ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (5 page)

“Rotors spinning or static?” she asked and then burst out in
laughter that made Duncan smile. Getting a grip on herself, Hillary’s voice
took on a serious tone. “Please tell me you’re going to get help.”

Duncan said nothing. He flopped his head over the sofa back
and ran a hand through his gray hair.

“You drank yourself out of the right seat, Duncan. And now your
drinking has gotten you slapped with two new DUIs. Your problem with the drink
is
real
. At least admit that to yourself.”

Still, Duncan made no reply.

She countered the silence by saying, “That’s the first step,
you know.
Admitting
—”

Duncan mumbled, “I can do it on my own. Besides … I was done
with Stump Town Aviation a long time ago.” He thumbed the Call End button, flipped
the phone closed and chucked it unceremoniously on the table by his keys.
Surrounded by a heavy silence, he drained his beer in one long gulp, belched
into his shoulder and wiped his silver mustache on his shirt sleeve.

“I ain’t no quitter,” he muttered. Grabbing the remote off
the side table, he pointed the sleek device at the television a dozen feet to
his fore, and powered it on.

As the big flat screen came to life, he stood and walked the
dead soldier to the kitchen, hoping to find the willpower to return empty-handed.

Cursing quietly at the snarl of honking cars clogging the
street and wanting to be true to his word that he’d get his fare to Mickey Finn’s
on time and under budget—the promised tip and cold beverage figuring heavily into
the decision—Nate threw the transmission into Reverse and made a quick J-turn.
Before the line of cars could hem them in, he nosed the retired cruiser through
a nearly empty parking lot, looped behind the Laughing Planet restaurant, and
emerged on a cross street still three blocks west of his fare’s intended
destination.

With the meter at $17.00 and climbing, Nate swung a left and
sped east down a side street paralleling Woodstock. At this point the challenge
seemed personal. Charlie gripped the grab bar as the three blocks went by in a
blur of front stoops, parked cars, and mature trees.

Finally, with the meter creeping toward $17.50, the cabbie
hooked another hard left and came to a screeching halt in front of Mickey Finn’s
east-facing windows.

“Seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents,” crowed Nate in a
deep baritone, as he punched a grimy button on the meter, halting the red
numeral’s steady crawl. “Told you I could do it in under twenty.”

“And I didn’t doubt you for a second,” Charlie said as he
stared at the cab’s reflection in the bar’s windows. The sun was nearly
overhead and beating down, throwing a glare off the vertical glass. He squinted
and shielded his eyes with a hand, trying to see inside. There was some movement.
Just shadow-like blobs at the bar tipping back pint glasses, but seeing as how the
parking lot where Duncan would have parked his pick-up was on the building’s
opposite side, there was no way Charlie could discern if one of the vague
shapes was him or not. So he handed Nate a twenty with a five folded inside and
said, “You coming in for a drink?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Nate shook his head. “I better
not. They’re bound to lift the no-fly if I do. Can’t afford to miss out on
those fares.”

“I might need a lift to 87th and Flavel. Can you wait for just
a second while I poke my head inside?”

Nate nodded and swept a hand at the cars vying for entry to
the Bi-Mart lot. “I’ve got to backtrack the way we came no matter what I do. Go
on inside. I’ll turn around and give you a couple of minutes. Least I can do …
not many good tippers left.”

“If my friend isn’t inside,” said Charlie, “I’ll be right
out.”

The driver nodded and slipped the cash into his shirt
pocket.

Unico Building Downtown

Don was just getting into his routine. His stress level from
sitting in the city bus in the midst of so much negative energy was no longer
sky high. The side-effects from whatever ingredients were in the tear gas shells
the police had used on the anarchist occupiers were no more aggravating to him
now than a mild case of hay fever. Though his eyes itched, he figured he’d
survive the small dose of pepper extract and that had started him thinking
about lunch. Subliminally steered his thoughts to the food cart down the block,
whose pepper-and-cheese-slathered tamales were the best he’d ever had. And he
had sampled tamales in nearly every city host to an NBA team prior to the
expansion into Orlando and Minnesota.
Twenty-two years out of the league,
he thought.
And broke as a joke.
But damn, he could justify sending out
for some eats from
La Carreta de Rosa.

A sleek Audi four-door rolled up silently. If it wasn’t for
the sedan’s glowing daytime running lights and the subtle squeak of
high-performance rubber on the smooth garage floor, he would have been dialing
his friend Javier and ordering up his lunch. But the food could wait. The look
parked on the face of the octogenarian philanthropist driving the car caused
him to start. Last time he’d seen one like it, was on the face of a man in blue,
hunched behind a Plexiglas shield and brandishing a collapsible whip baton. And
stranger still, he had only seen the look—an amalgam of terror, incredulity,
and astonishment all in one—twice in his life. And almost too much a
coincidence to believe, both instances were a mere hour apart.

Concerned, Don asked, “Mr. Childress … is everything okay?”

The bald man said nothing. Eyes never leaving Don’s, he
whirred his window down a few inches, reached through the narrow gap, and waved
his passkey in front of the reader. The older man’s body language made Don wonder
if the eccentric saw his puffy eyes and assumed he was carrying a bug deadly to
someone pushing ninety.

Childress’s icy gaze didn’t leave Don until the barrier arm
was in the full-up position. Then, shooting Don’s supposition out of the water,
the man turned his head and focused on the rectangle of daylight. In the next
beat, as if flung off an aircraft carrier’s deck, the low-slung sports car
accelerated rapidly, scraping its undercarriage where the garage floor
transitioned to ramp. It picked up speed on the incline and rocketed across the
sidewalk, missing by inches a pair of pedestrians seemingly oblivious to the
warning buzzer and flashing lights positioned above the garage entrance at
street level.

Don slid the door into the pocket and hinged his upper body
out the opening. “Would have been your fault, Childress,” he said, his voice
bereft of any conviction. Truth be told, the old man had just avoided a huge
lawsuit that he would have been able to easily afford, but furious at having
wrought. And Don had narrowly avoided having to choose whether to lie for the man
in order to keep his job, or tell the truth and live on his meager pension.

With the warning chime still echoing about the garage, he
watched the silhouetted pair stop mid-stride to swipe drunkenly at the airspace
just vacated by the speeding car. Then, as Don reached for the phone, the lucky
pedestrians conducted near-identical pirouettes and started down the ramp in
his direction.

Seeing nearly the same thing that Charlie had at shift
change, the difference: two backlit silhouettes instead of a single giant-sized
one, Don strained to make eye contact. Last thing he wanted to do was fill out
paperwork for a non-event.

“You didn’t heed the warnings,” Don said.
A half-truth.

Slow and deliberate, the pair kept coming.

“No pedestrians on the ramp!” Don implored forcefully.

The obviously drunken duo were nearly to the point where the
undercarriage of Childress’s Audi had left a fresh gouge in the cement floor.

Eyes locked on the trespassers, Don reached blindly for the
phone … to call security,
not
to order tamales. He didn’t have time to
do either, because simultaneously, three things happened at once. His fingers
brushed the handset, knocking it off the cradle. A coppery odor, like a jug
full of old pennies, hit his nose. And just reaching the bottom of the ramp, the
pair hit the light splash from above, affording Don a clear look at
what
had just wandered in from the street.

If he had been staring into a mirror, his face would wear the
same twisted mask as the riot cop and Childress, who owned the entire top floor
of the building resting over his head. The man who had almost pasted these two
street denizens who looked more dead than alive.

Suddenly the notion of calling Portland Police Homicide
trumped either building security or ordering lunch from
La Carreta de Rosa
.
In fact, the latter was put on permanent hold. One eyeful of the two from a
couple of yards away had forever spoiled his appetite.

The teenager nearest Don had a horrific wound on his neck. The
kind he would have pegged as the work of the Columbian Cartel if only Portland
wasn’t the most unlikely of places for a guy to have his neck slit ear to
throat. Don rose off his seat, a roll of paper towels in one hand, the phone
clutched in the other, and saw that the injury was jagged and likely not created
by a quick swipe of a straight razor.

A moist growl came from the kid’s mouth, causing a fresh
wave of blood to sluice from the yawning half-moon above his bloody shirt collar.

“Have a seat on the floor,” Don insisted, as he swung his
gaze to the phone and stabbed 9 on the keypad.

“I’m getting you help.” Focused on the task at hand, he punched
1 and then cried out as a stabbing pain erupted in his right elbow. A meteor
shower’s worth of tracers clouded his vision as, acting against his will, his right
hand snapped full open, letting the handset fall away. A grating sound reached
his ears as incisors cut through flesh and tendon alike. The wet growl
persisted and his knees grew weak as the gnashing teeth slowly made mincemeat
of the soft flesh under his forearm. Then a dull vibration, starting in his ulna—the
foot-long bone running from wrist to elbow—coursed up his arm and a cold hand
palmed his face, the fingers briefly probing the openings there before worming
their way around back and snagging his gray pony tail.

His weak call for help was drowned out as the silent one of
the pair clambered overtop the first attacker and their combined weight crushed
the air from his lungs and started a symphony in his head consisting of rushing
blood and his waning heartbeat.

With the dead weight of the two crushing down on him, Don
heard animalistic grunting and tearing of cartilage as his ear was rent from
his body. He screamed. A guttural wail to wake the dead echoed off the ceiling
as hot blood poured into his ear and cold skin pressed against his exposed
neck. A tick later the kid Don didn’t know from Adam, and certainly had no beef
with, grew tired of the nub of ear and went for the underside of his neck,
trapping several folds of hanging jowl there in a crushing, grinding bite.

A pain like no other hit Don and his body went limp as he
slipped from consciousness. And as his brain was shutting down from lack of
oxygenated blood, the last figment of thought: a lament about dying and not
attending the Blazer’s Big Man Camp in Vegas this year jumped synapses. Oh how
he enjoyed sharing his vast knowledge of post moves and footwork with the
willing incoming centers, even if he could no longer hold his own physically
among the tall trees.

Then the spark of life left his staring eyes and his large
frame slid off the chair, dragging the attackers inside with him. The last
thing Don saw as darkness edged out the world around him were the gray wads of chewed
gum pressed to the underside of the wraparound counter.

Duncan had returned from Charlie’s kitchen clutching not one
fresh bottle of Bud, but two. Mesmerized by what was taking place in downtown
Portland, he took a long pull from the bottle and set it beside the first,
which was already empty.

Charlie’s television was a flat screen plasma item nearly as
wide as the battered steamer trunk it was sitting upon.
Scratch and Dent
sale
, he had said when Duncan inquired as to how a man pulling in a measly five
hundred dollars a week—before taxes—could afford such a monstrous thing. And
though it likely cost his friend a week’s worth of wages earned the easy way, sitting
on his butt and breathing automotive fumes, its glossy screen was host to a
fine sheen of dust. Whether that spoke to its lack of importance to Charlie, or
the man’s disdain of physical labor, Duncan hadn’t a clue. Besides, with all of
his worldly possessions languishing in a storage locker on Holgate and one bad
bet away from being auctioned off to pay the rent, who was he to judge?

Duncan’s resolve to keep his eyes open and watch the ongoing
coverage some of the talking heads were calling “Riot in the Square” was taking
a hit after the first beer. Now, halfway through the third, he was getting his
second wind.

For the third time in ten minutes the nicely coiffed female
newscaster was back on the television droning on about the flare-up of violence
and pointing out how area hospitals were beginning to receive the injured. And
each time she handed off the airtime to other affiliates around the country,
she made sure she recapped the numbers of dead and injured already removed from
the Square, the latter, for now, far outnumbering the former.

Broadcast on a screen behind the anchor, at the edge of a
full city block paved in red bricks and filled with jostling bodies, was a
picket of columns reminiscent of the once mighty Acropolis. Maybe the architect
had thrown the intricate spires in as a way to thumb his or her nose at the
establishment and city planners who had commissioned the design. Whatever the
case, Duncan mused, he was struck with an uneasy feeling that just making the
connection, however subliminally, was a subtle harbinger of things to come.
Hell, throughout history many powerful societies rose and fell, Rome, principle
among them. And much like the United States, which currently manned garrisons
around the world and was embroiled in two wars in the Middle East, the Romans
had also spread themselves very thin towards the end of their reign. He also
noticed that over the last three decades, much like the hubris of those lording
over Rome had grown concurrent to the Empire’s sphere of influence, so, too,
had the attitude of invincibility shared by the career politicians entrenched
in the highest levels of government. Gone were the days of “for the people by
the people.” And as sad as it was for him to admit, the country he once knew
and still loved was close to the point of no return.

Rome was burning, literally, judging by the images on the
television.

Though not as serious about prepping as his brother, Duncan shared
the same gut feeling that be it a rogue nation getting a nuke or device capable
of producing a crippling electromagnetic pulse into the country, one of these
days people were going to wake up to one hell of a big surprise.

Almost capsized by the financial crisis of 2008, the country
was slowly clawing its way back. However, the prosperity and change promised by
the new administration was coming much slower for the rank and file. Millions
were out of work and, like a slow-moving train wreck, victims of the housing
bubble were suddenly finding themselves in foreclosure and in danger of being
homeless.

It was already one hell of a recession they were in and Duncan
was finding it harder than ever to stay above water both financially and
emotionally. Then along comes a spate of deadly terrorist attacks immediately followed
by a riot in his home town.

Jogging Duncan’s morbid train of thought, a wide-angle
aerial shot of downtown Portland replaced the anchor who was just finishing her
latest body count. The incoming video feed was jittery, the people on the
ground ant-like until the person panning the camera found something on the
ground worthy of scrutiny and tightened in on it. And every time it did the
plasma screen would be filled with the frenzied movement of civilians piling
onto one another or the practiced precision of police officers rushing in to
break up the brush fires of violence springing up on the Square’s periphery.

The one constant was that blood was in no kind of short
supply. If it bleeds, it leads—the unspoken tenet of those in the media
beholden to ratings to keep their lofty titles—was being taken to a whole new
level as the camera passed over a clutch of leather-clad forms tearing into a
prone officer. Hands flashed in and out of the writhing man’s midsection and
came out clutching ropes of shiny intestine.

It was clear to Duncan the carnage was being recorded by a camera
mounted to a helicopter orbiting slowly above what looked to be no more than
four square blocks. And at all four points of the compass around the Pioneer
Courthouse Square, police in riot gear and soldiers in tan uniforms were
actively engaged in deadly games of cat-and-mouse with a seemingly feral mob.
Then, even from the elevated vantage the moving aerial platform afforded, for a
quick second, the entire scene below was obscured by white smoke pouring from dozens
of metal canisters shot into the crowd from the officers’ stubby black rifles.

In response, the helicopter bled off altitude and side-slipped
to cut the corner. As the ground-hugging smoke drifted over the crowd, Duncan
picked up on what looked like winks of gunfire, the star-shaped eruptions illuminating
the slow-roiling cloud in shades of red and orange.

The firing continued and the glitter of tumbling and
bouncing brass was obvious as individuals squirted from the rank and file and
the cops on the ground parted their lines to allow the soldiers to move
forward.

“Holy hell,” Duncan muttered. He moved to the edge of the
couch and craned forward as the camera zoomed in to frame a lanky twenty-something
clad in cargo shorts and hoodie. There was a wild sneer parked on the kid’s
bearded face and his lips were drawn back over white teeth. Then, as though a
switch had been flicked, his eyes went wild and locked onto a nearby officer
brandishing a shiny clear shield in one hand and eighteen-inch baton in the
other. And like a fire-and-forget missile, ignoring everything around him, the
unarmed protester covered the yard-and-a-half toward the officer in a
herky-jerky-gait that seemed to catch her completely off guard. The millisecond
of hesitation during which a battle between training and normalcy bias waged in
the officer’s head proved to be fatal for her as the kid wormed around the
shield and got inside of the metal baton’s downward sweep. In the next beat the
officer’s mouth snapped open in a silent scream and the kid’s fingers on one
hand plunged under the face shield, going for the woman’s eyes. The two fell in
a heap, the protester on top and clawing frantically under the visor, the
officer beating at his back weakly with the baton. Barely a second elapsed before
the officer’s legs shot straight and, as if the baton and shield were totally
forgotten about, both gloved hands released the items and went for the attacker’s
hooded head, clawing at it wildly as spritzes of red that could only be her
blood pulsed onto the blacktop around her helmeted head.

“Kids today.” Duncan slumped back into the couch. He kicked
off his boots and stretched out prone, eyes locked on the television as other
shield-carrying officers surged forward to help their downed comrade. From
outside the frame a number of helmeted cops on bicycles outfitted with yellow
placards that read POLICE swarmed in silently only to be overtaken by the crowd,
many of them, their signs forgotten, now empty-handed and exhibiting the same
bloodlust as the kid kneeling over the cop and jamming a double handful of
human flesh into his maw.

The new round of tear gas was now roiling above the melee and
then breaking like waves as it met the rotor wash from the hovering helicopter.

The urge to get up and fetch another beer hit Duncan fast
and hard. In the next moment, just like the gas from the fired canisters, he
felt his resolve dissipating. Though he was comfortable in the present state,
his will wasn’t his to command. He hinged up and froze in his previous position
on the edge of the sofa. “Here comes the cavalry,” he said, as a low-flying jet
somewhere outside made the window behind him dance in its aluminum frame. The
rattling continued and, as quickly as the thought of another beer had arrived,
it was edged out by the sight of dozens of uniformed soldiers pouring around
the corner off of what Duncan guessed to be Fourth Street.
Someone knows
their stuff
, he thought as the troops came to a halt and fanned out, their
numbers shoring up the outmatched police force and causing the majority of the
moving mass to disengage and continue marching east.

Sensing the direction the unruly crowd was likely to take
before the seemingly single-minded organism pulled back, whoever was operating
the camera—likely a FLIR item mounted on a gimbal under the helicopter’s nose—panned
right, then zoomed in on the middle of the pack as it picked up speed and
fanned out across the four-lane. On both sides of the street, split down the
middle by deciduous trees planted in red brick and cement medians, were numerous
bars with neon signs framed in painted-over windows. Lured by the freight-train-like
cacophony and buzz of the hovering chopper, people spilled from the bars and
onto the sidewalk and were instantly caught up in the tide of swinging batons
and gnashing teeth.

Left in the wake of the moving orgy of violence and rage,
dozens of bodies lay sprawled on the roadway and sidewalks, their blood running
and pooling on the west/east running arterial that spilled thousands of cars
and bikes into the downtown core each morning.

The camera continued panning left-to-right before finally
settling on the Burnside Bridge four blocks east of the marchers. Inexplicably
the span’s two halves were canted skyward. Dozens of busses and cars were lined
up nose to tail against the near vertical roadway. To make matters worse,
scores of black-clad agitators were held at bay on the sidewalks by striped
gates automatically triggered to drop in the event of a bridge lift.

“This ain’t gonna end well for you,” Duncan muttered, his grip
loosening on the near-empty beer bottle. In the next beat his head tilted back
and, just as the standoff on the bridge was escalating, his eyes fluttered once,
then twice, after which they remained closed.