by Mark Tufo
All of that stuff would be stolen by the first person who showed up after my clients finally turned too degenerate to know what was going on, like my dad. I was positioning myself to be the first to know when that day arrived. I was planning to take all I could carry.
“They made concentration camps legal,” said Oscar.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Dad calls them concentration camps. He says the government is going to start rounding up people who got the virus and…” Oscar paused and glanced at my Dad. Oscar discreetly tapped one of his temples and he shook his head with a grimace.
I didn’t believe it. “Everybody’s caught the flu by now. Everybody.” I’d caught the Brisbane strain just over a year ago. Levi never showed any symptoms, but the online doctor we’d sent the blood samples to said Levi had the right antibodies in his blood and must have been lucky enough to have caught a very mild case.
“Just the ones who got that prion thing afterwards,” said Oscar. “The ones that can’t, you know, think right anymore.”
Neither Levi nor I had tested positive for the PRNP mutation that produced the prion. I asked, “Why would they do that?”
Oscar leaned forward. “Dad says they’re forced labor camps because most of the people who used to work in the factories and stuff are too stupid now to work. He says the government is going to make the degenerates do the necessary jobs like farming and stuff.”
I looked at my Dad. I didn’t think he was capable of doing anything productive. “What about the ones who are too far gone?”
“That’s the question my dad keeps asking. He thinks they’re going to take the ones like my mom, and…” he nodded toward my dad, “and put them in a death camp. You know, just kill them.”
“That’s bullshit.” I didn’t want to believe. It couldn’t be true. Nobody was going to take my parents away and kill them. Without any conviction to bolster my words, I said, “This is still America.”
“Dad doesn’t think it’s bullshit.” Oscar threw himself back in his chair. He’d taken offense to what I’d said. His dad was a hothead and Oscar was his apprentice in that.
“I’m not saying your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” I didn’t feel like arguing with Oscar over the whole thing. I was just asking questions. “Have you looked any of this up online?”
“The law passed.” Oscar said it with a finality that promised a tantrum if challenged.
I pursed my lips and nodded.
Sensing his victory, Oscar decided to give me what I was fishing for. “Dad has that news station on all the time. You know how he is.”
I nodded again.
“It’s like he likes to hear old men yelling at each other all day.” Oscar smiled. “But not saying anything.”
I laughed.
Dad stopped eating, so I got his attention and took a few bites from my bowl to get him doing it again.
“The new law was all they talked about on the TV last night,” Oscar told me.
With my dad back on track, I turned my attention to Oscar. “What do you think your dad is going to do about it? He’s still got all those guns, right?”
“He traded a lot of them away for food,” said Oscar, shrugging. “But he kept enough. He’s got a couple of rifles, some pistols, and a shotgun, I think. And lots and lots of ammo.”
“He’s going to shoot it out with the police?” I thought about it for a second before I continued. “You think they’ll send the police for the degenerates? How are they going to round them all up? It doesn’t seem possible.”
Oscar took offense again. Damn, he was touchy. I had half a thought of urging him to go home until he was in a better mood, but instead, I told him, “I’m not saying they’re not doing it, I just don’t know how they’ll make it all work with the way things are everywhere.”
“I think...” Oscar paused and his eyes showed a depth of worry that wasn’t coming through in his words. “My dad think’s this is the turning point.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“My dad says we’ve lost. He says the virus won. He says it’ll be generations before things get back to normal. He says the country is going down the shitter.” Oscar straightened up in his chair and he leaned forward. “He wants me to go down to Mexico. He says he’s not asking anymore, he’s telling. He says his brothers are doing fine. They have a place down there and it’s like a fortress. They’re rich and they’re safe.”
“Your uncles, the drug dealers?” I tried not to sound judgmental. Oscar had been floating the idea with me for over a month. I’d balked on any excuse I could come up with.
“Does that matter anymore?” Oscar asked. “They’ve got money and—”
Cutting in, I said, “Money’s not worth anything anymore.”
Shaking his head emphatically, Oscar said, “It doesn’t matter what they’re spending. They’ve got guys with guns to protect them. They’ll protect us if we go down there.”
“You’re going with your dad and your mom, then?”
Oscar shook his head and he looked away from me. He had sudden tears in his eyes. “Dad says they won’t take my mom because she’s got the prion thing. Dad won’t leave her.”
“It’s just you, then?”
Shaking his head, Oscar said, “He doesn’t want me to go alone. If you and Levi come, he says he’ll take care of your mom and dad while we’re gone.”
“You make it sound like we’ll be coming back but you know we won’t.” The Mexico thing seemed like a one-way trip to me.
It was Oscar’s turn to shake his head in silence.
“Why don’t you just go alone?” I asked, thinking that if Oscar’s dad honestly thought it was safe, then he’d send Oscar down by himself.
“He likes you. He likes Levi too.” Oscar thought for a moment and then added, “I think he doesn’t want me to be lonely.”
Was it really safe down in Mexico? Oscar’s uncles did have money. That had to make a difference. I looked at my dad. Could I leave him on the chance of a better life for myself? If my dad were still capable of creating a complex thought, would he urge me to go or tell me to stay?
Into my silence, Oscar said, “All we have to do is make the call. My dad will drive us down to Galveston. My uncles can send a boat to pick us up and smuggle us into Mexico. All three of us—you, me, and Levi.”
“Levi will never leave.”
“Have you asked him, yet?”
I didn’t answer. Oscar had pressured me to ask Levi at least a dozen times.
“You haven’t asked him, have you? I knew it.” Oscar huffed. “If you don’t think he’ll go, maybe just you and me can go. Maybe leave him here to help my dad take care of your parents. Why not, if that’s what he wants?”
The screen door to the kitchen banged loudly against the backside wall of the house as it swung open.
Startled, Oscar and I both looked.
Levi stumbled down the stairs, lost his footing, and rolled into the grass. At the top of the stairs, filling the doorway, an unshaven man with an ugly face and a big gun in his hand, barked, “Which one of you is Christian Black?”
Chapter 170
“Don’t move.” The unshaven man pointed the gun at Oscar, Dad, and me.
Oscar and me were too surprised to move. Dad was oblivious.
Levi lifted himself off the ground.
The big man told Levi, “That means you, too.”
Levi sat down in the grass, not appearing afraid, maybe defiant.
A banshee howl poured out of the kitchen through the door. A moment later, my mom slammed into the guy in the doorway, all fists and kicks. With his free hand, the man grabbed my mom and flung her into the grass beside Levi.
Mom bounced back up, unfazed, hollering at the man in the door. Levi grabbed her hand and held her back.
I jumped to my feet, ready to fight.
“Quiet her down,” the man ordered. “Or I’ll do it.” He brandished the gun to explain his
method.
Levi got to his feet and put himself between Mom and the man in the door.
The guy looked over at me. His eyes lingered on Dad for a moment, but Dad hadn’t moved except to continue scraping at his bowl of grits. Then the guy focused on Oscar. “Mexican boy, what’s your name?”
“Oscar,” he answered timidly.
“I’m Christian Black.” I spat it like a dare. “Who are you and what are you doing in our house?”
Mom was starting to calm.
Training his pistol on me, the ugly man took a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. He held it by one corner and shook it until it unfolded. He glanced first at the paper and then at me. “Picture looks like you, I suppose.”
“What do you want?” I demanded.
“I’m here for you.” He cocked his head toward the wall beside the door. “You come over here and put your hands on the wall.” He looked at Levi. “You two back off. Go over there by the Mexican boy. Go!”
Mom protested.
I crossed halfway to the patio and stopped. “This is all you get until you tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m a bounty hunter, boy.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“You got an assault conviction about two years ago?” He asked. “You’re on probation for it?”
“No, he’s not,” Levi argued. “The charges were dropped in lieu of counseling. He just had a session today.”
“Don’t mean shit to me, boy. Laws changed. You got a letter about a month back explaining everything. If you had something else going, you should have protested then.”
“The mail doesn’t come anymore,” Levi shouted.
Mom started to bawl as she fell to her knees. She lacked the capacity to understand the legal problem that was being crudely explained, but she’d already understood the bottom line of it. The ugly man was here to take me away.
Looking down the barrel of his pistol as he exaggerated his aim, he ordered, “Against the wall, boy. You’re going to a labor camp.”
“He’s just a kid,” Levi told him.
“Looks like a good-sized, law-breaking boy to me,” said the bounty hunter.
I still hadn’t moved.
The bounty hunter’s face turned to a smile, and he said, “Don’t matter if I bring you in alive. I get paid less, but I still get paid.” He glanced toward the wall, then back at Levi. “You get brave on me, boy, and you should know, I’m in my legal rights to put a bullet in your head. I’m acting as a duly authorized agent of the State.”
Not wanting to escalate the situation to the point where Levi or my mom might get hurt, I walked to the wall, leaned forward, and put my hands on it.
“Spread them feet, boy. Spread ‘em wide.”
I did.
A few minutes later, my wrists were strapped behind my back with plastic zip-tie cuffs. The ugly man shoved me through the kitchen and steered me toward the front door. Levi followed along but kept his distance. Mom cried desperately in the backyard.
Chapter 171
It could have been any generic Japanese commuter car that we rode in. It might have been American or Korean. It didn’t matter. They all looked the same, and they were all two sizes too small for the bounty hunter.
He was dressed like he should have been driving a Jeep with big tires, roll bars, and extra headlights. He looked tough when he’d been standing on my parents’ back porch wagging his gun, but with his oversized frame folded into the driver’s seat of the econobox, he looked like somebody’s dad griping about the traffic on his way to the company costume party, more disgruntled than tough, more old than grizzled.
He smelled like a summer armpit, and the upholstery had a baked puke scent that punched me in the nose every time the wind blew through just right.
“Child safety locks are on,” he called over his shoulder after we’d been in the car maybe fifteen minutes. “In case you try to open that back door.”
That was disappointing. Still, I wiggled my wrists in the plastic strap. The band around my right wrist was looser than the one on the left, and I was slowly working my hand free. At least I hoped I was. “Where are you taking me?”
“Astrodome.”
“Why there?” I asked.
“Lots of law-breaking punks like you in Houston. Need the space to process you.” He slowed when we neared a stop sign, looking both ways. His attention lingered on a gang of men and women down the street to the left. He sped through the intersection without stopping.
“What happens after that?” I asked absently, as I looked at the people who’d gotten the bounty hunter’s attention. I’d seen plenty of degenerates to know them just by looking. They had a way of moving that was distinct, the same way a puppy moves differently than a dog, only degenerates weren’t cute.
“Your paperwork says oil.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
The bounty hunter laughed gruffly. “Houston’s an oil town, boy.”
I rolled my eyes. Everybody knew that.
He looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re assigned to that industry. You’re too young to have any experience at anything. I don’t think they’ll put you to work at a refinery unless they need people to sweep the floors. They’ll probably put you in the oilfields. Or maybe on a rig in the Gulf. Be sure and mind your fingers, boy—that business is hard on fingers.”
“How long?” I asked. “I only had one more year of mandatory counseling.”
“Don’t plead your case with me. I get paid to pick you boys up and take you to the processing center. That’s it.”
I was trying to think of what Levi might say in my situation. “Will there be a judge at the processing center, somebody I can talk to?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“The law is what it is. You had your chance with that letter that got sent. This is a done deal.”
That was discouraging. I pulled harder to try and get my hand free. The bounty hunter looked like he might be twice my weight. I wondered if I could choke him out from the backseat. “What happens next?”
“They’ll assign you to a place after you get processed. They’ll put you on a bus and take you there. You’ll stay as long as they sentence you for. Five, ten years, don’t know. That’s what I’ve heard.”
The skin above my thumb, under the pressure from the plastic clasp on the strap and all that I was doing to pull my hand free, tore. I caught my squeal between my teeth. The restraint didn’t let me go, though.
“Don’t cry.” The bounty hunter glanced back at me, mistaking my pained gasp for tears. “Five years seems like a lifetime at your age but by the time you’re as old as me, you’ll figure out five years isn’t anything. It’ll pass in the blink of an eye. Besides, maybe you’ll get lucky, and they’ll put you on a rig in the Gulf. Matter of fact, if they give you a chance, ask for it. The way the world’s going, it might do you good to get away from all the shit until it settles back down. Hell, that might take five or ten years anyway. At least out on a rig, you’ll have a roof over your head and three squares a day.”
I wasn’t going to do five or ten years in any kind of labor camp. I didn’t know how, but I was going to get away. A chance was going to come, I was sure of that. When it did, I’d slip away and leave this bounty hunter to scratch his ass and wonder what happened to me. I’d go back home, maybe move into the Simpson’s house down the street. They’d disappeared six months prior. Nobody knew where they went. I’d be close enough to help Levi with Mom and Dad and when the time came—when they died—Levi and me could go down to Mexico and hook up with Oscar, who’d surely be there by then.
The bounty hunter cursed.
“What?” I asked, surprised out of my thoughts.
He pointed down the road.
I leaned over to get a view through the windshield between the front seats. Five or six blocks ahead, red and blue lights flashed in the road. The police. “Accident?” I asked.
“I hope.” The bounty hunter powered up his phone, and he fumbled with the screen as he drove, pulling up a map program. He was searching for an alternative route.
As we came within a block to the lone police cruiser parked in the road, a car ahead of us U-turned and came back toward us. I noticed dark smoke rising from several distinct points far ahead. It wasn’t a car accident that blocked our way.
We neared the police car, and the bounty hunter brought his toy-sized auto to a stop. One of two policemen came over to the driver’s side. The bounty hunter rolled down his window and asked, “Riots?”
Something buzzed by overhead and the bounty hunter flinched. “What’s that?”
The cop casually looked up. “The department started using drones to help track the riots.”
The bounty hunter looked up at the sky again, shrugged, and then he looked at the smoke spreading columns of gray into the dusky sky, he asked, “Bad?”
“Started about an hour ago,” said the cop. “Might be three or four thousand involved now. You know how it goes if you don’t nip it in the bud.”
The bounty hunter nodded. He knew. Even I knew. When gangs of degenerates got agitated about something and started running through the streets with mayhem on their minds, others joined in—they always did. And with the prion debilitating more and more people every day, the fuel for those riots was getting too plentiful.
“You got the riot squads down there taking care of it?” the bounty hunter asked. “If they’ve about got it under control I can wait. Otherwise, I need to backtrack five or six miles and then work my way around through the western suburbs.”
