The Zone (7 page)

The ass-munch was kicking my door, so I positioned myself carefully and poured most of a gallon of not-very-clean water down onto him. There had been an awning shading the sidewalk in front of my building once, the brackets were still in place, but it had been discarded long before I got here.

The tweaker shrieked and charged into the street, tripped, and thrashed madly until he regained his feet. He must have heard me chuckling, because he looked wildly around, literally turning in a full circle twice like he had forgotten how to turn his head. No matter how much he looked, he never raised his head above the horizontal despite the fact that I was laughing so hard at this point I had dropped the empty plastic bucket on my foot.

By the time I got my breath back he was staggering around the side of my place, across the law office parking lot, still looking for who was laughing at him, a poster child for the dangers of drug use.

I gathered up my bucket and went inside, making sure the roof hatch was bolted before crashing.

It was nearly noon when I woke up Sunday having slept well for the third day in a row; I worked out, showered, and nuked what was left of the wings for breakfast. Kicking on flip-flops I checked my front door, which was undamaged but blood-spattered-the tweaker had really gone at it. I splashed some bleach on the blood and then hosed the area off.

The water pressure faltered twice while I was hosing off the sidewalk; it had faltered once while I was showering; I was thinking about that and not much else, my thumb cold where I had it clamped over the hose opening to get the  pressure up, when I heard someone yell. Actually, more a shriek like when a woman who sees a mouse unexpectedly, the kind where they slap a hand over their own mouth in mid-yelp.

I turned and saw a woman in her early thirties standing in the middle of the street which intersected with the one my place faced; she was wearing a brown polyester skirt and a white blouse with a gold name tag hanging by one peg; her hair had been up but half was loose and straggling everywhere, and her hose were dirty and running above sensible shoes. She stood there with her hands clapped to her mouth, eyes wide, a smudge of grime across her forehead. I stood on the sidewalk with the hose hissing water past my thumb into the gutter and stared back at her.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” I finally asked, feeling kind of stupid.

She shook her head, hands still at her mouth.

“Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance? Are you diabetic?” Old habits.

“I…I…I,” she lowered her hands, which were dirty. “I was in…”

That seemed to be a starting point. “Were you in an accident? Did someone hurt you?” She was sweating and her blouse was dirty, but she looked like she had been clean, tidy, and respectable when she got up this morning.

“My car,” she shuddered. “My car…I was…”

“OK, you’re OK now.” I turned off the faucet and unscrewed the hose. “Lets get you some help. My name is Martin, I’m a retired police officer. Who are you?”

“They…they are coming,” she was staring back the way she came.

I snapped the locking cap on the faucet into place. Leave it unguarded for a minute in this berg and you’re buying drinking water for half the dopers in a fifty mile radius. “Who’s coming?” Keeping my hands in plain sight but down at my sides I walked across the cracked and buckling concrete to the corner and looked down the street. Two blocks to the east the elevated concrete access road loomed like a castle wall. I noticed that the building across the alley from mine had bright sparkles of shattered glass under the windows, but I didn’t see anyone. “Looks like you lost them. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll call for an ambo…ambulance and contact anyone you need to talk to. Were you on your way to work?”

“Yes…yes…work, I work at the Ryecroft Hotel, the Airport Ryecroft.” She was twisting her hands, but at least they were at her waist.

“I’ve seen it.” I stepped into the gutter. “Are you hurt?”

It was a cry, a moaning howl, a sort of inflection-less call, emotionless and full of import at the same time. I have heard people making noise from every sort of physical pain and mental anguish and nothing I had ever heard sounded like that. It spoke straight to my spinal column, though: I crouched, hands in fists, keenly aware that I was unarmed and outside my place. It came from the direction she had come from. “You better come inside…”

She was gone; I spotted her a half block to the west pelting down the center of the street as fast as tired legs that hadn’t done any serious running in years could carry her. With my knee there was no way I was going to catch her; glancing back to the east I saw people coming down the street at a purposeful trot, and headed back to my front door, leaving the hose where it lay.

The front door locked and barred, I headed up the stairs, grabbing a riot shotgun
I kept in a corner at the top in passing. Up on the roof I gimped over to the east and saw the people in question already crossing the intersection. They were a mixed bunch, dirty, disheveled, a couple bloody, all moving with a purpose in the same direction the woman had taken. There were about a dozen, an odd mix of races and ages; I yelled, but none faltered, continuing to move west as if in pursuit of the woman I had seen.

Cursing my knee I scrambled back down, careful to shoot the hatch’s bolt on the way, and got to my phone.

911 rang and rang; I counted thirty-five rings before I got an answer, and I hadn’t starting counting right away. A harried operator interrupted me before I got my entire address out. “Are you under personal attack?”

“What? No, but there is this woman…”

“Sir are you in a building or vehicle?”

“Yeah…I’m at home.”

“Lock your doors, cover all windows, like a blackout, use cloth or tape. Do not engage strangers. Stay indoors. Utility service may be interrupted, do not call if it does.”
Click
.

I set the phone down, shocked, then picked it up and checked that I had in fact called 911. The operator had said that last bit in the fashion of someone repeating something they had said over and over.

Lock your doors. Blackout. Stay indoors. Avoid strangers. What the hell was going on?

I called my ex, and got voicemail; I tried my daughter and got the same. I had never bothered to program many numbers so I had to find my address book to start calling friends in the Department. I kept getting voice mail, but finally I reached Fred Jackson, a guy I had served with in Tactical. He was fading in and out, the signal popping and clicking. “Fred? This is Martin D’Erin, can you talk?”

“Martin? Hey-I can barely hear you. Where are you?”

“At home-where are you?”

“Home! Good Lord,
are you still in town
? Damn, Slick, get the hell out! I’m two hundred miles north and still driving.”

“What is going on? I’ve been out of touch.”

“Its crazy, just crazy. The Guard arrived…today’s Sunday…Saturday afternoon, and I think Regular Army a few hours later. Around twenty-two hundred they said martial law, use of force now verbal command, then deadly force. In
writing
, slick. I think about twenty officers are dead, must be a hundred injured, the hospitals are a mess, everyone is going crazy, slick, I mean
insane
, big bunches of people. Around five I said to hell this and headed home, got my family.”

“What? You quit your post? Fred
, you’re
Tactical
.”

“Martin, Patrol has had guys fading since yesterday afternoon; the desk jockeys were fading even sooner. Hell, my whole team packed it in; we were almost out of ammo in any case. Martin, we were killing people, and the orders from the brass is just call in the time, place, body count, and badge number into the automated recorders we used to use to dictate reports, remember? The ones you could get from any pay phone?”

“What is wrong with people?”

Static buzzed and then Fred cut in “…lost
a substation, I mean over-run, Slick, like the freaking Alamo …you better …never seen anything …good…family…” the connection died.

I sat on my cot. Fred wasn’t one to joke, not like this. He was a Sergeant, a good cop. An entire Tactical team packing in, deserting their posts? Patrol officers bailing? This wasn’t Louisiana for crying out loud-police officers don’t just run off in the face of an emergency. Oh, sure, the sort of losers who go into Training or Internal Affairs slots,
screw-ups and cowards and the terminally useless, but not line officers. Not real police. And Fred was the real deal.

And shooting people with just a verbal report? What the hell?

But it explained the gunfire I had heard last night; military units with low-velocity rules of engagement. But why were they shooting people? Rioters were something I had experienced: the dregs of society trying to get even, cowards who would break and run when the gas was followed by batons. Brave at burning cars and smashing windows, but otherwise punks grandstanding for a photo and ten-second news clip. Looters were just thieves. Neither was worth the price of a bullet.

Then I thought about the single-minded crew I had seen running past: they seemed different. They might need a bullet to stop.

Nobody was around when I recovered my hose; I flushed out and filled the water cans and a couple containers I had laying about. I only had two second story windows and my front door to black out, so a few minutes with packing tape and a roll of tin foil took care of it. I couldn’t help but think about my night-time intruder: the light from my TV screen, even on screen saver, would have been clearly visible through the white butcher paper cover on the door. The building across the alley had lights on a timer that came on at night-but why light was a factor did not track. Burglars preferred buildings that looked unoccupied, and contrary to TV, they usually hit in daytime when people were at work.

A dozen twelve ounce water bottles salvaged from my trash, each filled three-quarters with tap water went to the freezer wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper; once frozen, if the power cut off they would make the freezer act as an old-style icebox for a couple days. It was work for hands while I thought; I cleaned my place to keep busy while I twisted at what was going on. Could I be delusional? Had I been alone so much I had imagined the woman and my night-time intruder and the people running past? I wished I had paid more attention in all the mental health classes I had sat through. The one thing that I did recall was that mentally ill people usually believed they were completely sane, like the old saying that if you were worried you were going crazy, you weren’t.

I hadn’t imagined the phone call with Fred-that was on my phone’s log. So was my call to 911-I pulled it up and noted the length of transmission.

There was a small breaker box on the roof but no power jacks so I had an extension cord coiled on a hook at the top of the ladder; I set the boom-box on the roof rampart, extended the antenna, and started searching the channels, looking for half-remembered stations. I found a station I used to listen to on patrol, mostly 80s rock, and got the emergency tone. Halfway across the dial I got a local station:

“…emergency broadcast system reporting. To repeat to all listeners, the State of Emergency declared by the Governor’s office will be superseded by the Federal emergency powers act as of six pee em today. There is a state-wide curfew from seven pee em to six aye em throughout Texas; any persons not indoors during those hours is subject to detention without recourse to Habeas Corpus. All National Guard and Reserve personnel are ordered to report to their unit armories. All other persons are advised to stay at home, to insure that no light is visible from their homes, and to remain on the upper floors in a multi-floor dwelling. Do not make contact with strangers, and do not take action against rioters or looters unless in self defense. A statement from the CDC reports that the avian flu outbreaks have been contained, but that the effects of the disorienting fevers are producing unpredictable and even violent outbursts in victims. Do not approach sick individuals, and do not transport infected subjects to region hospitals. This is the Emergency…”

If I was going insane, I wasn’t alone. Several other channels were broadcasting the same message. Interesting, but what did it mean? Flu driving people crazy? Maybe. A fever certainly was disorienting, although it usually was debilitating. Hard to see flu victims rioting so bad you had to shoot them. But I’m not a doctor. I needed more information.

The skyline didn’t look all that different; there were a couple smoke pillars, and a few military helicopters, but I couldn’t hear any shooting. Where could I find a TV or computer with Net service?

Struck by a thought, I gimped downstairs and rummaged in the back room, going through packed-away patrol gear until I found it: a portable CB radio. I had bought it after a few local burglars took to using them for communication. I hadn’t used it in years, but at least I had taken the batteries out, so it wasn’t ruined.

Back on the roof I powered it up, and traffic wasn’t hard to find. I found what I was listening for after a few minutes: an older man, gruff, calm, the sort who held together in an emergency. His call sign was fid-matt, meaning he was likely a veteran: FIDMAT, Fuck it, Don’t Mean A Thing, the manta of a combat soldier.

I asked him to jump channel. “Fidmat, this is seven-five Romeo: listen, I’ve been out of pocket for a few days What with the rioters, over?”