The Zone Read online

  The door to the back third was strap iron and bars, propped open by an Army-surplus ammo can; I didn’t use the area much; there was an alcove with a toilet and a sink, my gun safe from home, and some boxes of stuff gathering dust from my divorce. The double doors that led to the alley were original to the building, cast-iron panels on hinges you could lift a bridge section with to let ships pass by, held closed by both a central bar, and top & bottom latches that went four inches into concrete

  The whiteboard on the wall near the TV displayed the chores and duties currently outstanding, but none required immediate attention. I had a couple paperbacks to read and plenty of unwatched video to hand, so my options were numerous. After some poking around I settled down with a VHS collection on the Civil War that my uncle had taken in during the last days, a History Channel special.

  A couple hours learning about Lincoln and his generals (which was a lot more interesting than it sounds-history has always been a major interest of mine) passed pleasantly enough, until my stomach reminded me that half-a bag of stale stick pretzels wasn’t enough to hold the line. I made it a habit to get out of my place a couple days a week, and the white board indicated it had been four days since my last foray (I kept track), so I decided to head out for a bite to eat and a stroll about the city.

  In my closet I have a collection of knee supports, braces, crutches, half-crutches and canes, but my knee was responding very well to exercise and use so long as I didn’t try to move faster than ninety steps a minute. I put on one of the ace bandage tube supports you can buy anyplace just to be safe. The medics had assured me that my surgery and therapy had gone amazingly well and that I could expect the use of my leg for life, but I was very careful. What they considered ‘use of’ was not my definition. I wasn’t happy with my condition, and I wanted to insure it got no worse.

  Jeans, a navy tee shirt with the local radio station logo (they were giving them away at the mall one rainy day while I was walking laps), polished tactical boots, and a multi-pocketed khaki vest of the sort that photographers used to wear made up my outfit.

  I added some money from the desk, and strapped on my hardware: a Glock 21C with a combo laser sight/tactical flashlight on its rail in a pancake holster on my right hip, a .38 Colt Diamondback in a shoulder rig under my left arm, butt-down so I could draw with either hand, and a Spyderco lock blade clipped to the pocket of my jeans. Two Berretta Model 21As were tucked into pockets in my vest, along with a spare mag for the Glock and loose rounds for the Colt. I knew it was far too much firepower-I had always carried off-duty, but never like this. Since the House I never left home with less than three guns for reasons I never bothered to examine. The unexamined life is a lot easier to deal with, in my opinion.

  Firearms were always an interest of mine, and I had kept my collection in the divorce, plus a variety from my Uncles residual stock, the latter mostly low-value stuff. Since moving I had done a lot of selling and trading of firearms; my wife hadn’t approved of my hobby, and one positive aspect of being family-free was that I was able to indulge myself. With ample trading goods and plenty of time, I had built an impressive collection into something more impressive. Exceptional, maybe.

  Money was one of the areas where I had no problems, as fifty percent of Lieutenant’s pay, with reduced taxes due to being retired & disabled in a state which wisely had no income tax was not a bad sum of money; add in that I owned my new home free and clear, had no car and no credit card debt, and the result was a dearth of money worries. It didn’t hurt that I preferred a bare-bones existence, without cable, landline phone, or Net fees.

  The neighborhood I lived in was an old one, once the main street of a town long since absorbed by urban sprawl; built immediately post WW1, it had seen a lot of ups and downs over the decades, but ten years ago they had punched a circular eight-lane highway project around the urban mess to cope with increasing traffic; it passed about two blocks east of my street and although we were technically outside the ring it had revitalized the area a bit, besides ripping down a wide swath of decaying neighborhoods. Over half the original buildings were gone, mostly to create parking space; the rest were office space for low-to-moderate-priced lawyers, chiropractors, people who said they could help you get a green card, a few close-to-trendy art galleries and a couple places to eat. At night I was the only person on this street for a couple blocks in either direction unless somebody worked late. My place was on a corner, facing west; the north side was a parking lot for a building that housed a lawyer; to the east an alley separated me from a similar building that used to be an insurance office but currently was empty.

  The first weeks I had been here I had ridden the buses because with a monthly metro pass you can get onto a bus and ride until you were tired of riding, but I got sick of that very early on. It didn’t do my knee any good, and public transportation never draws the cream of society. Like so many other public programs it cost money and seemed to accomplish little other than to entertain the nonproductive members of society. The fact that I was now more or less a non-productive member of society didn’t confer any class solidarity, and in any case Texas heat does not go well with poorly air conditioned busses. It was fall now and cooler, but I wasn’t really interested in riding the friendly wheels of something or other, it was on the side of every bus under the gang graffiti.

  I gimped six blocks to a McDonald’s on the edge of a big mall for chicken nuggets and fries, giving the next few hours careful consideration. Within a brisk hobble was a used book barn, a flea market, and a surplus store, three regular haunts of mine when just plain walking wasn’t a goal. All three had their charms, but I decided to work the knee a bit, maybe grab a pizza to take home. Planning has always been important to me-the spontaneous act is a creature I had heard of but did not know on sight. Organization-that was important.

  Sipping the thin vanilla slurry at the bottom of my shake as I headed out the doors, I looked around for a trash can, then cut across the parking lot towards the big blue dumpsters. Sitting with his back to the steel box was a tweaker; I gave him a cursory glance as I tossed the cup, then took a second look. And a third.

  My first glance I had thought he was white or Hispanic, but upon closer examination I saw that he was a black guy, looked to be in his twenties, so sick his skin was the color of ash. Well, tweakers coming off a hard ride get sick, that’s the nature of the game, and while meth isn’t a primary drug of choice in the local black addict community a black tweaker is not unknown either.

  Except this guy had all his teeth and his skin was pretty clear; he had a bit too much muscle for a guy on go-fast, and he was wearing khaki Docker slacks and a polo shirt with tan stripes, and both looked to have been clean recently, and were fairly new. “Hey, buddy, you OK?” I asked; out of habit I started to squat, then stopped; my knee did not like that.

  The tweaker didn’t respond; he was sitting against the steel side of the dumpster (which stunk pretty good) with his legs stretched out straight, wrists resting on his thighs with his relaxed palms turned down; he held his head erect with his mouth gaping (which was how I could see his teeth), taking long, wheezing breaths. He had a thousand yard stare and blinked about every minute, which was a bit unusual for a tweaker but not impossible, especially on the downslide.

  “You got asthma, friend? You need help?”

  Nothing. He was in his own world. He was a bit grungy, but other than a scrape or bite on his left forearm he looked pretty much intact. I dug my disposable cell from my vest, the kind you buy minutes for on cards that look like credit cards, and called the non-emergency number for emergency services. I always liked that term.

  It took ten rings to answer, which surprised me: on a Saturday night that would be usual, but on a Thursday at…I glanced at my watch, fifteen hundred? Slackers. When someone finally picked up I reported a black male with difficulty breathing, semi-conscious but unresponsive, at the proper address.

  “Help’s on the way, buddy. Hang in there,” I
told the guy, who kept wheezing. Since he didn’t seem to be aware of anything I went back inside to tell the manager an ambo was on the way for a sick guy by the dumpster and left. No point in sticking around for a bunch of questions for which I had no answer and less interest.

  When they added the big traffic ring they had cleared out a closed school and a couple blocks of rat hole housing and used it to park equipment and store huge mounds of gravel, road base, and fill while they were working on this section. Since then it hadn’t been used for anything, and the half-assed chain link fence had long since been carted off to the recycling centers for two cents a pound. What remained was about eight acres of uneven ground covered with scrub. Vagrants camped there sometimes, and a couple kids had gotten dragged there to be molested or murdered or both, but otherwise it was unused. I walked it on occasion because the uneven ground was good for my knee.

  I bought a bottle of water and a pack of Slim Jims from a stop & rob before heading in because you could get a couple hours’ walk if you zigzagged right.

  It was a good workout, warm enough to break an honest sweat while soaking up a lot of fresh air. That’s supposed to be good for you, absorb vitamin D or E or J or something from sweating under the sky. Or so they say. I dunno, personally, but it was kind of fun, sort of like when you were a kid. Good to get out of the place. My knee was doing well, too, so long as I did not move fast it functioned well, just a twinge or two and the odd pull of scar tissue. Boots with ankle support and good traction certainly helped. The surgeon had been very pleased with his work, you would have thought he grew my knee from a seed like a prize-winning petunia or something. It worked a lot better than they had initially estimated-there for a few days they thought I might not use the leg much ever again.

  The terrain of the place was familiar to me from numerous hikes; other than kids riding BMX bikes or skateboards on a couple humps on the very edge I usually had it to myself, not counting a scattering of vagrants camping out. Homeless is the correct term, but I had picked up vagrant from my training officer, an old dinosaur who wouldn’t have known political correctness if it had tried to crawl up his leg. I preferred the term because ‘homeless’ is one of those pat New Age social worker labels which implies that it is a regrettable but temporary condition. In my experience, which being at the street level meant I dealt with them almost every day, ‘vagrant’ seemed more appropriate because as a whole society seemed only vaguely aware of their existence, and cared even less. Nearly all are mentally unstable, substance abusers, or both, and few ever break free of the life. Some lives are very cheap in our brave new world.

  Today I had it completely to myself, as the homeless vagrants were absent; of course, a lot would be out hustling for a buck, but usually a percentage would be around. I swung closer than I usually went to the squats on the patch nearest the highway (where they sell papers or flowers or just hold signs) and the area nearest the mall (where there were food-court dumpsters and parking-lot panhandling), but both were deserted. Vagrants tend to carry their goods with them, so the evacuated appearance of the shanties was not unusual, but the complete absence of people was odd; normally a cholera outbreak wouldn’t have budged them. Maybe Tactical had done a sweep, moved them along because too many commuters or mall-lovers had complained.

  There wasn’t any particular pattern to my walking; I avoided heavy brush, investigated piles of junk, took or avoided slopes or depressions on a whim. The point was to work the knee and get some air, not go anywhere in particular, just walk and think. And generally I don’t do a lot of thinking-I have no future to speak of, and the past is annoying, so I try to live in the moment and keep on moving.

  Towards the end of my meandering trek my feet brought me to a pile of concrete storm drain pipes and connections, three foot diameter tubing and boxes to keep the roadway from flooding in the spring, only these were cracked, broken, or miscast, and dumped here to biodegrade over the next couple centuries. So far as I know, you can’t recycle cement. Myself, I don’t recycle anything-I figure wasting as much of the planet’s resources is a sort of immortality. Plus it’s too much effort.

  The pipes and such were dumped over a half acre and coated with green briar, organic barbed wire. I normally skirted the place because green briar grows in thickets and will tear you up, but several paths had been thoroughly trampled down very recently so I followed them without really thinking about it, my mind elsewhere.

  I was in amongst the concrete jumble when I stopped and asked myself what had made the path? ATVs? No, no tracks. Feet, apparently a fair amount of traffic. Looking at the path I saw snagged threads and even bits of cloth on the thorns underfoot and on either side. Odd. Who would bust brush through green briar out here?

  Looking around, I noticed the silence for the first time: no birds, no bugs humming, no grasshoppers jumping about. Very still. Oddly still.

  And then something growled.

  I had the Glock out and toward the sound, feet set, left hand cradling the right, thumbs touching, finger kissing the trigger, all without conscious thought. Every nerve ending was alert, every sense straining. In my working life I had been a soldier or police officer, and while they could take a lot from me, they could not strip away what I had been, and in the final estimate I had always been a man trained and armed for violence. I felt alive in a way I had not since the House: the colors were drained, the world was smaller, and my blood sang in my ears; I could taste each breath. It is a feeling the dwarfs nearly every other experience: the real hunt, where the other half of the equation is just as dangerous as the hunter.

  Part of me asked if I was finally slipping off the deep end, but the physical had reacted, not the mental, or at least the higher-end mental that was the part to go crazy. Then I heard it again and I quit wondering because crazy happens in your head, and there was no way I could possibly imagine that sound; part of me hoped that I would be able to forget it soon, like before I had to sleep again.

  It was a breathy, raspy noise, a growl in the sense that a noise you make when confronted by a threat is a growl. It didn’t really sound like an animal, but I wasn’t a wildlife expert-it might be someone’s exotic pet that got loose.

  Except that the next growl, higher pitched and slower, came from behind and to my left. Unbidden my left hand scrabbled at my collar for a mike that wasn’t there. Call for back-up, ingrained instinct. Except that I was alone, and no one knew I was here.

  Swinging my sight picture in slow arcs to avoid tunnel vision I took a careful step back the way I came, then another. Something moved, not fast, not far, behind a green-encrusted pipe to my right, but it was going away. Another step. A fourth growl to my right ending in a sort of hacking breath that tried to connect to a memory but I ignored the connection and stayed rigidly focused on sight picture, all senses, and each slow, careful step. Step, listen, smell, look, repeat.

  There was a smell, I realized now, a stale smell, musty, sort of decay; the memory of deceased found in unheated homes in winter when the cold nights kept insects away and the rot was slow. Except not quite.

  Step by step. Something moved to my left beyond my field of vision, slow, clumsy, and not far; to what purpose I could not determine. Another five feet covered but that was unimportant, only the next step mattered, the front sight and the next step. Another step. Something moving to my right, keep the weapon centered, remember that might be what they want you to react to. Stay calm, stay alert, step, stay focused, front sight, step, when it moves hit it hard, step, fourteen in the Glock, six in Colt, step, nine in each Beretta, step, one step at a time, step, one shot at a time, step, live each second, step, and the start of the path through the green briar was in front of me; my boots were on straggly grass burned brown by the sun, not matted thorns.

  I waited for a few moments, but I didn’t hear anything so I moved off to my left, the way I had come, the Glock at chest height to rest my arms, moving half-speed, careful, the feeling of danger fading. Fifty yards from the edge
of green briar I made a beeline back to civilization, the Glock at my side but unholstered until my boots hit asphalt.

  Weapon stowed, I stared back the way I had come and flexed my fingers. That had been really odd, but truthfully I felt better since I couldn’t remember when. The honest fact is that living holds more fears for me than the thought of dying. That was probably some deep insight into my mind, but screw it, the unexamined life is easier.

  I picked up a thin crust pizza loaded with multiple meat toppings on my way home since there wasn’t much food in the place. After eating about half of it with a couple diet sodas I dug out my phone and my address book and called Bet Kiess, a communications supervisor who had worked for me during my light duty stint.

  She was on duty, and I got through to her without much time on hold. “Hey, El-tee, how are you doing?” She had a deep mellow voice from years of cigarettes and late-night radio work.

  “I’m good, retirement’s agreeing with me. How’re you?”

  “Over worked and underpaid, same as always. Your knee holding up?”

  “Better than some other parts. Listen, you have any reports of exotic pets getting loose? Bigger stuff, not spider monkeys or parrots.”

  “Doubt it.” I heard a keyboard clicking. “No, not this year. Some sort of macaw is the biggest thing, and it got captured after…lets see… biting a yard worker. Beaking a yard worker, I suppose. Why? You find one?”

  “Dunno, I heard something while hiking in some waste ground. Sounds like you guys are busy.” I could hear the radio traffic in the background.

  “Hell, yeah. Halloween weirdness starting early. No more vacation or holiday leave until after the end of the month, and overtime’s up.”

  “Damn, kind of early, isn’t it?”

  “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.”