ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story)

by Chesser, Shawn

“Take your time,” he chided, his voice echoing among the static cars, some of which belonged to folks having lunch upstairs, the majority, however, left in their usual stalls by those unfortunate enough to be working on a beautiful Saturday in July. From one coat pocket he took a crumpled navy blue Mariners ball cap—a survivor from the seventies emblazoned with a gold upside-down trident—and crunched it on his head, not even bothering to finesse it back into shape. With the engine sound of an approaching vehicle signaling the start of Don’s shift and the end of his, Charlie flung the red windbreaker over one shoulder and stepped into the exit lane.

  “Seat’s lowered and warmed for you,” he quipped. “Figured I’d set you up for success.” He looked toward the SUV then back to Don. “First customer of the day.”

  Don made no reply. Just issued a guttural grunt from the steamer-trunk-sized breadbasket of his.

  Still unable to make out his co-worker’s features on account of the street-level glare, Charlie made a sweeping gesture toward both the massive chrome grill on the SUV and the booth and open register drawer, the cash in it awaiting a quick count. “She’s all yours. Double-counted your starting change. Put last night’s revenue in the bag.”

  “Not my fault I’m late,” Don said in passing. He folded his massive frame into the booth sideways and sat down hard. “The protesters at the Square are getting out of hand. They had traffic blocked until the police got their reinforcements.”

  Ignoring the idling SUV, Charlie paused and turned to face the booth. “Reinforcements?” His brow furrowed. “What … like those military-looking cops? The what’s it called”—he stared at the cement ceiling—“the SERT guys?”

  Shaking his gigantic melon of a head back and forth, Don said slowly, “Fully equipped soldiers started showing up in their Humvees just as the Portland cops got our bus moving again. I remember watching the Seattle WHO riots a couple of years ago.” There was a long pause as he removed the bills from their slots and placed them on the counter. A neat little row: ones, fives, tens, twenties. Still disregarding the customer in the idling SUV, he added, “Hard to believe … but this mess was worse. The street kids—just a bunch of agitators if you ask me—started in on the reporters then moved on the cops. Just dog piled on them. Bloodied them up real good. Gotta give the boys in blue credit, though … they kept their guns holstered and stayed with the Tasers and Billy clubs and such.” He rubbed his eyes. Looking as if he hadn’t slept in days, they were red-rimmed and puffy.

  “You been crying?”

  Don shook his head as he started counting the twenties. “Nope. I caught a dose of whatever the cops were using on the anarchists. It seeped into the bus as we were sitting there waiting for traffic to move. Hell, we just sat there trapped and watching for thirty or forty minutes.” He picked up the tens and nodded toward the entry where a white and orange MAX Light Rail train was sliding by silent as a wraith. “There wasn’t a dry eye among us when the driver finally let us out at the Ankeny stop.”

  The Cadillac Escalade’s horn sounded. Not a courteous “Hey guys I want to get going” toot. No, it was a ship-moving-through-a-fogbank-type of wail. Long, sharp, and really, really loud in the low-ceilinged space. Then, adding insult to auditory injury, the impatient driver flung his elbow up on the window channel, poked his head out of the shiny black wall of metal and chrome, and implored Charlie and Don to “Wrap up your pow-wow and get the eff out of the way!”

  Which they did, but not without Charlie shooting the Suit from upstairs a death glare which he held while the SUV pulled forward and then let linger through the entire transaction.

  After the Cadillac cleared the gate and was up the ramp and lost from sight, Charlie waded through the dissipating exhaust and took up station in front of the sliding door. Even standing he found himself nearly eye to eye with the former cager.

  “So what I think I hear you saying is I should forget about riding Tri-Met and find another way home.”

  “That’s what I was getting at,” Don agreed. He continued reconciling the till and deposit bag. Counted the big bills first, then the coins, which were mostly quarters.

  “Well shit,” Charlie finally said, his words nearly drowned out by the rising and falling siren wail of a passing ambulance. “I better try Duncan again.” He retrieved his phone, flicked it open, and punched the glowing green key labeled Redial.

  There was a period of silence then a series of clicks. A tinny faraway-sounding ringtone buzzed in his ear. It went on for a couple of beats then was replaced by the carrier’s stock slightly-robotic female voice he knew all too well. It droned on in its oddly saccharine way, telling him to leave a message after the tone. As far as Charlie was concerned, it may as well have simply said: Duncan never answers his phone. Stop wasting your minutes, dumbass.

  Chapter 5

  Six miles by crow southeast of the Unico Tower—aptly nicknamed Big Pink long ago by Portlanders—Duncan ignored the sitar chords emanating from his pocket. He’d recently switched his ringtone from Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival to The End by The Doors, which he now thought fitting considering what was happening downtown. The song intro ceased and he felt a subtle vibration signaling a received voice mail—Charlie again—which he also ignored.

  However, there was no way to ignore the man to his right who, yet again, felt the need to butt in. “You gonna answer that can and string of yours?” he asked, his voice boozy from mimosa intake.

  Immediately following the quip, sparing the kid a number of broken bones and the joint a couple of irreparable bar stools, the bartender did two things: he watered down the antagonist’s drink with straight orange juice (an age-old drink-slinger’s trick) and then rapped his knuckles on the bar top directly in front of Duncan. “You want another three fingers of Jack, Mister Winters?”

  Instantly shrugging off the hurled barb, Duncan leveled his gaze at the bartender. “If you want to keep my business you will not refer to me as Mister or Sir … ever again. I go by Duncan or Dunc. If you need something easier to remember … D.W. will suffice. Are … we … clear?”

  “Crystal,” Chad replied. “My bad … I just keep forgetting. Won’t happen again.” He stowed the O.J. and crossed his arms, awaiting a reply.

  Again Duncan tapped the rim of his glass. He grabbed the neck of his Bud, swirled the suds at the bottom, and gestured for another. As the bartender went silently about his business, out of the corner of his eye Duncan watched the more attractive half of the two to his right reach out and snatch the remote control from behind the bar. When the bartender bent to retrieve the Bud from the cooler, the girl pointed the remote at the main television, changing the ongoing coverage of the black-clad dirtbags stirring things up in downtown Portland to another channel, where a Major League baseball game looked to be just getting underway. However, prior to the transition from the news channel to the one devoted solely to America’s pastime—in which way too much scratching and adjusting took place for Duncan’s liking—the original image abruptly split in two, with the local coverage downsized and parked on the left, and a hazy cityscape of mirrored glass buildings ringed by distant mountains that could only be Las Vegas popping up on the right. In the long two-count before the MLB Network feed materialized fully, Duncan made out the TRUMP tower and a couple of other oddly shaped buildings he vaguely remembered from his frequent booze-soaked trips there. And if he had a King James Bible nearby, he would have placed his palm on it and sworn to anyone willing to listen that large swathes of Sin City were burning.

  “Looks like we got us another Nine-Eleven on our hands.” He tossed down the Jack, chasing it with a swallow of Bud. “Maybe those desk jockeys in Washington will relax the rules of engagement. Take the gloves off our boys and let ‘em do what they’re there for.”

  “I was in Iraq in oh-three and four,” said the bartender.

  “Thanks for going.”

  “Had to. It’s in my blood. Dad was in Gulf One. Gramps was in Nam in sixty-eight. Great Grandpa
served in Korea at the tail end of that one. So … it only seemed right to join the Corps after those pricks brought down the towers.”

  “Check, please,” said the young woman.

  The bartender raised a brow at Duncan. “Twenty bucks,” he called over his shoulder. Then lowered his voice. “Millennials drive me crazy. So effin entitled.”

  Remembering his parents’ disdain for his generation and feeling like a gramps now more than ever, Duncan just smiled at that. “You in the Guard now? I bet they do another call up, way things are going south over there.”

  The couple pushed away from the bar, their stools making the same racket Duncan’s had, the guy saying, “Keep the change.”

  “No Guard for me,” Chad said as he watched the pair slip out the side door and into the daylight. “I’m done for good. Rocking a bionic from the knee down. Humvee I was in took an IED broadside.”

  Duncan finished his beer and pushed five of the twenties to the kid. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Keep whatever’s left.”

  “You’re a vet too … aren’t you?”

  Pausing with one foot on the floor and halting the stool’s noisy backward slide, Duncan nodded.

  “Thank you, Duncan,” Chad said as he policed up the kid’s money and empty champagne flutes.

  “You’re the one who left a piece of you over there,” Duncan acknowledged. “Thank you.” He folded his winnings in with his rent money. Stuck the wad in a pocket, stood on shaky legs, and parked the stool against the bar’s brass foot rail. He paused to look at the three screens filled up with millionaires playing sports in front of tens of thousands of spectators willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of being there. “You be safe, Chad. This country of ours … she ain’t what she used to be.”

  Chapter 6

  Charlie hated riding the bus. And though he wasn’t sharing space with talkative busybodies unaware of their own body odor problems, riding in the back seat of a retired cop car wallowing on shot suspension was hardly better. The driver of the Crown Victoria, a large African American man with an easy smile and glistening bald pate, wheeled the old car expertly through the slow-moving traffic heading north on Southwest Fourth Avenue. At Burnside Street the man hooked a right and used every ounce of pep left in the tuned pursuit engine to rocket the American iron across the Burnside bridge to the Willamette River’s east bank.

  And it was a good thing that he did. Because the moment the car cleared the center point of the span, the red lights flashed and the safety gates began their slow downward sweep.

  Meeting the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, Charlie asked, “Why’s the bridge going up?”

  The driver’s eyebrows lifted an inch, accentuating the horizontal wrinkles dominating his forehead. “There’s no reason far as I saw. Good thing we’re on this side, though. Is that going to factor in on my tip?” The man punctuated the tongue-in-cheek query with a wide smile, then returned his gaze to the road.

  “There’s been a lot of weird stuff happening today,” Charlie replied. “You get me home in one piece for less than twenty bucks, I’ve got a five-spot with your name on it.”

  Again with the brow lift. “My name’s not Lincoln”—now the easy smile was back—“but I’ll give it a shot.”

  A low rumble interrupted the casual back and forth exchange as they turned right off of Burnside. Now as the Crown Vic was paralleling the river heading south, the out-of-place sound grew to a throaty roar and a pair of gray, dart-shaped fighter jets passed low overhead. The vibration from their glowing engines coursed through the former police car’s thin sheet metal and instinctively the driver slowed and switched lanes.

  Craning to see through the windshield, Charlie asked, “Where’re Maverick and Iceman going in such a hurry?”

  The cab driver pulled back into the center lane, then glanced over his shoulder. “I’m guessing all of this activity has something to do with the attacks in D.C. and Vegas,” he said as he accelerated, shooting between a Loomis armored car and a Multnomah County Corrections van full of men in orange on their way to fulfill court-ordered service, no doubt. “And these ain’t no lone wolf attacks like the television folks want us to believe. I think it’s some kind of widely released biological weapon making people crazy. The unrest just popped up all at once in a bunch of different cities. Now the dispatcher says it’s spread to different parts of those cities. Vegas is bad. D.C., she says, is going bananas. If I had to … I’d bet my left nut it was those sleeper cells we’ve been hearing so much about since Nine-Eleven. These jets whipping around kind of remind me of the days after the buildings dropped—”

  Charlie looked skyward out his open window. Save for the retreating military jets that were now but twin pinpricks of orange, the sky was devoid of visible air traffic—and more troubling than that—residual contrails suggesting any had passed overhead recently.

  As if reading Charlie’s mind, the driver said, “I just realized I haven’t seen a jet on approach to PDX since Dispatch sent me downtown to get you.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I work underground,” Charlie said, grimacing as the driver cut across two lanes and dipped into a shallow right that looped around through a glowing green light and then back across the expressway and onto eastbound Holgate Boulevard.

  The driver leaned forward and barely made the next green light where Holgate fell away steeply for a couple of blocks.

  “Take it easy,” Charlie called forward, his stomach doing backflips. “Can’t tip you if I don’t make it there.”

  The driver made no reply. Instead he keyed a microphone and hailed Dispatch. “Any fares for me at PDX?” he asked.

  After a long three-count a curt-sounding voice replied, “Negative, Twenty-Three-Forty-Five. Another driver said all flights are grounded. The ones in the air are being diverted to SeaTac.”

  “I asked about awaiting fares,” said the driver. “There’s got to be some on the ground already.”

  Now Charlie’s brow furrowed. Things were getting stranger by the minute and he wanted … no, needed a drink. “Turn right on Thirty-Ninth,” he barked, startling the man he knew only as Twenty-Three-Forty-Five. But that was probably just the tag number on the car’s trunk, he thought as quickly as the notion struck him. Not a badge number or something defining the man. So he asked. “What’s your name?”

  The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview. They locked with and held Charlie’s gaze.

  Charlie could almost hear the gears turning in the man’s head.

  “Nate,” said the big man, finally. “Where am I taking you now?”

  “I want to get a drink before going home. The bar’s on the way. Come on in and I’ll buy you one, too.”

  “That’s a nice gesture,” Nate said. “But I’m on duty. Maybe a Coke or something. Where were you needing to go?”

  Charlie opened his mouth, an answer lingering on his lips, but was quickly cut off by the Dispatcher’s delayed reply. “Negative, Twenty-Three-Forty-Five,” said the disembodied voice. “We’ve been ordered to suspend all airport and railway service at once.”

  Nate asked, “By whom?”

  There was no pause this time. “Department of Homeland Security,” said the dispatcher.

  After a long, drawn-out whistle, Nate looked in the mirror, locked eyes with his passenger, and said, “Shit has just gotten real. I might have to take you up on that drink after all …”

  “You can call me Charlie. Like I said … first round is on me.”

  Chapter 7

  Four hundred dollars richer than when he arrived, Duncan shouldered open the glass door and squinted against the sun as it warmed his face where the Jack Daniels hadn’t already. It took a beat, but finally, reacting to the glare, the lenses in his aviator-style bifocals darkened automatically.

  Now able to see more than just its outline, he loped around front of the lifted 4x4 and used his key in the lock. He stood there for a moment, thinking he detected a hint of smoke in the air. He looked
over his shoulder toward downtown and saw a low-hanging brown smudge from a recent fire somewhere down near the river. In the Eastside Industrial District, presumably. That the cloud seemed to be dissipating was a good indicator the fire department was on top of it.

  After climbing behind the wheel, he started the motor and got the A/C working. A little troubled by the stuff he’d just seen on the TV—the quick snippet of video of the smoke-sullied Vegas skyline—he plucked his phone from a pocket and flipped it open.

  The two missed calls from Charlie didn’t raise a blip on Duncan’s give-a-shit radar as he selected the phone’s address book and scrolled through the two-dozen contacts listed under L. Highlighting the name he was looking for, he thumbed the green Talk button and pressed the phone to his ear. A beat later a satellite somewhere overhead connected him to the Utah number. The ring tone on the other end sounded and droned on and on through six cycles until a familiar voice replaced it. Duncan grimaced and listened to the male voice on the prerecorded greeting go through the usual formalities: Leave your name, number and why you called. Then there was a static-filled beep and he thought hard through the ensuing silence for a good five seconds while, lights flashing red and blue and running silent, a Portland Police cruiser edged around a line of cars waiting to get into the Bi-Mart parking lot across the street, hit its siren once, and sped off west toward the river.

  Eyes glued to the retreating Crown Victoria, its needle antenna quivering wildly in the slipstream, Duncan waited a tick for the wail to subside. “Little Bro,” he finally said, “it’s me, Duncan—” Suddenly feeling foolish because the call was already logged in as coming from his phone, thus pretty obvious it was he who had placed it, he lost his train of thought and consequently a few additional seconds of dead air made its way onto the recording, after which he added, “I’m sure you’re seeing what I’m seeing on television. This is no Y2K. The Chinese flu strain the talking heads have been going on about … I’m not buying it. And now these attacks or whatever. It all looks to me like a precursor to something bigger. First D.C., then Vegas … that’s a little too close to where you’re at.” More silence on Duncan’s end. “Now things are getting out of hand here. Call me when you get this.” He flipped the phone closed. He thought: And if I don’t hear back from you … I’ll be comin’ a looking.