There is an ugly truth about wearing personal protective equipment, or PPE, as we call it in the business: What is difficult to put on is also difficult to take off. The biohazard space suits we'd been issued were gray, one-piece outfits with built-in booties and a hood. That went on first. Next you had to slip on the gloves, and those had to be sealed to the suit at the seam with duct tape. The last item you had to put on was the gas mask, which had to be properly seated and sealed so that no skin or hair was exposed.
The first rule of wearing PPE is: DO NOT LET ANY SKIN SHOW.
When all three parts-body suit, gloves, and gas mask-were properly worn, the wearer would theoretically be encased in a plastic cocoon that no germ or gas or liquid could penetrate. Inside, you were insulated.
Of course, this also meant anything that happened inside the suit stayed inside the suit.
At the end of the day, after going through decontamination, the whole outfit had to come off. When doing that, the rule was last on, first off, and the process was every bit as involved as getting into the stuff. You very quickly learned that once the entire outfit was on, you didn't take it off until you knew you wouldn't need it again that day.
That was why there was a giant sign above the entrance to the locker rooms at the Scar that read:
PLEASE PEE BEFORE YOU PPE LET'S KEEP THE GEAR CLEAN
Unfortunately, very few people can make it through a 14 hour day without relieving themselves, and, well, sometimes…
I sat in the passenger seat next to Chunk and crossed my legs. Uncrossed them. Shifted around a little. Thought to myself, Master it, master it. You don't have to pee. You don't have to pee.
I had to pee.
Finally I couldn't take it anymore and tried to look casual, like I wasn't really doing what I was really doing.
I thought to myself, I'm glad I obeyed the second rule of PPE: NEVER WEAR NICE CLOTHES UNDER PPE.
Chunk and I were playing a hunch. We figured that anybody going into the GZ was going to focus on the area around Mrs. Villarreal's house for the simple reason that it was such a significant landmark.
We idled through those streets at five miles per hour or so, looking carefully at everything we passed. The streets were lined with oak trees, large and unmanaged, and beautiful in their own way. But the homes behind them were also old and in disrepair. They looked shabby. We saw a few rickety two-stories, but most of the homes were small gray shacks, fronted by yards littered with old cars, busted furniture, and every kind of accumulated garbage.
“Looks like a good place to dump a vehicle,” Chunk said.
“Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.”
We drove on, still looking, and I was surprised at how many of the houses didn't have doors. Strange, I thought. Why take the front doors? What could you possibly want with somebody's front door?
“I think your friend back there was kind of an asshole,” Chunk said.
“He certainly was a man with a mission.”
“Why do suppose hippo woman didn't tell us about Dr. Strangelove back there when we asked her what Bradley was doing out here.”
“I wish you would stop calling her that.”
“What?”
“You know what. Hippo woman.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm gonna end up calling her that by mistake the next time we see her.”
Chunk laughed. It sounded like a cough behind the mask.
“Seriously, though. What do you think the deal is there?”
I thought about that for a second, wondering if it was me, or if there really was someone watching us from the houses out there.
“Maybe Cole's right about the prejudice part. I mean, I don't hang around with doctors or anything, but I've seen the way they treat people from the MHD. It's like they're second class citizens.”
“So you think maybe Cole's on to something and Laurent thinks there's a chance he may be right?”
“Maybe.”
“So what? She sends her star player out to check it out?”
“Possible,” he said. “But it sounds like a bunch of unnecessary politics to me.”
I didn't answer him right away. One of the houses on my side of the street was missing a door, and I was pretty sure I saw a guy standing inside, watching us from the shadows.
But when I looked again, the doorway was empty.
“Yeah, well,” I said, “things are the same all over I guess. Tribes within tribes. That kind of nonsense. Remember when the lieutenant had us take the Resendez case away from the Stranger Rapes guys over at Sex Crimes? It's the same thing here. It's a high profile deal and everybody wants to be able to put it on their resume.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
I saw a flash of movement. A man ran between two houses off to my right.
“Chunk,” I said.
He heard the tone in my voice and slammed on the brakes. “What?”
“Look there,” I said.
The man was gone.
“What?”
“Somebody just ran between those houses over there.”
Chunk leaned over me, trying to see. “Where?”
“Chunk!”
Ahead of us, a young Hispanic guy in his early twenties, dressed in a blue t-shirt and jeans and no protective gear of any kind was running into the street, coming at the front of our car, waving his hands over his head like he was trying to flag us down.
He was shouting something.
“Chunk?”
“Not good,” he said, and glanced into the rearview mirror. We both felt it. Like it was a trap.
Chunk put the car in reverse.
The man was still coming at us, still waving, when we heard the pop of gunfire. A moment later, we heard the zing of a shot glancing off metal. Off the hood of our car. More pops came from off to our right. The windows shattered. Chunk stomped on the gas and we lurched backwards down the street.
Suddenly gunfire erupted all over my side of the street. I could feel the bullets thudding into the side panels, rocking it with the force of all those impacts. As I ducked my head down, I saw the white spurts from the muzzle flashes.
I screamed.
The car rocked to Chunk's side of the street, both of the tires on my side shot out. The man who had tried to wave us down was firing at us then, and bullets slapped into the hood of the car.
Over the rolling bark of the guns, I heard something snap and then slap the inside of the engine compartment, and the car rolled uselessly to a stop.
Chunk opened his door and spilled out, keeping his head low.
“Come on,” he yelled at me, his hands ready to grasp mine and pull me out of his side of the car if necessary.
I didn't need the help. I scrambled across the seats and poured out of the car on my hands and knees. We both crawled to the grass, got to a crouch, and ran for the cover of some oak trees and the corner of a nearby house.
Bullets whistled all around us, slicing through the limbs of trees and foliage and smacking into the sides of the house. Behind us I heard angry shouting, crazy voices, like madmen on the war path.
Chunk and I ducked behind a small flight of concrete stairs and listened to the shouting, trying to figure a way out.
“Who are those guys?” I asked Chunk. My breathing was so fast my lungs felt like they were on fire.
“Looters,” he said. He looked me over. “You're not hurt?”
“No. You?”
“No.” He glanced over the top of the stairs and quickly dropped back down. “Damn!” he said. “I wish we had our guns.” The guns were back in our car, in the trunk. Pistols don't do well in the decontamination chambers.
We heard more voices. Not just the ones behind us, but more from the back of the house, coming closer.
“Chunk?”
“We can't stay here.”
In front of us was a busted chain link fence. On the other side of that, a low line of tanglehead grass. Not high enough or thick enough to hide behind, but high enough to wrap around our feet and tie us down if we tried to run for it. Beyond that was the side of a weather-beaten house, a busted window midway down its length. In the backyard, I saw a small metal tool shed and a few trees.
The shooting stopped. Then, laughing. They cackled like witches, taunting us, calling us out. I saw movement in the backyard and a man shouted. “Over here! Over here! They're over here.”
He fired at us. The bullet hit the concrete next to my head, powdering me with dust. Chunk jumped up and cleared the chain link fence in a single stride. I was right behind him. I grabbed the top of the fence and swung my legs over. Another shot rang out. It hit something beneath my hand. The fence collapsed, and I hit the ground face first. I saw a flash of purple as my mask smashed into my nose.
When I looked up, men with rifles were running from the street into the front yard and Chunk was disappearing into the cover of the trees along the front of the house, running away from them.
I heard more shouting from behind me, and in an instant I realized I was cut off. I couldn't go forward after Chunk, and I couldn't go to the backyard. I jumped into the broken window of the house in front of me and tumbled to the floor. The wood was rotten, spongy beneath my weight. The house was dark, musty. No furniture that I could see. Dust was everywhere.
“Go that way,” the voices shouted from outside. “Get that one!”
“The other's in the house.”
“Which one?”
“That one. You get that one.”
Heavy footsteps pounded on the front porch. Men yelled at each other. They kicked debris out of the doorway, forcing their way inside. I got to my feet and ran out of the room, toward the back of the house. The men coming in from the front of the house saw me as I slipped around the corner. They fired a shot. Through a window, I saw more men in the backyard. They turned toward the shot and charged the house.
The yelling erupted again. The clapboard house felt like it was going to rattle to pieces in the stampede of so many intruders. I ran through shadows and hallways to the far side of the house, the sound of heavy boots running on the rotten floor coming from all around me.
I ducked into an empty room and spied a window on the opposite wall. I heard voices in the hallway where I'd just come from, and I knew I had to make a move then or die in that house.
Running at the window, I dove through it without bothering to look at what was on the other side. I landed hard on a wood pile, shot through and overgrown with weeds, my ribs on my left side hitting the pile before the rest of me.
My vision blurred from a piercing bright light of pain, and moaning sickly, I rolled off the wood pile, onto my uninjured right side. It took a second before I could make myself move. There was a thick stand of bushes ahead of me, and I pulled myself along on my belly towards it.
Just as I got behind cover I heard the voices behind me.
“Anything?”
“Not back here.”
I heard them trashing the house, and I used the noise to cover my movements as I crawled along the bushes to the back of the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought that Chunk must be around the next corner. That he'd realize we got separated and was waiting for me. But when I rounded the corner to the backyard, I didn't see him.
But what I did see stunned me.
It was the top of a U-Haul-style moving van, dented and worn-looking, but the right size and shape as what Chunk and I were looking for. A fence and some chest-high bushes separated the van from me, hiding the bottom half of it, but my hopes were up, and I ran for it.
“There!” one of the men shouted from inside. “There! In the yard.”
I jumped the fence as a shot rang out and I hit the ground. As I landed, through the panic, I saw the lower half of the van, and my heart sank. It wasn't the van we were looking for. The back axle was up on cinder blocks and the van was ringed on all sides by scraggly hackberry bushes.
A bullet whizzed past my ear.
I hit the ground and crawled for the van and squeezed under it, inching my way forward, where the hackberry was thickest. I was even with the front tires when I stopped crawling, for a new, but much older fear had gripped me. On the ground in front of me, slowly uncoiling, was a dusty, caramel-colored rattlesnake. Its head looked as big as a slice of pumpkin pie, and its body was as big around as my thigh. The muscles along its flank rippled as it glided through the dirt, its tongue licking the air, sensing a living presence, but smelling only rubber and plastic.
I was on my belly, eyes wide open, every muscle in my body frozen with fear. The snake inched closer to me. Its head rose off the ground slightly, and then we were so close we were almost touching, nose to nose. I could see every speck of color in its slitted eyes.
We were motionless, eyes locked together for what seemed like forever, though it couldn't have been more than four or five seconds at the most. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the snake broke eye contact and glided forward. It crawled right past my ear, over my shoulder and onto my back, its body impossibly long and heavy, disappearing with exaggerated and terrible slowness into the shadows at my feet.
I didn't even breathe.
“Check there,” somebody shouted. “Yeah, there! Under that van.”
A fresh wave of panic took me. I heard the men running across the yard, coming closer. I turned and looked at the back axle over my shoulder. The snake was there, moving towards the daylight.
Voices at the hackberry. Hands pushing the greenery apart.
The snake reared back, its tail alive with the fury of its rattle. A shadow fell over the snake, and a man's face and body appeared above it. The snake lunged for the man's face and he pulled back just in time.
I heard him yell, “Whoa!” and then, a moment later, “Fucking rattlesnake man!”
The others laughed.
“Shut the fuck up,” the man yelled back.
They kept teasing him, but to my amazement, their voices retreated. They were going off to hunt for me in other places.
I watched, thunderstruck, as the snake slithered out into the hackberry, out into the sunlight, leaving me alone. I closed my eyes and let my face mask drop to the ground.