The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Big trouble,” Ken said.

  ***

  Darren Cook had been itching to kill someone for days. He’d never done it, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d never been to New York City, either, but people did it every day. Didn’t mean he never would, just that he hadn’t accomplished that goal yet.

  When he’d thought about it over the last few days, it had always been Maryjane he had in mind. But not now. Now he was sighting down the length of his rifle at the driver of a bulldozer. His Jamboree was next in line after Merry and Lou’s place, and not only was Maryjane inside it but so were his collections of hockey cards and beer bottles—those he’d emptied himself and those he’d found in the desert and stacked up on the windowsills to catch the light when it streamed through. So he aimed and he squeezed the trigger and he felt the rifle kick against his shoulder.

  He couldn’t see where the bullet went, but he thought it spanged off the big blade of the machine. He levered another round in to fire again.

  ***

  “Taking fire,” Mike Zanatapolous said into a wireless microphone clipped to his collar. The other guys on the detail all wore them too, and earphones, so they could stay in touch with each other and command during this operation, even with the racket of the ‘dozers next to them. Mike Zanatopolous, more commonly known simply as Mikey Zee, headed up this crew, providing personal defense, security, and bodyguard services throughout the Palm Springs area. He’d known Nick Postak for years, and when Nick had warned him that this assignment carried certain dangers, Mikey Zee had just smiled. “If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be talking to me,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “I’ve got him,” Neil Woodward’s voice replied. Woody was on the other side of the Cat 277 from him. Mikey glanced past the machine and saw Woody raising his shotgun. He wouldn’t miss. Another bullet thudded harmlessly into the dirt ahead of them—guy was too scared to shoot straight, Mikey figured, and with good reason. Woody fired once, a bright muzzle burst and a loud crack, and the gunman was blown clean off his feet.

  “Subject’s down,” Woody said.

  He didn’t have to point out that there were still a dozen or so that they could see, and who knew how many more hiding inside their homes, any of whom could be pointing weapons at them right now.

  ***

  Vic thought Kelly would jump out of his skin when he heard the shooting start. “What’s that?” he asked, as if any of them had been outside Rock’s trailer since late afternoon. “What’s going on?” He returned to the windows he’d abandoned only minutes before, peering into the dark outside as if it would tell him something. “You hear that?”

  “I hear guns, man,” Rock said. “And something else, like tanks or something.”

  The military? Vic thought. No way could that girl have sicced the Marines on them. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

  “Well, it’s something big,” Rock insisted. “Hear it?”

  Vic strained to listen. Rock was right. It was coming from the far end of the Slab—the end closest to the road—but it definitely sounded like big vehicles of some kind. And the gunfire continued, scattered bursts of it.

  He made up his mind suddenly. “I’m going to Cathy,” he announced, grabbing Cam’s Ithaca pump-action 12 gauge. “Got to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Nobody breaks ranks,” Kelly said, his voice sharp. “Especially now.” His command voice, Vic knew. Fuck that.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “My wife is out there and people are shooting off guns. I’m gonna make sure she’s okay.”

  “You go out that door, you don’t come back,” Kelly said. “We don’t protect you anymore. You’re on your own.”

  “And that’s different from ten seconds ago how?” Arguing with Kelly would be pointless. He shoved open the door and ran out into the night.

  ***

  All the noise had worried Lucy. When she’d heard the vehicles coming up the grade, her first thought had been that the hunters she was hunting had called in reinforcements of some kind. But that was unlikely she realized. They couldn’t call the police, not without explaining their own crimes. She stayed put, moving about from time to time to keep her limbs from falling asleep, but keeping within the cover offered by the creosote bushes and now the darkness.

  Once the shooting started, she hoped that the fireworks would draw out her quarry. Anticipating a shot, she flattened herself on her stomach and propped the barrel of the gun up on a flat slab of rock, helping to angle it up the hill. Sure enough, after just a couple of minutes, the trailer door banged open and someone dashed out. She led him for a moment and pulled the trigger, and the man went down with a shout, his gun skittering off across the concrete. She swiveled the gun back toward the trailer’s door, in case someone else followed. But the trailer remained quiet.

  Earlier, she thought she’d glimpsed someone looking out through the one small window that faced off in her direction—a vague shape against the curtain. Now that the sun was down and the trailer lit from within, that shape, if that’s what it had been, would be more distinct. She’d watch the window now, too, and if no one came out the door to check on the one she’d hit, maybe she’d put a slug through the glass.

  One by one or all at once. She didn’t care how she took them down.

  Only that they fell.

  ***

  When the firing began, Billy Cobb made a quick exit from the Carnahans’ trailer. They hadn’t been in there anyway—he thought he’d seen Alex running toward the commotion with some kind of handgun, and Stephanie had been staying with her sister in Calexico since September eleventh. He’d gone in to warn them, as he was warning everyone, that bulldozers were coming to knock down their homes, but since the place was empty he took a few minutes to see if they had anything that looked valuable. Desert rats for years, the Carnahans had amassed an amazing collection of junk—antique glass, old horseshoes and bullet molds and badges, rusted food tins, animal skulls and horns, and the like—and Billy had always half-suspected they had some good stuff among the trash.

  He wasn’t finding it now, though, and since there were guns going off he decided that it was probably best not to be inside someone else’s trailer. He thought the wisest course of action was to take cover somewhere, maybe get off the Slab altogether, until whatever was going on had played itself out.

  Leaving their trailer empty-handed, he plotted out the safest way off the Slab—past the Bryants’ and Barry Lichter’s, then around Eddie Trujillo’s place and he was home free. Sparing only a glance toward where all the gunfire was coming from, he started to run.

  ***

  Jorge and Diego had gone to separate windows when the shooting started, their own rifles in their fists. Eddie stayed put on his couch, munching from a bag of tortilla chips. “Can you see what’s going on?” Jorge asked frantically. “Turn out that fucking light, I can’t see shit!”

  Almost reluctantly, it seemed, Eddie switched off the lamp next to his couch. Nearly everything in the place was next to the couch, Diego realized—if Eddie leaned far enough over the back of it he could get to the refrigerator and pantry, and the remote lived on the couch arm, pointed at a TV that was just beyond the reach of his toes if he stretched them out. If he didn’t need a toilet once in a while, he’d never have to move.

  When the trailer went dark it was easier to see outside, but what he could see in the distance looked like a nightmare—lights from some kind of big machines moving inexorably forward, men walking between them with guns raised, other men scattering to take up positions behind rocks or outdoor furniture or trailers, and taking shots toward the machines and the armed force that seemed intent on occupying the Slab. There was a hole where at least one trailer had stood, but most of it was flattened now, and bits of it still stuck out from the blade of the big bulldozer. Smoke hung on the air, giving everything a surrealistic, filtered look, like something out of a movie.

  “I can’t tell exactly,” he reported. “
I don’t think it’s the cops, but I can’t really see too well.”

  “I can’t see from here either,” Jorge said from his own vantage point. “But it looks like those things are flattening the houses.”

  A flurry of sudden motion caught Diego’s eye: a man in a Sheriff’s uniform, a pistol in his hand, breaking from the cover of another trailer and running straight toward this one.

  “Cops!” Diego shouted, near panic. Without pausing to think it over, he jammed the barrel of his gun through Eddie’s window and fired. Outside, the lawman hit the ground with a skid, fired a shot that went high, sailing over the roof of Eddie’s trailer, and rolled into the darkness beneath the next mobile home over from them. Diego lost him in the dark.

  “Damn,” he said. His brother and Eddie were staring at him. Which, he thought, was exactly the wrong thing to do. The threat lay outside, not within. “I couldn’t tell if I hit him or not. Can’t see him, now. Keep your eyes open, Jorge, in case there’s more.”

  ***

  Carter’s eyes were open but he wasn’t seeing the scene of Armageddon that unfolded in front of him, the bodies falling, the homes burning as primitive electrical systems were forcibly torn apart, the men he employed staying behind the cover of giant steel machines and firing round after round from powerful guns. He was already thinking ahead, to what would happen after the loaders had moved all the pitiful dwellings off the Slab. To the time that they would start tearing apart the multiple concrete slabs themselves. He’d have to bring in jackhammers to break up the concrete where it had survived the years intact. But it would only be a day’s work, maybe two, with enough equipment and money thrown at the job. Then the big machines could begin the task of moving the earth itself.

  Because, he understood now, the real prize wasn’t in building houses on this forsaken hillside.

  It lay beneath the earth, no longer slumbering but awake. Wanting to get out.

  And it had chosen Carter Haynes to make that happen.

  Carter had no intention of disappointing it…

  ***

  “I have to get to Virginia,” Hal said. “She’s probably terrified.”

  Ken thought about it for only a moment. He wanted to find Billy. What he really needed to do was to put a lid on this whole mess before more people got hurt, but he wasn’t sure precisely how to do that. Even with a bullhorn, he doubted he could be heard over the heavy equipment, the crash of trailers being crushed under steel blades, and the gunfire and shouting coming from all over the Slab. With a few well-aimed shots, he could maybe take down the equipment operators from behind, where their shovels and big chunks of mobile home didn’t shield them. But Carter Haynes’s crew would turn on him and blow him away before he’d fired more than a shot or two, so unless he could persuade Carter to call them off, that wouldn’t really help the situation any. And, while Carter’s body stood right next to his Town Car just like it had been, Carter’s mind didn’t seem to be there with it. Ken had tried to engage the developer in conversation a couple of times, but Carter just stared right through him, a malicious half-smile on his face and a thin line of spittle trickling from the corner of his mouth. His cell phone lay abandoned in the dirt by his feet, resting next to a couple of mushrooms.

  So going with Hal to find Virginia seemed like maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe the only way to deal with the insanity of this night was one person at a time. He touched Penny’s hand, feeling the now-familiar surge of power. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go with him.”

  She nodded, and he could see the fear glowing in her big moist eyes. “Okay,” she agreed, though it was clear that going up onto the Slab was the last thing she wanted to do. Well, he could relate to that feeling. But getting back in the Bronco and driving away—while probably the wisest course of action—also seemed like a gross dereliction of his duty.

  Besides, Billy was still here somewhere.

  ***

  “He’s hit,” Rock said. He’d dashed to the window to watch Vic when the man left his trailer to find his wife, and saw Vic go down, blood gouting from his side as he did.

  “Screw him,” Kelly replied. “He’s a traitor. Is he dead?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rock said. “Not yet.”

  “I ought to go finish him myself.”

  “You do, and whoever shot him will probably just shoot you too,” Terrance pointed out.

  “What do you mean, whoever shot him? The bitch did it. Who else?”

  But by now, gunfire sounded from every part of the Slab. Even Kelly, who had sat down heavily on a rickety metal-legged dining chair when Vic left, looked a little worried, Rock thought. “She’s not firing all those guns, Kelly,” he said. “Something’s going on out there.”

  “Then we’re safest in here.”

  Rock didn’t like the sound of that. For one thing, he wasn’t sure they were, in fact, safe in here. For another, this was his trailer, his home, and if they were going to become targets while they were in here, that meant his home was on the firing line as well.

  “It sounds like the whole Slab is under attack,” he observed. “I’m not sure we wouldn’t be better off out in the brush somewhere.”

  “You think that way, feel free to go outside,” Kelly said. “Not me. I’m staying right here.”

  Rock swallowed hard. “Kelly, this is my home, you know? If I say you guys have to go then you guys have to go.”

  Kelly came off the chair like a young fighter off his stool at the bell and put himself right in Rock’s face. “Are you telling us we have to go?” he demanded. Rock knew Kelly could take him in a fight. Rock was bigger, and plenty strong, but he didn’t have Kelly’s years of special ops experience or whatever it was—Kelly refused to talk much about his past, but he alluded to it often enough to keep everybody wondering. And his talk was convincing enough to make Rock worried about the prospect of going against him.

  He put up both hands, palm out, as a kind of warding-off gesture but also defensively, just in case. “No, I’m not saying that, man,” he insisted. “Just, if I did, you know? I have a right to protect my place.”

  “And we have a right to protect our asses,” Kelly countered. “You want us all to end up like Vic out there, bleeding out onto the concrete? Knowing that anyone who came to help him would get shot too?”

  “Guess you weren’t a Ranger,” Terrance said.

  “The fuck you mean by that?”

  “Isn’t it the Rangers who won’t leave one of their own behind, alive or dead? A Ranger would risk it to go help Vic.”

  “Vic stopped being one of our own when he went out that door,” Kelly said. “You two, you can make the same choice. We can stick together or you can turn traitor. But I warn you—anybody turns traitor, I’ll kill them myself before they can take two steps.” His voice was cold and as calm as if he were ordering lunch in a nice restaurant. “I promise you that.”

  ***

  Billy dove to the hard ground when he heard the glass break nearby, and the bullet whistled over his head. In the commotion he couldn’t hear where it landed. He rolled over, pausing only momentarily to fire a round in the general direction of the muzzle burst he’d seen, then he rolled again. The nearest home was a double-wide trailer mounted on blocks, and he shoved himself underneath it, pushing his way through spider webs and trash and who knew what else had grown or been blown under here by the desert winds. But at least he was in shadow here, and presumably couldn’t be seen by whoever had shot at him.

  Scrambling to get underneath, though, he accidentally kicked the underside of the double-wide, and the impact was almost immediately followed by a loud “What the hell was that?” Billy froze. Maybe the liberal bleeding hearts were right, there were way too many people around here with guns, and it didn’t take much to imagine one being aimed through the floor of the double-wide at him right now. The mobile home creaked and shifted as someone walked across the floor. Billy decided he needed to be away from it before somebody came out and t
rapped him under here—the last thing he wanted was to be caught in a crossfire with no room to maneuver. He pushed himself forward with his hands and feet, belly scraping the Slab, crushing mushrooms between himself and the cement, until he was at the front of the double-wide. Going this way would put him back out onto the Slab, not into the desert like he’d wanted, but as unpleasant as the prospect was it was better than backing out blindly. When he’d gone under he hadn’t had time to strategize. Now he’d just have to make do.

  ***

  At the other end of the stretch of desert that formed the eastern section of Imperial County, over the Arizona line in Yuma, past the confluence of rivers that had formed the Salton Sea, Colonel Franklin Wardlaw could barely refrain from rubbing his hands together in glee. It was too much of a cliché, he thought, so he bit back the urge. But he still experienced the glee, because Captain William Yato and Marcus Jenkins were taxiing an F/A-18 Hornet to an imminent take-off. The aircraft was armed—in addition its usual assortment of Sidewinders, Sparrows, and M61 Vulcan rotary cannon—with a centerline Guided Bomb Unit-12. The GBU carried a five-hundred-pound warhead that would plow through the concrete of the Slab like a hot knife through butter.

  Wardlaw knew that Jenkins and Yato were on his side in this. The Slab needed to be gone. What waited beneath it needed to be free. Nothing else mattered. Back in some cobwebbed corner of his military mind, Wardlaw knew that he could face serious charges for authorizing this mission. But would anyone bring those charges? What would the face of the Earth resemble when Wardlaw’s task was complete? Who would be in charge? He didn’t know the answers to those questions…he only knew that everything would be different, and he, who had obliterated the Slab, would be held in much favor.

  He paced in his office now, watching the aircraft take off in the dark. A corpse lay on his carpet, two bullet holes in its head. A Captain who had come in to protest the unscheduled mission, claiming that neither Yato nor Jenkins were flight certified, that there was no paperwork—paperwork! In a time of crisis this guy had been worried about marks on paper. Wardlaw had taken care of him, and no one else seemed to be complaining.