To the back! To the back!” As they went, he struggled to dig a handgun from his pocket. The hammer spur had snagged
on the fabric of his pants, and his haste and fear were not helping him.

“Stay here!” I hissed at him—the asshole had scared the crap out of me busting through the door like that. “Hey, look at me!” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Calm down. Talk to me: Where and who?”

“Three guys—they are robbing everyone!”

“Where?”

“The Dollar Store.”

“Deep breaths, okay?” I looked at him.

He nodded. “I’m okay.”

“Good, go look after your woman.”
All right: Think and go
, I told myself.

The Dollar Store was in the center of the strip. I was two stores down. Usually, by now, Max would be at the last store, which was really just a guy with a table. He did leather repair, and I was thinking about having him make me a cartridge belt. Max liked talking to him. Leather Man was a former marine who had done his time in Vietnam. He was old.

He also liked to spit—big nasty lungers, too—which was why he was at the end.

I changed sides and eased a bit out the door. I could hear a bunch of hollering to my right; it sounded like Korean. I could see a young Asian male standing by a yellow Honda Civic in the parking lot. They had pulled directly in front of the Dollar Store. He had some kind of assault rifle, kind of cool looking, with a wooden stock. A remote part of my brain approved of his choice: no plastic crap. Another man was standing about three feet in front of the door to the Dollar Store. Both men were focused on what was happening inside. I didn’t know where Max
was, but I wasn’t worried about it. I knew he would be in the right place at the right time. I heard a woman scream and I stepped out the door.

Stepping out that first second was like what I imagined stepping into space as a skydiver would be, or getting up to speak in front of thousands of people: a lightness that wasn’t disturbing. Actually, it was pleasant. I liked it. I walked toward the door to the Dollar Store. My movement caught the eye of the man with the assault rifle, and he went into motion, shouldering his weapon. The boom of Max’s Colt was unmistakable. The rifleman’s eyes widened. He jerked forward and began to fall, propelled even faster by the second boom. The other man reacted to the sound of Max’s gunfire, turning to his friend. For a precious second he processed that his friend had been shot and that another man was walking toward him with a pistol. He turned to me, his face contorting into a grimace as he realized that he was going to be too late. He was right: I shot him twice in the chest, then once in the head, just as I had been taught, drilling again and again on cardboard silhouettes. It sounds like overkill, but Max explained to me that we were not the only people wearing vests.

My peripheral vision caught Max’s movement as he approached the man he had shot by the Honda. That is when the guy in the Dollar Store decided it was time to go. He came out the door holding as hostage the elderly Korean man who worked there.

Damn, this is turning out to be like a bad TV show
, I thought.

Then it got worse: Max decided to be a hostage negotiator. Somehow I doubt he had learned that in the
Marines. He told the hostage taker, “Okay, man, we can work this out. Let him go, and we will let you go. Let’s make this easy.”

“Fuck you! Get away from my car!”

“Okay, okay. Chill.” Max started backing up, away from the car.

“You! . . . You too. You back up!” This was directed at me.

I estimated the range and the probability of blowing his head off. The odds were pretty good that I could do this. Then again, if I missed or the old man twitched at the wrong time—well, it would be sloppy. But so what. I never liked him all that much anyway. I blew the side of the hostage taker’s head off. Max was moving toward him as the old man fell to his knees babbling. Hostage Taker dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Well, that was easy.
Mama-san came rushing out the door to cradle the old man.

Max walked up to me, touching my shoulder briefly, “You okay?”

“Yeah. You?” He nodded.