American Apocalypse (12 page)

We were on the fourth house—this one had an intact entry—when she pulled up. Max had just gone around the back. I heard the car and quit kicking the front door in. It was a Volvo that had seen better days. I walked down the driveway toward the car when she stepped out. She was one of the “hard to tells.” That’s what I called them, because it was hard to tell their age. Whatever your first guess was, you usually ended up adding twenty years to it.

She was pretty from a distance—they always are—blonde, almost slim, with a nice rack of silicone. I don’t know a lot about women’s clothes, but hers fit nicely and looked expensive. Back when I worked for the mortgage company, a lot of the female brokers looked like her. Well, the new ones usually didn’t, but after they worked there for a few months they would begin the transformation. First they did the hair, then the breasts, followed by the face, ass, stomach, wherever. The clothes would get more expensive, tighter, more revealing. Their attitude would also change. They became “broker bitches.” Simple tech support guys no longer had a chance with them. We couldn’t afford them. If you caught one early, well, you
had until a couple months after the transformation began. Then you would get dumped. After all, a girl needs her space. Oh, occasionally they might forget, like at an office party, but the next day it was as if it never happened.

So as I watched her approach, I was not radiating awestruck appreciation of the goddess who would be soon was standing in front of me. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head, hesitated, and then gave me the smile—she had a great smile. “Hello, officer. I thought I would come by and see my house before they blew it up or whatever it is that you people do.”

“Ah, we bulldoze it . . . well, I don’t. I was just checking to make sure it was empty.”

“Really,” she drawled this out, “I saw you knocking on my front door. Perhaps these will help?” She held up a set of house keys.

“Well, there is only one way to find out.” I took them from her hand, and we walked to the front door.

“I was so hoping I would be able to look inside once more. I really loved this house.”

I slid the key into the lock. It fit, as did the dead bolt key. “You had one strong door there, ma’am.”

“Oh, please, call me Tiffany.”

“Okay, Tiffany,” I held the door open for her.

As she went through she told me, “Yes, it’s not an ordinary door. It’s is teak and it was handcrafted especially for—” She stopped dead “Oh . . . my . . . God.” I had no idea what the house looked like before, but I am sure it didn’t look the way it did now. It was nothing new or particularly shocking to me. It was to her. “Oh, my lord. What the . . . ” her voice trailed off. The foyer floor had been tiled with ceramic; most of it was now shattered.
The floor in the great room had a large burnt spot where someone had built a campfire. The fireplace pit was full of trash. The walls had been tagged with profanity and a poorly done outline of a giant black penis that had been labeled Obama. Yep, nothing new or unusual here. “My floor . . . oh, my God, my Italian ceramic floor! . . . And my mahogany floor, too”—she had noticed the fire scars. “My walls . . .” Her hand was over her mouth, her eyes were large; she was slowly spinning in place as she took it all in. “It was so beautiful, it was so beautiful. . . .”

After a moment, in a quiet voice she asked me, “Is it all like this?”

“I don’t know. My guess is yes.”

“Oh,”—a pause—“will you show me the rest?”

“Sure. Except we’re going to skip the basement. It might be dangerous.” She nodded in agreement. The real reason was, I didn’t feel like running into Max and having to explain—or share.

We walked the kitchen and dining area; all the appliances were gone. “They took my Vikings!” Whatever those were, their being taken had her sounding irritated for the first time, rather than stunned as she had been. She rattled on about her Natuzzi sofa and how her idiot husband had tried to mount the flat screen over the fireplace. The brackets had come loose, and the TV had ended up broken on the floor. Apparently, that had really been a big deal at the time.

She took my arm as we mounted the stairs; mounting was on my mind as I looked over at her. She gave me a little smile when she saw me looking. So what if it was past its prime? It had been a while. We made it to the top without incident and began touring the upper-level bedrooms.
Once again it was endless decorating chatter—I would interject a sincere sounding “Really?” or a nod of the head if she was looking and a “That sounds really pretty.” Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out where we could make it happen. Everything was dirty. That wouldn’t bother me, especially as I wouldn’t be on the bottom, but I was pretty sure it would matter to her. She looked like that type. We had just come out of the master suite, where she had spent what seemed like an eternity describing the master bath and the twin, cedar-lined walk-in closets.

She was looking around the room. “And that was where our king-sized bed was—Donny liked it. He told me that we would have plenty of room for playing—shit, the only thing he did in it was play possum. Even Viagra couldn’t get a rise out of him.”

As she finished spitting this out, the sun came out from behind the clouds and flooded the room with light. Not only did it illuminate the room, it illuminated her. I normally wouldn’t have cared. I had already seen her in the sunlight.

This time, the look on her face as she spat out her disdain of her husband’s sexual prowess, combined with the harshness of the sunlight on her face, was as effective as a cold bucket of water. The vicious glint of hate in her eyes, the artificiality of her body, of her soul, her mindless recitation of items purchased—it all repelled me.

An image of my last trip to a thrift store: a bin filled with old toys—on top, a naked Barbie, the dirt on it looking like bruises, the hair damaged by some kind of chemical, the body twisted. That was the woman in front of me. A cold chill ran down my back. The look of expectant
pleasure replacing the glint in her eyes was frightening in its intensity. I had a vision of her reaching out, taking me in her arms, and devouring me like a fresh-baked cookie. When she was done she would leave. The only thing left behind to show I had ever been here would be my rapidly dimming shadow and a hair ball.

“Okay. Time to go.” I didn’t even touch her. I just headed for the stairs. I think I heard a faintly muttered “Shit” behind me, before the sound of her heels let me know she was following. We left the same way we came in. I was surprised that Max wasn’t waiting there.

We were out the door and I was about six feet down the walk when she called out to me, “Wait! We have to lock the front door!”

I still had the house keys. I tossed them to her. “You can if you want. That door won’t be there in four hours.”

I think that’s when she understood: It was over. Wherever she was going now was just another step on the way down. No more everything, no more forever. I turned away and kept walking over the remains of the grass to the next house. I didn’t turn around when I heard the Volvo engine start up.

Max was sitting on the top step waiting for me. He eyed me, grinned, and said, “I guess it didn’t work out—or it has been a long time since the last time.”

“Fuck you, Max.”

“Ah, no score; I should have known.” He laughed. “Let’s finish this up. I want to be out of here before the suits shows up. I don’t want to end up getting stuck here doing security until they leave.” We finished up a little behind the city patrol boys working the other side. They were waiting for us.

Willis, the patrol sergeant, asked, “You boys see anything?”

Max and I both shook our heads. “Same old, same old,” Max told him.

“So you boys want to hang around, maybe pick up some OT?” We all laughed at that—we were volunteers, so we didn’t get paid.

“Maybe next time, Sarge.” We spent a few more minutes talking the usual bullshit and then parted ways.

The first cars were beginning to roll in as we walked through the tall, patchy, gone-to-seed grass of what were once manicured yards. Max and I walked and talked about nothing in particular: Some woman he had been seeing was pushing him to move in; whether or not we wanted to play softball for the city municipal team. It looked as if we were going to have to, even if we didn’t want to. The only way out would be if they canceled the season, which was looking possible. We split near the market and went our separate ways for the day. I thought I would cruise the market, go down the street, get something to eat, and head back to the room—maybe see if Night wanted to watch a movie or something. I had found out from one of the ninjas that she was older than I thought, which made me feel less like a pervert about hanging out with her.

I was still shaken up a bit from my encounter with the American harpy. Maybe I would just sit under the oak tree and talk with whoever was there or wandered by. Hopefully, it would be quiet. Some of the problems that were brought to us were so fucking petty that you wanted to shoot both parties involved. We were hearing more problems lately. People seemed more quarrelsome. Either that or we were just a lot easier and faster than getting enmeshed in the county legal system. We were definitely a lot cheaper. Official justice was an option increasingly available only to those with money. The courthouse charged for everything. Even a simple complaint could be very expensive to someone who had nothing. It wasn’t that the county fees had gone up; rather it was that so many people’s incomes had gone down.

Some people, especially media types, pontificated about how Americans would grow closer despite our
diversity. Usually, it was a white person doing the talking. Their idea of diversity was based on what they observed at work. It never occurred to them that the reason a company had such diversity in its lower ranks was because it paid the lowest salary or wage it could. They also seemed totally unaware that those same people knew to the dollar what kind of bonuses their “betters” were getting. Too many people in positions of power in this country mistook ass-kissing for actual affection.

I was walking past the shelter and heading for the oak tree when Tito, the security guard at the shelter, waved me over. “Hey, you got to go in there and see what’s happening on TV.” He was watching it through the window. I walked up and stood next to him so I could see. There was a group of people watching it inside. It looked like there was a riot somewhere that was getting seriously out of hand.

“Ain’t that some shit! Where is it?” I was expecting him to say Los Angeles or Miami from the complexions of the rioters.

He laughed. “That’s Arlington.”

Damn.
Arlington was about eight miles down the road. What made it even more surprising was that it was inside the Zone. I thought security was too tight inside to let anything more than an argument break out.

“Thanks, Tito. I got to check this shit out.” I walked in and paused behind the crowd of women who were gathered in a tight knot, raptly watching the big flat screen. The few who had cell phones were off to one side getting more information from friends and family about what was happening.

The shelter only housed women and children. It had been at capacity since the day it opened. Carol was standing to one side with her staff so I went over to join them.

“Hey, Carol.”

She looked up at me and smiled. “Hey.”

“What’s happening? Who set them off?

She whispered to me without taking her eyes off the screen. “You know the Safeway on Wilson Boulevard?” I nodded—it was the only grocery store left in that part of the Zone. All the mom-and-pop ethnic ones failed for one reason or another in the past year or so. A lot of people thought it was part of a conspiracy to make the populace dependent on one easily managed location. I thought too many people had way too much time on their hands when I heard the theory. “Well, a Latino woman—I know her sister, Rosario—she was caught by security for stealing food,” Carol said. “Anyways, she made a run for the door and made it. She was running through the parking lot—store security was just yelling at her—when some guys from Homeland Security pulled up. They saw her running and heard security yelling, so they started yelling. She didn’t stop, so they shot her. Then someone in the crowd started shooting at them, but one of the officers managed to shoot a couple bystanders, including a pregnant woman, before they went down.”

“Jesus,” I shook my head. The rules were: If you made it out the door of a grocery store and off store property, then you were home free. The security guards knew why people were stealing food. They also knew they had to go home after their shift. They never put any effort into it once people made it out the door.

That part of Arlington was packed. A lot of people were afraid to leave the Zone because they knew they wouldn’t be able to get back in. It had been a hot area during the real-estate boom, but that was long past. A lot of Hispanic families lived there, two extended families to one small 1950s red-brick house. Work was hard to come by, especially for the males. Many people spent the day and night standing around outside in that area. Usually, there was a group by the Safeway parking lot. Most of them were angry about something, and if they weren’t angry, they were probably high or drunk. There were also some hard-core gangs around there. Yeah, this was going to be interesting.

What made it even “better” was that the Homeland Security patrol had been white. They needed only one more thing to make this really flammable: a video of them shouting racial slurs as they shot the women. It turned out they didn’t need it. Arlington County police were the first responders. They were generally good, professional officers who were not known to reach for the baton or gun without being provoked. Homeland Security also responded. The name Homeland Security was really an umbrella covering a lot of agencies. The officers who were now lying dead or wounded on the asphalt belonged to one, the Federal Protective Service. Their original job of building security had been changed to providing security in the Zones. The local police hated them. Government agencies like the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. marshals looked down on them as wannabes who couldn’t get into a real agency. They liked kicking ass. They thought the Zones were war zones, not special security zones. They
had managed to alienate everyone they’d come in contact with, in an amazingly short time.