The park in San Bernardino was an idyllic slope of grass in a non-idyllic neighborhood. A gritty low smog had curled in from the San Gabriels and layered over the flats. An optimistic yellow spot of sun bled through, creating a confusing two-dimensional effect that flattened the surrounding body-detail shops and working-poor homes. The park’s slopes and parameters had no logic to them; it seemed that this misproportioned patch of land was all that had been left over after the neighborhood had hammered itself into place.
Evan gave a quick scan, checking the few folks out and about. A mother tapped at her iPhone with press-on nails, listlessly pushing her infant son in a creaky bucket swing between scrolling. Beneath a sturdy oak tree, a wholesome family of five had laid down a picnic, wicker basket and all.
Evan had taken a circuitous route back to California, picking up his Ford F-150 at Long Beach Airport’s long-term parking and beelining straight here to head the Leones’ drug delivery off at the pass.
Joey had downloaded him on the basics. Kontact was a new synthetic marijuana with a snappy delivery system. Place it on the eye like a contact lens and let it seep right into the bloodstream. The Leones San Bernardino chapter that had received the load was one of the newest, composed mostly of poached Verdugo Gang members from the East Side who brought with them infrastructure and distribution networks. Their primary push to market came through a rickety two-story trap house at the top of the park.
With its high crime rate and scant city investment in law enforcement, San Bernardino was a smart place for the Leones to sink resources. Established market of users, crumbling schools and communities, citizens worn down to the bone with hard work and despair. That’s how gangs thrived, by feasting on the wounded sheep.
After surveilling the surrounding blocks, Evan decided to approach from the base of the park, abiding the Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Strolling with his hands in his pockets, he focused on parked cars, rooftops, and windows. He noted alleyways and read the flow of traffic on the bordering streets. All of it rendered in that odd flat light, like a painting.
His boots crunched across sun-scorched spots of dead grass. Rusting chains locked the plastic picnic tables in place, their plastic benches gone mosaic from their time in the sweltering heat. The mom at the swing set was FaceTiming loudly now, phone flat beneath her chin. “I never said that. Uh-uh. Ne-ver.”
Upslope the trap house was backlit by the sun, a dark rise. The prefab house next door had been half eaten by a fire, the demolition job seemingly stalled. Most of the parking meters had their heads lopped off. Bike frames impaled with U locks clung to the others, rusting into the pavement.
Drawing in a deep breath, Evan opened up his senses. Warmth of the sun. Dryness in the eyes. The mom’s streamed altercation intensifying: “You tell her to come say that to my face. Not just Insta-ing that shit. To my face.” The creak-creak-creak of the swing. Scent of Kool-Aid wafting over from the picnic, aggressively sweet, the kids’ laughing mouths stained Joker red.
A shift in the earth’s rotation brought the sun behind a bank of clouds, muting it further. Just as abruptly everything around Evan changed.
The mother had stopped talking.
The phone fell from her hand, plopped in the sparse tanbark.
Her mouth was ajar, rimmed with orange lipstick.
The swing slowed: creak-creak-creak.
The children on the picnic blanket had stopped laughing.
Their father on his feet, grabbing the youngest around her waist, legs and torso flopping.
The mother and older kids tripping to gather everything up, plastic cups rolling, painting the blanket tropical-punch red.
Creak-creak-creak
As if in a dream, Evan swept his gaze upslope.
A wispy-faced druggie stumbling toward them down the slope, his legs buckling but somehow keeping him upright. He was bleeding from his eyes, hiccupping frothy red flecks across his lips.
Spread behind him like a zombie horde, another half dozen users spilled from the house. One clutched the post of a street sign in a football tackle, shoulder sliding down the metal, bare feet scraping the ground. A young teenage girl vomited foam down the front of her shirt, stumbled and fell. She sank her yellowed fingernails into her eyes.
Now a metallic jangle to Evan’s side, the mother ripping the boy from the bucket swing, his dimpled legs stuck in the hot black plastic, mouth wide and wailing.
Evan picked up his pace, jogging upslope into the horde.
The family of five blew past him, hustling the other way, the girl weeping, the father repeating a mantra through clenched teeth:—don’t look baby don’t look don’t look—
A hollowed-out man who might have been twenty or sixty stumbled between the trees, pants loose at his ankles, the buckle of his belt dragging along the ground, crotch bared to the world. He was grinding the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and emitting a prophet’s howl. To his side a woman with tangled witch’s hair sprawled on her stomach, grinding her face into the ground. Another lady staggered by her, mouth drooping, teeth red, bleeding from her gums. Two crimson stains ran jaggedly down the thighs of her jeans.
Anguished cries emanated from the trap house, more bodies pouring from the front door and the shattered windows, bubbling out like ants. Screaming and clawing and cackling, lost in the horror-trance of the spiked drug. Passersby all up and down the street backpedaled in terror and sprinted off. Everyone moving one direction out—away.
And Evan bucking upriver, cutting through the walking dead, running to the source.
Heat in his chest, his face, his heart fluttering. He was used to all varieties of pressure but had never waded into something like this.
Trash covered the porch—hamburger wrappers, syringes, and empty Mountain Dew two-liters rolling underfoot. He shouldered in through the front door, reeling from the smell.
Mayhem inside. A husk of a man sat on a ratty couch, chewing off his own finger.
“No,” Evan said. “No.”
The man looked up with blackened eyes and smiled, his chin sleek and dark.
More on the floor, moaning and puking and hacking. Someone seizing on the stairs, a blind throng trampling him on their way down.
Evan started upstairs. The balustrade had rotted away, and a man wearing filthy rags had tripped, impaling his thigh on the jagged rise of a snapped newel post. Blood sheeted down his leg, dripping off his bare toes to the ground floor.
Evan hit his knees, ripping off his belt, looping it around the guy’s leg above the gash. His hands were sticky and wet, but he managed the cinch. “Hold this,” he said, shoving the tail of his belt into the man’s hand, but the fingers pried open slowly and Evan looked up to see that he was already dead.
Evan rose, heartbeat thundering, sparks of static jittering across his visual field. His mind was racing, threatening to overload, so he extracted his breathing from the mess of his nervous system and set it on its own separate course. Two-second inhales, four-second exhales. Muscle memory, the click of a mental knob to start his internal metronome, and he could leave it to run in the background.
His vision cleared as he reached the second-floor landing. Garbage layering the floor like fallen leaves. The chemical reek was stronger here, overpowering the scent of human filth. Junkies lounging in various bedrooms, littered across floors and ratty couches, moaning and sobbing. Something in the horrid tableau—primal utilitarian space, packed human bodies, decay and poverty—brought him back to the foster home of his childhood. Sleeping in a room crammed floor to ceiling with bunk beds, the perennial battle for more food in the ant-infested kitchen, the indelible smell of despair and the marrow-deep sense of worthlessness that came from living in it.
A shirtless blonde staggered into his path, knocking him from his reverie, streams running from her eyes and nose. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She pitched forward, and he caught her beneath the arms. Her momentum took him by surprise, boots sliding out from under him until he struck the floor, still cradling her.
“Are you okay?” he asked dumbly.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Then she arched back violently, wrists and ankles pronating, lids fluttering over destroyed eyes.
He grabbed her cheeks, forced her mouth open, cleared her tongue from the airway. The smell lifting off her—industrial cleaner and ammonia—made his eyes water.
“Hang on, just—”
She shuddered once more and then went limp—full cardiac arrest. He eased her to the floor, thumped her chest. More people spilled out of the big room ahead, their knees banging his shoulders as he started compressions. The girl rolled to her side, rag-doll limp, and expelled a stream of fluid from her mouth.
Someone ran into him squarely, knocking him off her, and by the time he found his feet, she’d hemorrhaged out.
Blood on his shirt, his pants, his hands.
His feet felt numb as he pushed into the big room.
Folding tables lined the far side beneath a smoke-hazed window, hundreds of white packets laid out with KONTACT blazoned across them in alluring bubblegum pink. Other options abounded—meth Baggies, vape pens, preloaded syringes. Plastic tubs brimmed with thousands more. Past them in the bathroom, funnels and beakers filled a curtainless shower. The tiles and toilet were covered with hoses and propane tanks, tubs of solvent and an open blue barrel labeled EtOH. Chemicals burned the back of Evan’s throat, his eyes, nostrils. It was like breathing chlorine.
Two dealers scrambled around the room’s periphery, throwing handguns, scales, and grimy balled currency into duffel bags. They wore ribbed sleeveless undershirts, their arms sporting full Verdugo Gangster ink, the branding not yet converted to that of the Leones.
“—get the fuck out before po-po—”
“Grab the ledgers, man, or Rondo’ll kill us.”
Rondo.
Evan knew the leader’s name and the names of most of the affiliates in the local chapter, gathered up along with other intel in a neat virtual bundle by Joey. From the phones she’d hacked into, he knew most of their movements and schedules.
The men continued their scramble. “The ledgers! All them ledgers!”
They stopped and took in Evan. His hands gloved to the wrists in blood and grime, clothes soiled, sober upright posture.
Somewhere in his subawareness, his breathing kept on—two-second inhale, four-second exhale.
The skinny one near the bathroom had veiny tennis-ball biceps. A crack cigarette burned down to his lips, cherry burning beneath a solid inch of ash.
He spoke in a stunned monotone. “Bad batch, man. We didn’t know. No one knew.”
His colleague froze, stooped over the duffel, a gleaming .22 in reach. He made no move for it.
Evan heard his voice as if from afar. “Is this the main stash house?”
The second man straightened up. “No, man. It ain’t here. We was just seeding the market. The wider rollout comes tomorrow.”
“It kicks in after the high, so we didn’t know,” the skinny guy said, the cigarette bouncing in his lips, a cartoon effect. “The poison and shit, it hits later.”
The exchange was conversational, even civil, any strife paved over by the trauma all around.
The back of Evan’s throat felt dry and cracked. One, two on the inhale. Push out the exhalation. He kept his stare on the other guy. “Where, then?”
“HQ, man. Rondo at HQ’s got the main load.” He broke off eye contact with Evan, turning to his friend. “Get the fucking ledgers and let’s split.”
The skinny guy nodded, backing up.
Evan saw the jugs behind his heels.
The hanging ash of the cigarette.
The lidless barrel of ethyl alcohol.
Even before the puzzle pieces connected, Evan turned and ran, hurdling the dead girl in the hall.
He heard the guy’s heels strike something, the yelp of surprise.
Evan passed the landing, lunging down the steps four at a time.
Nothing yet nothing yet nothing y—
A whoosh thrummed the bones of the house, and then the pressure wall of the explosion rushed his back like a giant hand, sweeping him off the last few stairs. He got a foot down in the foyer, miraculously dodging fallen bodies. Knee buckling, other leg driving, like a running back dragging linebackers into the end zone.
Doorway—porch—boom!—flames licking his back.
Then he was rolling across the dead front lawn, the hair of his arms scorched. He found his feet and looked behind him. Flames eating the interior, flapping out the upstairs windows in bright orange sheets. The smell was indescribable. The taste of death and lesions, like necrosis withering his lungs.
He drooled and coughed and found his feet.
Ambulances, cop cars, and fire engines screamed up and down the street, a respectable first response mustered from San Bernardino’s paltry resources. Uniforms covering the park, tending to the fallen and the dead.
Evan shook his head, trying to clear his senses.
Someone was screaming, a higher pitch than the rest.
He lifted his gaze to the blown-out front window. Behind a thin wall of flame, he saw a young man with rotted teeth pacing in drugged agitation, rubbing his arms. He looked like he’d just woken up. “—help me—oh, Jesus—”
Evan rose, steadied himself on his feet.
A cop yelled at him from the curb. “Get back! Sir, get back!”
Evan took a step toward the house, but the heat was too strong, propelling him back on his heels. One of the Mountain Dew two-liters rattled across the dirt, caromed off his boot. He looked down at it.
Then at the neighboring house, half burned to begin with, the demolition stalled. A pile of scorched nails, a rusty sledgehammer with a broken handle, a few wadded paper dust masks streaked with ash.
Whipping his Strider knife out and open, Evan snatched up the two-liter bottle and sprinted for the heap of refuse next door. His hands working of their own accord, sawing off the bottle at the lowest seam, carving away the dimpled four points of the bottom. He sliced a U through the label, ending two inches from the cap.
Evan kicked the mound of trash, scattering the white orbs of the dust masks. They were all heavy with ash, but he plucked up the least battered and rammed it into the severed bottle, seating the gauzy disk at the base of the U. It wedged into place, an imperfect seal, but it was all he had.
The cop had stopped yelling at him, aiding paramedics on the sidewalk, waving over an ambulance. From the trap house, Evan could still hear the guy screaming.
Sprinting back to the house, jabbing a few holes through the lime-green bottle cap, ramming the makeshift gas mask to his face. The jagged edge where he’d sawed through the plastic cut into his cheeks.
Up the porch into the foyer, eyes streaming tears, lungs burning. Flames billowing down the stairs, the scent of poison and burned hair and angry periodic elements. A feminine form shuddered facedown at the base of the stairs. Evan got the toe of his boot beneath the body and flipped it over. Flames rose through her mouth; she was long dead, on fire from the inside.
The man still paced erratic circles behind the couch, lost in a drug haze. Holding the mask in place, Evan lunged through the flames, grabbed him around the ribs, and swung him toward the door. The guy tried to resist, but he was light as a scarecrow and Evan muscled him through the flames.
High-stepping over corpses, sucking oxygen through the tiny holes, trying not to cough, because if he started, he’d never stop.
Out into the bright light of day, half falling off the stairs, staggering toward the paramedics. The cop was gesturing wildly. Another explosion made Evan’s shoulders jerk, and he lost his grip on the mask.
He fumbled the man over to the paramedics, the cop grabbing Evan’s shoulder and shaking him—“You crazy? You fucking crazy?”—paramedics stabbing penlights into the guy’s eyes, his chest lurching with dry heaves, trying to hack out the toxins he’d inhaled.
The junkie’s head lolled to the side, and vomit spilled from his throat. Evan backed away, the puke spreading toward his toes, the cop still yelling at him—“Fucking junkie gonna die anyways! You can’t just run into a—”
Evan’s heels hitting first as he kept backing away and more ambulances wailing into view and EMTs triaging, the park covered with movement. He turned, lowered his head, and walked downslope, away.
His hands were shuddering and his heart thumped wildly, but he realized that he was still breathing at the right setting—two in, four out—and as long as he had his breath, the rest of his body would find its footing again. His neck felt blistered, his cheeks raw from the jagged plastic of the makeshift mask.
Neighbors were at their windows and on their front steps, glassy-eyed and pointing, hands clamped over mouths. Cops and firefighters and paramedics now pouring in and Evan moving once more alone against the current.
Finally he reached his truck and crouched by the driver’s door, palming the scorched nape of his neck, the grilled-meat smell still pasted through his nasal cavities, his gorge rising.
He vomited twice into the gutter and was relieved to see nothing like the foamy poison that had spilled from the mouths of the victims. He spit to clear his throat and then again and again.
This wasn’t war. These weren’t soldiers or hired guns or mercenaries. These were poor huddled masses, broken and useless, human refuse scraped from the bottom of the barrel. Throwaways.
Just like him.
He peeled off his bloody shirt, wiped his hands imperfectly, and stuffed it down a storm drain. Got into the truck and turned over the engine. Sweat dried across his bare chest, sticky hand on the gearshift, but he couldn’t manage to pull it into drive.
All he could manage to do right now was breathe.
Two in.
Four out.