by James O'Neal
Someone had escaped. He wondered how strict and alert the checkpoint was. As he marched through the field in his heavy boots he noticed a car, then two people on bicycles ride past from the bridge. He paused, sat down in the weeds and was shocked to see the guardsmen pass people by in both directions with little or no confrontation.
Besslia knew he had to get to Wilner. It looked like their killer was alive and in the zone.
SEVEN
His eyes popped open like they did every morning. He had welcomed every day for all these years in a rush of light and adrenaline. He didn’t understand the haze of sleep that others spoke of because he woke with a start and then dropped like a rock every night. No matter his activity for the day.
Once, years ago, before the collapse of much of civilization, when he had tried to hold a “regular” job at a department store in the area that used to be called Fort Lauderdale, he would occasionally lay awake in bed and think about his interactions with people during the day. They were unusual to him. He had spent his life tucked away, empty of contact with anyone other than his family. His father had always called him “impetuous,” but it was so much more. Nothing the old man could ever understand. It was an urge that ran through him like an electrical current. It pushed him in directions few could imagine. And he had little control over the urge.
He remembered the first time he had felt the urge to act out violently. The first time he had acted on an impulse. But the act itself had been so fast, so unpredictable, that he couldn’t control it.
She had blond hair and the most perfect white teeth he had ever seen. He recalled every detail of her beautiful face. She was tall and had a lithe, long body with an athlete’s legs. He’d been sitting on the intracoastal seawall wondering about the world when she had sat down near him. Not so close as to speak to him but close enough so he could see her clearly as she tipped her head to let the east breeze blow her light hair out of her face. Her clunky running shoes dangled over the white cement wall near Fourteenth Street in Pompano Beach where his family had lived. He hadn’t heard anyone even mention the city of Pompano in years. It was like it never existed.
But then it was a typical beach town on the southeast coast of Florida.
He kept stealing glances at the girl on the wall. She was about twenty. Then something occurred to him. Why not talk to her? She was pretty. What would she do? Slap him? He stood up and walked along the wide seawall and then plopped next to her.
“Hello, my name’s Leonard,” he blurted out. Why not? It explained who he was.
She looked over at him and smiled. “I’m waiting for my boyfriend,” was all she said, then she looked out at the water again.
This is exactly how his father had said people acted: rude and mean. He had no real experience at the time. This was one of his first times slipping away from his parent’s house without them. Then he noticed the girl’s neck; long and lovely with a muscle pulling as she continued to look in the opposite direction so she wouldn’t have to face Leonard.
He was mesmerized by it. He wanted to touch it. To squeeze it. Then he remembered the broken metal skewer next to the wall where he had been sitting before. An old barbeque skewer with a flat, solid ring on one end. He slid off the wall and raced back to find it. He didn’t even know why he needed it but the urge inside him said, “Find the skewer.”
He snatched it up from the weeds and gravel alongside the low wall. The metal base fit in his palm and the seven inches of steel skewer felt like another finger popping out of his fist. He walked back to the girl, who turned her head again as soon as he approached. Then, without thinking about it or hesitating, he held up his fist and plunged the skewer into the girl’s neck. It disappeared all the way into her long, beautiful neck until he felt his knuckles stopped by her skin. She was frozen for a second. He leaned back and saw that the other end of the skewer had just broken the skin on the other side of her neck.
The girl wheezed as she started to shake slightly.
The skewer came out amazingly easily. He just sat and watched in fascination as the girl slowly turned her head to see what had happened.
Blood started spurting from the hole in her neck. The red liquid shot out like a sprinkler as she rotated around. By the time she was looking at Leonard, he was sitting silently, the deadly skewer resting on the sea wall on the other side of him.
She tried to speak but nothing came out.
He saw her mouth was also filling up with blood. His urge subsided as he watched the girl.
He wanted to touch her. To explore her somehow, but he had so little experience. She reached across and clutched at his shirt as her balance began to falter. Her hand went to his face and he felt the need to touch her. He started to run his fingers through her hair and unhooked a black, plastic hair clip. He held it, looking at the shiny finish, then dropped it as he focused on the girl toppling into the murky intracoastal waterway.
It had all happened in a matter of seconds.
He’d been lucky and later realized it. He’d never even looked around to see if there were any witnesses.
But there had not been anyone around to see the attack. The news media covered her disappearance and then went wild about her body being found two miles down the intracoastal a few days later. Back then there were local channels and this was big news. He never told anyone.
The police pleaded for tips. Her family offered higher and higher rewards for information. Stories ran even ten years later about the unsolved murder of the girl sitting on the seawall.
That was the kind of experiences he had had before working for the department store. The whole job confused him. He was nice to customers, but they never seemed nice back. He had thought about acting on his urges again with one of those department store customers, but knew it would be easy for the police to figure it out.
He had many more instances where he acted on his urges over the years. A young mother from Davie. The grocery store clerk who needed a ride. It was always their necks that made him act.
Since the establishment of the Quarantine Zone he’d been much more active. Now he could move among groups of people and blend in, always staying anonymous and never leaving real clues to his identity.
Now he stretched and turned to sit up and leave his single bed in the house about eight miles from the U.S. border. His aunt lived with him. His mother had moved west when things had started to get bad in Florida and he had not heard from her since. Of course, he hadn’t tried too hard to reach her either. Her younger sister was actually much closer to Leonard’s age. She managed the household and Leonard provided either money or went out and traded for what they needed. Like most people in the Quarantine Zone they had a garden and raised their own potatoes, squash, corn and tomatoes. He bought the occasional goat or chicken; they lived pretty well.
In the living room of the old Florida house his aunt smiled at him.
“Hello, Lenny. What’s on your schedule today?” No wrinkles or other telltale signs of aging, but by Quarantine Zone standards she was ancient.
“Gotta go up into the Lawton District.”
“What for?”
“I gotta meet with a cop.”
Tom Wilner walked through the main doors of the Eastern hospital and was surprised at how busy the staff looked. The emergency room at the end of the hall actually had patients waiting to be treated. There was even a visitor at the front desk waiting to go up to the recovery ward.
A tall black man in a security guard’s uniform barked at him, “Hey, you. Where the hell you think you’re going?” He marched up to Wilner in an intimidation move Wilner had seen a thousand times in the service. He didn’t say anything, letting the man feel in control.
The guard said, “I asked you a question.”
Wilner reached inside his windbreaker, past his heavy-duty pistol on his hip to his rear pocket and pulled out his ID with a bright gold star affixed to one inside flap. “UPF and I don’t like your tone.”
Instantly the
man stepped back and lowered his voice. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know.”
Wilner eased up and said, “But you didn’t need to address me like that in the first place. What happened to just asking if I was lost?”
“Too many years in the army I guess.”
Now it was Wilner who felt like he needed to apologize. “Where’d you serve?”
“South Africa for the duration.”
Wilner looked at him. That was a term only used by one kind of soldier. “You were in a penal unit?”
The man nodded. “We bled just like everyone else.”
“But you were sentenced to the military for a crime?”
“Yeah. Got into a beef with my wife and ended up busting her up. Judge gave me the South African conflict until it was finished. Lucky for me we were only deployed for two years before the new government stabilized.”
“How’d you get a job as a security guard with a record?”
“You kidding? Short as they are on manpower they loved hiring a six-foot-three man. Just had to promise to keep my cool.”
Wilner nodded, then held up a photo of the slain nurse. “You know her?”
“Donna, sure. We all did. The whole place is in mourning over her.”
“How’d everyone find out?”
“Newscast over our V-coms.”
“Know why someone might do something like this to her?”
“That girl never said a harsh word to no one.”
“Nothing unusual about her?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Wilner tilted his head and gave him a stare. “You know I don’t have time for games. What’s the scoop?”
“She didn’t much care for men after her marriage broke up.”
“And?”
“She got herself a girlfriend that works up in the terminal ward on the fourth floor.”
“That’s the only thing unusual about her?”
“That and the girl loved to gamble. Snuck into the Quarantine Zone to play at their casinos whenever she could.”
That got Wilner’s attention.
Johann Halleck was not prone to loneliness. He had spent long segments of his life separated from his closest family, usually with the thought that soon the world would be different and he wouldn’t have to worry about man’s cruelty or the designs of the Simolits. He had lived so long—more than five human lifetimes—that he was back to facing some of the same old menaces. Somehow he knew, after the tears and agony of World War II, the world might have to face German aggression again. As news of Hitler’s cowardly death spread through the Polish countryside, where he lived at the time, he realized that it was too easy to blame the whole mess on just one man. Now, generations later, he knew he was right.
He sat alone in his living room of the large, empty house in the Western District, watching his gigantic video broadcaster. It seemed as if the top of every hour started with a brief story on the advancing alien ship, the next story was on the cleanup of the decimated Iranian capital and then a story on the German army that had remained stationary inside the Polish borders. The German advance had halted when the news of the nuclear explosion in Tehran had spread. It was as if the event reminded the new German chancellor that there were still nuclear weapons in the world and someone might use one on the rapidly advancing German troops.
It was only after several days that the world discovered that Iran had been responsible for its own fate. While working on a new type of fusion bomb an accident had caused a reaction that had cost millions their lives. But, in light of the German halt, it may have saved millions more.
In the interceding months, the United States, England and the remnants of old Russia had moved troops to the area, adding to Germany’s reasons to forget their new search for Lebensraum.
But Johann was concerned with much more immediate things like the safety of his good-hearted but naive friend, Steve Besslia, and the whereabouts of any members of the dangerous Simolit family left in the Lawton District.
Since he had been forced to kill Radko Simolit in order to save both Besslia and Tom Wilner, he knew his name was cursed around Simolit gatherings. Although there was a treaty in place to keep relative peace between the two ancient families, there were always exceptions. The question was if they viewed his actions as one of the exceptions to the treaty.
It was never known what had happened to Tiget Nadovich, a ruthless leader among the Simolits. He had stolen Wilner’s wife, planned to take over the Lawton District and was now presumed dead. But it was never wise to ever assume a Simolit was dead unless there was a body. It was the Simolits who inspired the vampire legend. It was even true that a stake through the heart, if it destroyed the muscle sufficiently, would kill them. But so would enough bullets in the brain, an explosion, fire. Anything as long as it was devastating enough.
He had seen the effects of the propane explosion that had destroyed part of the building on the edge of the Everglades. But he had not seen a body. He had searched the Zone River but the rapid current, fed by the constant rainfall, had flushed everything south. He hoped he had seen the last of the intelligent, Serbian-born Nadovich, but much like the Germans, he was afraid he would see him again.
EIGHT
Leonard Hall had made his way into the Lawton District once again by bribing his way through one of his most reliable checkpoints. It was the farthest west, near the Zone River and no one much came through that way. Recently there had been an influx of new residents out west. Not people relocated by the government, but secretive, reclusive people. There was a rumor that they were a religious cult, but Leonard thought they just were the type that valued their privacy. They were in the right place. No one wanted to live out there. Even the government wasn’t sending people to the swampy, cold wasteland.
Once in the district he went right to the main headquarters of the UPF, thinking that would be his best chance of seeing the cop he had become so interested in. He planned on visiting one of the libraries in the district to search what was left of the records on the Internet. The dilapidated network of computers had faltered since the mid-2020s. More attention was paid to terror and wars than shopping and information. As the military and government focused on security, the private sector stagnated and much of the effort that went into the Internet was turned elsewhere. Just like the decline of inventions and innovations not related to the military, the Internet slowly suffered and was reduced to an unreliable string of computers and mainframes with little more than out-of-date archives and pornography.
Leonard had seen a lot of things. He’d lived a long life and experienced many places under a number of different names, but he clearly saw a parallel between the declining supercomputer network and the rest of society. He hoped he’d be around to witness the end of it all.
After twenty minutes of waiting in the hybrid Honda that had been converted to run on propane and electricity, but couldn’t go faster than twenty-seven miles an hour, Leonard saw his cop leave by a side door. A minute later the hive that the cop had used to chase him left by the rear lot. It was one of the new government models with the engine set in the middle for balance and the chamber to make the hydrogen reduced to a small cylinder. They were fast, efficient cars but lacked any of the comfort of the early Chevys and Fords that had cushioned seats and air-conditioning. Those were relics as forgotten as the Supreme Court.
Seven minutes later he found himself watching the cop pull up in front of the biggest of the district hospitals. He hesitated as he considered when and where would be the best place to surprise the UPF detective.
He noticed the activity at the front as people came and went. Then an odd light spread across the five-story structure and he realized the sun was breaking through the clouds for the first time in weeks. He loved the sun almost as much as he loved necks. The combination of the two drove him wild and he made up his mind instantly.
He pulled the old Honda to the side of the street and hopped out, hustling toward the entrance
to the hospital.
Tom Wilner hesitated at the doorway to the break room. He knew the young woman watching the news was Donna’s lover. The security guard had been quite specific and maybe a little graphic. He cleared his throat to get her attention. When her red eyes focused on him he knew that she hadn’t been watching the video broadcaster as much as staring toward the big screen.
“Terry?”
She sat up, her broad shoulders turning toward him. “Yes?”
He held up his ID. “I’m Tom Wilner with the UPF.”
“You’re here about Donna.”
He nodded.
“You know we were close?”
He nodded again.
“I’m not embarrassed, just a little surprised you found me so fast.”
“I came by the hospital to ask a few questions. I don’t want to intrude.”
She gave him a slight smile. It wasn’t until she moved her right hand he realized what was different about her.
She saw his expression and raised the robotically enhanced prosthetic hand with eight fully controllable fingers. “I got the model designed for detailed work. They knew I wanted to go into medicine.”
Wilner couldn’t take his eyes off the high-end prosthetic as he came closer.
The thirty-five-year-old nurse said, “I lost it in the First Iranian War. Infantry.”
Wilner looked her in the eyes and said, “I was a marine during the Second Iranian War.”
“I figured you’d seen action. Seems like more and more vets are from the penal regiments. Nice to see a real one.”
Wilner eased into the chair next to her. He glanced up at the TV and saw it was a sports show focusing on the new World Football League. The Madrid Raiders were the team to beat and the Toronto Jets were the perennial losers.
