Dead City. Joe Mckinney

      I saw an officer pin a man to the ground and try to handcuff him.

      One of the officers who went to help Flores was surrounded by the mob, his back up against a fire truck. He climbed up the side and landed on top of the hoses. The mob reached up to grab him, clawing at the chrome valves and dials just below him, but they couldn’t get at him.

      Through the smoke several officers and firefighters came running back up Chatterton. I ran in the same direction, figuring we could regroup and call for more cover.

      Getting through the wreckage was like navigating an obstacle course. There had to be more than twenty cruisers up and down the street, and most of them looked damaged—some only a little, others completely torn apart.

      I couldn’t believe that all that destruction had happened so quickly, that we had lost control so completely and in such a short period of time.

      As I scrambled through the cars I could see people everywhere. An officer named Harner was maybe twenty yards off to my left, fighting with a group of three men.

      I turned in that direction to help him, but never made it.

      There, in front of me, was the man with the torn face, that horrible mud-encrusted flap of skin still dangling from his neck like a thick cut of fabric.

      He had a hole in his jawline where I had fired the head shot that took him down. I saw three blackish-red holes in his chest, and I knew I had put those there too.

      But I didn’t see recognition in his face. His eyes seemed empty. His mouth hung open hungrily.

      He grabbed me.

      Out of instinct, I knocked his arms away, backed up, and pulled my gun.

      “Don’t come any closer,” I said.

      I pointed my Glock at his forehead and squeezed the trigger. In that moment, the world around me slipped away into silence. The only thing I saw was the brass casing tumbling out of my gun and landing somewhere off to my right.

      It was a clean shot, right on target.

      His head snapped back, and he folded to the ground in a heap.

      I was in a daze. Over and over again we practice the shooting drills—keep your weapon up, scan left, scan right—but when it comes right down to it, nothing ever goes like the drill. All the skills the Department taught me melted away and there I was, a bare, exposed nerve, overloaded with shock.

      And then there was a rush of activity as the world came crashing back on top of me. The colors, the sounds, the confusion—all of it hit me at once.

      The mob kept coming and coming, and as I stood there shaking off my haze they began to close in around me.

      I told myself to run, to fight, to do anything but stand still. But my feet were frozen to the ground.

      I felt a hand grab my shoulder.

      It was like cold water on my skin and, in that instant, I found my feet. There was a hole in the mob in front of me and I took it. I ducked my shoulder and knocked a man in a denim jacket to the ground.

      I got through the cars and hit the grass running.

      The houses on the north side of Chatterton share a common stone wall that separates their backyards from the neighborhood greenbelt. I went around the side of a house and through the backyard, over the back wall, still running as fast as I could go, and I didn’t stop until I was out in the middle of the greenbelt.

      Once there I stopped and caught my breath. I hadn’t run since I was a cadet at the Academy and I was out of shape.

      The cold night air burned my throat. Shots were still being fired out in the street, but there were fewer now, with long pauses in between. Tall oak trees and houses blocked my view, but I could still see the glow of the emergency lights and the smoke rising up into the air.

      I needed to get to wherever our shift was going to regroup, but I had no idea where that was. And there was no one around to tell me. I was alone, cut off.

      The greenbelt was a mostly flat, open swath of undeveloped land about forty yards wide where the runoff water from the subdivision collected and channeled away after heavy rains.

      Wind whipped through the tall grass. The hurricanes that had decimated Houston for the last four weeks had brought almost daily rains to San Antonio, and the grass was lush and thick. It buzzed with mosquitoes.

      A few months earlier I had chased a couple of kids through that greenbelt, and I had seen wild strawberries growing everywhere. Blackberry bushes clustered around a few large blocks of milky white limestone outcroppings. It had been peaceful then, after the chase, and it might have been so while I stood there were it not for the frantic desperation ragging inside me.

      I watched as the wind pressed the grass flat, and it looked to me like an enormous piece of glistening black velvet.

      I wondered what I was supposed to do.

      I knew I had to find a car. Without a car I was a sitting duck, just waiting to be swallowed up by that mob.

      But to find a car I would have to go back into the street, and I really didn’t want to do that. I had no idea how far this riot had spread and there was no way I was going to rush headlong into something I didn’t understand.

      Being cut off and alone made me intensely aware of how quiet it was. I was so used to the noise and activity of patrol that I had developed the ability to talk on the phone, talk to complainants, and listen to my radio—

      I looked down at my radio and realized that was why it was so quiet. I guessed that the EMS guys had turned it off while I was in the unit. In all the commotion I had simply forgotten about it.

      When I turned it on I heard something unbelievable. The radio was a mass of overlapping voices and emergency tones. Officers were screaming for help, pleading for backup, and it seemed like all twenty dispatchers were trying to talk at once.

      Nothing made any sense because I was only getting half of a sentence before an emergency tone would kick in and somebody else would start talking.

      Whatever was happening wasn’t just on this little street on the west side. There were desperate calls being sent out all over the city. It sounded like a meltdown.

      South Division was being hit hard with fires and mobs and gunfire popping up on almost every block in their service area.

      The Downtown Division dispatcher couldn’t get any of her officers to answer their radios.

      Every available officer in the Northwest Division was being called to the hospitals at the Medical Center.

      The world was collapsing all around me and it was happening too damn fast. I was absolutely mystified how destruction on that kind of scale could happen so quickly, and no matter how I tried to comprehend it, I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

      Then it hit me, so hard that I almost collapsed, and I let out a moan.

      My family. My wife. My baby.

      I had to get to them. Now.

      I turned my radio down and crept back to the wall that separated me from the line of houses. I decided to use the wall for cover and to cross over as soon as I reached a point where there was as little activity as possible.

      From there I’d grab the first available patrol car I found.

      If I couldn’t get out of the subdivision through the main entrance, then I would cut through the playground of the elementary school.

      But I had to find a car first. And soon.

      Chapter 3

      I crept through one of the backyards to the east of all the commotion. Plastic toys and basketballs were scattered around the yard. A tricycle lay on its side on the porch. A rickety metal swing set off in the corner looked like some kind of giant insect in the shadows.

      What