PANIC

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Panic

PANIC

MISCHIEF NIGHT

RACEWAY GALERIA

MISTER MIMAL

WOOD WOMAN

THE GIRL

HAND OF GLORY

About the Author

All that I ask is that if you like this book, please rate and review it. Thank you for reading.

- J.A. Carter

19:30, 10/30/XXXX

H
E STANDS BECAUSE there’s never anywhere to sit, even though his is one of the first stops on the route. It’s one of the main lines: eight buses an hour in both directions, that’s one every seven and a half minutes to shuttle people from their jobs on the outer perimeter to their homes and apartments stacked up outside the jagged hoop of the inner perimeter.

Along the way are big, open air markets in the huge spaces swept by fire or paved over ages ago. Nobody really feels safe boxed in storefronts so every day they haul their goods out to big, tented clusters.

It’s always hot and it’s always sweaty no matter the time of year, no matter if sharp, stinging wind comes off the lake or not. It’s because of the neverending crush of warm bodies, jamming themselves on.

He tugs at the collar of his jumpsuit, the sweat making a filthy band around the neck of the garment. It’s October. It should be cool but it’s as baking hot as ever and the leaves on the trees are too exhausted to give a last burst of color before another mild winter sets in. They lay on the street in swirling heaps, dead, brown and curled like the shed layers of cicadas.

The city will be lucky to see snow.

He’s tired of standing, so tired he just forgets his legs are there. An older woman with a little girl moved toward the last seat at the front so he had no choice but to let them take it and they stood and watched him for a moment, then the woman nodded graciously and swooped. Her matted, gray hair was tied up in a simple bun. They must’ve been braving the market all afternoon.

His legs ached but he knew it was just an urge. He’d be home soon.

“God bless you,” said the grandmother and she wedged herself in, holding the silent little girl in place. The little girl looked tired from being dragged around all day under the sun, her eyelids were sagging as she sat still on the woman’s lap. She could’ve been taking the brat home to put her in a stew, but he didn’t care. Whatever there was left, it was worth holding onto.

19:35

ALL DAY AT the plant, he stands over a vat with a huge metal oar, stirring together mincemeat which continually fed from a raw sluice. The stink was always of glands and cartilage and bladders with the occasional gleaming muscle or rich-smelling heart.

He was never sure whether the cans were meant to be dog food or chili but they turned up sometimes in those plain boxes the food trains bought when there was drought. He was always thinking about stew on account of work, so he was far too sick of looking at it to ever try it. Still, sometimes he took a few to stack in his basement. No matter how bad things get, they could always get worse so it was wise to lay a few things by.

At work, he preferred cleaning the huge vats, standing in there in his spacesuit, spraying with a wide angle pressure hose. He’d spray until the cavernous vat gleamed and he stood alone inside, sound dampening mufflers making sea sounds in his ear like listening to a conch shell. The peace of it was calming as the world raged outside; it was a place to think and feel constructive, to ignore the mindless wallowing in hate, to get away from the frenzy of bodies trying to outrun the end of it all. It was like a capsule, floating in space.

He liked to stay in there awhile, as long as he dared, anyway, before the end of shift tone rang out over the PA.

19:40

THE BUS SWINGS onto the main strip, eight miles long and straight to the inner perimeter and ‘city proper’.

He doesn’t like to look outside whenever the he passes it, whether trundling along on a bus or walking from his stop to the plant. Most seem to just regard it with indifference. Someone on the bus whispers to the person next to them that there’s only one body there today, no doubt eaten up with bullets. He doesn’t look because he’s seen it before, they use those bullets that explode into fragments when they hit you. They leave the poor souls there where they lay, sometimes setting their dogs on the body when they don’t think it’s a junkie or a gang member, someone who’s poisoned their flesh with all manner of chemicals.

When the dogs aren’t sent, at night rats tug at the flesh, as desperate for food as the tens of thousands of orphans out there huddling in ruins and quick-made shacks.

It looks like a narrow clearing, no barbed wire, no mines, no fences - just a few hardened positions here and there, a thin strip ringing miles of storefronts and homes and parking lots.

The letters repeat over and over again, laid along the ground and angled just so they can be read from every approach:

FREE FIRE ZONE

The words turn red at night so they can be seen easily and he’s not too sure how they do that.

They say it’s National Guard but nobody’s really sure about that. One day they just stopped patrolling, tired of being shot at and just took up positions outside the city and fired at anyone trying to leave.

A guy at the plant said it was probably Kilo or Maxicom, whichever one held the wall at Laredo Crossing when the border situation turned hot. A few years ago, a couple hundred people decided to get up a caravan to just leave the city, tired of being caught in the crossfire. The rumor was that they staged it, that they spread the word that it was safe to leave. It was a demonstration to remove any shadow of a doubt; as soon as the train of refugees approached, they were hosed down with two fifty cals. Two hundred thirty two men, women and children turned to strawberry preserves in thirty seconds of mayhem.

Since then, every single day there was a tally printed on all the local news sites.

He watches it pass behind him, the valley of death.

Within the perimeter, the few dozen standing apartment blocks loom ominously, dotting the flat expanse of the city. Though they are dwarfed by the skyscrapers within the inner perimeter, he doesn’t regard them the same way.

The apartment blocks are brewing with all manner of vermin.

When the city went bankrupt, they decided it was beyond help. They could have just razed it and had two million people disperse but that would be too much of a headache. Instead, the diehards, the ones with cash and prominence and the last few good jobs, the ones that couldn’t bear to live in the pods or afford to head up north walled off downtown. The police don’t operate outside the wall, from Market to Spring, from the stadium to the university. That wall marked the inner perimeter, where the police were permanently stationed.

Outside the wall, they roam like termites in a rotting log.

19:50

THE BUS SWAYS along and his tired eyes see her, toward the back, separated by the accordion connection between the two halves of the bus. She doesn’t look like one of them, one of the tomb dwellers that pour out from their squats when the sun goes down.

Well, that’s a lie.

She does look like them, with the requisite tattoos across her collarbone marking her as property of her set and stretched earlobes. No one else dares to wear them for fear of being confused for one of them.

She just doesn’t have the hardness yet, that deep, wild, weary look that even the ten year olds get that make them look like chain smokers. Her face is fresh, he thinks, and it stops his heart, seeing her almond eyes and broad nose and wide smile. She looks about fifteen and carries herself like a teenager ought to, like so few of them do.

Her round face scrunches when she laughs, the features pinching inward like a yowling kitten.

She wears shorts in the heat and her bare legs have an attractive gloss of sweat on them, her skin like roasted coffee with real cream generously stirred in him. Her loose shirt hangs off one shoulder, exposing a dingy black bra. Her short, dark hair is braided together in the back, shaved just halfway up the sides with light brown feathers twined in them. The feathers are beautifully mottled; a hawk’s feathers. She’s probably a mutt but you could pass her off as a Plains Indian, one of those serious looking people you’d have to go to a museum to see.

His heart grows fuller, remembering that they’d have a girl if they’d have a child at all. He’d told himself long after she was gone that it was for the best, that he wouldn’t have a child who would be forced to fend for herself because her parents could barely support themselves, that he wouldn’t have to register her for boot camp just to get her off the streets or teach her never to go around with less than four other people, or to carry a knife on her to fend off muggers and rapists, or any of those things. He’d never have to explain to her when she was young that the city was dying, and wouldn’t have to leave out the part where he didn’t think there would be anything left if she made it to adulthood.

For all this and more, the feathered girl seemed unreal to him. He wondered if she had parents at all or if she had crawled up from hell like the rest of these soulless little bastards.

She clings to the boy with her; about her age, an intense, wiry looking little hoodlum covered all about the torso up to his chin with runic tattoos, a whole codice of stories across his body of fat-faced, forked tongued gods in blocky profile. The temple carving style was a dead giveaway for a Tarascan, as was the straight hair shaven on the sides and bulging cheek packed with chewing leaves.

They weren’t allowed to get high but they chewed the leaf all the time. He could see it in the boy’s eyes, alert but dead. He slept little and felt no pain whatsoever.

Her arms wrapped around his shoulders like she wanted a piggyback ride, talking to her girlfriend, flanked on three sides by his cohort. In the band of his rugged khaki shorts he had an antique pistol tucked prominently to make sure you saw it.

The city was theirs.

He felt ill inside, seeing her so intimate with the thug, jerked away from his fantasy of spending time with her. He leeched her purity, a great ugly moth on her beacon.

It seemed so wrong.

It was not that he felt stirring for her, though he hadn’t been adverse to those girls in the past. Once he’d paid for a girl who took him home and let him get his money’s worth while her young brother slept nearby on a pile of blankets. Another year and another young girl later, except this one set him up to get robbed by a Mu Family set.

They’d tried to cave in his head with a paving stone but only succeeded in knocking him cold.

He’d woken up in an alley missing whatever money he had and his knife, too, staring up at the familiar tag of an alien skull, its bulbous head distended upward and huge eye sockets swallowing him as he stared up at it.

Since then, there were no girls, certainly no women. They were all too defeated, far too run down even by thirty. He was grateful his wife hadn’t lived, grateful that he hadn’t have to watch her wither away in their crumbling home, all of their plans for the future weighed down like a drum full of rocks, sinking into the lake. Sometimes he thought to himself he was very near to crossing that line on the outskirt of the city, ready for the mercy of a dum-dum bullet exploding his heart.

It used to be a profound religious experience, taking your last breaths in a forbidding circle while animals devoured you in the sun.

She was not like them. Everyone had to compromise themselves to stay alive, but she wasn’t like that. How could she be?

19:51

THOSE BIG BROWN eyes met his and he stopped cold, swaying with the bus over the sagging road. Its suspension creaked like a bed as it shuddered to a stop and dipped at the front to let a few on but he didn’t see that.

What he did see, what he couldn’t take his eyes off was the girl whispering something in the tattooed boy's ear. He snapped out of it instantly, realizing he had been staring, that there was no other way she could take it.

He chilled; more than that, he turned to ice. Dread crawled over him, cold and scaly.

The kid’s eyes hadn’t bored into him yet but he wouldn’t know that, so fixated on the mean, blocky, ancient gun tucked into his pants. As long as you cleaned it and oiled it and stored it right, it would fire pretty well. He fixated on it, the obscene bulge in the kid’s loosely belted shorts.

Her arms were still folded around his neck, crossed at the fingertips. She was playing with a silver ring, working it on and off her finger, that sunny smile seeming so deadly.

“Hey, come on pal, you wanna move back a bit?” said an agitated voice on the other side of him.