ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) (4 page)

Charlie hated riding the bus. And though he wasn’t sharing
space with talkative busybodies unaware of their own body odor problems, riding
in the back seat of a retired cop car wallowing on shot suspension was hardly
better. The driver of the Crown Victoria, a large African American man with an
easy smile and glistening bald pate, wheeled the old car expertly through the
slow-moving traffic heading north on Southwest Fourth Avenue. At Burnside Street
the man hooked a right and used every ounce of pep left in the tuned pursuit
engine to rocket the American iron across the Burnside bridge to the Willamette
River’s east bank.

And it was a good thing that he did. Because the moment the
car cleared the center point of the span, the red lights flashed and the safety
gates began their slow downward sweep.

Meeting the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, Charlie
asked, “Why’s the bridge going up?”

The driver’s eyebrows lifted an inch, accentuating the horizontal
wrinkles dominating his forehead. “There’s no reason far as I saw. Good thing
we’re on this side, though. Is that going to factor in on my tip?” The man
punctuated the tongue-in-cheek query with a wide smile, then returned his gaze
to the road.

“There’s been a lot of weird stuff happening today,” Charlie
replied. “You get me home in one piece for less than twenty bucks, I’ve got a
five-spot with your name on it.”

Again with the brow lift. “My name’s not Lincoln”—now the
easy smile was back—“but I’ll give it a shot.”

A low rumble interrupted the casual back and forth exchange
as they turned right off of Burnside. Now as the Crown Vic was paralleling the
river heading south, the out-of-place sound grew to a throaty roar and a pair
of gray, dart-shaped fighter jets passed low overhead. The vibration from their
glowing engines coursed through the former police car’s thin sheet metal and
instinctively the driver slowed and switched lanes.

Craning to see through the windshield, Charlie asked, “Where’re
Maverick and Iceman going in such a hurry?”

The cab driver pulled back into the center lane, then glanced
over his shoulder. “I’m guessing all of this activity has something to do with
the attacks in D.C. and Vegas,” he said as he accelerated, shooting between a
Loomis armored car and a Multnomah County Corrections van full of men in orange
on their way to fulfill court-ordered service, no doubt. “And these ain’t no
lone
wolf
attacks like the television folks want us to believe. I think it’s
some kind of widely released biological weapon making people crazy. The unrest just
popped up all at once in a bunch of different cities. Now the dispatcher says
it’s spread to different parts of those cities. Vegas is bad. D.C., she says,
is going bananas. If I had to … I’d bet my left nut it was those sleeper cells
we’ve been hearing so much about since Nine-Eleven. These jets whipping around
kind of remind me of the days after the buildings dropped—”

Charlie looked skyward out his open window. Save for the
retreating military jets that were now but twin pinpricks of orange, the sky
was devoid of visible air traffic—and more troubling than that—residual
contrails suggesting any had passed overhead recently.

As if reading Charlie’s mind, the driver said, “I just
realized I haven’t seen a jet on approach to PDX since Dispatch sent me
downtown to get you.”

“I wouldn’t know. I work underground,” Charlie said,
grimacing as the driver cut across two lanes and dipped into a shallow right
that looped around through a glowing green light and then back across the
expressway and onto eastbound Holgate Boulevard.

The driver leaned forward and barely made the next green light
where Holgate fell away steeply for a couple of blocks.

“Take it easy,” Charlie called forward, his stomach doing backflips.
“Can’t tip you if I don’t make it there.”

The driver made no reply. Instead he keyed a microphone and
hailed Dispatch. “Any fares for me at PDX?” he asked.

After a long three-count a curt-sounding voice replied,
“Negative, Twenty-Three-Forty-Five. Another driver said all flights are
grounded. The ones in the air are being diverted to SeaTac.”

“I asked about
awaiting
fares,” said the driver.
“There’s got to be some on the ground already.”

Now Charlie’s brow furrowed. Things were getting stranger by
the minute and he wanted … no,
needed
a drink. “Turn right on Thirty-Ninth,”
he barked, startling the man he knew only as
Twenty-Three-Forty-Five
.
But that was probably just the tag number on the car’s trunk, he thought as
quickly as the notion struck him. Not a badge number or something defining the
man. So he asked. “What’s your name?”

The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview. They locked with
and held Charlie’s gaze.

Charlie could almost hear the gears turning in the man’s
head.

“Nate,” said the big man, finally. “Where am I taking you
now?”

“I want to get a drink before going home. The bar’s on the
way. Come on in and I’ll buy you one, too.”

“That’s a nice gesture,” Nate said. “But I’m on duty. Maybe
a Coke or something. Where were you needing to go?”

Charlie opened his mouth, an answer lingering on his lips,
but was quickly cut off by the Dispatcher’s delayed reply. “Negative, Twenty-Three-Forty-Five,”
said the disembodied voice. “We’ve been ordered to suspend all airport and railway
service at once.”

Nate asked, “By whom?”

There was no pause this time. “Department of Homeland Security,”
said the dispatcher.

After a long, drawn-out whistle, Nate looked in the mirror,
locked eyes with his passenger, and said, “Shit has just gotten real. I might
have to take you up on that drink after all …”

“You can call me Charlie. Like I said … first round is on
me.”

Four hundred dollars richer than when he arrived, Duncan
shouldered open the glass door and squinted against the sun as it warmed his
face where the Jack Daniels hadn’t already. It took a beat, but finally, reacting
to the glare, the lenses in his aviator-style bifocals darkened automatically.

Now able to see more than just its outline, he loped around
front of the lifted 4x4 and used his key in the lock. He stood there for a
moment, thinking he detected a hint of smoke in the air. He looked over his
shoulder toward downtown and saw a low-hanging brown smudge from a recent fire
somewhere down near the river. In the Eastside Industrial District, presumably.
That the cloud seemed to be dissipating was a good indicator the fire
department was on top of it.

After climbing behind the wheel, he started the motor and
got the A/C working. A little troubled by the stuff he’d just seen on the TV—the
quick snippet of video of the smoke-sullied Vegas skyline—he plucked his phone
from a pocket and flipped it open.

The two missed calls from Charlie didn’t raise a blip on
Duncan’s give-a-shit radar as he selected the phone’s address book and scrolled
through the two-dozen contacts listed under L. Highlighting the name he was
looking for, he thumbed the green Talk button and pressed the phone to his ear.
A beat later a satellite somewhere overhead connected him to the Utah number. The
ring tone on the other end sounded and droned on and on through six cycles
until a familiar voice replaced it. Duncan grimaced and listened to the male
voice on the prerecorded greeting go through the usual formalities: Leave your
name, number and why you called. Then there was a static-filled beep and he
thought hard through the ensuing silence for a good five seconds while, lights
flashing red and blue and running silent, a Portland Police cruiser edged
around a line of cars waiting to get into the Bi-Mart parking lot across the
street, hit its siren once, and sped off west toward the river.

Eyes glued to the retreating Crown Victoria, its needle
antenna quivering wildly in the slipstream, Duncan waited a tick for the wail
to subside. “Little Bro,” he finally said, “it’s me, Duncan—” Suddenly feeling
foolish because the call was already logged in as coming from his phone, thus
pretty obvious it was he who had placed it, he lost his train of thought and
consequently a few additional seconds of dead air made its way onto the
recording, after which he added, “I’m sure you’re seeing what I’m seeing on television.
This is no Y2K. The Chinese flu strain the talking heads have been going on about
… I’m not buying it. And now these attacks or whatever. It all looks to me like
a precursor to something bigger. First D.C., then Vegas … that’s a little too
close to where you’re at.” More silence on Duncan’s end. “Now things are
getting out of hand here. Call me when you get this.” He flipped the phone
closed. He thought:
And if I don’t hear back from you … I’ll be comin’ a
looking.

Though the A/C was rattling away under the hood, the air in
the cab was tepid, as if the Freon charge was totally depleted. Feeling the
sweat beads forming on his brow, he dropped the transmission into Reverse and
pulled the oversized truck around and marveled at the growing queue of cars
funneling into the Bi-Mart parking lot. The steel roller doors were in the up position
and people with colorful membership cards held high were jostling against each
other to get to the single door servicing the bunker-type building.

Trunk lids and hatches were open and people were stuffing
cases of food and water into the backs of their cars, vans, and SUVs. A man
with two carts parked against a truck similar to Duncan’s was hoisting the items
from them into the load bed. He was a frenzy of motion as if a civilization-ending
earthquake or asteroid strike was imminent.

So with the idea of bulling through the sea of vehicles and fighting
a crowd of bluehairs for the last can of peaches on the shelf riding just a
smidge higher on his bucket list than volunteering for a proper waterboarding
session, Duncan nosed the Dodge into the next break in eastbound traffic. He
wheeled through the Woodstock neighborhood on the boulevard sharing its name. Home
to nearly twenty different neighborhoods, most filled with eclectic shops,
eateries, and one- and two-story bungalows, Southeast Portland stretched east
from the banks of the Willamette River on a gentle upslope for sixty tree-dotted-blocks
before finally leveling off and becoming the blight colloquially known by
locals as
Felony Flats
—where Duncan currently lived.

A dozen blocks east of Mickey Finn’s he was forced to the
curb by a trio of cop cars screaming by. Same light show as before, but with
sirens blaring that sent endorphins flooding into his bloodstream, instantly dulling
the Jack- and Bud-induced buzz. While watching a laggard close the gap with the
other patrol cars, Duncan plucked his phone from his pocket and scrutinized the
tiny screen.
Nothing.
There was no indication of a missed call from his
brother, however, the signal strength meter was blipping left-to-right between
one bar and three as if keeping time with the Travis Tritt tune coming low and
slow through the door-mounted speakers.

Once the police were out of sight, he pulled back onto
Woodstock and continued east to where it crossed 82nd Avenue. Instead of continuing
on, he turned right onto 82nd and drove a few blocks south to Flavel, where a
hooker in a modified School Girl’s uniform—plaid skirt and white shirt, tails
tied in a loose knot over her pudgy midriff—tried to get his attention.

Not one to ever pay directly for extracurricular
activities—not even when he was on leave in Saigon—he ignored the streetwalker
and, while waiting for the light to turn, cast his gaze over the
rough-and-tumble neighborhood.

On the east side of 82nd, for blocks and blocks, garishly
painted establishments crowded the sidewalk. Signs of all types offering
Private
Lap Dances
,
Authentic Tamales and Burritos
,
Liquor
, and everything
in between beckoned. On the corner opposite a Chinese Take-Out place was a windowless
pawn shop with an armed guard standing sentinel underneath a splash of neon
promising
Cash for Guns, Gold and Jewelry
. A few blocks south on 82nd
Avenue was the
financial district
and its grimy storefronts with
hand-lettered signs offering
No I.D. Check Cashing
,
Western Union Wire
Transfers
and
Ninety-Nine-Cent Money Orders
.

Just beyond the storefronts, colorful banners and flags
fluttered lazily. Below the eye-catching heraldry, sunlight flared from
windshields of newly washed vehicles parked on a stretch of used-car-lots backing
up to a sprawling neighborhood consisting of multi-unit apartment complexes, double-wide
trailers, and rundown one- and two-story homes rented out by opportunist
slumlords. Save for pockets in Boring and Gresham, both far removed from inner
Portland, this miles-long enclave east of 82nd was the last bastion for the multitudes
of folks pushed out by the recent gentrification of inner Portland that sent
prices for thousand-square-foot two-bedroom homes skyrocketing into the realms
of the like-sized condos in the steel and glass South Waterfront Towers.

The left turn arrow turned green.

The hooker flashed some thigh.

Shaking his head “No,” Duncan steered the Dodge onto
Southeast Flavel and slowed halfway up the block to wave at a hunched-over old
woman pushing an upright wire-basket on wheels ahead of her. She lived on the
dead-end street opposite his and was very self-sufficient for her advanced
years. And if she saw him just now, or anything else going on around her, she
didn’t let on. Those white-spoked wheels kept spinning as she trudged toward
82nd at a glacial pace.

The drive to Charlie’s little cottage was gravel and rutted.
There were no sidewalks and both sides were overgrown to the point of
resembling a fauna tunnel. Gnarled blackberry bushes dominated at ground level,
while the long, hanging tendrils of a weeping willow cut off daylight from
above.

Like driving out from the finishing end of a carwash, wiry
branches and sun-shocked leaves brushed the truck’s roof and thorny brambles
raked its flanks, producing a fingernails-on-chalkboard keen that always sent a
cold shiver down Duncan’s spine.

Still chilled from the sound, he pulled the Dodge up close
to the tiny garage, leaving it skewed diagonally. Turning the bastard on the car-sized
circle of dirt and gravel here was akin to spinning a battleship around in a duck
pond. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, he supposed. The couch in Charlie’s
living room was just long enough so that his feet didn’t hang off the end. Much
better than having to find a dead-end street and cramming his carcass on the
bench seat of his truck night after night until a job materialized so that he
could afford rent for a room in an 82nd Avenue roach motel or an efficiency
apartment downtown.

The V8 suffered vapor lock and ran on for a second even
after Duncan switched it off and yanked the key.
A dying steed
, he
thought glumly.
First the A/C and now the engine’s going. Just what I don’t
need
. He grabbed his phone and elbowed the door open.

Boots on the ground, he was greeted by a low-throated growl
from beyond the brambles—a far sight more tolerable than the all-out bark-fest
that had been the norm. Lately, it seemed as if the neighbor’s dog was getting
used to the sound of his truck coming and going. However, the big-boned Rottweiler
had been bred and trained to keep the local riff-raff away, and the short time Duncan’s
scent had been present at Casa Charlie wasn’t nearly enough
conditioning
to fully endear him to the nameless guard dog.

The animal’s growl rose and fell in volume, and in one of
the valleys Duncan heard the wail of sirens and whoosh of hard-working high-performance
engines speeding left-to-right up Flavel towards 92nd Avenue.

As Duncan separated the door key from the tangle on the
ring, the stench of something burning was back, heavier on the air than before.
Though the flat land beyond 92nd was not quite rural by definition, it was still
feasible that somebody was thumbing their nose at the authorities and illegally
burning brush, trash, or a combination thereof.

Giving the heightened state first responders seemed to be
on, Duncan doubted the scofflaws would be given a second glance, even if a
neighbor or passerby ratted them out.

He worked the key in the chest-level lock and listened for
the throw of the bolt before pushing in. Once inside, he halfheartedly nudged
the door closed with the back of his boot, and made a beeline for the fridge.
After snatching a frosty Bud off the lower shelf, he thumbed his phone open and
punched in a number from memory, completely oblivious to the sliver of light
spilling around the edges of the compromised front door.

Sitting down hard on the sofa’s sagging cushions earned him
a lapful of suds and bounced his keys onto the floor. Cursing under his breath,
he hinged forward and snatched up the furry purple fob and tossed the keys on
the table. After the second ring a feminine voice answered with a warm, albeit
rehearsed greeting.

Wiping the beer off his crotch, Duncan said warmly, “Hi,
Hillary. How are you today, young lady?”

Hillary gushed for a second over his kind words. Then,
sparing no detail, she went into National Enquirer mode, spilling several months’
worth of gossip in seemingly one long sentence.

As Duncan listened to her lengthy reply, he took a long pull
on the beer and put his booted feet up on the table. Eager to get to the meat
of the call, he bobbed his head side-to-side and made a pretend mouth with his
free hand, opening and closing in perfect time to the cadence of Hillary’s
droning voice.

“That’s nice,” was his canned response once she’d finished
detailing an entire summer’s worth of office happenings as well as all six day
camps attended by her three grade-school-aged kids. “You’ve been a busy little
beaver. Is Darren in today?”

“Nope. He’s in up in British Columbia—”

“Valhalla?”

“Yeah,” Hillary replied, divulging this only because she had
a little bit of a crush on the older man. “He flew out yesterday to go look at
a pair of Bell 429s they’re trying to sell him.”

Duncan smiled. “That’ll make eight Bells and the two slicks
… I mean Hueys. Where’s he going to hangar all of them? Who’s going to pilot
them?”

Hearing the hope in Duncan’s voice, without thinking of the
hurt she was about to inflict, Hillary said, “I thought the FAA indicated they
will never reinstate you because of the
medical
?”

In a low voice, Duncan replied, “That’s old news. Twenty
years old now. I’ve conceded to the fact that my wings are clipped. I just want
my old job back.” He went quiet. Just the electronic hiss over the line.

After a few seconds, Hillary said, “I’m sorry, Duncan. I
heard the excitement in your voice, that’s all. I like you. But, I’m not supposed
to be talking to you. Darren thinks you’re a liability. He’s not going to take
you back until you first agree to his only demand. And you have to agree to do at
least
that
to get your driver’s license back.”

Duncan grunted. “Eff that,” he said. “I’m no quitter. You
can tell Darren I’m not going to AA. I’m not getting an SR-22 to drive to
Hillsboro and continue on as his glorified shop boy.”

“He cares about you, Duncan. Don’t burn a twenty-plus-year
bridge.”

Seeing red, Duncan said, “Tell Darren he can take his shiny
new Huey wannabes and stuff ‘em up his keister sideways.”

He heard Hillary chuckle at that. He imagined the thirty-six-year-old
executive secretary looking over both shoulders first, though.