The Zone (5 page)

“Yup, but call volume is climbing, fifty per cent over normal yesterday, and today is edging up to that count as well. Jail’s setting up max occupancy cots, and we’re nowhere near the weekend.”

“That sucks. Look, I’ll let you go; gimme a holler when it calms down and I’ll buy you dinner, catch up on the gossip.”

“You know there’s plenty of that. See ya.” 

Call volume spiking wasn’t all that unusual-things always seemed to happen at the same time; it certainly explained why it took so long to call the ambo earlier. Must be a pretty significant statistical swell for the department to cancel vacations and loosen overtime, although Halloween was only three weeks away, and that always gave the numbers a spike.

But I was uneasy. The incident in the briar was really odd; it wasn’t dogs, I had seen and shot a lot of sick or mean dogs, raccoons, opossums, you name it. I had even chased a feral iguana one time, and those bastards can move even though they only run on two legs. What I had heard was new to me, and there was more than one. Of course, it could have been a group of kids screwing with me, making strange noises and scurrying about. Not impossible. But I didn’t believe that.

Probably I was just spending too much time alone, getting a bit goofy, imagining great and terrible mysteries with each shadow. Most likely-Occam’s Razor and all that.

I dug around in the back room and found the scanner the dispatchers had given me as a retirement gift, a police-only model able to reach the high freqs we used now. It was still in the box. I unpacked it, studied the instructions, set it up. It didn’t take long for channels and codes to come back.

After a half hour I went and found a pen and a pad of paper. Around midnight I finished the pizza.

Friday I woke up at nine despite having gone to bed at two. The scanner was still chattering away, and after taking a piss and brushing my teeth I headed downstairs with the last juice box and pop tart. The pad was on the sofa, and I flipped through its pages while I ate. My last gig had been reviewing communications’ paperwork, which also involved listening to a lot of radio traffic to seek or confirm patterns. Boring work, but useful right now. You had to be a police officer to do it, someone who had supervised police officers.

With only a pad I had had to work up a way to collate the data as it came in, but I had sorted it out. I had listened for about eight hours on a Thursday night, normally a fairly decent night as police activity in this town went. The bars usually had a college special to draw the kids on Thursdays, occasionally ladies’ nights, and activity would be fairly steady from 2000 to around 0100, when it would drop off sharply.

Last night the pattern had been different; call volume was only up about half again as much, which goes to show that statistics are all too often just lies taken as truth. The numbers said the call volume was up, but not all that bad, but the reality was that the call volume was not too high because the line officers were ignoring routine calls in order to focus on priority calls, which meant the usual ash and trash calls which normally made up the largest portion of police business dropped off the screen without registering. Instead, last night was an unending series of fight, assault, and disturbance calls, nearly all being founded, that term meaning valid and true.

There was a pattern of sorts-the disturbances were muggings and unprovoked attacks by strangers occurring in dispersed locations; it was impossible to bring police pressure to bear because things appeared to be completely random. From what I heard, there were at least three officer-involved shootings, all against drug-crazed individuals who ended up being shot multiple times before going down.

Looking at it through my experience and training, a pattern was emerging, and obviously the brass saw it as well, which explained their precautions: a gang war was building, one of the old-style 80s bloodbaths. What we were seeing now was new recruits getting blooded in random assaults, earning their chops. Factions were prepping recruits and bolstering their forces before undertaking a serious realignment of the social order.

While I was fairly exposed, residence-location-wise, I was not in much danger because my place is a fort, and I had no car to worry about nor a job to draw me away from safety. I was, however, low on food. A survey of the state of supplies established that I could survive a standoff measured in hours. I complied a detailed list of food and household goods and went to shower and change.

There was a superstore eight blocks from my home, and I normally made do with a handy folding cart like the old ladies use, but this time I called for a cab to get me and my two shopping carts worth of  goods. It was probably overdoing it, but what the hell, most of what I got was canned goods, so I would eat it eventually anyway.

“Got family coming in?” the cabbie asked after we finished loading the stuff, a young guy with bad skin and a scraggly red beard.

“Naw, I’m thinking the natives are restless, might be some rioting.” I fastened my seatbelt. “Figure I might end up stuck in my place for a few days.”

“Could be right. There was a helluva fight across the access ring an hour ago, I drove past with a fare from the airport, then came back empty and took another look. Crowd was going at it, took about fifty cops to break it up, and they didn’t so much break it up as run one group off. Weird lookin’, like they was stoned, man.”

  By the time I had everything unpacked and stored, I figured I had enough food for a month, enough cleaning supplies for two months, enough toilet paper for six weeks, and three bottles of water. Twelve ounce bottles. There’s always something.

Which reminded me, the propane tank on the grill was nearly empty, and if I was thinking about losing utilities I was going to be in the dark, because while I had expensive police-issue flashlights, they had built-in rechargeable batteries.

On the other hand unpacking a full case of beef stew made me think I was definitely letting things become an obsession. How many impending ‘gang wars’ had we been alerted for during my career, and how many had actually panned out? Madhouse weeks were hardly unheard of, after all. I had had some excitement yesterday and it made me want to run around playing last survivor like the Charlton Heston movie. What I needed was a nap.

The phone buzzing woke me; I had kept it close to hand for a change. It was nearly fifteen hundred, I noticed as I hit the button. It was Sergeant Mesa on the line, office of the staff commander for emergency planning; I had met him a couple times while out-processing for retirement. “Sorry to disturb you, Lieutenant, but the Chief wants to put our type II assets on alert.” He sounded stressed. “Are you going to be available this weekend?”

I sat up on the sofa and scratched my head. “You mean for call up?”

“Yes, sir, if needed. From twenty-one hundred tonight through twenty-one hundred Sunday night we need you to be by the phone and able to respond to Training in tactical uniform within an hour. Will you be available if needed?”

“Sure.” What else would I be doing?

“This is largely a test of our capabilities, however you should treat it as the real program.” He recited the words like a prayer.

“I’ll be ready, feel free to call.”

The department had two hundred reserve officers, unpaid but fully trained and licensed personnel that served sixteen hours a month, or when called out in case of disaster or emergency. Since 9/11 they had also set up a system wherein retired officers could be called back to active duty in emergency, serving in whatever capacity their physical abilities allowed. I was Category II, which meant limited physical duty; static guard post, barrier duty, traffic direction, stuff where the old & infirm retirees could free up able-bodied patrolmen. Retirees had never been called up to date. What the hell was going on? I turned on the scanner, but every channel had moved to encrypted.

I climbed up onto my roof and took a look around; other than a couple big smoke pillars marking building fires, which was not unusual, the only thing I saw was a couple police choppers in the air, and a couple military birds as well.  There were more sirens than would be usual for a Friday, but it was clearly a busy week and the weekend’s approach would simply ramp that up.

For some reason I kept turning towards the scrubland where I heard the growl. The cabbie’s ‘big fight’ would have occurred just across the access ring from it. I thought about the absent vagrants, and mentally kicked myself for telling ghost stories.

But I did use the block & tackle I had rigged to lower the grill’s gas cylinder into the alley so I could exchange it later.

If I said the call didn’t make my heart sing I would be lying: I laid out a Tactical uniform, cleaned all my gear, polished already-shining boots, and in general fluttered around like a kid before Prom. To get to wear a real badge, even for a weekend, would be amazing. Even on a static post taking a certain amount of crap from snot-nosed rookie patrolmen. It would be like a visit home.

The shrinks would probably tell me letting go was healthier, but screw them.

Alan Hambone, owner and operator of Hambone’s Army Surplus and Amazing Gift Emporium, was a huge burly man running a bit toward fat as he ended his sixth decade on this planet. A retired USMC Sergeant Major, he ran a thriving business out of a decrepit sandstone warehouse that had been built before WW1 on a railroad spur, and whose claim to fame was that it had been used as a staging point for supplies sent to Black Jack Pershing when that worthy had been hunting banditos in Mexico. Pershing’s picture was one of two non-Marines in the photo collection that dominated the wall behind the cash register, the other being George S. Patton Jr, a staff officer of Pershing’s during the Mexico foray.

The warehouse was a wonderland of genuine military surplus from a dozen nations, all manner of outdoorsy goods both new and used, plus ammunition, guns, archery supplies, knives by the score, and an arts, crafts, and jewelry section to entertain the wives and girlfriends.

I was shocked to see the lot empty and Alan preparing to shut down the lights. “Alan! Hey, Alan! What’s up? Why are you closing?”

He turned, quick on his feet for a big man, clad in a red tee shirt with USMC emblazoned across the XXXL front, jeans, and a faded Marine-issue camo battle dress blouse worn open. I jumped at the sight of his big paw wrapped around a M1911. “Hell, sorry, Martin. Getting a bit jumpy, I guess.” He stuffed the pistol into his waistband and shook my hand.

“Why are you closing up early?”

He jerked his chin towards a heavily loaded Ford Explorer I hadn’t noticed. “Gonna meet up with my son and his family and head for the tall timber. Got a cabin off a good piece, gonna lay low for a while.” He tapped his beak of a nose. “Got a bad smell. Drums in the jungle and all that. Gonna be trouble, and the eagle don’t shit for me to kill booga-boogas no more. Time to
di-di-mau
.”

“What the hell is going on?” I shook my head. “The PD just called me to say that the wrecks and retirees are on alert for this weekend.”

“You’re smart, you’ll tell them to stick it and head for cover.” He grinned. “Too dumb to do that, though, right? They said, ‘
hey, want to take unnecessary risks for low pay
’ and you said ‘
where do I need to be
’, right?”

I shrugged. “There it is. I’m too old to change.”

“I know. The Crotch calls, I’d go, too. Some people are just too dumb to live. You need something, I’ll sell it to you if you make it brisk.”

“Sure.” I noticed he left the ‘Closed’ sign on and locked the door behind us. “You taking credit cards today?”

“From you, yeah. What do you need?”

“Candles, flashlights, stuff in case the utilities get cut off. I got food, and my place is like a bank vault, but every flashlight I’ve got is rechargeable.”

“No problem.” He grabbed a cart. “Follow me. Twenty-five percent discount for a fellow fightin’ fool-there ain’t many of us left anymore.”

We loaded up the cart with a couple Mag Lights, batteries, all the cylumes he had left, a propane lamp, his last six mini-cylinders of gas for the lamp, and some candles for good luck. “What about water and food?” Alan asked, rubbing his iron-gray burr haircut.

“I hit the grocery, but I forgot bottled water, and I need some water cans so I can flush if the water is cut off. What’s going on, Alan?”

“Me, I don’t know.” He lifted two groups of five tan plastic five gallon water cans bound together with strapping onto my cart and tossed in a couple bottles of purification tablets. “How about some MREs? Got two cases left, cut you a deal.”

“Sure. Why are you so low?”

“We ain’t the only ones getting the prickles, son. I’ve had a run on the useful stuff since Tuesday. Went cash only on Wednesday, and this morning I equipped a white collar type with everything from boots to cover and some hardware for three Rolexes. Some I sold to are fringe types, the kind who think the government will start shooting gun owners any day, but most were ex-military, kids not long back from
goat-ville and retirees. What really put me on edge was these suit and tie types, young Republican Rotary Club Kiwanis; guys I sold guns to and then had to explain what ammunition to buy and how to load them. About twenty of those have passed through, and you know that I’m not the only guy selling guns in our armpit of a city. When you see bean counters getting panicky, that’s a bad sign. Plus it
feels
wrong, I dunno what to say, but if this was at night and ‘sixty-eight again, I would say we had sappers in the wire.”