A man in khaki slacks and a gray polo shirt carried a bull horn up to a platform in front of the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, though even with the bullhorn’s amplification it was hard to hear him over the noise of the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “My name is Bob Prentice with the Metropolitan Health District.”
Maybe he thought telling them he was with the
MHD
would buy him some credibility with the crowd, but he was wrong. Rather than quiet down, the people in the front started shouting questions up at him, and the urgency of their demands seemed to completely derail him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “More food is on the way.”
A sea of voices shouted him down. “When? How much?”
“You all need to return to your homes,” he said. “Another drop will come later this evening. Please return to your homes and wait there.”
That didn’t even come close to mollifying the crowd, and as I remembered what I’d overheard Jennifer Langley saying in the women’s locker room, I couldn’t say I blamed them for being so upset. They were being lied to, and they knew it.
A panic erupted somewhere in the crowd and spread. It was like somebody had dropped a stone into a pool of water and I was watching the ripples spread from that. The energy of that panic shot outwards and I saw people pushing each other, some running for the edges of the crowd and the exits, others violent out of desperation. They all pushed toward the concrete barriers.
I drew a breath in between my teeth.
“Easy,” Chunk said.
The crowd broke on the barriers like a wave.
Prentice yelled into his bullhorn for calm, but no one listened.
Only Treanor seemed to keep his composure. He marched down the line, barking orders at the
SWAT
officers, all of them raising their pepper ball guns to their hips.
“Fire.”
The
SWAT
guys started firing, the
thump thump thump
of the pepper ball guns reminding me of those deposit capsules being sucked through the overhead tubes at the drive-thru of a bank.
Orange splotches the size of dinner plates appeared on the chests and shoulders and backs of the people closest to the barriers, and then people started falling. Smoke filled the air, and even with the protection of my gas mask I could feel a slight burn in my sinuses from the pepper spray.
Earlier, there had been anger and desperation, but now there was fear and panic and pain. People ran every which way trying to escape the burning in their lungs, and I’m sure a few of them were trampled in the exodus.
Treanor ordered the
SWAT
officers over the wall, and they immediately jumped the barrier, directing their fire into wide arcs over the crowd.
At first it didn’t look to me like they were aiming their shots, but then I realized what they were doing. They were directing their fire at areas away from the exits, and when the people ran from the smoking corners of the lot where the shots landed, they found themselves at the exits, where they could flee to the streets and the neighborhoods beyond.
Treanor stood on top of the wall and yelled for the rest of us to come over.
We did. We formed a skirmish line, and with our shields and our sticks we forced the few remaining stragglers to run for the gates.
My eyes watered, as much from the pepper spray smoke in the air as from pure, blinding fear. My head was soaked with sweat. It ran down my face and the back of my neck. My stomach had turned into knots.
Treanor was still yelling—hadn’t stopped yelling since all this began—and I wondered if the man wasn’t secretly enjoying this. He was like some little brass general, sending the troops in to beat some ass.
“This is us,” Chunk said as Treanor’s shouts drew closer to us.
Treanor read off a list of ten names that included mine and Chunk’s. “Those names I just called will secure the west entrance to the lot,” he said, the west entrance being the main one off Bandera Road. “Establish your perimeter and lock it down tight.”
We advanced on the west entrance and set up a defensive line across the driveway. I looked down the row, but I couldn’t tell who anybody was behind their riot gear. I did get the sense that most of them were as scared as I was, which didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.
A long white wall stretched along the roadway to my right, and I could see Chunk eyeing it suspiciously, like it might prove to be a problem later on. Across the street was an abandoned building that had once been a pawn shop, now without any front windows, its cinder block walls pocked with old bullet holes. Beyond that was a long row of store fronts and a strip mall. All the shops were closed now, and damaged by looters.
Behind the store fronts was a tall stand of oaks, and through the occasional gap in the foliage I could see the roof of a house or two.
People walked through the scene, though they gave us a wide berth, for which I was grateful. I could still feel the tension in the air. Those people, all of them, were on the edge of something, their patience stretched too far.
Not for the first time I wondered what the outside world must think of us. Did we still seem like Americans to them, fighting in the streets, eating the nation’s charity, our buildings crumbling, our streets still littered with corpses in places? It didn’t look like America to me.
We stood there in the glare of the midday sun, the temperature mounting beyond the ninety degree mark and everyone’s nerves becoming more and more frayed as the day marched on. People yelled at us, raised their fists and shook them in defiance. A few threw stones.
I was soaked through with sweat, every part of me sticky, my underarms and my crotch feeling like a swamp, and I was continually shutting my eyes, hard, to clear them of runoff sweat.
I was wondering how long I’d have to stand there when an explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.
The building across the street had been hit with some kind of homemade bomb. It was a sloppy job, but powerful. Dust and bits of rock crowded the air, and soon flames and smoke roiled upward.
The crowd, which had never really stabilized after we ejected them from the parking lot, panicked. Everyone was shouting at once, running without any idea in their heads except to move.
I watched a terrified mass of people running right at our line like they were refugees fleeing some African war on TV. The ground beneath my feet shook, and the smoke in the air turned my world to a blur. Some of the people running at us looked back over their shoulders, others were blind with terror, but all of them came down on us at once.
When the first few members of the crowd reached us we hit them with our shields and pushed them back. A rock glanced off my shield, and then a fist. Through the clear plastic I saw the face of a man, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, teeth barred in an expression too primal for me to name.
I punched his face with the shield. He grabbed the top of it and pulled it down. I stroked him in the leg with my baton, but he was too far gone for the pain to register. A weird stuttering growl came out of him, and then he was clutching at my knees, trying to pull me down, his hands grasping at my gas mask.
I screamed for Chunk, still trying to smack the guy in the legs with my riot baton.
Chunk was on him in a second. He grabbed the guy with one hand and threw him back into the crowd. Then, with the same hand, he grabbed me and shoved me behind his massive bulk.
The crowd broke apart under a hail of rocks thrown by young men across the street. The rocks hit our shields with enough force to shake my whole body.
Over the screams of the people caught in the crossfire, and through the clouds of smoke drifting across the street, I heard the echoing crackle of gunfire.
A bullet struck the white wall to our right. Our line at that end fell back automatically, shields up to provide as much cover as possible. Somebody shouted for all of us to fall back, and the line moved quickly after that, breaking apart and reforming in the parking lot behind the relative protection of the white stone wall at the edge of the pavement.
Everybody moved but me. Through the crowd I saw a child, a girl, Connie’s age by the looks of her, five or six maybe, standing next to a crumpled body in the grass. The girl was screaming for help.
I ran to her. Chunk, who only just then realized I wasn’t part of the reformed skirmish line, yelled at my back. I kept running. When I reached her I put my shield up to ward off the barrage of rocks raining down on top of us. The girl said something in Spanish, and I was pretty sure she was telling me her mama was hurt. Her face was smudged black with dirt and grime, warped by fear.
I looked down at the woman in the grass. Her forehead had been busted open by a rock or a fist, and she was groaning painfully. I tried to lift her, but I couldn’t get a grip under her shoulders and still keep the shield up to protect us.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chunk said. He was standing beside me, his chest heaving.
“Help me,” I said.
More rifle fire, this time kicking up dirt and bits of grass next to us.
Chunk put his shield toward the gunfire while I got on the radio and called for cover. I heard a bullet whistle over my head, and I pulled the little girl against my chest.
Another shot rang out and a little patch of ground next to Chunk’s feet exploded. Chunk dropped his baton and picked up my shield, holding both of them side by side in front of us.
“The shooter’s on the roof,” he said, pointing at the line of shops across the street with the chin of his gas mask.
“I can’t move her,” I said.
The little girl squirmed in my arms, trying to touch her mother.
The shooter’s aim was better on the next shot. It struck one of the shields Chunk was holding and shattered it. The blow knocked him backwards, and he almost landed on top of me. At the same time I heard the screeching wail of a police car’s tires sliding on the pavement as a
SWAT
unit pulled up on us. The driver slid the car to a stop between us and the shooter.
Two
SWAT
officers belly crawled out the driver’s door and knelt down beside us, the intention to hustle us into the car.
Chunk said, “Shooter’s on the roof, over there,” just as a bullet
zinged
off the hood of the police car.
One of the
SWAT
guys turned to the other one and said, “Light that mother fucker up!”
He ran in a crouch to the police car and pulled a fully automatic AR-15 from between the front seats. He set up over the trunk of the car, rifle pointed at the roofline. I watched him work his gas mask into position against the stock of the gun, and then he fired a quick burst of seven or eight shots into the shooter’s position. I watched the roofline, and saw dust settling onto the sidewalk from the roof. I couldn’t see the shooter.
And then time dilated on me as hands pulled the girl from my arms and lead us to the police car. All of us were huddled inside, the injured woman still groaning, the little girl crying. Chunk had pressed a towel onto the woman’s bleeding forehead. He was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear the words.
Movement—I felt the car racing across the parking lot, back to the command post. I felt everything, saw every detail, but it was like it was happening to somebody else.
Treanor, that puny brass general, had his hands on his hips, his feet spread in a go-ahead-and-try-to-fuck-with-me stance.
Somebody opened the door and pulled me out. I heard Treanor say, “Harris, what the fuck is wrong with your head?”
But he quieted when he saw the little girl and the injured woman.
“Get them to the infirmary,” he said to somebody behind me. And then to Chunk he said, “Dempsey, you and your partner get back on the line.”
A
SWAT
officer drove us back to the west entrance where the rest of the skirmish line was waiting. In the short time we were gone, most of the crowd that had so frantically swarmed our position had dispersed. I could see them melting back into the neighborhoods on either side of the store fronts across the street.
For the next hour or so, only a few stragglers came near our position. None of them looked at us, and they left the area as soon as they could, heads bent, eyes fixed on their shoes.
Soon, there weren’t even any stragglers. An eerie calm settled over the street, and it was like looking at a ghost town. It had become oppressively hot, and clouds of dust drifted sluggishly down the street. Signs dangling over the sidewalk to my left creaked and moaned in the hot breeze. Crumpled sheets of newspaper took the place of tumbleweeds.
We stood there in the eye of that terrible calm for most of the afternoon. Sometime around dusk, Treanor started touring the various entrances and quietly ordered us to return to our normal assignments.
“No,” I overheard him say to a nearby sergeant. “We don’t know if they’re gonna do another drop or not. Nobody’s picking up the damn phone.”
I imagined the same thing I’d just experienced going on at the Springvale Station where Billy went to get our family’s food. I hurried back to the command post after we were dismissed and asked Jennifer Langley if there had been a riot there.
Thankfully, there hadn’t.
Chunk hadn’t been so lucky. He lived on the east side of town and the
MLK
Station where he went to get his rations had apparently been completely overrun.
“Not enough
SWAT
to go around is what they told me,” he said. “Looters broke into the Station, took what they could carry, and tried to burn the place down.”
“Why burn it? I mean, you always see that, don’t you? There’s a riot, and people start trying to burn the place down.”
“That’s true.”
“It just seems like such a waste, you know? You’d think the people doing the burning would realize they’ve got to live there after the riot, so why burn your own neighborhood?”
“Why break into somebody’s house and take a crap on the rug?” he countered. “Why strap a bomb to yourself and blow up a bunch of Israeli teenagers in a disco? Why hijack a plane and fly it into the World Trade Centers? Who knows why people do the stupid shit they do.”