Dead City. Joe Mckinney

I told him.

      To April I said, “Sweetie, they gave me a call. I’ve got to go.”

      “You weren’t even listening to me, were you? When are you going to talk to them about staying on second shift?”

      “Soon.”

      “Your transfer expires next month.”

      “Come on, hon, I’ve gotta go.”

      “Fine.” But her tone said it wasn’t fine. It was very much not fine, and I was going to hear about it later.

      I put the phone down on the passenger seat, leaned back, and covered my face in my hands. She wore me out and I had to take a second to regroup before I left for my call. All I needed was to take that frustration with me and then have it erupt during an argument with some drunken asshole. Officers go to Internal Affairs for stupid mistakes like that.

      “You okay?” Chris said, but I knew he meant it was time for us to get moving.

      “You’re too eager,” I told him. “Let them fight it out. By the time we get there, they’ll be too tired to fight us.”

      The newscaster on Chris’s car stereo was talking about rioting again. I only half listened to it, though. Like most people, I’d grown numb to the terrible destruction that had been all over the news for the last month.

      The city of Houston, not 250 miles to the southeast of us, had been hit with five major hurricanes in the span of four weeks, leaving most of the city wasted beneath flood water and debris. Every morning, after I crawled out of bed and turned on the morning news, there were more images of mud-colored water two-and three-stories deep, moving sluggishly through the streets of Houston, the roofs of houses and buildings looking like rafts floating in sun-dappled, oil-stained sludge, and of course there always seemed to be blackened and swollen corpses drifting through the wreckage.

      The news had taken a lot of heat for showing all the dead bodies. They claimed they were trying to be discreet about it, but there always seemed to be corpses just the same.

      Some of the guys from our police association had gone down to Houston to help out, and they all said that it was the worst thing they’d ever seen. Sanitation was nonexistent, and the whole place smelled like death. Something like two million people had been forced to evacuate, and most of them had come to San Antonio. All five of our military bases and every out-of-business shopping center, had been turned into temporary shelters of some kind, and yet they kept coming. I heard on the news that FEMA was flying as many as ten commercial airliners a day into Kelly Air Force Base, and every single plane was packed with evacuees.

      Supposedly, there were still at least a million people to evacuate from the areas south of Houston, and conditions for those left behind were nightmarish. Listening to Chris’s stereo, I figured they were talking about food riots or something, because there had already been plenty of those.

      “Can you believe this?” he asked me, wrinkling his nose in disgust at whatever he was listening to now.

      “I haven’t really been listening,” I said. April’s voice was still ringing in my ears.

      “It sounds like Houston’s gone nuts,” he said. “They’re saying the survivors are attacking the boat crews that are going in to help them. This guy is even saying people are eating people down there.”

      “Great,” I said. “And those are the same lovely people that FEMA’s gonna fly in to our shelters. Can’t wait for that.”

      “This guy’s saying the riots and everything have been going on since last night. They’ve only just got word of it from people that were evacuated this morn—”

      “52-70.” The dispatcher calling me again.

      “Crap.” I keyed up the mike. “Go ahead, 52-70.”

      “52-70, second call. I’m getting it as burglars-in-action now. You and 52-80 getting close?”

      “Ten-four, ma’am,” I lied. “Still on the way.”

      “Ten-four, 52-70. Make it Code Two.”

      “Ten-four.” To Chris I said, “Now we go.”

      “Roger that. I’ll follow you.”

      Code Two means lights, but no siren. We’re allowed to go ten miles an hour over the speed limit, but we can’t blow stop signs or red lights. That’s reserved for Code Three.

      Of course, nobody ever does Code Two. It’s either get there when you get there or go balls to the wall. There’s no in between.

      I hit my lights and Chris and I tore out of the parking lot, leaving long, looping skid marks behind us. We headed south on Seafarer, down to Plath Street, and made a left. From Plath we turned into the Geneva Summits subdivision, went down four blocks, and turned left onto Chatterton.

      Chatterton goes up a gradual rise to the left, and then breaks right suddenly and goes downhill all the way to the end where it dead-ends into the back of the Arbor Town Elementary School. That curve can come up on you quick, and if you take it too fast you can end up in somebody’s front yard.

      I came off the gas as I got to the curve and turned on the car’s alley lights.

      As we pulled up to the three-hundred block, everything seemed normal. There was a small group of people off to the left who didn’t seem too concerned about a pair of police cars lit up like Christmas racing down their street, but otherwise the street seemed quiet.

      I took a quick count of four men and two women, and turned my attention back to the houses on the right.

      Most of the houses in Geneva Summits are small, two-and three-bedroom one-stories with brick fronts and old, weather-beaten wood siding on the sides and backs of the houses. It was one of the bright spots in my district, with regular folks who had regular jobs. No dope houses. No meth labs. No hookers. Just regular, decent people who did pretty well compared to the rest of the west side. They didn’t call the police much.

      It was already getting dark and most of the houses had their lights on, their owners settling down to dinner and the TV.

      But farther down, as we got closer to the call, the street seemed different. Something was just a little off, but I noticed it just the same.

      I pulled my car up to the curb three houses down from the call in front of a red-brick one-story with long, knee-high hedges running down both sides of the walk.

      “52-70,” I said to the dispatcher. “Myself and 52-80 are ten-six at the location.”

      “Ten-four,” she answered back. “All officers hold the air until I hear back from 52-70 and 52-80.”

      I got my radio and my flashlight and Chris and I started toward the house, working our way quickly through the cover of the trees.

      We didn’t see anybody at first. I could hear dogs barking not far away, but nothing else.

      Still, it felt wrong somehow.

      Then I saw her. She stumbled out from around the corner of the house and headed toward the street in an aimless, confused sort of way. She was a short, plump, dark-haired Hispanic woman in her mid-to late-twenties, wearing a light blue T-shirt and black pants that were a little too tight for a woman with her kind of figure.

      The way she moved, I thought for sure she was drunk.

      She didn’t seem to notice us.

      Chris and I stayed back for a moment, watching her and the house at the same time.

      The woman moved closer to the street, and in the soft buttery light of the street lamps it looked like she had spilled something on her shirt. It was wet, with dark splotches on her shoulders and sleeves and a massive tear down her left side.

      And then, from the same corner of the house where the woman had come from, more people appeared. They all moved with the same stop and start lurching motion that made me think of the