The Zone (6 page)

“Things are definitely screwy,” I agreed. “I don’t get the news.”

“Huh.” Alan put a lot of meaning into a grunt. “Like those ignorant bastards would know a fact if it was chewing on ‘em. Word on the CB is that the CDC has teams out at three local hospitals, and the Net says that the race riot in LA isn’t a race riot.” He tapped the keys on a calculator. “I’ll cut out the sales tax; I figure this place won’t be standing when I get back, and I’m insured. When I opened up this morning ‘bout dawn there was four-five winos limping across my parking lot, looked like hell. They eyeballed me like I was made out of Thunderbird or crack or something until I showed ‘em the business end of an 870 I keep handy and they moved on. Acted like they were three-quarters in the bag and seriously pissed off at the same time. Decided right then it was time to take a vacation, but my kid had to get home from Houston, didn’t get in until noon.”

“Hadn’t heard about LA. You got any ammo left?”

“Some, no guns, though. Sold all I’m not taking with me.”

“I’m OK on weapons. I could use ammunition and maybe some magazines.”

I bought the last AK and AR-15 magazines he had, the thirty-rounders anyway, plus a couple Colt twenty round AR-15 magazines, three cases of 5.56mm, one case of 7.62x39mm, one case of 7.62 NATO, one case of .45 ACP hardball, six boxes of .45 hollow points, six boxes of .41 Magnum, a box of .38 hollow points, a box of .25 ACP hollow points, twelve boxes of 12 gauge buckshot, and two bricks of .22 Long Rifle. It left him with almost no ammunition in stock, but what the hell. If there was a run on gun purchases the price wouldn’t be this cheap for another year. It wasn’t like it could go bad, and discount he was giving me made it a sweet deal by any standard. I would shoot it up eventually.

I sat atop the stacked cases while I waited for my cab, having specified a van; 7,400 rifle or handgun cartridges and three hundred shotgun rounds weren’t going to fit in the economy sized sedans they drive now. Alan locked up and left with an apology; he had no room to help me move my stuff even if he had the time. I didn’t mind, it was a nice night and I had no place to be and nothing special to do.

At least until my phone rang. I wondered if I wasn’t getting my hopes up for nothing-the brass might just be running a drill. But like Alan said, this smelled wrong.

The cab driver, a slender guy who looked Arabic but sounded like he was from the Bronx was freaked out by the ammunition, but an extra ten up front cured him. Another ten got him to help me lug it all inside my place. By the time I had moved it from inside the front door to the back room and organized it I was feeling pretty stupid again. Alan dealt with a lot of weirdoes and that sort of thing rubs off; years of police work had taught me that melodrama was a very strong and pointless motivator.

Still, his story about the winos struck a nerve. How I couldn’t say exactly, but it made me uneasy. I wondered if I was missing something.

Despite having a ton of food in the place I walked down to the corner and pulled two hundred bucks out of the ATM so I could order out. This had been the most expensive day since my divorce settlement, but I wasn’t in any financial danger, and a big chunk of it was household goods anyway. On the way back I stopped at the gas station and exchanged my propane cylinder for a full one. I thought about getting a second one, but shrugged it off-playing survivor had its limits.

Today had been fun, but it was ten minutes after eighteen hundred and there had been no call to arms from the Department. Time to stop playing Mad Max and get back to the real world. I needed more outside contact, I decided. Next week I would arrange for one of those plastic mini-dish services, get a couple hundred channels so I could bitch with authority about how there was nothing to watch. It was time to get back in touch with what passed for American culture. The decision pleased me somehow-it represented progress, I suppose. Out there in the green briar I had felt…well,
real
, and that had been a good feeling.

Maybe life wasn’t over for me after all.

Chapter Three

I dreamed about the guy next to the dumpster for some reason; it was pretty much as it had been in real life except he was looking at me and growling. And wearing a greeter’s smock from Target.

Since the power and water were on I deduced that civilization had survived the night despite the fact that I had not been recalled to duty, so I had a long shower after the full range of exercises and three miles on the treadmill.

A paper, I decided, since I couldn’t order satellite service until Monday; I hadn’t read a paper in weeks. Time to get back into the real world. I wore my gear vest but I left off the Diamondback; it was time to start cutting back to just one gun. Not all at once, but three would do for today. I felt oddly proud of the reduction in firepower.

For cooking and drinking I preferred bottled water over what ran through the old pipes in my place, so I took my little cart along, carrying it folded up. It was a bit cloudy and cool, but otherwise nice; my street was fairly deserted, offices being closed on weekends. I cut over a couple blocks to a dollar store I frequented for minor trips; as I suspected, the town was still standing. There were a couple windows being boarded up at the gas station where I exchanged propane bottles, the shattered glass getting swept up by a bored looking Hispanic teenager wearing a mp3 player, and half a block down a tired-looking wrecker driver was winching a crumpled Audi onto his flatbed, business as usual.

There were a couple streamers of yellow plastic crime scene tape fluttering from light poles in the buck mart parking lot, and a chunky Paki girl in an employee smock was trying to hose off what looked like a large puddle of dried blood; a workman was putting up sheets of plywood over a big window (actually, the now-empty place where a window should go) while the manager watched. I knew the manager from my patrol days, a short chunky guy from Pakistan (odds were the short chunky employee with the hose was a daughter or niece) named Malsomethingsomethingkin. He was a bit gray-faced and unhappy looking.

“Morning, sir,” I greeted him. “Vandals?”

“Ah,
Seer-jah-ant
, how are you?” he tried to smile at me, but it didn’t really come off very well. His white shirt under his polyester manager’s vest was grimy and ripped at the left cuff, and his left ear was bandaged. “No, we have trouble in plenty for ourselves. Last night your policeman shoot a miscreant in our parking lot, and this morning as I arrive there is a trouble with the bums, the home-less. My cashier is at the clinic getting the stitches, and my shirt is ruined. The window, I’m not sure how it broke during the trouble. I think a cart hit it when my assistant manager hit the bum with a stick.” He was sweating, and his sing-song accent was competing with phlegm.

“You’re all right?”

“Yes, indeed, I am fine, just some scrapes from the blacktop.” He tended to pronounce ‘the’ as ‘thee’. “But I am getting the flu. Good thing the cold medicine is on sale, yes?” He did better with the smile, but his heart was not really in it.

  The store was busier than usual and carts seemed to be fuller than normal; I put two 24-packs of water bottles into my cart and balanced a third on top; after paying I would use my bungee cord to strap it down. It was more water than I really needed, but what the hell; I would drink it eventually, and they were the last three cases left. I picked up Friday’s and today’s paper at the checkout.

Dragging my cart home I heard more sirens than usual for Saturday before noon, but it was a busy week. More gang trouble, I decided. I detoured a block and picked up a bucket of wings (half & half: spicy/crispy); they had a dispenser with the
New York Times
in front that was hung up so I helped myself to a free issue, having long ago sworn never to give that rag a cent of my money after they had bad-mouthed my old unit.

As I limped home, arms full and the scent of deep-fried breading making the world a better place I considered calling one buddy or another to see
about the shooting Malsomething had mentioned, and the whole madhouse week in general, but decided against it; everyone would be working extra hours, and I didn’t want to chance ruining the all-too-short sleep periods for working cops in this sort of week. It could wait until things quieted down.

The papers were full of not much; there was a big crisis between India and China and adjoining states, some sort of border clashes or border war or secession of provinces or something. Each side was issuing radically conflicting statements regarding what they were doing and what was being done to them, and none agreed with anyone else’s, while the few media sources in the zone were even more confused. The crisis in Turkey was prompting the accelerated withdrawal of Coalition forces from the Middle East, but I didn’t know what the ongoing crisis in Turkey was, and really didn’t care. Mexico City was under martial law and a failed coup was rumored but no hard data was available; the President had ordered forces from the Pacific to California in case Mexico got worse; this included most overseas USMC forces and the last combat brigade in South Korea. The US elements in Europe were also coming home temporarily in case a border crisis emerged. It looked like the White House was using various troubles as an excuse to radically realign US troop deployments without the usual domestic fall-out about appeasement and abandonment. All in all, nothing terribly exiting.

Riots had been reported in big urban sprawls on the East and West coasts, and violent crime was spiking in a lot of cities; Guard and Reserve units returning from overseas were already being alerted for state duty, and our governor was ordering the call-up of several battalions. The talking heads were throwing around the usual excuses: racial tension, the prison culture, prison gang influences, the severity of the US justice system, the weakness of the US judicial system, corporal punishment, the lack of corporal punishment, the welfare state, the shoddy state of American education, the economic crisis, unemployment, violence in pop culture, violence in music, and so forth.

My practical observations from a life spent at society’s weak points was that messed-up people produced messed-up children, and since everyone lived longer despite their best efforts, that meant the pool of screws-ups was growing by leaps and bounds.

What I learned in specific was that our urban area had a healthy little gang/drug conflict going on, and that avian flu was making the rounds. A curfew was going into effect tonight from 1900 to 0600, as the primary problems were occurring at night.

That last gave me a twinge that I couldn’t put my finger on, but I shrugged it off and settled down to eat wings and watch a DVD of John Wayne riding into Mexico with a red lockbox.

I opened my eyes, completely alert; I hadn’t awakened like this since a year after leaving the Army: one second asleep, the next wide awake and alert. I was lying on my sofa, the room illuminated by the blue box that was the DVD screen saver bouncing around the screen. I must have dozed off-last I remembered Lee Marvin was training the Dozen.

The noise that woke me repeated itself: the knob on my front door turning. There was a Colt Combat Elite on the black plastic milk crate near the couch, along with my remotes; I grabbed it and eased towards the door, thumb on the slide safety, index finger on the hot switch for the laser sight/flashlight mounted under the frame. There was a blurry shadow cast onto the butcher paper from the street light outside, and the knob turned a third time; this time a shoulder hit the door frame surprisingly hard. Very surprisingly hard-that had to hurt.

It wouldn’t work-the dead bolt at the center door was two inches of stainless steel extending into concrete. I kicked the sliding bolt at the base of the door and shoved up the one at the top of the door: now you would need a vehicle ram or a cutting torch to get through the door. “Beat it, asshole.”

A noise somewhere between a scream and a howl made me jump and the door rattled as the intruder threw himself into it full force. A tweaker, no doubt.

“Beat it, nimrod:
I’m not in the mood.” The door rattled again.

Muttering, I turned on the pistol’s flashlight and headed upstairs, pausing to light up my back door: fully locked and barred. My phone was still in my vest, and completely dead; I couldn’t remember when I had last charged it, or how many battery bars had been showing last time I had used it. I plugged it in and listened at the head of stairs: the tweaker was still banging on my door. Asshole.

I got my mop bucket and filled it three quarters full of water before climbing to the roof. It was a nice clear night; I paused to look at the stars before limping to the front of the building, stopping abruptly at what was clearly the rattle of small-arms fire to the north. Not a few pops of some jerk-off throwing a few rounds at the sky to impress a girl or scare a foe, nor the sudden wild inaccurate spray of a drive-by, but the deliberate crackling roll of several shooters who knew their business firing for both and speed and accuracy. It continued long enough that at least two shooters stopped to reload. From the sound it was one group, not a firefight. What the hell could it be? Buildings made sound tricky but I would put it at a half mile away. There were sirens, there always were on this area on a Saturday night, not all that many. There were helicopters, though, military birds flying in formation, only their red lights showing, maybe a dozen.

What the hell? The skyline looked normal, one good fire going off across the access way, but fires weren’t that uncommon, lots of empty buildings and meth labs over that way. Another rattle of fire, this time to the east, further out, ten or so shooters putting out maybe a dozen rounds each. A squad-sized element, I thought, and wondered at the thought: I wasn’t overseas. There was a curfew on, I remembered, so those could be checkpoints, but what sort of situation called for that kind of fire? Plus, those were long guns, and the department only had a few. Patrol had one shotgun per three officers, but those weren’t shotguns.